The Struggle between the Future and the Past: Where Is Cuba Going?

By Michael A. Lebowitz

Republished from Monthly Review.

I have two favorite sayings. One draws upon the dialogue in Shakespeare’s Henry the VI part 2 when Jack Cade envisions that the effect of his plot will be that “all the realm shall be in common.” To this, comrade Dick responds, “the first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

I’ve replaced this statement with “the first thing we do, let’s kill all the economists.” It’s not the result of many years of surviving in economics departments filled and overfulfilled with neoclassical economists. After all, there were none that I can recall who wanted a realm in which all would be in common. Rather, my priority came from of observation of economists in countries oriented toward building socialism.

Whether it was observing upon visits to the Faculty of Economics of the University of Havana that the Marxists had been sequestered in the Department of Economic Development while the real teaching of economics was in the Micro and Macro departments. Or learning that at Karl Marx University in Budapest the basic text was Samuelson. Or that Milton Friedman and his ilk were celebrated in their lectures in China. Or that I found Russian economists commenting on tendencies toward egalitarianism “as alien to the proletariat.” Many reasons to reach for my guns.

Yet, who could blame them? If when these countries were facing significant economic problems, the choice was between dogmatic incantations of Marxism drawn from “real socialism” versus a self-confident belief in the magical properties of the market, the attraction of the best and brightest students to the latter would not be astonishing. No surprise that Vietnamese students told me the most boring classes they had in economics were those in Marxism, taught by the worst professors who simply read from the textbook.

But remember what they were learning and going on to teach and advise. The idea of the market has as its premise separation–separation between buyer and seller, separation between sellers, separation between buyers. Separation, atomism, alienation–what is the place of these in trying to build socialism? In the struggle to the death between the Future and the Past that is Revolution (as Fidel said), what is their place? [1]

Marta’s Questions

How can we judge the progress of that struggle between the Future and the Past? In her A World to Build (and in the closing section of her speech upon receiving the Libertador Prize for this book), Marta Harnecker posed a series of concrete questions about left governments in Latin America under the heading, “a guide to judging how much progress is being made”:

• Do the governments mobilize workers and the people in general to carry out certain measures, and are they contributing to an increase in the people’s ability and power? Do they understand the need for an organized, politicized people, able to exercise the necessary pressure that can weaken the state apparatus and power they inherited and thus drive forward the proposed transformation process? Do they understand that our people must be protagonists and not supporting actors? Do they listen to the people and let them speak? Do they understand that they can rely on the people to fight the errors and deviations that come up along the way? Do they give the people resources and call on them to exercise social control over the process? To sum up, is the government contributing to the creation of a popular subject who is increasingly the protagonist, one who is assuming governmental responsibilities? [2]

All these questions have as their premise an earlier one posed in that chapter, what is “the attitude to economic and human development?” In particular, she asks if governments understand that “human development cannot be achieved with a paternalistic state” but only “through practice and creating spaces in which popular protagonism is possible?” [3]

Certainly, these are important questions when posing the question of progress to the Future. And so, we might appropriately ask, what do neoclassical economists have to say about these? Nothing at all. There is no measure within neoclassical economics for the development of human capacity as the result of protagonism. Indeed, the closest approach to such a measure is to consider the effects of investments by paternalistic governments. For neoclassical economists (witting and unwitting), the atomistic individual is not an actor except when responding (in Veblen’s words) to: “the buffets of the impinging forces that displace him in one direction or another.” Recalculating pleasure and pain, that individual instantaneously maximizes. And that is all. [4]

Revolutionary Practice

In contrast, Marta’s emphasis on protagonism as central to the development of human capacities should be familiar to all Marxists (including Marxist economists). Having hailed Hegel’s outstanding achievement as that of conceiving “the self creation of man as a process” and human activity “as man’s act of self genesis,” Marx logically went on to reject the “materialist doctrine” that, by changing circumstances for people, you change human beings. No, he insisted, “the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self change can be conceived and rationally understood as revolutionary practice.” In short, there are two products of human activity–the change in circumstances and the change in human beings. Unfortunately, that second product, the human product, is often forgotten even by Marxists. [5]

Over and over again, Marx explained that, through their struggles, workers transform both conditions and themselves. His message to workers in 1850 was that “you will have to go through 15, 20, 50 years of civil wars and national struggles not only to bring about a change in society but also to change yourselves, and prepare yourselves for the exercise of political power.” [6] Over two decades later (after the defeat of the Paris Commune), he continued to stress the inseparability of human activity and self-change: the working class knows that “they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, transforming circumstances and men.” [7] “Through practice and creating spaces in which popular protagonism is possible” is an investment in human capacity.

This was, too, the key point in Chapter 10 of Capital, where Marx explained how, in the struggle over the Ten Hours’ Bill, the working class developed as a class in their struggles against capital’s drive for absolute surplus value. We see there “the daily more threatening advance of the working-class movement,” how workers moved from “passive, though inflexible and unceasing” resistance into open class protest, how they were transformed. In this, he echoed Engels’ argument that “the working man, who has passed through such an agitation, is no longer the same as he was before; and the whole working class, after passing through it, is a hundred times stronger, more enlightened, and better organised than it was at the outset. [8]

The second product, however, is not only the result of struggle. As Marx noted in the Grundrisse, in the very act of producing, “the producers change, too, in that they bring out new qualities in themselves, develop themselves in production, transform themselves, develop new powers and new ideas, new modes of intercourse, new needs and new language.” [9] Similarly, the recognition of the worker as outcome of his own labour is present in Capital’ s discussion of the labour process–there the worker “acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.” [10]

Yet it must be recalled that human activity always occurs under particular social relations, and this necessarily affects the particular nature of the second product. Consider, for example, the worker produced as the result of activity under capitalist relations of production. Where “it is not the worker who employs the conditions of his work, but rather the reverse, the conditions of work employ the worker,” a particular second product emerges. Head and hand become separate and hostile in this capitalist inversion, “this distortion, which is peculiar to and characteristic of capitalist production,” and “every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity” is lost.” Through its destruction of existing (and potential) capacities, capital produces the workers it needs. It produces workers who are fragmented, degraded, and alienated from “the intellectual potentialities of the labour process,” a “working class which by education, tradition and habit looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self-evident natural laws.” With workers produced as such under capitalist relations of production, the capitalist can rely upon the worker’s “dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them.” [11] Working under capitalist relations is dis investment in human capacity.

Under a different set of productive relations, however, Marx envisioned a quite different second product. In contrast to the society in which the worker exists to satisfy the need of capital for its growth, in Capital Marx explicitly evoked “the inverse situation, in which objective wealth is there to satisfy the worker’s own need for development.” [12] In contrast to the worker under capitalist relations, who “actually treats the social character of his work, its combination with the work of others for a common goal, as a power that is alien to him,” here associated producers expend “their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force.” In this “inverse situation,” rather than the crippling of workers, here workers develop their capacities: “when the worker co-operates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species.” [13]  It follows, too, that through this collective protagonism, the second product is a growth in the workers’ capacities and thus their productivity. [14] Underlying Marx’s critique of capitalism was his conception of the possibility (and, indeed, the necessity) of a different society.

The Future We Want

My second favourite saying, which I’ve repeated many times in various forms, is that if we don’t know where we want to go, no road will take us there. We do know, certainly, where we don’t want to go. It is not to a society in which we are directed and subordinated from above. Nor is it one where we are separated and compete with each other in our own self-interest. Rather, the Future we want is the association of free and equal producers that Marx called a communal system.

Begin with communality, Marx proposed, and “instead of a division of labour…there would take place an organization of labour,” where the producers, “working with the means of production held in common,” combine their capacities “in full self-awareness as one single social labour force.” [15] In this system, Marx explained in the Grundrisse, “communal production, communality, is presupposed as the basis of production,” and the activities undertaken by the associated producers are “determined by communal needs and communal purposes.” [16]

In such a society, communal ownership of the means of production and communal production for communal needs is what Hugo Chavez called ‘the elementary triangle of socialism’–social ownership of the means of production, social production by workers, for the purpose of satisfying social needs). In such a system, its results are premises of the system as “is the case with every organic system.” [17] Just as capital produces its own premises in their “bourgeois economic form” once it has developed upon its own foundation (i.e., once “it is itself presupposed, and proceeds from itself to create the conditions of its maintenance and growth”), so also once the communal system has developed on its own foundations, it proceeds from itself to create the conditions of its maintenance and growth, producing and reproducing its own premises in their communal form. [18]

Not only reproduced, however, are communal ownership, communal production and communal consumption. The critical premise that is reproduced in this organic system is communal social relations, communality. By acting within these relations, people produce themselves in a a particular way–one described by Emily Kawano as characterised by “solidarity, cooperation, care, reciprocity, mutualism, altruism, compassion, and love.” [19]  Homo solidaricus develops her capacities by relating to others out of solidarity. If I produce consciously for your need, Marx reasoned, I know my work is valuable: “in my individual activity,” he proposed, “I would have directly confirmed and realised my true nature, my human nature, my communal nature.” Thus, the second product of our activity in communal society is the development of rich human beings for whom their own “realisation exists as an inner necessity.”  [20] With “free exchange among individuals who are associated on the basis of common appropriation and control of the means of production,” Marx envisioned the production of “free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on their subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth.” [21]

Communal relations, however, do not arise from consciousness nor from revolutionary decrees calling for a battle of ideas. Rather (as István Mészáros points out in his close study of the Grundrisse), true sociality is the product of real conditions, “under fully developed communal conditions.” The conscious social relations characteristic of the communal system “can only be produced in reality itself; or to be more precise, in the material and cultural intercourse of the individuals’ communal social existence.” [22] Their consciousness is the product of their protagonism within the radically restructured social metabolic order as an “organic whole,” i.e., as a circularly self-sustaining “organic system” the constituents of which tend to reciprocally reinforce one another. [23]

Once that communal system rests upon its own foundations, “the social individuals active in the communal system of production and distribution determine for themselves how they allocate the total disposable time of their society in fulfilment of their own needs and aspirations” [24]. In order that “objective wealth is there to satisfy the worker’s own need for development,” they plan. [25] In this process, they reinforce and reproduce their social relations, and their productive capacities increase “with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly.” [26]

We are describing the communal system as an organic system. As Marx commented about capitalism, “In the completed bourgeois system, every economic relation presupposes every other in its bourgeois economic form, and everything posited is thus also a presupposition; this is the case with every organic system.” [27] Similarly, the completed communal system contains within itself the conditions for its own reproduction; viewed “as a connected whole, and in the constant flux of its incessant renewal,” it is understood as “a process of reproduction.” [28] The begged question, though, is how does the new organic system we want, this system of community and communal relations, emerge?

Contested Reproduction between the Future and the Past

Organic systems do not drop from the sky. They develop upon their own foundation through a process of producing their own premises in place of the historic premises they have inherited. Given our grasp of the premises of the communal system, can we gain any insights from Marx into the process of becoming that organic system?

Considering the draft programme for the German workers party for their convention at Gotha in 1875, Marx challenged its idea that in the society with common ownership of the means of production, “the proceeds of labour belong undiminished with equal right to all members of society.” Nonsense, he insisted. Before it is possible to talk about the portion of the proceeds of labor intended for individual consumption, we must talk about the deductions from the total product. These include provision for replacement of the means of production used up plus an “additional portion for expansion of production” (i.e., investment), and funds for reserve in the event of natural calamities. These, he described as “an economic necessity.” In addition, however, he described several deductions from the total product which are not economic necessities but which, rather, point to the development of the new society.

First is “the general costs of administration not belonging to production,” and the second is “that which is intended for the common satisfaction of needs.” Both are characteristic of the old society but they change, and their developments are essential to understand Marx’s view of how the communal system becomes. In the case of the first, he proposes that “this part will, from the outset, be very considerably restricted in comparison with present-day society and it diminishes in proportion as the new society develops.” In the case of the second (which includes schools and health services), he projects a quite different path: “From the outset this part grows considerably in comparison with present-day society and it grows in proportion as the new society develops.” [29]

Why is the deduction in the first case considerably smaller from the outset and diminishing with the development of the new society? The point is central. Four years earlier, Marx had learned much from the Paris Commune, “the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of Labour.” [30] Those costs of administration, he argued, are considerably restricted because the state immediately ceases to be “a public force organized for social enslavement”; “from the outset,” state functions are “wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself, and restored to the responsible agents of society.” [31] Had this struggle been successful, in place of the old centralized government, “all France would have been organized into self-working and self-governing communes.” And the result would be “state functions reduced to a few functions for general national purposes.” [32] “As the new society develops,” the state would be converted more and more (in the words of the Critique) “from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it.” [33]

In short, as this new society develops, new organs, self-working and self-governing communes, are increasingly created in place of the “systematic and hierarchic division of labour” in which state administration and governing are treated as “mysteries, transcendent functions only to be trusted to the hands of a trained caste—state parasites, richly paid sycophants and sinecurists.” These self-governing spaces for protagonism of the producers become an essential condition for the development of their capacities.

This is one side of the transformation implied by the Critique’s discussion of the deductions from the total social product. In the case of the second deduction, that related to the common satisfaction of needs, Marx proposed that “from the outset this part grows considerably in comparison with present-day society, and it grows in proportion as the new society develops.” Thus, the new society moves immediately to expand considerably its provision of use-values for common satisfaction of needs. More and more is deducted from what is available for individual consumption; more and more “what the producer is deprived of in his capacity as a private individual benefits him directly or indirectly in his capacity as a member of society.” In short, as the new society develops, our claim upon the output of society is increasingly as a member of society. It’s a point that Mészáros reinforces; considering the ratio between private consumption funds and public funds, he proposes that this must be “regulated by the conscious decisions of the associated producers themselves, and that an improving ratio of public funds “may become in fact a measure of the advancement of the society in question.” [34] The measure of the development of the new society is the expansion of the commons at the expense of individual claims.

But as Mészáros well understood, such new relations of distribution do not rest in midair. Crucial is “the decision making process itself”–“a substantively democratic decision making by the associated producers themselves.” [35] Underlying an increase in the ratio of distribution toward the common satisfaction of needs implies a change in their productive relations from one in which they interact as individuals focused upon their private consumption to one in which they function self-consciously as members of society. Communality develops as the new society involves producers directly in a conscious process of planning as “determined by communal needs and purposes.”

It is essential to understand that this new society develops through a process in which both circumstances and human beings are transformed. For one, it creates new organs for cooperatively planning the distribution of society’s labor in order to satisfy “the worker’s own need for development.” Rather than doing so through a state superimposed upon society, it proceeds through democratic self-management of production and “self-working and self-governing communes.” [36] With the increasing emergence of “genuinely planned and self managed (as opposed to bureaucratically commanded, from above) productive activities,” people are able to develop their potential; the result (as the Critique indicates) is that “the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly.” [37] The combination of the deduction for investment, the reduction of the deduction for state administration and the increased capacity of the producers as the result of their protagonism has as its result increasing social wealth.

However, Marx understood that this can not occur overnight. While this new society begins to develop “from the outset,” it emerges from the old society “ in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.” Rather than producing its own premises, in the interregnum between the Future and the Past the new system begins by inheriting “historic” premises and presuppositions. Accordingly, the process of becoming the new organic system is one of transcending those historic premises: “Its development to its totality consists precisely in subordinating all elements of society to itself, or in creating out of it the organs which it still lacks. This is historically how it becomes a totality.” [38]

In short, there is a struggle between the Future and the Past. The Future must subordinate the elements inherited from the Past. From the perspective of the Future, the new system is defective as it emerges from capitalist society. “But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society.” So, what were the defects Marx identified in his Critique of the Gotha Programme? What historic premises must the society subordinate?

Marx answered that as the new society emerges from capitalism, there is a “bourgeois limitation”–a continuation of “bourgeois right”; “the narrow horizon of bourgeois right” has not yet been “crossed in its entirety.” That continuation of bourgeois right, that birthmark from the old society was the principle that “the individual producer receives back from society–after the deductions have been made–exactly what he gives to it.” [39]

Consider the premises that the new society inherits. Characteristic of capitalist relations is “the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of non-workers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of the personal condition of production, of labour power.”[40] There we can see the inherited defect: transformation of the means of production from capitalist property into common property still leaves the individual producers as “owners of the personal condition of production, of labour power.” The right of property is not immediately crossed in its entirety, and it is this that must be subordinated if the new society is to develop upon its own foundations.

In this new society as it emerges from capitalism, the producer does not yet act to satisfy communal needs and purposes. Rather, the owner of labor-power expects from society “exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labour”; that is his right as owner entering into exchange. The characteristic from the old society remains “obviously the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labour in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labour in another form.” [41]

Marx did not hesitate to describe this principle inherited from the Past as a defect. The equality involved in this exchange, he pointed out, “tacitly recognises unequal individual endowment and thus productive capacity as natural privileges.” Thus, the quid pro quo between the owner of “the personal condition of production” and society is by its very nature “a right of inequality”! To the extent to which this society is marked by this defect, this bourgeois right, it generates a process of producing and reproducing inequality.

One-sidedness is the problem with this principal of equal exchange. Years earlier Marx had criticised bourgeois economists as one-sided because they look at the producer “only as a worker [and do] not consider him when he is not working as a human being,” Almost four decades later, he returned to this distinction between the worker and the human being as a whole. Thinking about this communist society as it emerges from capitalism, Marx declared that the problem with this principle of equal exchange is that it considers the members of this society “from one definite side only, for instance, in the present case, are considered only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else in them ignored.” [42] The principle of “to each according to his contribution,” in short, is one-sided; its defect is that it considers the needs of members of society only as workers and not as human beings. Neither their differing needs (e.g., the size of families) nor their differing capacities (thus, “one will be richer than another”) are relevant. Entitlement here is based solely upon the individual quantum of labour provided.

How different this is from growing entitlement simply as a member of society! It is no small irony that the defect that the new society must subordinate has been subsequently embraced by many Marxists as “the socialist principle,” the principle to be followed in a distinct stage, socialism. In contrast to Marx’s emphasis upon the process by which the new society develops, the concept of this socialist stage is distinguished solely by the nature of distribution within it–the necessity of distribution in this stage in accordance with contribution as a material incentive. This substitution of a unique stage based upon distribution occurs despite Marx’s insistence that it is ‘a mistake to make a fuss about so-called distribution and put the principal stress on it.” Marx criticised “vulgar socialism” for following the bourgeois economists in treating “distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution.” [43]

Remember the second product. What kinds of people are produced in relations in which individuals expect and demand an equivalent for their activity? For Marx, the relations of distribution are not independent of the relations of production. One of the most outstanding insights of Mészáros concerns this link between relations of production and relations of distribution. Considering the regulating principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” he points out that all attention is to the second half, the side of distribution. “The first half is usually, and tellingly, forgotten. However, without the neglected part, the second has no chance of being taken seriously.” Indeed, Mészáros continues, “unless the individuals can contribute to the production of social wealth according to their ability–and that means: on the basis of the full development of the creative potentialities of the social individuals–there can be no question of meeting the requirements of the second half, i.e., the satisfaction of the individuals’ needs.” [44]

Without investigating their relations within production, we lose sight of why the creative potential of the producers is fostered or thwarted. Neither the “stagist” followers of “real socialism” nor neoclassical economics focus upon the importance of the relations of production. In the case of the first, it is presumed that state ownership of the means of production is all that needs to be said and that the self-management and protagonism by social individuals that develops the capabilities of their species is a matter for a later stage, communism. In the case of the second, relations of production are a “black box,” and reliance upon individual self-interest as communicated by markets ensures both the efficient allocation of resources and economic growth.

There is no mystery why “real socialism’ has failed to develop the human capacities required to move in the direction of communality. Characterised at its best by a social contract which provides specific benefits (like subsidised necessities and full employment) for workers in return for their acquiescence to direction from above, this relation of conductor and conducted discourages protagonism in production and society. [45] Ultimately, the failure of this relation to develop human capacity and productivity led in the Soviet Union to attacks on the social contract for what Gorbachev called “serious infractions of the socialist principle of distribution according to work” and fostering “a mentality of dependence.” [46]

Given their orientation toward material incentive, neoclassical economists have no difficulties with “the socialist principle.” Indeed, they are especially keen to exorcise anything deemed to interfere with the proper functions of the market; if steps to the market are constrained, the failure to reach the Promised Land is clearly the result of ignorance. More, more market is their mantra. Thus, in the Soviet case, economists played a central role in attacking the central allocation of resources between enterprises on the grounds that it was necessary to move to horizontal relations (i.e., the market) between them. Such a profound restructuring (perestroika), they argued, would update the relations of production so they no longer fettered development of productive forces. Further, they opposed “the parasitic confidence in guaranteed jobs”–a relatively small reserve army of labor being seen as a cure for laziness and a way to restore “a personal interest in hard efficient labor.” As part of their attack on that social contract, too, they called for ending food subsidies and allowing prices to be determined by the market as well as commodification of healthcare. On the other hand, they did not challenge the subordinate positions of workers. From the perspective of a communal system, they did not merely support existing defects; rather, those economists were the ideological spokesmen of a return to the Past. [47]

Between the Future and the Past, there is contested reproduction. [48] For the new communal system to develop, it must subordinate the elements of the Past. As Sam Bowles indicates, material incentives “crowd out social preferences” (which include motives such as intrinsic pleasure in helping others and aversion to inequity–in short, solidarity). [49] When relying upon material incentive, the Past tends to crowd out the Future. It’s why Mészáros provides his powerful rejection of commodity exchange and the market. And it is the point underlined by Che in his Man and Socialism in Cuba(and as the twentieth century subsequently demonstrated)–relying upon the material self-interest of producers to build the new society is a dead end. [50]

A dead end if you are trying to build the communal society of the Future but not one if your goal is to return to the Past.  For neoclassical economists, the interactions of atomistic self-seekers through markets spontaneously lead to the best of all possible worlds; accordingly, the role of a political instrument (assuming there is any) is to remove any barriers to markets. By contrast, the path to the Future cannot develop spontaneously. Of course, the solidarity characteristic of communal society cannot be imposed; however, people can be guided to learn from their own practice that solidarity is common sense. [51] To build the new society consciously requires a political instrument; However, as Marta wrote when we were in Venezuela, it is essential to avoid the “verticalism that stifles the initiative of the people” and to develop a political instrument “whose militants and leaders are true popular pedagogues capable of stimulating the knowledge that exists within the people.” [52]

Reflections on the Cuban Revolution

No country has faced greater obstacles in trying to build a post-capitalist society than Cuba. Criminal blockades, sanctions, invasions, imperialist terrorism, externally supported internal subversion, the loss of lifelines, natural disasters such as hurricanes and drought–and, still, Cuba persists (as does some of the marvelous solidarity that marked its early years). But, like every society in the interregnum between capitalism and community, Cuba has been and continues to be characterized by contested reproduction (or what Fidel called the struggle to the death between the Future and the Past.).

The Cuban Revolution. though, began with an advantage: at its outset it was able to draw upon the Soviet Union both for economic and political support and for an economic model based upon several decades of Soviet experience. Whether the latter was an unequivocal advantage, on the other hand, is questionable. [53] After several decades of Cuba’s own experience, Fidel Castro confessed:

Here is a conclusion I’ve come to after many years: among all the errors we may have committed, the greatest of them all was that we believed that someone really knew something about socialism, or that someone actually knew how to build socialism.  It seemed to be a sure fact, as well-known as the electrical system conceived by those who thought they were experts in electrical systems.  Whenever they said: “That’s the formula,” we thought they knew. Just as if someone is a physician.  You are not going to debate anemia, or intestinal problems, or any other condition with a physician; nobody argues with the physician.  You can think that he is a good doctor or a bad one, you can follow his advice or not, but you won’t argue with him. [54]

There was, however, one leader of the Cuban Revolution who did openly argue. In his too-brief existence in Cuba after the revolution and in the material world, Che Guevara challenged the basic tenets of the Soviet economic model. As President of the National Bank of Cuba and then as first Minister of the newly-created Ministry of Industries, Che developed a system of management (known as the Budgetary Finance System) in which state-owned industries were treated as divisions of a single large firm; it was a system that differed significantly from the received Soviet model of autonomous state enterprises with their own budgets (the Auto-Financing System or Economic Calculus). [55] In particular, the debate over these two systems came into the open in 1963 and revealed differences over the focus upon material and moral incentives. To understand Che’s argument, it is essential to consider his perspective as a whole:

Che’s Tenets

1. The Goal and the Path

Having begun studying Marxism, including Capital and the Communist Manifesto in his late teens and Lenin’sState and Revolution in university, Che’s understanding of the goal for revolutionaries was clear–-the fully developed communist society, the free association of producers that Marx envisioned. [56]  It was not defined simply by abundance but, as well, by new conscious relations among people, a new consciousness toward society. For Che, communism was: “a phenomenon of consciousness and not solely a phenomenon of production.” Accordingly, it could not be arrived at “through the simple mechanical accumulation of quantities of goods made available to the people.” [57]  Indeed, he insisted that “we fight poverty but we also fight alienation.” [58] And, for that process, Che saw centralized planning as critical–it is “the point at which man’s consciousness finally succeeds in synthesizing and directing the economy toward its goal: the full liberation of the human being within the framework of communist society.” [59]

2. Characteristics of the Period of Transition

Of course, as Che well knew, you can’t leap from capitalism to the new communal society. There necessarily is a period of transition in which elements of the old interact, interpenetrate and, indeed, collide with elements of the new. As the result of such interaction, the elements of neither system exist in their pure form. Consider, for example, the law of value, which reveals the way capitalism is spontaneously reproduced though the market. Che argued that “it is impossible to analyse the law of value separate from its natural medium, the market. In fact, the capitalist market is itself the expression of the law of value.” Unfortunately, as Tablada noted, nearly all the literature on the political economy of the period of transition lacked original conceptual tools suited to the topic. By applying Marxist categories that pertain to capitalism outside their context, that literature distorted the very object of study. [60]

One implication is the lack of clarity as to what is to be done in this society in which elements of the old and new coexist. For Che, rather than extrapolating from the static analysis of Capital, the central need is to build the Future: “We understand that the capitalist old categories are retained for a time and that the length of this period cannot be predetermined, but the characteristics of the period of transition are those of a society that is throwing off its bonds in order to move quickly into the new stage.” Not surprisingly, Che rejected the Soviet Manual of Political Economy which argued that “it is necessary to develop and use the law of value as well as monetary and mercantile relations while the communist society is being built.” [61] Why develop, Che asked! Behind the thinking of the Manual, he proposed, was “an erroneous conception of wanting to construct socialism with capitalist elements without really changing their meaning.” That was a gradual path back to capitalism–a path that “obliges new concessions to economic levers, that is to say retreat.” [62]

Characteristic of the period of transition between the future and the past is, as we have stressed, contested reproduction. Whereas Che argued the necessity to cast off the elements of the old society as quickly as possible, he recognized that there were movements in the opposite direction. Looking in 1964 at the resolutions of the Polish Communist Party, for example, he commented that “the solution they are proposing for these problems in Poland is the complete freedom of the law of value; that is to say, a return to capitalism.” [63]

3. The Struggle Against the Past

Especially in underdeveloped countries, “the temptation is very great,” Che noted, “to follow the beaten track of material interest as the lever with which to accelerate development.” However, we must remember that material interests come from capitalism and are remnants of the Past. “We do not deny the objective need for material incentives, although we are reluctant to use them as the main lever.” In fact, “the tendency should be, in our opinion, to eliminate as fast as possible the old categories, including the market, money and, therefore, material interest–or, better, to eliminate the conditions for their existence.” [64]

Che was very clear as to why:

The pipe dream that socialism can be achieved with the help of the dull instruments left to us by capitalism (the commodity as the economic cell, profitability, individual material interest as a lever, etc.) can lead into a blind alley. And you wind up there after having traveled a long distance with many crossroads, and it is hard to figure out just where you took the wrong turn.

You may build an economic foundation this way; however, he predicted that the one produced “has done its work of undermining the development of consciousness.” [65]

And that was the point! Building on material interest, “a lever we unfortunately have to use, a remnant of the old society,” produces people without socialist consciousness. The result of building upon individual material self-interest is to produce people fit for capitalism. That is why Che stressed the importance of the second product: “to build communism it is necessary, simultaneous with the new material foundations, to build the new man.” [66]

4. The Struggle for the Future

“One of the fundamental aims of Marxism,” Che indicated, “is to eliminate material interest, the factor of ‘individual self-interest’ and profit from man’s psychological motivations. [67] To this end, he stressed the importance of building a socialist consciousness–one in which workers “feel part of a great collective effort that the nation must make and so we can be as integrated as possible in making this effort, everyone with their own varied way of thinking, and each with their own varied convictions, but trying to incorporate themselves into work that is alive.” [68]

Recognizing themselves as part of a whole to which members of society have a social duty, though, is a change that “will necessarily be prolonged and cannot be expected to be completed in a short period of time.” It will neither be automatic as a result of the development of productive forces, nor will exhortation alone transform people. “You cannot change how people think by decree. People have to change their way of thinking by their own conviction.” [69] Accordingly, as Helen Yaffe details at length in her study, within the Ministry of Industry Che attempted to build in reality spaces for protagonism in which people learn through practice.

In Production Assemblies, for example, all members of a factory (at least 70 percent for a meeting to occur) regularly came together to discuss the plans and progress of the work and to audit the work of administrators. These were, Che indicated, “part of the life of the factories” and were meant to motivate workers to participate in management of production. [70] Further, given that the Ministry of Industry used the Budgetary Finance System which rejected the boundaries between state companies (boundaries characteristic of the Auto Financing System), Committees of Local Industry (CILO) were encouraged to coordinate and rationalize local resources–a step important for decentralizing production and for worker management. By decentralizing and creating work habits independent of any material incentive, “the working class has to be preparing itself to take up management work in the shortest time possible.” Che proposed; in particular, such inter-factory cooperation is as an attempt “to create the consciousness of one factory.” As the ministry official overseeing these committees commented, “most important about the CILOS was the sense of belonging, that each unit was part of that big Cuban factory.” [71]

As well as these initiatives, Yaffe calls attention to the Committee for Spare Parts (created for workers to invent solutions for the lack of spare parts following the Revolution), the Advisory Technical Committees (involving an average of 10 percent of the workforce) and The Plan of Integration in which specialist work brigades moved throughout the ministry to assist in solving problems. She concludes this account by describing these policies as “aimed to integrate workers into the management of production, to harness their experience and creativity to resolve problems and rationalise production and to induce them to identify with the means of production as their own.” [72]

No discussion of Che’s proposed path to struggle for the Future, however, would be complete without stressing his strong advocacy of voluntary labor. Just as masses had mobilized successfully in October 1962 (during the Missile Crisis) and October 1963 (after the damage done by Hurricane Flora), Che called for “the Spirit of October” to be created “all year, every month, every day”; that spirit was one of “considering one’s work at any moment as a fundamental task for the country, whatever it is, however humble or simple it is.” Within the ministry itself, Che created the Red Battalion consisting of brigades of ten ministry workers in each, all pledged to a minimum of 80 hours of voluntary labor in six months, and through friendly competition and emulation (in which Che participated) brigade members went well beyond this. [73] In particular, he argued, “emulation must be the fundamental basis for developing socialist consciousness and for making gains in production and productivity.” [74]

5. The Need to Walk on Two Legs

For Che, you build a socialist consciousness through practice, by creating spaces for collective protagonism. In contrast, he described direct material interest as an economic lever as “the great Trojan horse of socialism.” [75] Reinforcing the alienation and self-orientation inherited from capitalism, it points backward. This self-orientation, however, has “preponderance in people’s consciousness” in the period of transition; accordingly, he believed it was necessary to find ways to help material interest to wither away.

One way was to use material interest to guide people into viewing their work as a social contribution and duty. With salary classifications (established after job evaluation), workers in the Ministry of Industry could get bonuses by exceeding the established norms but could never get an income which was appropriately that of the next salary group. Nevertheless, they could take classes and develop their capacities: “for example, going to a school where your salary is paid and where you come out with a new qualification. On returning to the factory this new qualification is automatically converted into an increase in salary. That means that it is a material incentive; the only thing is that the material incentive is not derived directly from the relationship between the work and what is received for the work.” [76]

More important than trying to subvert material incentive, though, was necessity that the individual learn to “identify with his work”–for which voluntary labor was the “school that creates consciousness.” To transform work from “a disagreeable human necessity… into a moral necessity, and internal necessity” was essential, and Che argued that the main responsibility for combating material incentive as the main lever rests with the Party: “the role of the vanguard party is precisely that of raising as high as possible the opposing banner, the banner of moral interest, of moral incentive, of the men who fight and sacrifice themselves and expect nothing more than the recognition of their compañeros.” [77]

An increase in consciousness and in production could go hand in hand. Che maintained “that the development of consciousness does more for the development of production in a relatively short time than material incentives do.” [78] But the important thing was balance–the necessity to walk on two legs. Changing consciousness, he insisted, was essential as part of the “dual aspect of the construction of socialism. Building socialism is neither a matter of work alone nor of consciousness alone. It combines work and consciousness–expanding the production of material goods through work and developing consciousness”. [79]

In this light, Tablada argues that for Che the “plan should incorporate and unite two elements:

• creating the basis for economic development of the new society, as well as for economic regulations and controls;

• creating a new type of human relations, a new man.”

To reduce the plan to an economic notion, “would be to deform it from the outset.” [80] Like Marx, Che understood that the nature of the human product depends upon the relations within which people interact. Socialist consciousness would not follow automatically from development of production. Rather than the specific measures he conceived at the time, Che’s legacy is the recognition that, if the Future is to prevail, it is essential to create the conditions in which a socialist consciousness develops.

Updating: “The Guevarista Pendulum” and Path Dependency

Obviously, the goal and the path to that goal at that time were quite clear for Che. Whether he would have adjusted or changed entirely his specific measures in the more than half-century after he left Cuba and the material world, we will never know. Still, we can consider post-Che developments in Cuba in the light of his tenets.

In her chapter on Che’s legacy in Cuba, Yaffe explores phases in the economic history of the Cuban Revolution, portraying them as “a pendulum swinging between what is desirable and what is necessary.” The “Guevarista pendulum,” she proposes, “reflects Cuba’s ability to push forward with its socialist development, creating innovative new social and political forms, without falling back on capitalist mechanisms to solve economic problems.” [81]

Whether these have been swings of a pendulum (with its regularity) and whether each of the subperiods (that she classifies as “swing away” or “swing towards”) are indeed swings, there can be no doubt that there have been significant changes in the Cuban path. In particular, following Che’s departure, the Soviet planning mechanism with its focus upon material interest became increasingly dominant and became official with the adoption in 1976 of the Economic Management and Planning System. Within 10 years, however, that model was strongly rejected beginning in 1986 in what became known as “Rectification.”

Rejected were the familiar perverse patterns characteristic of “Real Socialism,” patterns that Che understood well. [82]  Speaking on October 8, I987, Fidel stressed that Che would have been “appalled” by what had emerged in Cuba. He would have been appalled that there were “enterprises prepared to steal to pretend they were profitable” and that would “cheat to fulfill and even surpass their production plan.” He would have been appalled by the idea “that voluntary work was kind of silly” and at the paths “that lead to all the bad habits and the alienation of capitalism.” Che would have said, “It’s exactly as I warned, what’s happening is exactly what I thought would happen.” If only we had studied Che’s economic thought, Fidel argued, we would have been better equipped, and he appealed to party members and to “our economists to study and familiarize themselves with Che’s political and economic thought.” [83]

The potential implied by Rectification may be seen from the decision of the party in 1990 to open a wide discussion in advance of the Fourth Congress of the Communist Party. This generated proposals from the population synthesized by Juan Valdés Paz as “demands of: decentralization, debureaucratization, destatization; and of greater popular participation.” [84] What would have developed had Cuba been able to proceed at that time along this path, however, will never be known.

While Rectification produced the momentum for the creation of Popular Councils, new local participatory bodies, their potential (and that of Rectification itself) was not realized because of the need to respond immediately to the crisis produced by a powerful external shock–the collapse and disappearance of the Soviet bloc after 1989. Cuba lost 80 percent of its trade, its oil imports dried up (leading to both a drastic decline in domestic production and lost revenue from re-exports) and to a fall in national income by about one-third. “Everything to the Front!” meant a struggle for survival, which miraculously was won. During the “Special Period,” marked by starvation, an imposed shift to organic agriculture and serious difficulties in urban and national transport, Cuba turned increasingly to tourism as a source of hard currency to pay for necessary imports. With the inflow of hard currency from the tourism enclave and remittances from Cubans abroad to which was added increasingly support from Chavez’s Venezuela in return for Cuban medical and sports services, the first few years of the 21st Century marked a definite economic improvement. [85]

This also was a period, though, in which there was a major political development–the Battle of Ideas. Buoyed by the success of the mass mobilizations in the campaign for the return of the kidnapped boy, Elián González, Fidel stressed the importance of ideas as the main tool with which to fight U.S. imperialism. In particular, the program focused upon education and youth–especially the less privileged. Having noted in February 2003 that despite the gains offered to all citizens, “the Revolution has not been as successful in its struggle to eradicate differences in the social and economic status of Cuba’s black population,” Fidel pointed out that one aspect of this was inequality of access to higher education: “The possibility of studying, obtaining higher qualifications or a university degree was the exclusive privilege of the more knowledgeable and economically powerful sectors. It was only the exception among the poor who was able to beat the system.” Now, as the result of the Battle of Ideas, “we have made an old dream come true: the universalization of higher education…. This program has given unheard of opportunities to young people and adults who were not previously able to attend higher education institutes but who now can join in the revolutionary aim of having all citizens, regardless of the work they do, obtain a comprehensive education.” [86]

There were many other aspects of the Battle of Ideas including very large investments in education (expanded training of teachers to reduce the size of classrooms to 20, training of art teachers and the availability of computers, TVs and VCRs for primary and secondary classes, etc). Perhaps the most inspiring part of this campaign, which (in the words last year of La Tizza Collective) “enabled Fidel to raise the self-esteem of young people, especially among the most disadvantaged, and succeed in reconnecting them with the revolutionary project” was the creation of the “social workers.” [87]

In his speech in December 2004, Fidel indicated that the new social worker schools had already graduated more than 21,000 youths, who now “constitute a veritable detachment of social support and solidarity.” Some of the activities of this group, mostly young women from disadvantaged backgrounds, fell into categories normally thought of as social work–e.g, going into communities to seek out and work with disaffected youth and doing a nationwide door-to-door survey which discovered 37,000 elderly people living at home and in need of personal attention. But other activities were unique and linked them directly to the needs of the revolution; for example, they were charged with replacing every domestic incandescent light bulbs in the country with an energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulb. More dramatically, more than 10,000 social workers were assigned to take over 2,000 petrol stations for several weeks and monitored the delivery of fuel from the refineries. The exercise revealed that half the revenue from fuel sales was being lost to theft and corruption. [88] Although the Battle of Ideas was disdained by some who “totally lost sight of its meaning–thousands of young people in marginalized areas” were reconnected with the revolutionary project. [89]

However, Fidel was soon forced to step down from his presidential duties for health reasons. The implications were soon apparent. Within a few years, Cuba embarked upon a path that Jose Luis Rodriguez, former Minister of the Economy, described as “a period of profound change.” [90] The initial signals appeared in Raul Castro’s’ first major speech as Acting President in July 2007, where he spoke of the need to “change concepts and methods that were appropriate at one point but have been surpassed by life itself.” [91]

In the following two years, a series of what Raul called “unnecessary prohibitions” affecting consumers were removed, idle state land was distributed in usufruct to individuals and cooperatives, and state barber shops were turned over to their workers. Stressing the unsustainability of the state budget, Raul pointed to the need to cut expenditures due to the effect of hurricane damages and the world economic slowdown [which affected both tourism and revenues from nickel exports]. As an indication of direction, the party paper, Granma, reported in September 2009 that the government would begin the process of closing 24,700 workplace cafeterias, and it ran a signed editorial in October, arguing that the libreta, the monthly ration book, should be replaced by subsidies going only to those in need. [92]

In the next year, the Cuban government proceeded further along this path: lengthening the maximum term of land leases to foreign investors from 50 years to 99 years, announcing [via the Trade Union Federation] that a half million workers in the state sector would be laid off by April 2011, loosening requirements for licensing private entrepreneurs and, finally. in November 2010, releasing a draft of the lineamientos, the Guidelines for economic policy upon which the Economic Policy Commission of the Party had worked at length. These proposed guidelines were meant to set out profound changes in concepts and structures underlying the Cuban model, changes described as the “updating” of the Cuban model. [93]

Raul left no doubt as to the significance of the intended changes. Speaking to the National Assembly on December 18, 2010, he argued that “It is necessary to change the mentality of the cadres and of all other compatriots in facing up the new scenario which is beginning to be sketched out. It is just about transforming the erroneous and unsustainable concepts about socialism, that have been very deeply rooted in broad sectors of the population over the years, as a result of the excessively paternalistic, idealistic and egalitarian approach instituted by the Revolution in the interest of social justice.” As an example, he pointed to the libreta, the ration book: “Quite a few of us consider the ration card to be a social achievement that should never be gotten rid of.” While its establishment was meant to ensure people had necessities, it was now the source of many problems; “it is an evident expression of egalitarianism that equally benefits those who work and those who do not.” These were among the many problems to be addressed in the Guidelines, and he concluded that “We either rectify–because we no longer have time to keep on skirting around the precipice- or we will sink.”

Widespread organized discussions in workplaces, communities and social institutions produced many amendments and additions to the Guidelines but the most striking result of this consultation was significant opposition to the end to the libreta and to the reduction in state employment–not surprisingly since universal subsidized necessities and full employment had been part of the Cuban social contract since the early days of the Revolution. [94] As Raul had understood with respect to the libreta, many Cubans looked upon this as “a social achievement that should never be gotten rid of.” [95] Taking that opposition into account, the party decided to proceed on these measures—but to do so only gradually.

Other goals in the Guidelines approved by the 6th Congress of the Communist Party in 2011 include reduction of state ownership and employment, the encouragement of a broad sector of non-state ownership and management, the expansion of markets and the role attributed to them, a new focus upon individual material incentive, the creation of a free labor market and the potential for accumulation by small and medium-size private enterprises. In his article, “A Lot Done but Much More to Do,” Cuban economist Juan Triana praised “the political and ideological assimilation of the need for change” and argued that, among these, “the changes to be introduced in the state enterprise system are clearly the most significant because the country’s economy and a substantial portion of employment are concentrated in these.” Those changes involve increasing economic and financial autonomy–effectively the self-financing of state enterprises, “an old unattained goal dating back to the 1970s when Cuba began its first ‘opening’ under the Management of the Economy System.” [96]

Taken as a whole, it is not surprising  (as Al Campbell notes) that “a deep fear of supporters of Cuba’s half-century effort to begin to construct socialism–and an equally fervent hope of its opponents–is that the present reforms will take Cuba back to capitalism.” [97] Recalling Che’s view in 1964 about the decisions of the Polish Communist Party, there can be no doubt that this would have been his fear. Campbell proposes, though, that there are important barriers to the restoration of capitalism. Perhaps the most significant at this time is the determination of the Party leaders to prevent this and to build instead a “prosperous and sustainable socialism.” The point is illustrated by Raul’s statement that “I was not elected President to restore capitalism in Cuba nor to surrender the Revolution. I was elected to defend, maintain, and continue improving socialism, not to destroy it.” [98]

Even if you know where you want to go, however, it doesn’t mean that you will get there. Once begun upon this path with the goal of a prosperous and sustainable socialism, might it lead somewhere else? How, indeed, would this path differ from one in which the conscious goal is capitalism? As in the case of unstable dynamic systems, slight variations when beginning upon a path may lead ultimately to major differences in outcomes. [99] And once upon a path, it may be very difficult to leave it. Path Dependency is a well-known concept in economics and studies of institutional change that explains how choices once made may make it easier to remain on a path rather than to change paths. Consider the possibility of ending up in what Che called that “blind alley. And you wind up there after having traveled a long distance with many crossroads, and it is hard to figure out just where you took the wrong turn.” Initial steps matter: indeed, “History matters” is the point regularly made with respect to path dependency. [100]

In the case of the “updating” of the Cuban model, in short, the path may lead to other than the announced goal precisely because, rather than reconsidering the path, the logical response to every barrier may appear to be further (and faster) steps. And this would be more likely if there is an organized current that advances this as rationality. Cuban economists play such a role. As Anthony Maingot proposes, “it is arguably the economists who have been the most important organic intellectuals of this search for reform.” We can understand his perspective from his statement that the new that “cannot be born” is not socialism. “Today, it is decidedly just the reverse in Cuba.” [101] Is the “old” that is dying, then, the Cuban model or is it socialism?

Consider the advice of Cuban economists. Much like neoclassical economists in capitalism who defend their theories in the face of unpredicted results, their answer may be–we just haven’t gone far enough! In this respect, Cuban economists, like their Soviet counterparts, may act as spokespersons of capital–always inclined to propose another step in the direction of capitalism in the name of (their) science versus dogma. [102]

Omar Everleny, for example, recently exclaimed, “If only the reforms economists have been proposing for decades are finally set into motion.” But they might not be accepted, however, because of “firmly rooted political and ideological beliefs among the leadership circle.” Similarly, Juan Triana referred in 2021 to 30 years of a deep economic crisis,”30 years postponing and delaying necessary changes in the economic sphere, ignoring the existence of objective laws, which in the end are imposed,” and he noted among the reasons for this, putting “particular organizations above the interests of the nation.” For his part, Pedro Monreal had complained in 2007 that “academic economists like himself,” unlike those who work on the state plan and within ministries, are not listened to. Influence in this respect is “never a question for technical professionals…. They are decisions which basically correspond with political questions.” More recently, Triana praised the “updating” because there is finally clarity with respect to the acceptance of the need for foreign investment, but it still faces “indisputable prejudices that are difficult to remove quickly.” [103]

Science versus dogma.  Economic problems, Everleny insists, “can only be overcome with economic solutions” That requires, however, “bold decisions and the courage to break with dogmas.” But what are the prejudices, ideological premises, and dogmas that these economic scientists have bemoaned?  Very simply, the existing “Cuban model,” the model currently in the process of “updating”–for which there has been “A Lot Done but Much More to Do.” [104]

To attempt to describe the existing Cuban model briefly is certain to offend both those who understand it intimately and those who have a pre-determined conception of it. However, without such an attempt, it is impossible to grasp the meaning of “updating” and its prospects. Led by its Communist Party, Cuba has been able to defeat over 60 years of counter-revolutionary efforts by the strongest power on earth, U.S. imperialism. In its attempt to build socialism, the Party has used state planning to develop key sectors, provided full employment (via the state), ensured universal free education, universal free healthcare and universal subsidized necessities (thus, an egalitarian ideal). Its model of socialism refers mainly to the State (rather than to self-governing and self-managing processes), and it is a variety of the “conductor-conducted” model in which the self-conception of the orchestra conductor is that “without me, there would be chaos.” [105] Accordingly, the party leadership conceives of its responsibility as that of ensuring the survival and realization of the goals of the Revolution and, to this end, has mobilized masses to battle the effects of natural disasters and for the purpose of consultation on party proposals.

The current path of the “updated” Cuban model is the product of two forces. On the one hand, there is the tendency for a growing reliance upon market forces, the creation of both a significant capitalist sector and reserve army of labour, increased opening to foreign capital and the freeing of state firms from state direction. On the other hand, on the part of top party leadership, there is caution about uncontrolled spontaneous processes (given the omnipresent threat of imperialism) and the mirror of this caution by those lower in the hierarchy, practiced in following rules and explaining, accordingly, “no, no es possible.” As a result, projected reforms are slow, and the pattern has been one of delay, bumps, and reversals along the path, [106]

But along the path to where? “Updating” the Cuban economic model while preserving the responsibility of the State appears to be a path in the direction of the “market socialism” (or whatever other euphemism one prefers) of China and Viet Nam. That should not be a surprise as Cuban economists have long been enamored of the models and experience of those two countries. [107] Of course, there is the begged question of whether Cuba could proceed successfully copying their path. Unlike China and Vietnam, Cuba does not have large reserves of population in the countryside to draw upon as a cheap source of labor for export-oriented activity nor is it likely to have the same access to U.S. markets as those countries. [108]

In any event, the future path of the updated model cannot be considered in isolation from its past and present. The long-standing Blockade and its tightening (as with the Trump-Biden measures) has severely limited access to the hard currency which is essential for importing necessities (such as food and oil) and left it vulnerable to the fortunes (or lack of same) of  international allies which in the past reduced Cuba’s international payment deficits. But the past also means that we cannot ignore the long-standing results of the Party’s interpretation of its responsibility upon Cuba’s economic performance–as in the inefficiency of State farms and state requirements upon agricultural production and the lack of the opportunity for protagonism by workers in State firms, which has meant alienation and low productivity in industry. [109]

Unfortunately, Cuba has now suffered yet another external shock. Not only the pandemic and its internal effects plus the crippling of tourism in this period but, as well, countries like Brazil that have expelled Cuban doctors, and the U.S. has created new barriers to the flow of remittances to Cuba. The result has been a disastrous effect upon Cuba’s trade balances and State budget deficits. Add to that the effect of Cuba’s “own goal” in carrying out its long-needed monetary reordering, its currency reform, at the very time of an economic crisis. The result is what German Sánchez Otero, former Cuban ambassador to Venezuela, described in 2021 as a “perfect storm”–one characterized by “an overwhelming increase in the prices of food and other essential items, significant shortage of medicines, rising corruption, mini-mafias related to illicit businesses, inefficiencies and weaknesses of management cadres, and the inefficiencies of institutions at different levels, to name a few.” [110]

It’s hard not to compare the effects of this external shock to the last one, which ushered in the Special Period. In addition to shortages and that “overwhelming increase in the prices of food and other essential items,” there have been bee-stings of electricity blackouts because of oil shortages, day- long queues to buy basic necessities like bread and the rise in prices of public services (e.g., Havana transport saw a price increase of 500 percent). In February 2022, Oscar Fernández compared this situation to the Special Period, noting that “the magnitude of the crisis is not yet so great or at least the accumulated decrease may not be so great, but the impacts may be similar, even worse for many families, because social coverage, say social guarantees, the cushion on which disadvantaged families fall in this context,  it’s much thinner than the one most of us fell on during the ’90s.” [111]

Without question, the current economic situation is very dire. Cuba needs to deal with its serious shortages of food and fuel; however, those problems can not be resolved overnight, and the immediate problem takes the form of the extreme shortage of the hard currency needed to import necessities. In response, the government has attempted to collect all available MLC (Moneda Libremente Convertible, or Freely Convertible Money) by creating MLC stores that sell consumer goods not otherwise available. However, in order to concentrate all available MLC in government hands, it decided not to establish a formal mechanism to permit those with only peso income to convert this into MLC at the official exchange rate (of 24 pesos to the dollar). As a result of an excess demand for MLC, the value of the peso has been driven down in the informal or black market (to an estimated 100 pesos to a dollar); this has accelerated inflation (and further reduced real wages) well beyond that already existent as the result of the monetary re-ordering that occurred in January 2021.To already existing inequality, it has added more.

And that brings us to speak about the special tragedy of the current situation; in a country whose revolution valued egalitarianism, inequality has increased since the 1990s. In his talk at the Martin Luther King Centre on October 15, 2020, Juan Valdés Paz called attention to this pattern and predicted that “When we get to 2025, we will have a much more unequal society than the one we have now, than the one we have today.” But he stressed that inequality, though growing, is not the real issue. Rather, the problem is that this pattern of inequality “already contains a considerable strip of poverty” And that is growing: “we have more and more poor people. There is no policy for poverty, what’s more, the word poverty does not appear in a single official speech. There is not a Cuban official who dares to say poverty.”

And the situation is worse: “because blacks and mulattoes are overrepresented in that poverty line, they are overrepresented in the worst indicators: the lowest income, poverty, homelessness, the worst jobs, etc. Therefore, there are objective tendencies for the issue of raciality to become a socialist problem for us and a base for the enemy on which he is acting with great energy.” [112] Just as poverty is not discussed in polite company, neither is the issue of race. As Esteban Morales, the recently deceased Afro-Cuban scholar commented, “Our economic statistics do not allow to cross color, with variables of employment, housing, wages, income, etc. This prevents us from investigating, in-depth, how the standard of living of the different racial groups is advancing. Especially those who were previously disadvantaged.” The obvious point: “as long as the racial issue is not treated systematically and coherently, at a comprehensive level, and is reliably reflected in our statistics and in our media, we cannot aspire to socially advance the country on the subject.” [113]

Precisely because of the lack of official statistics, the study of the “re-stratification” of Cuban society carried out by Hansing and Hoffmann provides some interesting information. Based upon extensive interviews and sampling, they argue that not only has there been growing inequality since the 1990s but that it is most marked on the basis of race. They estimate that, while 95 per cent of Afro-Cubans report a yearly income below CUC 3,000, only 58 per cent of white Cubans fall into this lowest income category. Further, income levels above CUC 5,000 are limited almost exclusively to white Cubans. [114]  In terms of bank accounts, among white Cubans, 50 per cent of respondents reported having an account, while “among Afro-Cubans, this figure was a mere 11 per cent.” So, who receives remittances, giving themaccess to MLC stores? Hansen and Hoffmann note that, according to U.S. census data, of the over 1.8 million Cuban-Americans, 85 per cent are white. [115]

Will updating and the shift to the market make things better or worse? Mayra Espina Prieto and Dayma Echevarría point out that the updating process omits consideration of the problems of poverty, inequality of race and gender and the social mechanisms that reproduce in a structural way the processes of social exclusion. Because the platform of the updating process is insufficient in this respect, they conclude that “the reconfiguration is accompanied by a widening of equity gaps and the resilience of poverty and disadvantage.” [116]

Updating, in short, provides more to worry about. There was a point, Juan Valdés Paz noted, when state employment accounted for 95 percent of the total. Now, it is at “75 percent and there is a commitment by the State not to employ more than 60, that is, to be the employer of no more than 60 percent of the nation’s workforce. That means that almost a million more workers still have to be shed.” Presumably, jobs for the rest would be provided by self-employment, micro/small/ medium private firms [the last employing no more than 100 workers], family enterprises and cooperatives. So far, though, establishing the legal framework for these (especially for workers in private firms and non-agricultural cooperatives) has been very slow. [117]

But assume this is all resolved, and Cuba manages to be able to march along its updating path. What is the new that is being built? There is a “problem, which curiously we don’t talk about,” Valdés Paz notes. As Marxists, “we never ask ourselves how the socio-class structure of Cuban society evolves.” Yes, it means the emergence of a bourgeoisie; it means “that the socio-class structure of the country is evolving in a very different way from how Cuba socialism built it until the 1980s.” And he adds that “the social structure is moving toward greater stratification, diversity, complexity of new and different dynamics to those we have known, with ‘X’ political effects.” [118]

The Shock Doctrine and the Path

On July 11, 2021, Cuba received another shock–this time an internal one. Organized and spread by counterrevolutionaries (both external and internal) under the slogan #SOSCuba, high numbers of people came into the streets to demonstrate. The sad fact is that the call to protest fell upon fertile ground–people who were suffering from that perfect storm. For example, the protests began when hundreds of people demonstrated in San Antonio de los Baños (in Artemisa province) over prolonged and constant power outages but, given the high incidence of Covid-19 there, it was also marked by the slogan, “We want vaccines!” [119]

As Helen Yaffe details, the residents were responding to an appeal on the Facebook page of “Danilo Roque” (with the decapitated head of Diaz-Canel, the Cuban President, as his profile picture), who had called upon Cubans to take to the streets several times since 2019 to no avail. However, as he told a journalist, “Then the situation worsened with COVID-19 and the lack of medicines”; accordingly, given the summer heat and the spread of covid, the blackouts created that “opportune occasion,” said Roque. “My team and I decided that this was the moment to strike, given that the government was concentrating on COVID-19 .” [120]

Live streamed on social media (on sites like Cuba Decide, set up in Miami in 2015) , the protests spread throughout the country, occurring in at least six provinces out of 14, and peaking in Havana, where an estimated 3,000 people marched, many chanting antigovernment slogans. There were many instances of violence–stone-throwing between protestors and counter-protesters (who responded to Diaz-Canel’s statement on tv, “Let the revolutionaries take to the streets”). Police cars were overturned in several places, a children’s hospital was stoned, and MLC stores were attacked and looted (with videos showing people taking appliances, mattresses, soap and toilet paper).

While Diaz-Canel’s immediate description of the protests as a “soft coup” speaks to the goal of the instigators, it is important to recognize that, while most of the Cuban population continues to support the government, “the protests originated in the working class neighbourhoods with the greatest social problems.” [121] Nothing like this had happened in Cuba since the protest on the Malecon during the Special Period, and that had dispersed after Fidel appeared at the protest.

A few days after 11 July (but presumably written before), Sánchez Otero described Cuba as in a state of “pessimism, and uncertainty spread among many people who identify as revolutionary and patriotic.” Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that the government turned to those who are never uncertain–-the economists. In interviews one month after July 11, Triana explained who was at blame: “We see what happens when the application of policies does not fulfill its mission and does not meet the expectations of part or all of society, when they delay unnecessarily, when the bureaucracy usurps time that does not belong to them. That an objective situation existed internally that could lead to something like this was very evident.” (On this occasion, both Triana and economist Henry Colina expressed approval, on the other hand, at the recent inclusion of economists in the process of developing policies and measures especially during the presidency of Diaz-Canel.). [122]  The message was clear: as noted earlier, in January Everleny chimed in, “If only the reforms economists have been proposing for decades are finally set into motion”! [123]

You can’t let a good crisis go to waste, and this was an opportunity to push harder on the chosen path. Everleny’s proposals to curb inflation include “Getting rid of red tape and decisions that come from “superior bodies” to guide state-led companies,” “Allowing private owners or foreign companies to invest in the retail market, getting rid of the State’s monopoly on retail stores, and allowing private firms” to import without state intermediaries.”  Similarly, in the next month, among proposals to alleviate the economic crisis made by six economists interviewed by the Cuban journal Revista Alma Mater, the following appeared regularly:  open consumer goods markets to foreign corporations [as in Panama], increase foreign direct investment, and eliminate the state monopoly on foreign trade. In a proposal more far reaching, Antonio Romero proposed replacing “the still existing mechanism of centralized planning of the economy, which in practice consists of the centralized allocation of resources, which are perennially scarce.” Similarly, in his blog, Pedro Monreal proposed that “the emerging business fabric seems to be incompatible with a centralized planning scheme.” [124]

As Everleny put it, “The government should think more about how to open the economy, create more markets, like countries such as China and Vietnam, where the economy has played a different role due to the contribution of the private sector.” In this context , it is interesting to point out parallels to the proposals of an open opponent of the Cuban Revolution, Elias Amor Bravo, a Cuban economist teaching in Spain: ending controls and subsidies, reducing state pressures on the economy, letting salaries be determined by the market, privatise state-led companies in an orderly fashion, join the IMF and World Bank and finally that, “Cuba will need to do a 180º, and go back to orthodox economics, such as Vietnam or China. Collectivist adventures have reached their end.” [125]

The “shock doctrine” in capitalism refers to the use of crises and shocks to push aside existing barriers to the advance of neoliberal policies. Within Cuba, external and internal shocks have been used by economists to advocate overcoming the government’s hesitation in advancing along what we might call the capitalist road. There is nothing inherent, however, in the political effect of a shock because it all depends on the correlation of forces. A shock potentially provides an opportunity to leave the existing path. Has it done so in Cuba?

What did the Cuban government learn from July 11? They didn’t learn how they were suffering as the result of the Blockade or the sanctions or the effects of the pandemic upon tourist revenue they were dependent upon to import necessities. They didn’t learn that U.S. was actively pushing for regime change or that it worked with counterrevolutionary forces in Cuba to this end. They knew all this (as we should). What they learned can be seen by what they immediately proceeded to do.

The problem was apparent: marginalized neighborhoods, youth and especially youth from marginalized neighborhoods. So, the immediate response, as Yaffe recounts, was “Resurrecting a program of the Battle of Ideas of the early 2000s, on 26 July 2021, the Union of Young Communists launched new Youth Brigades of Social Works.” On 5 August they began to visit homes in the 302 poorer neighborhoods, and “Within five weeks of the protests, 3,400 university students, young teachers and other professionals had joined these brigades.” [126] Further, as the governor of the province of Havana reported in November, in 4 months, “more than 2,300 young people have joined the study and a similar number of jobs have been granted.” [127]

It was also decided to reveal to the nation what the party leadership had known. On October 13, 2021, Michael Hernandez reported in OnCubaNews that he had attended the premiere in 2014 of Cancion de Barrio, the documentary made from 2 years of Silvio Rodriguez’s concerts in marginalized neighborhoods. “The cinema collapsed at the end of the projection. Tears, closed applause, cheers. Also surprises among the spectators when suddenly realizing that this Cuba existed behind the walls of privileges or social segmentation.” Why was he writing about this seven years later? Simply because this film, which had been censored for seven years, was suddenly shown on Cuban TV at prime time! The widespread public reaction was that of “astonishment, of pain in the heart, of unprecedented surprise.” And the appropriate questions were “Why didn’t they show the documentary after its theatrical release and wait seven years for its massive screening? Who is responsible for an act of censorship that denied Cubans the possibility of thoroughly soaking up their reality?” [128]

The lesson the Party learned was summarized in Diaz-Canel’s closing speech to the Central Committee on October 24, 2021. “In the face of the dissatisfactions in our population” he said,” we will be attending the population properly, working in the neighborhoods and reactivating the mechanisms of popular participation.” It was, indeed, essential “to win the time lost due to routine, schematism and the lack of link with the base.” As he subsequently noted upon visits to neighborhoods and communities in December, we have to begin with the local diagnosis of the problems that have to be solved: “Everything has to start from the people, from the participation of the people.” Furthermore, there was the special necessity to reach youth: “If youth do not receive differentiated attention, the continuity of the Revolution is at risk.” [129] Very simply, there was a failure in the Party’s work.

Yet another thing the Party learned is that the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDRs) in their current form were not adequate to their mission. “Our mission was, is and will always be the defense of the Revolution, from our neighborhoods and cities,” stressed Gerardo Hernandez, Hero of the Republic (as one of the Five) in his role as National Coordinator of the CDRs. However, he acknowledged that” there are problems with the functioning of the base” including places where “there is no volunteer work, collection of raw materials and other tasks that the organization traditionally assumed.” Accordingly, in prioritizing 65 neighborhoods, he argued it was necessary to “revitalize” the CDRs and to strengthen their structures and missions; in particular, he pointed to the need to pay attention to social problems, especially those that generate inequalities and alerting organizations and institutions about their obligations, promote prevention work, strengthen revolutionary vigilance to face problems from their inception, and promote work with children, adolescents, and youth.

New in the planned revitalization of the CDRs is the need to incorporate young people beginning at the age of 16 and to find ways to select activists to serve social networks and to strengthen revolutionary surveillance systems, “taking into account the modes of action of the counterrevolution.” Renewal of members and functions was necessary under these new conditions. In particular, noting the role of elderly members in the CDRs, Gerardo Hernandez stated clearly that “there is a lot of experience and teachings to take from them, but we are interested in many more young people joining.” [130]

Was the shock of July 11, then, sufficient to jar Cuba from its existing path and onto a path less likely to lead in the direction of Viet Nam and China? Not immediately on its face. Objective 3 of the Economic and Social Strategy (ESS) for 2022 adopted by the IV Plenum of the Central Committee of the Party did “give priority to people, households and communities in situations of vulnerability.” However, the other 4 named objectives for the ESS referred to economic reforms, stabilizing the electricity system, transforming the state business system and to decentralizing to allow municipalities more autonomy. The main subject of the Plenum, too, was evaluation of the implementation of the Guidelines for 2021-2026, i.e., its progress along the “updating” path. [131] Even if this was not the intent of the Plenum, however, did the effect of July 11 point in a new direction?

Changing the Path

Given the apparent perspective of the party leadership, the influence of economists and the international environment, Cuba’s chosen path seems to be in the direction realized in Viet Nam and China. It is far from arriving there at this point, and whether Cuba’s situation (e.g., its demographics and the U.S. impatience for regime change) ever would permit it to match that success is uncertain. However, the advice of Cuban economists for the updating of the economic model promises, if followed, to lead to capitalism with Cuban characteristics.132

What, on the other hand, might lead to a socialist Future? Elements of such a path have been identified above. They include Marx’s emphasis upon the simultaneous changing of circumstances and self-change (“revolutionary practice”) and his vision of a society of “self-governing and self-working” communes (rather than a state characterized by a “ systematic and hierarchic division of labour” in the hands of “a trained caste”). They can be found in Che’s argument on the necessity to build socialist consciousness through socialist practice rather than through self-interest, in Fidel’s plea that Cuban economists study Che, in Mészáros’s rejection of commodity exchange relations and his emphasis upon the necessity for the “development of the creative potentialities of the social individuals” and in Marta’s attention to the importance of spaces in which people can develop their capacities through their protagonism. Fidel’s statement in 1979 made the point well: “Development is mainly attention to the human being, who must be protagonist and the end of any development effort. [133]

Were Cuba to step boldly to remove barriers to the advance of agricultural cooperatives by freeing them to make their own way, by finally removing restrictions to the development of non-agricultural coops (and privileging them relative to capitalist firms), by introducing real worker management processes into state firms (as well as private firms), and by realizing the potential of popular councils, it could create spaces that can unleash the collective creative energy of people and move onto a socialist path, a path which develops both productive forces and socialist consciousness . [134] Is this a fantasy?

Marxists have an unfortunate record in predicting the Future–especially when it comes to forecasting the next economic crisis or the final gasp of capitalism. The combination of analysis and hope may lead (as it did for Marx) to an overestimation of the significance of certain phenomena and the failure to grasp that of other factors. So, it is with a recognition of this tradition that I approach this discussion of a possible Future for Cuba.

There is definitely the suggestion of an alternative path in the speeches of Miguel Diaz-Canel as President of Cuba and First Secretary of the Party. The current strategy recognizes, he told the April 2022 meeting of the Council of Ministers, that based upon the situation in Cuba and the world, there will always be new measures and ideas to put into practice; however, “there is a premise that cannot be ignored in any scenario.” This essential premise is that “the solutions and transformations that are proposed have to respond to socialism and have to be seen from the Marxist perspective. [135]

Consider the party’s response to problems in communities. After listening to residents in vulnerable neighborhoods following July 11, Diaz-Canel stressed the importance of not bringing ready-made solutions to them. We are not there “to intervene in the neighborhoods; we are going to support the neighborhoods and the diagnosis, proposals, ideas have to come from them…we are going to help channel all of this and work with the people, with the actors who are in the neighborhood, which will allow us to articulate well the concepts of participation and democracy.” In fact, these concepts of participation and democracy represent a departure from existing practice. The problems in the neighborhoods, he explained, demonstrated the need “to revive practices and experiences that were put in practice at another time and have proven their worth.” [136]

Several months later, Diaz-Canel returned to the same theme when visiting communities. Arguing that the concepts he was advancing originated with Fidel, he insisted that “everything has to start from the people, from the participation of the people.” [137]  Further, concluding the discussion at the Central Committee meeting in October 2021, Diaz-Canel emphasized the need to develop “a genuine, inclusive, democratic and participatory process that defends that concept of popular power that we were discussing here.” It means, he pointed out, that the party should become “pedagogues when interacting with society, not only in the way we transfer our contents, but also in the way we learn from that interaction.” That concept of popular power, he continued, requires “spaces to debate and propose, that after debating and proposing there are spaces to implement, and that after debating and proposing, actions are implemented, then there will also be transparency to control, to exercise popular control, to be accountable and to advance.”

That emphasis upon everything starting “from the participation of the people” would constitute a significant change in direction. In order to be able to do this, the First Secretary of the Party insisted, demands “strengthening and updating the work of our mass organizations” [138] Such an updating of party practice (were it to occur) would change the nature of the relation of the party to society. It means, as Marta argued, that “political cadres should fundamentally be popular pedagogues, capable of fostering the ideas and initiatives that emerge from within the grassroots movement.” [139] Further, if everything is to start from the people, it means that consultation (however salutary it has been recently) is not enough. As German Sánchez wrote, “Only by respecting the role of the people as the main actor in the real process of decision-making (and not as subject of consultation) will we have the ability to get out of the labyrinth.” [140]

So far, the renewed focus upon protagonism and popular control does not seem to have extended beyond communities, in particular to workplaces. While Diaz-Canel earlier had talked about the “importance of expanding democracy on the basis of popular control and the active participation of workers” in state companies, his point at the time was to reduce theft–in that “this leads to a greater sense of belonging and a brake on the occurrence of criminal acts and corruption.” [141]  July 11 revealed a serious problem in neighborhoods to which the party has had to respond quickly, but it has not felt the same urgency to concern itself with the lack of a “sense of belonging” and the existence of alienation within workplaces that have long plagued productivity and pride and contributed significantly to Cuba’s economic straits. This, too, requires “updating.”

In the struggle to the death between the Future and the Past in Cuba, we can see two concepts of “updating.” The first is the updating of the economic model, which expands the role of the market, allows the development of private capital, emphasizes the attraction of foreign capital, would close unprofitable state companies, encourages individual material incentive and produces people fit for capitalism. As Che stressed, “wanting to construct socialism with capitalist elements without really changing their meaning” is a path that “obliges new concessions to economic levers, that is to say retreat.” That path does not build socialist consciousness.

The second is the updating of the concepts of participation and democracy in which the Party takes responsibility for encouraging and facilitating collective protagonism. Recall in this respect, Che’s view of “the role of the vanguard party”–not to focus upon economic self interest but “precisely that of raising as high as possible the opposing banner, the banner of moral interest.” Insofar as updating the economic model does not rely exclusively upon material incentive but stresses protagonism in workplaces, communities and society as a whole, there is the possibility of following Che’s emphasis upon balance–the simultaneous development of productive forces and socialist human beings. [142]

The Cuban Revolution now faces a very serious challenge because its desperate need for hard currency to be able to import food and fuel has been exacerbated by the effects of the war in Ukraine. So far, Cuba has demonstrated its remarkable ability to respond to enormous challenges (development of agroecology and its latest success being its independent development of vaccines). [143] Perhaps July 11 can be the shock that allows Cuba to change its path from that advocated by its economists. Were it to ignite protagonism with a national campaign such as Rectification and the Battle of Ideas, Cuba could build socialist consciousness and update the Revolution.

Notes

1. “Understand above all and first of all, that a revolution is not a bed of roses, a revolution is a struggle to the death between the Future and the Past.” lanic.utexas.edu

2. Marta Harnecker, A World to Build: New Paths toward Twenty-First Century Socialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015), 161. See also Marta Harnecker receives Libertador Award for Critical Thinking – YouTube.

3. Not incidentally, these questions were formulated when Marta and I were advisers in Venezuela, 2004-2011.

4. See my discussion of “the atomism of neoclassical economics” in Michael A Lebowitz, Between Capitalism and Community (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), chapter 1.

5. Extended discussion of this question may be found in “Never Forget the Second Product,” Chapter 5 of Between Capitalism and Community, , Ibid..

6. Karl Marx, “Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne,” Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol..11, 403.,

7. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol 22, 335.

8. Friedrich Engels, “The Ten Hours’ Question” (1850), in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 10 (New York: International Publishers, 1978), 275.

9. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage, 1973): 494.

10. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 283..

11. Marx, Capital, 1: 548, 643, 799. 899.

12. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 772

13. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 3 (New York: Vintage Books, 1981): 178; Marx, Capital, Vol. 1: 447.

14. Michael A. Lebowitz, “Protagonism and Productivity,” Monthly Review, November 2017.

15. Marx, Grundrisse: 172; Marx, Capital, 1: 171.

16. Marx, Grundrisse: 171-2.

17. Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative: 85-9; Marx, Grundrisse: 278.

18. Marx, Grundrisse: 278, 459-60.

19. Emily Kawano, Solidarity Economy: Building an Economy for People & Planet.

20. Karl Marx, “Comments on James Mill,” in Marx and Engels, Collected Works,, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975) 227–28; Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in Marx and Engels,,, Collected Works, , vol. 3, 302, 304.

21. Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative: 78-81; Marx, Grundrisse: 158–59.

22. István Mészáros, Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition (New York: Monthly Review Press: 1995), 756.

23. Ibid., 789.

24. Ibid,. 764.

25. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, 711.

26. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Marx and Engels, Selected Works. Vol.2 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Press, 1962), 24.

27. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage, 1973), 278.

28. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1977), 711.

29. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 2 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Press, 1962), 22. An extended analysis of this document may be found in Michael A. Lebowitz, The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015), Chapter 2, “Understanding the Critique of the Gotha Program.”

30. Marx, Civil War in France in Marx and Engels, On the Paris Commune (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971), 75.

31. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, op.cit., 68–73.

32. Karl Marx, “First Outline of The Civil War in France,” in Marx and Engels, op.cit, 155–56.

33. Marx, Critique, 32.

34. Mészáros, op.cit., 836.

35. Ibid.,. 836.

36. See Michael A. Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), in particular Chap. 6, “Making a Path to Socialism.”

37. Mészáros, op. cit, 761; Marx, Critique, op cit, 24.

38. Marx, Grundrisse, 459–60, 278.

39. Marx, Critique, 23,24.

40. Ibid., 25.

41. Ibid.., 23.

42. Ibid., 24; Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 241.

43. Marx, Critique, 25. Those who rely upon Marx’s Critique to support their argument for the treatment of socialism as a stage say nothing about Marx’s point about the “deductions,” his critique of inequality or his point about “the fuss” about distribution made by “vulgar socialists.”

44. Mészáros. Op.cit, 817.

45. See Michael A. Lebowitz, The Contradictions of “Real Socialism”: The Conductor and the Conducted (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012).

46. Ibid., 138.

47. See the section, “The Class Perspective of the Economists” in Ibid. 120-28.

48. To label the period as one of “transition” presumes the triumph of the Future.

49. Samuel Bowles, The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives are No Substitute for Good Citizens (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.,50. See also Michael A. Lebowitz, Between Capitalism and Community (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2021, chapter 8, “Beyond Atomism.”

50. Carlos Tablada, Che Guevara: Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism (Sydney: Pathfinder, 1989), 92.

51. Marta and I were privileged to observe how Hugo Chavez’s encouragement of initiatives from below enabled people (through communal councils and in recovered factories) to develop strength, pride and dignity–characteristics that continue today where they build communes in Venezuela in response to his message, “comuna o nada.” What remains of Chavism is best followed in Venezuelanalysis[https://venezuelanalysis.com]. See also Cira Pasqual Marquina and Chris Gilbert, Venezuela: the Present as Struggle (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020).

52. Marta Harnecker, “ Ideas for the Struggle,” 2016, www.oldandnewproject.net; see also Lebowitz, 2020, op.cit , Chapter 12, “ The Political Instrument We Need.”

53. Note the effect of the lack of protagonism of the working class in “real socialism” , Lebowitz, The Contradictions of “Real Socialism,” op.cit.

54. Fidel Castro, Speech speech at the University of Havana, November 17, 2005, www.cuba.cu

55. Helen Yaffe, Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), Chapters 1-3 passim.

56. Carlos Tablada, “La creatividad en el pensamiento económico del Che,” Rebelión, 25 November 2004.

57. Carlos Tablada, Che Guevara: Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism (Pacific and Asia: Pathfinder, 1989), 93.

58. Helen Yaffe, Che Guevara: the Economics of Revolution (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan,2009), 63.

59. Tablada, Che Guevara, op.cit, 121.

60. Ibid., 122, 126-7, 133-4.

61. Yaffe, op.cit., 56.

62. Ibid., 250-1.

63. Ibid., 49.

64. Tablada, Economics, op.cit, 135-6, 193; Yaffe, op.cit, 56.

65. Tablada, op.cit, 136.

66. Ibid., 193, 136.

67. Yaffe, op.cit, 63.

68. Ibid., 131.

69. Ibid., 171, 133.

70. Ibid., 146-8.

71. Ibid,.133, 149-50.

72. Ibid., 138-9, 144-5, 161.

73. Ibid., 207-16.

74. Tablada, op.cit., 200.

75. Yaffe, op.cit, 249.

76. Ibid.., 85.

77. Tablada, op.cit.,172,178, 194.

78. Yaffe, op.cit., 67.

79. Tablada, op.cit., 201.

80. Ibid., 121-2.

81. Yaffe, op.cit., 263.

82. Cf., Michael A Lebowitz, Contradictions of “Real Socialism”: the Conductor and the Conducted” (New York: Monthly Review Press), 2012.

83. Tablada, op.cit., 41-51.

84. Juan Valdés Paz, “Cuba: los cambios institucionales que vendrán,” December 5, 2015 La Haine (Paper, 2011).

85. It is generally acknowledged, though, that the increased reliance upon markets led to an increase in inequality at this time.

86. Fidel Castro Ruz, Speech to Young Communists League 8th Congress, Havana, 5 December 2004. Juan Valdés Paz recalled in 2020 that another factor was unemployment.: they told Fidel “we have 12 percent unemployment” and Fidel said “unemployment in socialism? Juan Valdés Paz, “Las instituciones cubanas tienen una serie de graves desviaciones,” Talk at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Center, Marianao, Havana, La Tizza, Dec 3, 2021.

87. La Tizza Collective, “We Must Return to the Future,” (published July 15, 2021 in Spanish in Cuba), Monthly Review, Vol 73, no. 8 (January 2022).

88. Marce Cameron, “Cuba’s Battle of Ideas,” Green Left Weekly, Np. 667, May 10, 2006. I recall well seeing recent social work graduates, all dressed in white, file proudly onto the balcony at the Palace of Conventions in Havana where they were applauded by the participants in the 2003 Globalization Conference.

89. La Tizza Collective, op.cit;; From the perspective of an economist, however, the period was marked by “irresponsible fiscal and monetary policies.” Pavel Vidal-Alejandro, “Cuban Macroeconomic Trends and the Pending Monetary Reform.” Cuban Studies, No. 47 (2019), pp. 279, 286. University of Pittsburgh Press. Similarly, Julio Carranza, another leading Cuban economist, noted that the Battle of ideas “brought back inoperative and limited forms of economic management” in addition to its a very positive dimension from a political and ideological point of view. Cuba News, July 17, 2021.

90. José Luís Rodríguez, “The Recent Transformations in the Cuban Economy,” international Journal of Cuban Studies , Vol. 5, No. 2 (Winter 2013).

91. Raul Castro Ruz, http://www.granma.cubaweb.cu/2007/07/27/nacional/artic01.html; Philip Peters, “A chronology of Cuba’s ‘updating’ of the socialist model,” International Journal of Cuban Studies , Autumn/Winter 2012, Vol. 4, No. 3/4,

92. Peters, op.cit.

93. Peters, op.cit. These changes are not referred to as “reforms” nor by the Russian term for restructuring, “perestroika.”

94. See the discussion of the social contract in “real socialism” in Lebowitz, 2012, Chapter 2.

95. Among other valued social achievements of the Revolution are universal free healthcare and universal free education.

96. C. Juan Triana Cordovi and Stephen Wilkinson, “A Lot Done but Much More to Do: An Assessment of the Cuban Economic Transformation So Far,” International Journal of Cuban Studies, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Winter 2013),119, 127-8.

97. Al Campbell, “Updating Cuba’s Economic Model: Socialism, Human Development, Markets and Capitalism,” Socialism and Democracy, 2016 Vol. 30, No. 1, 18.

98. Campbell, op.cit.,18-26; Raul Castro, op.cit, 2010.

99. See the discussion of Leontiev’s explanation of why it is necessary to write history backwards in Lebowitz, 2020, Chapter 10, “How to Find a Path to Community.”

100. Classic examples often cited in relation to path dependency include the continued dominance of the Qwerty keyboard on computers over the Dvorak layout [despite the superiority of the latter], the small railway gauge initially adopted for railways over wider ones that allow for greater speed, the victory of the VHS format over the Betamax as the result of contingent initial steps.

101. Anthony P. Maingot, “Epistemic ‘Organic Intellectuals’ and Cuba’s Battle of Ideas,” Yumpu.

102. Lebowitz, 2012, Chapter 5, “The Conductor and the Battle of Ideas in the Soviet Union.”

103. Omar Everleny, “How Can we Reduce Prices and Stop Inflation in Cuba,” Havana Times, January 29, 2022; Helen Yaffe, “Che Guevara’ Enduring Legacy: Not the Foco but the Theory of Socialist Construction,” Latin American Perspectives, March 2009, Vol. 36, No.2; C. Juan Triana Cordovi and Stephen Wilkinson, “A Lot Done but Much More to Do: An Assessment of the Cuban Economic Transformation So Far,” International Journal of Cuban Studies, Vo.5, No. 2 (Winter 2013); Juan Triana in “Desafios de Consenso Economia,” Revist a Alma Mater, August, 9, 2021.

104. Triana and Wilkinson, op.cit.

105. See the “Overture: The Conductor and the Conducted” in Michael A. Lebowitz, Contradictions of “Real Socialism”: the Conductor and the Conducted (New York: Monthly Review Press (2012), 21-7.

106. One egregious example is that co-operatives have been accepted and promised for many years as a form of social property. However, economist Oscar Fernández recently commented that, “unfortunately there has been no strength or political will or knowledge to promote cooperative solutions.” Revista Alma Mater, “Economía cubana: Cuatro preguntas urgentes,” Cuba y la Economía.

107. German Sánchez Otero, “The Communist Party of Cuba and Present Challenges: Reflections on the Eighth Party Congress,” Monthly Review, Vol. 73, No. 8 (January 2022), 38.

108. Stephen Wilkinson, “Neither Beijing nor Hanoi but a Cuban Market Socialism?,” International Journal of Cuban Studies, Autumn/Winter 2012, Vol. 4, No. 3/4, Note Sánchez’s devastating caveat re the idea of copying China and Vietnam. Op.cit, 38-9.

109. Among other characteristics that need to be recognized are demographic factors such as an aging population (especially in agriculture), low birth rates (in part as the result of housing shortages, with several generations cohabiting) and emigration of young people.

110. German Sánchez Otero, “The Communist Party of Cuba and Present Challenges: Reflections on the Eighth Party Congress,” Monthly Review, Vol. 73, No. 8 (January 2022), 36-7. As Cuban Ambassador, German Sánchez was close to Chavez and author of books on him.

111. Revista Alma Mater, “Economía cubana: Cuatro preguntas urgentes,” Cuba y la Economía., op.cit.

112. Juan Valdés Paz, “La institucionalidad Cubana tiene una serie de grave desviaciones.” La Tizza, December 3. 2021.

113. Esteban Morales Domínguez, “The Census, Skin Color and Social Analysis,” Portside, September 11, 2021. See also by Morales, Race in Cuba: Essays on the Revolution and Racial Inequality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012) and La Problematica Racial en Cuba(Havana:Editorial Jose Marti, 2012.)

114. The CUC, the convertible peso, meant to mirror the U.S. dollar, was discontinued as part of the currency reform.

115. As Hansing and Hoffmann point out, the implication of this racial differentiation (although under-reported by the government) can not be overstated. They cite in this respect Esteban Morales, who stated, “The Cuban population is treated as a homogenous mass. This is an error of incalculable dimension.” Katrin Hansing and Bert Hoffmann, “Cuba’s New Social Structure:: Assessing the Re-Stratification of Cuban Society 60 Years after Revolution,” German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA) (2019), No. 315 (February 2019), http://www.jstor.com/stable/resrep21213 See also Katrin Hansing. “When Racial Inequalites Return:Assessing the Restratification of Cuban Society 60 Years After Revolution,” March 20, 2020; Rafael Betancourt, “The Social and Solidarity Economy’s Contribution to Building Socialism in Cuba,” On Cuba News, July 9, 2020.

116. Mayra Espina Prieto and Dayma Echevarría León, “El cuadro socioestructural emergente de la ‘actualización’ en cuba: retos a la equidad social” ( The Emerging Socio-Structural Framework of the ‘Update’ in Cuba: Challenges to Social Equity), International Journal of Cuban Studies , Vol. 12, No. 1, (Summer 2020), pp. 29-52.

117. One problem finally presumably resolved) has been the delay in authorizing non-agricultural cooperatives involving professionally-trained people. Cuba has produced many university graduates. However, as I argued in my talk at the University of Havana in November 2016, there is “moral depreciation of human capacity that has been built up, all other things equal, if it is not used.” It would not be surprising if this were a source of discontent among youth. Lebowitz, “Protagonism and Productivity,” op.cit.

118. Juan Valdés Paz, “· Las instituciones cubanas tienen una serie de graves desviaciones,” Talk at the Martin Luther King.Jr. Memorial Center, Marianao, Havana, La Tizza, Dec 3, 2021. Valdes Paz comments there about Cuban economic advisors: “Comrade Marino Murillo can talk for two hours about any number of problems without mentioning any social implication. The social never appears when economists speak.”

119. A similar example was in in Manzanillo, where young teenagers were protesting after the area had been without water for seven days. Communistas, “From Cuba: A Description of the Protests,” Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal.

120. Helen Yaffe, “Cuba After the July 11 Protests, “ American University, Washington, DC. Yaffe reports that slogans and placards calling for protests apparently appeared on websites at 9.a.m (before the protests in San Antonio).

121. Communistas. Op.cit.. The same point was made by the La Tizza Collective, which noted that the “most marginalized sector” was mobilized by “the political agenda of the counterrevolution.” “We Must Return to the Future,” Monthly Review, Vol. 7 3, No.8 (January 2022), 23-4

122. “Desafios del Consenso,” op.cit

123. Everleny, “How Can we Reduce Prices and Stop Inflation in Cuba,” op.cit.

124. Revista Alma Mater, “Economía cubana: Cuatro preguntas urgentes,” Cuba y la Economía. https: elestadocomotal.com.

125. Vicente Morin Aguado, “How Cuba Can Rise from the Ashes Post COVID-19?,” Havana Times, May 12, 2020.

126. Yaffe, op.cit

127. CubaNews, November 21, 2021.

128. Michael Hernandez, OnCubaNews, October 13, 2021.

129. Diaz-Canel, “We are ready and willing to do everything to defend what is most sacred, what unites us” , CubaNews, Oct 26, 2021;. Díaz-Canel in Las Tunas and Holguín: “Everything has to start from the people, from the participation of the people,” CubaNews, December 10, 2021;.Díaz-Canel:” Developing a policy for attention to youth is among the most important government projects underway, Granma February 23, 2022/

130. Fidel Rendon Matienzo, “The CDRs will carry out the process of revitalizing and strengthening their missions.” ACN [Cuba News Agency], 01 April 2022 ; Yenia Silva Correa “The country grows in its neighborhoods,” | internet@granma.cu April 1, 2022; Gerardo Hernandez Nordelo, We have to revitalize the organization with creativity and enthusiasm,” ACN, September 28, 2021.

131. Yaima Puig Meneses, “Cuba will not stop its development,” CubaDebate, April 27, 2022.

132. Valdes Paz commented that “we have many social democrats: ‘in the end the empire is not so bad, we have to solve it, that is inevitable, we have to be objective, we have to be realistic…’ and a discourse begins to appear in the name of ‘realism.’” op.cit.,

133. Carlos Tablada, ““La creatividad en el pensamiento económico del Che,” op.cit.

134. See also interview in 2014, Michael A. Lebowitz, “Cuba Needs to Unleash Creative Energy,” Havana Times, March 28, 2014.

135. Yaima Puig Meneses, “Díaz-Canel: The transformations of the economic-social strategy have to respond to socialism” | internet@granma.cu, April 25, 2022

136. CubaDebate: “Cuban President: We are going to support the neighborhoods, not to intervene in them” , translated by Walter Lippman,Cubanews, August 18, 2021

137. René Tamayo,” Díaz-Canel in Las Tunas and Holguín: Everything has to start from the people, from the participation of the people” Cubadebate, 09 December 2021. Translated by Walter Lippman, Cubanews 12 December 2021

138. Diaz-Canel, “We are ready and willing to do everything to defend what is most sacred, what unites us.” Op. cit., Recall Marta’s emphasis on the need for space for the popular protagonism that builds human capacity, See also Lebowitz, “The Political Instrument as Revolutionary Pedagogue,” 171-5, Lebowitz, (2020), op. cit.

139. Harnecker, “Ideas for the Struggle,” op.cit.; Lebowitz, Ibid,

140. German Sánchez, op. cit, 41.

141. “Educate to strengthen internal control and crime prevention,” Granma, April 27, 2021 This doesn’t mean that Diaz-Canel does not himself support a general extension of democratic participation from below in the workplace. Indeed, in a recent interview, he summarized his position as “We are defending the need to increasingly expand democracy on the basis of people’s participation and control in our society.” Manolo De Los Santos, “We Will Prevail: A Conversation With Cuba’s President Miguel Diaz-Canal,” Counterpunch, April 8, 2022.

142. Recall here Marta’s questions posed at the beginning of this essay.

143. Mauricio Betancourt, “The effect of Cuban agroecology in mitigating the metabolic rift: A quantitative approach to Latin American food production,” Global Environmental Change, June 25, 2020.

From Commodity Fetishism to Teleological Positing: Lukács’s Concept of Labor and Its Relevance

By Wang Pu

Republished from Monthly Review.

The concept of labor constituted a pivotal problematic in Georg Lukács’s theoretical development throughout his Marxist years. His 1922 essay, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”—the central piece of his work History and Class Consciousness, famously opens with the phrase phantom objectivity. The idea of phantom (or phantom-like) objectivity derives from Karl Marx’s discussion of commodity and labor in Capital. The question of labor becomes especially crucial in the third section of History and Class Consciousness, where the young Lukács argues that the proletariat will become conscious of being the object-subject of history. On one hand, labor is reduced to the pure abstractness of labor-time, which marks the nadir of capitalist reification; on the other, it is within the immediate experience of reified labor that the proletarian consciousness is rendered possible. In this sense, labor under capitalism not only determines the lowest point of reification, but also forms “the vantage point of the proletariat.” [1]

Lukács’s later criticism of History and Class Consciousness revolved around the issues of labor and human praxis in general. In his preface to the 1967 edition, he wrote that “the purview of economics [in History and Class Consciousness] is narrowed down because its basic Marxist category, labor as the mediator of the metabolic interaction between society and nature, is missing.” Thus, labor refers not only to the historical phenomenon of reification (that is, wage-labor), but also stands for a more general, even ontological, question. In the same preface, Lukács later wrote that labor, characterized by its “teleological system,” should be taken as “the original form and model” of all human praxis. [2] He described his own development in the following way:

Once I had gained a definite and fundamental insight into what was wrong with my whole approach in History and Class Consciousness, this search became a plan to investigate the philosophical connections between economics and dialectics. My first attempt to put this plan into practice came early in the thirties, in Moscow and Berlin, with the first draft of my book The Young Hegel (which was not completed until autumn 1937). Only now, thirty years later, am I attempting to discover a real solution to this whole problem in the ontology of social existence, on which I am currently engaged. [3]

The first attempt produced his book The Young Hegel, in which the discussion of labor is associated with his reading of G. W. F. Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit and his encounter with Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. The outcome of this project, on which he was working in the 1960s, was The Ontology of Social Being, one chapter of which was devoted to the question of labor. In that chapter, labor is philosophically defined as the fundamental teleological positing that forms the model for social praxis.

His 1923 essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” and later works, The Young Hegel and TheOntology of Social Being, constitute a trajectory in his theorization of labor. Here, we trace emergence of the question of labor in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” and the ambiguity it causes in the Hegelian-Marxian tradition.

Dualism of Wage-Labor: Labor-Time and the Soul

It is no accident that the issue of the of labor emerges in third section of essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in which Lukács discusses immediacy and mediation. The reification confronting the proletariat differs little from the rigid immediacy imprisoning the bourgeoisie. However, the proletariat contains the potential of unveiling and overcoming the “opposition of subject and object.” For the proletarian consciousness to emerge, both the immediacy and the mediating force must consist of reified labor. When writing this essay, Lukács was highly concerned with “the Marxist analysis of labor under capitalism.” What he referred to as labor was wage-labor, rather than labor per se. He conceived of wage-labor as the point of departure for the identity of immediacy and mediation for the proletariat. [4]

Above all, Lukács wrestled with the issue of labor-time. While bourgeois thought always assumes a rigidly double form, “for the proletariat social reality does not exist in this double form.” To substantiate this thesis, Lukács followed Marx’s abstraction of labor into labor-time in the first volume of Capital. This abstraction is identical to the historical “process of abstraction of which [the proletarian] is the victim.” Yet Lukács also went on to claim that it is this very fact of quantification into labor-time that “forces [the worker] to surpass the immediacy of his condition.” At this point, the young Lukács’s eloquence and ambiguity become intertwined. He continued thus: “the quantitative differences in exploitation which appear to the capitalist in the form of quantitative determinants of the objects of his calculation, must appear to the worker as the decisive, qualitative categories of his whole physical, mental and moral existence.” The emergence of this consciousness hinges on the fact that “the worker is forced to objectify his labor-power over against his total personality and to sell it as a commodity.” In this sense, labor-time is not merely considered the immediate social existence of reification and abstraction in which the worker is dehumanized; it is also the mediation for class consciousness. [5]

A presupposed duality, however, is already discernible, for the commodification of both the worker’s labor-power and “total personality” coexist in the same labor-time. Lukács then raised the question of the “work-situation” as the concrete experience of dualism within wage-labor, abstract labor-time versus “the soul”:

This enables us to understand why it is only in the proletariat that the process by which a man’s achievement is split off from his total personality and becomes a commodity leads to a revolutionary consciousness. It is true…that the basic structure of reification can be found in all the social forms of modern capitalism… but this structure can only be made fully conscious in the work-situation of the proletarian. For his work as he experiences it directly possesses the naked and abstract form of the commodity, while in other forms of work this is hidden behind the facade of ‘mental labor.’… The more deeply reification penetrates into the soul of the man… the more deceptive appearances are. Corresponding to the objective concealment of commodity form, there is the subjective element. This is the fact that while the process by which the worker is reified and becomes a commodity dehumanizes him and cripples and atrophies his ‘soul.’… It remains true that precisely his humanity and his soul are not changed into commodities.

Here, the word soul is especially worth pausing over. Lukács indicated that it is the coincidence of the reifying manual, machine-like labor and the resisting soul in the same work-situation that determines the proletariat’s “vantage point,” from which to grasp historical totality. [6]

To this point, we can summarize that Lukács’s dualism assumes two corresponding, yet incongruous, forms: the first, as shown above, is the dual meaning of labor-time, that is, that labor-time is simultaneously recognizable as the pure quantity and the determining category of personality. The second is a kind of internal division of the “total personality.” The worker is divided into two antagonistic parts: the commodified labor-power and the soul resisting dehumanization. To some extent, the second seems to be developed to mediate the first, but at any rate, the two forms highlight the ambiguity in the identification of immediacy with mediation. Between the two forms arises Lukács’ ambivalence. [7]

The reference to “the soul” reminds us of Lukács’s pre-Marxist aesthetic endeavor; his invocation of experience also is reminiscent of the Diltheyian categories and the Neo-Kantian atmosphere of German so-called spiritual sciences in the early twentieth century. We must also bear in mind that, as Harrt Liebersohn has tried to demonstrate, the young Lukács’s pre-Marxist conception of labor was in dialogue with Weber’s and Simmel’s discussions of work in the context of bourgeois life and Christian-Protestant culture. Yet what characterizes Lukács’ dualism on the issue of labor in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” is his radical move from German sociology and Neo-Kantianism to revolutionary Marxism. The mediation for this move was nothing other than his turn toward Hegel. [8]

One of the philosophical origins for such correlation between labor and self-consciousness is found in Hegel’s “lord-bondsman dialectic.” According to his work The Phenomenology of Spirit self-consciousness springs from the triangular relationship among the lord, the bondsman, and the object on which the bondsman is working. Hegel asserted forcefully that “through work… the bondsman becomes conscious of what he truly is.” Thus, Hegel assumed the activity of labor as the “middle term” and concluded that “it is in this way, therefore, that consciousness, qua worker, comes to see in the independent being [of the object] its own independence.” What lies hidden the bondsman’s work is the issue of objectification. That is to say, the bondsman’s spiritual freedom is objectified in the “permanent independence” of the product of his labor, and thereby is made conscious. [9]

Though Lukács certainly drew upon Hegelian logic in the discussion concerning labor and consciousness, it is evident that his case was complicated by the fact that he wedged commodity fetishism into this context. The worker’s objectification through wage-labor is interlocked with the commodification of labor-power. [10] As quoted above, wage-labor is shaped by the “compulsion to objectify [the worker] himself as a commodity.” Lukács then argued:

Above all, the worker can only become conscious of his existence in society when he becomes aware of himself as a commodity. As we have seen, his immediate existence integrates him as a pure, naked object into the production process. Once this immediacy turns out to be the consequence of a multiplicity of mediations, once it becomes evident how much it presupposes, then the fetishistic forms of the commodity system begin to dissolve: in the commodity the worker recognizes himself and his own relations with capital. [11]

Here, the mediating role of work in Hegel’s dialectics is repeated, yet reversed: while the Hegelian bondsman recognizes his freedom in his objectification, the Lukácsian worker recognizes his imprisonment. If the product of work attests to the bondsman’s humanity, as is shown in Hegel’s case, then the capitalist history in the Lukácsian sense is the opposite: the worker himself is commodified as the “pure, naked object.” To translate this into Marxian language: what the bondsman recognizes in the object is his own objectification; what the worker recognizes in the object/commodity, according to Lukács, is actually his own “phantom-like objectivity.”

Moreover, though this step forms a parallel with Hegel’s idea of labor as the “middle term,” in Lukács this very mediation itself is dualized—at least implicitly—corresponding to Marx’s fundamental insight about labor’s duality under capitalism (that is, use-value/value, objectivity/phantom-like objectivity). The antithesis between the qualitative objectivity and the quantitative “phantom objectivity” cannot be solved by a Marxian version of the Hegelian notion of labor that mediates self-consciousness. Rather, what is at stake here is how, in the crude immediacy of the “work-situation,” can commodity fetishism dissolve in the experience of the worker, rather than devour the worker’s whole humanity and absorb it into phantom objectivity? Despite Lukács’s theoretical vigor, the chasm between objectification (as found in Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit) and phantom objectivity (from the penetrating analysis offered by Marx) remains unbridgeable. [12]

Vergegenständlichung and Entäusserung [13]

It is interesting to note that, when writing History and Class Consciousness, Lukács, like V. I. Lenin, had no access to Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In formulating his revolutionary labor theory of Entäusserung (or alienation, also translated as estrangement and externalization), the young Marx placed Entwirklichung (“the loss of realization”) in opposition to Vergegenständlichung (objectification), thereby launching a profound critique of Hegel’s phenomenology:

The object which labor produces—labor’s product—confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labor. Labor’s realization is its objectification. In the sphere of political economy this realization of labor appears as loss of realization for the workers; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation. [14]

Concerning the alienation of labor, Marx went on to say:

The fact that labor is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that in his worker, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself…does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. [15]

This striking account, with no doubt, marks a Marxian subversion of Hegel’s dialectics of labor: the independence of the product does not testify the bondsman’s freedom, but stands as an alien power governing the worker’s existence. While the Hegelian concept of work humanizes the bondsman and realizes his being as self-consciousness, Marxian wage-labor dehumanizes the worker totally and alienates the worker from his or her own “essential being.”

Marx’s critique turned out to be a crucial intervention into Lukács’s theoretical practice following the debate about History and Class Consciousness. In his preface to the 1967 edition he recollected one of his “unexpected strokes of good luck” in the 1930s: “the text of the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts had just been completely deciphered and I was able to read it.… In the process of reading the Marx manuscript all the idealist prejudices of History and Class Consciousness were swept to one side.” [16] This encounter with early Marx therefore helped initiate his study of early Hegel. The same passage from the young Marx was used in The Young Hegel to lay the foundation for Lukács’s analysis of the difference between Hegelian Entäusserung and Marxian Entäusserung. Lukács’s emphasized Hegel’s “confusion” concerning alienation: the young Hegel equated alienation (Entäusserung) with objectification (Vergegenständlichung), while the young Marx drew a “precise distinction between objectivity and alienation in human praxis.” [17]

Only when it comes to the question of labor can the relevance of such confusion or distinction be fully manifested. In the chapter “Hegel’s Economics During the Jena Period,” Lukács dealt with the young Hegel’s labor theory in relation to Entäusserung. Correspondingly, in the concluding chapter, “‘Entäusserung’ as the Central Philosophical Concept of The Phenomenology,” Lukács elaborated on this concept in relation to Marx’s labor theory. Through a close reading of the bondsman’s labor, Lukács believed that Hegel’s discovery of the origin of self-consciousness concerned labor as the universal mode of human existence. Whereas in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” Lukács focused on wage-labor under capitalism, this time, Lukács wanted to seize the interpretation of labor (in a universal sense) found in Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit. [18]

Here arises the problem of Entäusserung. In short, at least two interrelated points made by Lukács are significant at this juncture. First, since Hegel had no insight into the “specifically capitalist form of ‘externalization’ (alienation or Entäusserung), i.e. what Marx would later call ‘fetishism,’” Hegel tended to equate Entäusserung with objectification. [19] Second, as the alienation of labor was beyond his sight, Hegel made a “false equation of ‘externalization’ (Entäusserung) and ‘thinghood’ or objectivity.” [20] This led to his central theme that “all alienation (Entäusserung) of the human essence is therefore nothing but alienation of self-consciousness.” [21] As a consequence, alienation can always be superseded by returning to the subject-substance identity. Hegel’s characterization of labor as the origin of self-consciousness, therefore, conceals the starting point of what Lukács called the “mystification of alienation.” Drawing upon Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Lukács summarized Hegel’s confusion in a schematic manner: “on the subjective side, there is the mistaken identification of man and self-consciousness demonstrated and criticized by Marx; on the objective side, there is the equation of alienation and objectification in general.” [22] Meanwhile, Lukács’s distinction between alienation and objectification is built solely upon a distinction between two modes of labor itself. The following passage, as a part of Lukács’s cross-reading of Hegel with Marx, is particularly lucid:

For alienation is sharply distinguished from objective reality, from objectification in the act of labor. The latter is a characteristic of work in general and of the relation of human praxis to the objects of the external world; the former is a consequence of the social division of labor under capitalism, of the emergence of the so-called free worker who has to work with the means of production belonging to another and for whom, therefore, these means of productions as well as his own product exist as an independent, alien power. [23]

One can even go so far as to say that if the act of labor is the universal mode of human praxis, objectification is the alienated labor under capitalism.

While Lukács asserted that “the socialist critique of ‘externalization’ (Entäusserung) has exposed the real alienation contained in the capitalist form of work, an alienation that has to be annulled in reality,” he nevertheless gave much credit to Hegel for uncovering labor as the origin of human essence: “the decisive factor…was that Hegel thought of work as the self-creating process of man, of the human species.” Rather than point out the road toward the supersession of alienation of labor (so-called bad labor), Lukács seemed more concerned with laying the philosophical foundation of labor as the genesis and model of praxis, that is, the universal and humanizing labor (or good labor). [24]

Between these two chapters of The Young Hegel, there is a chapter devoted to labor and the problem of teleology. There, Lukács turned to Marx for a definition of labor as “an exclusive characteristic” of human beings. He quoted from Marx: “at the end of every labor process, a result emerges which had already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally.” By linking it with Hegel’s philosophy, Lukács tried to elevate this Marxist insight into labor as a “purposeful activity” to a kind of teleology of labor, and, therefore, a teleology of history. Since labor is posited as the objective realization of purpose, Lukács’s teleology of labor comes back to Hegelian alienation/objectification and use-value. What he attempted to demonstrate is that “Hegel’s concrete analysis of the human labor-process shows that the antinomy of causality and teleology is in reality a dialectical contradiction in which the laws governing a complex pattern of objective reality become manifest in motion.” For the young Hegel, the bondsman’s labor—associated with a pre-capitalist, quasi-feudal economy—is a phenomenological agent; in early Marx, the worker’s labor testifies to the alienation of labor under capitalism. But in grounding labor as the model of human praxis, Lukács now reached a point of further generalizing labor as an ontological category. [25]

The If… then of Teleological Positing Versus the as if of Commodity Fetishism

In his post-Hungarian Uprising magnum opus, The Ontology of Social Being—written in the 1960s and still under revision until the last days of the author’s life—Lukács addressed the issue of labor in the first chapter of the second volume. His elaboration of labor teleology was a direct continuation of his discussion of the relationship between labor and teleology in The Young Hegel. [26]

In the section on “teleological positing,” Lukács came to focus on what he found missing in his early writings (such as “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”): labor as immediacy and mediation; as the metabolism between man and nature; and as a condition for human social being. In this way, he proceeded from the so-called general characteristic of labor to “elementary labor” in its “essential original nature.” In this chapter, most of Lukács’s examples come from primitive forms of labor, such as the making of a knife or an axe from stone. This generalization was undertaken by Lukács in order to fill the gap left by what he called the “leap” from nature to humanity. Again, labor is posited as the “genuine humanization of man.” [27]

At the beginning, Lukács cites Marx’s definition of labor as purposive activity: “labor, then, as the creator of use-value, as useful labor, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society.” Central here is use-value/objectivity in labor teleology. Lukács then articulated his ontological category of labor:

Through labor, a teleological positing is realized within material being, as the rise of a new objectivity. The first consequence of this is that labor becomes the model for any social practice, for in such social practice—no matter how ramified its mediations—teleological positings are always realized, and ultimately realized materially. [28]

Clearly, the Hegelian ideas of objectivity and realization again resurface. Here, the later Lukács reverts to the Hegelian/pre-Marxist idea of Entäusserung (alienation/objectification), which, according to Lukács’s interpretation, initially meant the positing of the object in the German idealist tradition. [29] Ultimately, the “teleological positing of causality” is supposed to contain the “ontological kernel of freedom.” Consequently, every social practice, no matter how developed or complex it is, can be ontologically reduced to the original nature of labor, which, he maintained, is as elementary as everyday experience. Its basic rationality, as Lukács contended, can be formulated as if… vthen. [30]

Though Lukács often said that he would deal with the question of capitalist labor in subsequent chapters, one cannot help but realize that what is missing on this ontological landscape is precisely the phantom objectivity of capitalist labor, or commodity fetishism. According to Slavoj Žižek, commodity fetishism centers on the fantasy of as if rather than if… then For Žižek, the problem of fetishism happens on the side of objective reality: people act as if the money-form is the embodiment of the objective Universal; “they are fetishists in practice, not in theory.” It is in the sense of as if that the objectivity of capitalist labor becomes phantom-like at best. Interestingly enough, both the Žižekian as if and the Lukácsian if… then hinge on the famous Marxian formula to which both Lukács and Žižek frequently referred: “they do not know it, but they do it.” Žižek considered Marx’s formula to be a definition of ideology and related it to the “fetishistic illusion” Žižek attempted to demonstrate that commodity fetishism is “at work in the social reality itself, at the level of what the individuals are doing” and that it is in the reality of doing that people “are guided by the fetishistic illusion.” He then drew the following conclusion:

The illusion is not on the side of knowledge, it is already on the side of reality itself, of what the people are doing. What they do not know is that their social reality itself, their activity, is guided by an illusion, by a fetishistic inversion. What they overlook, what they misrecognize, is not the reality but the illusion which is structuring their reality, their real social activity. They know very well how things really are, but still they are doing it as if they did not know.

In this light, we can say that phantom-like objectivity is presupposed and performed as if it were the Universal the objective necessity. [31]

Yet for Lukács’s ontology, Marx’s formula means that, even though humans do not consciously recognize the causality of objective necessity, the teleological positing of causality is still constantly practiced in basic human labor. In this labor, objective causality is directed to human ends, and in turn contains the genesis of science and human knowledge. However, a closer look reveals that this rationality is not purged of as if. Above all, if labor teleology is indeed ultimately determined by social being itself, then objective necessity (the internal necessity of nature; the chain of causality; the logic condition of if… then; and so on) can be viewed as if it were necessity. The formula of if… then seems to be drawn closer to the “bourgeois philosophy” that had been criticized by the young Lukács in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” In the labor process of if… then, an illusion has to be presupposed as the internal necessity of nature in order to structure labor (doing/reality) itself. Under capitalism, a new layer of phantom-like objectivity is added upon the layer of presupposed objective necessity in order to structure capitalist labor. This is what Lukács depicted as the “doubly intensified” alienation (or objectification) of labor or, in Žižek’s language, the “doubled” illusion. [32] At this point, Žižek came much closer to the critique of bourgeois idealism developed in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” Žižek wrote that “the roots of philosophical speculative idealism are in the social reality of the world of commodities; it is this world which behaves ‘idealistically.’” In this light, the later Lukács’s ontology of if…then has idealized—if not fetishized—labor per se with a concealed, yet presupposed, as if. Thus, if then actually represents an elementary level of fetishistic as if. [33]

While raising the question of teleology in The Young Hegel, Lukács cited Lenin: “in actual fact, men’s ends are engendered by the objective world and presuppose it… but it seems to man as if his ends are taken from outside the world, and are independent of the world.” [34] This is a Leninian version of Marx’s formula, a version in favor of Lukács’s labor teleology. However, Lenin’s as if should be reversed to a Žižekian one. To translate it into Žižekian language: as if happens precisely on the side of presupposition; on the side of actual human activity. The presupposition of the objective world is an as if, which engenders the chain of if…then. The idea of teleological positing betrays the imprint of positing as if. [35]

All this leads us to the issue of the fundamental leap from nature to human. As we have seen, Lukács’s labor teleology is formulated in order to address this leap ontologically. Although—and also because—this leap cannot be historically reconstructed, Lukács believed that his labor teleology could fill the unfathomable chasm between nature and human beings. As he wrote: “the leap remains a leap, and in the last analysis it can only be made clear by intellectual comprehension.” [36] Here, by “intellectual comprehension,” Lukács meant the Marxist method of abstraction. Yet his ontological abstraction—from every social practice to the elementary realization of use-value—runs counter to Marx’s historical abstraction which, following the abstracting power of capital itself, moves from use-value to phantom objectivity. Nevertheless, this ontologization/de-historicization is itself a structural positing, or presupposition like as if, in the understanding of human nature.

Conclusion and Further Questions

From the “phantom objectivity” of labor-time to “useful labor” as teleological positing, this theoretical trajectory can be sketchily characterized as a reversal in development of the historical abstraction from use-value to value that opens Marx’s Capital. Moreover, this counter-movement should be examined alongside the historical context in which Lukács was writing. As Lukács himself noted, History and Class Consciousness was related to the high tide of Bolshevism and Messianism in Central Europe, as well as his determination to become a communist in the wake of the catastrophic First World War and triumphant October Revolution. His study of Hegel was associated with his reflections on his early work, but also on the changed situation of European communist politics. After the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution and the controversy of his Blum Theses, he had to reorient himself amid a series of party struggles toward the new historical task of antifascism. This turn should be viewed as an effort to renew the linkage between Marx and Hegel under Stalinism. One should bear in mind, finally, that The Ontology of Social Being was undertaken in a post-1956 situation; it was written between his Specificity of the Aesthetic (finished in 1963) and his long-planned (yet constantly suspended) Ethics. When he dealt philosophically with the realization of freedom modeled on elementary labor, he was, practically speaking, concerned with the deterioration of everyday ethical life under socialism as it existed at the time.

This outline of Lukács’s theoretical development is not immune to doubt, for the theology of labor was not intended to be the final chapter of Lukács’s The Ontology of Social Being. His philosophy of labor was written in preparation for subsequent chapters on reproduction, ideology, and alienation. Yet the other side of the story is also worth noting: according to his student István Mészáros, when Lukács began writing his Ethics, he realized in the process that it was necessary to write an introductory ontology. Not only did this introduction turn out to be a manuscript of more than two thousand pages, but the protracted writing of this social ontology “procede[d] very slowly” up until his death. [37] The difficulty for our philosopher might be this: there is always an idealistic short-circuit in any materialistic ontology, just as in Žižekian sense, reality presupposes a fetishistic as if. Lukács’s theory of labor attains particular significance in that it shows how he was caught between historicization and ontologization—a structural yet symptomatic tension of his Marxist theory.

But we will not end this essay merely with this critical note. Criticism of a similar kind, in fact, have already surfaced in internal debates between Lukács himself and his disciples. “Notes on Lukács’ Ontology”—a document prepared by his students Ferenc Fehér, Agnes Heller, György Márkus when Lukács requested critical feedback in the late 1960s—records their discontent with their mentor’s manuscript. The first sentence of their commentary to the labor chapter reads thus: “In our view, the greatest defect of this chapter is that the problem of objectification remains unsolved—indeed, is not even posed—which is the same reproach that Comrade Lukács leveled against his own History and Class Consciousness.” [38] In this, his students touched upon the ultimate aporia of Lukács’s lifelong philosophical inquiry. As they indicate in their notes, they became inclined to believe that a project of Marxist ontology may be a dead end. Upon receiving these critical yet insightful comments, the ailing Lukács submerged himself in painstaking revisions and suspended publication of the work. In “Lukács’ Later Philosophy,” Heller laments the futile effort–though “not a complete failure” of The Ontology of Social Being while lauding The Specificity of the Aesthetic as the true masterpiece of later Lukács. [39]

But should we simply consign the ontological issue of labor to the trash bin of the history of philosophy? I contend that precisely because of this aporia of ontologization that the role of the concept of labor in Lukács’s philosophical development should not be overlooked, and that his problematic conceptualization of labor spurs us on to re-problematize this classic Marxist category in a vastly changed historical context. Marxism holds that the fundamental contradiction of capitalism is the antinomy between capital and labor. Yet it seems to me that our current perception of labor—both as a concept and as human experience—has become ever-more confusing; vague and pallid. On one hand, the idea of labor has degenerated into a common positivistic word for sociology or economics, losing philosophical and political relevance. On the other hand, wage-labor has penetrated into every corner of social praxis and everyday life, becoming more amorphous and pervasive. Its contemporary dominant form is immaterial labor, which has less to do with the mediation between nature and humanity and more to do with the constant reconfiguration of effects within commodity fetishism itself. As a result, even the machine-like labor of industrial age seems backward and primitive, receding into the remote horizon. In this fully fetishized world, is an ontology of social being possible? To what extent can we revive and redeem the category of labor as a part of our de-fetishization and as a reflection of social praxis and its future? If we deny the possibility of the socio-anthropological-ontological issue of labor, we will surely avoid the idealistic abstractions we see in Lukács. At the same time, we risk giving up a task of critical philosophy and unintentionally succumbing to vulgar sociology, which is yet another product of bourgeois, limited consciousness. Therefore, Lukács’s conceptualization of labor, with all its insights and limitations, is not yet a closed case.

Wang Pu is associate professor of Chinese and chair of the comparative literature program at Brandeis University. He attended Peking University and received his PhD in comparative literature from New York University. He is author of The Translatability of Revolution: Guo Moruo and Twentieth-Century Chinese Culture (Harvard University Asia Center, 2018). He is also the translator of the Chinese edition of Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life.

Notes

1. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 83; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage), 128.

2. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, xvii, xviii, xx.

3. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, xxxiv.

4. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 167.

5. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 165, 166, 167–8.

6. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 171–2. Not only can one detect the duality between the dehumanization of labor power and the soul that resists such dehumanization, but there is also some trace of the latent division between the manual, mechanical labor and mental labor, the latter of which is doomed to fuller fetishization and therefore penetrates the soul. For the question of fetishism of intellectual labor, see Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology (London: MacMillan, 1978), 13–16.

7. For one thing, the idea of “total personality” or “soul” seems to be too subjective to be historically grounded. In this respect, the soul is more like an enclave of overwhelming reification, further exposing an intense duality. This might account for what Lukács, in his later self-criticism, called subjectivism. More important, while labor-power can be reduced to the totalizing abstractness of labor-time, the “total personality” cannot be restored to the level of the historical totality. The furthest point Lukács could reach is labor’s daily experiential or phenomenological confrontation, or in his own language, appearance: the labor-time or work-situation “appears to the worker” as a qualitative category. Meanwhile, for the “mental laborer,” the appearance is too deceptive to be demystified. After all, according to the duality of capacity and personality that Agnes Heller, one of Lukács’s disciples, proposed in Everyday Life, the daily activity of work under capitalism does not necessarily involve any historical experience or historical consciousness. See Agnes Heller, Everyday Life, 60–70 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). In other words, while in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” the abstraction of labor is sufficiently formulated alongside historical abstraction, the mediating force of wage-labor turns out to be an invalid leap (or rebound) from the immediate work-situation to revolutionary consciousness, which itself remains unmediated. In short, rather than illustrate the identity between immediacy and mediation, Lukács became enmeshed in ambiguous dualism.

8. Harry Liebbersohn, “Lukács and the Concept of Working German Sociology,” in Georg Lukács: Theory, Culture, and Politics, ed. Judith Marcus et al., (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1989), 63–71.

9. G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 118, 114. Here arises the question of recognition, or, in Hegel’s language, “recognition as an independent self-consciousness,” a question that has been (over)developed by Alexandre Kojève and others. When Kojève marked the lord-bondsman dialectic (which he translated as “master-slave”) as the starting point of so-called recognition politics, he downplayed the relationship between the bondsman and the object was downplayed, thus missing the point of labor in his account.

10. Whereas Hegel’s lord-bondsman anecdote bears reference to feudalist conditions.

11. Lukás, History and Class Consciousness, 168; emphasis added.

12. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 128.

13. I leave the two terms untranslated because people have translated Entäusserung into different words. For instance, Martin Milligan, the translator of Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 into English, translated Entäusserung as estrangement. Rodney Livingstone, a major translator of Lukács, translated Entäusserung as alienation when related to Marx, and as externalization when related to Hegel.

14. Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. D. J. Struik, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1984), 108.

15. Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 110.

16. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, xxxvi.

17. Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations between Dialectics and Economics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 561. Also see Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, xxiv.

18. Elsewhere in the book, Lukács was critical of Hegel’s myopic observation of labor under capitalism. Though the young Hegel, a reader of Adam Smith, was sensitive to the phenomena of labor division, abstraction or mechanization of labor, exchange of labor, and so on, his era simply did not allow for a dialectical understanding of capitalist labor. (See Georg Lukács, The Young Hegel, 329–31.)

19. Livingstone explained why he translated Hegelian Entäusserung as externalization in his Translator’s Note: “I have preferred to translate it as ‘externalization’, since in Hegel’s usage it has a broader application than the current term.” See Luckács, The Young Hegel, i.

20. Lukács, The Young Hegel, 540, 542.

21. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 178.

22. Lukács, The Young Hegel, 551.

23. Lukács, The Young Hegel, 549

24. Lukács, The Young Hegel, 570, 553.

25. Lukács, The Young Hegel, 338–64; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 284, 346.

26. This chapter includes sections of “Labor as a Teleological Positing” and “Labor as a Model for Social Practice,” translated into English as an independent volume entitled Labor.

27. Marx, Capital, vol 1, 133; Georg Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being: Labor, trans. David Fernbach (London: Merlin, 1980), 42.

28. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 133; Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being: Labor, 3.

29. See Lukács, The Young Hegel, 538; especially Lukács’s etymological survey of Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s use of this term.

30. Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being: Labor, 39.

31. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, (London: Verso, 1989), 31

32. Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being: Labor, 18; The Young Hegel, 549.

33. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 32.

34. Cited in Lukács, The Young Hegel, 350

35. The disagreement between István Mészáros and Jean Hyppolite concerning Entäusserung can be viewed as a similar case. What was at issue was whether the transcendence of Entäusserung, which Mészáros insisted is a myth, or the “insurmountable otherness” (central to Hyppolite’s Hegelian version of Entäusserung), is a mystification. See Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London: Merlin, 1972), 243–44.

36. Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being: Labor, iii

37. István Mészáros, Lukács’ Concept of Dialectic (London: Merlin, 1972), 6–7

38. Ferenc Fehér et al., “Notes on Lukács’ Ontology,” in Lukács Reappraised, ed. Agnes Heller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 141.

39. Agnes Heller, “Lukács’ Later Philosophy,” Lukács Reappraised, ed. Agnes Heller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 190.

What would be different about a socialist economy?

By Ben Hillier

Republished from Red Flag.

The New York Stock Exchange is perhaps the premier institutional expression of the capitalist economy. It’s hard to conjure an image of American capitalism without including the Wall Street sign at the corner of Broad, or the stone streetscape of the exchange with its US flags, or the bronze “charging bull” statue at Bowling Green. 

Wall Street is for some a wondrous emblem of American exceptionalism. For most of us, it is a picture of moral desolation and criminality. Indeed, since it became the centre of US finance in the nineteenth century, Wall Street has repeatedly been the target of protests by workers who recognise it as a place where their enemies organise to rip them off and destroy their lives. 

So when you think “socialism”, you might, not unreasonably, conjure images of the storming and burning of stock exchanges everywhere. Yet a socialist economy would likely retain the machinery of Wall Street, albeit for refashioned ends. To understand why, and how a socialist economy might work, it’s important first to grasp just how remarkable the capitalist economy is. No human society before it has come close to developing the science, technologies and industrial capacities that we now take for granted.

Take the production of one of the most important things for human survival: food. Prior to capitalism, economies were primarily agrarian, the continued existence of any given population being almost entirely dependent on seasonal crop yields. Survival was a year-by-year proposition, famine just one flood, one drought, one failed harvest away. “A bad year such as 1817 could, even in tranquil Switzerland, produce an actual excess of deaths over births”, the late historian Eric Hobsbawm noted in his 1962 book The Age of Revolution. 

Today, thanks to capitalism, scarcity is a thing of the past. The amount of food available to an individual in France, for example, is estimated to be more than double what it was prior to the revolution of 1789, even though the population has more than doubled, from 28 million to 68 million. Across the world, the volume has increased by nearly 50 percent in the last 60 years, from fewer than 2,200 calories per person per day to more than 2,900, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. The recommended daily caloric intake being between 2,000 and 2,500 per day suggests that there is more than enough food available for everyone on the planet.

There’s an obvious problem, though, isn’t there? All around the world, billions of people are going hungry. At the extreme end, the humanitarian organisation Action Against Hunger estimates that more than 800 million people are undernourished. Even in the richest of countries, there’s an issue. In Australia, for example, more than one in six adults and more than 1 million children routinely miss meals, according to Foodbank, a charity.

This minor detail—more than enough being produced but billions of people struggling—is replicated in almost all areas: housing, incomes, health care, education etc. The problem is that, while capitalism excels in producing masses of things, it fails dismally in distributing them in any equitable way. 

“The workman is the source of all wealth”, an article in the Lancashire Co-operator noted of nineteenth century England. “Who has raised all the food? The half fed and impoverished labourer. Who built all the houses and warehouses, and palaces, which are possessed by the rich, who never labour or produce anything? The workman. Who spins all the yarn and makes all the cloth? The spinner and weaver ... [Yet] the labourer remains poor and destitute, while those who do not work are rich.”

Things haven’t changed much from those early years of capitalism. According to the financial group Credit Suisse, the richest 1 percent of adults on the planet together own nearly A$300 trillion in personal wealth—which is about 46 percent of the world’s total personal wealth. But the poorest 55 percent, close to 3 billion people, have just 1.3 percent of the wealth—on average less than A$2,000 per person.

It’s not just that the distribution of personal wealth is unequal, it’s that the productive infrastructure—the factories, the mines, the office blocks, the arable land, the telecommunications systems, the transport networks and so on—is owned and controlled by the rich and used to enrich them further.

One of the first goals of a socialist economy would be to put all of these important economic resources under the collective ownership and control of workers. By doing so, the majority of the population would gain the ability to decide what the priorities of production and distribution should be.

This brings us back to those stock exchanges. Every day, the Australian Securities Exchange in Sydney executes nearly 2 million trades. The system is remarkably efficient in pairing buyers and sellers of a diverse array of financial instruments. By and large, this is just wealthy people making themselves wealthier by buying and selling claims to the ownership of companies and other things. They, or their brokers, simply get online, look at what’s available to purchase, and trade away. 

In a socialist economy, this sort of technology, instead of being used to link capitalist traders around the world, could be used to link every workplace and every suburb in a city, every city in a country, and every country in the world. Instead of endlessly trading claims to ownership of different companies, the trades would be simple declarations of needs and availabilities. That is, any given region would let the system know how much it had produced of certain goods and how much of certain other goods its population needed for the week (or the day, whatever the case may be). The system would then balance out all the claims and society would immediately know where there were excesses and where there were shortages and alter production accordingly.

It sounds so simple as to be utterly utopian. But this is basically the way the world works already. Take the extensive global supply chains linking farms with ports with food manufacturers with warehouses with supermarkets—everything is coordinated down to the last kilogram between buyers and sellers. When it comes to this sort of distribution, capitalism is in general incredibly efficient. 

So as you read this, somewhere a supermarket line manager is scanning a series of barcodes and entering a corresponding quantity of units for each item; tomorrow a truck will turn up with several pallets of whatever it was that they ordered. It’s as simple as that. If you went back in time 200 years and tried to explain this to someone, they would likely consider you utterly mad. Yet here we all are, living in a world in which a stranger in a truck turns up with a mountain of goods after someone points a laser gun at a series of black lines on a small piece of paper. Marvelous. 

The process today is overseen by the small number of owners of the production and distribution chains who allow their workers to make orders and process deliveries only if they believe their company will make money. That’s the limit to the capitalist economy and its efficiency. But there’s no technical reason that this operation couldn’t be run instead to meet human need. The whole process is already carried out by workers—from producing the food to driving the trucks to stacking the shelves in the shops. All that would need to happen is for production and distribution to be put under the democratic control of the people who do all the work. 

Under capitalism, bosses like Jeff Bezos reap the rewards of their impoverished, exploited workers, then turn around and say, “I want to go to space”—and it happens. Under socialism, working people would reap the rewards of their own labor and communities would turn around and say, “We need a hospital”—and it would happen. It’s not materially or technically different; it’s just a different set of priorities and beneficiaries.

Along with its inability to distribute things equitably, capitalism generates a huge amount of waste. First is the mountain of things that are thrown out because they aren’t sold. Again take food. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, nearly half of all fruit and vegetables produced globally are wasted. In the United States, it’s about 30 percent of all food. Of that, up to a third of wastage happens at the farm and one-quarter at the retail level. It’s actually extra work to keep people starving—food producers and sellers have to put extra time into organizing to dump or remove unsold produce, rather than simply allow it to be distributed, in the usual way, to those who need it. Plus they wasted all the labor producing it in the first place only to see it rot. It was also a massive waste of soil nutrients and precious water resources. 

Second is the huge amount of planned obsolescence in capitalist production: many things are designed to fall apart or with short lifespans so that people come back and buy them over and over again. Industrial-scale planned obsolescence reportedly originated in the early twentieth century with the Phoebus Cartel in light globe manufacturing, which decided to limit the lifespan of bulbs to around 1,000 hours. The idea is now embedded in pretty much every industry. It’s such a waste of labor and resources, but it’s the production model that makes companies the most money. In many cases, it is cheaper to drive wages lower and just produce more and more new things than it is to create durable or serviceable products. (Did you know that some 24 billion pairs of shoes are sold every year?) 

Third is the monumental waste of entire industries and the labor associated with them: things like the legal profession or sales and marketing. One estimate of the cost to end global hunger (using existing capitalist economic means) is about US$33 billion per year over ten years. Compare that to the investment in marketing: US consulting and research firm Forrester predicts that it will reach US$4.7 trillion in 2025. That’s trillions of dollars and millions of labour hours, every year, outlaid by companies trying to convince us to buy their products, which will soon fall apart, rather than their competitors’ products, which are generally the same and also fall apart.

It’s madness.

A socialist economy would get rid of most of this waste almost overnight by starting with simple questions that the whole population can respond to: “First, what do we all need? Second, what do we want? Third, how many resources do we have? Fourth, what are our priorities?” A huge amount of office space, factory space, fertile land, machinery and, above all, labour time, would be freed up by starting with those questions, rather than the capitalists’ questions (“How do I make people want to buy this product, how can I generate a profit?”). 

Think of all the millions of hours of wasted labour that could otherwise be used to increase the production of things in short supply, or to reduce the working week by either producing things to last (therefore reducing the need to produce so much) or by bringing in a greater number of workers into productive industries and reducing everyone’s working hours, while still providing for everyone’s needs. 

Finally, a socialist economy would be more rational. Defenders of capitalism always talk about how innovative their system is. As noted above, it is. But again, this has serious limitations. Take the ongoing economic addiction to oil, coal and gas. How innovative is it, really, to be wedded to energy sources from the nineteenth century? The problem again is profits: the huge companies already invested in and determined to squeeze every cent out of the fossil fuel economy just won’t let go. A socialist economy, being run by the majority in the interests of all, simply would not allow our planet to be trashed so that a few of us could live better than the rest.

Getting to a socialist economy will not be simple—we need a workers’ revolution to get past capitalism. But once we are there, it will be quite easy using existing technologies and processes to run the world according to the maxim, “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need”. The poet Bertolt Brecht put it best in his poem “In praise of communism”:

It is reasonable. You can grasp it. It’s simple.

You’re no exploiter, so you’ll understand.

It is good for you. Look into it.

Stupid men call it stupid, and the dirty call it dirty.

It is against dirt and against stupidity.

The exploiters call it a crime.

But we know:

It is the end of all crime.

It is not madness but

The end of madness.

It is not chaos,

But order.

It is the simple thing

That’s hard to do.

Ben Hillier is the author of Losing Santhia: life and loss in Tamil Eelam and The art of rebellion: dispatches from Hong Kong.

Capitalism and the “Feminization of Poverty”: A Marxist Perspective on Ending Women’s Oppression

By Radhika Miller

Republished from Liberation School.

Sexism is so endemic today that it can be difficult to imagine a society that does not degrade and devalue women. Modern capitalist society is a form of class society, and in today’s capitalist society women face sexism everywhere we turn — within our own homes and personal relationships, in school and in our professional careers, even as we walk down the street.

But this is not the way things always have been and, despite its prevalence in today’s society, the oppression of women is not a part of human nature. Sexism is not natural, which means we can eliminate it.

The oppression of women is rooted in a hierarchical system that values men over women, a system organized around patriarchal norms but that is much broader than patriarchy, in which the oppression of people is not based simply on sex but on class.

Class society the root of women’s oppression

For the vast majority of human history, society was organized around communal groups, and women were not specially oppressed. It was the emergence of class society that formed the foundation for patriarchal norms and the oppression of women.

Class society is the organization of society based on economic exploitation. People are separated into two classes with opposing interests: one is the group of people who own the means of production, who use this ownership of resources and productive forces to accumulate wealth unto themselves — the ruling class; the other class is the group of people who do not own the means of production, but who, through their labor, in fact produce the wealth of society — the laborers. The ruling class exploits the laboring class in order to amass wealth.

Feudalism and capitalism are two examples of class society. In a feudal society, serfs and peasants worked the land, but they did not own the land, and they did not keep the full value of what they produced. Much of the fruits of their labor were handed over to the lords, the landowners that were members of the ruling class that became rich off the land. In a capitalist society, workers produce goods and provide services, but they do not own factories and corporations. The capitalists who own the factories, banks and corporations, members of the ruling class, become rich by paying workers less than the value of the goods produced and lining their pockets with the difference — the profits.

Communal society

If we think of all of human history as one year, or 365 days, the duration of class society and patriarchy would be only five days — less than one week. For the vast majority of our existence, we lived in communal societies. In those societies, women and men performed different work, but all people were valued for their contributions to the survival of the group.

For thousands of years, humanity struggled together for survival in the face of scarcity and deprivation. There were no social classes based upon wealth or power, and no individuals or families amassed wealth; everything was owned by the communities as a whole. Each task was critical to survival and considered a communal responsibility. Hunting, gathering, building homes, child rearing and caring for elders — each of these tasks was valued as critical and was accomplished by members of the group working together rather than by individuals or individual familial units. An individual’s value to society was not based on their gender but rather on their ability to contribute to each of these critical tasks, tasks which may have been performed by different genders but were held in high esteem regardless.

In “The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State,” Frederick Engels outlined the material reasons for why people lived communally:

A division of the tribe or of the gens into different classes was equally impossible. And that brings us to the examination of the economic basis of these conditions. The population is extremely sparse; it is dense only at the tribe’s place of settlement, around which lie in a wide circle first the hunting grounds and then the protective belt of neutral forest, which separates the tribe from others. The division of labor is purely primitive, between the sexes only. The man fights in the wars, goes hunting and fishing, procures the raw materials of food and the tools necessary for doing so. The woman looks after the house and the preparation of food and clothing, cooks, weaves, sews. They are each master in their own sphere: the man in the forest, the woman in the house. Each is owner of the instruments which he or she makes and uses: the man of the weapons, the hunting and fishing implements, the woman of the household gear. The housekeeping is communal among several and often many families. What is made and used in common is common property — the house, the garden, the long-boat.

Society at this stage was matrilineal: women, the organizers of food, shelter and child rearing, were the center of life. The lineage of any person was traced through the mother’s line. Children were not the sole responsibility of the biological mother and/or father but rather were linked by kinship to what we now refer to as extended family.

Class society produces inequality

As Engels explained, inequality emerged for the first time only after millennia of this communal, shared existence. With the emergence of surplus, wealth, and class society came the emergence of patriarchal society and the oppression of women. Over time, as the development of the tools and methods of production produced a surplus, one sector of society, primarily men as the primary hunters and organizers of animal husbandry, could hoard and accumulate wealth as private property.¹ Before the advent of private property, there was no special power or privileges associated with this type of labor. As explained above, all types of labor were valued as critical to survival of the community.

As the capacity to produce continued to grow beyond the minimum for survival, the social and productive relations of matrilineal pre-class societies weakened.

Mother-right was overturned, and men came to control the wealth and resources, using organized violence and redefined family institutions in the form of monogamous marriage to maintain their new position in society.

Engels describes the magnitude of this historical development:

The overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children. This degraded position of the woman, especially conspicuous among the Greeks of the heroic and still more of the classical age, has gradually been palliated and glossed over, and sometimes clothed in a milder form; in no sense has it been abolished.

The origins of violence against women and the denial of women’s right to control reproduction can be traced to this development. The overthrow of mother-right resulted in women essentially becoming the property of men. Female sexuality, once freely expressed, was now severely restricted in order to assure the “legitimate” line of descent from father to son for the purposes of inheritance. This was, in turn, tied to the emergence of class society itself, initially on the basis of slavery through warfare.

Engels explained:

The increase of production in all branches — cattle-raising, agriculture, domestic handicrafts — gave human labor-power the capacity to produce a larger product than was necessary for its maintenance. At the same time, it increased the daily amount of work to be done by each member of the gens, household community or single family. It was now desirable to bring in new labor forces. War provided them; prisoners of war were turned into slaves. With its increase of the productivity of labor, and therefore of wealth, and its extension of the field of production, the first great social division of labor was bound, in the general historical conditions prevailing, to bring slavery in its train. From the first great social division of labor arose the first great cleavage of society into two classes: masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited.

Previously, the victors in war either killed or adopted those they defeated into their own tribes to contribute critical tasks of survival, but now, they enslaved the losers in order drive production and create wealth. Slavery was an early form of class society. The development of productive forces and advent of private property set into motion: (1) the emergence of the male-controlled family; (2) the emergence of class society itself. These are closely related, and in the modern form of capitalism, inextricable.²

Women’s oppression in capitalist society

Women’s oppression has changed over time as economic exploitation has changed. Slavery, feudalism and capitalism all demonstrate the exploitation of people in class society. The oppression of women under capitalism manifests in a myriad of ways.

Capitalism is a class society driven by the generation of profits. The capitalist class owns the means of production. This includes the factories and resources required to produce material goods, which run the gamut from shoes to houses. Resources include the means to access fuels, like oil, and even necessities like water. Capitalist production requires the employment of both male and female laborers. Since its inception, working-class women have been drawn out of the isolated atmosphere of the home and into collective production. Some of the first factory workers were women.

And since its inception, capitalism has generated profits by exploiting and undervaluing women in the workplace to a greater degree than men. This directly affects economic status, both by underpaying women and by excluding them from higher paying positions — relegating them to “gendered” positions that are typically service-oriented and lower-paying.

In the United States, women work longer hours and make less money than men. Even though equal pay for equal work has been federal law since 1963, when compared to men with similar education, skills and experience, women earn less than 76 cents to the dollar. For women of color, this is closer to 50 cents. In fact, the average 25-year-old working woman will lose almost $500,000 due to unequal pay during her lifetime as a worker. Yet, she will pay the same for rent, food, utilities and services as her male counterpart. In addition, she is likely to pay more for necessities like health care and more likely to lose money when she is sick. In the United States, among working women earning less than $40,000 per year, up to half are without basic benefits, including secure, affordable health insurance, prescription drug coverage, pension or retirement benefits, or paid sick leave.

This inequality allows capitalism to thrive. Lower pay for a sector of workers — women — plays two critical roles: (1) This directly translates to greater profits because capitalists keep more of the value of the good or service by not paying as much to workers. (2) It also creates a division within the working class, pitting women and men against each other in the workplace because the availability of cheaper labor by women is a bargaining chip that allows capitalists to pay men less as well.

Beyond being underpaid in the workplace, women carry out a great amount of unpaid labor in capitalist society. This is because work like childcare, preparing food in the household and other similar work that was greatly valued in pre-communal society is not assigned a monetary value in capitalist society. Moreover, this work has been de-socialized. Often referred to as “the second shift,” what used to be a communal responsibility has become the onus of individual women to complete on top of the work they perform for pay outside the home. Of course, these tasks are no less necessary to survival to the workforce, regardless of gender. As critical tasks performed at no cost to the capitalists, this unpaid labor — the exploitation of women — is a great source of profit in capitalist society.

All of this makes women more likely to be poor. In 1978, professor Diana Pearce used the term “feminization of poverty” to describe trends in the standard of living in the United States. The fact that women perform unpaid labor, are more likely to perform lower-paying jobs, and that even when performing the same job are paid less means that under capitalism, women will always be poorer than their male counterparts simply because they are women. In the United States, almost 60 percent of adults with an income of less than half the poverty line are women. Black and Latina women have a much higher poverty rate than white women (generally two to three times as high).

In addition, the violence against women we see in today’s capitalist society is a vestige of women’s historic status as property — a status that emerged with and is inextricably tied to class society. Rather than a random or individual crime, violence against women is a symptom of women’s subordinate position in modern class society. The sheer magnitude of violence against women around the world, including in the most advanced capitalist societies speaks to this. In the United States, every two minutes a women is sexually assaulted and every six minutes one is raped. This amounts to about 200,000 victims per year, with 17 percent of women having survived a complete or attempted rape. Domestic violence is the greatest form of injury to women in the United States, more than all other causes combined.

Moreover, the emergence of “global capitalism” has meant that all of these manifestations of women’s oppression are being incorporated into business practices and imperialist military strategies worldwide.

Globally, women earn about 50 percent of what men earn and are the majority of the 1.5 billion people who survive on a dollar or less a day. In transnational sweatshops doing business under free-trade agreements like NAFTA, young women working for slave wages are routinely abused at work. Since 1993, more than 1,000 women and girls have been killed in Juarez, Mexico. Most were workers in the “maquiladora” factories in the free-trade zone in the U.S.-Mexico border. Around the world, one in three women has been beaten, forced into sex or abused in her lifetime.

Despite militant struggle and the many hard-fought gains of the women’s liberation movement, oppression continues on a broad scale, and every gain faces the threat of being rolled back. In the United States, one of every two women experience sexual harassment at school or work; homicide is the leading cause of death for pregnant women; women’s health care rights, including reproductive rights, are increasingly under attack; and although abortion is legal, there are no abortion providers in 83 percent of U.S. counties. Critical programs like childcare, housing, education and health care are constantly under attack, if not outright denied or zeroed out.

In cases of violence against women, the police and the courts find every excuse to avoid punishing the perpetrator. Every stage is a struggle: to have it recorded as a crime, to force an investigation, to force a prosecution, to force a trial, to win a conviction. Even when a woman wins at all of these stages, her subjugation by society remains ever apparent. That is what happened in the recent and notorious Stanford rape case, in which, despite his conviction by a jury for raping an unconscious woman and a request by prosecutors for six years, Judge Aaron Persky sentenced Brock Allen Turner to only six months in jail. Persky’s reason: a prison sentence would have a severe impact on Turner, and he would not be a danger to others.

Under capitalism, feminists fight for — and can win — important rights and equality under the law. But capitalism relies on the subordination of sectors of the working class, including women. Without a state and society determined to enforce equal rights, and determined to deem the subordination of women and violence against women unacceptable — in the eyes of society and in the demonstrated enforcement of law — women will remain oppressed. This is exactly why a woman becoming president of the United States does not signal the liberation of women. The state she would lead is a capitalist state. It is a state constructed to uphold, what is necessary to uphold capitalism — exploitation, inequality and oppression — not to eliminate them. This is exactly why the full liberation of women is not possible within the capitalist system.

Socialism lays the basis for women’s liberation

Socialism lays the basis for two necessary steps toward women’s liberation: (1) removing the inextricable motivation for women’s oppression — the need to exploit workers in order to generate profits; and (2) building a society and state committed to combatting oppression, and not just recognizing but also enforcing the equality of all workers.

In regards to this Sarah Sloan noted at a Party for Socialism and Liberation conference in 2014:

Socialist revolutions have not happened in rich societies but in the poorest parts of the world. At the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Russian economy was one-twelfth the size of the U.S. economy. By eliminating the profits for a tiny handful of capitalists, even a poor country like the Soviet Union, managed by the 1930s, to provide every worker with the right to a job and the right to free health care.

By 1960, the Soviet Union had emerged as the second-biggest economy in the world. There was no unemployment and there was a right to housing — to pay no more than 6 percent of your income for rent. Evictions were illegal because there were no landlords. It was your housing.

Women had a right to free childcare and one year’s paid maternity leave, and they had the right to put their child in child care facilities at no cost. Women in the Soviet Union had the right to retire at 55 years of age at half pay. And remember, they had free health care, so retirement didn’t mean being plunged into poverty. They had a month’s paid vacation.

It doesn’t mean that there were no problems in the Soviet Union, or that we agree with all the policies of different leaderships. But the Soviet Union proved, just as Cuba proves today, that when you take the wealth out of the hands of the capitalists, it can be used to meet people’s needs.

Socialist Cuba has made enormous strides in combatting women’s oppression since its revolution in 1959, which was declared socialist in 1961. And, as women leaders there often state, there is still much work to be done to achieve full equality.

In 1966, Fidel Castro spoke at the fifth national plenum of the Cuban Women’s Federation. Aware of the challenges that face a new socialist society after the overthrow of the ruling class, he described the fight against women’s oppression as a revolution within the socialist revolution. The vestiges of capitalist society’s special oppression of people based on race and gender cannot be simply swept away with a revolution. The revolution begins the work of undoing those vestiges.

However, there is no comparison between the capitalist society of the United States and the socialist one of Cuba. Cuban women are guaranteed housing, health care, education and employment. Men and women are guaranteed parental leave for up to one year. Reproductive rights, abortion and birth control, for example, are legal and provided for by the national health care system. These are just a few examples but they are illustrative.

The United States has no guaranteed paid parental leave. Reproductive rights are constantly under attack. Housing, education, health care and employment are not considered rights.

We fight for reforms and struggle for full liberation through socialism

What, then, is women’s liberation? The term evokes images of women leading marches, rallies, strikes and hunger strikes to demand the right to vote, to demand safe working conditions, to demand equal pay, the right to abortion and reproductive freedom; women standing together to demand an end to sexism and against sexual assault. It is marked by militant struggle in the face of extreme repression and by victories in the recognition of rights and changes in societal attitudes. The women’s liberation movement militantly struggles for equal rights and status for women.

As revolutionary feminists, we must embrace the militancy of the women’s liberation movement and carry it forward. We must remain strong and unwavering in our demand for equal rights. It is critical to fight for as many rights recognized by law, for as many legal reforms, for as many changes in society thought and action as possible. All of this eases the oppression faced by women.

As socialists, we also understand that while militant struggle can win important rights in capitalist society, the women’s liberation struggle reaches beyond the goal of equal rights. It is telling that after centuries of struggle, women still do not have equal rights under the law. What is even more telling is the other component of the struggle — that capitalist society continues to subject women to patriarchal norms; that in capitalist society, women remain oppressed.

When a society is built upon exploitation, as capitalism is, equality is contradictory to the system. This is the very reason why — even in the face of militant struggle — women do not have equal rights, and why even the rights we do have are rarely enforced and continuously threatened and eroded by legislatures and courts, instruments of the capitalist ruling class. Capitalism relies on social constructs, such as race and gender, to support the exploitation of groups of people that is necessary to generate profits froms the labor of workers. By reclaiming political power from the capitalists, we attack the root of all bigotry and inequality based on these social constructs. In doing so, we lay the basis for the full liberation of women and all oppressed people.

Endnotes

1. Women also participated in hunting, but men were the primary hunters and controllers of the process of the domestication of animals.

2. The emergence of class society not only led to the oppression of women, it is also the root of LGBTQ oppression and bigotry. Maintaining the concentration of wealth in the upper class requires children who can inherit that wealth — same-sex relationships became valueless, although they naturally have continued. As is the oppression of women, the oppression of LGBTQ people is inextricably tied to today’s capitalist society.

Woke Antiracism: It's a Gospel According to John McWhorter

By Marc James Léger

Republished from Blog of Public Secrets

There are many facets to today’s woke culture wars and many ways of approaching the subject. Disciplines like sociology, psychology, anthropology and political science would make use of standard methods of analysis, as would subdisciplines and interdisciplinary clusters find something to say about it. Political tendencies treat the subject differently, depending on their principles and orientation. And the mass and social media that could be referred to as the field of communications find their own uses for social tensions. 

When a difficult subject with intractable social characteristics — like for example fascism or police violence — combines clear characteristics with dreadful implications, its analysis often calls for extra-disciplinary efforts. The Frankfurt School, for example, explained the failures of the twentieth-century workers’ movement by recourse to psychoanalysis and theology. A similar challenge has preoccupied the critics of recent trends like woke-washing and cancel culture. 

Since the rise of Black Lives Matter and MeToo, the political nihilism and eclectic materialism of the postmodern theories that had been challenged by the successes of the anti-globalization movement and movements of the squares have returned under the guise of new academic trends like intersectionality, privilege theory, decoloniality, and critical race theory. While some may argue that they never disappeared and that to think so is a form of intellectual regression, there is nevertheless the sense that the spread of postmodern ideas beyond the academy and into popular culture, and now also into public policy, is cause for concern and resistance. That is the tenor of John McWhorter’s Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. In reviewing McWhorter’s book, the question for us is: What is the political orientation of this concern and what forms of resistance are advocated? 

Before publishing Woke Racism, McWhorter had gained an online media presence by appearing alongside Glenn Loury on the YouTube Glenn Show at Bloggingheads.tv. A Columbia University linguist with a considerable list of book publications and magazine articles, McWhorter is a long-time advocate of (black) capitalism and critic of (black) radicalism. This is important to keep in mind when listening to McWhorter’s forays into what seems to be common sense about race and social aspiration. 

After a private school education and degrees at Rutgers, New York University, and Stanford, McWhorter taught at Cornell and UC Berkeley. He then worked as a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI) from 2003 to 2008. Although he identifies as a liberal democrat, McWhorter’s affiliation with the MI allows us to appreciate the conservative political orientation of his diagnosis of woke antiracism. Formerly known as the International Center for Economic Policy Studies (ICEPS), the MI is a libertarian think tank that was co-founded by Sir Antony George Anson Fisher, an advocate of neoliberal free-market theories who established no fewer than 150 similar institutions around the world. These corporate-funded and right-wing think tanks, like the Atlas Network and the International Policy Network, support hundreds of similar think tanks in dozens of countries. 

ICEPS was at one time headed by former CIA Director William Joseph Casey, who in 1977 established the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, which promotes the same ideological principles that characterize McWhorter’s critique of civil rights activism: individual freedom, private initiative, personal responsibility, welfare reform, privatization, supply-side economics, free markets, and limited government. The MI was co-founded by Casey, an advocate of the Truman Doctrine and aid to the Nixon, Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations. Casey was a fixture of American Cold War policy and was implicated in the Iran-Contra affair.

The MI promotes its anti-communist propaganda through books, articles, and publications like City Journal. Neoconservative MI ideologues argue that Keynesian welfare programmes cause poverty and offer non-scientific, social Darwinist “alternatives” to social spending. They advocate monetarist economic policies, budget cuts, low corporate taxes, low wages, urban gentrification, the charterization schools, pharmaceuticals, tough-on-crime policing, fossil fuel extractivism, climate change denial, economic inequality for the sake of prosperity and social mobility, the security state, and the promotion of corporate capitalism through business schools. Affiliates of the MI have included Daniel Patrick Moynihan, William F. Buckley, Rudy Giuliani, Rupert Murdoch, Henry Kissinger, Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush and Charles Murray. 

Not that a scholar is guilty by association, but McWhorter’s colleague Glenn Loury is likewise an advocate of entrepreneurialism and individual responsibility. Loury has also been a fellow of the Manhattan Institute and has links to the Heritage Foundation, a Washington D.C. think tank founded by right-wing conservatives, anti-communists and the Christian Right. The Heritage Foundation has closer ties to the military apparatus than even the MI and has been implicated in foreign policy “defense” initiatives in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Nicaragua, and Iraq. 

When it comes to race issues, Loury’s conservative politics advocate socioeconomic mobility through the expansion of the black middle class. Like McWhorter, he rejects the black leftist critique of bourgeois America as well as the definition of blacks as victims. For Loury, social justice does not require government reform but rather the protection of freedoms. While both of these black conservatives acknowledge that racial disparities are due to the history of racial discrimination, they argue that liberation from this legacy is a matter of individual freedom and responsibility. According to them, black politics and leadership should privilege voluntary action and individual initiative.   

As a popular commentator and public intellectual, McWhorter has repeatedly demonstrated his liberal-to-conservative values, while occasionally acknowledging the views of his left-wing colleagues. As someone who speaks as a black American man about black issues, like housing, education, poverty, and crime, it is easy to mistake McWhorter’s politics as socially responsible, along the oxymoronic lines of George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.” By targeting mainstream black antiracists like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and Nikole Hannah-Jones, McWhorter would seem to share some common ground with left-wing critics like Adolph Reed Jr., Cedric Johnson, Vivek Chibber, and David Walsh. But that is hardly the case and that is why it is necessary to elucidate the difference between a leftist and a conservative critique of woke antiracism. 

The Left and Right critiques of antiracism are not, as Robin D.G. Kelley has suggested, strange bedfellows. The left-wing view defines woke antiracism as a petty-bourgeois politics of the professional-managerial class. While there is an existing and growing literature on the Left that defends emancipatory universality and advances a class critique of contemporary identity politics, these views are not widespread and the political Left tends to follow the radical democratic tendency of new social movements. This makes it that much easier for McWhorter to correctly associate woke antiracism with postmodern theories.

The right-wing critique of woke antiracism makes the task of the Left more complicated than it was previously. Unfortunately, the activist and academic milieu has been reluctant to criticize woke culture wars, fearful that any such effort would serve the Right. Moreover, the “cancel culture” that has gripped postmodern progressives is at times as harrowing as the conditions of labour precarity and so creates an atmosphere of conformity. 

Compromise formations have been the modus operandi for leftists since the postwar period and it would be foolhardy to think that we can advance the cause of socialism without taking up what appears to some to be matters that are secondary to problems of political economy. However, the weakness and reluctance of a Left that has been in retreat for decades has reduced the socialist challenge to capitalism to an inoperative infrapolitics of resistance and democratic agonism. Today’s petty-bourgeois leftism considers genuine socialism to be an outmoded totalitarian ideology. The only remaining task for conservatives is to attack the countercultural attitudes of postmodern scholars and activists. 

Against the latter, McWhorter adopts conservative takes on public issues. At the risk of taking some of his views out of context, this would include the following: racism is hardwired; the elimination of racism is a utopian pipe dream; black America’s problems are not all about racism; black antiracists want whites to give them more attention and kowtow to them; the politics of respectability and responsibility are not incompatible with black pride; black agonism is self-defeating and insults blacks; black people should stop thinking of themselves as victims and should instead prepare for the job market; family dysfunction is not a distinctly black issue and poverty is a multiracial problem; the Congressional Black Caucus contributed to flawed War on Drugs policies; the emphasis on white-on-black crime ignores black-on-black crime; the election of Barack Obama and the success of people like Condoleezza Rice and Tiger Woods are rebukes to the insistence that America is defined by its racism; Obama did not disappoint black people; the Trump election was not a whitelash but was mostly due to social media having made politics more aggressive; antiracists turn black people against their country; oppositionality is a question of psychology, not politics, and exaggerates the problem of racism; because segregation is illegal, antiracists must inflate minor problems; the obsession with the concept of institutional racism is more damaging to black people than the n-word; oppositional antiracism prevents reasonable analysis of the problems of racism; antiracists betray the cause of black progress; antiracist academics are expanding the classification of racism to new areas, repeating the failed indoctrination methods and psycho-social experiments of the radical sixties and seventies; antiracism is self-congratulatory delusion; progressives should focus on helping those who need help rather than attacking the power structure; antiracists prefer a conversation about race than they do advancing practical priorities like ending the war on drugs, promoting vocational education, and ending the AIDS and obesity epidemics.

Each of these points are not necessarily countered by simple contradiction. Some of them may be correct, but for the wrong reasons. Some of them may be wrong, but for the right reasons. Others require a different set of historical, social, cultural, political, and economic considerations. Woke Racism offers more than enough, in that regard, to make the assertion that McWhorter’s conservative politics have nothing in common with the class politics of leftist universalism. 

The book begins with five assertions, each of which has its left counterpoint: 1) McWhorter’s argument that the ideology of woke antiracism is best understood as a destructive, incoherent, and seductive religion mitigates a critical explanation; 2) his goal of explaining why it is that black people are attracted to a religion that treats them as simpletons ignores the class function of antiracism (and racism) within a multiracial social space; 3) his suggestion that the woke religion harms black people avoids the analysis of which social groups it benefits — namely, the black middle class, the multiracial professional-managerial class, and, ultimately, the capitalist upper class; 4) the argument that a woke-free Democratic Party-friendly agenda can advance the cause of black Americans ignores the organic link between capitalism and the Democratic Party, a tendency that harms radical left politics more generally; 5) his suggestion of ways to lessen the grip of woke religion on public culture entails the problem that a flawed analysis cannot lead to effective solutions. 

While McWhorter wishes to reassure his readers that he is not against religion, even in its BLM incarnation, he also wishes to reassure liberals and leftists that he is not a supporter of the conservative Right. He seeks to address New York Times and NPR-type audiences that, he says, have wrongly accepted the argument that virtue signaling about racism will in some way help black people. McWhorter thus marshals Martin Luther King’s idea that character is more important than skin color against the kind of victim politics that emphasizes weakness and injury as rewards in their own right. 

While the rejection of a culture of complaint is perhaps necessary to political integrity, it has also been an alibi for those who seek to restrict benefits to those who can already afford them. That is why McWhorter’s defeatist stance abandons the task of convincing antiracists that their approach to social praxis is mistaken. On this point, McWhorter’s post-racialism complements rather than challenges the ideology of race managers like Coates and Kendi. His call to “live graciously” among antiracist power brokers should not be countered with activist outrage and indignation, or even smarmy academic irony, but with those left critiques and strategies that have sustained the communist hypothesis across and beyond the valley of postmodernism.

While leftists are no more enamored of DiAngelo-style diversity training than the black guys at Bloggingheads or the reasonable folks at The New Culture Forum, the Left does not advocate self-reliance so much as autonomy in and through solidarity. That the concept of solidarity is now also under attack from the academic Left is only one reason why radical leftists, unlike McWhorter, do not see themselves as serving their race or, as the case may be, attacking their own (white) race. For a socialist, politics is not a matter of identity.   

Building an in-group, rather than a universalist politics, so as to buttress society against the woke mob, is McWhorter’s first line of attack. The first chapter of Woke Racism is dedicated to establishing who these “woke” people are who, for example, cancel nurses for saying things like “everyone’s life matters.” What kind of people are they? Why do they get away with their righteous attacks? Should others allow them to continue? 

In some ways, these questions answer themselves. The devil is in the details insofar as the mounting of any challenge to woke antiracism must appreciate the distinct aspects of the postmodern variant of antiracism. Although nothing about political purges or encounter groups is new, McWhorter is correct to say that some of what we are witnessing did not exist only five years ago. One of the shifts, as Angela Nagle has argued, is that countercultural transgression is now also common on the Right, while the liberal Left has arguably become more censorious than it was during the politically correct eighties.

To take one example described by McWhorter, the data analyst David Shor was fired in 2020 for tweeting a study by a black Ivy League scholar which shows how violent sixties protests were more likely to deliver voters to the Republicans than nonviolent protests. The fact that Shor was not endorsing this study did not prevent his critics from arguing that it was inappropriate for a white man to make this information available. What Shor did, regardless of his intention, is nothing that someone like Chris Hedges would not also say. However, not everyone has the platform that Hedges has to defend his views from those who would demand absolute conformity to inexistent and absurd rules.

What defines the new phase of antiracism is the shift away from abolition and civil rights struggles toward the kind of “third wave antiracism” (TWA) that considers whites to be inherently complicit with structural racism. The obverse to this is the assumption that the fact of embodiment makes blacks inherently radical. McWhorter rightfully decries the zealous sort of inquisitorial micro-politics that brands even leftists as backward. Wokesters do more damage than they advance the cause of antiracism when they define mathematics and punctuality as “white” or reduce Shakespeare and Lincoln to racism. That this heightening of performative politics, of giving and taking offense, has led to denunciatory rituals is an indication of the illiberal shadow of conventional liberalism. It’s a capitalist world, after all, and that is something that most cynics can agree about. 

McWhorter is correct to say that the woke serve a purpose other than the one they say they do. However, his critique of contradictions does not point to those of labor and capital, but rather to an anthropological realism that is populated by bigots, killjoys, power-mongers, and social justice slayers. The “catechism of contradictions” that McWhorter attributes to latter-day inquisitors is as dualistic as it is metaphysical and no doubt the lodestar of a Protestant work ethic that continues to associate material wealth with salvation. 

McWhorter contends that only religion explains why the actually existing antiracist public policies are not enough for the woke. Since these missionaries are inherently self-interested, he adopts Joseph Bottum’s concept of “the Elect” to define those who consider themselves the chosen ones who can lead their people to the promised land. A moral critique is thereby devised to strategically detract from the political and class critique. This moral critique is something that liberals share with conservatives about as much as their concern for tax breaks. 

McWhorter ignores the reality that causing “beautiful trouble” is today not only a matter of social justice but also a career in the creative and knowledge industries. The main character in the TV series The Chair tells the continuing education student David Duchovny that a great deal has happened in the last 30 years, like affect theory, ecocriticism, digital humanities, new materialism, book history, and critical race theory. Indeed.

McWhorter predicts that the woke will soon have to tamper their Elect nonsense if they are not to lose more people to the Trump Right. In the meanwhile, the best defense against the Elect is knowing how to identify them and understanding the ways in which they operate like a religious sect. The woke do not know they are religious, yet they unquestioningly accept doctrine as a matter of etiquette, demanding the submission of their followers. Their clergy includes gifted orators who denounce the sin of white privilege, going the extra mile to denounce the presence of this within themselves. Testifying to privilege on Sunday is more important than what one does the rest of the week. 

Woke evangelism teaches that the discussion of racism is in and of itself a matter of revelation. Donations to the church of woke by corporate America, even in the form of expiation, like the removal of Confederate statues or The New York Times 1619 Project, or just taking a knee, are accepted as signs of the infallibility of the Elect’s view of the world. As the list of heretics who are burned at the stake increases along with the number of words that constitute blasphemy, their power increases. In practical terms, this means that unless one is actively committed to issues of race, gender and sexuality, one can be suspected of heresy.

While the Elect can be found anywhere, their presence among university faculty adds intellectual cachet to their prosecutorial might. All of this is true enough, but the reality of academic life is that it is a competitive environment in even the best of circumstances. Cornel West has been decrying the gangsterization of academic life since at least the 1980s. The difference now is that, with the disappearance of tenure and the overreliance on adjunct teachers, the pressures placed on instructors by neoliberal administrations and disrespectful students has made “the last job that makes sense anymore” into an increasingly privatized zone of conflict. 

Because it risks undermining solidarity, TWA accompanies and facilitates the managerial deskilling, commodification and marketization of education. Even those programs that specialize in TWA are affected by what they do. As McWhorter claims, or as Thomas Kuhn might have put it in more scientific terms, TWA supplants older religions. While one might think that ceci tuera cela is par for the course in an innovative knowledge sector, new knowledge is not necessarily better knowledge. The march through the institutions by radical intellectuals is undermined in this regard by the broader defeats of the Left in the postwar era, leading, as Richard Barbrook has put it, to a replacement of the struggle between socialism and capitalism with the struggle between old (left) forces and the new (left) social movements. Since TWA is by and large a postmodern phenomenon, even this matters less than the term social justice suggests. 

If religion has no place in the classroom, which is not a claim that can be fully sustained, what about race metaphysics and applied social justice postmodernism, as Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay refer to it? McWhorter claims that the woke do not play according to the rules of Enlightenment reason. However, if the classroom is to remain a place of critical inquiry, it does not serve anyone to limit what can and cannot be studied. As Slavoj Žižek says, it takes religion to make good people do bad things. McWhorter says the same about woke antiracism. For this reason, he insists that trends like critical race theory can not only be taught, but that they can also be criticized. The question for us is whether the extended metaphor of religion is fair in that regard. 

As with fascist irrationality, the definition of woke antiracism as a religion allows McWhorter to generously add that its advocates are not simply insane. Like Pluckrose and Lindsay, his rejection of TWA allows him to make a second, arguably more ideologically important move, which is to relate the “performative ideology” of the woke Elect to literary deconstruction and then extend this critique of postmodernism to the academic Left. If woke activists can claim that seeing a white man hold a black baby hurts them, or claim that cisheteropatriarchy justifies looting, then the shift from a socially reformist Left to a culturally conformist Left transforms the politics of equality into a guerrilla war against reason, objectivity, truth and accountability. This is not a politics of speaking truth to power but a will to empowerment through the relativization of truth claims through concepts like standpoint epistemology. Postmodernism’s suspicion of meta-narratives becomes the meta-narrative of suspicion.

McWhorter argues that Electism is today more powerful than the Marxist pretense to offer a comprehensive worldview. The woke are thus identified and identify themselves as the left in contemporary American politics. So long as there is no socialist around to provide some needed contrast, the woke can present themselves as the redeemers of humanity, filling the left-wing hole that was created with the political shift to neoliberalism. 

Deconstructing privilege, the woke have come to view their struggle as the activist dismantling of hegemonic structures. Unlike Jane Addams and MLK, McWhorter says, the woke do not accomplish anything much since they have given themselves the easy task of denouncing everything as racist, sexist and homophobic. He argues that buzzwords like structural and institutional racism anthropomorphize the term racism and require that people suspend their disbelief that not everything is driven by prejudice. This interesting suggestion does nothing to alter the reality that these concepts are products of the same Cold War liberalism that McWhorter ascribes to but does not analyze, better to leave his readers none the wiser about that fact. And why should he when so many of the more critical voices among academic and activist leftists do not do so themselves? 

Woke antiracism is an ideological support of neoliberal institutions that have undergone a thorough legitimation crisis. Since McWhorter defends this system, his sleight of hand on the issue of antiracism substitutes class politics for disingenuous concern about the fate of black people. While nothing about his own politics has much in common with the labor politics and anti-imperialism of the Civil Rights generation, the fact that BLM has little to do with them either allows him to pose as the defender of black interests. 

The transformation of black radicalism in the form of TWA difference politics now finds “allies” among whites who gladly engage in sycophantic rituals of humility and demand that others do the same. Although not all black people want or expect this from whites, the focus on the condition of being psychologically broken, according to McWhorter, is advanced as proof that one has not sold out to the white power structure. The loyal opposition of the woke antiracist is therefore not the Marxist Left or white liberals but right-wing whites. The Elect ultimately associate all heretics with this group, regardless of the reasons for them having fallen out of favor. 

The only group remaining that can advance the cause of blacks, McWhorter claims, are black conservatives. Along postmodern lines, today’s blackness is more a deconstructed category than it is a matter of black essentialist authenticity since blackness is not defined by the woke in terms of what it is, but rather in terms of what it is not, namely: not white and not racist. “Elect ideology,” McWhorter writes, “requires non-white people to found their sense of self on not being white, and on not liking how white people may or may not feel about them.”Like the hysteric in Freudian analysis, antiracists do not call for people to stress their individuality but their condition of secondariness. On this topic, McWhorter avoids the more heady concepts of people like Orlando Patterson, Sylvia Wynter, Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton, and Fred Moten. 

Although someone can genuinely be said to be victimized – like George Floyd, for example, or Julian Assange – victim politics counter-defines McWhorter’s definition of individualism. One is an individual (like John McWhorter) because one is not a victim or because one refuses the status of victim on the singular basis of ascriptive racial category. However, one can be both an individual and a victim. The experience of victimization need not lead to the balkanization of the self but a social world in which the latter would be a desirable outcome, in the form of negative theology, is one in which Marxism has lost all purchase on reality and praxis. That this can be reverse engineered by the kind of zealotry that McWhorter otherwise accurately describes merely underscores the reactionary if not fascist frames of reference in which these social phenomena and discussions take place. 

This perhaps more than anything else explains why woke antiracists make “being oppressed” the essence of black identity — because victim status is a seemingly winning hand in a game that blacks cannot lose given the postulate that majority subjects cannot make similar claims. If they do, they identify with reactionary racist whites and lose the game twice over. While McWhorter’s rejection of antiracism as a performative and expressive anti-politics is shared by some leftists, the limitation of (black) politics by anyone to notions of masquerade and transgression is not something that can pose a serious challenge to capitalism.   

McWhorter is correct to say that there is nothing progressive about a performative game of victim politics that is gloomy, illogical, and pointless. However, a different game cannot be played when people insist on its unwritten rules. Changing the game means changing the rules of the game. On this point, McWhorter is no help at all. While he does not wish to insist on “the race thing” in the same way that people like Kendi do, he is self-admittedly short on solutions.

Rather than the long list of policy demands that defined the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns, for example, McWhorter is satisfied to identity three policy proposals: 1) end the War on Drugs, 2) teach phonics to improve literacy, and 3) get past the idea that everyone needs to go to college and instead value working-class jobs. Why so few planks? Because, McWhorter says, platforming too many good ideas is more performative than actionably pragmatic in a polarized parliamentary system. Although Great Society efforts are facts of history and Democratic Party liberals like Mark Lilla advocate a return to them, McWhorter dismisses this as unsophisticated utopianism. Better to keep your sights on the realistic future rather than bygone times, he advises, adding that those gains achieved by the labor struggles he cannot bring himself to mention have not, in his estimation, had any lasting effect. Only a limited number of policy proposals that have a chance of making it through Congress and come with in-built gains should be pursued. 

One can see from this why it is that working-class jobs need to be valorized. If nothing can realistically advance the interests of the working class in corporate America at the level of wages, paid time off and holidays, affordable housing, free college tuition, universal health care, criminal justice reform, ecology, day care and elder care, etc., then conservatives do well to minimize demands for equality since any one major gain for the working class, like those civil rights laws that were not simply utopian, threaten to lead from one victory to another.

Woke Racism offers no real solutions to our problems. It is not even a good analysis of them. It just says no to woke antiracism in the same way that conservatives say no to the countercultural “mobocracy” that they consider to be little more than a nuisance.

McWhorter is right to say that opposition to racism is not by itself a politics. What would do the most to alleviate the problems that are exacerbated by racism or that lead to racism is not something that he addresses head on. Rather than the broad set of phenomena that cannot be limited to minorities or to racism, he prefers, as a black man, to think of woke antiracism as an exaggerated form of virtue signaling. If the performance of black authenticity is inoperative as the substance of left politics, it is not, as McWhorter suggests, because it lacks logic, but because it does not, by itself, provide a radical perspective on class relations. 

While there are different approaches to the identity and class debate, Žižek’s recent publication, Heaven in Disorder, offers a useful summary of the fundamental dilemma. In the entry “Class Struggle Against Classism,” Žižek mentions the political divide between progressive neoliberals like Biden — who give lip service to identity and demographics but are otherwise no different than the Republicans — and progressive populists, who mobilize constituencies on the basis of progressive policy as well as cultural competence, meaning the kind of postmodern equity that replaces universalist equality with attention to disparities based on ascriptive differences. 

An ostensibly “inside-outside” populist like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can criticize the Biden administration while simultaneously rejecting the “class essentialism” of socialists. This criticism, Žižek argues, is the old liberal-left trick of accusing the Left of serving the Right. It is reflected in Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara’s downplaying of the January 6 coup attempt and warning to the Left that too much criticism of the Democratic Party only serves the far Right. 

The “brocialist” Left is said to privilege class over anti-racism and feminism. The question is: Does the progressive neoliberalism of Clinton, Obama, and Biden actually do anything better to advance the cause of women, blacks, and minority groups? Assuming it is accepted that global capitalism is the target of left politics, class essentialism cannot be considered to be the problem, that is to say, except as Stalinist deviation. 

Contrary to his equivocation on the Biden administration on the Bad Faith Podcast, Žižek does not accept the Democratic Party agenda as part of a strategy that, by making things worse, would eventually lead to change. He does not advocate staying “inside” the system so as to pursue a more radical “outside” politics. This does not imply that the Left must reject any and every progressive policy put forward by the Biden administration — not that there have been very many, beyond the withdrawal from Afghanistan. 

The accusation of class essentialism, Žižek says, misses its mark. Without dismissing ecological, feminist, antiracist, decolonial, and national struggles, class should be understood as the dynamic that overdetermines these interacting and multiple struggles. Against radical democratic and intersectional approaches, Žižek rejects the bell hooks idea that class is only one in a series of antagonisms. When class is reduced to one among other identities, he argues, class becomes another version of identity politics. The resulting “classism” advocates (self-)respect for workers, which Žižek says is a characteristic of both populism and fascism.

The problem with John McWhorter’s Woke Racism is that it tacitly accepts racial oppression because it defends class exploitation. Since capitalism makes use of antiracism in ways that are similar to its use of racism — by and large to divide the working class and defend the interests of the ruling plutocracy — internationalist class solidarity is the missing element of his study. Class overdetermines the relation between race and class in McWhorter’s analysis. Because he accepts capitalist class exploitation, his description of race politics has no explanatory value. 

Not only is McWhorter’s theory regressive with respect to the possibility of improving people’s lives, but it must rely on anthropological guilt structures, couched in the terms of religion, in order to make capitalism seem eternal and unchanging. In the end, it is McWhorter who is a strange bedfellow of woke antiracists since both rely on a static view of the social order. The woke libertarian’s emphasis on the original sin and eternal damnation of racism is echoed by the economic libertarian’s conservative theory of human nature and ratification of capitalist social relations as the norm and telos of social progress.   

Marc James Léger is a Marxist cultural theorist based in Montreal. He is author of Bernie Bros Gone Woke: Class, Identity, Neoliberalism (2022) and Too Black to Fail: The Obama Portraits and the Politics of Post-Representation (2022).

What is the Fetishism of Commodities?

By Carlos Garrido

I was asked by a few comrades to explain Marx’s concept of the fetishism of commodities, and with that, the main ways it has been misunderstood by both mainstream bourgeois academia and by well-meaning Marxists. The following short reflection attempts to do just that.

Marx begins section four of the first chapter of Capital by saying that “a commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing;” however, “its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (Marx, 71). I can imagine ‘bourgeois’ political economists reading this in 1867 wondering what the hell is ‘queer’ about a commodity? I can envision them asking “what in the world does a commodity, a category of political economy, have to do with metaphysics and theology?” Before I analyze what Marx means, let us look at some of the things he doesn’t mean, but which, as usual, people think he does.

There are a few ways the commodity fetish is misunderstood, but the most prominent misunderstanding describes the fetishism of commodities as a sort of ‘false consciousness’ which takes us over when we engage in the market; a sort of ‘illusion’ that occurs when we idealize the products we consume, or the products we are faced with the opportunity to consume. The commodity fetish is understood here as a sort of libidinal connection to products. It is as if one could watch Confessions of a Shopaholic and retrieve the same message Marx is proposing in this section.

This is not, in my view, what Marx means by the fetishism of commodities. It is not an illusion which functions as a filter to distort our view of the world. If that were the case, as Michael Heinrich notes, “false consciousness must disappear once the real conditions have been explained” (Heinrich, 71).  This is not, however, the case. We don’t become immune to the ‘false consciousness’ of the commodity fetish after reading Marx’s Capital. Instead of thinking of the commodity fetish as a subjective experience of ‘false consciousness,’ Marx holds the fetish is in the world itself. It has an objective presence in the social relations of capitalist commodity production.

Marx uses the example of the construction of a table. When wood is formed into a table, there is no mystery present. We have a “common, every-day thing” (Marx, 71). However, “so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent” (Ibid – my italic). Notice here how he is very explicit that it is the object itself that is changed into something transcendent when it becomes a commodity. It isn’t, again, simply a matter of a mental illusion or false consciousness.

“The mystical character of a commodity,” Marx will go on to say, “does not originate, therefore, in their use-value” (Ibid). If it was simply a result of the use value of the good, all things – regardless of whether they were commodities or not – would have ‘metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.’ Instead, what makes a commodity such a queer thing is the relation which makes a good into a commodity in the first place –  its exchangeability. It is here where a good becomes a sinnlich übersinnliches ding (sensuous extrasensory thing). As Marx says: “whence, then, arises the enigmatic character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form itself” (Ibid, 71-2).

For a good to carry an ‘exchange value’ means that the specific type of concrete labor and materials which were necessary to create that good have fallen to the background. What matters in exchange value is not the type of work, but the socially necessary time it takes for that work to produce its product. In essence, qualitatively different forms of work, producing objects with qualitatively different utilities, are all homogenized and differentiated only quantitatively, that is, by the amount of socially necessary labor time materialized in the work. The homogenization of the human element of the commodity creates the conditions where “the social relations of the producers… and the social character of their labour” takes “the form of a social relation between products” (Ibid, 72). The human source of the commodity disappears, it becomes absorbed and metamorphized into the thing itself, appearing “as an objective character stamped upon the product” (Ibid). In the commodity a “definite social relation between men” assumes “the fantastic form of a relation between things” (Ibid).

A good analogy to such a queer relation can be found in the religious fetish, wherein human creations (the Gods) are disconnected (in their being and in their qualities) from their human creators. The relationships are seen not as relations between human constructions, but relations between “independent beings endowed with life” (Ibid). A prominent example of this phenomenon can be seen in the religious alienation Ludwig Feuerbach depicts in The Essence of Christianity. Nonetheless, the point is that because this fetishism “attaches itself” to the “products of labor, so soon as they are produced as commodities,” in a system of commodity production, this fetish has an objective character (Ibid).

For instance, in the movie ‘They Live,’ the protagonist John Nada finds a box of glasses which when worn show the real message behind social symbols (e.g., advertisement for vacation reads ‘reproduce and consume,’ the dollar reads ‘this is your God,’ etc.). In his reaction to the film, Slavoj Žižek’s The Perverts Guide to Ideology provides a helpful analysis of these “ideology critique glasses,” which aids our understanding of how the commodity fetish has been misunderstood. Ideology, Žižek states, is usually thought of as a set of glasses distorting our view of the real world. Therefore, ideology critique is usually framed as the removal of these glasses, an act which allows a spontaneous and direct engagement with the real world. Similarly, the central misunderstanding of the commodity fetish is that it is merely an illusion we hold, once we remove the illusion from our understanding the fetish disappears. This way of thinking about ideology critique is, as Žižek notes, ideological as well.

Instead, as the movie rightly depicts, ideology is objectively in the world. The task of critique is beyond the commonsensical and spontaneous. Critique is an often-painful addition which mediates between us and the world in such a manner that provides us with insights into the objective limitations of the objective world. The commodity fetish is not a distorted view of the world. It is not ‘fixed’ through easy liberal consumptive practices; through knowing where your cow died and where your eggs came from. The commodity fetish is an objective reality in a world dominated by commodity production. It takes critique to see this, but a revolution to change it.

Bibliography

Karl Marx (1867), Capital Vol. I, International Publishers (1974).

Michael Heinrich (2004), An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, Monthly Review (2012).

The Contradictions of Bourgeois Secularism

By Yanis Iqbal

We live in a conjuncture characterized by the resurgence of fascist groupings. This has meant the activation of religious fanaticism, in which spirituality breaks out of the confines of secularity to openly assert undemocratic identities. The inability of the modern epoch to preempt the emergence of primitive fundamentalism is a result of its internal contradictions. In “On the Jewish Question,” Karl Marx writes that feudal civil society “secluded the individual from the state as a whole and…converted the particular relation of his corporation to the state as a whole into his general relation to the life of the nation, just as…[it] converted his particular civil activity and situation into his general activity and situation.” This specific configuration of social organization meant that “the unity of the state, and also the consciousness, will, and activity of this unity, the general power of the state…appear[ed] as the particular affair of a ruler and of his servants, isolated from the people. The advent of bourgeois political revolution changed this situation by smashing “all estates, corporations, guilds, and privileges, since they were all manifestations of the separation of the people from the community.” Henceforth, state affairs would become affairs of the people, a matter of general concern.

Thus, the bourgeois political revolution “broke up civil society into its simple component parts; on the one hand, the individuals; on the other hand, the material and spiritual elements constituting the content of the life and social position of these individuals.” This division of humanity into the abstractness of political society and the concreteness of civil society “set free the political spirit, which had been, as it were, split up, partitioned, and dispersed in the various blind alleys of feudal society. It gathered the dispersed parts of the political spirit, freed it from its intermixture with civil life, and established it as the sphere of the community, the general concern of the nation, ideally independent of those particular elements of civil life.” However, the “political revolution resolves civil life into its component parts, without revolutionizing these components themselves or subjecting them to criticism. It regards civil society, the world of needs, labor, private interests, civil law, as the basis of its existence, as a precondition not requiring further substantiation and therefore as its natural basis.”

Further, “man as a member of civil society is held to be man in the proper sense, homme [man] as distinct from citoyen [citizen], because he is man in his sensuous, individual, immediate existence, whereas political man is only abstract, artificial man, man as an allegorical, juridical person.” In other words: “The real man is recognized only in the shape of the egoistic individual, the true man is recognized only in the shape of the abstract citizen…Political emancipation is the reduction of man, on the one hand, to a member of civil society, to an egoistic, independent individual, and, on the other hand, to a citizen, a juridical person”. This disjunctive dimension of bourgeois modernity has special implications for secularism. Insofar that the bourgeois state does not abolish real distinctions in the realm of civil society and feels itself to be universal only in opposition to the particularity of the latter, religion under capitalism is not weakened but simply displaced from the state into civil society. In short, capitalism privatizes religion.

Marx writes:

“Man emancipates himself politically from religion by banishing it from the sphere of public law to that of private law. Religion is no longer the spirit of the state, in which man behaves…as a species-being, in community with other men. Religion has become the spirit of civil society, of the sphere of egoism…It is no longer the essence of community, but the essence of difference. It has become the expression of man’s separation from his community, from himself and from other men…It is only the abstract avowal of specific perversity, private whimsy, and arbitrariness”. This conversion of religion from the social medium of public life to the individual language of private life ensures that religion continues to exist as the irrational counterpart of rational secularism. In fact, the abstract secularism of capitalist modernity can exist only through its constant juxtaposition to the parochial religiosity that makes up the concrete content of civil society. This is because the bourgeoisie does not want to radically transform the social relations that prevail in society; it is content with the empty idealism of the state. Such idealism does not eliminate the egoism that is found in feudal civil society. Instead, it accepts the “egoistic man…[as] the basis, the precondition, of the political state. He is recognized as such by this state in the rights of man. The liberty of egoistic man and the recognition of this liberty…is…the recognition of the unrestrained movement of the spiritual and material elements which form the content of his life. Hence, man was not freed from religion, he received religious freedom.”

Since the capitalist privatization of religion perpetuates the existence of undemocratic spirituality in civil society, we need a communist transformation of political society that replaces its thin conception of juridical generality with the thick conception of socially evolved universality. This would entail the democratization of religiosity, the fostering of communicative rationality wherein participants would critically argue and question stereotypical suppositions about religion. While this won’t necessarily translate into a radical conversion or the adoption of a totally different point of view, it would certainly facilitate the creation of a public discourse that has a willingness for democratic dialogue and self-critical examination. In this democratically-collectively managed spirituality, one will gain the ability to be both religious and rational, and take part in a praxis of communicative rationality without being hindered by any dogmas.

The Mecca of African Liberation: Walter Rodney in Tanzania

By Chinedu Chukwudinma

Republished from Review of African Political Economy.

Karim Hirji, a Tanzanian student, was in a good mood when he went to bed on the 10 July 1969. That evening he had heard the most impressive lecture of his life at the University of Dar es Salaam. The lecture was on the Cuban Revolution and its relevance to Africa. Back in his dorm, he praised the speaker in his diary: “one could almost feel the strong conviction and deep emotions from which he spoke”. The man he admired and later befriended was Dr Walter Rodney. [1]

After being banned from Jamaica, Rodney settled with his family in Tanzania to teach history and political science at the University of Dar es Salaam from 1969 to 1974. He reconnected with the socialist students he had met during his first stay in 1966. In those days, Rodney helped them establish the University Students African Revolutionary Front (USARF). He ran their Marxist workshops and attended their anti-imperialist protests and talks. His connections brought the likes of CLR James, Stokely Carmichael and Guyanese politician Cheddi Jagan to speak on USARF platforms. Upon his return in 1969, Rodney was pleased to see that the USARF had gained new members. Karim Hirji was one of them. He got Rodney to write the first article for the group’s magazine Cheche on African labour (Cheche took its name from Lenin’s newspaper Iskra. Both words mean ‘spark’–in Swahili and Russian respectively). Rodney thus continued agitating for socialism on campus as he had done in Jamaica. But the political climate was now more favourable for him, as Tanzania was the mecca of African liberation. [2]

Tanzania offered hope to Rodney and many radical black intellectuals. They believed the African diaspora’s fight for freedom and equality relied on the success of anti-imperialist movements in Africa. Tanzania’s first president Julius Nyerere and his party, the Tanganyika African Nation Union (TANU) opposed imperialism as few independent African states did. Nyerere gave diplomatic and material support to every national liberation movement in southern Africa. He opened offices for the Liberation Front of Mozambique (FRELIMO) and built military bases for them. He established training camps for the paramilitary wing of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, uMkhonto we Sizwe, to help it fight the apartheid regime in South Africa. Living in Tanzania enabled Rodney to deepen his understanding of guerrilla warfare and international solidarity. FRELIMO fighters taught him how to shoot a rifle when he visited their camps. He also met with delegations from Vietnam, then involved in the war against the United States and organised solidarity protests with the Vietnamese on campus.

When Rodney first visited Tanzania in 1966, he witnessed Nyerere publish his program for socialism and self-reliance, the Arusha Declaration. The president had turned his African socialist philosophy known as Ujamaa—familyhood—into a policy of nationalisation of foreign companies and land reform. He aspired to increase food production through the creation of Ujamaa villages based on collective farming. Africans no longer had to rely on volatile cash crops and aid from advanced capitalist nations to make a living. Nyerere was confident that his plan suited the interest of the peasant majority. But he had yet to convince the minuscule educated elite, made up of students and state officials, to help the peasants. Back in 1964, some elitist students had shown Nyerere their disdain for work in the countryside when they protested against compulsory national service. Afterwards, Nyerere vowed to turn the university into a battleground for his progressive ideas. [3]

By 1970, Rodney stood at the heart of the debates concerning African underdevelopment that occurred almost every night at the University. In the packed auditorium, Rodney debated a TANU Cabinet Minister on Tanzania’s economic direction. He also debated the renowned Kenyan political science professor, Ali Mazuri, on why Africa should be socialist, not capitalist. His ideas, however, did not always please Nyerere. The president replied with anger to an article Rodney published in TANU’s newspaper, which argued that African leaders who served western capitalism deserved to be overthrown by the people. Nyerere disagreed and accused him of preaching violence to young people. The regime set limits on how left-wing students and academics could be. A few months later, it banned the USARF for promoting “foreign ideology”. [4]

The ban did not change Rodney’s respect for Nyerere, nor did it discourage him from sharing his radical Marxist ideas with students. He taught a graduate course on the Russian Revolution to show his African students that they could draw lessons for their own struggle from October 1917. He made parallels between present-day Tanzania and Tsarist Russia, which both had a large peasantry and a small working class. Rodney praised the Russian Revolution as the first break with capitalism, transforming the once mainly agrarian country into an industrial power in its aftermath. Bourgeois historians, he argued, sought to discredit October 1917 because it represented the victory of organised workers allied with peasants over their class. [5]

Rodney had begun a monograph on the Russian Revolution in 1971, but he never finished it because he had more urgent matters at hand. He wanted to use Marxist theory to address the issue of African underdevelopment.

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Rodney’s involvement in debates concerning African underdevelopment in Tanzania inspired him to write his most influential book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. He was concerned that most African nations had not broken ties with the old colonial powers in the decade after colonialism. They had achieved political independence, but their economies remained in the hands of European and American companies. They remained poor and reliant on foreign aid because the Western ruling class stole their natural wealth (land, oil etc.) for its benefit, with help from African leaders who served them. Yet, many African intellectuals still believed that trade deals, loans and investment from advanced capitalist countries would benefit African development. Rodney sought to convince them to the contrary.

His book, published in 1972, revealed that European intervention in Africa, through the slave trade and colonialism, stifled African development. It told how the European ruling class robbed Africa of its wealth, which contributed to Europe’s prosperity and industrial growth. Rodney examined Africa’s relationship with Europe from 1500 to 1960 to elucidate the present. He opened the preface with his message for the future: “African development is only possible on the basis of a radical break with the international capitalist system” which had underdeveloped Africa for centuries. [6]

Rodney’s skilful use of Marx’s historical method in his book uprooted Africa from the colonial myths surrounding its past. In Chapter One, Rodney dismantled the racist idea that Africa stood outside progress by defining development as a universal and multifaceted process. As Marx and Engels did before him, he understood development as being rooted in how human beings cooperate to provide the necessities of life out of nature. He explained that when people found better ways to produce wealth by working together, they developed new forms of cooperation, new ideas and changed the form of their society. Rodney showed a sophisticated understanding of development, arguing that it did not unfold as a linear process but rather was uneven across continents and regions, as sometimes the people who defended old forms of cooperation and ideas stopped those attempting to modernise production, delaying societal change for years to come. [7]

Rodney dedicated the second chapter to portraying Africa’s development before Europeans arrived in the 1500s. Far from being outside of progress, Africa displayed formidable advances in agriculture, science, and art. Most societies at the time were small classless ones with low levels of production, where people had equal access to land and evenly shared resources. Africa, however, developed more hierarchical societies that resembled Europe’s feudal states in places like Ethiopia, Egypt, and Zimbabwe. In these unequal societies, a ruling class owned the land and appropriated the surplus created by the exploited peasants. Rodney argued that underdevelopment was never the absence of development. It was not inherent to Africa and its people, but the historical consequence of capitalist expansion and imperialism. [8]

By the 16th century, Europe developed at a faster pace than Africa and the rest of the world, transitioning from feudalism to capitalism. Rodney argued that European powers demonstrated their superiority in maritime and armaments technology. They opened West Africa for trade with their ships and canons and transformed it into a supplier of slaves for their plantations in America and the Caribbean. In the third and fourth chapter, Rodney explored the consequences of the transatlantic slave trade on African development by engaging in the debate concerning the number of African captives. He opposed Philip Curtin’s tally that counted only 10 million enslaved from 1500 to 1870. “Because it is a low figure it is already being used by European scholars who are apologists for the capitalist system and its long record of brutality”. [9] Rodney explained that Curtin’s toll failed to measure the whole tragedy because it only relied on records of slaves’ arrivals in America. The number of victims went far beyond 10 million, as some captives were smuggled, and millions more never left Africa. They died in the wars fought over slaves and more captives perished during the long journeys from the interior of Africa to the coast as well as the so-called ‘Middle Passage’ the journey across the Atlantic.

After he established the horrific magnitude of the slave trade, Rodney explained how it underdeveloped Africa. He showed that the trade stunted Africa’s demographic growth. As European powers kidnapped able young men and women, Africa lost those of childbearing age who performed the most arduous tasks on the land. With fewer people at hand, many African societies struggled to harness nature and develop. Moreover, Rodney argued that Europe’s demand for slaves made slave raiding and wars commonplace in West Africa. Societies that had hitherto coexisted in peace now turned on each other to acquire more slaves. Violence instilled fear and insecurity among Africans. It disrupted the organisation of agriculture, mining, and commerce that they had established over centuries. It destroyed crops and artisanal trade turning farmers into soldiers, and soldiers into slaves. This disruption of farming and trade even impeded the development of African regions that were not involved in the slave trade.

While the slave trade stalled and reversed African development, it contributed to Europe’s capitalist development. Rodney demonstrated that the slave trade generated enormous profits for the Portuguese, British and French empires, making fortunes for countless bourgeois merchants and plantation owners. Its wealth and magnitude gave rise to the infamous ports of Bristol, Liverpool, Nantes and Bordeaux. He explained how the profits and goods accrued from the exploitation of African slaves in the New World fuelled Britain’s Industrial Revolution. A century ago, Karl Marx had made the same point when he wrote, “without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry”. [10] At the end of chapter four, Rodney explained how colonialism emerged out of the imperialist stage of capitalism in the late 19th century. Rivalries between European capitalist firms assumed the form of a competition between nation-states for control over the world’s markets, natural resources and trade routes. Africa, which had been weakened from centuries of slave trading, fell victim to Europe’s violent colonial conquest. European ruling classes justified this conquest with racist ideology, as they claimed to be civilising savage people by converting them to Christianity. Thus, by 1900, they had divided the entire African continent into colonies. [11]

In the fifth chapter, Rodney analysed colonialism (1885-1960) as a cruel and exploitative system, whereby the European bourgeoisie extracted wealth from African workers and peasants. He assessed the oppression and suffering of African workers at the hands of the colonial state. The state ensured that Africans often worked under forced labour, while their European counterparts could freely sell their labour. Even those Africans who were able to choose their employer received miserable wages for endless hours of work. Colonial rule was even worse for the African peasant. Rodney showed how the colonial state confiscated their land through severe taxation, evictions, and warfare. It forced some peasants to abandon food production for export crops that were sold cheap. Moreover, peasants suffered at the hands of trading companies and their middlemen who offered miserable prices. Rodney, however, did not simply illustrate the horrors of colonialism. He provided case studies of multinational companies, like Unilever, and the enormous profits they acquired from robbing Africans. Moreover, he described how Africa’s contribution to capitalism went beyond monetary returns. Its raw materials supported Europe’s advancement in electronics, metallurgy and chemistry and other industries, which stood at the centre of Europe’s capitalist development in the 20th century. [12]

In the final chapter, Rodney attacked the racist idea that colonialism had benefits for Africans because the colonisers built railroads, schools and hospitals. All the roads and railways, he said, went from the plantations and mines to the coast to ship raw materials to Europe, never to encourage trade between different regions of Africa. The infrastructure that colonialists built served to entrench Africa’s unfavourable position in the world economy, as a precarious supplier of raw materials and a free market for European finished products. The colonialists had no interest in providing health care and education to Africans. Rodney established the grim tally of five centuries of Portuguese colonisation:

The Portuguese had not managed to train a single African doctor in Mozambique, and the life expectancy in Eastern Angola was less than thirty years. [13]

Rodney’s historical account received support from Tanzania’s radical socialist minister A M Babu who clarified Africa’s present predicament in the postscript. “Foreign investment”, the minister wrote, “is the cause, and not a solution, to our economic backwardness.” [14] Investment went into projects designed to exploit African labour and raw materials for the benefit of the Western ruling class, never into health care and education. At best, foreign investment made fortunes for the few African leaders and businessmen, who partnered with western states and multinationals. But it failed to uplift the masses from poverty. Babu and Rodney advocated a revolutionary path to development, aimed at breaking Africa’s dependence on imperialist powers and empowering the workers and peasants. What would that path look like? Initially, Rodney thought that Nyerere’s socialism offered an answer to that question.

Chinedu Chukwudinma is a socialist activist and writer based in London. He writes on African politics, popular struggles, and the history of working-class resistance on the continent and is a member of ROAPE’s editorial board.

Notes

1. Karim Hirji, The Enduring Relevance of Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Mkuki Na Nyota, 2017).

2. Karim Hirji, Karim, Cheche: Reminiscences of a Radical Magazine. (African Books Collective, 2010), p.29.

3. See Mattavous, Viola, 1985, “Walter Rodney and Africa”, Journal of Black Studies, pp. 115-130. and Amzat Boukari-Yabara, Walter Rodney (1942-1980): Itinéraire et Mémoire d’un Intellectuel Africain, PhD thesis, (Centre d’Études Africaines CEAf, EHESS, 2010) pp.351-362.

4. Karim Hirji, 2010, p.95.

5. Rodney, 2018, p.76.

6. Walter Rodney, 2012, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Pambazuka Press, Cape Town, 2012), p.xi.

7. Rodney did not see development as a linear process. Although it was a general trend, it was uneven across continents and regions. As sometimes, the people who defended old forms of cooperation and ideas stopped those attempting to modernise production, delaying societal change for years to come. See Rodney, 2012, pp.7-10. For Marx’s historical materialist method, see Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Lawrence & Wishart, 1970) pp.42-60.

8. Rodney, 2012, pp.3-70.

9. Rodney, 2012, pp.96.

10. Karl Marx, Karl, Letter from Marx to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov (1846).

11. Rodney, 2012, pp.75-145.

12. Rodney, 2012, pp.149-201.

13. Rodney, 2012, p.206.

14. Rodney, 2012, p.284.

Derek R. Ford’s “Encountering Education:” Bridging Marxist Educational Theory and Practice

By Peter McLaren

It was almost seven years ago that I participated in Derek R. Ford’s dissertation defense at Syracuse University. In that work—later published as Education and the Production of Space—Ford built on my own revolutionary critical pedagogy by further experimenting with the exact educational logics at work in revolutionary struggles and their spatial relations and implications.[1] After many twists and turns, for the last several decades I’ve worked to enlarge the scope of critical pedagogy into social movements because Marxist pedagogy is nothing unless it’s contributing to a social universe outside of capitalist value production.[2] Ford is one of several who continue to take that project in new directions, and since his dissertation he’s continued his work as a communist organizer at the local, national, and global levels and, just as importantly, has continued to write and theorize at the intersections of Marxism, pedagogy, and revolutionary struggles today. His seventh book, Encountering Education: Elements for a Marxist Pedagogy continues this trend in important and provocative ways.[3] The book is an incisive intervention in the fields of educational and political theory, yet it’s also one that’s relevant to organizers and activists today.

Ford begins by observing the frequency with which Marx’s eleventh Theses on Feuerbach—that “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it”—is cited. From here he launches into his own intervention by noting that what is rarely mentioned is “the direction toward which he wanted to change it,” something that is inseparable from what he studied and the theory he articulated.[4] In other words, Marxist theory isn’t merely about changing the world but about advancing the class struggle toward the eventual abolition of class society. This is the transformation from the capitalist mode of production to the communist mode of production via socialism, which “as a social formation” is a combination “of elements of both modes of production in which communist relations and means of production are ascending through the class struggle.”[5] The novelty of Ford’s work is the way he sees pedagogical processes as absolutely central to not only the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production but, more importantly, as key yet neglected aspects of the struggle for a new mode of production. Ford contends that we have to both explain the political context of our moment and the pedagogical philosophies of marxist education appropriate to that conjuncture, while insisting that neither are reducible to the other.

An Overview of Ford’s Latest Riffs

The first chapter begins where his last book, Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy, left off: with Ford’s unique and bold excavation of two latent pedagogical logics in Marx’s own works.[6] This is a theme he’s developed elsewhere in various ways, and in this sense Encountering Education is another extended riff on this theory. This is not mere repetition, but rather the result of Ford’s sprawling research that refuses to follow a linear trajectory. In this book, it serves as the foundation for the “elements of a marxist pedagogy” that Ford organizes around the “disinterpellative encounter,” a concept first proposed by another former student of mine, Tyson E. Lewis. Whereas Althusser articulated interpellation as the material process through which subjects are inaugurated into the mode of production, Lewis and Ford theorize disinterpellation as the disruption of that process. “The pedagogical encounter,” Ford writes here, “is ‘an exposure to an outside,” and an excess or surplus gap within the lesson.’”[7]

For Ford, Marx’s distinction between the method of presentation and inquiry serves as the starting points for a marxist pedagogical philosophy of learning and studying, the former of which is linear and guided by predetermined ends and the latter of which is open-ended and guided by a ceaseless wondering and wandering to and fro. Ford innovatively reads work by Marx and his commentators as gesturing toward but never reaching this pedagogical dialectic Marx articulates.

The next chapter develops a theory of “errant learning” in which both pedagogies are blocked together, and the political context here are anti-colonial and decolonial struggles. He begins with John Willinsky’s Learning to Divide the World, which looks at how education was and is fundamental to colonialism.[8] Ford attends to Willinsky’s neglect of learning and colonialism while at the same time contributing to revolutionary work on studying that has focused primarily on neoliberalism. He does this through a highly unique—and for some, probably, controversial—turn to Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Space and Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres project. Here, Ford identifies “the grasping drive as the educational foundation of the colonizing apparatus. I argue that the grasping drive positions opacity as a potential that must be realized—as a thought that must be known—an orientation that ends up sacrificing opacity as such.”[9] Ford turns to the question of form through Sloterdijk, linking the grasping drive to “lordly imagining,” before drawing out the revolutionary potential of Sloterdijk’s work on foams. He develops his theory of “errant learning” as “another form of dialectically blocking together the methods of inquiry and presentation, but one that shows the necessity of presentation and the existing historical material conditions in which we engage in inquiry.”[10]

After exploring the colonial and imperial context of our times, Ford turns next to the urban coordinates of our struggle and our present. He shows how the grasping drive is the pedagogical logic of today’s urbanism, which he justifies and then develops a pedagogical response to by turning to Jean-François Lyotard’s later work. Indeed, here we will note Ford’s highly unorthodox marxism that, while it’s unapologetically committed to the proletarian class camp and the struggle for communism, looks for philosophical allies everywhere he can, even in the most unsuspecting of places. Today’s urbanism—the megalopolis—is one in which everything is put into circuits of communication and exchange and “is ‘an economy in which everything is taken, nothing received,’” and is thus illiterate. Ford takes illiteracy as a positive element for marxist pedagogy insofar as such illiteracy “is not the negation or suppression of literacy, but instead a development of literacy as grasping, through which forms and concepts constitute objects under the mind’s direction and the subject’s will.”[11] Instead of presenting what this looks like, he inquiries into examples, one of which is the use of “scare quotes.” When we write or read square quotes, we “create a margin around the words and prevent any firm links between the words inside and outside to be drawn. While we can produce uncertain connections (“what is it about ‘this’ word?”), these always slip out of our grasp.”[12]

Urbanism isn’t only about steel and pavement, bounded densities of population and production, but is also virtual and material at the same time. In the fourth chapter, he builds on Curry Malott’s work on the postdigital, which Malott sees as a struggle “over what form the postdigital will take, which will be determined,” Ford urges, “by what mode of production prevails.”[13] While there is much of interest in this chapter, what is perhaps most politically and theoretically important is Ford’s argument against marxist theorists who have abandoned Marx’s theory of value today on the basis that “immaterial” and “knowledge” or “cognitive” work and products are immeasurable. “Marx’s law of value,” he reminds us, “is precisely immeasurable” insofar as both aspects of socially-necessary labor time are “dynamic,” “unpredictable,” and at times even outside of even our individual and collective consciousness.[14] The main problem he identifies with capitalist postdigital pedagogy is “that it limits individuation to the capitalist form of individuality and reinforces our conception and experience of individuality as a finalized starting point rather than an endpoint.”[15] Capital needs the individual subject-form to produce commodities (like knowledge). Yet rather than argue for the collective alone, Ford proposes—in postdigital fashion—for the pedagogical and political process of individuation through incalculable thought.

Ford begins the conclusion by noting that “there’s an immense power that comes from hearing an explanation for one’s oppression and our collective poverty and misery,” but that “explanation is only one part of the marxist pedagogical dialectic. The other part—inquiry—is a different kind of power: the power of wonder.”[16]  Here he summarizes the political and pedagogical distinctions between inquiry and presentation beautifully:

“If one side of the marxist pedagogical dialectic is about knowing and presentation, then we have to attend to the other side, which is about thought and inquiry. Such a distinction turns on the dialectic between exchange-value and use-value, between abstraction and differentialization, between capitalism and communism. The dialectic itself is here, in the present, in the global capitalist world, but in the world in transition. Understanding or knowing involves a determinate judgment that takes place when given data comes under the mind’s order and comprehension is a faculty of determination in which data comes under the mind’s comprehension. Thinking, by contrast, is an exposure to stupor, an experience with immeasurable concepts that the mind can never grasp.”[17]

After an important presentation and study of interpellation, counterinterpellation, and disinterpellation, Ford turns to the role of noise and music in anti-colonial struggles to tie together the various riffs produced in the book, ending with the example of technologies that mediate the voice such as autotune, which show us that vocalization is a ‘process without a subject’ insofar as they prevent us from linking the sound of a voice to an essence of an individual subject or a piece of fixed capital.” These technologies produce a “sonic surplus” that we have to listen to both synchronically and diachronically as well in order to “receive an immersive education in the wonder as well as the theory of class struggle, a struggle that is advanced ideologically and materially through the forces of opposition and swerve.”[18] The swerve is the unpredictable but nonetheless intended action of the marxist pedagogue.

Conclusion

There’s no doubt in my mind that Ford’s book—and this review—will be challenging to some. Yet for those who are confused, I can only urge you to spend time with Encountering Education, which makes these dense and difficult theories accessible and makes them come to life with real-world examples. That the book is available as an affordable paperback and a free online PDF will hopefully contribute to the essential ideas in this book proliferating throughout our movements. The pedagogical elements of the book aren’t recipes or dictates, but rather resources for us to use in all of our revolutionary educational endeavors.

Peter McLaren is Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire Democratic Project and International Ambassador for Global Ethics and Social Justice. In 2005, a group of scholars and activists in Northern Mexico established La Fundacion McLaren de Pedagogía Critica to develop a knowledge of McLaren's work throughout Mexico and to promote projects in critical pedagogy and popular education. On September 15, 2006 the Catedra Peter McLaren was inaugurated at the Bolivarian University of Venezuela.

Notes

[1] Derek R. Ford, Education and the Production of Space: Political Pedagogy, Geography, and Urban Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2017).

[2] Peter McLaren, Pedagogy of Insurrection: From Resurrection to Revolution (New York: Peter Lang, 2016), 373.

[3] Derek R. Ford, Encountering Education: Elements for a Marxist Pedagogy (Madison: Iskra Books, 2022).

[4] Ibid., 1.

[5] Ibid., 94.

[6] Derek R. Ford, Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

[7] Ford, Encountering Education, 14.

[8] John Willinsky, Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire’s End (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

[9] Ford, Encountering Education, 43.

[10] Ibid., 44.

[11] Ibid., 76.

[12] Ibid., 85.

[13] Ibid., 86. See also Curry S. Malott, “Capitalism, Crisis, and Educational Struggle in the Postdigital,” Postdigital Science and Education 1, no. 2 (2019): 371-390.

[14] Ibid., 93.

[15] Ibid., 99-100.

[16] Ibid., 102.

[17] Ibid., 103.

[18] Ibid., 122.

Toward a Third Reconstruction: Lessons From the Past for a Socialist Future

By Eugene Puryear

“The price…of slavery and civil war was the necessity of quickly assimilating into American democracy a mass of laborers…in whose hands alone for the moment lay the power of preserving the ideals of popular government…and establishing upon it an industry primarily for the profit of the workers. It was this price which in the end America refused to pay and today suffers for that refusal” [1].

– W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America

Karl Marx wrote to Lincoln in 1864 that he was sure that the “American anti-slavery war” would initiate a “new era of ascendancy” for the working classes for the “rescue…and reconstruction of a social world” [2]. The Black historian Lerone Bennett, writing 100 years later, called Reconstruction, “the most improbable social revolution in American history” [3].

Clothed in the rhetoric and incubated within the structure of “American Democracy,” it was nonetheless crushed, drowned in blood, for being far too radical for the actual “American democracy.” While allowing for profit to be made, Reconstruction governments made a claim on the proceeds of commerce for the general welfare. While not shunning wage labor, they demanded fairness in compensation and contracts. Reconstruction demanded the posse and the lynch mob be replaced with juries and the rule of law. This all occurred during a time when the newly minted “great fortunes” brooked no social contract, sought only to degrade labor, and were determined to meet popular discontent with the rope and the gun where the courts or the stuffed ballot box wouldn’t suffice.

The defeat of Reconstruction was the precondition for the ascension of U.S. imperialism. The relevant democratic Reconstruction legislation was seen by elites as “class legislation” and as antithetical to the elites’ needs. The proletarian base of Reconstruction made it into a dangerous potential base for communism, especially as ruling-class fears flared in the wake of the Paris Commune, where the workers of Paris briefly seized power in 1871. The distinguished service of Blacks at all levels of government undermined the gradations of bigotry essential to class construction in the United States.

Reconstruction thus lays bare the relationship between Black freedom and revolution. It helps us situate the particular relationship between national oppression and class struggle that is the key to any real revolutionary strategy for change today.

The new world

Like the Paris Commune, the People’s Republic of China, the Soviet Union, Vietnam and Mozambique, the Reconstruction governments were confronted by the scars of brutal war and long-standing legacies of underdevelopment. They faced tremendous hostility from the local ruling elites and the remnants of their formerly total rule, and were without powerful or terribly well-organized allies outside of the South.

With the status quo shattered, Reconstruction could only proceed in a dramatically altered social environment. Plantation rule had been parochial, with power concentrated in the localized despotisms of the forced labor camps, with generalized low taxes, poor schools, and primitive social provisions.

Reconstruction answered:

“Public schools, hospitals, penitentiaries, and asylum for orphans and the insane were established for the first time or received increased funding. South Carolina funded medical care for poor citizens, and Alabama provided free legal counsel for indigent defendants. The law altered relations within the family, widening the grounds for divorce, expanding the property rights for married women, protecting minors from parental abuse… Nashville expanded its medical facilities and provided bread, soup, and firewood to the poor. Petersburg created a thriving school system, regulated hack rates, repaved the streets, and established a Board of Health that provided free medical care in the smallpox epidemic of 1873” [4].

And further:

“Throughout Reconstruction, planters complained it was impossible to obtain convictions in cases of theft and that in contract disputes, ‘justice is generally administered solely in the interest of the laborer…’ Equally significant was the regularity with which lawmakers turned down proposals to reinforce labor discipline” [5].

South Carolina disallowed garnishing wages to settle debts, Florida regulated the payment of farm hands, and the Mississippi legislature instructed local officials to construe the law “for the protection and encouragement of labor.” All across the South, former slaves assessed the taxable property of their former owners; state after state protected the upcountry farmer from debt, exempting his tools, personal property, and horse and plow from the usurers. In Alabama, personal property tools and livestock were exempt and a Republican newspaper declared that “a man who has nothing should pay no tax” [6].

The school-building push resulted in a serious expansion of public education:

“A Northern correspondent in 1873 found adults as well as children crowding Vicksburg schools and reported that “female negro servants make it a condition before accepting a situation, that they should have permission to attend the night-schools.” Whites, too, increasingly took advantage of the new educational opportunities. Texas had 1,500 schools by 1872 with a majority of the state’s children attending classes. In Mississippi, Florida, and South Carolina, enrollment grew steadily until by 1875 it accounted for about half the children of both races” [7].

Georgia, which had no public school system at all before the war, had 1,735 schools by 1874. The first public school law in Georgia was passed on the 100-year anniversary, to the day, of Georgia’s slave-era law making it a crime to teach Blacks to read and write [8]. In South Carolina, in 1868, 30,000 students attended four hundred schools. By 1876, 123,035 were attending 2,776 schools, one-third of all teachers were Black [9].

The source of this social vision was the most solid base of Reconstruction: the Black workers, farmers, and farmhands. Within the Black population there grew a few men of wealth and the pre-war “free” population provided notable and standout leaders. However, at the end of the day, Black was essentially synonymous with “proletarian.”

Black political power made itself felt all over the South in perhaps the most profound cultural turnaround in U.S. history. Blacks—who just a few years previously had, in the words of the Supreme Court, “no rights” that a white man “was bound to respect”—now not only had rights, but exercised power, literally and metaphorically, over their former masters.

The loss of a monopoly on the positions of power vested in either local government or local appointments to state and federal positions was deeply intolerable to elite opinion, alarming them “even more than their loss of statewide control” [11]. In 1900, looking back, a North Carolina Congressman, highlighted Black participation in local government as the “worst feature” of Reconstruction, because Blacks “filled the offices which the best men of the state had filled. He was sheriff, deputy sheriff, justice of the peace…constable, county commissioner” [12]. One Charlestonian admirer of the old regime expressed horror in a letter: “Surely our humiliation has been great when a Black Postmaster is established here at Headquarters and our Gentlemen’s Sons to work under his bidding” [13].

This power was exercised over land sales, foreclosures, tax rates, and all civil and minor criminal cases all across the Black Belt. In Mississippi, former slaves had taken control of the Board of Supervisors across the Black Belt and one-third of the Black population lived under the rule of a Black sheriff.

In Beaufort, South Carolina, a center of the Plantation aristocracy, the mayor, police force, and magistrates were all Black by 1873. Bolivar County Mississippi and St. John the Baptist Parish in Louisiana were under total Black control, and Little Rock’s City Council had an on and off Black majority [14].

Vicksburg and New Orleans gave Black officers command of white policemen while Tallahassee and Little Rock had Black police chiefs. Sixty Blacks across the South served as militia officers as well. Integrated juries also appeared across the South; one white lawyer said it was the “severest blow” he had ever felt to have to address Blacks as “gentlemen of the jury” [15].

In South Carolina, Blacks had a majority of the House of Representatives and controlled its key committees. There was a Black majority in the Senate, the Lt. Governor and Secretary of State were Black throughout Reconstruction, and Blacks served as Land Commissioner, on the Supreme Court, and as Treasurer and Speaker of the House [16]. Scottish journalist Robert Somers said the South Carolina statehouse was “a Proletarian Parliament the like of which could not be produced under the widest suffrage in any part of the world” [17].

In Mississippi, throughout Reconstruction about 20% of the State Senate was Black as were 35% of the State House of Representatives [18]. Two Black men served as Speaker of the House, including Isaac Shadd, a militant abolitionist who helped plan John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. Mississippi sent two men to the U.S. Senate, the only Blacks to serve during Reconstruction in that body. Sixteen Blacks from the South served in the U.S. Congress.

In Louisiana, a Black man was the governor for a brief period and the treasurer and the secretary of education for a much longer time. Florida’s superintendent of education was also Black, along with the Secretary of State.

One Northern observer touring South Carolina summed up the general upending of the social order noting there was “an air of mastery among the colored people.” They further noted that whites were “wholly reserved and reticent” [19].

The source of Black power in the South was not simply the passive presence of large Black populations, but their active political organization and mobilization. This took place in a variety of overlapping venues such as the grassroots Republican “Union Leagues,” churches, and masonic networks. Newspapers often served as points of political education and influence as well.

“By the end of 1867, it seemed, virtually every black voter in the South had enrolled in the Union League or some equivalent local political organization…informal self-defense organizations sprang up around the leagues, and reports of blacks drilling with weapons, sometimes under men with self-appointed ‘military titles.’ The local leagues’ multifaceted activities, however, far transcended electoral politics. Often growing out of the institutions blacks had created in 1865 and 1866, they promoted the building of schools and churches and collected funds ‘to see to the sick.’ League members drafted petitions protesting the exclusion of blacks from local juries” [20].

In St. Landry Parish in Louisiana, hundreds of former slaves gathered once a week to hear the newspaper read aloud to get informed on the various political issues of the day. In Georgia, it was said that every American Methodist Episcopal (a predominantly Black denomination) Minister was active in Republican organizing (Hiram Revels, Black Senator from Mississippi was an AME minister). Holland Thompson, a Black power-broker in Montgomery, Alabama, used a political base in the Baptist church as a route to the City Council, where he shepherded into being that city’s first public school system [21].

All across the South, it was common during Reconstruction for politics to disrupt labor flows. One August in Richmond, Virginia, all of the city’s tobacco factories were closed because so many people in the majority-Black workforce were attending a Republican state convention [22].

Blanche K. Bruce’s political career, which would lead to the U.S. Senate, started when he became actively engaged in local Republican political meetings in Mississippi. Ditto for John Lynch, one of the most powerful Black politicians of the Reconstruction era. The New Orleans Tribune was at the center of a radical political movement within the Republican Party that nearly took the governor’s office with a program of radical land reform in 1868.

Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina all had “labor conventions”—in 1870 and 1871—where farm workers and artisans came together to press for regulating rents and raising minimum wages, among other issues. Union Leagues were often sites of the organization of strikes and other labor activity.

One white Alabamian noted that, “It is the hardest thing in the world to keep a negro away from the polls…that is the one thing he will do, to vote.” A Mississippi plantation manager related that in his part of the state Blacks were “all crazy on politics again…Every tenth negro a candidate for some office.” A report from the 1868 elections in Alabama noted the huge Black turnout: “In defiance of fatigue, hardship, hunger, and threats of employers.” They stood in the midst of a raging storm, most without shoes, for hours to vote [23].

Republican politics in the South were viable only due to these Black power bases. The composition of these politics required the rudiments of a popular program and a clear commitment to Black political power, and thus a degree of civil equality and a clear expansion of social equality as well. Reconstruction politics disrupted the ability of the ruling classes to exercise social control over the broad mass of poor laborers and farmers.

Republican politics was a living and fighting refutation of white supremacy, in addition to allowing the working classes access to positions of formal power. However outwardly accommodating to capital, the Reconstruction governments represented an impediment to capital’s unfettered rule in the South and North.

The political economy of Reconstruction

In addition to economic devastation, Reconstruction governments faced the same challenges as any new revolutionary regime in that they were beset on all sides by enemies. First and foremost, the Old Southern aristocratic elite semi-boycotted politics, organized a campaign of vicious terrorism, and used their economic influence in the most malign of ways. Secondly, the ravages of war and political turmoil caused Wall Street, the city of London, and Paris Bourse to turn sour on democracy in the South. On top of that, increasingly influential factions of the Republican Party came to agree that reconstructing the South was shackling the party with a corrupt, radical agenda hostile to prosperity.

The Republican coalition rested on a very thin base. While they had the ironclad support of Black voters, only in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi did Blacks constitute a majority, and even there, Republicans needed some white support to firmly grasp electoral power.

Most of the white Republican leaders were Northerners, with an overrepresentation of Union army veterans seeking economic opportunity after the war. Most entered politics to aid their own economic interests. These would-be capitalists, lacking the economic resources and social connections, sought a political tie and the patronage that came with it, which could become the basis for fortunes. This created a pull towards moderation on a number of economic and social issues that seeded the ground for Reconstruction’s ultimate defeat.

The Reconstruction governments had one major problem: revenue. Republican leader John Lynch stated as much about the finances of the state of Mississippi: “money was required. There was none in the treasury. There was no cash available even to pay the ordinary expenses of the State government” [24]. Reconstruction governments sought to address this issue with taxes, bonds, and capitalist boosterism.

Early Reconstruction governments all operated under the belief that, with the right accommodation, they could revive and expand commerce. In particular, the railroad could open the upcountry to the market and encourage the expansion of various forms of manufacture and mineral extraction. A rising tide would lift all boats, and private capital would provide the investment and employment necessary for the South to prosper. And as such, they showered favors on the railroads in particular:

“Every Southern state extended munificent aid to railroad corporations… either in… direct payments… or in the form of general laws authorizing the states endorsement of railroads bonds… County and local governments subscribed directly to railroad stock… from Mobile, which spent $1 million, to tiny Spartanburg, South Carolina, which appropriated $50,000. Republican legislators also chartered scores of banks and manufacturing companies” [25].

In 1871, Mississippi gave away 2 million acres of land to one railway company [26]. The year before, Florida chartered the Great Southern Railway Co., using $10 million in public money to get it off the ground [27]. State incorporation laws appeared in Southern legal codes for the first time, and governments freely used eminent domain. Their behavior, in the words of one historian, “recapitulated the way Northern law had earlier been transformed to facilitate capitalist development” [28].

Many states also passed a range of laws designed to exempt various business enterprises from taxation to further encourage investment. That investment never showed up, to the degree required at least. Diarist George Templeton Strong noted that the South was “the last place” a “Northern or European capitalist would invest a dollar” due to “social discord” [29].

As investments went, the South seemed less sure than other American opportunities. There were lucrative investment opportunities in the North and West as the Civil War had sparked a massive industrial boom, creating the careers of robber barons like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.

The South was scarred by war, generally underdeveloped, and politically unstable from the fierce resistance of white supremacy to the rise of Black power. Major financiers were willing to fund cotton production—which was more of a sure thing—and a handful of new industries, but generally felt the South wasn’t much worth the risk. Southern state bonds thus traded at lower values than Northern or Western states, and given the South’s dire economic straits, their supply far outstripped demand for them on the market.

This meant that these investments attracted those “trained in shady finance in Wall St.” whose “business was cheating and manipulation,” and who were “in some cases already discredited in the centers of finance and driven out…of the North and West” [30].

The old ruling classes grafted themselves onto the new enterprises, using their history and connections to become the board members and agents of many of the companies. Among other things, this meant the new enterprises were controlled by Democrats, who, while happy to exploit the Reconstruction governments, were doing all they could to undermine them and restore themselves to political power.

The old plantation owners were joined in the new ruling class matrix by the merchants and bankers who arose alongside the expansion of the railroad and of the commercial farming economy outside of the Black Belt.

This new “Bourbon” aristocracy quickly emerged as the main interlocutor with whatever outside investment there was. Economic uncertainty only increased after the Panic of 1873 sent the country into a depression. This made the South an even less attractive investment to outsiders and increased the power and leverage of the Democratic elite, who desired a quick return to total white supremacy and Black subordination.

Republican governments, then, had a choice: they could either turn towards this business class and try to strike an understanding around a vision of the “Gospel of Prosperity,” with some limited Black suffrage, and thus, expanded social rights for the laboring class, or they could base themselves more thoroughly on those same laboring classes, particularly in the Black Belt.

The political power of the elite still rested primarily on their monopoly of landownership and thus effective control over the most profitable industries. Land reform, breaking up the big plantations, and granting the freedman access to tracts of land would fatally undermine that control. It was a shift that would have curtailed the ability of planters to exercise economic coercion over their former slaves in the political realm and would have inserted the freedman more directly into the global economy, thereby marginalizing former planters’ roles as intermediaries with the banks, merchants, and traders. Among other things, this would strengthen Republican rule, crippling the economic and social power most behind their opposition.

Land, was, of course, the key demand of those emerging from slavery. Aaron Bradley, an important Black leader in Savannah, Georgia became known for holding “massive…public meetings” that were described by one scholar as “frequent gatherings of armed rural laborers,” where the issue of land ownership was front and center [31]. “Deafening cheers” were heard at a mass meeting in Edgefield County, South Carolina, when a Republican orator laid out a vision where every attendee would acquire a parcel of land [32]. In the words of Du Bois, “this land hunger…was continually pushed by all emancipated Negroes and their representatives in every southern state” [33].

Despite that, only in South Carolina was land reform taken up in any substantial way. There, under the able leadership of Secretary of State Francis Cardozo, 14,000 Black families, or one-seventh of the Black population, were able to acquire land in just the four years between 1872 and 1876 [34].

Elsewhere, states eschewed direct financial aid to the freedman in acquiring land and mostly turned to taxation as an indirect method of finance. Cash-strapped planters, unable to make tax payments, would be forced to forfeit their land that would be sold at tax sales where they could be bought by Blacks. Of course, without state aid, most freed people had little access to the necessary capital. In Mississippi, one-fifth of the land in the state was forfeited through tax sales, but ultimately, 95% of that land would end up back with its previous owners [35].

Through hard struggle, individuals and small groups of Blacks did make limited footholds into land ownership. In Virginia, Blacks acquired 81-100 thousand acres of land in the 1860s and 70s. In Arkansas in 1875 there were 2,000 Black landowners. By that same year, Blacks in Georgia had obtained 396,658 plots of land worth the equivalent of over $30 million today [36]. Ultimately, however, most Blacks were consigned to roles as tenant farmers, farm laborers, or town and city workers. This placed the main base of the Reconstruction governments in a precarious position in which they were susceptible to economic coercion on top of extra-legal terrorism by their political enemies.

The chief advocates of the showering of state aid and the eschewing of land reform was the “moderate” faction of Republicans who tended to gain the upper-hand in the higher and more powerful offices. The fruits of these policies, however, sparked significant struggle over the direction of the Republican cause.

In Louisiana, in the lead-up to the 1868 elections, the Pure Radicals, a grouping centered on the New Orleans Tribune—the first Black daily newspaper—nearly seized the nomination for the governor’s chair on a platform laden with radical content. Their program was for an agriculture composed of large cooperatives; “the planters are no longer needed,” said the Tribune. The paper also editorialized that “we cannot expect complete and perfect freedom for the working men, as long as they remain the tools of capital and are deprived of the legitimate product of the sweat of their brow” [37].

As mentioned, several states had “labor conventions.” The South Carolina convention passed resolutions endorsing a nine-hour day and proportional representation for workers on juries, among other things. The Alabama and Georgia conventions established labor unions, which embraced union league organizers across both states, and engaged in a sporadic series of agricultural labor strikes. Ultimately, most of these resolutions would never pass the state legislature.

Nonetheless, they certainly give a sense of the radicalism in the Republican base. This is further indicated by Aaron Logan, a member of the South Carolina House, and a former slave, who in 1871 introduced a bill that would regulate profits and allow workers to vote on what wages their bosses would pay them. The bill was too controversial to even make it to a vote. But, again, it’s deeply indicative of the mood among Black voters since Logan represented the commercial center of Charleston. Logan, it should also be noted, came on the scene politically when he led a mass demonstration of 1,000 Black workers, demanding the right to take time off from work to vote, without a deduction in wages, and he ended up briefly imprisoned at this action after arguing for Black gun ownership [38].

On the one hand, this resulted in even the more moderate factions of the Republican coalition broadly to support Black officeholding. Additionally, the unlimited largess being showered on corporations was curtailed by 1871.

On the other hand, the Reconstruction governments were now something of a halfway house, with their leaders more politically conservative and conciliationist than their base. They pledged to expand state services and to protect many profitable industries from taxes. They were vigilant in protecting the farmer’s axe and sow while letting the usurer establish debt claims on his whole crop. They catered to—but didn’t really represent—the basic, and antagonistic, interests in Southern society. And it was on this basis that the propertied classes would launch their counter-offensive.

Counter-revolution and property

The Civil War had introduced powerful new forces into the land:

“After the war, industry in the North found itself with a vast organization for production, new supplies of raw material, a growing transportation system on land and water, and a new technical knowledge of processes. All this…tremendously stimulated the production of good and available services…an almost unprecedented scramble for this new power, new wealth, and new income ensued…It threatened the orderly processes of production as well as government and morals…governments…paid…the cost of the railroads and handed them over to…corporations for their own profit. An empire of rich land…had been…given to investors and land speculators. All of the…coal, oil, copper, gold and iron had been given away…made the monopolized basis of private fortunes with perpetual power to tax labor for the right to live and work” [39].

One major result was the creation of vast political machines that ran into the thousands of employees through patronage posts that had grown in size as the range of government responsibilities and regulations grew along with the economy. It created a large grey area between corruption and extortion. The buying of services, contracts, and so on was routine, as was the exploitation of government offices to compel the wealthy to come forth with bribes.

This started to create something of a backlash among the more well-to-do in the Republican coalition. Many of the significantly larger new “middle classes” operating in the “professions” began to feel that the government was ignoring the new “financial sciences” that prescribed free trade, the gold standard, and limited government. They argued that the country was being poorly run because of the political baronies created through patronage, which caused politicians to cater to the whims of the propertyless. These “liberals,” as they became known in Republican circles, increasingly favored legislation that would limit the franchise to those of “property and education” and that would limit the role of government in the affairs of businesses or the rights of workers.

This, of course, was in line with the influence of the rising manufacturing capitalists in the Republican Party, and became a point of convergence between “moderate” Republicans and Democrats. That the Democratic Party was part of this convergence was ironic as it postured as the party of white workers, although in reality they were just as controlled by the wealthy interests, particularly on Wall Street, as their opponents.

Reconstruction in general, and in South Carolina in particular, became central to the propaganda of all three elements. The base of Reconstruction was clearly the Black poor and laboring masses of the South, who voted overwhelmingly for Grant and whose governments were caricatured as hopelessly corrupt. On top of all that, they were willing to raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for public goods for everyone else.

It made the Reconstruction governments the perfect scapegoats for those looking to restrict the ballot of the popular classes in the service of the rights of property. Taxes, corruption, and racism were intertwined in a powerful campaign by the wealthy—in the clothing of the Democratic Party—to dislodge Republican rule.

Increases in taxation were as practical as they were ideological. The Reconstruction states had only debts and no cash. In order to attract more investment, early Republican governments didn’t dare repudiate the debt racked up by the rebels. The failure to ignite an economic boom and the lackluster demand for Southern bonds left increasing taxes as the only realistic means to increase revenue to cover an expanded role for public services.

The antebellum tax system had been very easy on the planters. Republicans relied on general property taxes that were increased more or less across the board. In particular, the wealthiest found their wealth—in land, stocks, and bonds—taxed, often for the first time. Their wealth was certainly taxed for the first time at their real value, since planters lost the power to assess their own property.

The planters, the bankers, and the merchants, or the “men of wealth, virtue and intelligence” in their own minds, organized a vicious propaganda war against higher taxes. They went so far as to organize conventions in the mid-1870s to plead their weak case. South Carolina’s convention, which included 11 Confederate Generals, put the blame for the tax “burden” squarely on the fact that “nine-tenths of the members of the legislature own no property” [40].

Their critique wasn’t just over tax rates, but what they were being spent on. They depicted the Reconstruction governments as corrupt and spendthrift. These were governments run foolishly by inferior races, which were, in their world, dangerous because they legislated for the common man.

They also linked Reconstruction to communism. In the wake of the war, working-class organization intensified. Only three national unions existed at the end of the war, while five years later there were 21. Strikes became a regular feature of life [41]. Their regularity was such that the influential magazine Scribner’s Monthly lamented that labor had come under the sway of the “senseless cry against the despotism of capital” [42]. In New Orleans, the white elite feared Louisiana’s Constitutional Convention in 1867 was likely to be dominated by a policy of “pure agrarianism,” that is, attacks on property [43].

The unease of the leading classes with the radical agitation among the newly organized laborers and the radical wing of the Reconstruction coalitions was only heightened by the Paris Commune in 1871. For a brief moment, the working people of Paris grasped the future and established their own rule, displacing the propertied classes. It was an act that scandalized ruling classes around the world and, in the U.S., raised fears of the downtrodden seizing power.

The Great Chicago Fire was held out to be a plot by workers to burn down cities. The Philadelphia Inquirer warned its readers to fear the communist First International, which was planning a war on America’s landed aristocracy. Horace White, editor of the Chicago Tribune, who’d traveled with Lincoln during his infamous debates with Douglas, denounced labor organizations as waging a “communistic war upon vested rights and property.” The Nation explicitly linked the northern labor radicals with the Southern freedman representing a dangerous new “proletariat” [44].

August Belmont, Chairman of the Democratic National Convention, and agent for the Rothschild banking empire, remarked in a letter that Republicans were making political hay out of Democratic appeals to workers, accusing them of harboring “revolutionary intentions” [45].

The liberal Republicans opened up a particular front against the Reconstruction governments, with a massively disorienting effect on Republican politics nationwide. Among the ranks of the liberals were many who had been made famous by their anti-slavery zeal, including Horace Greeley and his southern correspondent, former radical Republican James Pike. The duo turned the New York Tribune from a center of radicalism into a sewer of elitist racism. They derided Blacks as lazy, ignorant, and corrupt, describing South Carolina as being victimized by “disaffected workers, who believed in class conflict” [46]. Reporting on the South Carolina taxpayer convention, Greeley told his audience that the planters were menaced by taxes “by the ignorant class, which only yesterday hoed the fields and served in the kitchen” [47].

Greeley also served as a cipher for Confederate Secretary of State Robert Toombs, who observed that “reading and writing did not fit a man for voting. The Paris mob were intelligent, but they were the most dangerous class in the world.” He stated further that the real possibility of poor whites and Blacks uniting was his real fear in that they would “attack the interests of the landed proprietors” [48].

The liberal Republicans were unable to capture the zeitgeist in the 1872 election. Former Union General and incumbent President Ulysses S. Grant and his campaign managers positioned their campaign as the true campaign of the working man. Nominating Henry Wilson, “The Shoemaker of Natick,” former indentured servant, and “friend of labor and the Negro,” as Vice-President. They famously waved the “bloody shirt,” reminding Northern workers and farmers what they had fought for and linking their opponents to a return of the Slave Power.

However, their challenge scrambled Republican politics and Grant quickly sought to conciliate his opponents by backing away from enforcing the rights of the freedman with force and doling out patronage and pardons to all manner of rebels, traitors, and terrorists. In 1874, Democrats swept the midterm elections, further entrenching the consolidation of the political power of capital. So emboldened, the 1875 elections devolved into an orgy of violence and fraud. Black Republican leader John Lynch noted that “Nearly all Democratic clubs in the State were converted into armed military companies” [49].

In Yazoo County, Mississippi, a Republican meeting was broken up by armed whites who killed a state legislator. In Clinton, Mississippi, 30 Black people were murdered when bands of white vigilantes roamed the countryside [50]. As one historian details:

“What we have to deal with here is not a local or episodic movement but a South-wide revolution against duly constitute state governments…the old planters as well as the rising class of bankers, merchants, and lawyers…decided to use any and every means…they drew up coordinated plans and designated targets and objectives. Funds for guns and cannons were solicited from leading planters” [51].

That same historian estimates that “thousands” were killed in this brutal campaign [52].

John Lynch, the Black Republican leader from Mississippi, related that, when he asked President Grant in the winter of 1875 why he had not sent more assistance to loyal Republicans besieged by terrorists in Mississippi, Grant replied that to have done so would have guaranteed a Republican loss in Ohio. This is as clear a sign as any of the shifting sands of Republican politics.

Black Power in the South had become an obstacle to the elites in both parties. It was the only area of the country where the “free ballot” was bound to lead workers holding some of the levers of power. Black suffrage meant a bloc in Congress in favor of placing social obligations on capital, a curtailment of white supremacy, and bitter opposition to property qualifications in voting. The very fact that opposition to Reconstruction was cast in “class” terms, against the political program of the freedman as much as the freedman themselves, speaks to these fears.

A solid (or even not so solid) Republican South was an ally to political forces aggrieved by the “despotism of capital” around the country. A solid white supremacist South was (and is) a bastion for the most reactionary policies and allies of policies of untrammeled profit making, which is, as we have shown, the direction in which the ruling classes were traveling. Thus, Reconstruction had to die.

The final charge

“It was not until after…that white labor in the South began to realize that they had lost a great opportunity, that when they united to disenfranchise the Black laborer they had cut the voting power of the laboring class in two. White labor in the populist movement…tried to realign economic warfare in the South and bring workers of all colors into united opposition to the employer. But they found that the power which they had put in the hands of the employers in 1876 so dominated political life that free and honest expression of public will at the ballot-box was impossible in the South, even for white men. They realized it was not simply the Negro who had been disenfranchised…it was the white laborer as well. The South had since become one of the greatest centers for labor exploitation in the world” [53].

-W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America

While Reconstruction was destroyed in the service of the ruling classes, its defeat could not have taken place without the acquiescence and assistance of the popular classes among the white population as well. In the South, in particular, the role of the “upcountry small farmer” was essential.

During the war, these yeomen farmers had coined the phrase “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.” At first, there was some fear, and some electoral evidence, that poor whites and the newly freed slaves might make an alliance of sorts. Instead, the rift between them widened. The hierarchy constructed of white supremacy relied on inculcating racial superiority in many ways, one of them being the idea of “independence” that made white small farmers “superior” to slaves. They were poor, but at least they were masters of their own patch of land.

The coming of the railroad changed all of this drastically. The railroad opened up the upcountry to the world economy. While it initially seemed like an opportunity, it was, in fact, a curse. Many small farmers dove into cotton production, the one thing financiers were eager to fund. They quickly found, however, that the cost of transporting and marketing their goods, in addition to the costs of inputs from merchants, made success very difficult, and made it almost certain they would have to resort to credit. The rates of usury were, however, allowed to go high enough that a majority of these small farmers became trapped in webs of debt.

The only way to keep going was to offer one’s crop as security for loans, ahead of time—the so-called “crop-lien.” From masters of their own realm, these farmers had now become slaves to debt, losing all real control of their destiny and farming to avoid eviction rather than to make any money.

This reality increased resentment at Reconstruction governments, and, given their dire financial situation, created another base of support for those trying to make an issue out of higher taxes. This ultimately helped solidify white opposition to Republican rule behind the planters and their Democratic Party.

As the 1870s turned into the 1880s, this consensus started to crack. The depression unleashed in the Panic of 1873 led to a breakdown of the two-party system as the two parties consolidated their views on how to move the country forward at the expense of workers and farmers. A variety of movements started to emerge, particularly strong in the West, opposing various aspects of the new consensus.

In the 1880s, the movement started to strengthen itself through a series of “Farmers Alliances” that spread like wildfire across the country. The alliances not only advocated and agitated for things like railroad regulation and more equitable farming arrangements, but also organized their own cooperatives and attempts to break free of the unjust state of affairs to which they were subject. The alliances were also major sites of political education where newspapers and meetings helped define and disseminate the economic realities of capitalism and exactly why these farmers were facing so much exploitation.

A Black alliance, the Colored Farmers Alliance, also grew rapidly, ultimately embracing millions of Black farmers. Black farmers, likewise, were getting the short-end of the stick in terms of the results of Reconstruction-era land policies. Despite being shut out of land ownership, Black farmers were highly resistant to returning to the plantations as farm laborers. This led to a rise in tenancy where Black farmers rented the land and took on the production of the crops for a share of the crop that they could sell, or what is called “sharecropping.”

Similar to white farmers in the upcountry, however, this system turned viciously against them. The costs of credit to carry out various farming activities or to cover the cost of goods in the offseason meant that they too, quickly and easily became ensnared by debt. This started to create intriguing political opportunities in the South. Disaffected white farmers started to become interested in the third-party movements representing popular discontent, particularly the Greenback-Labor Party.

The Greenbackers embraced much of the agrarian reform ideas favored by farmers, and added in support for an income tax, the free ballot, and the eight-hour day for workers. In Mississippi, Texas, and Alabama, the Greenback movement found some shallow roots with white farmers who, recognizing the political situation, understood their only possible ally could be Blacks.

Black politics, while in retreat, had not disappeared. The Colored Farmers Alliance was rooted in the same networks of religion, fraternal organization, and grassroots Republican political mobilization that had formed during Reconstruction. It was thus more politically inclined than the Southern Farmers Alliance of whites, which remained tied to the Democratic Party and its white supremacist policies.

Nonetheless, a growing number of Blacks seeking political opportunity sought to embrace the Greenback movement through a process known as “fusion.” This meant Republicans running joint candidates or slates with third parties in order to maximize their voting power and take down the Democrats. This led to somewhat of a “second act” of Reconstruction. The Colored Farmers Alliance played a key role in the early 1890s in pushing the alliances to launch the Populist Party, turning the incipient potential of the Greenback Party into a serious political insurgency, but one which couldn’t be truly national without a Southern component. Populism united the agrarian unrest of the West and South against the “money power” of the Wall Street banks.

Populists championed public ownership of the largest corporations of the time—the railroads—as well as the communications apparatus of the country. In addition, they advocated an agricultural plan known as the “sub-treasury system” to replace the big banks in providing credit to the farmers as well as empowering cooperatives rather than private corporations to store and market goods. All of these were ingredients to break small farmers out of a cycle of debt.

They also advocated for a shorter working day and a graduated income tax and sought to link together the demands of urban workers and those living in rural areas, saying in their preamble: “Wealth belongs to him who creates it, and every dollar taken from industry without an equivalent is robbery. ”If any will not work, neither shall he eat.” The interests of rural and civil labor are the same; their enemies are identical” [54]. This turned the People’s Party into a real challenge to the ruling class on a national scale, one particularly potent in Georgia, North Carolina, and Alabama on the Southern front:

“The People’s (Populist) Party presidential candidate James B. Weaver received over one million votes in 1892 (approximately nine percent of the vote), winning 22 electoral votes (albeit, mostly in the West); in North Carolina, a Populist-Republican alliance took over the state legislature in 1894; Populists and their allies sat in Congress, governor’s offices, and held dozens of local offices over the next two years; and scores of Black and white People’s Party chapters had been established across the region” [55].

This success would evoke a wave of terrorist violence against Populists and the Black community writ large that rivaled Reconstruction times and that, in terms of outright election fraud, exceeded it, which can be viewed clearly through the example of North Carolina, and Wilmington, in particular.

The 1892 election, the first time out for the Populists, opened up a new lane of cooperation. White Populists openly appealed for Black votes. “In addition to voting the ticket, blacks sometimes…took roles in county organizations and in mobilizing black voters. Some counties [even] placed blacks on ballots, and blacks were present at Populist rallies and in local Populist nominating conventions” [56]. In Raleigh, Blacks campaigned on horseback and on mule with the Presidential candidate James Weaver as well [57]. The results reflected the campaign: “African Americans voted “en masse” for the People’s Party in 1892 in the first and second districts of the eastern part of the state, where the majority of black counties were. Black voters in both Hyde and Wilson counties, for instance, gave near unanimous support to the third party ticket” [58].

Over the next two years Populists, Black and white, worked with Republicans, Black and white, to hammer out a fusion agreement for the 1894 state elections. This was despite fairly significant differences, such as the rise of Black populism, for instance, which heralded a rise in class differences within the Black community. Nonetheless, they found common ground and swept the elections:

“Among other changes, the elected Republican-Populist majority revised and simplified election laws, making it easier for African Americans to vote; they restored the popular election of state and county officials, dismantling the appointive system used by Democrats to keep black candidates out of office; and the fusion coalition also reversed discriminatory “stock laws” (that required fencing off land) that made it harder for small farmers to compete against large landowners. The reform of election and county government laws, in particular, undermined planter authority and limited their control of the predominantly black eastern counties” [59].

The Fusion coalition also championed issues like “public funding for education, legislation banning the convict-lease system, the criminalization of lynching” [60]. The Fusion government also restricted interest rates to address the massive debts being incurred by farmers and sharecroppers. Most notably, the Fusion governments stood up to the powerful railroad interests and their Northern backers like JP Morgan.

The port city of Wilmington was an important Republican stronghold and had to be neutralized for Democrats to break through the Fusion hold on the state. In 1897, Democrats started a vicious campaign of white supremacy, forming clubs and militias that would become known as “Red Shirts,” along with a media offensive.

As the Charlotte Observer would later state, it was the “bank men, the mill men, and businessmen in general,” who were behind this campaign [61]. One major theme of the campaign was a particular focus on Black men supposedly “preying” on white women and girls. Physical violence and armed intimidation were used to discourage Blacks or Republicans and Populists of any color from voting.

As the election drew closer, Democrats made tens of thousands of copies of an editorial by Alex Manley, the Black editor of the Daily Record newspaper. Manley, an important civic leader in Wilmington had written the editorial in response to calls for increased lynchings against Blacks to stop interracial relationships. Manley argued that white women who sought out relations with Black men often used rape allegations to cover their tracks or end a dalliance.

While undoubtedly true, it raised the ire of white supremacists to the highest of pitches. On election day, most Blacks and Republicans chose not to vote as Red Shirt mobs were roaming the streets and had established checkpoints all over the city. Unsurprisingly, the Democrats won.

Unwilling to wait until their term of office began, some of the newly elected white officials and businesspeople decided to mount a coup and force out Black lawmakers right then and there. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of whites, marauded through the streets, attacking Black businesses and property and killing more than 300 Black people in the process. They forced the Republican mayor, along with all city commissioners, to resign at gunpoint. They banished them from the city, leading them in front of a mob that assaulted them before putting them on a train out of town. At least 2,000 Black residents fled, leaving most of what they owned behind.

The Wilmington massacre destroyed the Fusion coalition. All over the state, fraud and violence had been used against the Fusionists to no avail, but, as evidenced by the example of Wilmington, there was little chance of rebuilding ties of solidarity.

The same can be said for the populist period more generally. While Populists certainly have a mixed record, at best, when it came to racism in the general sense, it’s undeniable that the Populist upsurge opened up new political space for Blacks that had been shut-off by the two major parties. Further, it did so in a manner that was ideological much more commensurate with the unrealized desires of Republican rule.

So, in North Carolina and all across the South, Populists were crushed in an orgy of violence and fraud. Racism was a powerful motivating factor in Southern politics across this entire period. This racism, however, did not stop large numbers of whites from entering into a political alliance with Blacks. The anti-Populist violence has to be seen in this context as a counterweight against the pull of self-interest in the economic field.

Toward a third Reconstruction

Reconstruction looms large in our current landscape because so much of its promise remains unrealized. The Second Reconstruction, better known as “the sixties,” took the country some of the way there, particularly concerning civil equality. It reaffirmed an agenda of placing social claims on capital. It also, however, revealed the limits of the capitalist system, showing how easily the most basic reforms can be rolled back. This was a lesson also taught by the first Reconstruction.

The history of Reconstruction also helps us to understand the centrality of Black Liberation to social revolution. The dispossession of Blacks from social and civic life was not just ideologically but politically foundational to capitalism in the U.S. The Solid South, dependent on racism, has played and continues to play a crucial role as a conservative influence bloc in favor of capital.

Reconstruction also gives us insight into the related issue of why Black political mobilization, even in fairly mundane forms, is met with such hostility. The very nature of Black oppression has created what is essentially a proletarian nation which denounces racism not in the abstract, but in relation to its actual effects. Unsurprisingly, then, Black Liberation politics has always brought forward a broad social vision to correct policies, not attitudes, which is precisely the danger since these policies are not incidental, but intrinsic, to capitalism.

In sum, Reconstruction points us towards an understanding that “freedom” and “liberation” are bound up with addressing the limitations that profit over people puts on any definition of those concepts. It helps us understand the central role of “white solidarity” in promoting capitalist class power. Neither racism nor capitalism can be overcome without a revolutionary struggle that presents a socialist framework.

References

[1] Du Bois, W.E.B. (1935/1999).Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880(New York: Simon & Schuster), 325.
[2] Marx, Karl. (1865). “Address of the International Working Men’s Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America,” Marxists.org, January 28. Availablehere.
[3] Bennett, Jr Lerone. (1969). Black Power U.S.A.: The human side of Reconstruction 1867-1877(New York: Pelican), 148.
[4] Foner, Eric. (1988/2011).Reconstruction: America’s unfinished revolution, 1863-1877(New York: Perennial), 364-365.
[5] Ibid., 363, 372.
[6] Ibid., 372-375.
[7] Foner,Reconstruction, 366.
[8] Du Bois,Black Reconstruction in America, 651.
[9] Bennett,Black Power U.S.A., 179.
[10] Magnunsson, Martin. (2007). “No rights which the white man is bound to respect”: The Dred Scott decision. American Constitution Society Blogs, March 19. Availablehere.
[11] Foner,Reconstruction, 355.
[12] Rabinowitz, Howard N. (Ed.) (1982).Southern Black leaders of the Reconstruction era(Urbana: University of Illinois Press), 106-107.
[13] Bennett,Black Power U.S.A., 150.
[14] Foner,Reconstruction, 356-357.
[15] Ibid., 362-363.
[16] Facing History and Ourselves. (2022). “The Reconstruction era and the fragility of democracy.” Availablehere.
[17] Bennett,Black Power U.S.A., 183-184.
[18] Du Bois,Black Reconstruction in America, 441.
[19] Bennett,Black Power U.S.A., 160.
[20] Foner,Reconstruction, 283-285.
[21] Ibid., 282-283.
[22] Ibid., 282.
[23] Ibid., 291.
[24] Lynch, John R. (1919).The facts of Reconstruction(New York: The Neale Publishing Company), ch. 4. Availablehere.
[25] Foner,Reconstruction, 380.
[26] Ibid., 382.
[27] Rabinowitz,Southern Black leaders of the Reconstruction Era, 73.
[28] Foner,Reconstruction, 381.
[29] Ibid., 391.
[30] Du Bois,Black Reconstruction in America, 407-408.
[31] Rabinowitz,Southern Black leaders of the Reconstruction era, 291-294.
[32] Foner,Reconstruction, 374.
[33] Du Bois,Black Reconstruction in America, 601.
[34] Foner,Reconstruction, 375.
[35] Ibid., 376.
[36] Du Bois,Black Reconstruction in America, 603.
[37] Bennett,Black Power U.S.A., 247.
[38] Foner,Reconstruction, 377-378.
[39] Du Bois,Black Reconstruction in America, 581.
[40] Foner,Reconstruction, 415-416.
[41] Ibid., 478.
[42] Cox Richardson, Heather. (2001).The death of Reconstruction: Race, labor, and politics in the post-Civil War North, 1865-1901(Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 85.
[43] Foner,Reconstruction, 328.
[44] Cox Richardson,The death of Reconstruction, 86-88; Foner,Reconstruction, 518-519.
[45] Cox Richardson,The death of Reconstruction, 88.
[46] Ibid., 94.
[47] Ibid., 96.
[48] Ibid., 97.
[49] Lynch,The facts of Reconstruction, ch. 8. Availablehere.
[50] Foner,Reconstruction, 558-560.
[51] Bennett,Black Power U.S.A., 330-331.
[52] Ibid.
[53] Du Bois,Black Reconstruction in America, 353.
[54] Populist Party Platform. (1892). Availablehere.
[55] Ali, Omar. (2005). “Independent Black voices from the late 19th century: Black Populists and the struggle against the southern Democracy,”Souls7, no. 2: 4-18.
[56] Ali, Omar. (2010).In the lion’s mouth: Black Populism in the new South, 1886-1900(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi), 136.
[57] Ibid.
[58] Ibid.
[59] Ibid., 140.
[60] Ibid., 141.
[61]The Charlotte Observer.(1898). “Editorial,” November 17.