Theoretical and Practical Self-Determination of Indigenous Nations in the Soviet Union

By Nolan Long

Introduction: Indigeneity in the Soviet Union

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was home to huge swaths of nationalities, including numerous Indigenous nations, many of which were located in Siberia. The Russian Empire, which preceded the Soviet Union, engaged in the systematic oppression of all minority nationalities, while promoting Great Russian nationalism. [1] As a result, it was a prime issue for the Bolsheviks to address national woes and relations. The Leninist approach to nationalities enshrined the equality of nations, opposed nationalism, and supported the unconditional right to self-determination. This right bore a special class character; in essence, the working and exploited classes of Indigenous nations gained the right to self-determination, not the ruling classes. The practical policies of the Soviets largely lined up with their theoretical outlaying, suggesting good faith on the part of the state towards the Indigenous peoples of the USSR.

One aspect of the Soviet approach to nationalities is that indigeneity, as such, was not expressly considered. While Indigenous nations were, in some cases, afforded special privileges, [2] Indigenous groups were firstly seen as minority nationalities, not as Indigenous nationalities. But it was because of the positive Soviet policy toward minority nationalities that Indigenous rights were, in some sense inadvertently, protected. The Soviet approach to national self-determination allowed Indigenous groups in the Soviet Union to flourish and experience a relatively high quality of living and independence, despite the lack of direct recognition of that indigeneity.

Indigenous groups in the Russian SFSR existed primarily in the North and the Far East. [3] Under the policy of the Russian Empire, the Indigenous peoples of these lands were negatively affected by the tsarist government. They were subjected to European diseases, resource extraction, settler colonialism, and induced alcoholism. [4] Contrastingly, the Soviet policy towards Indigenous groups was based on development, socialism, and the right of nations to self-determination.  This essay deals with Soviet Indigenous groups generally while occasionally looking at the Yakut for specificity. The Sakha/Yakut are an Indigenous group in Siberia who, during the Soviet era, maintained their ancient cultural practices (such as reindeer breeding) while also industrially developing under Soviet policy. [5] The Yakut had their own autonomous region, which allowed them to maintain their own culture. [6] Soviet policy stated that Indigenous groups with a population over 50,000 were to be recognized as ethnic minorities, rather than Indigenous as such. [7] However, the Indigenous groups with populations over this threshold (including the Yakut) were allowed to assemble into ASSRs with the right to self-determination. [8] The Soviet approach was complex due to this mutual recognition of the right of nations to self-determination, and the lack of recognition of the status of certain Indigenous groups. This dichotomy necessitates a study into the theoretical policy of the Bolsheviks.

The Theoretical Marxist-Leninist Approach to Nationalities and Self-Determination

In 1914, V.I. Lenin wrote, “self-determination of nations means the political separation of these nations from alien national bodies, and the formation of an independent national state.” [9] It is undeniable that the Soviet conceptions of nations and self-determination differed significantly from the Western ones. [10] J.V. Stalin added to this definition: “the right to self-determination means that only the nation itself has the right to determine its destiny, that no one has the right forcibly to interfere in the life of that nation, to destroy its schools and other institutions, to violate its habits and customs, to repress its language, or curtail its rights.” [11] This conception mapped out the later Soviet practice, which allowed for the political independence of Finland and the Baltic states shortly after the Russian Revolution, even while the Western nations opposed Soviet support for self-determination. [12]

Western opposition to the self-determination of nations, in the Soviet sense, was opposition to the emancipation of Indigenous and minority nations from tsarist rule, as well as opposition to socialist sovereignty. Gerald Taiaiake Alfred argues that the Western model of sovereignty is incompatible with Indigenous governance methods/structures. Indigenous governance is traditionally without absolute authority, hierarchy, or classism. [13] In comparison, the Soviet model of sovereignty, derived from its theory of nations and the right to self-determination, seems to be more compatible with Indigenous society and governance, given its tendency towards class abolition.

But while Finland, the Baltic states, and others gained their independence on the basis of Soviet support for self-determination, none of the many Indigenous nations did. Whether this is because the Bolsheviks opposed the rights of Indigenous nations to secession, or because these nations did not want to secede, is undeniably a debated topic. However, the evidence seems to show that Indigenous groups (at least their previously exploited classes) supported the new government. For example, communists were at work in the Yakutia working-class and peasantry. [14] So, while they did not become independent, the Indigenous nations generally seem to have been in support of the new Russian Soviet Socialist state nonetheless.

The Leninist approach recognized the necessity of nations to be able to pursue their own paths of development and to protect their own cultures.  This doctrine was derived from two related sources: fighting Great Russian nationalism [15] and adhering to proletarian internationalism. [16] Great Russian nationalism was that of the dominating nationality, of the ruling class of the Russian Empire. As the Bolsheviks believed in the equality of nations, [17] they believed in the necessity of fighting this nationalism in tandem with their struggle against Russian tsarism and capitalism. Proletarian internationalism is the belief that the working classes of all nations should share a sense of brotherhood in their mutual struggles against their respective ruling classes. Resultingly, Lenin believed it was in the interests of the Great Russian proletariat to struggle against the oppression that their bourgeoisie imposed upon minority nations. [18] “The Leninist position is made up of two intersecting tendencies: an internationalist outlook, and a support for the right to self-determination.” [19]

The Bolshevik leaders said relatively little about indigeneity. Rather, they focused on the ‘national question,’ and thus viewed Indigenous nations as minority nationalities in most cases. Consequently, the Soviet Indigenous policy was bound up in the national policy. Lenin did not say whether Indigenous groups should receive special status, but he “asserted the absolute, unconditional right of peoples to self-determination, including secession from a future socialist state.” [20] Stalin did not say whether Indigenous groups should receive political independence, but said that all minority nationalities (thus inclusive of Indigenous groups) have the right “to arrange its life on the basis of autonomy…[and] the right to complete secession.” [21] This silence on the question of Indigeneity is at least partially attributable to the fact that the Russian Revolution and the Bolshevik Party existed well before the modern centrality of Indigenous rights and politics on national and global stages. Nonetheless, the Soviet approach to national self-determination allowed indigenous groups in the Soviet Union to experience cultural development and protection, and levels of independence unparalleled in the Western world.

The Question of Class

Both Lenin and Stalin made it clear that the right to self-determination had a class character. Lenin wrote that the proletarian approach to self-determination “supports the bourgeoisie only in a certain direction, but never coincides with the bourgeoisie’s policy.” [22] The Russian proletariat, he said, should support the right of the oppressed nationalities to form their own state, as this right opposes Great Russian nationalism. [23] Stalin also made it clear that the right to self-determination does not mean that the socialist state should support every aspect of that national independence, at least when its independence puts it under bourgeois rule. [24] Bedford offers a concise summation: “whether support for the cultural aspirations of an ethnic group is in effect supporting the Indigenous bourgeoisie against the proletariat, or is serving to further the revolutionary struggle is the definitive question.” [25]

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The Indigenous nations of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union did, of course, have class relations, though they were quite different from those of the rest of the country. “Soviet authorities admit that the working class in Yakutia was few in numbers and contained almost no industrial proletariat.” [26] The Soviets, thus, had to consider the question of class differently in the Indigenous nations than in the non-Indigenous ones. Firstly, the principle of self-determination had to be analyzed; it was found that the workers and other exploited classes of Indigenous Yakuts were in support of the Russian Revolution. [27] However, the ruling classes of Yakutia, including the kulaks, were “stronger in Yakutia than elsewhere in the Soviet Union.” [28] Given these class conditions, the Bolsheviks found that self-determination belonged to the proletariat rather than the bourgeoisie, and aided the exploited Yakut classes in throwing off their ruling classes over a long period of time. Soviet intervention in Yakutia was not based on a policy of eliminating the Indigenous culture, but on removing the bourgeoisie from their culture.

Stalin addressed the question of culture and nationality: “the unity of a nation diminishes…owing to the growing acuteness of class struggle.” [29] The common culture between the proletariat and bourgeoisie of a nation is weakened by the development of capitalism. This evidences the Bolshevik claim to eliminating bourgeois cultural elements from Indigenous nations while not attacking the culture or people as a whole. For example, Shamans in Yakutia, identified as part of the ruling classes of that nation, were “chastised” as “being responsible for the ‘backwardness and ignorance’ of Indigenous communities.” [30] As such, given the material conditions of the Indigenous nations of the Soviet Union, self-determination took a proletarian character rather than a bourgeois one.

The Reality of Indigenous Self-Determination in the Soviet Union

As previously mentioned, the Soviet government put certain structures in place to ensure the special rights of Indigenous nations/individuals. “For example, if there were regions for hunting or fishing, those territories went to the Indigenous people right away on a natural basis without any constraints.” [31] The Committee of the North was a Bolshevik Party organ that “persuaded the Soviet government to extend certain special privileges to northern peoples,” including exemption from taxation and conscription. [32] Indeed, while Indigenous groups underwent some degree of change, [33] such as a ‘proletarianization,’ they were largely allowed to maintain their cultures and regular ways of life. “In the northlands, the indigenous people continued to be nomadic, everywhere the peasants depended largely on hunting and fur-trapping.” [34] The Indigenous Dargin people of the Caucasus “preserved their traditional Sufi-influenced Islamic practices and endured less government pressure [to adhere to atheism].” [35]

While the Soviet government attempted to include Indigenous nations in the worker culture of the USSR, their relatively lax approach to Indigenous culture demonstrates some level of good faith. Furthermore, Davis and Alice Bartels argue that “all national and ethnic groups were radically changed as a result of Soviet state policy,” [36] not just Indigenous groups. Industrialization, collectivization, educational opening, and the liberation of women were new and radical concepts for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous groups. [37] As such, these policies were not aimed at otherizing one group, or anything alike. Rather, such policies were aimed at national development and socialist construction.

The Soviets outwardly supported the cultural development and autonomy of Indigenous nations in more explicit ways. “Soviet policy [was] to encourage the development of national cultures and preservation of the native languages.” [38] Samir Amin writes that “the Soviet system brought changes for the better. It gave…autonomous districts, established over huge territories, the right to their cultural and linguistic expression.” [39] This cultural and linguistic expression included “the creation of written forms of [Indigenous] languages and educational programs in northern languages.” [40] The Soviet policy towards Indigenous groups was not one of assimilation, but allowance for autonomy (derived from self-determination) in the realm of culture.

Indigenous groups also had political rights which were reflective of their right to self-determination. “Stalin specified that each nationality should man its own courts, administrative bodies, economic agencies and government by its own local native peoples and conduct them in its own language.” [41] Lenin likewise argued that it was of great importance to create autonomous regions in Russia. [42] Soviet practice largely lined up with Leninist theory. Directly after the October Revolution, the Bolshevik Party released the Declaration on the Rights of Peoples of Russia, “which guaranteed the right to self-determination and the abolition of religious and ethnic discrimination.” [43] Skachko, an academic expert on Siberian Indigenous groups, wrote in 1930 that the Soviet state did not intend to keep Indigenous peoples “as helpless charges of the state in special areas reserved for them and isolated from the rest of the world…On the contrary, the government’s goal is their all-around cultural and national development and their participation as equals.” [44]

Conditions were not perfect for Indigenous nations in the Soviet Union; they experienced some drawbacks as a result of Soviet policies, sometimes due to the lack of recognition of indigeneity. “In 1917, the Yakut/Sakha people constituted 87.1% of the province’s total population.” [45] However, by the end of the Soviet era, the Indigenous people made up only 33% of the population. [46] Beyond the settlement of Indigenous land by non-Indigenous peoples, another drawback was that traditional Indigenous occupations had been “disrupted by industrial and resource development” by the late 1980s. [47] This is, however, at least partially attributable to the fact that Mikhail Gorbachev was not a Leninist, meaning he did not follow the preceding Soviet approach to nationalities.

The Soviet government “established a system to transfer capital from the rich regions of the Union (western Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, later the Baltic countries) to the developing regions of the east and south.” [48] By providing aid for the newly autonomous Indigenous republics, the Soviets were expressly supporting their development. Beyond this aid, Indigenous political systems were manned by members of the nation itself. The Soviet policy of korenization (nativization) “sought to fill key management positions with Indigenous representatives.” [49] This policy was implemented because “leaders of the governing Bolshevik Party considered Great Russian chauvinism as a major impediment to economic and social development because it turned a blind eye to the national/social aspiration of the many peoples and nationalities in the Soviet Union.” [50] This policy allowed Indigenous nations to develop on their own terms while remaining within the Union, allowing them to express their self-determination without needing to exercise their right to secession.

While it is true that the Indigenous nations did not secede from the Soviet Union, two facts remain that prove that the Soviet state supported the independence of these nations; firstly, these nations were allowed to organize into Autonomous Republics which exercised a large amount of self-governing, even relative to the Soviet state and the Republic states. [51] Second, these nations still (at least theoretically) had the right to self-determination. [52] It is arguable, then, that the Indigenous nations of the USSR merely never exercised the right to cessation due to their support for the Soviet system/government.

Conclusion

In the capitalist Russian Federation, Indigenous peoples are significantly worse off than under the USSR. Russia has not yet adopted the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, [53] nor the ILO Convention 169. [54] Contrastingly, the Soviet Union was often at the forefront of international efforts to recognize Indigenous-centred issues, including the push to recognize cultural genocide in UN documents. [55] While Indigenous groups are formally protected by the Russian Constitution, the enforcement of these protections is often inadequate, leaving these groups in a precarious position where unemployment and poverty rates are high. [56] Whereas the Soviets funded the education of Indigenous languages, the Russian Federation now funds Russian-language schools in these regions, seriously threatening Indigenous languages. [57] Especially in view of the experiences of Indigenous peoples in the modern Russian Federation, the Soviet policies towards Indigenous nations continue to be vindicated.

In their theoretical and practical approaches, the Soviet state was relatively open, egalitarian, and accommodating to the Indigenous groups that lived within its borders. Relative at least to the Western nations, the Soviet Union, existing only until 1991, was consistently measures ahead in its policies towards indigeneity. [58] While not explicitly recognizing the concept of indigeneity in all Soviet Indigenous groups, the state nonetheless provided them with sufficient autonomy for their cultures to be preserved and developed. While imperfect, the Soviet approach was admirable in its own time, to say the very least.

Endnotes 

[1] Sidorova, Evgeniia, and Rice, Roberta. “Being Indigenous in an Unlikely Place: Self-Determination in the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1920-1991).” p. 5.

[2] Sulyandziga, Pavel. “We Need Two Keys.”

[3] Bartels, Davis A., and Bartels, Alice L. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. p. ix.

[4] Ibid., p. 16-22.

[5] Ibid., p. x.

[6] Ibid., p. 1.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Lenin, V.I. The Right of Nations to Self-Determination. p. 4.

[10] Goshulak, Glenn. “Soviet and Post-Soviet Challenges to the Study of Nation and State Building.” p. 494.

[11] Stalin, J.V. Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. p. 18.

[12] Anderson, Edgar. “Finnish-Baltic Relations, 1918-1940.” p. 52.

[13] Alfred, Gerald Taiaiake. “‘Sovereignty’: An Inappropriate Concept.” p. 323.

[14] Kirby, Stuart E. “Communism in Yakutia – The First Decade.” p. 29.

[15] Lenin, V.I. The Right of Nations to Self-Determination. p. 48.

[16] Ibid., p. 91.

[17] Stalin, J.V. Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. p. 18.

[18] Lenin, V.I. The Right of Nations to Self-Determination. p. 31.

[19] Bedford, David. “Marxism and the Aboriginal Question: The Tragedy of Progress.” p. 108.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Stalin, J.V. Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. p. 18.

[22] Lenin, V.I. The Right of Nations to Self-Determination. p. 25-26.

[23] Lenin, V.I. The Right of Nations to Self-Determination. p. 29-30.

[24] Stalin, J.V. Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. p. 18.

[25] Bedford, David. “Marxism and the Aboriginal Question: The Tragedy of Progress.” p. 109.

[26] Kirby, Stuart E. “Communism in Yakutia – The First Decade.” p. 29.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Ibid., p. 39.

[29] Stalin, J.V. Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. p. 35.

[30] Sidorova, Evgeniia, and Rice, Roberta. “Being Indigenous in an Unlikely Place: Self-Determination in the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1920-1991).” p. 5.

[31] Sulyandziga, Pavel. “We Need Two Keys.”

[32] Bartels, Davis A., and Bartels, Alice L. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. p. 30-31.

[33] First Peoples Worldwide. “Who are the Indigenous Peoples of Russia?”

[34] Kirby, Stuart E. “Communism in Yakutia – The First Decade.” p. 36.

[35] Eden, Jeff. God Save the USSR: Soviet Muslims and the Second World War.

[36] Bartels, Davis A., and Bartels, Alice L. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. p. 4.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. p. 51.

[39] Amin, Samir. Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism. p. 29.

[40] Bartels, Davis A., and Bartels, Alice L. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. p. 5.

[41] Ibid., p. 8.

[42] Bedford, David. “Marxism and the Aboriginal Question: The Tragedy of Progress.” p. 108.

[43] Bartels, Davis A., and Bartels, Alice L. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. p. 29.

[44] Ibid., 30-31.

[45] Sidorova, Evgeniia, and Rice, Roberta. “Being Indigenous in an Unlikely Place: Self-Determination in the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1920-1991).” p. 7.

[46] Ibid., 8.

[47] Bartels, Davis A., and Bartels, Alice L. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. p. xii.

[48] Amin, Samir. Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism. p. 29.

[49] Sidorova, Evgeniia, and Rice, Roberta. “Being Indigenous in an Unlikely Place: Self-Determination in the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (1920-1991).” p. 6.

[50] Kovalevich, Dmitri. “Ukrainian Nationalists Have a Long History of Anti-Semitism which the Soviet Union Tried to Combat.”

[51] Russian Federation’s Constitution of 1918. Art. 11.

[52] Russian Federation’s Constitution of 1918. Art. 6.

[53] Representatives of the Republic of Sakha. “An Appeal from the Representatives of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) to the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).”

[54] First Peoples Worldwide. “Who are the Indigenous Peoples of Russia?”

[55] Mako, Shramiran. “Cultural Genocide and Key International Instruments: Framing the Indigenous Experience.” p. 183.

[56] First Peoples Worldwide. “Who are the Indigenous Peoples of Russia?”

[57] First Peoples Worldwide. “Who are the Indigenous Peoples of Russia?”

[58] Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. p. 295-296.

Bibliography

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Amin, Samir. Russia and the Long Transition from Capitalism to Socialism. Monthly Review Press, 2016.

Anderson, Edgar. “Finnish-Baltic Relations, 1918-1940: An Appraisal.” Scandinavian Studies, Vol. 54, No. 1, 1982, pp. 51-72. jstor.org/stable/40918186?seq=2

Bartels, Davis A., and Alice L. Bartels. When the North was Red: Aboriginal Education in Soviet Siberia. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995.

Bedford, David. “Marxism and the Aboriginal Question: The Tragedy of Progress.” Canadian Journal of Native Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1, 1994, pp. 101-117. cjns.brandonu.ca/wp-content/uploads/14-1-bedford.pdf

Eden, Jeff. God Save the USSR: Soviet Muslims and the Second World War (eBook). Oxford University Press, 2021. doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190076276.003.0001

First Peoples Worldwide. “Who Are the Indigenous Peoples of Russia?” Cultural Survival, 2014. culturalsurvival.org/news/who-are-indigenous-peoples-russia

Goshulak, Glenn. “Soviet and Post-Soviet Challenges to the Study of Nation and State Building.” Ethnicities, Vol. 3, No. 4, 2003, pp. 491-507. jstor.org/stable/23889868

Kirby, E. Stuart. “Communism in Yakutia – the First Decade.” Slavic Studies, Vol. 25, 1980, pp. 27-42. eprints.lib.hokudai.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2115/5096/1/KJ00000113076.pdf

Kovalevich, Dmitri. “Ukrainian Nationalists Have a Long History of Anti-Semitism which the Soviet Union Tried to Combat.” Monthly Review, 2022. mronline.org/2022/10/21/ukrainian-nationalists-have-long-history-of-anti-semitism-which-the-soviet-union-tried-to-combat/

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Szymanski, Albert. Human Rights in the Soviet Union. Zed Books, 1984.

Capitalist Urbanization, Climate Change, and the Need for Sponge Cities

[Pictured: State-level pilot district of Sponge City in Yuelai, Chongqing.]

By Tina Landis

Republished from Liberation School.

According to the United Nations Population Fund’s 2009 report, 2008 was the first time in history that over 50 percent of the world’s population resided in cities instead of rural areas. Because of the different ways countries define cities, others date the qualitative shift to as recently as 2021 [1]. Regardless, across the spectrum it’s undisputed we now live in an “urban age” and, as such, transforming the relationship between cities and the natural world is essential for climate change adaptation and mitigation. The international capitalist institutions like the World Bank that are increasingly taking up the issue of cities and climate change can’t explain the various factors behind urbanization nor can they pose real solutions to its impact on or relationship to climate catastrophes. Cities consume 78 percent of the world’s energy resources and produce 60 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2022 UN Habitat report [2]. Under the capitalist model, urban planning lacks a holistic approach, leaving human well being and ecological needs as an afterthought, which will continue to have a degenerative effect on the environment and global climate.

Marx and Engels lived during a time in which capitalist urbanization was a nascent phenomenon concentrated mostly in some European cities, like Manchester, the English city about which Friedrich Engels wrote his first and classic book, The Condition of the Working Class in England. Engels demonstrates how the “great town” of Manchester, the first major manufacturing center in England, was great only for capitalist profits. The concentration of capital required for the invention and adoption of machinery outproduced independent handicraft and agricultural production, forcing both into the industrial proletariat of the city. There, they had to work for the capitalists, whose wages were so low they could, if they were lucky, live in overcrowded houses and neighborhoods just outside the city limits. Because the city was produced chaotically for capitalist profits, no attention was given to accompanying environmental impacts [3]. As the masses were driven from their land into the urban factories, the ancestral ties to the land and ecological knowledge of how to live sustainably on that land was lost.

It was not the “industrial revolution” that produced the new sources of power needed for machinery, but the need for new sources of power that produced the industrial revolution. For the machinery required more powerful and reliable sources of energy than wind or the water wheel, animals or humans could provide. They were replaced at first by coal and the steam engine, “whose power was entirely under man’s control, that was mobile and a means of locomotion, that was urban and not, like the water wheel, rural, that permitted production to be concentrated in towns” [4]. Capital was thus not bound to any particular place and free to move and establish new “great towns” wherever they could accumulate the greatest profits, and with this came increasing detrimental effects on people and the planet.

Today’s crisis

We see the result of centuries of unfettered capitalist development in the climate crisis today. Atmospheric rivers, bomb cyclones, hurricanes, heat waves, and drought are all becoming more frequent and extreme with climate change. This summer, with the onset of El Nino, these extremes are amplifying [5].

The first week of July 2023 was the hottest week on Earth ever recorded, with one-third of the United States under excessive-heat advisories. Sweltering heat domes brought triple-digit temperatures across the northern hemisphere from the U.S. to Europe and Asia, while countries in South America experienced record-high temperatures during their winter months [6]. Annually, around 1,500 people die of heat-related deaths in the U.S. States, a count that is likely low since many extreme-heat deaths aren’t documented as such. As of early August, extreme heat in the United States had killed at least 147 people in just five counties in 2023.

As air and water temperatures increase globally, the frequency of extreme weather increases. In the 1980s, billion-dollar disasters occurred every 60 to 120 days on average. In the last decade, they have occurred every 20 to 30 days [7]. Intensifying extreme weather includes more extreme flooding and extreme drought, as the air and water currents globally are becoming destabilized due to the increasing heat in the atmosphere.

Cities were, generally speaking, built near rivers or coastlines. Often, wetlands and floodplains were drained and blockaded with dams and levees to direct water away from population centers. As flooding and drought increase with climate change, these systems are creating even more detrimental conditions in the short and long term.

The U.S. has experienced an urban flooding event every two to three days for the past 25 years, costing $850 billion since 2000. Heavier rains are causing flooding in many parts of the globe, and the eastern U.S. has seen a 70 percent increase in heavy rain events annually [8]. Sea level rise also contributes to flooding events. While the 6.5-inch increase in sea level in the United States may seem minimal, this increase impedes gravity-fed drainage from working during storms and high tides, bringing water into the streets.

Capitalist cities and the surrounding urban sprawl are major contributors to climate change and environmental degradation. The majority of the world’s cities today were built for profit and speculation in mind, with little to no consideration given to negative impacts on either ecology or humanity. They were premised on the idea that nature could be controlled and dominated instead of the proven conception that construction should work collaboratively with natural cycles. Vast hardscapes—sidewalks, roads, parking lots, buildings—and gray infrastructure that channels water away as it falls, places these urban centers at odds with biodiversity and the natural cycling of water through the landscape. Green spaces that are created within urban environments are often highly managed areas separate from the rest of the city, filled with non-native ornamental plants and thirsty grasses that require intensive irrigation, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides, while providing little to no benefit to native species of birds, insects, and others.

With climate change, the existing city-structures are becoming increasingly disastrous for all residents. The heat island effect that adds more warming to the atmosphere has accelerated deadly implications as the climate warms, making heat waves and droughts even more severe. Hardscapes, such as pavement, buildings, and rooftops, as well as bare earth, absorb solar radiation and continue to radiate heat long after the sun has set. Vehicles, air conditioning units, buildings, and industrial facilities also heat the atmosphere.

The heat island effect results in daytime temperatures in urban areas to be 1-7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than temperatures in outlying areas, and nighttime temperatures about 2 to 5 degrees higher [9].

What can be done? China leads the way

To cool and rebalance the climate, we need to not only eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, but also reduce ecological impacts and restore what has been lost.

Just 40 percent tree cover in a city can reduce temperatures by up to 9 degrees F [10]. Trees and other vegetation not only provide shade from the sun but reduce surrounding air temperatures. Plant leaves are like miniature solar panels and transform solar radiation into sugars and oxygen. Unlike human made structures, plants do not add heat to the surrounding atmosphere; they actually cool the atmosphere when they get hot by releasing water vapor

Water also has a cooling effect on the surroundings due to evaporation. When water bodies are integrated within the landscape they not only cool air temperatures, but also supply hydration to surrounding soil and vegetation, and recharge groundwater. Global heat dynamics regulated by water are between 75-95 percent, so creating more space for water throughout landscapes and urban areas is a key climate change mitigation tool.

Wetlands, floodplains, and bioswales act as flood prevention giving water space to flow and be absorbed into the ground when heavy rains fall, unlike concrete structures that increase the power of water and cause flooding downstream or down the coast from where these structures exist. By allowing water to pool within the landscape, rather than channeling it away into storm drains, rivers and oceans as it falls, makes water available during times of drought. Gray infrastructure flood control mechanisms often fail, with greater frequently in the U.S., which received a “D” on its Infrastructure Report Card from the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2021.

These increasing challenges from climate change are happening globally, but one country in particular is taking comprehensive action to address how urban areas impact the environment and how climate impacts are demanding more resilience in urban planning.

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China is one of the countries most severely impacted by floods globally due to geographic and environmental conditions, as well as experiencing increasing droughts and heat waves. To minimize the impacts of climate change, China has implemented their sponge cIty model that aims to retrofit and create 30 cities by 2030 as climate resilient population centers. At a cost of $1 trillion, or around $33.3 billion each, transforming these cities will save billions in annual flood recovery costs and save thousands of lives [11]. For comparison, the U.S. government spends $1 trillion annually just on military expenditures. Imagine what we could accomplish if those funds went to things like sponge cities that improve our lives and the health of the planet!

Sponge cities utilize green infrastructure so that surfaces act as a sponge absorbing water. They integrate space for water to collect such as wetlands and bioswales, create vegetative cover and trees throughout including green roofs and vegetation integrated into building structures, and porous pavement and roads so water can infiltrate soil and catchments underneath to be available during dry times. These cities have areas integrated throughout that have a dual purpose, such as parks adjacent to water bodies that can be enjoyed in dry times, which then act as wetland areas during heavy rains. These sponge cities can deal with four times the amount of rainwater than a normal city, reducing flooding by 50 percent. These cities, when complete, can absorb and reuse 70 percent of rainfall.

How the sponge city movement emerged

China, over the past few decades, has seen major achievements in development. From a mainly agrarian society at the time of the 1949 revolution, China has seen the rapid industrial growth and development of urban centers and has made great achievements in overcoming the legacy underdevelopment imposed by colonial and imperialist powers that the country was plagued with for centuries. At the time of the revolution, extreme poverty, floods and famine plagued the country.

Since that time, China has made major advances, improving the quality of life of the population. In 2020, China eradicated the last vestiges of extreme poverty through the mobilization of Communist Party cadres to the countryside to investigate the needs of the people and bring services and economic opportunities to those most in need [12]. This process which began in 1949 has lifted 850 million out of dire poverty, an unparalleled achievement for humanity.

Chinese culture has historically had a deep connection with nature and connection to ancestral lands. Through rapid development and misunderstanding of the environmental impacts, Chinese cities, as with most cities of the world, have created a separation of the people from nature.

Renowned ecologist and landscape architect, Kongjian Yu, has been the driving force behind the sponge city movement within China and globally, taking inspiration from traditional Chinese irrigation systems [13]. Yu recognized the shortcomings of China’s development path and spearheaded a new way of looking at cities – “big feet” versus “little feet” aesthetics and negative planning [14].

Little feet aesthetics references the debilitating foot binding practices of imperial China that viewed unnaturally small feet on women as beautiful. Yu compares this practice to modern China’s urban development, which often mimics western architecture and imperial Chinese styles with grand plaza and parks that do not serve the general population or ecological needs. These urban parks integrate exotic plants requiring intense irrigation and other inputs with little to no ecological or human benefits.

Yu instead promotes big feet aesthetics, creating green spaces throughout cities using native plants for all populations to interact with in their daily lives that integrate urban areas into the ecosystem rather than inserting a manufactured version of nature for aesthetics only. His argument for big feet aesthetics is to bring people and nature back into coexistence for the well-being of all, which also improves biodiversity and air and water quality, and cools air temperatures. These methods also alleviate flooding and drought, which are increasing with climate change.

Using big-feet aesthetics, Yu has led the eco-city and sponge city movements in China and leads similar projects across the globe. He first made his appeals to local leaders within China and later won over President Xi Jinping to the need to marry development with ecological sustainability. The need to address environmental impacts received broad support within China’s Communist Party which included the goal of building an ecological civilization in their constitution in 2012 [15]. Sponge cities are one of many tools that China is utilizing to achieve that goal [16].

How sponge cities aid in climate change mitigation and adaptation

Yu’s promotion of eco-cities and sponge cities stems from the concept of negative planning, which has its roots in the early Chinese practice of feng-shui and focuses on urban growth based on ecological infrastructure. Rather than a city with green space included here and there, Yu’s eco-city model looks more like a natural area with urban infrastructure woven in.

It is crucial with increasing droughts and floods for urban areas to allow space for water to sit rather than trying to drain it away, which in the end gives water more power and creates flooding in other areas. Slow water systems are being embraced globally as populations experience the negative impacts of gray infrastructure and rains become more intense and erratic.

While water consumption and waste must also be addressed, particularly regarding industrial agriculture and lawns—the single most irrigated crop in the United States—we must also shift away from gray infrastructure to green. Damming of rivers and draining of floodplains and wetlands, not only decimate river ecosystems and harm biodiversity, but inhibit the recharging of groundwater resources. Aquifers are being drained at an alarming rate and as the world warms, water resources are becoming scarcer [17].

Urban development, the creation of hardscapes, and the damming of rivers only continues this trend of a drying landscape, blocking natural water cycling that replenishes groundwater and supports biodiversity.

Yu’s projects aim to work with nature instead of against it, shifting past practices of creating parks as ornamental spaces to ones that mimic wild landscapes filled with native plant species. The use of native plants is crucial to conserve water resources in dry times by greatly reducing or eliminating the need for irrigation and creating a more climate resilient system. Birds, insects and other wildlife benefit from native plant species for food and shelter, increasing overall biodiversity, which in turn increases ecosystem resilience.

A few examples of how detrimental the introduction of non-native plants can be are the example of California and Hawaii. The recent wildfires in Maui were not fueled solely by climate change-induced drought, but also due to the introduction of non-native grasses for livestock feed that dry out quickly and become tinder during drier months [18]. The same is true in California, where early colonizers replaced perennial grasses (which have deep roots and stay green even through the dry season) with annual grasses for livestock feed, which die in early summer, drying out soil and greatly increasing drought and fire risk [19].

The vegetation and bodies of water integrated throughout sponge cities also addresses the heat island effect, lowers air temperatures, and improves air and water quality.

If left to thrive, vegetation captures carbon from the atmosphere aiding in climate change mitigation. Trees absorb carbon dioxide and transpire water vapor and microbes that seed cloud formation and maintain a healthy, balanced small water cycle bringing moderate rainfall rather than deluges. Trees also transpire chemicals that are beneficial to human health, immunity, mental health, and stress reduction. They also act as windbreaks and shelter for animals during storms.

Conclusion

Sponge cities are a crucial tool to address climate change and minimize the negative impacts of urban areas on the overall health of the planet and its inhabitants. Other nature-based solutions such as reforestation of native tree species, a return to agro-ecological methods for food production, and restoration of marine habitats are also key to our survival. None of these solutions will be profitable for corporations to implement, which is why there is a lack of widespread implementation of sponge cities outside of communist China. Only under a socialist planned economy, like that of China, can real solutions to climate change be implemented on a mass scale, as resources are directed to projects not according to the needs of profit, but to those of humanity and the planet.

Tina Landis is the author of the book Climate Solutions Beyond Capitalism, for which Liberation School has a study and discussion guide. Additionally, they host a 4-part video course Landis taught on the relationship between climate change, capitalism, and socialism.

References

[1] United Nations Population Fund,Annual Report 2008(New York: UNFP, 2009), 20. Availablehere; Megha Mukim and Mark Roberts (Eds.),Thriving: Making Cities Green, Resilient, and Inclusive in a Changing Climate(Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 2023), 75. Availablehere.
[2] Nicola Tollin, James Vener, Maria Pizzorni, et. al. (2022).Urban Climate Action: The Urban Content of the NCDs: Global Review 2022(Nairobi: United Nations Human Settlements Programme, 2022), 6. Availablehere.
[3] Friedrich Engels,The Condition of the Working Class in England(Oxford: Oxford University Press,1845/2009). Availablehere.
[4] Karl Marx,Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 1): A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1867/1967), 361.
[5] Tina Landis, “Atmospheric Rivers, Weather Whiplash and the Class Struggle,”Liberation News, 14 January 2023. Availablehere; Evan Branan and Tina Landis, “Heat Waves Bake the World: Workers Don’t Have to Bear the Brunt,”Liberation News, 13 July 2023. Availablehere.
[6] Ayesha Tandon, “Record-Breaking 2023 Heat Events Are ‘Not Rare Anymore’ Due to Climate Change,”Carbon Brief, 25 July 2023. Availablehere.
[7] Climate Matters, “Billion-Dollar Disasters in 2022,”Climate Central, 11 October 2022. Availablehere.
[8] Flood Defenders, “America’s Most Frequent and Expensive Disaster.” Availablehere.
[9] Sara Dennis, “Heat Island Effect,”Moody Engineering, 28 September 2022. Availablehere.
[10] Tamara Iungman, Marta Cirach, Federica Marando, et. al. “Cooling Cities Through Urban Green Infrastructure: A Health Impact Assessment of European Cities,”The Lancet401, no. 1076 (2023): 577-589.
[11] Tom Carroll, Sponge Cities: A Solarpunk Future by 2030,”Freethink, 28 April 2022. Availablehere.
[12] Tings Chak, Li Jianhua, and Lilian Zhang, “Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China,”Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, 23 July 2021. Availablehere.
[13] See, for example, Xu Tao, Yu Kongjian, Li Dihua, and Miao Wang, “Assessment and Impact Factor Analysis on Stormwater Regulation and Storage Capacity of Urban Green Space in China and Abroad,”China City Planning Review32, no. 1 (2023): 6-16; Kongian’s website ishere.
[14] Kongjian Yu,Letters to the Leaders of China: Kongjian Yu and the Future of the Chinese City(New York: Terreform, 2018).
[15] The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, “Document: Responding to Climate Change: China’s Policies and Actions,”China Daily, 28 October 2021. Availablehere.
[16] Ken Hammond, “China’s Environmental Problems: Beyond the Propaganda,”Liberation School, 08 December 2020. Availablehere.
[17] Tina Landis, “Colorado River Water Deal: A Bandaid or Real Progress?”Liberation News, 27 May 2023. Availablehere.
[18] Simon Romero and Serge F. Kovaleski, “How Invasive Plants Caused the Maui Fires to Rage,”The New York Times, 15 August 2023. Availablehere.
[19] Masanobu Fukuoka,Sowing Seeds in the Desert: Natural Farming, Global Restoration, and Ultimate Food Security(Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2012).

Canadian Oligarchy: How the Super-Rich Rule "Socialized" Healthcare

By Miranda Schreiber

At the intersection of College St. and University St. in Toronto, six hospitals crowd together over five blocks. Although they are public institutions, most of their various departments are named by both speciality and private donor. In fact, nearly every center for care, research center, ‘wellness gallery,’ and atrium - even the nearby medical school - bears the name of its wealthy Canadian financier. Papered onto bus stops and the temporary barriers around construction sites are hospital fundraising campaigns, sometimes containing the stories of patients who feel particularly served by a given institution. Testaments to the power of private capital are everywhere.

In many ways this philanthropic basis of public healthcare is a virtually unquestioned aspect of the Canadian system, which is partially dependent on sporadic ‘gifts’ of millions of dollars from the highest echelons of the capitalist class. Major hospitals repeatedly characterize such events as generous, rather than reflective of the system that causes much of the sickness they spend their time treating. The Canadian situation is an example of the limits of public services under fundamentally capitalist conditions, the ways that the super-rich rule even ‘socialized’ systems.

Like many other kinds of capitalist infrastructure, the public healthcare system is useful to Canadians. However, it was designed to serve profit, not working people. An institution that has existed since the 1960s, it is easy to forget that it was not a gift from the government, a sign of an enlightened national character, but a concession from the capitalist class. Public healthcare did not simply appear due to a moment of moral clarity on parliament hill, it was demanded.

The history of Canadian medicine reveals this. Capitalist expansion onto Indigenous land led to the state-sanctioned destruction of food systems and smallpox epidemics; Indigenous nations were coerced into signing treaties in the midst of famine, allowing material resources to be expropriated by the settler state. [1] The Canadian government’s refusal to meet basic treaty obligations facilitated the spread of tuberculosis in substandard living conditions on reserves and in residential schools, internment camps where thousands of Indigenous children perished. [2] [3] Since its founding Canada’s existence as a capitalist colony has been contingent on the spread of disease. [4] This was simultaneous with the attempted destruction of Indigenous medicine and healthcare.

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After the first world war, the Canadian settler population became increasingly conscious of class warfare as their economic exploitation accelerated, frightening the capitalist class. “It seems strange now but at the time the possibility of a socialist or communist revolution was a viable threat to the ruling classes everywhere internationally,” says Tyler Shipley, author of Canada and the World. Revolutions in the USSR and Latin America revealed the possibility for working people to seize the means of production. As Alex Birrell explains on the podcast Unmaking Saskatchewan, the rapid spread of infectious disease among settlers led to grassroots organizing for the purposes of establishing public clinics in rural Saskatchewan for the treatment of diseases like tuberculosis. [5] In the 1930s during the depression, farmers who could not pay off medical debts unionized and formed the Farmer’s Labour Party, demanding social security and socialized medicine from the provincial government. [6] Even while farmers faced starvation due to drought, the medical establishment - specifically insurance companies and regulatory bodies representing urban doctors with wealthier patients - resisted public clinics from their inception, fearing a reduction in profits. [7] As Birrell explains on the podcast, “We had to drag the government around and force them to care, force them to act.” The first medicare bill was dramatically diluted by representatives of the medical establishment and commerce, so that “moderates won the battle over what medicare would look like….it was a victory built to be moved to the right.” A more comprehensive medicare plan was rejected in favor of one that placed more power in the hands of physician regulatory boards and industry.

Socialized healthcare in Canada came about at a time of capitalist crisis, as a concession, and so an aberration, of a fundamentally exploitative system that has required human deprivation from its beginning. As Shipley explains, the creation of Canadian healthcare, along with the rest of its social welfare system, stove off revolutionary activity and permitted the social reproduction of labor, offering enough care and security primarily to keep people looking for work. In the sixty years since medicare was passed, this Canadian social security net has been slowly stolen away, as the very forces that resisted public healthcare in the first place have reclaimed the infrastructure they reluctantly handed over to the working class. Over six decades, although more rapidly since the 1980s, the Canadian state has cut back government services and civil service employment while transferring power to private capital in the mass sale of public infrastructure and increases in tax breaks. [8] [9] Public health has been targeted at two ends: in the destruction of the resources that keep people healthy, and the sale of aspects of the healthcare system to private industry. Since 1985, housing and public sector pensions have been consistently clawed back, drug companies have been permitted to monopolize pharmaceutical drugs over generic brands, and thousands of civil service jobs have been eliminated while unemployment insurance has been cut. [10] [11] Grants to advocacy groups supporting the environment, Indigenous people, women, and children have been slashed, and occupational safety training programs have been defunded along with health and welfare grants.  At the same time, the wealthy have received massive tax breaks and government shares in transportation, universities, colleges, and communications have been sold off to private ownership.

The healthcare system is whatever remains after this attempt to maximize surplus profits, which has only hastened in the last several years. This is what explains the absurdly common event in Canadian healthcare in which a person who does not have a house is sent back out into freezing temperatures after receiving a free medical procedure. It clarifies the government decision to offer citizens care for ears but not for eyes, and a free patient-intake interview but not free medicine. There is no moral justification for this with the explanatory power of class analysis.

The story that healthcare makes Canada extraordinary is circulated in the media, in textbooks, and in political rhetoric. Another story we are often told is that people who can’t work but need healthcare are responsible for social misery. Patients are chided for ‘poor lifestyle choices’ and ‘wasting government resources’ by a healthcare system that effectively resents having to treat them. Predominant leaders in healthcare continue to collaborate with the philanthropists who are responsible for increasing homelessness and poverty. These multi-millionaires and billionaires have stolen from the public once through the theft of surplus value and the destruction of the public welfare state, and again in an evasion of just taxation. They donate to hospitals to expedite exploitation, not to end it; it’s just PR and a tax write-off. Representatives of commerce who are price-gouging groceries during a housing crisis like Galon Weston sit on hospital boards, claiming the system. [12] They name every medical building in their image.

Notes

[1] Clearing the Plains pg 24-29 (More in depth chapter 5, chapter 9)

[2] Clearing the Plains pg 27

[3] https://globalnews.ca/news/9432774/saddle-lake-cree-nation-residential-school-investigation-report/

[4] Clearing the Plains pg 24-29 (More in depth chapter 5, chapter 9)

[5] Unmaking Saskatchewan

[6] Ibid

[7] Ibid

[8] https://www.sfu.ca/~mcohen/publications/Polecon/dismantl.pdf

[9] Stephen McBride and John Shields, Dismantling a Nation: Canada and the New World Order (Halifax: Fernwood, 1993), Table 2.4.

[10] Stephen McBride and John Shields, Dismantling a Nation: Canada and the New World Order (Halifax: Fernwood, 1993), Table 2.4.

[11] Federal Budgets 1985 to 1995; Canadian Council on Social Development, Canada's Social Programs are in Trouble, (Ottawa 1989);

[12] https://sunnybrook.ca/team/member.asp?m=948&page=4071

Chile 50 Years Later: Imperialism's Blight Still Reverberates

By Alex Ackerman

September 11, 2023 marked the 50th anniversary of the devastating US-backed coup in Chile that resulted in the death of President Salvador Allende and the installation of fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet. The years that followed under the regime were marked by state-sanctioned disappearances, torture of dissidents, widespread poverty, and systematic repression. In looking back on this day in history, a day that would forever change the course of the country, it is important to connect the example of Chile to the broader structure of imperialism and its manifestations, both past and present. The tactics employed in fomenting destabilization of the country and its subsequent regime change are not an historical aberration; rather, they represent the tactics and aims of imperialism, epitomizing the very intent of the system: exploitation of the people and resources of the Global South for the enrichment of the Global North, especially the United States. Such a system has unleashed incalculable harm as a result of the hundreds of violent interventions motivated by greed and financial interests. However, the case of Chile is not one of deference; the resistance and organization of the working class stands as testament to the collective power that stands to threaten imperialist hegemony, in spite of the numerous contradictions with which it dealt. Through linking Chile to the ways in which imperialism functions historically and currently, a deeper understanding of the history and function of imperialism as a system can emerge. The case of Chile exemplifies the continuous provokation of unrest and instability as a pretext for intervention and control, thereby securing Western economic interests via imperialist tactics and violently maintaining their hegemony. Furthermore, popular resistance to this foreign domination has been violently repressed both historically in Chile and currently, as workers have encountered brutal state-sanctioned violence in the name of anti-communism. 

This coup is a harrowing moment in Chilean and world history, as it marks not only the death of former president Salvador Allende, but also the ushering in of a fascist dictatorship that would loom over Chile for 17 years and still haunts the country to this day. On September 11, Chilean military leadership, which had been incorporated into Allende’s government, launched the coup that would usurp Allende; they initially occupied Valparaíso and subsequently moved in on Santiago, wherein soldiers attacked Chileans on the ground while simultaneously bombing the presidential office, El Palacio de La Moneda. In the days following the swift and ruthless coup, the regime unleashed atrocities on the Chilean people in order to consolidate power and eliminate any potential threat to their authority. Thousands were kidnapped and held hostage in the national stadium, where ultimately they were tortured and massacred by government firing squads. Even the smallest hint of association with support of Allende, or the indigenous and working class masses more broadly, was a death sentence. The leaders of the coup and dictatorship openly admitted that these anti-democratic massacres were fueled by virulent anti-communism, though they claimed to have “freed” the country. For almost two decades, Pinochet oversaw an uninterrupted campaign of terror that claimed at least 3,000 lives and was characterized by extrajudicial kidnapping and trafficking, in addition to widespread poverty and income inequality. 

While the actual day of the coup is significant, it did not occur in isolation nor spontaneously; rather it was the result of a coordinated effort by the Chilean bourgeoisie and the United States government to usurp Allende. In fact, the Chilean working class had thwarted years of attempted sabotage, and the coup was therefore a last resort. The right-wing opposition, consisting of the Christian Democratic Party and the National Party, used any means at their disposal to manufacture unrest across Chile in order to delegitimize Allende’s government, led by the Popular Unity party, and restore the conditions that served their own interests and augmented their personal profit at the cost of the Chilean masses. As a developing country, Chile depended on copper as its main export, accounting for 76.9% of all exports in 1970. Therefore, when copper miners launched strikes across the country in 1972, the entirety of Chile was forced to endure the ramifications that such shortage of production inflamed. Supported by the opposition-led Congress, these mobilizations facilitated calls for regime change, reflecting their reactionary nature and more insidious purpose. Such strikes were not uncommon, and many petty-bourgeois professionals stood on the wrong side of history in their desire for greater personal comfort. For example, with aid and training from the US, Chilean bus owners that dominated the transport sector called an indefinite strike, aggravating already precarious conditions and further paralyzing the country. The 600 state buses stood in stark contrast to the 5000 privately owned buses that no longer offered transportation to and from the factories, resulting in the disturbance of the supply chain and the loss of millions of dollars. 

In addition to the economic pressures, the Chilean opposition used their control of Congress and the Supreme Court to obstruct Allende’s governance and strip the legality of his executive authority. For example, the legislature launched a boycott against the promoters of state-controlled food distribution, leveling accusations against top officials to discredit their competence and integrity, resulting in their acquiescence or expulsion. At least two intendants and seven ministers in Allende’s government were removed by the opposition; they even attempted to dismiss 15 ministers at once, although this specific effort failed. Congress also led continuous efforts to obstruct the legal expropriation of industries that would have further entrenched the power of Popular Unity and cemented their shift away from the capitalist mode of production and imperialist collaboration. In this manner, the opposition stirred political conflict, expanding power that benefited them while attempting to dispute that which Allende held through the executive branch. Furthermore, the military played a role in fabricating this crisis of legitimacy, as they threatened to mutiny if Allende violated the Constitution, of which the right-controlled legislature had control to amend. On June 29, 1973, the military would foreshadow their destruction of democracy, revealing their true face with an unsuccessful coup attempt wherein a small faction of officers attacked La Moneda with tanks and soldiers shot civilians, ultimately killing 22 people. In this instance, Pinochet remained loyal to the forces that defended Allende, who was blind to the fate that awaited him. In the aftermath of the failed uprising, the legislature blocked Allende from declaring a state of emergency, further entrenching their own power while provoking more instability. The political conniving that ensued after Allende took office thus demonstrates the lengths to which the opposition felt threatened by the ongoing project of nationalization that Allende undertook. 

These political ploys were not limited to the Chilean government, but also included support from the US government. The role of the United States in generating social, political, and economic chaos cannot be understated. In seeking to maintain cheap access to Chile’s copper, former employees of US Information Services in Chile instructed Chilean fascist groups, such as Homeland and Freedom, to provoke violence and terrorize the Chilean people with the goal of justifying a coup. These were not solitary acts; rather, they formed a right-wing mass movement fueled by anti-communism that sought to implement a neoliberal, capitalist order in Chile. This neoliberal policy would eventually come to fruition with the aid of the Chicago Boys, economists who studied under Milton Friedman and oversaw the realization of neoliberal policy in Chile once Pinochet had seized power. In addition to aiding fascists, the Chilean military itself received training from the US, with more than 4,000 officers attending courses in the US or Panama Canal area since 1950, as well as $45 million dollars in aid from the Pentagon since Allende took office. By incorporating the military into the government, his hand forced due to gridlock by the right-wing legislature and judiciary, Allende unwittingly signed his own death certificate. 

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Another means by which the US engineered the conditions for regime change in 1973 can be found in its economic warfare against Chile, specifically through boycott and sanctions. By preventing the import of spare parts, the conspirators hoped to halt production in factories, stifling the economy and thus fomenting further social unrest due to this manufactured scarcity. These sanctions affected all aspects of life, as food distribution became a crucial focus amongst the working class as an immediate result of limited supplies; the presence of black markets and the issue of hoarding necessitated the creation of direct supply systems, eliminating the role of intermediaries, whose petty-bourgeois role aligned them with the opposition. This ingenuity on the part of the Chilean people demonstrates their commitment to a government that operated in service of the interests of the masses rather than the few elite, in addition to the innovation that is possible when people organize, especially in the face of such monumental adversity as US imperialism. 

Just as the US weaponized sanctions against Chile during Allende’s tenure in office, US sanctions today impact almost one third of the world population, including those from Syria, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, and the DPRK. This policy is an act of warfare itself, designed to intentionally target those most vulnerable and to sow discord amongst the people, ripening the conditions for regime change. The extremely limited supply of food and medical supplies, as well as restrictions applying to international trade, entail a disenfranchised population that struggles to survive on a day-to-day basis. In this manner, sanctions elucidate the connection between the economic and political aspects of imperialism, given that the United States and international bodies such as the International Monetary Fund will contribute “aid” and facilitate trade so long as the respective government heeds the wishes of its neo-colonial puppet masters. Often, a small comprador class will collaborate with the Western imperialist forces, securing personal enrichment at the cost of adhering to neoliberal policy imposed by Western powers, characterized by austerity, free markets, and, in the case of the Global South, inexpensive exports, especially of raw materials. In the case of Chile, the right-wing opposition comprised the few elite who wanted to institute neoliberalism, implicating the entire country in the imperialist machinations of the United States. Thus, the Chilean struggle against imperialism took on a national character, as the fate of the country and what it meant to be Chilean stood in question, while simultaneously belonging to the collective efforts of the international proletariat. 

The US imperialism that deposed Allende in 1973 is the same imperialism that currently operates around the world and informs international politics. In Latin America alone, the US has intervened in at least 15 countries, including Bolivia, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, Panama, and Uruguay. This unfettered violence has resulted in the destruction of democracy and even the very fabric of the countries themselves, as evidenced by the resurgence of open-air slave markets in Libya after the NATO-led operation that resulted in the death of Gaddafi in 2011. In this manner, the US has made clear that the unending pursuit of profit and capitalist expansion will eclipse any moral goodwill or qualms about the ordinary people who face the brunt of being caught in the crossfires of imperialism. The magnitude of resources that the United States poured into regime change in Chile demonstrates the lengths to which they have gone and will continue to go in order to preserve their hegemony and maintain the capitalist-imperialist system that continues to shape current global relations From Iran to Korea, from Syria to Chad, from Vietnam to Ghana, the US empire has unleashed its full arsenal against the colonized and working class masses, deposing leaders across the Global South for threatening the imperialist hegemony that has enriched a few at the cost of the exploitation of billions of people. Important to note is the fact that this imperialism is not a relic of the past, but rather a structure that has evolved concurrently with the changing conditions of an increasingly globalized and digitized world. For example, the Organization of American States (OAS) orchestrated a coup in Bolivia that installed right-wing leader Jeanine Áñez, utilizing bogus statistics and the threat of military violence to unseat democratically elected former president Evo Morales. Morales had presided over a government responsible for a 42% reduction in poverty, as well as the empowerment of historically marginalized indigenous populations and a greater emphasis on environmental protection. These modern machinations of imperialism function in the same manner as they did in 1973, revealing the serpentine nature of empire and its relentless cruelty in perpetuating capitalism and neo-colonialism. 

The weaponization of sanctions, as exemplified in the case of Chile, highlights the importance of organization and national unity among those affected, given that the United States’ express aim is to manufacture forced scarcity in order to destabilize and undermine those countries that resist the encroachment of American empire. In July 2021, the ongoing embargo by the US against Cuba, coupled with even more dire conditions arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, sparked counter-revolutionary protests against the government that the United States exploited for their own purposes. This attempted color revolution mirrors the various ways in which the US manipulated the material conditions in Chile with the aim of inciting the overthrow of Allende; only the sacrifice and mass organization of the Chilean working class prevented his earlier demise, which subsequently impelled the US and Chilean elite to their last resort: the coup. The swift implementation of neoliberal policy in Chile, in tandem with the brutal repression of the Pinochet regime, sharply contrasts the previous emphasis on nationalization and agrarian reform under Allende that alleviated the harsh conditions of poverty. The resulting widespread hardship endured by the Chilean people serves as the basis of the model inflicted on countries around the world; in other words, it is the intended consequence, not an aberration or mistaken oversight. What the Chilean people suffered, the US hopes to inflict on Cuba and other countries who resist its hegemony. In fact, the US actively engenders Cuban suffering and obstructs the Cuban people’s right to self-determination because of its continuous struggle against imperialism. For example, despite Cuba developing a vaccine with an efficacy rate of 92 percent, rivaling that of vaccines produced in the United States, a shortage of syringes due to the embargo prevents Cuba from ensuring its citizens' health, even though the vaccine is readily available to be produced. This deliberate approbation of hardship for the Cuban people by the US government serves as an example of the US denial of Cuba’s right to self-determination, exemplifying how rather than championing self-determination, the United States is its active adversary. 

In the midst of United States interference in the conditions of Chile before the coup itself, contradictions emerged specifically amongst the Chilean left from which the left today can learn and use to discern its own path forward. The Chilean working class understood the necessity of community self-defense and organized vigilance committees in order to prevent right-wing sabotage and protect against US-funded fascist violence. This protection was a matter of utmost urgency: military violence manifested across the country in the form of raids, including of cemeteries, under the pretense of searching for illicit weapons, in addition to the looming presence of extrajudicial right-wing groups. However, the issue of taking up arms presented itself with many difficulties due to right-wing interference by the legislature and judiciary. While extrajudicial violence carried out by right-wing fascists received monetary and instructional support from the American state department, the Chilean people were legally not entitled to bear arms and thus take up armed self-defense. In attempting to negotiate with the Christian Democratic Party, Allende was forced into a position wherein he could not risk further alienating this wing of the opposition, who would only balk at the left demonstrating an explicit show of force. Thus, Allende was caught between the growing desire on the left for the right to bear arms and the consequences of enabling this form of defense on his success with maintaining any semblance of cooperation with the other branches of government. 

This specific contradiction that arose amongst the left reflects a growing class consciousness that developed concurrently with the highly systematized organization of the working class in their defense of Allende’s government. The steadfast determination of the Chilean working class maintained the functioning of the mines and factories, as they organized under the slogan “popular power,” or poder popular. Embodying this slogan in every aspect of their praxis, the Chilean masses developed autonomous forms of food distribution, transportation, union protection, and even self-governance. Consequently, workers found themselves directly immersed in the contradictions concomitant with the nationalization of various industries. Though these changes facilitated greater worker participation and control, the nature of the state itself remained unchanged, and the bourgeoisie maintained their grasp of the means of oppression against the proletariat. These conundrums reveal the inherent limitations of liberal democracy, as well as the dangers of granting concessions to the right; the right will always manipulate the verbiage of the law, and even the law itself, in order to gain more power at the cost of progress made by the left. Thus, the left today can call awareness to the fact that genuine revolution will not take place in the form of the ballot or liberal reformism; only through the complete seizure of the state and the suppression of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat can an end to capitalism and imperialism be achieved. 

After decades of repression and subsequent papering over the past, Chile is just now beginning to contend with its history. The government announced at the end of August that it would play a more central role in leading the search for the almost 1500 people forcibly disappeared by the Pinochet regime, demanding cooperation from the military, which has historically feigned ignorance as to its crimes. The number of families torn apart by the dictatorship spans beyond those tortured, executed, and dumped in mass graves; at least 20,000 infants were stolen from their families and trafficked into other countries, primarily the United States. Such institutionalized, state-sanctioned devastation bespeaks the cruelty on which these structures of inequality rely. No aspect of life has remained impervious to this government repression, and the ramifications of the regime reverberate through the world to this day. Though the United States, a settler-colonial state founded on slavery and genocide, will never address its own past, it is the task of the left–still scattered and reeling in many ways from previous decades of coordinated anti-communist and racist repression–to reckon with this history and adapt to the current material conditions that dictate the most immediate concerns. An increasingly prevalent rise in right-wing censorship and an institutionalized erasure of history necessitates even greater urgency in confronting the ongoing escalation of domestic and international state-sanctioned violence. 

The lessons the left can learn from Chile assume an even greater importance in this current context of state-sanctioned repression. The United States government is currently escalating state violence against its own population, as evidenced by the RICO charges brought against Stop Cop City protestors in Atlanta. The collective, organized effort of these forest defenders reflects a growing resistance to this imperialist police state in spite of the immense resources levied against those who dare to challenge its hegemony. Furthermore, this brutality is not exclusive to the imperial borders of the United States. The people of Palestine, Kenya, and Haiti, among numerous other countries, continue to challenge the brutal violations of their right to sovereignty and self-determination. In this manner, the imperialist violence occurring today parallels that which occurred in Chile in 1973. 

Chile stands as a principal testament to the viciousness inherent to capitalist imperialism, as well as the power and necessity of unified, working class organization. Imperialism is a global force, and its enforcers are highly organized and have proven that they will use any and all means in order to preserve their power. Thus, it is our collective responsibility to organize, and the example of Chile illuminates the multitude of possibilities that such organization can inspire, with purposeful mobilization guided by concrete goals that do not underestimate the primary enemy of the world. Then and now, Chile shows that revolution is not some distant ideal but rather an immediate possibility; Chile shows that the masses control their own destinies, and that a better world is ours to win.  

Assessing Empire: A Marxist Review of Vijay Prashad and Noam Chomsky's 'The Withdrawal'

By Edward Liger Smith

Republished from Midwestern Marx.

Last year in the summer of 2022 a wonderful friend named Debbie sent me a copy of Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad’s new book The Withdrawal. A year later I finally got the chance to sit down and read it (sorry it took me so long Debbie) and I was not disappointed as this text provides an excellent history of the major events and developments that have taken place within Western Capitalist imperialism throughout the last forty years or so. Those looking for a dense historical text will be disappointed as The Withdrawal is actually a transcribed conversation between Prashad and Chomsky, but this makes it a quick and easy read, perfect for beginners setting out to understand modern American policy and geopolitics.

Going into this book I was curious to see how Chomsky and Prashad reconciled their views on existing socialist countries. Prashad is someone I’ve always admired for his ability to stand up for existing socialist countries and his refusal to parrot U.S. State Department talking points about countries like China. Chomsky on the other hand, has always provided brilliant critiques of the American empire, but has a tendency to sound like a mainstream  liberal propagandist when the topic of the Soviet Union or Leninism comes up. However, it seems that Chomsky may be turning over a new leaf at the ripe age of 94 as attacks on China, Vietnam, and other existing socialist countries are notably absent from this book. 

The Withdrawal provides an excellent summary of the American Empire going back thirty years at least, and it does an incredible job of placing the major geopolitical events of the past few decades within their proper historical context. By example Chomsky’s analysis of the 9/11 terror attacks doesn’t begin on September 11th 2001. Instead he details the millions of dollars that were funneled into Osama Bin Laden’s terrorist group known as the Mujahideen by the United States after the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan in an attempt to stabilize the country. Through this historical analysis Chomsky reveals how the U.S. empire created the forces who carried out 9/11, then used 9/11 as justification to invade two countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, who had nothing to do with the attacks on September 11th. In fact, the U.S. waged war against Taliban and Iraqi Governments that were actually enemies of Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda group, an outgrowth of the Mujahideen. 

Notably absent from Chomsky’s analysis is the claim so often made by Western academics that Soviet imperialism in Afghanistan was just as bad as American imperialism. Instead, Chomsky admits that most Afghans see the era of Soviet occupation as the most hopeful time in the country’s history. The Soviet soldiers fought bravely on behalf of the Marxist Democratic Government in power at the time against U.S. backed terrorist groups like the Mujahideen. They also helped the Government build factories, hospitals, infrastructure, and launch literacy campaigns teaching people to read even in the impoverished rural regions of the country. The U.S. on the other hand, dumped money and arms into Jihadist extremists who would throw acid on the faces of literacy workers and women who dared to walk outside without being covered head to toe. Thankfully, The Withdrawal avoids falling into the Western myth that tries to conflate Soviet and American imperialism as equal evils. And this may be due to the influence of Prashad, who has said in another book, Washington Bullets, that the CIA makes a concerted effort to conflate Soviet foreign policy with the worst acts of Western imperialism

Similarly absent from the book are any attacks against the People's Republic of China (PRC), which Prashad and Chomsky accurately say is providing a counterweight to the long-held hegemony of the American empire. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and Belt and Road Initiative (BRICS) were created to counter American imperialism through cooperation and economic development, not to rival American imperialism through exploitation and debt trapping. The authors refuse to fall into the Western trope of dismissing everything that the PRC is doing as “authoritarian” or “imperialist” as so many academics tend to do. Instead, they take a measured and fact-based approach to looking at the foreign policy of the PRC, which ends up making socialist China look pretty dang good.

The book covers four core topics including Vietnam and Laos, 9/11 and Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. It will be an enlightening read for anybody who believed the mainstream media myths surrounding these major events. Chomsky brilliantly counterposes the facts of what actually happened in these four wars, to the mainstream media myths that were created to justify them. He also explains how the empire’s justification myths have morphed over time from the war against communism, used to justify the horrific bombing campaigns against Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, into the war on terror, used to justify the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya (as well as Syria although it’s not discussed thoroughly in The Withdrawal). 

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In totality the book provides a fantastic summary of American imperialism since World War II, and I would recommend that beginners in the field of geopolitics read this text in conjunction with Prashad’s Washington Bullets that I mentioned earlier (After you read Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Lenin of course). The Withdrawal is an easy read and it is not cluttered with hundreds of academic sources, but it is filled with the knowledge of two academics who have spent most their lives studying the U.S. Empire.

Critique 

My criticisms of The Withdrawal are contained to the explanations given by Prashad and Chomsky as to WHY the U.S. carries out the murderous and imperialistic policy that it does. For one, the authors use the analogy of the Godfather to explain U.S. policy, arguing that since World War II the U.S. has held unrivaled and unprecedented power on the global stage, allowing them to act like a mafia, breaking the knees of anybody who goes against their interests. I agree with this description of American power, and I find the Godfather to be a useful analogy for how the U.S. conducts foreign policy, constantly ignoring international law in order to violently protect their own economic interests.

Where I disagree with Chomsky and Prashad is when they say that American Policy is “rooted in a settler-colonial culture” or history. Make no mistake American policy is ROOTED in the mode of production, in the economic system of capitalism. America is not a uniquely evil country where people are born with some kind of innate drive to conquer foreign lands. Rather, we are a country of working people who are dominated by multinational corporations and finance capitalists that deceive the public in order to use them as pawns for advancing their global interests. It is not an attitude held by the American public that drives imperialist aggression, it is the incessant need for capital to expand, and the drive for surplus value inherent to the capitalist mode of production. The U.S. did not invade Iraq because Americans are a bunch of settler colonialists who wanted to seize a random country in the middle east. The U.S. invaded Iraq because the Koch brothers and other capitalists wanted Iraq’s oil. That is what American imperialism is rooted in, the need for constant expansion and increased profits which results from the capitalist mode of production, the basis for American society. And it is only through transforming this mode of production into a socialist one that we can bring a halt to American imperialism. Labeling the American working class as “settlers” will simply not achieve this goal.

In fact, America’s settler colonial attitude and history, to the extent that it has existed historically, is itself rooted in the capitalist mode of production, not the other way around. It was the expansion of capital that brought European settlers to America in search of new land, labor, and resources; and it was capitalism that incentivized the mass genocide of the native populations. As Karl Marx brilliantly details in Capital Volume I, in order for capitalism to work it requires a large population of workers who do not own their own means of production or produce their own means of subsistence (food and other things humans need to survive) and thus are forced to sell their labor power to capitalists in order to survive. When European settlers got to America the native peoples already had their own mode of production and produced their own means of subsistence, and thus they needed to be wiped out by the settlers, or divorced from their own means of production and subsistence, in order for capitalism (and the bourgeois form of slavery seen in the American south) to take hold as the dominant mode of production. The genocidal settler colonial culture of European settlers at the time was rooted in the capitalist mode of production and its incessant need to expand. To say that American imperialism and the expansion of capital is rooted in a settler colonial attitude or culture is to flip reality on its head. Although, the capitalist mode of production has certainly benefited from such attitudes.

Additionally, over 500 years have passed since European settlers first came to America. The U.S. is no longer a settler colonial project akin to the apartheid state of Israel, where every day native Palestinians are being forced off their land to make room for new Israeli settlement. It cannot be said that a settler colonial attitude has carried over hundreds of years later, and now acts as the motive force of American Imperialism in the year 2022 (the year the book was published). 

From the Marxist perspective, settler colonial or American exceptionalist attitudes stem from the mode of production, and in turn help to condition the mode of production. By example the attitude of American exceptionalism has been produced and maintained by the ruling economic class of capitalists in order to get the American people on board with their regime change wars. American exceptionalism is rooted in the capitalist imperialist system, and in turn helps to keep that system churning. Again, to say that U.S. imperialism is rooted in an attitude of American exceptionalism or settler colonialism is to flip reality on its head.

Chomsky has never claimed to be a Marxist or dialectical materialist, and so I was not surprised to see him make this mistake. Prashad however, does come from a Marxist-Leninist tradition similar to myself, and I hope that he gets a chance to read this review and reconsiders his use of the word rooted when it comes to describing attitudes of American exceptionalism and settler colonialism. 

Regardless, The Withdrawal is a fantastic text from two intellectuals who I deeply admire. It is filled with information about American Imperialism that has been systematically withheld from the American public by the American ruling class of capitalist, bankers, shareholders, and neoconservative/neoliberal politicians. I would recommend this text to any Americans who want to know what our government has been doing around the world in our name for the last 75 years or so. 

Edward Liger Smith is an American political scientist (with a focus on Geopolitics, Socialist Construction, and U.S. health care), wrestling coach, and Director of the Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis. 

Taking a Closer Look at Vivek Ramaswamy's Supposed Anti-War Record

By Jon Reynolds

With a stiff drink, a heavy heart, and a strong sense of masochism, I recently subjected myself to the first round of Republican presidential debates. While the clown show lived up to expectations of being a tragic showcase of democracy gone wrong, the aftermath has been even more disturbing, particularly the flood of pundits and news stories claiming that Vivek Ramaswamy is anti-war.

Ramaswamy himself has even adopted the title, telling Israeli media in late August that “Israel needs to be in a strong position to defend itself. And the United States will be at Israel’s back. But I think that that’s a very different thing from automatically sleepwalking ourselves into war. I’m an anti-war president. And the way I’m going to do it is by deterring war, be it ending the war in Ukraine and deterring China.”

And yet, as is often the case with supposedly “anti-war” politicians operating in the two major political parties, there is more to the story, and Ramaswamy, like every other Republican on the GOP debate stage — and every other Democrat currently running for president — is far from anti-war.

IRAN AND CUTTING AID TO ISRAEL

During the debates — which were hosted by Fox News — Goddess of War, Nikki Haley, worked eagerly to out-hawk Ramaswamy on foreign policy:

“You want to go and defund Israel. You want to give Taiwan to China. You want to go and give Ukraine to Russia. You will make America less safe.”

Like clockwork, Ramaswamy played right into it:

“I will lead Abraham Accords 2.0,” he said. “I will partner with Israel to make sure Iran never is nuclear armed.”

Nevermind that politicians have been fearmongering about Iran building a bomb for decades, or that Iran has said it does not want to build a bomb, or the consensus of US intelligence agencies, which have repeatedly stated Iran is not pursuing nukes.

Moreover, despite claims to the contrary, Ramaswamy doesn’t actually want to flat-out cut aid to Israel.

First, Ramaswamy said Israel should not get more aid than its other neighbors after the year 2028, when the current US aid package of $38 billion expires. But secondly, and perhaps most crucial to his comments about Israel, is that it’s questionable if he actually wants to cut aid to the country at all. Shortly after the Republican debate, Ramaswamy appeared on Israeli TV and offered a very different view:

“I said that if Israel was so strong that it would not need our assistance anymore, it would be a sign of success for inter-country companies. I want to be clear: we will never stop aid to Israel until Israel says it is ready for it. Relations between Israel and the US will be stronger at the end of my term than they have ever been, and more than they will be under the other contestants.”

In other words: don't count on Ramaswamy to break the decades-long, bipartisan tradition of arming Israel to the teeth.

“I love [Israel’s] border policies,” Ramaswamy said during the GOP debate. “I love their tough on crime policies. I love that they have a national identity and an Iron Dome to protect their homeland."

Or, put another way, the border policies which routinely cost Palestinians their lives are the same border policies “anti-war” Ramaswamy admires.

And if that's the case, just imagine the horrors awaiting Mexican people living along the southern border of the United States.

RAIDING MEXICO

“A lot of what he [Trump] did makes total sense to me," Ramaswamy told Russel Brand in early August. “I’m saying a lot of the same things.” But, in some cases, “I’m going further than he ever did. I said I’d use the military on our southern border."

Ramaswamy’s proposal apparently involves exploiting the fentanyl crisis and using it as justification to launch drone strikes into Mexico to “eliminate” drug cartels.

As reported by Politico in April, Ramaswamy said using military force on cartels without permission from Mexico “would not be the preferred option” but we would “absolutely” be willing to do it, adding that what the cartels are doing “is a form of attack” on the United States. “If those cartels meet the test for qualifying as a domestic terrorist organization for the purpose of freezing their assets, I think that qualifies them for the US president to view them as an eligible target for the use of authorized military force.”

And what could possibly go wrong considering how much success the US has endured trying to kill its way to victory in the decades-long failure known as the drug war.

Perhaps it would be more surprising that Ramaswamy wants to take Trump’s border policies to the “next level” if he wasn't so utterly infatuated with the former president and obsessed with strengthening his legacy.

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TRUMP "THE SINGLE GREATEST" PRESIDENT IN MY LIFETIME

During an August News Nation Town Hall, Ramaswamy referred to Trump as “the single greatest president” in his lifetime.

However, the problem with Ramaswamy’s love for Trump — and a seriously gigantic red flag — is that Trump is not anti-war.

While in office, Trump amped up Obama's drone wars, boosted military spending, bombed Syria and pledged to “keep” their oil, cut up the Iran nuclear deal, and dropped the largest non nuclear bomb in America's arsenal on Afghanistan.

Trump also mulled killing Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, whereas Ramaswamy claims he wants to pardon him, and they both share the same views on Chelsea Manning, who shared classified info with Wikileaks exposing US war crimes in Iraq:

“I will pardon Julian Assange because his prosecution was fundamentally unjust,” Ramaswamy tweeted in June. “Chelsea Manning, the government officer who actually leaked the information to Assange, had ‘her’ sentence commuted by President Obama because ‘she’ was part of a politically favored class: she’s trans — yet Assange now sits in a foreign prison for doing what the DC press corps does every day. This is wrong & I will fix it. We can’t have two tiers of justice: one for trans people, one for everyone else; one for violent Antifa/BLM rioters, one for everyone else; one for Trump on government document retention, another for Biden.”

COLD WARRIOR

It’s in our “vital interest” to make sure China “doesn't control the global semi-conductor supply chain in Taiwan,” Ramaswamy said in June, adding: “until we achieve semi-conductor independence, we will ensure Taiwan is not invaded by China” by ending the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

This should be good news, right? Ramaswamy wants to end the war in Ukraine. But how, you ask? By convincing Russia to break their alliance with “our enemy” China:

“The Russia-China military partnership outmatches the US on nuclear capabilities, on hypersonic missiles, on China’s naval capacities,” Ramaswamy said, later adding: “Worst of all, through the Ukraine war, we’re actually pushing Russia further into China’s hands. So, I will end that war.”

“The top military threat we face is the Russia-China alliance,” he said during an early August interview with PBS. “Our top adversary today is communist China.”

“I’m a George Washington America First conservative,” he tweeted on August 21. “Just as Nixon opened China to win the Cold War against Russia, the next president must open Russia to defeat China, starting with a peace settlement in Ukraine.”

WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE

“We talk about nation building,” Ramaswamy said during the early August News Nation Town Hall. “We have a nation to build right here back at home.”

But 23 years ago, another politician running for president also made this promise:

“I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations,” George W. Bush said during the 2000 presidential debate with Al Gore. “Maybe I'm missing something here. I mean we're going to have kind of a nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not.”

Three years later, he was nation-building in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

While on the campaign trail, Obama promised to end the US war in Iraq:

“I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank.”

In early 2008, Obama reiterated that he was “opposed to this war in 2002. I have been against it in 2002, 2003, 2004, 5, 6, 7, 8 and I will bring this war to an end in 2009.”

Well, the war in Iraq didn’t end. In fact, Obama added more conflicts to the tally while his other anti-war campaign promises slowly fizzled out, such as investigating torture under the Bush administration or closing down Guantanamo Bay.

Trump was a deviation from Obama and Bush in the way that he campaigned and the things he campaigned on. Unlike Obama and Bush, Trump made comments about “loving” torture and wanting to “bomb the hell” out of ISIS. Trump’s campaign — and his presidency — was US imperialism with the mask off.

And still, the bulk of his campaigning had less to do with promoting actual policy and more to do with promoting his own image as a businessman, a non-politician, and most importantly, as an “outsider” to the establishment. Yet once elected, Trump’s promises of “draining the swamp” came to an abrupt halt as he spent his first term adding Bush-era neocons like John Bolton to his cabinet while dutifully continuing all of the wars started by Bush and Obama since 9/11.

Ramaswamy, like Bush, claims he is against nation building. Like Obama, he makes comments that are passable on a surface level as anti-war. And like Trump, he is marketing himself as a businessman, a non politician, and an outsider.

With recent polling showing a majority of Americans turning against the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, and general burnout from other wars such as the ones in Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s not at all surprising that so many of us desperately latch on to any politician who even remotely seems to promote a message of peace.

Unfortunately, between parroting neocon talking points about Iran, praising Israel’s oppressive border policies, regurgitating cold war propaganda about China and Russia, pledging to launch drone strikes inside Mexico, and praising hawkish presidents such as Trump, Ramaswamy hardly deserves to be called anti-war.

Ideology and Hypocrisy Amid Slavery and Democracy - Strange Bedfellows from Time Immemorial

By Stephen Joseph Scott

The history of the existence of slavery as an institution in antiquity and beyond is one of the most common; and, at the same time, one of the most complex tales to be told. Virtually every society, touching almost all the continents of the world, has had its own form of enslavement. The implication being that, nearly, every group of humankind whether racially, ethnically, or culturally categorized as diverse, unattached, or essentially separate, has been marked by the legacy and tradition of human bondage geographically and/or ancestrally. This work will be focusing on the origins and culturally supportive underpinnings of ancient Greek identity, its philosophy, law, ideology, and ethnicity; and, those extant essentialist elements, such as class, that not only made slavery in the ancient Greek world possible but normalized its place within a societal hierarchy that helped define who and what an ancient Athenian was - pitched against a broader Mediterranean ethos. Beyond that, this work will address how ancient Greek thought, as to what essentially constituted a slave versus a free person, later ignites a heated counterpoint which asserts hypocrisy lies at the core of ancient Greek thinking when it comes to the fundamental differences: physical, psychological, and emotional, that inexorably lie between free-persons and human-beings in captivity – made evident by how that debate rages to this day in contemporary historiography….

It is best that we start at the beginning with Homer: ancient Greek storyteller and legendary poet, who lived as early as the 8th century BCE; and, is still considered one of the most celebrated and influential writers of antiquity - for good reason. Homer is brought to the fore because his illustration as evidenced below reveals the essential deleterious effect of human bondage, which, poignantly foreshadows the debate mentioned above by millennia, ‘For Zeus who views the wide world takes away half the manhood of a man, that day he goes into captivity and slavery’ (Homer, Odyssey 17.367-9). Homer is explicitly defining the enslavement of a man as the diminishment, in a purely ontological sense, of one’s inherent human dignity. Aristotle, on the other hand (ancient aristocratic Greek philosopher and polymath extraordinaire), who penned his work in the latter 4th century BCE, some four hundred years after Homer, sets a foundational opposition and enduring precedent of his very own when it comes to the quality, status, value, and condition of enslaved persons.

Aristotle, as is broadly known, defined an enslaved person (doulos), that is, a human-being held in bondage, as ‘a live article of property’ (Aristotle, Pol. 1253b33). The great thinker himself, speaking on behalf of his class interests, goes on to define the value he derived from such persons defined as property, ‘Of property, the first and most indispensable kind is that which is … most amenable to Housecraft; and this is the human chattel.’ He then goes on, with a decisively imperialist tone, ‘Our first step therefore must be to procure good slaves (doulous)’ (Arist. Oec. 1344a23-26). Aristotle makes clear his essentialist views which not only defined a slave as property, but goes further, stating that the value, status, utility, and material condition of persons classified as slaves is not only a useful one, but a natural one:

These considerations therefore make clear the nature of the slave and his essential quality; one who is a human being (anthrôpos) belonging by nature not to himself but to another is by nature a slave, and a human being belongs to another if, although a human being, he is a piece of property (ktêma) (Arist. Pol. 1254a14-18).

Aristotle’s proposition is an important one given this work’s purpose which is to bring forth these precise notions, or conflicting theories, that have significantly undergirded, influenced and/or reinforced conceptions of class, personhood, value, and status interwoven within western thought throughout the ages.

Which brings us inevitably to the longstanding property versus domination argument spearheaded, in modern scholarship, by Orlando Patterson in his 1982 book entitled Slavery and Social Death. Patterson delivers a scathing rebuke to Aristotle’s customary formulation of slavery in terms of property. He unequivocally argues that slavery, from his learned vantagepoint, is, in fact, ‘the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons’[i]. Which poignantly parallels Homer’s description that human beings, held in captivity against their will, are not only persons dominated physically, but are individuals essentially diminished morally, emotionally, and psychologically. The conventional view, as presented by Aristotle, is unsound, according to Patterson based on two distinct factors. Firstly, Patterson argues, ‘to define slavery … as property fails as a definition, since it does not really specify any distinct category of persons.’ Because everyone, whether ‘beggar or king, can be the object of a property relation.’ One can only construe that what Patterson is saying, when it comes specifically to slavery, is that the term ‘property’ obscures, diminishes or diverts one’s attention away from the overt and brutal nature of an enslaved person’s everyday lived experience. Secondly, Patterson contends that the term property is inconsistent in substance when it comes to diversity of culture - meaning many societies, however archaic, lacked the very concept of ownership. Denoting that slavery has accompanied mankind through time immemorial, from primitive village societies to ancient Mesopotamia and beyond, where, he argues, the laws and social mores of any given society didn’t precisely match that of Aristotle’s definition of property – therefore it generally fails as a classification of slavery [ii].

David M. Lewis counters Patterson’s argument on the ‘property point’ as stated above by proclaiming that during the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods, the evidence clearly demonstrates in abundant detail, that the circumstance between slave and master, in legal terms, was ‘a relationship based on the fact that the slave was the property of his or her owner’-exhibiting all the elementary features necessary, per legal theory, to reach the standard of ‘property’ [iii]. Lewis challenges Patterson’s stance further by stating:

[The popular] view that esteems private property rights to be an advanced development of Roman legal theory ignores the findings of almost a century of legal anthropology, which has observed private property systems in a variety of tribal social systems that were far less advanced in terms of technological and social complexity than even the society imagined in Homer’s epics [iv].

While Lewis’ examination proves ‘slavery as a form of property’ in a legal context, there is still validity in Patterson’s position given the fact that persons in bondage (from a humanist perspective) reduced to the level of property in a solely ‘legal sense’ nullifies their individual agency and all that essentially makes them human.

In fact, slavery, and democracy, in ancient Athens and beyond is a multidimensional and multifaceted story of innate human capacity and agency, dignity, adaptability, fortitude, and resistance. Meaning, ‘…slaves were not passive objects, whose identity and existence was completely dominated by their masters.’[v]  As described by Xenophon (Greek military leader and philosopher), there were without a doubt slaves forced into strenuous domestic work: ‘baking, cooking, spinning’ and scrubbing under their owner’s will (Xen. Oec. 9.9). That said, we are also told of others that gained valuable skill-sets outside the home, coinciding with their inherent intelligence and creativity, from potters to builders to bankers and shoemakers (Hyperides, 3.1-9; and Aeschines, 1.97)[vi]. These slaves participated in communal undertakings (such as workshops and spiritual associations) together with other free and enslaved persons. Even Aristotle, who had little love (agape) for the underclasses, had to acknowledge, albeit cautiously, the inherent democratic nature (and/or threat thereof) made evident by the sheer numbers of this uniquely collective phenomenon - what the great theorist himself branded as koinônia, simply defined as fellowship of the masses. But the politikê koinônia (he warns) was specifically formed for the benefit of its members (Arist. Eth. Nic. 1160a4-6). Influenced by his celebrated teacher, renowned philosopher Plato, who argued that the limits of citizenship and its influence correlate with ‘the precise form of constitution and law’ in place (Plato, Laws 714c) - Aristotle’s well-known anti-democratic discourse on ‘mob-rule’ and the necessity for the ‘rule of law’ as fundamental to ‘the natural order of things’ thus becomes most evident. While in agreement with Pericles’ famed proclamation on the importance of the ‘rule of law’ in the ancient Greek city-state; when it came to what Pericles professed as the virtues of democracy defined, the two-men parted ways in dramatic fashion. In what is considered the ideal of a democratic philosophical vision, Pericles outlines demokratia (in his famed funeral speech of 431 BCE), as follows:

Its administration favors the many instead of the few…equal justice to all…class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way. The freedom which we enjoy in our government…[teaches] us to obey the magistrates and the laws, particularly as regard [to] the protection of the injured (Thucydides, 2.37).

On the contrary, Aristotle’s depiction of a ‘democratic regime’ and/or constitution is one with an inherent propensity toward ‘license and lawlessness.’ He defines, ‘radical democracy,’ in that of Athens for example, as having two critical flaws: firstly, the influence of the demos can potentially supersede the law (Arist. Pol. 1292a4ff.); and secondly, the demos hold the power to impeach magistrates for wrongdoing (such as malfeasance) which Aristotle intimates are both a step too far (Arist. Pol. 1292a30, and cf.1298a29-35). That said, as threatening as he might have interpreted it, the concept of koinônia permits us to observe enslaved persons actively utilizing their intrinsic agency within a broader collective milieu.

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Returning to the question as stated at the outset of this work, Lewis’ focus on the laws of ancient societies, in lieu of the contention outlined above, is immensely valuable when it comes to understanding the conventions per Athenian slave society and their ramifications. Broadly viewed as a protection mechanism for slaves, given a singular example, the Greek law on ‘hybris,’ in ancient Athens, expressly defined as the negation of the deliberate implementation of violence to humiliate, demean, or degrade - is not as straightforward as it might appear. Yet again, hypocrisy abounds as evidenced: to presume that the Athenian law pertained to an owner’s mis-conduct toward his ‘property’ obliges us to disregard the ‘abundant proof’ of regular and generally habitual violence toward slaves by their masters.[vii] Beyond that, it is difficult to correlate the law as ‘protectionary’ given this evocative assertion by Plato, ‘[a slave] when wronged or insulted, is unable to protect himself or anyone else for whom he cares’ (Plato, Gorg. 483b). The following statement is as definitive as it gets when revealing the underlying deceit interwoven within Athenian law itself when it came to enslaved persons and their standing, ‘[the] law included slaves [simply] because the lawgiver wished to curtail the spread of hubristic [or anti-social] behaviour among the citizens tout court … the hubris law was designed to engender respect and orderly conduct among citizens not to protect slaves’ [viii] [ix]. Meaning, that the Athenian lawgivers were not overly concerned with the physical wellbeing of persons classified as slaves, but perhaps were more intent on curtailing their judicial workload.

The reality was that the right of masters to physically abuse their slaves in ancient Athens was, if not absolute, certainly extensive. Xenophon affirms the practical necessity on behalf of owners to punish their slaves, but simply asks for them not to do so in a state of rage (Xen. Hell. 5.3.7; cf. Hdt. 1.137). Demonstrating that, violence toward persons in bondage in ancient Athens was perfectly acceptable if it was executed in a manner of equanimity. According to Xenophon, however, slaves should never resist. He goes on to say, that masters could, or should, ‘clap fetters on them so that they can’t run away’ (Xen. Mem. 2.1.16). Hence, so it is argued, in summary, that what helps clarify, or defend, Aristotle’s assertion that ‘the slave [is] an article of property imbued with a soul’ (Arist. Pol. 1253b32), is justified due to the fact that ‘this view of the slave as an article of property’ was a generally held belief of society at large when it came to the status of enslaved persons within the ancient Greek ethos [x].

That said, when it comes to hypocrisy, the law and excessive abuse – domination, as defined by Patterson permeates the historical record.  A poignant example of the common acceptance in ancient Athens of emotional and physical abuse (or the threat thereof) cast upon slaves, and the like, is provided by Lysias, where he describes in detail the testimony of a plaintiff in an Athenian court recounting the brutal (and pervasive) threat of torture (and even death) that hung over the heads of enslaved mill workers - commonly known ‘as mill-roaches’ (Lysias 1. 18-22). In addition, owners of enslaved persons were generally granted legal leeway, under the authority of judges, to sexually abuse their slaves.[xi] Signifying that when a slave was purchased, they were in fact the owners’ possession to do with as they desired - which helps lend even more credence to Patterson’s analyses of domination as described.

A question of further importance is what defined, or signified, a slave and their station in ancient Athens? Was it one of ideology or innate difference that helped delineate the distinction between a Greek and a non-Greek? As understood in the broadest sense of the term, barbarian is the word used to describe not only a non-Greek speaking immigrant, but in fact, a definitional term which explicitly portrayed an enslaved person of foreign origin, as, ‘non-Greeks imported from foreign lands via the slave trade’[xii]. An Athenian essentialist view, as noted, between native slave and foreign slave, (that is, between natural born Greeks and outsiders) is underscored by Aristotle’s description of an enslaved Greek as ‘an accident contrary to nature’ (Arist. Pol. 1255a1). These Greek essentialist views, of one people’s ethnic superiority over another, are noteworthy because they significantly impact western thought and societal conditions throughout the ages – emphasizing race and class as inherent points of difference develop into a clear normative of class hierarchy.

Fast forwarding to the 18th century Anglo-world for example, Francis Hutcheson (elite 18th century British moral philosopher) proclaimed that permanent enslavement should be ‘the ordinary punishment of … idle vagrants.’ ‘Idle vagrants,’ being defined as most anyone with what Hutcheson considered, ‘slave like attributes,’ from the idle poor and indigent to confiscated and subjugated human cargo - principally Africans [xiii]. Conversely, in something of a confessional, Thomas Jefferson (slave owner, philosopher, and 18th century American statesman) recognized and voiced the odious elements of the dominion argument, as defined, some two hundred years prior to Orlando Patterson, ‘[the] commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of … the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.’ He then goes on in a revelatory tone, to inform just how these elite classes, throughout the millennia, bequeathed attitudes of dominion from one generation to the next. Stating that, the children of the elite were thus ‘nursed, educated and exercised in the daily art of tyranny.’ Virginia’s slave plantations as he describes, were by their very nature, ‘schools of iniquity and domination’[xiv]. Consequently, Aristotle’s, early, and pervasive, theory of the ‘natural order of things,’ when it comes to class and ethnicity, is made brazenly evident (Arist. Pol. 1252a-1253b).

Finally, how common place was slave society in the ancient Greek world and what was its magnitude? It is said that the importation of slaves was a lasting one, being that Greek slave society lasted enduringly throughout both the archaic and classical periods until its absorption by Rome in 146 BCE. Although the Roman slave trade surpassed that of the Greek numerically, given Rome’s imperial might over the Mediterranean world, it is said that ‘the Greek slave system was both the elder and the longer-lived.’ The Greeks had helped set a historic precedent by perfecting their own imperial prowess through the conquering of their neighbors [xv]. But, where in fact were these subjugated and enslaved persons extracted from and how common were they in ancient Greece? Ancient Greek inscriptions help make evident that enslaved peoples, represented a wide breadth of humanity throughout the known world at the time. These people included men, women, and children in a variety of hues, from such far-off places as Thrace, Phrygia, Syria, Caria in southwest Anatolia, Illyria on the western Balkan Isthmus, Scythians from eastern Iran; and, Colchians from the eastern Black Sea [xvi] - depicted by Herodotus, in the 5th century BCE, as a ‘dark-skinned and woolly haired’ people (Hdt. 2.104.2). What Herodotus’ quote helps to highlight for us is an ancient Athenian social construct. That being, the prevalent belief (when it came to the stature of imported slaves), of a clear and innate delineation based on race (and/or phenotype), accentuating a natural taxonomic classification or difference between indigenous Greeks and all others – especially slaves.

When it comes to how common slaves were, Josiah Ober estimates the slave population of fourth-century BCE Athens to be around 35 per cent of the total population of roughly 227,000 [xvii]. Which made slavery quite pervasive throughout ancient Athens and helps to explain the essentialist Greek/Other dichotomy as such. As Vincent Rosivach makes evident, ‘[When] Athenians thought about slaves, they habitually thought about barbaroi, and when they thought about barbaroi they habitually thought about slaves’[xviii]. Suggesting that this was commonplace in classical Athens - legislatively undergirded by the proposed law of Pericles of 451 BCE which confined citizenship solely to persons of Athenian birthparents on both sides. Ultimately defining in ethnocentric terms, an essentialist difference (between Greeks and others), based on birth lineage and cultural origin (Arist. Const. Ath. 26.3). In paralleling slave societies throughout the epochs, ‘the slave system of the fourth-century Greek world was of roughly the same numerical magnitude as that of the United States ca. 1800.’ By the early 19th century, in the South, ‘30-40 percent of the population’ was made up of chattel slavery under the brutal control of concentrated wealth and political power, land, and resources… [xix]. Both societies (separated by millennia) became indulgently rich and hegemonically powerful in their respective spheres of influence – primarily based on the wealth created by their slave societies thus implemented. As mentioned, due to the commonality of the everyday interaction between slave and non-slave, and its oblique dangers in ancient Athens, elite class interests reinforced ‘the construction of local and wider Hellenic ethnicities, as well as of non-Greek ethnicities, must have been fundamentally imbricated with the ideological needs of the slave trade…’[xx] [xxi]. The main point being that the possibility of a unifying or coming together of freeborn citizens, of lower-class status, and slaves, posed a direct structural (and numerical) threat to the established order of things. Ideology, woven within Greek identity, plays a key role in the hegemonic control of social norms, but not an absolute one.

The understanding by the masses (and a small number of elites alike) that extreme concentrations of wealth played a destabilizing role in the Athenian political and social realms, when it came to privilege, power and class, is made obvious by the following quote from Demosthenes, ‘for the demos to have nothing and for those who oppose the demos to have a superabundance of wealth is an amazing and terrifying (thaumaston kai phoberon) state of affairs’ (Ober, 1990, 214; Dem. Ex. 2.3). Which helps make evident an ancient Athens as not only the well-known paradigm of direct democracy (or rule by the many), but also its intrinsic contradictions (or threats thereof) when it came to status, class, and wealth – which has echoed, as argued, throughout the centuries. As presented, Lewis and Canevaro, bring to the fore, a carefully crafted top-down societal prejudice designed to sow division amongst the masses using class distinctions and/or differences as its exclusionary tool of choice:

Since it was in fact slaves who were more naturally associated with manual labor—they were the prototypical manual laborers— elitist writers and reformers found in this proximity a productive avenue for attacking their suitability for political participation—for having a voice. For elite Greeks and Romans this was a productive strategy for denigrating and dehumanizing ‘the poor’ in political as well as daily life [xxii].

Paradoxically, these notions of disdain toward the poor (or the slavish), defined (mostly) by the ancient Greek elite as, ‘anyone who had to work for living’ (Arist. Pol. 1277b5-7; 1255b23-38), were not limited to the Athenian upper classes. In fact, as Lucia Cecchet suggests, due to the sheer force of elite ideological thought and its pervasive influence (in the 4th and 5th centuries), even within the jury courts of democratic Athens, the repulsion of poverty (including slaves) became commonly offered as a widely conventional view, ‘a communis opinio that the rich and poor shared alike’ [xxiii]; attitudes that permeate western societies to this day, making evident, the powerful effects of elite capture through hegemonic cultural influence in ancient Athens and beyond.

In conclusion, throughout western history, ancient Athens has been viewed as the ultimate model of democracy in a political, ideological, philosophical, and ethical sense – as presented in this work. At the same time, hypocrisy, pertaining to these epitomes of democracy (demokratia – or rule by the many – as outlined by Pericles), adversely permeated its upper classes and beyond with lasting ramifications. Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle and Xenophon, for example, were all critical of democracy, focusing their ire upon the populous; the possibility of its bad decision making; and (what they believed to be), as ‘the [intrinsic] ignorance … of the demos, demagoguery and civil strife’ [xxiv]. Again, these great theorists thought of democracy not as the rule of the many (which was the general Athenian ideal of demokratia), but they portrayed it in a more threatening or hostile sense, such as, ‘the rule of the poor or the mob,’ which helps taint Athenian demokratia within recorded history with a prejudicial top-down class perspective throughout the millennia [xxv]. The proximity between, slave and poor within the democratic confines of ancient Athens, made them susceptible, in both high-level institutional deliberation and, sometimes, in daily collaborations, to manipulative stratagems which ‘aimed to denigrate and even disenfranchise them by stressing the “slavish” nature of their occupations, as incompatible with the virtue required for political participation’ [xxvi]. Furthermore, enslavement, as implemented in ancient Athens and across time, populations and locations could differ enormously or, in fact, possess significant similarities. As is inferred, by ancient Greek scholars throughout this work, the characteristics which helped mold Greek slave culture and its expansion comprised, but were in no way limited to, the amount of prosperity slavery added to the fundamental aspects of that society’s supposed wellbeing, especially its economic growth and military strength. In most instances, throughout the ancient world and beyond, the capturing and subjugation of persons classified as salves was meant to possess, chastise, and/or diminish an economic rival. Thus, as noted, chattel slavery was quite widespread throughout the ancient world and beyond. That said, the agency and humanity, as offered by Orlando Patterson, of subjugated persons, and their relentless struggle for freedom, permeates the historical record (from Athens to Virginia) - which cannot and should not be ignored. Enslaved human beings left behind a powerful legacy of opposition and struggle to free themselves and the family members they so loved. Through the common bond (of unrelenting misery) they forged powerful alliances of resistance and revolt, despite the cultural forces arrayed against them – their historical age or geographical setting.

Stephen Joseph Scott is an essayist associated with The University of Edinburgh, School of History; a singer/songwriter, humanist/activist – a self-taught musician, and performer. As a musician, he uses American Roots Music to illustrate the current American social and political landscape.

Notes

[i] Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Harvard University Press, 1982), 13.

[ii] Patterson, 20–21.

[iii] David M. Lewis, Greek Slave Systems in Their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BC, First edition. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018), 34.

[iv] Lewis, 39.

[v] Kostas Vlassopoulos, “Greek Slavery: From Domination to Property and Back Again,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 131 (2011): 195.

[vi] Edward E. Cohen, Athenian Economy and Society: A Banking Perspective (Princeton University Press, 1992), 61–109.

[vii] Lewis, Greek Slave Systems in Their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BC, 43.

[viii] Mirko Canevaro, “The Public Charge for Hubris Against Slaves: The Honour of the Victim and the Honour of the Hubristēs,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 138 (2018): 100–126.

[ix] Lewis, Greek Slave Systems in Their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BC, 42–43.

[x] Lewis, 54.

[xi] Lewis, 42.

[xii] David M. Lewis and Mirko Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” in A Cultural History of Poverty in Antiquity (500 BCE – 800 AD), ed. Claire Taylor (Bloomsbury, 2022), 14.

[xiii] Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1995), 324.

[xiv] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition, Notes on the State of Virginia (Yale University Press, 2022), 249.

[xv] Lewis and Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” 7.

[xvi] Lewis and Canevaro, 4.

[xvii] Josiah Ober, “Inequality in Late-Classical Democratic Athens: Evidence and Models,” in Democracy and an Open-Economy World Order, ed. George C. Bitros and Nicholas C. Kyriazis (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017), 129–129.

[xviii] Vincent J. Rosivach, “Enslaving ‘Barbaroi’ and the Athenian Ideology of Slavery,” Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte 48, no. 2 (1999): 129.

[xix] Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 242.

[xx] Lewis and Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” 15.

[xxi] Thomas Harrison, “Classical Greek Ethnography and the Slave Trade,” Classical Antiquity 38, no. 1 (2019): 36–57.

[xxii] Lewis and Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” 29–30.

[xxiii] Lucia Cecchet, “Poverty as Argument in Athenian Forensic Speeches,” 2013, 61, https.

[xxiv] Ober quoted in Mirko Canevaro, “Democratic Deliberation in the Athenian Assembly: Procedures and Behaviours towards Legitimacy,” Annals HSS 73, 2019, 3.

[xxv] Mogens Herman Hansen, The Tradition of Ancient Greek Democracy and Its Importance for Modern Democracy, Historisk-Filosofiske Meddelelser 93 (Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 2005), 8.

[xxvi] Lewis and Canevaro, “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity,” 29–30.

Bibliography 

Canevaro, Mirko. “Democratic Deliberation in the Athenian Assembly: Procedures and Behaviours towards Legitimacy.” Annals HSS 73, 2019.

———. “The Public Charge for Hubris Against Slaves: The Honour of the Victim and the Honour of the Hubristēs.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 138 (2018): 100–126.

Cecchet, Lucia. “Poverty as Argument in Athenian Forensic Speeches,” 2013.

Cohen, Edward E. Athenian Economy and Society: A Banking Perspective. Princeton University Press, 1992.

Hansen, Mogens Herman. The Tradition of Ancient Greek Democracy and Its Importance for Modern Democracy. Historisk-Filosofiske Meddelelser 93. Copenhagen: Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 2005.

Harrison, Thomas. “Classical Greek Ethnography and the Slave Trade.” Classical Antiquity 38, no. 1 (2019): 36–57.

Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition. Notes on the State of Virginia. Yale University Press, 2022.

Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery, 1619-1877. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.

Lewis, David M. Greek Slave Systems in Their Eastern Mediterranean Context, c.800-146 BC. First edition. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Lewis, David M., and Mirko Canevaro. “Poverty, Race, and Ethnicity.” In A Cultural History of Poverty in Antiquity (500 BCE – 800 AD), edited by Claire Taylor. Bloomsbury, 2022.

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: Norton, 1995.

Ober, Josiah. “Inequality in Late-Classical Democratic Athens: Evidence and Models.” In Democracy and an Open-Economy World Order, edited by George C. Bitros and Nicholas C. Kyriazis, 125–46. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017.

———. Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology and the Power of the People. Second print., with Corrections. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Harvard University Press, 1982.

Rosivach, Vincent J. “Enslaving ‘Barbaroi’ and the Athenian Ideology of Slavery.” Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte 48, no. 2 (1999): 129–57.

Vlassopoulos, Kostas. “Greek Slavery: From Domination to Property and Back Again.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 131 (2011): 115–30.

What Latin America Can Teach About Political Instability

[Pictured: A group of fascists march in Brazil in 2019, with hopes of reviving Brazilian Integralism]

By Diego Viana

For a Latin American like me, a certain anxiety currently expressed by liberals and social democrats in the wealthy West is intriguing. Op-eds in the mainstream media and book titles in political science set off the alarm: democracy, often designated our democracy, is in danger. Why? Because centrist political forces are gradually losing their capacity to determine the terms of the debate and the universe of what is possible, election after election, opinion poll after opinion poll. Meanwhile, the social landscape is transformed by an increasingly aggressive far Right and the return of the Left to the streets around 2011, after a somewhat dormant decade. It is true that political, economic, and social leaderships with little esteem for a democratic veneer are clearly on the rise. It is also true that mass protests and barricades are back in the game. Yet, seen from my part of the world, these trends are remarkably familiar.

It is tempting to reduce the complexity of current political tendencies by jamming them all into the single narrative of “rising populism,” as mainstream political scientists and journalists in the West so often do. It is comfortable, but hardly elucidating, to melt such names as Marine and Jean-Marie Le Pen, Éric Zemmour, Donald Trump, Georgia Meloni, Vox, Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the United Kingdom Independence Party, but also Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Bernie Sanders, Podemos, Jeremy Corbyn, and others, into a single political concept, and then contrast them with a liberal center deemed democratic in essence. 

Comfortable, of course, for those who only aspire to lament the slow corrosion of liberal democracy, as witnessed in Eastern European countries like Poland or Hungary. The framework that delimits the trend as a rise of populism or illiberalism conveniently leaves aside the traditional Right's consistent drift further right. France is a good example. While the suburbs burn in protest against police brutality, the traditional Republicans (formerly “Union for a Popular Movement”) send out xenophobic and racist messages and policy proposals. President Emmanuel Macron, in turn, who was once a minister under socialist president François Hollande, then was elected in 2017 with a strictly neoliberal platform, places himself increasingly in the orbit of rightist ideas, hoping to keep right-wing voters within reach. In 2021, he adopted the notion that universities are dominated by “Islamo-leftism.” This year, he repeated far-right novelist Renaud Camus's diagnosis of a “decivilization” of France.

And yet, someone like Macron, who bypassed Congress to sign a pension reform into law despite overwhelming popular opposition, is considered a symbol of liberal democracy. Is it simply because, unlike Le Pen's Right or Mélenchon's Left, he remains a free market champion? Or, likewise, is the Conservative British government, which installed a prison boat to detain immigrants, liberal-democratic because they don't subscribe to the recoil of economic nationalism characteristic of their Brexiteer predecessors under Boris Johnson? If (neo)liberalism itself develops into a strict surveillance/police state, with a distinctly authoritarian horizon, are we still speaking about democracy?

I believe the Latin American experience suggests that the most significant aspect of the current political trend is neither its “populism” [1] nor its “illiberalism,” but its instability. While the usually nationalistic, sometimes ultraliberal, occasionally religious, and often openly fascist New Right has been rising relentlessly, by creating new parties or caucuses inside the traditional ones, the process has not been as steady as it might seem. In the last decade, the Right, Left, and Center have all seesawed vertiginously between victory and defeat. Think of how the AfD in Germany grew during the refugee crisis of 2016, then lost popularity in the aftermath of the pandemic, then grew again. Or how the traditional Left won the French 2012 elections, only to be practically wiped out in 2017, replaced by Mélenchon's France Insoumise, which has now become the centerpiece of the left-wing coalition NUPES (New Ecological and Social People’s Union) in Congress. Or how the Labour Party reached 40% of the vote that same year with Corbyn as leader, before the debacle [2] that led to the rise of Keir Starmer. Or even the rise of young socialists in the United States, while the obscurantist Right took over the Supreme Court. More recently, in Spain, the Right's inability to form a government with the neofascists from Vox, immediately following a significant victory in local elections, shows that the game is not as linear as is often depicted. Quite the opposite: it oscillates wildly.

Moreover, in most of these countries, opinion polls do not show a clear preference for the nationalist, xenophobic, ultraconservative ideas these groups profess. It is true that they usually don't tip towards left-wing ideas either, such as redistribution or public ownership. Nevertheless, if people in Europe and the United States tend to view the world with a more "centrist" lens, then the loss of steam by the centrist forces becomes puzzling in its own right. Which leads to the good old materialistic interpretation: the political oscillation and the ultra-conservative call may reflect economic insecurities, or, more widely, deeper anxieties concerning living conditions.

The relation between the worsening living conditions and the odd mix of nationalism, racism, bigotry, religious fanaticism, and libertarianism we are becoming used to is not immediately obvious. Sadly, structural relations are rarely obvious. But it is not hard to notice that, in the absence of factors that foster social cohesion — through common experiences, such as work relations and opportunities to consume, which give people a feeling of participation in economic life, and public services, pensions, unemployment benefits etc. — those yearning for belonging may recourse to confrontational forms of religiosity, a renewed strength of white supremacy, or the extreme demands of a neoliberal ethics as it appears in the Silicon Valley way of life, where every aspect of existence is monetized. All of these seem to be fusing as the contemporary face of fascism.

Which brings us back to Latin America, this old periphery of the Western colonial powers (the United States came up with a much cruder term: “backyard”). Here, political oscillation has been the rule in most countries, not in the sense of what in the region is usually called the “healthy alternation of power,” but violent swings between oligarchic (and, more recently, neoliberal) and progressive forces, with a constant risk of authoritarian slides. The 1990s were a nearly monolithic neoliberal period in the region, succeeded by two “red (or pink) tides,” when a series of somewhat left-wing parties took power in many countries almost simultaneously. In between, a conservative interregnum took hold, either via elections or coups — explicit or not (Honduras in 2009 [3], Paraguay in 2012, Brazil in 2016, Bolivia in 2019).

The Argentinian case is probably the most extreme, as the country is still grappling with financial asphyxiation due to the insistence on a one-to-one parity between the peso and dollar from 1991 to 2001, and the  “rescue” packages from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that followed. In the last decade, the left-wing “Peronista” president Cristina Kirchner was followed by the businessman Mauricio Macri in 2015. Macri then fell out of favor with the electorate due to an inflationary hike intensified by yet another IMF package, and the left-leaning Peronistas [4] regained the Casa Rosada in 2019 with the current president Alberto Fernández.

This year's electoral process has a particularity. In the primaries (where voting is open to all and mandatory), the libertarian, discreetly fascist candidate, Javier Milei, received 30% of the vote, ahead of the traditional right-wing opposition (28.3%) and the governing coalition (27.3%). This means that Milei's prospects of actually becoming president by the end of the year are far from unrealistic. At the time of writing, he’s the betting favorite.

In Brazil, a decade of turmoil ended the relatively stable period associated with the post-1988 “New Republic.” This era of stability, whose hallmark is the adoption of an economic stability plan in 1994, was punctuated by the presidencies of center-right Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002) and center-left Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva (2003-2010), whose tenures marked a particularly optimistic time, when Brazilians genuinely felt that the country had reached a new stage of political maturity — if there is such thing. The following decade, which began hopefully and the expectation of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, would turn out to be marked by a series of mass protests beginning in 2013 and political strife.

The apex of this instability came in 2016, when a poorly justified impeachment process sacked Lula's successor, Dilma Rousseff, who faced increasingly vitriolic opposition in Congress, the media, and even heavily astroturfed protests in the streets. The process, which has consistently been denounced as a coup by the Left, installed her conservative vice president, Michel Temer, in her seat. The traditional political forces of Brazil, which includes large landowners, bankers, the very few families that control the media, the high bureaucracy, the military, and what is left of the manufacturing sector, believed this would obliterate the Workers' Party (PT) and lead to many years of center-right governments.

Instead, the 2018 election brought what felt like a preordained victory for a caricatural far-right candidate who promised to “clean up” the country of leftists and, during the pandemic, mocked the victims and imitated a person suffocating to death. COVID killed more than 700.000 Brazilians. Four years later, Lula was back in office, elected by an insignificant margin of 1.8% of the vote, and riding on the widest imaginable alliance.

In the last few years, the oscillation intensified and accelerated. Peru, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Ecuador have faced protests, impeachments, jailed ex-presidents, fascist presidents, and strikes [5]. Chile — historically the most stable South American country — caught fire.

The 2019 “estallido social” (social blowup) during the presidency of neoliberal Sebastián Piñera led to the formation of a remarkably progressive constituent assembly. The 2021 election pitted the young left-wing activist Gabriel Boric against the neofascist José Antonio Kast, with a victory for Boric that may have been his last. Since then, the project of a new constitution suffered a resounding defeat and his approval rates have sunk. 

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In Colombia last year, Gustavo Petro, a former guerrilla fighter and mayor of the capital, Bogotá, was the first left-wing candidate to reach the presidency, with Francia Márquez, a black female environmentalist, as vice president. Petro's party, Humane Colombia (formerly “the Progressive Movement”), is small and had to rely on a heterogenous alliance (Historic Pact for Colombia) to achieve victory. In government, as the alliance shattered with some of the parties failing to vote with the government, Petro and Márquez came under fire from all sides: the regional agricultural elites, the traditional parties (such as ex-president Álvaro Uribe's Democratic Center) and, of course, the media — which, as in many of the neighboring countries, is highly concentrated. As usual, accusations of corruption are the first tactics employed. In Petro's case, they involve illegal drug money in the electoral campaign and spying on his enemies.

In sum, except for Uruguay, where the Left governed for 14 years and was succeeded last year by a traditional, “normal,” neoliberal president, the politics of Latin America are unstable and often nasty. Progressive, conservative, and neofascist governments have been coming and going in many of the key Latin American countries. No particular set of policies seems to be able to take hold. One group reaches power when the others have disappointed their constituencies.

Why are they disappointed? Once again, because of living conditions, which have largely stagnated for at least two generations, beginning in the early 1980s and leading to rural and urban conflicts, underemployment, and that same permeability of the middle classes to neofascist messages as we are witnessing in the West. As the social tissue increasingly frays, those with a certain level of property and wellbeing feel threatened, and it is hardly a surprise that they resort to “saviors” and “punishers.”

And what makes the Latin American case so instructive for the developed West? I would argue that Latin America, being a “fragile” satellite of the Western world, is particularly exposed to the fluctuations that reveal a crack in the edifice of liberal democracy, in the way this form of government has developed over the last half-century.

While a significant portion of humanity has been living under the aegis of neoliberalism since the late 1970s and particularly after the fall of the Soviet Union, it seems that everywhere in the world the mental model of political stability is still the social-democratic system of the post-WW2 period, particularly in Europe, and known in France as “Les Trente Glorieuses,” the three “glorious” decades of growth with distribution, well-paid manufacturing jobs, widespread unionization, and a managed form of capitalism that guaranteed a comparatively high level of social participation in policymaking. In other words, we seem to expect a kind of world, with the living conditions it implies, that belongs to a bygone era. Our grandparents took a certain political security and quality of life for granted, and we still long for that. But it is not within our reach.

Social-democratic parties promise to reconstitute this historical structure, and occasionally win with that message. But they cannot deliver and lose face, support, and credibility. Then come the conservatives, who intensify the neoliberal agenda, only to cause more precariousness and financialization. Then come the neofascists, who generate horror, social conflict, and brutality. And the cycle repeats.

The illusory character of this somewhat rosy depiction of the mid-20th century is well-documented and nowhere more evident than in what was then called the “Third World.” In Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, the voracious quest for raw materials and cheap labor left a trail of civil wars, coups, and massacres. This probably reminds you of the Vietnam War, but the military dictatorships in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile etc., all of which were supported by the CIA, are also part of the story. The colonial grip over these parts of the world far outlasted the formal colonial ownership or “protection,” as we see from the Western interventions following independence wars in African countries. To a large extent, the comfortable lifestyle that the West associates with liberal democracy was built on the exploitation of the rest of the world, in a renewed form of colonialism.

What made possible the political balance that characterized the “Trente Glorieuses,” with strong trade unions, rising manufacturing wages, and social mobility (in French again: the “ascenseur social,” or “social elevator”), was the possibility and necessity of class negotiations and agreements. Neither capital nor organized labor could expect to have their way in full — even taking into account the strong communist parties of Europe, whose revolutionary flame was kept as low as possible most of the time. Political systems could remain stable and successful due to this delicate equilibrium. However, the equilibrium in turn was maintained thanks to a fear of the Soviet bloc, an unimpeded flow of cheap oil, easy access to resources and markets in the “Third World,” and the absence of serious economic competition from non-Western countries.

As we know, this model was progressively eroded by several factors. The quick rise in productivity that accompanied the industrial advance waned off, making it harder to keep the wage increases. The rise of neoliberalism eliminated the redistributive mechanisms that could have extended the balance of power between capital and labor for a few more years. The capacity of China and other Asian countries to attract manufacturing jobs with ever higher skill profiles, in part due to the opening of markets known as globalization, broke unions' bargaining power. Neoliberalism first emerged and reached power as a response to the exhaustion of the post-war welfare state, the social-democratic model. But it never truly replaced, even among the Left, the notion of a nearly ideal state of affairs where a certain level of democracy was guaranteed by what the German philosopher Theodor Adorno called “managed capitalism” [6].

What makes Latin America a particularly relevant place to understand where the structural power relations are heading elsewhere is that many of the countries mentioned above have been experiencing a post-industrial kind of stagnation for several decades already, after an incomplete process of economic development undertaken precisely in the period of late colonialism, Cold War, and the belief that industrialization was an infallible catalyst of development. Latin America, which never quite developed the institutions of Western social democracy, has to cope with swollen cities, underemployment and informal work, capital imbalances, crumbling infrastructure, but has poor political means to respond. And it was, after all, the site of the first experiment in neoliberal governance: Augusto Pinochet's Chilean dictatorship.

As a result, neoliberal, progressive, and fascist governments replace each other continually, not always in the smooth manner one expects from the ideals of liberal democracy. Occasionally, promises of improved living conditions can be fulfilled, but only to a limited extent, which is why the success stories are quickly followed by a period of frustration and revolt, leading to power changing hands again.

In this context, it is not hard to see that the authoritarian far Right has an edge. Its advantage comes at a low cost. By promising the past over the future, the known over the unknown, the neofascists of our time are always able to delay satisfaction and simultaneously keep their position by blaming someone else. The worse it gets, the easier it is to repeat the process. While an ultraconservative government cannot provide the quality of life that subsists in people's imagination as a mark of the 20th century — the economic and even environmental conditions are incompatible — it can still renew its promise by blaming non-conforming groups for the slowly worsening conditions of life. Hence, the ghost of communism, the widespread xenophobia, the justifications of racism, misogyny, homophobia, etc. that have become so common in our time. 

The post-WW2 model tends toward utter unattainability. It should no longer be our horizon of expectations. Bleak as this may sound, it is safe to say that the edifice of multi-party democracy is crumbling before our eyes. In a world where energy is no longer abundant, manufacturing does not guarantee safe jobs for the working class, unions are busted, climate change puts crop yields at risk, and the neocolonial control over the rest of the world can no longer be expected, the social-democratic balance is hardly tenable.

The greatest risk is that the dominant classes give up the pretense of democracy and revert to a more explicit authoritarian regime. This is most certainly already underway, if we think of the Republican Party under Donald Trump, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's reforms, the British Conservatives, the Spanish People’s Party, or Macron. Once again, Latin America provides a clear-cut example of this choice, as the Right turns to military and religious leaders in their attempts to regain or extend control over the state.

If we can still hope for democracy, we have to accept that it will not be social democracy and certainly not liberal democracy. Whatever it will turn out to consist in, it must be built from the ground up, and the very process of construction needs to be as democratic as the expected final result. In this respect, the bright side — and it is always advisable to conclude from the bright side — of the Latin American landscape is that this part of the world is also a vibrant cluster of the grassroots political and social experimentation we must nurture. The plurinational constitution of Bolivia, the ecosocialism being developed by the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement, the strength of solidarity economy schemes in Argentina, and the articulation of indigenous movements in many of the countries show that the authoritarian conservative turn is not a matter of necessity. New models of collective life and social organization are being forged, and this is where we should turn to find inspiration.

Diego Viana is a Brazilian economic journalist. He earned his PhD in political philosophy from the University of São Paulo and covers Brazilian politics, economy, and social conflict.

Footnotes

[1] In its contemporary form, the concept is most often used in a way that corresponds to Jan-Werner Müller's definition as pitting a “pure and unified people” against a “morally corrupt elite.” This is, of course, not a helpful definition if we are trying to understand the inherent instability of the period. I will not discuss this definition, and also leave aside the appropriation of the concept of populism by Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, and Pierre Dardot, as the question of defining populism is beside the scope of this text.

[2] The main instrument of Corbyn's downfall was a report that accused him of not handling antisemitism accusations within the Labour Party appropriately. Later, Al Jazeera revealed that the party bureaucracy actively worked to undermine his leadership, which included drafting the antisemitism report. Corbyn was later suspended from the party.

[3] In 2009, the Honduran president Manuel Zelaya was forcefully removed from office by the army, in a traditional coup d'état. In Paraguay, President Fernando Lugo was ousted after a summary impeachment process with only two hours to prepare his defense. The cause was allegedly the insecurity in the country after a bloody conflict between landless workers and the police. This inaugurated the series of “parliamentary coups” that reached Brazilian Dilma Rousseff in 2016. The Bolivian case is different in that it involves the questionable decision by the Supreme Court to allow President Evo Morales to run for a fourth term. After he won the election, accusations of electoral irregularities emerged and the military forced him to resign.

[4] “Peronista” designates the political groups that claim the legacy of Juan Domingo Perón, president in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The reason why one must specify that these “Peronistas” are left-leaning is that there are “Peronistas” of all tendencies, including the conservative Carlos Menem, who introduced neoliberalism to the country in the 1990s. Perón himself tended to favor the right-wing Peronistas. In the 1960s, when exiled in Spain, Perón gave an interview where he was asked to explain how he saw the Argentinian political landscape. He listed the parties but did not include “Peronista” as a category. The reporter reminded him of that, to which he replied: “Oh, but they are all Peronistas.”

[5] I will leave aside the cases of Venezuela, El Salvador and Nicaragua, whose paths are outliers.

[6] A possible reason for this is that the neoliberal agenda transformed living conditions gradually — except in transitioning countries subjected to “shock doctrine” — progressively eroding labor's position in the distributive conflict, in order to uphold Western capitalism's competitive edge. The slow, but sure erosion of the Welfare State and the possibility of what the International Labour Organization names “decent work” seems to sustain the hope for a return to managed capitalism.

Why Didn’t the Revolution Happen?: A Critical Assessment of Marx and Class Struggle

By K. Wilson

There has been a perceptible shift in how Marxists discuss the revolution in the past decades.  Marx insisted that a revolution in industrialized Europe was not just inevitable, but imminent.  The process of “proletarianization,” he wrote, had divided the world into workers who sell their labor and employers who own the means of production, all but eradicating other class distinctions.  This state of affairs would incubate “class consciousness” among European workers, a rational understanding that their interests as a class consisted of seizing the means of production – leading inexorably a socialist revolution.  Marxists in the early twentieth century matched this confidence that the world was on the cusp of revolution.  Lenin, writing in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s 1917 February revolution, proclaimed that “[t]his first stage of our revolution will certainly not be the last.”[1]

But as economic development progressed in western Europe and North America – the countries with advanced industrial economies seemingly ripest for revolution – the revolution simply didn’t occur.  Capitalism and bourgeois democracy remain the dominant economic and political modes in the industrialized west.  And although some socialist revolutions really did occur throughout the twentieth century, most took place in pre-industrial agrarian economies, and almost all of the resulting governments have since collapsed.

In the mid-twentieth century, thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School – most notably Herbert Marcuse – tried to explain the absence of revolution while maintaining a broadly Marxist framework.  Marcuse argued that mass media and consumerism had eliminated the proletariat’s political imagination, thereby sapping the West of its revolutionary potential; in lieu of positive revolutionary activity, he urged a purely negative “great refusal” to participate in consumerism.[2]

Most contemporary Marxist thought tacitly adopts Marcuse’s pessimism about an imminent revolution.  When Marxist literature mentions revolution at all – a rarity – it discusses revolution as a pipe dream, or a hazy and contingent possibility, or sometimes even a strategically unsound goal.  In a rather frank article from 2019, apropos of the 100th anniversary of the First Communist International, Jacobin editor Loren Balhorn wrote that “[a]t least for the time being, it would appear unwise to emulate the Comintern’s strategic perspectives” – that is, the pursuit of an international proletarian revolution – “for working class power.”[3]

For a Marxist, these answers are both unsatisfying and strategically unhelpful.  It is time to return to the very basic question that the events of the twentieth century raise: why didn’t the revolution happen?  The question is of vital strategic importance to contemporary socialism, but there are few attempts to formulate a square answer.

This essay focuses on one aspect of that question – the failure of class consciousness to take hold in western industrialized countries.  A close analysis of the economic and social changes in the industrialized west since Marx wrote reveals several interrelated reasons why class consciousness hasn’t developed.  The disruptive global events of the twentieth century, especially World War II and its aftermath, slowed the “proletarianization” of workers and created breathing room for the growth of a large, relatively prosperous middle class.  The middle class has since served as a buffer between the antagonistic interests of labor and capital.  Further, the transition of many advanced economies from manufacturing-based models to information-based models has blurred the hard line between capital and labor that Marx identified.  These conditions have given rise to a mode of politics on the left based on personal identity rather than class solidarity.  The essay concludes with some strategic observations based on these constraints.

Forces of Convergence

In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, French economist Thomas Piketty established a helpful framework for evaluating conditions that affect income and wealth inequality.  He distinguished between “forces of divergence,” which render society more unequal, and “forces of convergence,” which reduce inequalities.  After conducting an exhaustive analysis of these forces in the twentieth century, Piketty found that three forces of convergence impeded the growth of wealth and income gaps – contrary to Marx’s prediction.

First, Piketty noted that the populations of advanced countries grew dramatically since Marx wrote.  Population growth tends to diminish the importance of inherited wealth, since large family fortunes dilute when the family grows, so this trend reduced wealth inequality.  Second, Piketty observed that the total output of industrial economies grew much more quickly than Marx anticipated.  This reduced income inequality, as rapid economic growth provides more opportunities for people born in poverty to accumulate significant wealth.  Third, Piketty pointed out that the twentieth century was rife with major geopolitical events – World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II – all of which produced massive inflation in the developed world.  Although inflation can cause serious privations in the short term, over the long run, it reduces economic inequality.  This is because debts are measured in specific units of currency, so as currencies lose value, debts become easier to escape.

Due to this confluence of historical phenomena, the mid-twentieth century experienced an unprecedented reduction in economic inequality.  The geopolitical, social, and economic chaos resulting from two World Wars and a global financial crisis created breathing room for genuine upward economic mobility.[4]

The “Middle-Class” Buffer

The result of this upward mobility was the growth of a large and relatively prosperous middle class in most advanced economies, rather than the stark division of bourgeoisie and proletarian that Marx predicted.  The prominence of the middle class has significantly inhibited class consciousness.  Class consciousness, as Marx defined it, is an understanding of the world in terms of “relations . . . not [] between one individual and another, but between worker and capitalist, tenant and landlord, etc.”[5] 

The more stratified the economy becomes, the easier it is for workers to develop a rational understanding of their interests as a class – and a corresponding realization that their interests are antagonistic to the capitalists’.

But without a stark, binary division between workers and capitalists, these antagonisms become murky.  An upper-middle-class worker – say, a corporate middle-manager – is still a worker because she doesn’t own the assets the corporation uses to produce value.  But if she’s wealthier than her neighbors, has a cushy and reasonably fulfilling job, and enjoys a comfortable lifestyle, she has little reason to perceive her interests as hostile to her employer’s.

Throughout the last century and a half, neoliberal institutions have exploited that strategic reality by using the middle class as a “buffer” for class antagonisms.  Howard Zinn’s leftist history textbook, A People’s History of the United States, is rife with enlightening examples of this strategy.  For instance, in his discussion of the Progressive era at the beginning of the twentieth century, Zinn notes that many states began to pass laws providing for compensation for injured workers and otherwise limiting abusive employment practices.  These laws improved conditions for the flood of working-class immigrants arriving from Europe and allowed just enough immigrants to prosper to form “a middle-class cushion for class conflict.”  Later, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, a wave of protests drew attention to the woeful inadequacy of urban schools attended predominantly by Black children.  Boston’s government developed an insidiously clever solution to this problem: rather than fixing the urban schools, it implemented a policy of “busing Black children to white schools, and whites to Black schools.”  The result, Zinn explains, was “an ingenious concession to protest.  It had the effect of pushing… whites and poor Blacks into competition for the miserable inadequate schools.”[6]

These examples illustrate how capital has – more or less consciously – allowed the middle class to thrive in order to pit it against the poor.  The tactic has been remarkably successful.  In America, nearly 90% of people consider themselves “middle-class,”[7] and politicians on the left and right obsessively appeal to middle-class anxieties when seeking election.  Obviously, the middle-class doesn’t actually encompass 90% of the population.  And even if it did, a person in the 95th percentile of income (the top of this purported “middle-class”) and a person in the 5th percentile (the bottom) probably don’t share many tangible interests.  But if both of those folks think of themselves as “middle-class,” they likely won’t perceive their interests as antagonistic.

This tactic works in part because it appeals to a basic human psychological tendency: the fear of relative deprivation.  A person is “relatively deprived” if she is less materially wealthy than her community.  Behavioral psychology shows that a relatively deprived person is likely to feel anger, envy, and resentment even if she is perfectly well-off from an “absolute” perspective.[8]  People’s sense of satisfaction depends on feeling materially better-off than other members of their community, or at least not feeling worse-off.  Due to the various economic strata in the industrialized west, most workers have people slightly worse-off to fear, and people slightly better-off to envy – which makes it easy to divide and conquer folks with similar interests.

The Eroding Distinction between Capital and Labor

Efforts to foment class consciousness in the twenty-first century are complicated by the fact that “capital” and “labor” are harder to pinpoint than when Marx wrote.  In Marx’s world, poor laborers survived by selling their labor and rich capitalists got rich by possessing the means of production.  There were few (if any) rich laborers or poor capitalists.

Not so in the America of today.  As of 2020, over half of Americans owned stock, and many of them – even those who earn relatively low wages – have a significant amount of stock.  Stockholders in the 50th to 90th percentile of income owned an average of $132,000 in stock, while those in the bottom half still owned a healthy $54,000 on average.[9]  A little under half of American adults own mutual funds,[10] while three quarters have a retirement account that rises or falls in value with the stock market.[11]

All of these assets are forms of capital because they represent either a direct (in the case of stock) or indirect (in the case of mutual funds and retirement accounts) ownership interest in the means of production.  Many Americans thus have a tangible interest in the success of corporations – which is why incumbent presidential administrations are much more likely to win reelection when the stock market is strong,[12] and why voters tend to conflate the success of the stock market with the health of the economy.  The notion that laborers and capitalists always have antithetical interests is a harder sell to Americans whose wealth depends on capitalists succeeding.  As it turns out, there are some poor capitalists.

There are also some rich laborers. Socialists often discuss professional athletes as laborers, even though many of them are astonishingly wealthy.  For instance, a Jacobin article celebrated NBA players as “highly-skilled workers” who are in a “position to build working-class solidarity across different groups of workers and extract concessions from management.”[13]

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But this example illustrates why the labor/capital distinction has become harder to draw in late capitalism.  In one sense, calling athletes “laborers” makes sense because they’re paid to train and play games, which is a form of labor.  But many professional athletes make a lot more money from endorsements and advertising than they do from playing.  Are those athletes really “laborers” when most of their income derives from their image, rather than any specific work they perform?  Is an athlete’s personal image really “labor” rather than “capital”?  More fundamentally, would rich professional athletes tangibly benefit from a socialist revolution?

Just as it’s difficult to isolate “labor,” it’s also sometimes hard to locate the means of production with any precision. In Marx’s world, the means of production were concrete: industrial machines that laborers operated to make products.  That’s still true in some industries, like manufacturing, but what about information-based industries?  Picture a software developer.  The “product” she makes is computer code.  What are the “means of production” for computer code?  The simplest answer is a computer, coupled with a programming language and a code editor.  But most software developers probably have their own computers, and most programming languages and code editors are open-source.  In that sense, software engineers own the “means of production” for the product they make – whereas an assembly-line worker doesn’t own the assembly line.  Yet software developers are undoubtedly “laborers” under a traditional Marxist analysis.

None of this undermines Marx’s basic point that labor and capital have antagonistic interests.  But the existence of the middle class, coupled with the transition of advanced economies from manufacturing-based to information-based industries, has made it more difficult to figure out who’s the capitalist and who’s the laborer.  That necessarily inhibits the development of class consciousness.

A Politics of Personal Identity

These conditions have made it difficult for the American left to organize around class.  Instead, throughout modern American history, most leftist political movements have centered on identity – race, ethnicity, gender, gender orientation, sexuality, etc.  Of course, there have been some exceptions; Eugene Debs, the brief prominence of the Industrial Workers of the World in the ‘20s and ‘30s, and more recently, Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign spring to mind.

But in terms of both numbers and influence, class-based leftist movements pale in comparison to identity-centric efforts like the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, and the Black Lives Matter protests.  Because Americans don’t strongly perceive themselves in terms of class, it’s difficult to organize class-based leftist political activity.  This trend is especially stark in the twenty-first century.  By far the biggest left-leaning political movement in America in the past few decades is the Black Lives Matter protests against racially-motivated police violence.  The largest confluence of protests occurred in the summer of 2020 and involved around 20 million participants – making the protests one of the largest social movements in American history.[14]  Other contemporary rallying points for the left include abortion and LGBTQ rights, which are identity-centric issues.

To give credit where it’s due, identity politics has produced some remarkable results.  Although the Black Lives Matter protests haven’t achieved much tangible progress on police violence – police shootings per capita have actually increased since the protests began[15] – the movement galvanized a generation of Americans into leftist politics.  And thanks to relentless activism by the LGBTQ community, in the past twenty years, Americans’ views on gay rights underwent an astonishing reversal; in 2004, 60% of Americans opposed gay marriage, while in 2019, 61% favored it.[16]

It’s also worth noting that approaches to leftist politics that emphasize only class, to the exclusion of other predicates of oppression, alienate potential supporters and ignore the manifold forms of structural violence that afflict society.  For example, some socialists have tried to reframe police violence as a primarily class-based issue.  But while police are more likely to kill poor people, class explains a mere 28% of the disproportionately high rate of police violence against Black people.[17]  By the numbers, police violence is primarily a race issue.

For that reason, proponents of identity politics often accuse socialists of “class-reductionism.”[18] But while this is sometimes fair criticism, more often than not, the exact opposite is true – movements centered around one type of personal identity conceptualize every political struggle in terms of that identity, replacing “class-reductionism” with race- or gender- or sexuality- reductionism.  That tendency both inhibits class consciousness and causes a fundamental misunderstanding of key political issues, to the strategic detriment of the left.

The “school-to-prison pipeline” is a case in point.  The phrase refers to the tendency of some schools to apply harsh disciplinary policies and refer students who break the rules to law enforcement.  This is pervasive at low-income, predominantly Black and Latinx schools, and was the subject of one of the most widely-read leftist books this century – Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.  Following in Alexander’s footsteps, virtually every framing of the school-to-prison pipeline fixates on race-based disparities in school discipline and incarceration.  Google “school-to-prison pipeline,” and you’ll find that one of the first results defines it as “practices and policies that disproportionately place students of color into the criminal justice system.”[19]  Class doesn’t even get a mention.

But while there are doubtless real differences in the outcomes Black and white adolescents face in school and the justice system, the majority of those differences are attributable to class, not race.  According to one comprehensive study, about a third of the discipline gap between Black and white students cannot be explained by poverty, disciplinary histories, and school district characteristics.[20]  Obviously this indicates that a disturbing share of the gap in school discipline stems from pure racism, but don’t miss the forest for the trees: two-thirds of the gap is attributable to the material economic conditions of the students.  Another study found that although Black men are significantly more likely to face incarceration than their white counterparts, a majority of that disparity (between 54 and 85%, depending on the definition of “incarceration”) is attributable to class.[21]  In sum, most of the people who traverse the school-to-prison pipeline – and face subsequent terms of incarceration – do so because they’re poor, not because they’re Black.

The way we talk about these issues has strategic consequences.  A poor white person hearing about the school-to-prison pipeline might decide that the issue isn’t important to him because it’s unlikely to affect his kids – an incorrect conclusion founded on an inaccurate framing of the issue.  The school-to-prison pipeline is a class issue, but because leftist politics centers on personal identity, discourse on the school-to-prison pipeline doesn’t promote class consciousness.

Identity politics – or, more accurately, “identity-only politics” – also leaves oppressed groups vulnerable to divide-and-conquer tactics by the right, which further inhibit class consciousness.  The artificial tension between Black people, gay and lesbian people, and trans people is a good example of these tactics.  In the early 2010s, the National Organization for Marriage, an anti-gay advocacy group, circulated an astonishingly frank internal memo on how to use gay marriage as a wedge issue.  An excerpt reads:

The strategic goal of this project is to drive a wedge between gays and Blacks – two key Democratic constituencies.  Find, equip, energize, and connect African American spokespeople for marriage; develop a media campaign around their objections to gay marriage as a civil right; provoke the gay marriage base into responding by denouncing these spokesmen and women as bigots… Find attractive young Black Democrats to challenge white gay marriage advocates electorally.[22]

Later, when trans rights came to prominence in the cultural discourse, right-wing groups pivoted to manufacture another “wedge” between women plus gay and lesbian folks, on the one hand, and trans people on the other.  In 2017, Meg Kilgannon, the executive director of Concerned Parents and Education, spoke at a summit hosted by the Family Research Council – a Christian rightist, anti-LGBT organization.  Kilgannon laid out a strategy for opposing measures expanding trans rights in schools: portray trans rights as anti-feminist and anti-gay.  This would be effective, Kilgannon argued, because “the LGBT alliance is actually fragile and the trans activists need the gay rights movement to help legitimize them.”  But for many LGB activists, “gender identity on its own is just a bridge too far. If we separate the T from the alphabet soup we’ll have more success.”[23]

Wedge issues are an insidiously effective way to blunt the efficacy of identity-based leftist politics.  Promulgating wedge issues pits oppressed groups against one another, which inhibits the members of those groups from perceiving themselves as part of a single economic class with united interests.

Of course, practitioners of identity politics are not to blame for this unfortunate reality.  Most of those folks are sincere advocates for marginalized groups who simply use the most effective political strategies they can muster – and sometimes achieve real progress in their communities.  But while leftist politics in America remains centered on personal identity, class consciousness is unlikely to develop.

Conclusion

This analysis of class consciousness in modern America gives rise to several strategic observations.  First and foremost, the delicate balance of factors that has allowed the middle class to remain viable for almost a century may be deteriorating.  Although factors of convergence have supported the existence of the middle class for the past century or so, those trends seem to be reversing.  Near the end of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Piketty suggests that population and economic growth are slowing, inflation is slowly declining, and economic inequality is on the rise in the western world.  If the forces of convergence turn into forces of divergence, the classes will slowly stratify, and a degree of class consciousness will probably develop on its own.  Socialists should exploit this reality by advancing a class-centric analysis directed at members of the middle class suddenly cast into poverty by these economic trends.

By the same token, leftist generally should recognize that, given the competing substrata of the economy and the multifarious forms of oppression, neither class nor personal identity furnishes a comprehensive answer to all social ills.  As discussed, class alone doesn’t provide a satisfactory explanation of police violence, and race alone doesn’t provide a satisfactory explanation of the school-to-prison pipeline.  Instead, we should take an empirical approach to confronting specific problems.

Relatedly, leftists should spot wedge issues – which thrive in the areas where two oppressed groups believe their interests are in tension – and avoid schismatic arguments.  Instead, leftist analysis should begin with the tangible interests that most oppressed people share.  For instance, it is routine to point out that Black women face significant and unfair disparities in pay; women tend to be paid less than men and Black people tend to be paid less than white people, meaning that Black women face compound inequities in their salaries.   But discussing pay disparity in terms of identity pits these groups against each other, implying that Black women have different interests from white women and Black men.  A better way to frame the issue is to focus on an enemy common to all of those groups – employers, which have overly broad discretion to set their employees’ salaries – and the common problem that results, namely, that workers as a whole are paid too little and unfairly.

By framing issues in terms that take into account both identity and class, socialists can take advantage of rising economic inequality to promote class consciousness.  And then, perhaps, we can prove that the revolution was merely deferred – not denied.

Sources

[1] Vladimir Lenin, “Letters from Afar: The First Letter,” Pravda, March 21, 2017, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/lfafar/first.htm.

[2] Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (New York: Routledge Classics, 2007), 21-51, available at https://www.cs.vu.nl/~eliens/download/marcuse-one-dimensional-man.pdf.

[3] Loren Balhorn, “The World Revolution that Wasn’t,” Jacobin, March 2, 2019, https://jacobin.com/2019/03/comintern-lenin-german-revolution-ussr-revolution.

[4] Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Bellknap Press, 2014), 13-15, 20-27, 69-85, 99-109, 377-393.

[5] Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Paris, 1847), available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/index.htm.

[6] Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), 349, 467.

[7] Jeffrey Wenger and Melanie Zaber, “Most Americans Consider Themselves Middle-Class.  But Are They?”, Rand Corporation Blog, May 14, 2021, https://www.rand.org/blog/2021/05/most-americans-consider-themselves-middle-class-but.html.

[8] Heather J. Smith and Yueh J. Juo, “Relative Deprivation: How Subjective Experiences of Inequality Influence Social Behavior and Health,” Policy Insights from Social and Personality Psychology 1, no. 1 (October 1, 2014), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2372732214550165.

[9] “What Percent of Americans Own Stocks?”, FinancialSamurai, 2021, https://www.financialsamurai.com/what-percent-of-americans-own-stocks/.

[10] “Share of Households Owning Mutual Funds in the United States from 1980 to 2019,” Statistica, November 9, 2020, https://www.statista.com/statistics/246224/mutual-funds-owned-by-american-households/.

[11] Alicia Adamczyk, “25% of Americans Have No Retirement Savings,” CNBC, May 24, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/24/25-percent-of-us-adults-have-no-retirement-savings-fed-finds.html.

[12] Paul Vigna, “The Stock Market Is a Strong Election Day Predictor,” The Wall Street Journal, September 7, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-stock-market-is-a-strong-election-day-predictor-11599490800.

[13] Barry Eidlin, “Last Week’s Pro Athletes Strikes Could Become Much Bigger Than Sports,” Jacobin, August 30, 2020, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/08/sports-strikes-kenosha-racial-justice.

[14] Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui, and Jugal Patel, “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History,” New York Timesx, July 3, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html.

[15] “National Trends,” Mapping Police Violence, last modified September 30, 2022, https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/nationaltrends.

[16] “Attitudes on Same-Sex Marriage,” Pew Research Center, May 14, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/.

[17] 3P Staff, “Class and Racial Inequalities in Police Killings,” People’s Policy Project, June 23, 2020, https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/project/class-and-racial-inequalities-in-police-killings/.

[18] Tatiana Cozzarelli, “Class Reductionism Is Real, and It’s Coming from the Jacobin Wing of the DSA,” LeftVoice, June 16, 2020, https://www.leftvoice.org/class-reductionism-is-real-and-its-coming-from-the-jacobin-wing-of-the-dsa/.

[19] “Who is Most Affected by the School to Prison Pipeline?”, American University School of Education Blog, February 24, 2021, https://soeonline.american.edu/blog/school-to-prison-pipeline/.

[20] Maithreyi Gopalan and Ashlyn Nelson, “Understanding the Racial Discipline Gap in Schools,” American Educational Research Association Vol. 5, No. 2 (April 23, 2019), https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2332858419844613.

[21] Nathaniel Lewis, “Mass Incarceration,” People’s Policy Project, 2018, https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/MassIncarcerationSummary.pdf.

[22] Brett LoGiurato, “Read The Leaked Anti-Gay Marriage Memo Whose Authors Wanted To ‘Drive A Wedge Between Gays And Blacks’”, Business Insider, May 27, 2012, https://www.businessinsider.com/nom-gay-marriage-memos-drive-a-wedge-between-gays-and-Blacks-2012-3.

[23] Hélène Barthélemy, “Christian Right Tips to Fight Transgender Rights: Separate the T from the LGB,” Southern Poverty Law Center, October 23, 2017, https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/10/23/christian-right-tips-fight-transgender-rights-separate-t-lgb.

40 Differences Between Public Schools And Charter Schools

By Shawgi Tell

Public schools and charter schools are apples and oranges. They differ profoundly from each other, including in organizational, fiscal, philosophical, and legal ways.

Below is an annotated comparison chart of some of the differences between public schools and charter schools. Each annotation could be extended to show more nuances and how deep the dissimilarities go.

Three Important Notes

1. Charter schools have been around for 31 years while public schools have existed for over 150 years. Today there are 7,800 charter schools and 91,000 public schools in the U.S. About 45 million youth attend public schools while 3.7 million youth attend charter schools.

2. When comparing public schools and charter schools, scale, scope, and proportion have to be considered, both quantitatively and qualitatively. For example, if a problem exists in a public school, it is typically much worse or more serious in a charter school. For instance, teacher turnover occurs in both public schools and charter schools, but, pound for pound, in terms of scale and proportion, the teacher turnover rate is usually far greater and more serious in charter schools than public schools. The fact that problems in charter schools are more severe than problems in public schools given the numbers in note number one is revealing.

3. For decades neoliberals have painstakingly set up public schools to fail while simultaneously promoting failed charter schools and dividing people.

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