Thomas Hobbes, the Communist?

By Carlos Garrido

Republished from Midwestern Marx.

The British materialist philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is one of the fathers of social contract theory and modern political philosophy. His magnus opus – Leviathan[i] – is a text which á la Plato’s Republic covers a wide breadth of subjects from epistemology, science, religion, and moral and political philosophy. However, his text is most widely remembered for its monarchism-endorsing political philosophy and its speculative warring state of nature. Nonetheless, there is a contradiction at the heart of Hobbes’ work, between his notorious political thought and his moral philosophy, which is surprisingly egalitarian, collectivist, and progressive (esp. for the 17th century). Before we embark on the examination of this contradiction, let us refresh his position on the ideal political state and the state of nature.

In his political philosophy Hobbes espouses three forms of commonwealth, viz., monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy – each with their respective corrupted forms (tyranny, oligarchy, anarchy) (TH, 143). From these three options (whose minimum threshold is having some form of absolute sovereign power) he considers monarchy the most practical. In his ideal absolute monarchy, the sovereign, instituted by either force (“sovereignty by acquisition”) or choice (“sovereignty by institution”), uses fear – either the fear men have to return to a state of nature, or the fear men have of the sovereign himself – to rule over his subjects. This absolute monarch is paradoxically described as a “mortal god” and analogized to a leviathan – a biblical sea monster which Isaiah 27:1 urges God to slay (TH, 132). With very minor exceptions, Hobbes ideal political state is one in which the autonomy of the subjects is alienated onto the Monarch, making the later a singularity through which the multiplicity of suspended wills expresses itself.

Written during the English civil war, Hobbes’ Leviathan’s state of nature is a projection of the de facto chaotic state of England, where the warring factions of parliamentarian, absolute monarchist, and recently expropriated peasants – led by Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers agrarian socialist movement – battled it out. In this context, Hobbes projects that in the state of nature (who he warns against interpreting as existing generally the same in all places), humanity is in a state of war, “every man, against every man” (TH, 92). This state of nature, we must clarify, is not limited to the condition pre-state primitive societies lived in. Beyond this, Hobbes describes conditions in a civil war (which he was in) and those in international relations between sovereigns as constitutive of a state of nature as well. For Hobbes, this state of nature in “continual fear” provides infertile grounds for industrial and human development, for the security of one’s life is the prime concern (TH, 94). In essence, within the state of nature “the life of man” is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Ibid.). 

Out of his political philosophy and speculation on the state of nature, the latter has remained the most influential in contemporary discourse. I remember the news reports during hurricane Katrina claiming that New Orleans was under a ‘Hobbesian state of nature,’ where rape, lootings, and killings dominated. This, of course, was false. Instead, as was shown in Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell (among many other places), events like Katrina show that in times of adversity, when formal institutions seem to temporarily fall, people generally turn to collectively cooperating for the community. Nonetheless, the narrative that the “general inclination of all mankind” is “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death” remains essential in a system that can survive only insofar as it can “perpetually and restlessly” accumulate capital and reproduce the relations that facilitate this accumulation (TH, 73).

Hobbes’ political philosophy’s emphasis on an absolute sovereign is unacceptable for modern socialists. His anthropology, as constitutive of a portion of his theory on the state of nature, is also a perspective diametric to a Marxist position which shuns from these forms of speculative bourgeois essentialisms. Nonetheless, Hobbes’ laws of nature, the study of which he relegated as “moral philosophy,” retains interesting insights that lend themselves to striking moral criticisms of contemporary neoliberal capitalism (TH, 119).

Although before coming together into a commonwealth, humanity exists in the anxiety of the state of nature, Hobbes nonetheless posits that the laws of nature, centered around preserving life and keeping peace, are “immutable and eternal; for injustice, ingratitude, arrogance, pride, [and] iniquity… can never be made lawful” (TH, 119). Proceeding from the fundamental first law of keeping peace, let us examine a few of the nineteen laws Hobbes lays out for us. It is important to clarify that in our analysis we will be assuming that the modern political scenario is not constitutive of a state of nature, i.e., the grand majority of existing governments are not simply failed, sovereign-less states, most states do have an instituted sovereign power with roles similar to those needed to pass the threshold for Hobbes (even if some might be categorized within the three previously mentioned ‘corrupted forms’). Nonetheless, since for Hobbes, international relations, that is – relations between sovereigns – are constitutive of a state of nature, a loophole for excusing violations of the laws of nature in international relations is present. We will say more on this below.

To begin with – what is a lex naturalis (law of nature)? He says, “a precept or general rule, found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that, which is destructive of his life, or taketh away the means of preserving the same; and to omit that, by which he thinketh it may be best preserved” (TH, 97).

The first and most fundamental law of nature for Hobbes is that one must “seek peace, and follow it,” and if peace cannot be obtained, then one is allowed to defend themselves “by all means” (TH, 98). What greater violation of this law on earth than American imperialism? A system in which the supremacy of capital forces it to go abroad, as Marx said, “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt,”[ii] to continuously plunder foreign lands, is in a direct contradiction with peace. A nation which has been at war 226 out of its 244 years of life does not seem to be too fond of peace. And as to the times when violence, even when we seek peace, is inevitable, does not Hobbes’ proposition remind us of Fanon’s dictum to the colonized, who stuck in a “web of a three-dimensional violence”, are told they must “[end] the colonial regime by any means necessary?”[iii]

A Hobbesian might respond that within international dealings the laws of nature do not apply since international dealings are, for Hobbes, constitutive of a state of nature. Hence, the activities of American imperialism are fair game. It is important that we deal with this early, for similar international violations of the laws of nature are referenced below. This argument fails to distinguish two points: 1) international relations are always bound to national conditions – a sovereign does not take aliens to fight in wars of plunder, but his own citizenry, which, as in the case of the US, often return dead or physically and psychologically mutilated; 2) As Plato had already noted, states whose economic foundation is grounded on the “endless acquisition of money,” find it that they must “seize some of [their] neighbor’s land.”[iv] International relations reflect the national relations of class. To suppose, as Hobbes does, that international relations are in a state of nature is to presuppose a national economy based on accumulation, plunder, and expansion – and to ignore the possibility, effectively realized under socialism, of international relations based on cooperation and mutual development. Thus, the conditions of imperialism and global capital relations, instead of simply being brushed away through Hobbes’ categorization of them, further highlight the antinomies in Hobbes’ moral and political philosophy. For they demonstrate a condition where the commonwealth, that is, the general organization the laws of nature thrust humans into, is presupposed by Hobbes to be continuously flickering into a state of nature (the condition the laws of nature and commonwealth is supposed to negate) when dealing with the international realm of national politics. Nonetheless, let us continue our examination of his laws of nature.

In the fifth law of nature, the law of mutual accommodation, Hobbes states that just like an architect must toss aside material that takes “room from others” in the “building of an edifice”, so too “a man that by asperity of nature, will strive to retain those things which to himself are superfluous, and to others necessary; and for the stubbornness of his passions, cannot be corrected, is to be left, or cast out of society, as cumbersome thereunto” (TH, 114). In a world where the eight richest people have the same wealth as the poorest half (almost 4 billion people), we live according to global relations which directly violate Hobbes’ fifth law of nature. For the Hobbesian unconvinced with the global nature of this violation (for reasons previously  mentioned), in the US, the country which spearheads the G7 in income inequality, the richest 1% of American households hold 15 times more wealth than the bottom 50% combined. This inequality exists at a time when hundreds of thousands are homeless, and when 42 million people, including 13 million kids, experience hunger in the country. From a Hobbesian moral philosophy, all those who are superfluously hoarding those things which others lack, must be immediately expropriated and expelled from society. Of course, a change in the society that allowed this in the first place is a precondition of the former.

The ninth law against pride gives an insight to how the inequality mentioned in five arose. Hobbes states, “the question who is the better man, has no place in the condition of mere nature; where, as has been shown before, all men are equal” (TH, 115). If men are equal, where did inequality come from? He says, “the inequality that now is, has been introduced by the laws civil” (Ibid.). In essence, men are born equal, it is their social formation which makes them unequal. Interesting enough, although Hobbes and Rousseau are seen to be in polar opposites, Rousseau also agrees that inequality is a development of our transition into society, specifically seen in the development of private property.[v]  Hobbes concludes that every man must “acknowledge another for his equal by nature” (TH, 116).

The tenth law is an extension of the ninths into the realm of the jus naturalis (rights of nature). Hobbes asserts that no man can desire a right for himself, “which he is not content should be reserved to every one of the rest” (Ibid.). He continues, “as it is necessary for all men that seek peace, to lay down certain rights of nature; that is to say, not to have liberty to do all they list: so it is necessary for man’s life, to retain some; as right to govern their own bodies, enjoy air, water, motion, ways to go from place to place; and all things else, without which a man cannot live, or not live well” (Ibid.). There are a few important things to note with this law. Firstly, the notion of rights applying to all was something that took more than three centuries after the writing of this text for the US to figure out. In some places, namely, in the settler colonial state of Israel, this law is still being violated. Secondly, the right to enjoy such things as clean air and water seems dim in a world where fossil capitalism is taking humanity and various other species on the planet to the brink of extinction. Lastly, Hobbes sustains as jus naturalis not just the right to all things one needs to live, but also to all things one needs to live well. In the US, the leading economic power in the history of the planet, having more than enough resources to do so, guarantees neither the latter nor the former to its people as a right. Shelter, food, water, and medical care, i.e., the basic necessities people need to survive, are not guaranteed to the American public. Beyond this, those specific things which each person requires in order to ‘live well,’ to virtuously develop themselves in community, are restricted for only those who can afford it. A system which is dependent for its reproduction on the commodification of people and nature is fundamentally unable to exist non-antagonistically to Hobbes’ tenth law.

Laws twelve and thirteen may also seem surprising to some. Here he states:

The twelfth, equal use of things common. And from this followeth another law, that such things as cannot be divided, be enjoyed in common, if it can be; and if the equality of the thing permit, without stint; otherwise proportionably to the number of them that have right. For otherwise the distribution is unequal, and contrary to equity.

But some things there be, that can neither be divided nor enjoyed in common. Then, the law of nature, which prescribeth equity, requireth, that the entire right; or else, making the use alternate, the first possession, be determined by lot. For equal distribution, is of the law of nature; and other means of equal distribution cannot be imagined.

These passages deserve the reply Marx gives the “intelligent” bourgeois of his time, who, while rejecting communism promote co-operative production and societies – he tells them, “what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, ‘possible’ communism?”[vi] We must ask Hobbes here, ‘what is this, if not communism?’ From law twelve and thirteen we get three forms of property: 1) property that can be distributed equally to all deserving, 2) property that can be enjoyed in common, 3) property that can neither be enjoyed in common nor distributed equally but is assigned by lottery. Although it might not be what Marx deems the highest phase of communism, where relations are based “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,”[vii] Hobbes nonetheless conjures the necessity for a form of lower phase communism out of his ‘laws of nature.’

As I hope to have shown, there is a persistent contradiction between Hobbes’ moral philosophy – dedicated as a science to knowing the lex naturalis – and his political philosophy, grounded more on his projected conception of human nature, than on the laws of nature which supposedly thrust humanity into a commonwealth. Hobbes’ moral philosophy can be described as a militant egalitarianism, which runs directly counter to his ideal conception of the state. If Hobbes’ moral philosophy were transferred in an honest manner into the political-economic realm, he would be alongside Gerrard Winstanley as a forefather of modern socialist thought. Unfortunately, the baby was dropped in the transfer, and what we received is a reactionary political philosophy.

As is often the case with the best of bourgeois thought, the faithful applicability of their moral philosophy would cause its transition into the political realm to escape beyond the boundaries of possibilities within bourgeois society, e.g., Smith, Rousseau, Kant, Mill. In Hobbes we have the most shocking of these cases. As a thinker whose defense of contractual relations has become sacrosanct for the religion of capitalism (used centrally to justify wage-slavery), and whose views on human nature provided a universal grounding for the capitalist ethos, we nonetheless find in his communistic moral philosophy fertile ground for an immanent critique of his own philosophy and of bourgeois society in general. However, we must remember moral criticism of a system is insufficient for its transformation. For a substantial transformation, i.e., for a revolution, a scientific understanding of the systemic mechanisms through which these morally reproachable things arise is necessary. It is here important to remember American Marxist and Socialist Labour Party leader Daniel DeLeon’s famous dictum, “the moral sentiment is to a movement as important as the sails are to a ship. Nevertheless, important though sails are, unless a ship is well laden, unless she is soundly, properly and scientifically constructed, the more sails you pile on and spread out, the surer she is to capsize.”[viii] 

Carlos L. Garrido is a philosophy graduate student and professor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. His specialization is in Marxist philosophy and the history of American socialist thought (esp. early 19th century). He is an editorial board member and co-founder of Midwestern Marx  and the Journal of American Socialist Studies. 

Notes

[i] All quotations will be from this edition: Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. (Touchstone, 2008).

[ii] Marx, Karl. Capital Vol 1. (International Publishers, 1974), p. 760.

[iii] Fanon, Franz. “Why we use Violence.” In Alienation and Freedom. (Bloomsbury, 2018), p. 654.

[iv] Plato. “Republic.” In Complete Works. (Hackett Publishing Co, 1997)., p. 1012.

[v] See Rousseau’s 1755 Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.

[vi] Marx, Karl. “The Civil War in France.” In in The Marx-Engels Reader. (W.W. Norton & Co, 1978), p. 635.

[vii] Marx, Karl. “Critique of the Gotha Program.” In The Marx-Engels Reader. (W.W. Norton & Co, 1978), p. 531.

[viii] DeLeon, Daniel. Writings of Daniel DeLeon. (Red and Black Publishers, 2008), p. 13.

Decolonization and Communism

By Nodrada

Republished from Orinoco Tribune.

“We have to give life to Indo-American socialism with our own reality, in our own language. Here is a mission worthy of a new generation.”

-José Carlos Mariátegui, “Anniversary and Balance,” José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology¹

While the turn towards analyzing ongoing settler-colonialism has finally reached the mainstream of North American political discussions, there is still a lack of popular understanding of the issues involved. Settler-colonialism is, ironically, understood within the framework of the ways of thinking brought by the European ruling classes to the Americas. By extension, the conceptions of decolonization are similarly limited. Although the transition from analyzing psychological or “discursive” decolonization to analyzing literal, concrete colonization has been extremely important, it requires some clarifications.

Settler–colonialism is a form of colonialism distinct from franchise colonialism. The colonizers seek primarily to eliminate the indigenous population rather than exploit them, as in the latter form of colonialism. Decolonization is the struggle to abolish colonial conditions, though approaches to it may vary. Societies formed on a settler-colonial basis include the United States, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and Australia. For our purposes, we will focus on the United States in analyzing local ideas of settler-colonialism and decolonization.

Among North American radicals, there are two frequent errors in approaching decolonization.

On the one hand, there are the opponents of decolonization who argue that settler-colonialism no longer exists. In their view, to identify specific concerns for Indigenous peoples and to identify the ongoing presence of settler-colonial social positions is divisive and stuck in the past. They believe that settlers no longer exist, and Euro-Americans have fully become indigenous to North America through a few centuries of residency.

On the other hand, there are proponents of decolonization who believe that Euro-Americans are eternally damned as settlers, and cannot be involved in any radical change whatsoever. The most extreme of these argue for the exclusion of Euro-Americans from radical politics entirely.

Settler-colonialism is not over, contrary to the first view. Rather, Indigenous peoples still struggle for their rights to sovereignty within and outside reservations, especially ecological-spiritual rights. Their ostensibly legally recognized rights are not respected, either. The examples of the struggles of the Wet’suwet’en, Standing Rock Lakota, Mi’kmaq, and other peoples in recent memory are testimony to this. Indigenous peoples are still here, and they are still fighting to thrive as Indigenous peoples. Capitalists drive to exploit the earth, destroying ecology and throwing society into what John Bellamy Foster calls a metabolic rift.² This means that the demands of capital for expansion are incompatible with the ‘rhythm’ of ecology, destroying concrete life for abstract aims as a result.

An atomistic, individualist worldview is what undergirds the view of settler-colonialism as over and of contemporary Euro-Americans as being just as indigenous as Indigenous peoples. When settler-colonialism is seen as an individual responsibility or guilt, we are left with a very crude concept of it.

The denialists of settler-colonialism assume that it must be over, because the colonization of the Americas is apparently over. Thus, they think that modern Euro-Americans cannot be blamed for the sins of their forefathers, since individuals shouldn’t be held responsible for things which happened outside of their lifetimes. Guilt in this conception is an assessment of whether an atomistic individual is responsible for extremely specific crimes, such as participating in something like the Paxton Boys’ ethnic cleansing campaign in 1763 Pennsylvania.

The same ideological approach characterizes the other side, which obsesses over the individual status of “settler” and micro-categorizing the contemporary residents of North America within an abstract concept of settler-colonialism. They argue that having the individual status of “settler” means one is eternally damned, one is marked as a specific person by the crimes of a social system always and forever. This hefty sentence has high stakes, thus the obsession with categorizing every unique case within a specific box.

Neither of these approaches offers a successful insight into settler-colonialism. Instead, they project the thinking of European bourgeois liberalism. The individual is defined in an atomistic way, in their characteristics, rights, crimes, and so on. The individual as a node on a web of social relations is totally out of the question here. Yet, that is how we must think if we wish to understand settler-colonialism and, therefore, abolish it.

To focus primarily on categorizing atomistic individuals, instead of focusing on social relations, loses sight of the true engine of settler-colonialism. It is not that individuals choose one day to behave brutally, or that it is simply the nature of a specific people. Instead, it has very concrete historical motivations in the global system and the rise of settler-colonialism within it. For example, North American settler-colonialism was motivated significantly by the land hunger of capitalists who grew cash crops like tobacco and cotton, which were sold on the world market. Thinking in broad, structural terms is important in order to avoid reductive analyses and approaches.

While the side which focuses on damning individual Euro-Americans certainly have land in mind while thinking about this subject, they have a static and simple concept of land. In their minds, settlers are settlers because they are present in a certain place, to which a specific Indigenous group has an abstract, moral right to exclusive habitation in. To put it simply, their thought process is “if X person is in Y place, which belongs to Z people, then they are a settler.”

They do not understand the social relation of Indigenous peoples to their homelands, which extends into the aspects of ecology, history, spirituality, etc. That is, Indigeneity as itself a social relation. Indigenous peoples explicitly refer to their nations and homelands as relations. Their relation to land is not to land as an abstract thing, but to specific spaces that are inseparable from their specific communal lives.

In the context of describing his people’s history, Nick Estes (Lower Brulé Lakota) said in Our History is the Future:

“Next to the maintenance of good relations within the nation, an individual’s second duty was the protection of communal territory. In the east, the vast wild rice patties and seasonal farms that grew corn, beans, and squash demarcated Dakota territory. In the west, Lakota territory extended as far as the buffalo herds that traveled in the fertile Powder River country. For Dakotas, Lakotas, and Nakotas, territory was defined as any place where they cultivated relations with plant and animal life; this often overlaid, and was sometimes in conflict, with other Indigenous nations.”³

Identity and mode of life in communalist societies is specific to spaces, because keeping in the ‘rhythm’ of these spaces is a basic guiding logic of life. Because land is a relative, there was and is significant resistance among Indigenous peoples to the settler seizure of land and commodification of their non-human relative. The European bourgeoisie, meanwhile, was more concerned with what value could be extracted from the land, their worldview being based in abstract concepts of Right, Justice, Liberty and so on.

The faction in question does not understand settler-colonists as part of social relations which seek to negate that communal land social relation for concrete aims. They lack broad perspective, they only see society as a collection of atoms, falling into micro-categories, bundled together.

Having critiqued these two views, we can now give a better idea of how to properly approach the category groupings involved in analysis of settler-colonialism.

Indigeneity is defined by continuity of long-standing communal relations and identities indigenous to a certain region. Relation to a specific homeland or region is important to this, but the loss of direct ties to land does not necessarily negate Indigeneity. Rather, the continuity of belonging to a certain ‘mode of life’ and community is key.

A settler is one who is outside of these relations, and plays an active role in the negation of these Indigenous relations. A settler is not merely a settler because they are foreign. Rather, they are a settler because of this active negating role.

To play an active negating role does not necessarily mean one personally enforces colonial laws. Instead, it means that one directly benefits from their participation in the destruction of these relations, such as by gaining residencies or employment at the expense of those land-relations. An important aspect of being a settler is being a socio-political citizen of a settler-colonial society. This means that, in law and in social practice, one has the full rights of belonging to the settler-colonial nation, and is recognized as such in ideology.

Many analysts of settler-colonialism, such as Jodi Byrd (Chickasaw), use a third category in their analysis: arrivants.⁴ Arrivants are those who are part of social structures which dissolve those land-relations, but lack the citizenship and agency of settlers. An example of this would be Filipino debt peons. They cannot fully belong to the settler structures, in practice or in ideology, but they are still part of those structures. In North American history, these groups have at various times been explicitly excluded from the potential to own property or obtain full legal citizenship. Said citizenship was directly defined around whiteness, first de jure, and later de facto.

These categories should be treated in a nuanced way, as tools to understand a concrete society and history. We should avoid trying to bend reality to fit abstract categories. Otherwise, one assumes these categories are destiny. One assumes that Indigenous peoples cannot be part of settler-colonial structures, or that all settlers are eternally damned and cannot overcome their social role.

In history, there are many examples of Indigenous peoples participating in settler-colonial processes, such as with Tohono O’odham warriors participating in the Camp Grant Massacre against Apaches, or the Indigenous Vice President Charles Curtis sponsoring assimilation and allotment of communal lands. There are also examples of people without full socio-political citizenship participating in these processes, such as with Black Buffalo Soldiers fighting on the front lines of Manifest Destiny.

There are also examples of Euro-Americans defecting to Indigenous societies in order to escape bourgeois “civilization.” Cynthia Ann Parker was abducted and adopted as a child by a Comanche war band. Texas Rangers, who had massacred her adopted relatives, had to force her to return to Euro-American society. While adopted Euro-Americans remained Euro-Americans, inclusion in those communal relations transformed them. Instead of playing a negating influence on the part of bourgeois society, they became participants in Indigenous relations. To be a settler is not destiny, but is a status which can be negated through a revolutionary transformation of society. In a word, through decolonization.

To obsess over policing micro-categories is not helpful for understanding or fighting settler-colonialism. Being conscious of it is important, but the key is to focus on broad social structures. The way we alter individuals is by altering social relations, and the way we fight for Indigenous sovereignty is by abolishing the negating forces in society. To successfully treat a disease, one must keep in mind the body as a system rather than a simple collection of parts. The same applies to society.

Settler-colonialism in North America is the conflict of two social forms, one fighting to negate the other. The capitalist system: private, individualist, focused on expanding an abstract ‘god’ (capital). The Indigenous communal modes of life: premised on relationality, collectivist, focused on viewing the individual as a part of a whole.

The bourgeoisie seek exclusive, private ownership of land as property to be bought and sold as a commodity. They do not recognize communal land rights, or anything like having a social relation with a place. Instead, they seek to cut off the nerves connecting every aspect of communal life in order to box things in as commodities, so that they can be abstracted into an exchange-value.

The 1887 Dawes Act, which dissolved Indigenous communal landholdings in the United States, was aimed at forcing this system on Indigenous peoples.⁵ In the eyes of the ruling class, this was simply “civilization.” The bourgeoisie had to go to war with these communal ways of life to construct a capitalist system in its place. In the communal systems, unlike capitalism: land itself has rights as a relative instead of being merely a vehicle for value, people live off the land as a community instead of being landless wage-laborers, and exploitation is heavily frowned upon.

The first Red Scare in the United States was not during the 1919–1920 assault on organized labor and anti-war activists, but during the struggle of the government and capitalists against Indigenous communal modes of life.⁶

This war of generalized commodity production, capitalism, against alternative ways of being extended to ways of knowing. When forcing Indigenous children into boarding schools, the colonizers worked hard to destroy languages, religious practices, and cultural practices.⁷ In their place, they promoted individualism, bourgeois values, and a future as wage-laborers.

The liberal view of individuals is quite representative of typical bourgeois thinking. Liberalism posits individuals in an atomistic way, without considering them as concrete beings with concrete relationships in a real world. It sees individuals as simply bundles of rights, obligations, and so on. It premises meaning on extremely abstract, albeit universalizing concepts, such as “justice.” The rights of the liberal citizen are rights they have apart from society. Their freedom is a space separate from society, since they see others as fundamentally competitors.

This abstract thinking, individualism, and competitive view makes plenty of sense for a bourgeois. Their well-off conditions and obsession with preserving their private property against others reflect in their lack of concern for positive rights (rights to things, like food or shelter). What they want is to realize their capital, defeat their competitors, and pay as little as they have to for the working class’s living.

They only concern themselves with concrete things as far as they relate to their mission to realize abstract, congealed labor: capital. Capital commands them. If they do not expand their capital through exploitation and investment, they fall behind and decay in the rat race. Thus, the bourgeois is shrewd, atomistic, and anti-social.

By contrast, the communal view of individuals which is characteristic of Indigenous nations is focused on very concrete things. Individuals are part of specific communities with specific histories, who are relatives with specific land-spaces. To preserve balance in one’s real relations is an important value, contrasting sharply to the obsession with satisfying the god of abstract capital by feeding it concrete sacrifices. The key to this worldview is keeping in the ‘rhythm’ of life: the rhythm of one’s human relatives, non-human relatives, the ecology, the spirits, etc.

The latter view has a sibling in the views of Karl Marx. In the sixth thesis from Theses On Feuerbach, Marx said:

[…]the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations.⁸

Further, Marx was very concerned with the metabolic rift wrought by capitalism. In his view, while capitalism had for the first time linked up the whole world and all people into one global social system of production, it had also unleashed forces it could not control. While everyone in capitalism depends on everyone else, the system is controlled by self-interested bourgeoisie, who have no concern for humans, animals, or ecology.

Therefore, there is a need for a working class revolution, where the people who produce what the world runs on establish social control of this social production. Through that social control, they must restore the balance of humanity and nature, using the planning of production to end the chaos and blindness characteristic of capital. Once they have fully developed this system of social control and planning and brought about a world where all people contribute to the social product instead of anyone exploiting anyone else, they will have established a communist society.

The basis for Pan-Indigenism in North America was laid by the proletarianization of Indigenous peoples during and after World War II.⁹ The Federal government explicitly hoped to use this to assimilate Indigenous peoples by removing them from communal life on reservations. Instead, the contact of many distinct peoples in urban workforces and communities led to the development of a new, broad concept of Indigeneity. These proletarians thought of themselves not only as, for example, Standing Rock Lakota or Chiricahua Apache, but also as “Indigenous.”

This had precedence with people such as Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee leaders of a Pan-Indigenous resistance to settler-colonialism in late 18th and early 19th century Ohio, or Wovoka, the Paiute founder of the Ghost Dance movement in the late 19th century. However, it had never reached this scale before. The same forces which sought to destroy Indigenous identity created means of establishing a new political movement in defense of it.

This universalization of identity from particular to general, without necessarily negating the particular, is something which must be done by social revolution as well. Proletarianization unites many distinct peoples into one class, leading to radical contacts between worlds. It lays the basis for a revolution which for the first time establishes a real community of all of humanity.

Decolonization ties directly into this project of social revolution. Capital attacks communal relations to establish and reproduce itself, yet by doing this it lays the foundation for a more universal form of communal life: communism. To decolonize is not to merely undo history and return to the past. We cannot undo centuries of change, of destruction.

Instead, as advocated by anti-colonial theorists like Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, we must assert indigenous aims on the basis of the world colonialism has brought. This must take the form of the social revolution, because capital leaves intact the negating force against communalism and the relations of domination between groups of people.

In our theorizing of communism, we must avoid the thought patterns of the bourgeoisie. We must not only avoid individualism, but avoid the denigration of communalist ways of life. Indigenous peoples are at the forefront of the defense of bio-diversity. They are staunch protectors of the earth, of their ways of life and of their relation with the earth. They resist capitalist primitive accumulation, defending their sovereignty, daily. Communism cannot be some form of universalized bourgeois society, nor can it carry over the denigrated view the bourgeoisie have of life. Instead, it must be communalism reasserted on a universal scale.

Decolonization does not mean one throws out settlers. It does not mean we send Euro-Americans back to Europe. This belief is premised on a bourgeois, colonial thinking about life. It assumes that behavior is ahistoric, inscribed into the DNA of people. Rather, it is social relations that we must expel, transforming people through incorporation into new ones.

In the past, the adoption of Euro-Americans served as an alternative to their behavior as settlers. A decolonized society can follow this model on a broader scale, while preserving the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples over their homelands. Indigenous conceptions of land are not based on bourgeois exclusive right, but the right of specific people to have an ongoing relation with specific spaces. Abolishing the negating force, capitalism, and asserting these ways of life while working to establish the universalist form, communism, must be our program.

To put it simply, decolonization should be understood as the indigenization of settlers. This necessitates a social revolution in all aspects of life. It does not mean settlers must immediately “play Native.” Within the context of bourgeois settler-colonialism, that is part of a process of dissolving Indigenous communities, destroying their ability to remain sovereign. Rather, it means that we must destroy the capitalist society which drives these antagonisms.

This decolonization also necessitates a conscious revolution in ideology as part and parcel of social transformation. As discussed, communalist societies have a strong sense of concrete locality, of specificity according to a space and the relations of that space. Capitalism seeks to negate that in favor of universalist abstractions. Communism must take the universalizing capitalism has engaged in and place it on a concrete, conscious basis.

We ought to oppose the negation of local life capitalism engages in, while having the universal goal of revolution. That is, unite the particular with the universal, establish the particular as the basis of the universal. The old, European bourgeois ways of thinking, lacking metabolism or relationality with other humans and with ecology, must be overcome.

Communism is the abolition of the present state of things on the basis of existing premises. The emancipatory project of communism should not be hostile to, but a student of Indigenous peoples. When all people are one kin, when they are not divided by class or other social antagonisms, then we will all be free. That is the relation of decolonization to communism.

Countless Charter Schools Hire Many Uncertified Teachers

By Shawgi Tell

Privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools[1] run by unelected officials are legal in 45 states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam. About 7,400 charter schools currently enroll roughly 3.3 million students.

According to a 2018 state-by-state information chart from the Education Commission of the States, more than 25 states (including Washington, DC) either do not require charter school teachers to be certified or allow charter schools to hire a large portion of teachers with no teaching certification.[2]

It should also be noted that, on average, charter school teachers have fewer years of teaching experience and fewer credentials than their public school counterparts. They also tend to work longer days and years than public school teachers while generally being paid less than them. Further, many charter school teachers are not part of an employee retirement plan and are treated as “at-will” employees, which is linked to why 88% of charter school teachers are not part of any organization that defends their collective interests.

A few examples of charter schools with uncertified teachers are worth noting. A May 30, 2019 article in The Palm Beach Post titled, “Underpaid, undertrained, unlicensed: In PBC’s largest charter school chain, 1 in 5 teachers weren’t certified to teach,” points out that the Renaissance Charter School chain in Florida routinely employed large numbers of substitute teachers and operated many schools where a quarter to a third of the teachers were not certified to teach.

Several years ago, one of the main charter school authorizers in New York State unilaterally further lowered teaching qualifications for teachers in charter schools. It willfully ignored numerous public demands to not further dilute teaching standards, prompting a lawsuit against its arbitrary actions. An October 18, 2019 press release from New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) titled, “Court rejects fake certification scheme for charter school teachers,” reads in part:

After the union fought back against “fake” certification for some charter school teachers, a midlevel appeals court this week ruled the SUNY Charter Schools Committee does not have the authority to set its own standards for certifying teachers. NYSUT President Andy Pallotta said the court ruling is a big win for the union and the profession. “This is about preserving what it means to be a teacher in New York State,” Pallotta said. “This would have created a two-tiered certification system and allowed unqualified educators to practice in some charter schools.”

While public school teachers in North Carolina have to be trained and certified to teach in public schools, charter schools are exempt from such requirements and can hire uncertified non-educators to teach. And while they enroll a significant percentage of youth, in Arizona “Teachers at charter schools are not required to have any certification.” Importantly, privately-operated charter schools are notorious for relying heavily on the infamous Teach for America (TFA) program which has come under fire for many reasons over the years. Much of this criticism comes from formers TFA’ers themselves. Many other examples from across the nation could be given.

Taken together, these facts help explain why there is such persistently high teacher turnover rates in the crisis-prone charter school sector—a situation that increases instability and does not serve students and families well. Given the broad disempowerment and marginalization of charter school teachers, it is no accident that there has been an uptick in recent years in the number of charter school teachers striving to unionize. The most recent example comes from Chicago.

It is not possible to build a modern society and nation by creating more corporatized schools that are segregated, non-transparent, deregulated, created by private citizens, run by unelected officials, and staffed with a large number of uncertified teachers. Who thinks this is a great idea? Such neoliberal arrangements lower the level of education and are a slap in the face of thousands of teacher education students across the country who spend years and thousands of dollars training to become effective certified teachers.

Notes

[1] The “non-profit” versus “for-profit” distinction is generally a distinction without a difference: both types of entities engage in profit maximization. Charter school promoters always downplay the fact that there are many charter schools, including “non-profit” charter schools, run by for-profit entities.

[2] Public schools sometimes hire uncertified teachers as well, but what makes the corporatized charter school sector different is that many charter school laws are intentionally and explicitly set up to evade certified teachers. This usually has to do with the neoliberal goal of “cost-cutting” and profit maximizing. Such a set-up lowers the level of education.

Rock-A-Bye Baby: On the State's Legitimation of Juneteenth and Liberal Concessions as Political Anesthetization In Slavery's Afterlives

(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

By Joshua Briond

“Everything has changed on the surface and nothing else has been touched[...] In a way, the state is more powerful than ever, because it has given us so many tokens.”

—James Baldwin

On Thursday, June 17th, President Joe Biden signed a bill establishing June 19 as Juneteenth National Independence Day, a US federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. According to CNN, the holiday will become the first federal law holiday established since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was signed into law in 1983. Ultimately, the bill will allow a fragment of the nations’ surplus populations —excluding much of the largely racialized lumpenproletariat and underclass— a day ‘free’ from the capitalist exploitation and alienation that comes with the traditional day-to-day of the laboring class. The timing of the implementation of the national holiday—amidst rebellions, particularly in Minneapolis, in the aftermath of Winston Smith’s clearly politically-motivated, state-sanctioned assassination—cannot be understood as anything other than yet another attempt at anesthetizing the captive Black colonies in sentimentality and symbolic gestures. 

"this is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. i, too, am the afterlife of slavery."

—saidiya hartman, lose your mother: a journey along the atlantic slave route (2006)

The institution of Black slavery, that rendered Black captives as chattel, capital, productive property, was economically, culturally, and politically ubiquitous. Yet, despite its legacies and afterlives, there has been no material reckoning, or atonement for its anti-Black psychosexual and physical terror and violence. In fact, the ghosts of what is largely understood as slavery’s past, have continued to manifest in the economic polity, modern policing and prisons, and social, cultural, and ideological underpinnings, etc. Descendants of Black captives whom, in many ways, remain hyper-surveilled, overpoliced, hyper-exploited, underpaid, alienated, and often succumbed to occupation of our communities and premature death, have little-to-nothing to show for being major instruments in assembling and maintaining the global capitalist economy since we were trafficked to the Euro-Americas. But you are damn sure we have one month per year, and now an extra day, to learn about and hashtag-celebrate the most whitewashed and bleak articulations of Black historical events—events that have largely only taken place because of Black resistance to white terror, violence, and domination. 

“A critical genealogy of White Reconstruction requires close examination of the non-normative—nonwhite, queer, non-Christian, and so on—iterations of white supremacy within contemporary institutionalizations of diversity, inclusion, and multiculturalism. Such non-normativities are constitutive of (rather than incidental or exceptional to) the protocols, planning, and statecraft of contemporary counterinsurgency/domestic war, extending and complicating rather than disrupting or abolishing the historical ensembles of anti-Black and racial-colonial state violence.” 

—Dylan Rodriguez, White Reconstruction 

Since 1776 and the founding of the United States of America, the white power structure has been in a constant state of attempting to—arguably, at times, successfully—ideologically and politically sedate the most wretched, particularly the Black colonies, through incremental concessions and symbolic gestures while ultimately supplementing white rule. As Gerald Horne has taught us, this founding itself was brought into being after a successful power struggle against the British rulers to preserve the institution of Black slavery. As noted by Dylan Rodriguez in the epigraph above, and throughout his book White Reconstruction, the white settler-colonial state has had to “undergo substantive reform to remain politically and institutionally viable.” This includes, but is not limited to, incremental (neo)liberal reform as sedation and the multicultural diversification of settler-colonial, surveillance-capitalist, and imperialist apparatuses.

If we are to understand the American project itself as a consequence of intra-European counterrevolution to preserve the institution of slavery. The civil war as described by Frederick Douglass, “[starting] in the interest of slavery on both sides[...]both despising the Negro, both insulting the Negro.” The Reconstruction era as an attempt to establish a workers-democracy—in the aftermath of the countless slave revolts across North America and the Civil War ultimately ending chattel slavery—only to be defeated by ruling class forces. Jim Crow as an inevitability of the settler state and its individual deputized upholders’ idiosyncratic anxieties surrounding the collapsing synonymity of Blackness and the slave positionality. The Civil Rights Movement as an understandably decentralized reformist effort toward Black freedom, through attempts to expand the civil liberties of Black people within the American colony, co-existence with whites within the white power structure that became co-opted by the state ordained Black bourgeoisie and US intelligence leading to mild concessions. Then, we—as Black people—have to understand that we have been in an outright war of attrition with the white power structure for nearly half a millennium.

It is important to recontextualize major historical events — from the Civil War, to the crushing of the Reconstruction era, to Jim Crow, to the Civil Rights Movement, to the rise of neoliberalism and the expansion of the carceral regimes posited as the solution to Black rebellion in the 1980s, to modern policing and prisons, etc. — are all distinct types of “reforms” to politically sedate Black surplus populations and sustain white settler-capitalist hegemony. 

In an interview at Howard University, Gerald Horne discusses the weakening and marginalization of Black radical independent institutions, publications, and leaders, such as Shirley Graham, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, as a trade-off to disintegrate Jim Crow in return for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and “other examples of legislation meant to chip away at Jim Crow.” Horne goes on to question whether the price for political “freedom,” in the electoral arena (which many Black radicals would argue, in the age of neocolonialism and pseudo-independence was never actually freedom) was substantial enough to warrant celebration as a form of Black progress without the economic infrastructure and self-determination needed for true liberation and justice. Just like in the 60s, as Horne notes, we are still performing uneven trade-offs with white power. We demand an end to police terror with Defunding the Police at the outset; they give us painted Black Lives Matter streets, while celebritizing, commodifying, and cannibalizing the names and faces of Black martyrs like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. We demand healthcare, living wages, and erased student loans; they give us a federal holiday. In the post-Civil Rights era, and the state’s crushing of Black Power, there has been a depoliticization, if not outright assassination, of Black politics: all symbolism, uneven trade-offs, bare-minimum concessions, and identity reductionist representation as a substitute for actual Black power and self-determination. In the era of neo-colonialism, with the expansion and symbolic inclusion into the plantation economy through our coerced [lumpen]proletarization, we have been anesthetized to our continued exploitation, alienation, destruction, and genocide. Liberal multiculturalism, reform, or as I would call it, political anesthetization, at the very least, temporarily, has been able to halt the “problem” of black resistance.

“The understanding that modern policing has emerged out of the dreadful history of Black enslavement brings with it an urgent need to acknowledge what is not yet behind us. The plantation isn’t, as so many of us, Black and otherwise, think or at least wish to believe, a thing of the past; rather, the plantation persists as a largely unseen superstructure shaping modern, everyday life and many of its practices, attitudes, and assumptions, even if some of these have been, over time, transformed.”

- Rinaldo Walcott, “On Property” 

Though there has been a virtual erasing of our chains and the physical plantation (at least for those of us who are not “legally” incarcerated), the plantation economy has expanded and the mere logics and ideological production have remained the same: keep the slave(s) in check. The white power structure has always been concerned with keeping its thumb on the pulse of its slave population. There has been a non-stop, coordinated counterinsurgent effort by the white power apparatus to divert energy away from the inevitable radical potentialities of the slave, colonized, dispossessed, and superexploited classes—especially as capitalism’s contradictions become far too blatant to disguise. The marking of Juneteenth National Independence Day is just a continuation of the settler society’s legacy of empty promises and symbolic gestures to supplant material gains and maintain their hegemony. 

The United States is incapable of bringing about true justice or accountability for the crimes of its psychosexual and political economy beyond these hauntingly insulting and psychopathic attempts at state recognition of its own historical aberrations through moral symbolism. True justice and accountability must be avoided at all costs by this power structure, as this would inevitably expand the political imaginations of people, leading to the incrimination of every cop, soldier, politician, wall street hack, ceo, etc., and exposing itself for what it is: illegitimate and obsolete. Once you realize that all of the violence being exported everyday in and around the US are not individual aberrations that could be changed with a shift in political leadership, but an inevitable and continual outcome of superstructures built on and sustained through anti-Black slavery, capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, everything begins to make sense. It is liberatory. Heartbreaking. Infuriating, even. Because the solution becomes clear. It is the solution that everyone—whether subconsciously or not—is doing everything in their power to avoid coming to. It is the solution the United States and its propaganda networks spend billions of dollars every year to shield from the psyches of its captives. It is what Black captives in Haiti realized circa 1791, and are still being punished for ‘till this day. 

There is a special, psychopathic irony in the legitimation of Juneteenth through the colonial-capitalist state’s immortalizing of the liberation of the slaves through the very structural foundations in which said slaves were rendered productive property as captives, in which the legacies of slavery remain pervasive across social, cultural, political, and economic lineages. Not to mention the colonial and imperialist technologies inspired largely by the events of (anti-)Black slavery and colonialism, exported across the imperialized world for the purposes of land, capital, and resources—under the guise of (white) freedom and democracy. To paraphrase Frederick Douglass, what is the state’s recognition of Juneteenth to its Black captives? To the Afro-Palestinians living under the world’s largest open-air prison on the United States’ dime? Or the slave-labor of mineral miners in the Congo supplying the U.S. resources? How can visualizations of Nancy Pelosi and Black lawmakers singing Lift Every Voice and Sing in ceremony for the bill making Juneteenth a federal holiday—while actively rejecting Black organizers’ rallying cries that could improve Black people’s material conditions and save lives, such as Defunding the Police— signal anything other than yet another colonial lullaby to anaesthetize our dreams and efforts toward Black liberation and self-determination? While openly and unapologetically pledging their allegiance to multiculturalist white supremacy in the age of neocolonialism? 

“Let me put it this way, that from a very literal point of view, the harbors and the ports, and the railroads of the country, the economy, especially of the southern states, could not conceivably be what it has become, if they had not had and do not still have, indeed, for so long and for so many generations, cheap labor. I am stating very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: I picked the cotton, and I carried it to the market, and I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing[...] This, in the land of the free, and the home of the brave. And no one can challenge that statement, it is a matter of a historical record. In another way, this dream is at the expense of the American Negro.”

—James Baldwin, 1965

Their Freedom, and Ours: A Case Study on Morality, Inequality, and Injustice Amid a Pandemic

Photo: Stacey Wescott / Chicago Tribune

By Peter Fousek

David Hume opens his essay “Of the First Principles of Government” with the statement that “Force is always on the side of the governed.”[1] Though she uses different terminology, Hannah Arendt’s understanding of power is analogous to Hume’s “Force.” In On Violence, she asserts that “[i]t is the people’s support that lends power to the institutions of a country, and that this support is but the continuation of the consent that brought the laws into existence to begin with.” Both accounts consider social power to be something fundamentally popular, rooted in collective action undertaken in accordance with a shared will. Thus, “[a]ll political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power,” which “petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them.”[2] This understanding of power is consistent with the nature of the social world: institutions do not come into existence of their own accord, but are created and maintained by the actions of people. Laws do not exist as natural truths—they are established in accordance with shared beliefs and modes of understanding, and retain their jurisdiction only insofar as people assent to them. Therefore, those social structures and formations which hold significant influence over our world, do so because they have substantial, popular support underlying their authority and answering their commandments with corresponding action.

Given this notion of power, “[n]othing appears more surprising…than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.”[3] If the governed possess a constitutive power over their social world, how is it that institutional authority so often supersedes the will of the masses with that of its ruling contingent? I will argue that this counterintuitive state of social organization, in which the few hold dominion over the majority, must rely on an imposed, hegemonic system of belief capable of convincing the general population that their oppression is just and their liberation villainous. Such a system of belief, while certainly instrumental in the maintenance of totalitarian states, is especially important in the context of ostensibly representative systems of government like that of the contemporary U.S.

In these contexts, voters must be convinced not that it would be amoral for them to overthrow their rulers, but rather that it is moral for them to continue to formally reproduce the power of those rulers year after year, by way of the voting booth. In the United States, that process of coercion has proved quite successful. According to exit polls, over 42% of voters with household incomes under $50,000 per year voted for Donald Trump, despite his promises to cut taxes for corporations and the super-wealthy while defunding already limited social services; in 2020, that contingent rose to 43%.[4] Over half of the Kentuckians in that income bracket voted to reelect Mitch McConnell in the same election cycle.[5]  In a country where well over half of the population has a household income of under $75,000,[6] our governing authorities consistently promote the aims of the wealthiest few, often at the expense of the many. While the United States incarcerates more people than any other country, and while 969 people have been killed by U.S. police this year alone,[7] the State does not rely solely on such direct repressive force to achieve its inequitable ends. As the electoral data shows, the electorate consents to its own socioeconomic oppression; with shocking frequency, we as a nation “resign [our] own sentiments and passions to those of [our] rulers.”[8]

What system of belief is responsible for convincing American citizens, whose collective sovereignty is systematized in electoral systems, to continue voting directly against their economic interests? If we are to build a better world by overcoming the oppressive systems and structures of the established order, we must first understand the mechanism by which that implicit consent of the oppressed is elicited. A society designed to pursue the aims of a small and exclusive minority at the expense of the majority cannot rely on force alone to sustain itself, since institutional authority possesses the apparatus of force only so long as a substantial contingent of the people are willing to follow its orders. Instead, it requires the tool of an official moral framework capable of securing the popular mandate upon which its dominion is established. It is possible for a small ruling class to maintain its jurisdiction over a much larger oppressed one only when the dominant segment promotes its ends as necessary, and thereby convinces its society that anything which goes against those ends is immoral. The ruling class perpetuates its existence by convincing the ruled majority that their subjugation is just, according to supposedly universal moral precepts.

That moral indoctrination is possible because, to use Marx, the economically dominant class “rule also as thinkers and producers of ideas and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age. Their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.”[9] Therefore, the ruling class is able to disseminate its own beliefs and understandings as comprehensive fact, absorbing, in the words of Barthes, “into its ideology a whole section of humanity which does not have its basic status and cannot live up to it except in imagination.”[10] The universality of the established ruling order and its corresponding cultural norms supersede any alternative worldviews or systems of belief, and thereby create the illusion that the entire social formation lacks meaningful class differentiation (the absence of ideological stratification is implied as evidence that social class does not cause a fundamentally different experience of the world). So, using its near monopoly on the dissemination of far-reaching ideas and discourse, through channels including broadcasting companies, social media platforms, and the national political stage, the economically dominant class convinces its entire social world that its particular morality, corresponding to its particular class interests, is in fact universal, natural moral law, obligatory for all.

Any system of official morality imposed on a society is necessarily repressive on account of that claim to universality. Morality is the product of social development in the same sense that the institutions, laws, and norms of our societies are, as Arendt notes, the products of beliefs held by the popular masses. As social institutions etc. exist to achieve defined ends, such as the preservation of property rights and relations, morality also serves social interests. We see this to be the case in moral precepts as basic as the commandment that “thou shall not kill,” which provides a foundational basis for social cohesion by establishing a normative framework in which a might-makes-right paradigm becomes condemnable. Nonetheless, even so fundamental a moral tenet as that one fails to prove universally applicable in the context of the real and dynamic world. History shows that societies which condemn killing in times of peace often herald it as the most honorable task of their soldiers in times of war. Therefore, the presentation of any system of morality as something universal, and so too ahistorical, is deceptive, given the necessarily specific and dynamic nature of moral analysis (and thus the impossibility of truly natural and universal morality).

Still, such universal moral precepts do serve social interests, even if those interests differ from those which the popular majority perceive as the purpose of their moral laws. The imposition of a particular morality onto the whole of society establishes a moral hegemony, wherein only that which promotes the aims of the social class who defines the moral system is considered right and just. Such a process serves the social interests of the dominant class, allowing the many to be subjugated by the few: the universal application of specific moral norms is all too often employed to prevent the oppressed from striving towards their own liberation. During times of relative historical calmness, that morality-mediated oppression may be concealed to the point of near-invisibility. In the United States, a nation satiated with spiritual and secular prosperity gospels, whose popular consciousness is inundated with myths of the American Dream predicated on the principle of productivity (the notion that an individual’s success is the reflection of their efforts), the illusion that social mobility is always possible—if only for the “most industrious” among us—lends credence to a moral framework that condemns the poor as lazy people suffering from self-imposed shortcomings, while celebrating the wealthy as tenacious and driven individuals whose opulence is merely the manifestation of their moral virtue.

On that basis, cycle after cycle Americans vote against their economic interest, without even understanding that they are doing so. When we are taught that poverty is personal iniquity embodied, and wealth the reflection of the opposite, then those who are not wealthy must identify “not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires,”[11] if they are to consider themselves virtuous according to the official moral framework. Thus, as they have for decades, millions of working-class Americans continue to vote for “representatives” who facilitate their exploitation for the sake of the wealthy elite. When we fail to recognize the foundational social power we hold as a class, or even our position as members of the working class as such, we unwittingly provide consent for our continued oppression. The underlying misconception of the meritocratic nature of our society is bolstered by the perception that our political and legal institutions are egalitarian, and therefore that all members of our citizenry have an equal shot at financial success, free from any undue external influence or restriction. In other words, we are told that the official morality of our society is just, because all members of our society share equal freedoms under the law. However, I will argue that even if we use that politically conservative understanding of freedom, labeled negative liberty by Isaiah Berlin (that is, the understanding of freedom as freedom from interference in an individual’s exercise of her rights), supposedly universal freedom is not, in fact, shared universally across class divisions.[12] For that reason, the official morality imposed by one class onto all cannot validly substantiate its claims to universality, and can only be understood as a repressive apparatus implemented to ensure the continued self-subjugation of the oppressed. 

The contradictions of normative morality often appear more sharply when contrasted against a backdrop of historical tumult and upheaval. Such has been the case over the past fourteen months, as the national response to the pandemic in the United States has exposed the degree to which our official morality is willing to sacrifice the wellbeing, and even the lives, of the working class, in order to promote the interests of the possessing one. In this time, it has become clear “that lack of money implies lack of freedom,” even in the sense that it is defined by Berlin and the political Right, as “the absence of obstacles to possible choices and activities.”[13] This inequitable distribution exposes the class-interestedness of an official morality which heralds such freedom, by which is meant, for the most part, negative liberty, as the most just and morally virtuous ideal to be promoted by our norms and institutions. Our socioeconomic order is one predicated on the value of individual productivity and wealth accumulation. Resultantly, the freedom of the individual to exist in such a way that they might promote their own wellbeing without restriction by external influence is foundational to the American sociopolitical psyche. Hence Berlin’s explanation of the moral condemnation of the poor, whose wellbeing, we are told, is not our concern, since “it is important to discriminate between liberty and the conditions of its exercise. If a man is too poor or too ignorant or too feeble to make use of his legal rights, the liberty that these rights confer upon him is nothing to him, but it is not thereby annihilated,” (Cohen 4). According to the Right, that is the freedom of which this nation’s founders wrote, the liberty to which the United States declares its dedication, our ultimate moral value: the nominal liberty to act without restriction in pursuit of a given set of possibilities, with no guarantee to the outcome or ease of such a pursuit.

In times of crisis, like that brought on by the pandemic, the most crucial exercise of such freedom involves the liberty to protect oneself and one’s family from immediate threat of harm. The relative ability or inability of American citizens to do so, depending on their socioeconomic status, provides a tragic illustration of the fact that in the United States, “lack of money implies lack of freedom.”[14] In contemporary America, as in any capitalist society, right (as either or both ownership and access) to any object or pursuit is conferred largely by money. This claim is exceedingly apparent: for example, one does not have the freedom to sleep in a hotel room that they have not paid for, and their attempt to do so would likely be met with interference regardless of their otherwise complete ability, will, and legal allowance. In Cohen’s words, “when a person’s economic security is enhanced, there typically are, as a result, fewer ‘obstacles to possible choices and activities’ for him.”[15] Even under the dictum of nominal or negative freedom, an individual’s liberty is largely determined by their wealth. During the COVID crisis, the limits to liberty begotten by poverty have become a visible, existential threat to the marginalized poor.

In the early months of the pandemic, when we knew little about the life-threatening contagion sweeping the globe, many state and local governments to attempted to secure the safety of their citizens through mandatory stay-at-home orders and economic closures. However, the Trump administration, along with countless others in positions of power and influence, were quick to employ the tools of their official morality to an antithetical end. Mask mandates designed to promote some degree of communal security were decried as unjust, immoral attacks on freedom,[16] and as to shutdown orders, these guarantors of liberty held at best that it is the prerogative of an individual to stay at home if she so chooses, but that the State should have no say. As a result, sections of the country opened prematurely, well before the prevalence of testing, much less the existence of a vaccine.[17] Even in places where that was not the case, the categorization of almost 74 million working class Americans as “essential workers” forced them and their families into positions of very real, potentially life threatening, risk.[18] That undue burden placed on the working class was deemed the necessary condition for the restoration of moral equilibrium, according to the language of negative liberty. The resultant dichotomy of freedom as a function of wealth is substantiated by New York Times polling. Higher earners, far more likely than their lower-income counterparts to hold substantial savings, were largely free to continue working from home without risk of job loss or pay cuts. Lower earners were not afforded the same security, financially or otherwise.[19] In this, we see that the working class were compelled to observe moral norms established by the investor class, and thereby to sacrifice of self in accordance with precepts that the wealthy members of our society did not observe themselves. Through the mechanism of universalized official morality prescribed by the dominant contingent, the subjugated were convinced to accept their own suffering while those who demanded their sacrifice refused to do the same.

And to what end? While many essential workers were employed in healthcare or public infrastructure fields, millions of others included members of the food service industry,[20] Amazon warehouse laborers,[21] Tesla factory line workers[22]—in short, the exploited employees of massive, profit-seeking firms focused solely on their goal of increasing shareholder’s returns. In pursuit of profit, these firms compelled countless workers, for pitifully inadequate wages and often without even the most basic protective measures, to sacrifice their safety,[23] and in many cases even their lives.[24] These efforts by executives for the sake of their investors certainly did pay off: according to Inequality.org, “between March 18, 2020, and April 12, 2021, the collective wealth of American billionaires leapt by $1.62 trillion, or 55%.”[25] All this, as thousands died preventable deaths and millions in the world’s wealthiest country faced hunger and eviction. But what of the workers’ freedom? Surely, they were not literally forced to come into their workplaces. The answer to that depends on how we define force. Essential workers, as well as employees of businesses allowed to preemptively reopen, were barred from receiving unemployment benefits if they refused to work, as our legal framework for employment regulation deemed such refusal voluntary even when motivated by fear of death.[26] So, these workers, many of whom would have received more money through unemployment insurance than they were paid at their “essential” jobs,[27] were compelled—quite literally under threat of starvation—to put themselves and their families in harm’s way so that the rich were able to continue amassing wealth at as aggressive a rate as possible.

The hypocrisy of the official morality, and thus its repressive class-interestedness, is evidenced by the fact that this shockingly inhumane restriction of the right of the working class to self-preservation was undertaken under the guise of “freedom,” and thereby given a “moral” justification. In April 2020, Congressman Trey Hollingsworth echoed widespread convictions with his statement that “in the choice between the loss of our way of life as Americans and the loss of life of American lives, we have to always choose the latter.”[28] That stance was, and remains, a truly popular sentiment—protests in opposition to shutdowns were prevalent across the country last spring, populated largely by working class Americans who had been convinced that economic closures represented government overreach and a restriction of individual liberty.[29] To foster that sentiment, members of the investor class funded media campaigns to promote the notion of the shutdowns as morally wrong[30] These campaigns serve as a tragic example of the investor class forcing its ends onto the whole of our society, portraying anything that interferes with the pursuit of those ends as morally condemnable. The campaigns, of course, concealed their class interestedness to preserve the supposed universality of their precepts. In their polemics against “unfreedom,” they were careful to omit the fact that the “immorality” of the shutdowns, the restriction of liberty which they constituted, was a restriction of the freedom of wealthy firms to force their workers into life-threatening conditions for the sake of profit margins.

Only in being justified by the official morality of the dominant class was such blatant disregard for human life allowed to occur. During the initial months of the COVID pandemic, the foundational social power of the working masses could have been utilized to substantial and life-saving effect, if only there had been sufficient organization for the development of a collective will to do so. Consider the power represented by the opportunity of essential workers to join together in a general strike in protest of unsafe conditions, or in opposition to unjust regulations which cut them off from unemployment insurance if they refused to work. Consider the power of the voting population to hold their elected officials accountable for refusing to put such protective measures in place, or that of the consumer base to boycott companies engaged in blatantly exploitative and dangerous labor practices. These collective actions were not taken because the iniquity of the situation was masked by a veil of official morality, which labelled the direct repression of the working class—the elimination of its most basic liberties—as itself a crusade for freedom. Such “moral” manipulations enable the paradox of power noted by Arendt and Hume, in which “the living power of the people,”[31] despite its foundational importance, is restrained and left unrealized by the amplified repressive force of a small but economically dominant social contingent.

It is important to note the role of the State in this process of moral imposition on behalf of the ruling class. By debating and legislating in accordance with the official morality, institutional authority reifies it, providing those precepts of ruling class interest with an appearance of naturalness and thereby working to validate their claims to universality. Representative Hollingsworth was not alone in expressing the sentiment that the flourishing of the stock market is more important than the lives of American workers; instances as brazen as the vehement attempts of conservative politicians to prevent an increase in food stamp funding despite the staggering number of children going hungry represent efforts to embody the official morality. [32] The success of such reification is heartbreakingly clear: ours is a country in which Nobel laureate economist Angus Deaton “explained the anomalous mortality rates among white people in the Bible Belt by claiming that they’ve ‘lost the narrative of their lives’,”[33] having failed to realize their own “moral value” in the terms imposed on them, unable to earn anything above a starvation wage regardless of their efforts.

Such is the outcome of the ruling class indoctrinating “into its ideology a whole section of humanity which does not have its basic status and cannot live up to it,”[34] using the apparatus of authority as an aid in its illusion. The supposed truth of the official morality, that most insidious of the “ruling ideas”[35] disseminated by the dominant class, holds a devastating weight in the popular psyche because it is manifested by our systems of power and thereby made to seem concrete. To that end, our political representatives, armed with the formalized consent of their constituents, speak and legislate in a manner that serves to enshrine official morality in the rule of law. In the face of the pandemic, they declared that the just action on the part of the working poor was to accept their loss of liberty for the sake of their country. And, faced with that reactionary mandate justified by an apparently eternal morality, we chose not to oppose oppression, but instead to clap for the essential workers as they made their way home.

“The price of obedience has become too high,”[36] writes Terry Tempest Williams, following a vivid illustration of the destruction wreaked by U.S. nuclear arms tests in the Southwest on American lands and American people. Such state-sanctioned harm is the norm, rather than the exception, as we have seen in examples ranging from the Tuskegee Study to the COVID pandemic response. It is enabled by the “inability to question authority,”[37] on account of its justification by official morality, which would have a repressed populace rather accept the rule of their oppressors than challenge it in the hope of change. But this does not have to be the case; ours could be a better world. A governing body loses its legitimacy if its commands are not carried out; its orders are not heeded if the popular masses refuse to recognize its sovereignty. Strikes, protests, and other acts of defiance, in which participants utilize their communal power by refusing, in unison, to conform to the commands of their oppressors, demonstrate the ability of an organized populace to make authority impotent and annul its influence. That transformative kind of resistance is only possible when the official morality which condemns it is recognized as a tool of reaction, when the oppressed declare a morality of their own, oriented towards the liberation and collective betterment of the social world. “[A]nd even then, when power is already in the street, some group…prepared for such an eventuality is needed to pick it up and assume responsibility.”[38] These tasks: the revocation of repressive morality, its replacement with a conviction for true justice, and the development of leadership capable of organizing such a movement, are all possible. It is imperative that we undertake them if we are to liberate ourselves by realizing our collective power.  

References

Arendt, H. On Violence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1970.

Barthes, R. Mythologies. Trans. Jonathan Cape. Paris: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1957.

Blake, A. “Analysis | Trump's Dumbfounding Refusal to Encourage Wearing Masks.” The Washington Post.      Washington, D.C.: WP Company, 25 Jun. 2020: Digital Access.

Cohen, G.A. On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, and Other Essays in Political Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Scholarship Online, 2011.

Collins, C., Petergorsky, D. “Updates: Billionaire Wealth, U.S. Job Losses and Pandemic Profiteers.” Inequality.org. Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, 29 Apr. 2021: Digital Access.

DeParle, J. "As Hunger Swells, Food Stamps Become a Partisan Flash Point." The New York Times. New York: The New York Times, 6 May 2020: Digital Access.

Desilver, D. "10 facts about American workers." Fact Tank. Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2019. Aug. 2019: Digita Access.

Diaz, J. “New York Sues Amazon Over COVID-19 Workplace Safety.” The Coronavirus Crisis. Washington,     D.C.: National Public Radio, 17 Feb. 2021: Digital Access.

“Essential Workers and Unemployment Benefits Do Not Go Together.” Occupational Health & Safety. Dallas: 1105 Media Inc., 7 May 2020: Digital Access.

“Fatal Force: Police Shootings Database.” The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.: WP Company, 22 Jan.        2020: Digital Access.

Flynn, M. “GOP congressman says he puts saving American ‘way of life’ above saving lives from the coronavirus.” The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.: WP Company, 15 Apr. 2020: Digital Access.

Hume, D. “Of the First Principles of Government.” Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. Hume Texts Online,   2021: Digital Access.

“Kentucky 2020 U.S. Senate Exit Polls.” CNN. Atlanta: Cable News Network, 2020: Digital Access.

Maqbool, A. “Coronavirus: The US Resistance to a Continued Lockdown.” BBC News. London: British         Broadcasting Corporation, 27 Apr. 2020: Digital Access.

Marx, K. Selected Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1994.

McNicholas, C., Poydock, M. “Who Are Essential Workers?: A Comprehensive Look at Their Wages,             Demographics, and Unionization Rates.” Economic Policy Institute. Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy             Institute, 19 May 2020: Digital Access.

Nuttle, M. “Essential Workers Accounted for 87% of Additional COVID-19 Deaths in California, Data         Shows.” abc10.com. 30 Apr. 2021: Digital Access.

Reinberg, S. “Nearly 74 Million Essential Workers at High Risk for COVID in U.S.” U.S. News & World        Report. Washington, D.C.: U.S. News & World Report, 9 Nov. 2020: Digital Access.

Siddiqui, F. “Hundreds of Covid Cases Reported at Tesla Plant Following Musk's Defiant Reopening, County            Data Shows.” The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.: WP Company, 13 Mar. 2021: Digital Access.

Tankersley, J. "Job or Health? Restarting the Economy Threatens to Worsen Economic Inequality." The New York Times. New York: The New York Times, 27 Apr. 2020: Digital Access.

Tempest Williams, T. "The Clan of One Breasted Women." Psychological Perspectives (23): 123-131. Los Angeles: C.G. Jung Institute, 1990.

“U.S. Income Distribution 2019.” Statista. Statista Research Department, 20 Jan. 2021: Digital Access.

Vogel, K. P., et al. “The Quiet Hand of Conservative Groups in the Anti-Lockdown Protests.” The New York Times. New York: The New York Times, 21 Apr. 2020: Digital Access.

Wright, R. A Short History of Progress. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2004.

Wronski, L. New York Times|SurveyMonkey poll: April 2020. New York: The New York Times, 2020: Digital Access.

Zhang, C. “By Numbers: How the US Voted in 2020.” Financial Times. London: Financial Times, 7 Nov.        2020: Digital Access.

Notes

[1] Hume, 1

[2] Arendt, 41

[3] Hume, 1

[4] Zhang

[5] “Kentucky 2020 U.S. Senate Exit Polls.”

[6] “U.S. Income Distribution 2019”

[7] “Fatal Force: Police Shootings Database.”

[8] Hume, 1

[9] Marx, 129

[10] Barthes, 140

[11] Wright, 124

[12] G.A. Cohen provides a proof of this in his essay “Freedom and Money.” 

[13] Cohen, 9

[14] Cohen, 9

[15] Ibid., 10

[16] Blake

[17] Tankersley

[18] Reinberg

[19] Wronski

[20] McNicholas

[21] Diaz

[22] Siddiqui

[23] McNicholas

[24] Nuttle

[25] Collins

[26] “Essential Workers and Unemployment Benefits Do Not Go Together,” 1

[27] Ibid.

[28] Flynn

[29] Maqbool

[30] Vogel

[31] Arendt, 41

[32] DeParle

[33] Livingston

[34] Barthes, 140

[35] Marx, 129

[36] Williams, 128

[37] Ibid.

[38] Arendt, 49

On Police Abolition: Decolonization Is The Only Way

(Photo taken by Jordan Gale for The New York Times)

By John Kamaal Sunjata

The United States is a project of both anti-Blackness and racial-colonial power. From the founding of this white supremacist settler-colonial state, Black people have endured 250 years of slavery, ninety years of Jim Crow, sixty years of “separate but equal” legal doctrine, and thirty-five years of explicitly anti-Black housing laws among other insidious forms of de jure and de facto racial discrimination. The racial capitalist state and its policing functionaries employ state violence as a means of containing and controlling the working-class, especially racialized and colonized domestic peripheries. The late political prisoner and revolutionary ancestor George Jackson (1971, p. 99) writes the following:

The purpose of the chief repressive institutions within the totalitarian capitalist state is clearly to discourage and prohibit certain activity, and the prohibitions are aimed at very distinctly defined sectors of the class- and race-sensitized society. The ultimate expression of law is not order—it’s prison. There are hundreds upon hundreds of prisons, thousands upon thousands of laws, yet there is no social order, no social peace. …Bourgeois law protects property relations and not social relationships.

The United States is a punitive carceral state with 25 percent of the world’s population behind bars despite comprising only 5 percent of the world’s population (Collier, 2014, p. 56; Hayes, 2017, p. 17). The American criminal so-called “justice” system holds almost 2.3 million people in 1,833 state prisons, 110 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile prisons, 3,134 local jails, 218 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. settler-colonies (Sawyer & Wagner, 2020). U.S. incarceration is disproportionately racialized, targeting Black and brown people who represent 60 percent of the incarcerated (Marable, 2015). If Black and Latino people were incarcerated at the same rate as whites, their imprisoned and jailed populations would decline by almost 40 percent (NAACP, 2019). The problems are not rooted in crime but policing itself which constructs, (re)produces, and institutes white supremacy and anti-Blackness through racial capitalism. The police have been waging asymmetric domestic warfare on Black people, encircling, and capturing their prospects for self-determination and self-actualization. From the Greensboro Massacre of 1979 to the murder of Marcus Deon Smith of 2018 to the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the only solution for Black liberation is abolishing the police and freeing what is essentially a semi-colony of peripheral peoples.

This essay has five sections. This first section discusses the problems of policing. The second section explains the history of U.S. policing and its development. The third section lays out the failure of liberal reforms to grapple with policing as an institution. The fourth section argues the case for police abolition. The last section concludes.

The History of U.S. Policing

The earliest origins of policing in the United States evolved from directly slavery, settler-colonialism, and brutal control of an emergent industrial working-class (Vitale, 2017, p. 34). The organization of police forces within the United States was modeled after that of England. In the early colonial forms, policing was informal and communal, which is referred to as the “Watch” or private-for-profit policing, also known as the “Big Stick.” These policing models had little with fighting crime and more to do with “managing disorder and protecting the propertied classes from the rabble” (Vitale, 2017, p. 35). Strike-breaking and labor surveillance were among the most important services provided by private-for-profit policing, the Pinkerton’s were among the more notable agencies (Spitzer, 1979, p. 195). The “Big Stick” dissolved when 1) company towns declined, 2) labor costs grew more socialized, 3) organized labor grew in its militancy and strength, and 4) major changes happened in U.S. socioeconomic infrastructure (1979, p. 195).

The watch system was not particularly effective at halting crime as watchmen were often drunk or asleep on duty (Potter, 2013, p. 2). As a method of process improvement came the implementation of a system of constables—official law enforcement officers—who were normally paid according to the warrants they served (2013, p. 2). Informal policing models persisted until 1838 when Boston implemented a centralized municipal police force based on the London Metropolitan Police force and New York followed suit in 1845 (Vitale, 2017, p. 36). The main functions of the London Metropolitan Police Force were “protect property, quell riots, put down strikes and other industrial actions, and produce a disciplined industrial work force” (Vitale, 2017, p. 36).

In Southern states, modern U.S. policing developed from the “Slave Patrol” (Potter, 2013, p. 3; Vitale, 2017, p. 46). Slave patrols were tasked with developing terroristic infrastructure designed to prevent slave revolts (Hadden, 2001, p. 20; Vitale, 2017, p. 46; NAACP,  2019). They were vested with the power to “ride from plantation to plantation, and into any plantation” taking up slaves who did not have a ticket from their masters (2001, p. 20). The slave patrols could forcibly enter any private property[ii] solely on the suspicions of harboring runaway slaves (Vitale, 2017, p. 46; NAACP, 2019). The slave patrols had three primary functions: 1) chase, apprehend, and return runaway slaves to their owners; 2) organize terror squads to deter slave rebellions, and; 3) maintain legal and extralegal disciplinary measures for slaves who violated plantation rules to produce desired behavior (Potter, 2013, p. 3; NAACP, 2019).

White people had “tremendous social anxiety” about large groups of unaccompanied slaves and free Blacks intermingling. The police responded by regulating their behavior through the “constant monitoring and inspection of the [B]lack population” (Vitale, 2017, p. 47). After the Civil War, slave patrols were replaced by modern Southern police departments who controlled freed slaves who were now entering the workforce which was primarily agricultural (Potter, 2013, p. 3). The work of the modern police force included enforcing Jim Crow segregation laws and denying Black people equality de jure and de facto (2013, p. 3). The primary concern during this period was forcing Black people into sociopolitical docility (Vitale, 2017, p. 47). More than a response to crime, the police are for instituting a social order that is safe for capital penetration for the sake of capital accumulation, especially from the Black masses (Marable, 2015, p. 94). Capital accumulation requires a stable and orderly workforce for a predictable order of business (Potter, 2013, p. 4). The racial capitalist state, therefore, absorbs the costs of the private sector, protecting its enterprises. The environment must be made safe for capital through an organized system of social control (Potter, 2013, p. 4; Vitale, 2017, p. 34; Marable,  2015, p. 95). Under a system of racial capitalism[i], Black people are among the most brutalized by the carceral state.

The Failure of Liberal Reforms

Liberal efforts at reforming the police have largely been adject failures mostly because liberals misunderstand the role of the police. They ignore that policing itself is an inherently anti-Black institution that is premised on the repression of the domestic Black periphery for the purposes of capital penetration for capital accumulation. The role of the police has served to protect white supremacy and wealth creation for white people while denying Black people essential human rights (Vitale, 2017, p. 33). In the face of 400 years of anti-Black policing institutions that have, through every evolution, maintained a systemic logic of settler-colonialism that relegates the Black masses to a semi-colony within white America, liberals have proposed more training, more diversity, and community policing (Vitale, 2017, p. 33; Samudzi & Anderson, 2018,  p. 13; Rodríguez, 2021, p. 45).

The push for more police training is well-intentioned but it misses the point. Whenever a Black person is killed by police, a common refrain from liberal reformers is “improve use-of-force training.” If these same reformers were around during slavery, there is no doubt they would have called for slave masters to employ more ethical whip deployment techniques. Despite the racial bias training that many officers have undergone, researchers have found that outcomes remain unchanged with respect to racial disparities in traffic stops and marijuana arrests (Vitale, 2017, p. 8). Racist policing is not merely a matter of individual bigotry but institutionalized racism. Asking for increased training of police so police learn “restraint” ignores how the police already exercise restraint against populations that are not marginalized and not targeted. The Capitol Hill riots were illustrative of the police’s ability to show remarkable restraint. The mostly white rioters were not subjected to nearly as much force as Black protestors are for nominally peaceful protests (Henderson & Alexander, 2021). Any training that justifies the institution of policing will only strengthen its white supremacist and anti-Black logics, even if there is a rhetorical shift from “Warrior mentality” to “Guardian mentality.”

Another common liberal reform to policing involves diversity hires, in hopes this will result in communities of color being treated with “greater dignity, respect, and fairness” (Vitale, 2017, p. 11). There is no evidence that diversifying police forces affects, much less reduces, their use of force (Friedrich,  1977; Garner, Schade, Hepburn, & Buchanan, 1995; Brown & Frank, 2006;  Lawton, 2007). This tactic of reform is even more insidious because it is a method of counterinsurgency through promiscuous inclusion (Rodríguez, 2021, p. 45). Through political warfare against the domestic Black periphery, the racial capitalist state seeks to (neo)colonize its colonized subjects within their own communities.

Diversity is a tool for manufacturing credibility, increasing external institutional legitimacy without dramatically changing internal institutional formations or technologies of repression (2021, p. 45). Diversity changes the presentation of the white supremacist order, but it does not change its outcome: domestic warfare (Samudzi & Anderson, 2018, p. 13; Rodríguez,  2021, p. 51). White supremacy is a multicultural enterprise: just because the beneficiaries of the racial-colonial order are primarily white does not preclude the use of semi-colonized peoples to accomplish white supremacist ends. Diversity hires will not solve the problems of policing, but they will ensure the white supremacy runs through a sepia filter.

Liberal reformers may present “community policing” as possible reform and prima facie, it sounds reasonable. Who would not want neighborhood persons, known and respected by the communities they live, as officers? The answer to that question maybe someone who understands the role and the institution of policing. Police are tasked with criminalizing disorderly conduct, using up to and including lethal force, and responding to populist resistance with state-sanctioned assertiveness. This is well illustrated in the city of Greensboro, North Carolina by its City Council. At a Greensboro City Council meeting from July 31, 2020, the members of the City Council spoke favorably of community policing. Councilwoman Marikay Abuzaiter is on record saying, “[I]f we ever did consider incentivizing [police officers to live in the neighborhoods they work]. I would think the Chief would need a big raise in his police budget because you are looking at money there.” In the same session, Councilwoman Sharon Hightower said:

In reading articles about ‘community policing,’ it never emphasizes resident, it always talked about relationships. And we can start to build relationships, so we can eradicate this distrust in my community because right now, a lot of people I talk to in my community see a police car and their hair stands up on their neck. So, let’s start to work on that. Build that trust, and if somebody moves in the neighborhood? Great, that’s fantastic. …Let’s spend our resources where we get the most bang for our buck. As community talks about more investment in community problems, let’s do that.

It was certainly admirable that Councilwoman Sharon Hightower wanted to “eradicate distrust” and “build relationships,” but the solutions to the problems for the domestic Black periphery of Greensboro are rooted in anti-Black racism and racial capitalism more broadly, not a lack of police presence. What tools do the police possess for “community”? Punitive enforcement actions such as arrests and ticketing (Vitale, 2017, p. 16). Community policing is only possible as a solution if the police do not have police powers. Attempts at community policing, as demonstrated by the Greensboro City Council members, prioritizes giving more resources to the police to live in neighborhoods than giving resources directly to the marginalized members of the communities. Community policing does not empower the domestic Black periphery, but it strengthens the tools of repression and suppression on the part of the police by increasing their proximity to the territories they occupy.

Recently, the #8CantWait campaign has gathered significant support from liberal reformers who wish to address “police brutality.” It is a set of ideas from the nonprofit Campaign Zero, with policy proposals such as ban chokeholds, change reporting standards for use of force incidents, require police officers to warn before they shoot, and more (Murray, 2020). The #8CantWait campaign is not trying to solve racist policing, it is trying to reduce police killings by 72 percent (2020). Mayor Nancy Vaughan endorsed the #8CantWait proposals (Greensboro City Council, 2020):

I have been looking at some resolutions, I have been looking at one from the city of Memphis who is codifying the #8CantWait, we are looking at making it for the City of Greensboro. It has not been finalized but I would like the City Council to look at, once we get it all written up for the City of Greensboro, passing a resolution for the #8CantWait. I don’t want to wait until [the] next meeting because it’s quite a ways [sic] out, so maybe we could have a meeting and a work session because our next meeting is quite a ways away and the #8CantWait and I don’t think we should wait.

After a similar comment from Councilwoman Sharon Hightower, Greensboro Police Chief Brian L. James responded, “In reference to the #8CantWait and looking at that, we are almost there with some of the things that I have recently [done] and some of the things that I did previously as well as our regular policies and there’s one on the #8CantWait that I would like to have some conversation with y’all around the specific wording…” This underscores not only the uselessness of the #8CantWait campaign but the overall failure of liberal reforms to produce meaningful structural change.

The Argument

The concrete historicity of the United States’ state-imposed, state-promoted, and state-tolerated anti-Black racial-colonial violence and white supremacist domination has perpetuated a consistent and persistent situation of Black devalorization, disinvestment, devastation, destruction, and dislocation. White supremacy articulates and structures the American polity; race as a social construct articulates and structures every social relation and institution. This reality produces a domestic Black periphery, an underclass—a subproletariat—that exists as mere residents of a settler-colony (Samudzi & Anderson, 2018, p. 6). The Black community itself exists as semi-colony within the United States wherein the police are an occupying army (Allen, 1969).

The police have consistently represented (and erected) institutional barriers to Black agency, equality, self-determination, and political expression. That is because policing within the United States is inherently white supremacist and extends the logics of racial-capitalism and anti-Blackness throughout the political economy. With the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865, slavery was only abolished as “except as punishment for crime [emphasis added]” (Gilmore, 2020). Black people have been subjected to targeted police surveillance, coercion, force, and incarceration. Slavery was never abolished, it was reformed.

For the domestic Black periphery, the American carceral state and its functionaries have always been in a state of permanent asymmetrical warfare against them (Vitale,  2017, p. 27; Burden-Stelly, 2020, p. 8; Rodríguez, 2021, p. 42). James Baldwin compared policing Black communities to settler-colonial occupation (Baldwin, 1966):

And the police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function. They are, moreover—even in a country which makes the very grave error of equating ignorance with simplicity—quite stunningly ignorant; and, since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty. … Occupied territory is occupied territory, even though it be found in that New World which the Europeans conquered, and it is axiomatic, in occupied territory, that any act of resistance, even though it be executed by a child, be answered at once, and with the full weight of the occupying forces.

Black people are not citizens, we are residents of settler-colonial occupation. Black lives do not matter under a regime of racial capitalism and ironically enough, Black people were at our most valuable (i.e. most insulated from public executions and imprisonment) when we were legal chattel. In that sense, doing irreparable damage to property-in-chattel was bad for business and few slave patrollers wanted to foot the bill (Marable, 2015, p. 97). A citizen would have a Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial, but the residents of the domestic Black periphery can be legally and extralegally murdered by police with impunity (Samudzi & Anderson, 2018, p. 14; Briond, 2020).

The regime of racial capitalism has at its heart, private property ownership, an institution fiercely protected by the carceral state and its settler-colonial agents in policing. Racial capitalism reproduces and buttresses itself and the white supremacist order through a series of supposedly race-neutral policies (Stein, 2019, p. 44). Race-neutral policies themselves have been used to both “discredit and rationalized practices that perpetuate racial stratification” (Siegel, 2000, p. 106). Hence why white supremacy and the anti-Black order it entails can “coexist happily with formal commitments to objectivity, neutrality, and colorblindness” (Harris, 1994, p. 759). The earliest origins of property rights are rooted in racial domination and the interactions between race and private property have played a critical role in subordinating the domestic Black periphery within the American political economy (Harris C. , 1993, p. 1714). Whiteness itself, as a historized social and legal construct, marks power and domination over non-white others (Mumm, 2017, p. 103). Whiteness is valorized and private property ownership is an expression of whiteness; thus, property ownership is conflated with (white) personhood under racial capitalism (Safransky, 2014, p. 238; Bhandar & Toscano,  2015, p. 8). That is why in American society it is perfectly acceptable for white people to kill Black people in defense of private property; however, the domestic Black periphery can never destroy private property in response to the murder of a Black person. Blackness itself represents powerlessness, enslavement, and dispossession (Burden-Stelly, 2020).

The domestic Black periphery exists at the nexus of indispensability and disposability (Burden-Stelly, 2020), subhumanity and superhumanity. The technologies of white supremacy and their accompanying legal strictures and structures reify white supremacist ideologies into the carceral state. Black people represent 28 percent of all people killed by police in 2020 despite being 13 percent of the United States population (Sinyangwe, 2021). Black people are three times more likely to be killed by the police than white people are, and Black people are 1.3 times more likely to be unarmed as well (2021). This demonstrates that “[a]t any given time our government can utilize and maneuver the boundaries of legality and illegality as applicable to the material interests of the ruling class” (Briond, 2020).

Freedom for the domestic Black periphery poses an existential threat to white supremacy as a political economy within the United States because “free[ing] Black people necessitates a complete transformation and destruction of this settler state” (Samudzi & Anderson, 2018, p. 13). The United States cannot exist without the predominant systems of domination and oppression of Black people; it cannot exist without the hyper-policing and hyper-regulation of Blackness. For an internal semi-colony to be free across a geospatial territory, it must be decolonized. For an enslaved people to be free, they must not reform slavery’s conditions but abolish it in its totality. Police abolition is but one step, but a necessary step, in the Black liberation struggle.

Conclusion

The domestic Black periphery can never know freedom so long as policing exists within this settler-colonial state. So long as the Black masses exist as mere residents, citizens in name only, as a semi-colony of white America, constantly surveilled and brutalized by arms of the state, the United States will exist. The United States as a carceral nation begets anti-Black oppressive systems and institutions and that is best exemplified through the police, who act as an occupying army in Black territories, rather than guardians within Black communities. The ideological resistance to police abolition within Greensboro is in part informed by the “racialized colonial logics of the biologically determined criminal, slave, and savage” (Briond, 2020).

There is a Hobbesian assumption that the domestic Black periphery will descend into “the state of nature” unless they are constantly patrolled, surveilled, and policed according to the logics of settler-colonial occupation. The underlying fear has been a constant feature of white supremacist anxieties, a justification for ceaseless instances of anti-Black violence by police who see Blackness as a synthesis of subhumanity and superhumanity incarnate. The amazing feat of political economy has been the militarization of police, the multiculturalism of white supremacy via diversifying the police force, and the escalation of wanton violence against semi-colonized subjects. The central contradiction of the United States is settler-colonialism, the structural location of the domestic Black periphery as simultaneous indispensable and disposable. If Black masses are semi-colonized, the solution is decolonization. If slavery was merely reformed, slavery must be abolished in all its iterations. The U.S. police are the representation and manifestation of modern-day slave patrols. For these reasons and others, the police must be abolished in their entirety and other carceral institutions as well.

Bibliography

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[i] Racial capitalism does not describe a distinct permutation of capitalism or imply there exists a non-racial capitalism, but rather emphasizes that, in the words of Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines.” As a system of political economy, it depends on racist practices and racial hierarchies because it is a direct descendent of settler-colonialism. It is a translation of the “racial, tribal, linguistic, and regional” antagonisms of European feudal society, reconstituted for the American context. It profits off the differentiated derivations of human values, non-white people are especially devalorized and their exploitation is a justifiable and profitable enterprise (see Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

[ii] Private property is not the same as personal property, which is almost exclusively wielded for its use value, it is not a personal possession, it is social relation of excludability. It is the ownership of capital as mediated by private power ownership that removes legal obstacles for one’s existence and provides an unalloyed right to violence. It is “the legally-sanctioned power to dispose” of the factors of production and “thus dispose of [labor-power]: property as synonymous with capital.” Toscano, Alberto, and Brenna Bhandar. “Race, real estate and real abstraction.” Radical Philosophy 194 (2015): 8–17.

Fascism and the Politics of the Past

By Yanis Iqbal

Fascist groupings are in the ascendant throughout the world. While some are emerging from the political peripheries - slowly but steadily gaining traction on the terrain of ideological hegemony - some have already taken the reins of state power. This new wave of fascism poses an important question: why did the intensifying crisis of neoliberalism strengthen the Right instead of revitalizing the Left? The post-1990s trajectory of austerity and immiseration should have bolstered the appeal of progressive forces among the masses. However, what we have been witnessing is the growing hold of extremely conservative ideas on the proletariat.

Non-synchronicity

Ernst Bloch, a German Marxist philosopher, witnessed a similar situation as the left-wing camp in his country was trounced by Nazism. His response to this contradictory development resonates with the current conjuncture. Bloch deployed the concept of “non-synchronicity” to understand fascism, writing, “Not all people exist in the same Now. They do so only externally, by virtue of the fact that they may all be seen today. But that does not mean that they are living at the same time with others”. There are social strata that have been left behind in the process of modernization. These layers express their dissatisfaction with the present by looking back, towards a better past.

In other words, fascism draws from the future in the past, calling up mythologized forces, responding to modern disenchantment, joining a romantic anti-capitalism - roots, soil, homeland - among rural strata with fears of decline and genuine impoverishment among middling urban strata and a youth out of step with the capitalist drive toward abstraction and immateriality. Fascism, therefore, expresses an authentic longing for something different. It creates new figures, synthesizing various elements into hybrid structures, using materials from elsewhere - fairytales, myth, kitsch, Romanticism, occultism and magic, masculine qualities (strength, openness, decency, purity), as well as vitalist philosophy (will, life, creation, instinctive knowledge).

The palingenetic ideals of fascism serve transhistorically as a medium for processing every historical present. The subjects of fascism are called upon to leave a shameful normal life and to enter a proud life of bravery. It is important to note that pride and shame are fundamentally related. Feeling pride involves a realization of the ideals that define the faults and errors that cause us to feel ashamed. Shame collapses the “I” with the “we” in the failure to transform the social ideal into action, a failure which, when witnessed, confirms the ideal, and makes possible a return to pride. In the fascist case, the return to pride depends on the positioning of the subject as someone who confesses to being part of the imminent chaos and decline. Thus, the enactment of shame functions as a means of returning to pride. This return involves correcting wrongdoings by defending the survival of the nation, the people and the race.

Destroying Public Discourse

Fascism’s nostalgic idealizations are always empty. And yet, we know that the emptiness of the mythically constructed past that the Right holds out as a lost version of a better life as well as the emptiness of its promises with regard to the contradictions of capitalism are precisely the point of the underlying strategy. Empty times and spaces are effective spaces for the creation of the fears, fantasies, and hopes that the Right seeks to cultivate. Vague references to a better past ask the audience to fill in the gaps in content and logic with their own nonsynchronous projections; a rhetorical model of broad strokes, vague slogans, provocations, and propositions clearly replaced articulated programs. The point is not precision or the communication of actual information but the establishment of spaces in which anomy and anxiety can play themselves out and which can amplify discontent rather than finding answers to it.

The invocation of historically indeterminate imageries has real consequences for electoral battles and discursive struggles. Eberhard Knödler-Bunte argues that the entanglement of fascist ideology in the past turns it into a “depoliticized mass movement.” The “fascist public sphere,” Knödler-Bunte contends, is ultimately nothing other than “a politicized public sphere aimed at real depoliticization.” Hence, fascism operates on an innately contradictory ground - establishing a public sphere that encourages politicization while simultaneously reducing political dialogue and thought to impoverished versions of public deliberation.

Knödler-Bunte’s arguments help us understand the strategy of contemporary right-wing governments that lower the bar of public and political discourse in order to replace political dialogue with emotionally charged slogans. Paired with the mere semblance of rebelliousness, these tactics obfuscate structural problems and promote a depoliticized discourse, including pseudo-political branding efforts, disinformation campaigns, and conspiracy narratives, in place of political analysis, debate, and programmatic thinking. The extreme Right has traditionally relied on this co-optation of revolutionary energy and its displacement from a critique of capitalism to a vehement yearning for a hazy past.

Liberatory History

Fascism has a constitutive contradiction: the rising tensions between the ironclad rhythms of the working day and the promise of a magical rupture with these empty homogenous routines. Demagogic talks about national-cultural regeneration are always in dissonance with the brute system of surplus value extraction. In order to use these weaknesses of fascism to its own benefit, the Left needs to adopt a liberatory conception of history. Instead of turning to the past to restore lost forms of order, we may understand the past as a rich collection of unheard appeals, unfulfilled hopes, of silenced demands for freedom - and such a relation to the past in turn shows us what is missing in the present and what cries out for completion.

Understood in this manner, the past denotes for us not mythical unity and purity but the history of systemic injustice, oppression, and exploitation, which in turn means that the past contains the energy that leads the way into the future. The past is not just what was. It is that which was never allowed to be, that which never could be, and it therefore points towards that which may yet be. A truly utopian and revolutionary imagination examines the past as an archive of emancipatory struggles that were repressed or abandoned but that reach into our present and herald a future through their continuous demand for realization.

How 'Justice for George Floyd!' Shook the Ruling Class to the Core

By Nino Brown

Republished from Liberation News.

On May 25, 2020, 44-year-old white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on 46-year-old unarmed Black man George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds, sadistically murdering him. Floyd was accused of using a counterfeit 20 dollar bill at a local convenience store in the middle of a pandemic that left tens of millions of Americans out of work and deeper in poverty. Floyd was a victim of the capitalist system, one of the tens of millions who were out of employment. The deadly encounter between Floyd and Chauvin was captured on video by community members and went viral shortly thereafter. 

The next day, the Black working-class communities of Minneapolis led thousands of people of all nationalities demanding justice and accountability, inspiring a nationwide protest movement against racism and police brutality that brought an estimated 35 million people into the streets in righteous and militant indignation. Solidarity protests were held in 60 countries all over the world from Palestine to Haiti to South Korea and more. As brutal force and thousands upon thousands of arrests were employed to repress the movement, the racist underbelly of so-called U.S. democracy was on display to the entire world.

One year since these rebellions began, many reforms have been passed and changes made to combat racism. Politicians and corporations have pivoted to allay the rage of the masses of people across the country sick and tired of racist police terror and the entire system of capitalism with its disgusting inequality. All across the country organizers, activists and progressive groups have demanded radical change, with some raising the slogan “defund the police” and “abolish the police” — representing a marked shift in the struggle for justice.

Derek Chauvin was convicted of two counts of murder and one count of manslaughter on April 20. Facing sentencing in June, Chauvin could be put in prison for 40 years for second-degree murder, up to 25 years for third-degree murder and up to 10 years for manslaughter. 

Yet, since that fateful day in May 2020, many more people have been killed by U.S. police. Some of these people’s names are widely known, such as Daunte Wright, Ma’Khia Bryant, Adam Toledo and Andre Brown. George Floyd’s murder was the “straw that broke the camels back.” But no matter how much negative attention the police get, as an institution of racist rule by a tiny class of the super-rich, they cannot help but enact all kinds of violence against poor and working-class communities, especially Black communities. The fundamental task of the police is to preserve the racist, capitalist status quo.

In the year since Floyd’s murder, activists all over the country have taken aim at qualified immunity, which shields officers from civil and criminal liability. President Joe Biden met with the Floyd family and other families of police brutality on Tuesday in a push to get the Senate to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. The bill would impose limitations on the use of police chokeholds, standards for no-knock warrants and limits on the sharing of military equipment by the Defense Department with police departments. Many of these reforms were already on the books in various cities and towns, yet they have not significantly hindered the police from continuing to kill and enact wanton violence on the people. The ruling class is far more reluctant about stripping the police of qualified immunity — their carte blanche to kill, maim, harass and bully. This continues to be an important front of struggle.

The police have been killing people since they were formalized as an organization growing out of the slave patrols in the U.S. South and out of the needs of the capitalist class to police immigrants and low-wage workers in the industrial North. The violence is not new, and many outright murders and assassinations have been captured on camera by civilians. So what is new? What has changed? It is the consciousness of the working class. All of last summer and even into the fall and winter, people continued to rise up against racist police terror and state violence.

As revolutionaries, we know that in order to win basic reforms and so much more, the working class and oppressed people of this country need to be organized. Our class must continue to keep the pressure on through mobilization, education and agitation — drawing in more people to the fight for justice in the immediate sense and also more broadly against racism and capitalism and imperialism. The rebellions have changed the political calculus of the ruling class and thus the terrain of the class struggle. 

In the aftermath of the conviction of Derek Chauvin, many debated what more needed to be done to win true justice. While the verdict was a victory secured through arduous struggle, we know that true, enduring justice can only be enjoyed by winning a new system that removes the basis for white supremacy and all the other unspeakable injustices in this society. To honor George Floyd’s memory, millions have and will commit themselves to this task.

Bourgeois Education and the Reproduction of Common Sense

By Christian Noakes

Republished from Peace, Land, and Bread.

Despite right-wing conspiracy theories depicting universities as a communist threat to capitalist society, academia serves as a primary institution in the reproduction of the bourgeois common sense on which capitalism relies. Furthermore, it presents its own version of knowledge as not only self-evident but “progressive,” while denouncing any effective attempt to confront capitalism and imperialism.

With a few flips of intellectual gymnastics, it often asserts that Marxism is the “master’s tools.” As such, it presents Marxism as an oppressive force and bourgeois thought as a force of liberation—albeit one in need of periodic reforms. Fundamental to this inversion is the complete misunderstanding—or at least misrepresentation—of both Marx and the larger historical tradition of Marxism.

Marx is typically treated as a class reductionist who never addressed the interrelated issues of racism, colonialism, and slavery. However, all three of these are given significant attention by Marx and were in fact treated as fundemental to the capitalist processes of accumulation, dispossession, and exploitation. One needn’t delve deep into Marx’s writings to begin to see this. In the first pages of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels state:

“The discovery of America, the rounding of the cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie... The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.”[1]

Elsewhere they state:

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of negroes, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.”[2]

Marx and Engels do not equivocate the role of racial oppression and colonialism which are both a means of capitalist expansion and an outgrowth of it. Not only are these pervasive forms of oppression central to the birth of capitalism, but confronting these twin evils of racism and colonialism are essential to combating capitalism today. This is no doubt what Marx means when he noted that, “labor in the white skin cannot emancipate itself where the black skin is branded.”[3] In other words, capitalist exploitation cannot be eradicated so long as racial oppression remains intact.

To even talk about class within the hallowed walls of the academy is too often assumed to be a “white issue”—a convenient assumption that obscures the material reality of racial oppression. The explicitly anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-slavocratic sentiments in the writings of Marx suggest that many who, in good faith, claim Marxism is implicitly “white”—and therefore conserving racial oppression—are drawing such conclusions without doing the readings. Under the influence of bourgeois thought that pervades capitalist educational institutions, “one knows it is absurd without reading it and one doesn't read it because one knows it is absurd, and therefore one glories in one's ignorance of the position.”[4]

This fundemental misunderstanding—premised on hubristic ignorance—goes far beyond Marx and Engels to encompass all of Marxism. The Guyanese guerrilla intellectual Walter Rodney argued that the perennial debate on the relevance of Marxism across time and place is both an outgrowth of the dominant bourgeois ideology and a fundamental misunderstanding of Marxism.[5] Contrary to an understanding of Marxism as a static manual of revolution, Rodney points out that Marxism is a living thing—a methodology and ideology which concerns itself with material relations in the service of the oppressed and exploited classes.

As a methodology or a scientific lens of analysis, Marxism concerns itself with the material conditions of society, the relations of production which exist—in various forms—across time and place. Marx, and the Marxist tradition which has developed from his contributions to the revolutionary struggle, give considerable attention to the particular relations of production under capitalism—a system into which the Global South has long been forced at gun point. Rejecting Marxism as irrelevant to any context outside of 19th Century Europe follows the same logic as if one were to claim that the theory or relativity—and other developments in physics built on such understandings—only applies to the world Einstein inhabited.[6]

To deny the relevance of Marxist methodology is to inadvertanly suggest that relations of production (especially the predominant capitalist relations) do not exist—a bourgeois position that serves to preserve capitalist exploitation and the racial/colonial relations which underpin it. Despite the often good intentions, such assertions are inevitably in line with bourgeois ideology in that they serve to reproduce the common sense of capitalism which both naturalizes and obscures the social relations of capital. Such academic positions also ignore the historical role of Marxism in national liberation struggles throughout the Global South—an historical fact that makes the question of the relevance of Marxism itself irrelevant.

However, the relationship between Western academia and the Global South is not simply a matter of the erasure of national liberation struggles; it is also openly antagonistic in that the former provides the intellectual justification for imperialism under a facade of progress.

For the sake of brevity, we will limit ourselves to recent events in Bolivia.

On 10 November 2019, the Indigenous President Evo Morales was ousted in an apparent coup. Support for this coup—which would quickly reveal itself as deeply anti-Indigenous and reactionary—included a letter signed by several US academics. Signatories included the anthropologist Devin Beaulieu, a vocal opponent of the Movement for Socialism (MAS) party. Beaulieu—like many other academics—framed their opposition to MAS in pro-Indigenous language. Central to this position has been the reduction of Indigeneity to a monolith in opposition to Morales.[7] This has, in a sense, included the construction of the Indio permitido (the authorized Indian). Under a progressive facade, academics like Beaulieu sit comfortably in the imperial core, deciding for themselves which Indigenous voices are legitimate. Not unlike their colonial predecessors, they rely on a deeply imperialist conception of progress as a modern “white man’s burden.”

Other academics are not so blatantly imperialist. For instance Fabricant and Postero correctly point out how treating Indigenous peoples as a monolith is akin to defining Indio permitido and Indio prohibido (the prohibited Indian).[8] Their acknowledgement of heterogenous Indigeneity is markedly different from the treatment seen in the likes of Beaulieu. However, despite this difference they too fall into the dichotomous thinking which frames MAS as both a capitalist movement for the mestizo and an opposition to Indigenous Bolivians. Despite their apparent attempts to provide balanced analysis, they conflate efforts toward self-determination via the utilization of the country’s natural resources and the fostering non-US trade relations as “capitalist” and “neoliberal,” when in reality not utilizing national resources means a continued subjugation of Bolivia to the imperial core—a position these academics ponder from relative comfort. These (not-so-blatant) imperialist academics also refer to concerns of Indigenous groups over national development as a concern of “further colonisation by Andean coca growers.”[9] Where these coca growers are, in fact, Indigenous, this position only succeeds in weaponizing anti-colonial rhetoric against the colonized.

All of the above is emphasized to say that bourgeois academia’s primary social function is to reproduce capitalist common sense and to reinvent capitalist society with ever-new, illusory facades of progress and liberation. As a central institution of the capitalist superstructure, the university as a whole cannot help but be anything else.

As Jose Carlos Mariategui observed:

“Vain is all mental effort to conceive the apolitical school or the neutral school. The school of bourgeois order will continue to be a bourgeois school. The new school will come with the new order.”[10]

This is not to say that individuals or groups cannot exist in opposition in such institutions or that no revolutionaries should attend university. Institutions of higher learning can and should be treated as sites of struggle from which guerilla intellectuals can, in a sense, redistribute the resources and means of knowledge production otherwise kept from the public.

Following in the footsteps of revolutionaries such as Marx and Rodney, Marxists should utilize capitalist institutions to better understand and combat capitalism. However, the bourgeois academy should never be treated as something that can be adequately reformed under capitalism; or, further, that bourgeois academia is the only source of knowledge production under capitalism. Indeed, a true guerrilla intellectual need not be of the academy at all, and, in fact, cannot be a true guerrilla intellectual if they are confined to the bourgeois institutions which serve only to reproduce capitalist common sense in opposition to the true struggles of liberation.

Endnotes

[1] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. In The Marx-Engles Reader (2nd ed.) Robert C. Tucker (ed), 275-276.

[2] Karl Marx. Capital, Vol. 1. (Chicago 1952), P.372.

[3] Karl Marx: On America and the Civil War (New York, 1972) p. 275.

[4] Walter Rodney (1975). “Marxism and African Liberation.” https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney- walter/works/marxismandafrica.htm.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Jose Carlos Mariategui. “The World Crisis and the Peruvian Proletariat.” in Selected Works of José Carlos Mariátegui.

Workers and Communities Must Control COVID Relief Funds: A View From Detroit

By Jerry Goldberg

Republished from Liberation News.

The Biden Coronavirus Relief Bill offers significant funding that could alleviate at least in part the poverty faced by millions of people in the United States. An article in Bridge Michigan summed up the potential benefits for poor people in Michigan.

• An estimated 1.97 million children under 18 in Michigan — and 65.7 million across the United States — could benefit from the expansion of the child tax credit. This constitutes 92% of all children in the state.

• The bill includes an $880 million increase for food assistance, including a 15% increase in food stamp benefits. This potentially could help alleviate hunger for the more than 430,000 adults in Michigan who reported they can’t afford food to adequately feed their children.

• Some $25 billion in rental assistance and housing vouchers could provide assistance to the 139,000 families at risk of eviction in the state.

• There is $25 billion in aid to help child-care providers reopen safely and $15 billion in additional child-care assistance to help families return to work, as well.

All these benefits will be squandered if the workers and oppressed people rely on the capitalist state, a state set up to serve the interests of the corporations and the rich, to deliver these benefits to the people for whom they are intended. This is especially so in oppressed cities like Detroit.

Detroit’s poor completely alienated from capitalist state apparatus

In Detroit, years of grinding poverty and austerity imposed by finance capital have deprived hundreds of thousands of people of the resources to know about and take advantage of benefits, on the rare occasion when they are offered. The following statistics bear out the depth of poverty and lack of accessibility from any basic resources for tens of thousands of Detroiters.

• In Detroit, 40% of the population has no access to any type of internet, 57% lack a high-speed connection, and 70% of school-aged children have no connection at home.

• A 2011 report noted that 47% of Detroiters were functionally illiterate. In 2020, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held that Detroit schools deprive their students of basic access to literacy.

• The median household income for Detroiters in 2018 was $31,283 compared to $61,973 nationally.

The effect of this lack of online access and basic literacy among Detroit’s poor means that even when grandiose programs are announced, those who could benefit the most are not in a position to take advantage of them.

• While Detroit’s Black community suffered some of the highest COVID rates in the state, only 34.5% of Detroiters have been vaccinated compared to 54.5% of the statewide population.

• As of January 2020, 11,297 homes lacked water service. Despite a plan being announced to restore service after the pandemic hit in March 2020, in fact there were only 1,250 water restorations as of May 17, 2021.

• Between 2011 and 2015, one in four properties in Detroit was foreclosed on for unpaid property taxes by the Wayne County treasurer.

• A survey conducted in 2019, found that of the 25,000 homeowners behind on paying their property taxes, 55% were unaware of the Homeowner Property Tax Assistance Program tax exemption, a program which exempts families earning less than $26,780 per year from paying any property taxes. And in 2017, only 197 families benefitted from the $760 million in federal hardest hit funds given the state to stop foreclosures. Instead, $380 million of the funds were diverted to contractors to tear down homes in a program laced with corruption.

Let the workers and community run things

One of the aspects of the Coronavirus Relief Bill is that it is expected to provide $10 billion for governments across Michigan: $4.4 billion for local governments plus another $5 billion for the state. The City of Detroit will be receiving $826.7 million. These funds must be spent by 2024 or be returned to the federal government.

The people must organize to make sure these funds aren’t squandered as they too often are in the capitalist United States, diverted to crony contractors and nonprofits. Instead, these funds should be used to set up community centers in every neighborhood of cities like Detroit, staffed and run by residents from the communities they serve.

The centers should have computer stations, and aides trained in helping individuals learn about and get access to all benefits they are entitled to. They should sponsor literacy classes. They should employ workers who go out into the community every day, to make sure those who are homebound are reached out to.

The workers and community members staffing these centers should be from the communities they are serving where they are known by their neighbors. They should take stock of basic items like access to electricity, heat and safe non-lead-poisoned water, so families are not afraid to report the lack of basic necessities for fear of having their children taken away.

They should also make sure that undocumented workers, who often are afraid to request aid for fear of deportation, get the services they need regardless of their so-called “residency status.”

Each center should include a health clinic, staffed by doctors, nurses and medical students who live in the community and can provide holistic and environmentally sensitive healthcare that really meets people’s needs.

Cuba shows the way

A model for community-based services can be found in socialist Cuba. An article by Ronn Pineo published in the Journal of Developing Societies described Cuba’s community-based health care system. As early as 1984, Cuba began implementation of its “one doctor plus one nurse team” approach — called Basic Health Teams — with each team unit caring for 80 to 150 families. The healthcare teams live in the communities that they serve so that they can better understand the local health issues.

The doctor/nurse/public health official teams are supported, in turn, by local Group Health Teams, which meet regularly to scout for common issues facing the populations they serve, keeping very careful records of their findings and reporting to the Ministry of Public Health.

Rather than waiting for people to get sick and come into doctors’ offices — the common practice elsewhere in the world — the Cuban doctor/nurse/public healthcare worker groups spend their afternoons walking about their assigned districts, medical bags in hand, dropping in unannounced on the homes of those living in the communities. As a result, they are in a position to notice medical conditions of the people they serve before most afflictions can grow to become too serious. The teams use their house calls as opportunities to remind residents to take their medications — supplied free or at very low price-controlled costs — to exercise more and usually quiz their patients closely about their daily diets.

Demand worker/community control the of relief funds

For the Coronavirus Relief Bill to really make a dent in poverty, hunger and homelessness, it will be up to workers and oppressed people to organize to demand control of the funds to ensure they serve the people for whom they are supposed to be intended. We cannot leave it to the capitalist state, an organ for repression of the people on behalf of the corporate elite, to do the job.

Ultimately, the only way to take the vast wealth of U.S. capitalism, produced by the working class and stolen by the bosses, is to overthrow this rotten system and replace it with a socialist system where the needs of the people in the United States and worldwide could easily be met.