Union Politics: The Contradictions of a Capitalist Labor Movement

By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso

On December 1st, 2023, the United Auto Workers (UAW) officially voiced their support for a ceasefire in Gaza, becoming the largest labor union to do so. The announcement came from the union’s director, Brandon Mancilla, during a press conference outside the White House. In announcing, the UAW added its name to a growing list of union locals, national chapters, and labor organizations that have called for an end to the genocidal violence still unfolding in the region.

On January 24th, the UAW went on to announce their endorsement of Joe Biden for president during the union’s national Community Action Program (CAP) conference. Thus, in just under two months, UAW managed to call for an end to a genocide whilst simultaneously endorsing a second presidential term for one of its most powerful proponents. And they are not alone. Of the roughly 150 organizations that have signed onto the labor movement petition calling for a ceasefire, nearly one third have also publicly endorsed — or are directly affiliated with a national chapter that has publicly endorsed — Biden for the presidency. Such a gross contradiction cannot be ignored, especially as it represents only the latest example of a broader phenomenon present in much of the American labor movement: capitalist dissonance.

The movement’s shortcomings are well-documented. Much of the labor landscape in the United States — while certainly working to win immediate material improvements for the working class — often fails to provide a more comprehensive framework for revolutionary praxis that looks to a liberated future. The Black Rose Anarchist Federation said it best in their piece ‘The State of Labor: Beyond Unions, But Not Without Them,’ when they described contemporary American unionism as a largely “bureaucratic, service-oriented form” that remains “controlled by a hierarchy of career officials who operate outside the workplace, manage the sale of labor to capital, confine union struggles to narrow and legalistic ‘bread and butter’ issues within their respective industries, and encourage members to pin their hopes to the Democratic Party.” In other words, unions in the United States exist within a heavily enclosed space, one in which their organizational structures and strategic logics, either by external force or internal conviction, do not move past the operational and theoretical limits imposed by the powers that be.

On the domestic front, this can mean a gross lack of worker militancy. Pro-establishment sensibilities make many labor unions averse to necessary direct action and militant resistance in the workplace, especially when financial and legal stability is at stake. This was the case when bureaucratized inaction kept grocery workers across the country from winning tangible post-pandemic gains with their union, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). It exacerbated the ever-growing division between rank-and-filers and leadership in the education sector with both the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). It also prompted members of the Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU) to begin a petition campaign calling on leadership to demand a ceasefire in Gaza. After all, career organizers and labor leaders are incentivized to chart the path of least resistance, forged by impotent contract negotiations and anti-strike clauses. The same can be said for international solidarity. A top-down labor union in cahoots with the US government may state their disagreement with a foreign policy decision — as many did by signing the ceasefire petition. But their entrenched incentive structures and hierarchical layout will rarely allow for a wielding of labor power that truly beats the state into submission. 

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This is because such radical resistance would put the stability of the managerial labor class at risk. Domestically, opposing a two-party candidate for the presidency means foregoing an otherwise surefire way of securing business-as-usual governance for the next four years. The third-party-facing or non-electoral implications of such opposition would produce a level of uncertainty not compatible with the otherwise predictable “bread and butter” issues, industry-specific bargaining, and established labor relations so characteristic of big unions. On the international scale, the same is true. The stability of managerial labor is feasible only if preceded by that of US capital, as downturns in economic growth and fluctuations in performance can pose a risk to corporate power -- the de facto handler of labor managers -- and radicalize workers into embracing more militant sympathies and radical action as a result. One outstanding threat to such stability is the emergence of left labor movements abroad, as such movements are often characterized by policies that harm US economic interests such as the nationalization of industries and the cutting of economic ties with Western nations. The logical conclusion of such a dynamic can be seen in institutions such as the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (AFL-CIO) Solidarity Center. This agency has a stated mission of “[e]mpowering workers to raise their voice for dignity on the job, justice in their communities and greater equality in the global economy.” Meanwhile, its exploits have heavily involved confrontations with leftist governments in South America, often via funding they provide to opposition groups in countries such as Venezuela.

Highlighting this unfortunate reality is hardly an all-encompassing indictment of the US labor movement. The undeniable upsurge in union activity following the COVID pandemic improved people’s lives and deserves credit. Between 2021 and 2022 alone, “the National Labor Relations Board saw a 53% increase in union election petitions, the highest single-year increase since fiscal year 2016.” The embrace of more militant leadership by unions such as the UAW and the Teamsters has yielded significant victories as well, not to mention the advances made by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild in September of last year.

But the imperative of organizers and class strugglers to reshape unions to better facilitate collective liberation remains. This can take many forms, such as bolstering organizing efforts by independent unions like (ex: Trader Joe’s United, Amazon Labor Union), supporting the ongoing work and growth of rank-and-file-oriented unions like the Industrial Workers of the World, and backing the emergence of caucuses and coalitions within established unions that either organize to push their organization in a more radical direction, or ultimately become an independent union that can subsequently hold a candle to its establishment counterpart in terms of size and resource access.

Reformist concessions at the negotiating table and rhetoric restricted to the worker-boss dichotomy do not have to be our daily bread. Worker militancy on the shop floor and a rhetoric of class warfare are more in line with the aims of a revolutionary movement. Moreover, symbolic slaps on the wrist and stern talking to’s — petition signatures, public denouncements — needn’t be the only forms of accountability when our government actively finances and endorses acts of genocide. We can do better. Acknowledging this potential will allow us to transform labor in America, liberating ourselves and each other in the process.

Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso is a Colombian writer, organizer, and artist. In his writing, he seeks to interrogate the nuances of socialist thought and praxis.

Beyond the 4-Day Workweek: Unveiling the Capitalist Roots of Worker Anomie and the Quest for Meaningful Labor

[Photo credit: TOLGA AKMEN/AFP/Getty Images]

By Peter S. Baron

Recently, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has put forth a bill to cut the workweek to 32 hours—an effort unlikely to succeed amidst resistance from Republicans and even his Democratic party peers. His argument hinges on the undeniable truth that technological advancements have significantly boosted productivity, which could, in an ideal world, lead to shorter workweeks without sacrificing wages. Although Sanders' proposed bill faces significant hurdles to enactment, it unmistakably highlights the deliberate strategies of the ruling elite to capitalize on productivity gains, blatantly prioritizing profit maximization over the welfare of workers. This choice epitomizes the capitalist ethos that prioritizes profit over people.

Sanders is advocating for a significant change, however, the manner in which he has presented his bill avoids a confrontation with the underlying structure of capitalism, which is at the heart of the issue. This distorted framing is quintessential Sanders, exposing the superficiality of his role as the so-called "democratic socialist" within the Democratic Party.

As exemplified in his most recent proposal, Sanders typically proposes major policy overhauls but stops short of questioning or altering the foundational capitalist system itself, as if the path to social and economic justice is simply a matter of swapping "bad" policies for "good" ones. He puts forth reformist bills, masquerading them as far-reaching, lasting solutions, only for them to be dismissed as extreme by Republicans and impractical by mainstream Democrats. This charade serves to pacify the Democrats’ base by creating the illusion that the Democrats closely represent the people's interests, sidestepping the essential challenge to the capitalist system that truly reflects the people's interests. This strategy effectually tempers the rising leftist inclinations among workers and the youth, ensuring their continued support for the party by diverting attention away from its fundamental allegiance to corporate interests.

The public deserves to be told the truth: that the root of our problems lies in capitalism itself, not merely in bad policies. If framed in this way, the idea of a four-day workweek would not only become widely accepted but could also serve as a catalyst for a wider social movement aimed at fundamentally rethinking and transforming the capitalist system.

The Limits of Shorter Workweeks in Healing Capitalist Alienation

Reducing the workweek to four days, while undoubtedly a positive step in transitioning to a more humane existence, fails to address the root issue: the grotesque alienation and exploitation of workers that comes as a package deal with a capitalist economic system. Capitalism produces a fundamental disconnect between the labor of the worker and the fruits of this labor that engenders a profound sense of anomie, a term the 19th century French Sociologist Émile Durkheim used to describe the normlessness and social instability resulting from a breakdown in the connection between the individual and the community.

This anomie is not merely a byproduct of long hours, although such hours certainly are a factor. Rather, anomie is woven into the very fabric of capitalist work structures, where workers, stripped of any meaningful control over their labor or its outcomes, become cogs in a vast, soulless machine.

The introduction of a 4-day workweek, while benevolent, does little to mend the gaping wound inflicted by this alienation. It's akin to applying a band-aid to a festering sore, superficially covering the issue without addressing the underlying infection: the capitalist mode of production itself, which inherently prioritizes profit over people, exploiting labor to extract maximum surplus value.

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The Many Faces of Disconnection

In the relentless pursuit of profit, capitalism commodifies work, stripping it of personal meaning and transforming it into a mere transaction. This commodification alienates workers not just from the fruits of their labor, which are appropriated by the capitalists, but also from the labor process itself, reducing it to repetitive, uninspiring, and, frankly, boring tasks that fail to tap into even a fraction of the worker's creative potential.

This narrow focus on productivity fosters an environment where innovative ideas and creative solutions are often stifled unless they directly contribute to immediate financial gains. The loss of creative expression and the inability to see one's unique ideas come to fruition can lead to a stifling of personal growth and a diminishing sense of self-worth among workers, exacerbating the sense of anomie.

The issue at hand is not merely about reducing the working hours for those stuck in such mind-numbing jobs nor is it about crafting policies to infuse creativity into jobs. It's about reevaluating the entire mode of production, the nature of jobs deemed necessary, and the overarching structure of society. Capitalism, by its very design, is prone to producing jobs that contribute to a sense of anomie, suggesting that the system itself may be irreformable in this regard.

Dissolving Bonds: The Erosion of Individuality and Community in Capitalist Rationality

Inevitably, under capitalism, the implementation of technology and automation further alienates workers from the production process. While technological advancements have the potential to liberate individuals from menial tasks, under capitalism, they often result in the deskilling and rising specialization of labor, reducing jobs to the performance of progressively monotonous, machine-like functions. Making jobs more interchangeable intensifies concerns over job instability for workers, who find themselves entangled in a rapidly automating world.

This dehumanization of labor and the relentless commodification of time mean that workers are constantly racing against the clock, further disconnecting them from the natural rhythms of work and life. The unyielding commercialization of time transforms workplaces into arenas of surveillance and regimentation, where every task is monitored, and every minute accounted for. The blurring of boundaries between work and personal time, exacerbated by the digitalization of workspaces, means that workers are never truly 'off the clock,' leading to burnout and a pervasive sense of being trapped in an endless cycle of work.

In this environment, the sense of belonging and community that can arise from collective labor is eroded. Workers are pitted against each other in a competitive race to the bottom, where solidarity is sacrificed on the altar of individual gain. They are thrust into a relentless competition, vying for survival in an environment where job security and advancement are scarce commodities. This competitive pressure fosters an atmosphere of every person for themselves, undermining any sense of collective well-being or mutual support.

Instead of banding together, workers find themselves locked in a desperate scramble to outdo one another, often at the cost of their own and their colleagues' dignity and security. This race to the bottom erodes the fabric of solidarity that could unite workers against exploitative conditions, replacing it with a divisive pursuit of individual gain that ultimately benefits the capitalist system by keeping workers isolated and disempowered.

Workers are reduced to mere data points in a vast algorithm of production, their individuality and communal ties dissolved in the acid bath of capitalist rationality.

Towards a Radical Reimagination of Work

The rigid, top-down structures in our workplaces crush any semblance of autonomy and creativity among workers. The whole labor system is set up to strip workers of their skills and reduce them to nothing more than cogs in a giant machine, churning out profits for the few. This isn't just about stifling creativity; it's about the blatant dehumanization that props up the capitalist machine.

The disconnect between productivity growth and real wage increases only deepens the anomie. Workers are producing more and more, yet their paychecks tell a different story—stagnant or worse. This gaping disconnect between the wealth workers generate and the crumbs they're thrown isn't just unfair; it's a slap in the face. It's no wonder people feel lost and disconnected, exactly like Durkheim's warning of a society adrift.

Proposals like the one Sanders has put forth should be framed not merely as swapping out bad policy for good, but as opportunities to critically examine the system itself—a system whose very foundation undermines worker autonomy and creativity, and actively unravels the social fabric, exposing the deep-seated causes of widespread anomie. We must recognize the myriad ways the capitalist logic oppresses our humanity.

In the face of systemic assaults on the human spirit, the call for a shorter workweek, while benign, falls dramatically short. It is not merely the quantity of work that torments the “soul” but the quality and conditions of labor under the yoke of capitalist exploitation. Addressing the endemic alienation and anomie woven into the fabric of capitalist societies demands a radical reconfiguration of the values that underpin our economic systems, one that dismantles the hierarchical edifices of power and replaces them with egalitarian structures where workers can utilize their unique creative potential and have a direct say in the decisions that affect their lives. This would not only bridge the gap between labor and its fruits, mitigating the alienation and anomie endemic to capitalist societies, but also unleash the imaginative resourcefulness of the workforce, fostering a sense of community and purpose that transcends the mere accumulation of capital.

The transition to a 4-day workweek must be seen not as an end but as a steppingstone towards a more profound transformation of society. It's about reclaiming the dignity of labor, restoring the human connection to work, and constructing a world where work serves the well-being of humanity, not the insatiable appetites of capitalist exploitation. Only then can we begin to heal the deep-seated anomie that plagues our societies, paving the way for a future where work is a source of fulfillment and communal solidarity, not alienation and despair.

Peter S. Baron is the author of “If Only We Knew: How Ignorance Creates and Amplifies the Greatest Risks Facing Society” (https://www.ifonlyweknewbook.com) and is currently pursuing a J.D. and M.A. in Philosophy at Georgetown University.

The Duplicitous U.S. Constitution: How An Autocratic Legal Document Became A Sacred and Incontestable Scroll

[Photo credit: MPI/Getty Image]

By Tim Scott

Republished from Dissident Voice.

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

— Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

We live in a nation founded within a prevailing story line that characterizes the United States as being an exceptional, enlightened and charitable nation. A nation that is a “beacon of light…in every corner of the globe,” generated by the ethos of the American Dream, based on the values and ideals of liberty, justice, fairness, equality and democracy for all.

We also live in a nation that was established to be an empire, whereby imperialism and settler colonialism are endlessly justified and promulgated by an underlying cultural narrative which ascribes whiteness to morality, and by extension a nation bestowed with a divine right to lay claim—at will—to the lands, resources and bodies of Black, Brown and Indigenous people. A nation where private property rights are akin to natural rights, therefore framing capitalism, no matter how brutal, with benevolent intent and thus inviolable. These structural foundations, which are rooted within the barbarism of chattel slavery and the brutality of gender oppression, constructed an enduring national culture defined by genocide, dispossession, white supremacy, anti-blackness, heteropatriarchy, misogyny, social inequity and wealth inequality. Over three centuries later, despite significant efforts by resistance movements to transform it, this underlying national culture persists; entwined within an era where mass surveillance, mass incarceration, unprecedented wealth inequality and unending militarism are perversely justified as imperatives to preserve freedom, democracy and the mythical “American Dream.”

The contradictions between the nation’s mythologies and actual practices are inherent to—and effectively serve to preserve—the cultural, political and economic foundations of the United States. They are indicative of a nation that was founded by an opulent minority of white men who believed that they alone had a God-given right to freedom and prosperity and thus constructed the structural means to protect their wealth and power from a dispossessed demos and to justify the subjugation and exploitation of entire groups of people. Their design for the new nation was based on what economist Joseph Stiglitz refers to as the “interplay between ideologies and particular interests.” As such, the white supremacist and patriarchal ideologies of the wealthy, slave-owning Christian men who founded the nation were fused with free market ideology, the engine for the emerging interests of industrial capitalism. Within this design and from the outset, the founders intended for government to serve as the executor of these violent and undemocratic ideologies and interests.

As many political, legal, and history scholars have acknowledged, the U.S. Constitution was constructed to be an ideological and legal document intended to secure the interests of the virtuous and enlightened gentry who—like royalty—considered themselves to be ordained with a natural right to rule the nation in perpetuity. The founders’ declarations and ensuing constitution promoted an overriding myth or “origin story” that defined the new nation as a unified whole, engaging in a virtuous republican mission whereby, according to John Adams, “all men, rich and poor, magistrates and subjects, officers and people, masters and servants, the first citizen and the last, are equally subject to the laws.” Democracy was therefore (falsely) equated with the ideology of republicanism, whereby the nation’s citizenry was promised equal rights under the law and the inalienable rights to liberty. It is within this context that individual sovereignty and private property were intended to be protected, according to John Adams, from the “tyranny of the majority” (i.e., the “mob rule” of a direct democracy).

In effect, the founders constructed the intersecting cultural, political and economic instruments that would permanently advance the interests of a wealthy white minority through institutionalized and impervious methods of domination and extermination. Thus, the origin story generated by the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” and have “inalienable rights” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” were never intended to be all inclusive. This also holds true to Preamble of the U.S. Constitution, which states:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Instead, the civil and political rights within the U.S. Constitution were restricted to focus exclusively on individual and property rights—for some. This design sought to undermine the possibility for the establishment of universal and equal participation in all spheres of life (participatory parity), not only between the ruling elite, their agents and those they subjugated, but more importantly amongst and between subjugated groups. Thus, complex interdependencies, chains of democratic equivalences, meaningful deliberative processes and solidarities that could threaten the power of the ruling elite were intentionally defused. The founders’ discourse and origin story myths were intended to serve as empty signifiers, having very different meanings and values with regard to who they apply to and how they were to be operationalized. Thus, the discourse of republicanism was ascribed with the interests of the nation’s white male Christian aristocracy and to a lesser degree to their citizen agents who occupied the white middle-class. However, the narrative of life, liberty and equality was never intended to pertain to everyone else.

During the nation’s infancy, when disorder and uncertainty were widespread, the founders’ myths served to define in totality a positive and fully sutured national identity, establishing a foundation for social practices and ideological representations that were instrumental in the social construction of reality and subjectivity for the nation’s white citizen subjects. This set forth a process whereby socialization and identity formation were based on the ideological shaping of a cultural imaginary, constituted through what political theorist Chantel Mouffe referred to as the logic of equivalence, which is “to create specific forms of unity among different interests by relating them to a common project and by establishing a frontier to define the forces to be opposed, the ‘enemy.’” Initially this “common enemy” was the tyranny of the British monarchy, and subsequently took many forms—the tyranny of majority rule, the threat of the “savage Indian,” the emancipation of slaves, Blackness, Mexicans, recognition rights for women and notions of equity and equality in general. Over time and as the empire expanded, the enemy would include any group—or any idea—that posed a threat to the nation’s prevailing power structures.

Despotic ideologies such as this reject the historical conditions by which social relations are constructed, instead representing them as outside of history, as inevitable and natural, while disguising their underlying belief systems as common sense facts. According to Anne Makus, presenting events and practices as ahistorical truths allows problematic events to be framed as unproblematic and a “natural” consequence of society. By losing their postulational status, beliefs are transformed into narrative truths that are immune to differing accounts of events.

Ultimately, the ideological function of the founders’ origin story myths, cultural imaginaries and their corresponding discourse or “narrative truths” resulted in a what Cultural theorist Raymond Williams describes as a “complex interlocking of political, social and cultural forces” known as hegemony.

A Revolution for “Great and Overgrown Rich Men”

Historian Gary B. Nash documented how, for over a century prior to the American Revolution, an elite class of white male landowners, slaveholders and large-scale merchants dominated the political, economic and cultural landscape of the thirteen British settler colonies. In 1770, Boston’s top 1% of the population owned 44% city’s wealth. In the late 17th century the wealthiest 10% of all colonists owned approximately 47% of all the wealth; and by 1775 the wealthiest 10% owned roughly 65% of all the wealth. During the 18th century approximately 30% of all British colonists were free white men, with about 50% of those men owning land, though most of them did not own enough land to be considered wealthy. Approximately 20% of all colonists were Black slaves, and 50% were poor white indentured servants.

At the outset, the privatization of land in the British settler colonies occurred through the genocidal project that is settler colonialism and later through the transfer or privatization of state (“public”) land. According to historian Meyer Weinberg and economists Engerman & Gallman, seized land was often awarded to individuals and families based on their location to power and influence within seats of government and became the basis for commercial pursuits and further accumulation of private wealth. Increasingly during the 18th century, land acquisition and allocation was sold for profit and speculation.

As documented by historian Howard Zinn, the leaders of the Sons of Liberty, the first and second Continental Congress and Continental Army Officers primarily came from the landed gentry of British settler colonial society. With high unemployment and hunger fueling class upheaval following the French and Indian War (1754-1763), aristocratic colonial leaders faced the prospect of waging war against Britain, while also “maintaining control over” the discontented “crowds at home.” During the delegates elections for a convention to frame a Pennsylvania constitution in 1776, a Committee of Privates (composed of white working class enlisted militiamen), “urged voters to oppose ‘great and overgrown rich men” for “they will be too apt to be framing distinctions in society.” According to historians Young, Raphael and Nash, these sentiments led the Committee of Privates to draw up a bill of rights for the convention stating, “an enormous proportion of property vested in a few individuals is dangerous to the rights, and destructive of the common happiness, of mankind; and therefore every free state hath a right by its laws to discourage the possession of such property.”

According to Zinn, the populist discourse of the Declaration of Independence, which declared the right to “popular control over governments, the right of rebellion and revolution, indignation at political tyranny, economic burdens, and military attacks,” proved to unite large enough numbers of white settler colonists to actively rebel against Britain. This propaganda-based document was highly effective in shaping popular opinion by appealing to the yearnings of disenfranchised white settler colonists as a means to unite against a common enemy. Of course, large populations were left out of the populist cause elicited by the Declaration of Independence; namely Black slaves, Native people and in many regards white women. This reality would only become further institutionalized following the War of Independence. It would also turn out that the aristocratic founders were indeed “apt to be framing [class] distinctions in society” as many white working class militiamen had feared.

As Historian Gordon S. Wood explained, in 1776, immediately after issuing the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, a committee of the Second Continental Congress was charged with drafting the first U.S. Constitution known as the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. It was signed by Congress in 1777 and ratified by representatives from all thirteen states in 1781. The Articles established the U.S. to be a confederation of sovereign states, with appointed representatives from the thirteen states making up a national government. Under the Articles the national government was composed of a legislature consisting of one house in which states had equal voting power. There was not an executive branch or a general judiciary. This new national government was charged with overseeing domestic relations with Native tribes, international diplomacy and conducting the war with Britain.

According to Charles A. Beard, at the end of the War of Independence in 1783, establishing a cohesive economy and infrastructure overseen by common laws proved to be difficult under the decentralized system of government outlined by the Articles of Confederation. This was especially challenging during a time of economic instability due to immense war debt. Congress lacked the authority to tax and collect debt directly, to stabilize legal tender and regulate commerce since state legislatures were often unresponsive to these demands, operating without legal restrictions or judicial oversight.

For many former colonial noblemen known as Federalists—who made up a majority in most state legislatures and the Continental Congress—the Articles of Confederation were failing to secure the protection and advancement of their personalty or personal property (movable assets). Many southern plantation owners were also Federalists since their wealth was also largely held in personal property (including slaves) and therefore tied to the same economic interests as northern merchants and financiers. According to Beard, this aristocratic class of large-scale farm owners, merchants, shippers, bankers, speculators, and private and public securities holders believed that a more powerful federal government was required to protect their economic interests.

A minority coalition within the Continental Congress whose economic interests were primarily tied to real (landed) property were known as Anti-federalists. This group of white wealthy male freeholders, small business owners and middle-class, tenant and debtor settler farmers equated concentrated federal power with British rule and therefore preferred a weak central government that would not “tread” on individual rights and state sovereignty.

A Constitution for “The Minority of the Opulent”

As Michael Cain and Keith Dougherty documented, the eruption of Shay’s Rebellion in 1786 only strengthened the Federalist cause. This indebted settler farmer rebellion against the state of Massachusetts was fueled by high taxes and farm foreclosures in western Massachusetts, a mounting crisis that was sweeping across the new republic. Noah Brooks chronicled how General Henry Knox, a major public securities holder, wrote to George Washington in response to this “desperate debtor” rebellion of farmers, laborers and Revolutionary War veterans:

The people who are the insurgents have never paid any, or but very little taxes – But they see the weakness of government; They feel at once their own poverty, compared with the opulent, and their own force, and they are determined to make use of the latter, in order to remedy the former. Their creed is ‘That the property of the United States has been protected from the confiscations of Britain by the joint exertions of all, and therefore ought to be the common property of all. And he that attempts opposition to this creed is an enemy to equity and for justice, and ought to be swept from off the face of the earth.’ In a word they are determined to annihilate all debts public and private and have agrarian Laws, which are easily effected by means of un-funded paper money which shall be a tender in all cases whatever.

As Beard explained “the southern planter was also as much concerned in maintaining order against slave revolts as the creditor in Massachusetts was concerned in putting down Shays’ ‘desperate debtors.’” This proved to be a precarious time for the new nation’s elite, which was exalting the virtues of freedom, liberty and democracy while simultaneously taking action to establish new and improved systems of domination. Insurrection was indeed a clear and present danger to the post-war aristocracy within this decentralized and tumultuous landscape.

In 1787 the Federalists in Congress called on state legislatures to send delegates to a Convention in Philadelphia for a single and stated purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation. Members of Congress quietly went to Philadelphia, with a majority of them intent on constructing a federal government powerful enough to protect their class interests. The first order of business, according to Gerald J. Fresia and Robert W. Hoffert, was for the convention delegates to agree to a secrecy clause concerning their decision-making deliberations. As reported by Beard, the delegates were not only acting to protect their personalty interests from foreign competitors, but as importantly, against the threat the domestic unpropertied masses posed to their wealth and power.

James Madison receives endless accolades for his enlightened roles in the founding of the United States, including the title of “Father of the Constitution.” Like most of the founding fathers, Madison was explicit in his undemocratic aims for the new nation. As documented by Steve Coffman, during the construction of the U.S. Constitution, when deliberating over two of the pillars of a substantive democracy—universal suffrage and the equal distribution of resources— Madison argued, “if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure,” and “agrarian law would soon take place,” one that distributes land to the landless. Therefore, according to Coffman, Madison argued, “our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country” through the protection of property rights. More explicitly, Madison went on to pronounce, “Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests” thus making the charge of government “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”

According to the Yale University political theorist Robert A. Dahl and author Daniel Lazare, under the terms of the Articles of Confederation, which was the law of the land during the Philadelphia Convention, the 1787 Constitution was, in fact, an illegal usurping. The Articles were clear in stipulating that there had to be unanimous approval of all thirteen states to approve constitutional change. Yet those who attended the Philadelphia convention unilaterally changed the ratification rule to nine states, which was by no coincidence the number of states that initially ratified the Constitution of 1787. This strategic and unconstitutional move on the part of the Federalists in Congress was an attempt to work around the significant opposition from Anti-federalists. Lazare went on to claim, “the assertion that ‘We the People do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America’ implies a right not only to create new frames of government but to abrogate old ones when they are no longer serving their purposes.”

Dahl and Beard point out that when it came to choosing delegates for the Philadelphia Convention, a large body of aristocrats were selected by state legislatures that were elected according to suffrage laws requiring “high property qualifications” relating to taxpayer status aligned with the amount or worth of one’s real property and/or personalty holdings. According to Beard, when delegates for the Convention were chosen, “representatives of personalty in the legislature were able by the sheer weight of their combined intelligence and economic power to secure delegates from the urban centres or allied with their interests.” Beard went on to explain, “Thus the heated popular discussion usually incident to such momentous political undertakings was largely avoided, an orderly and temperate procedure in the selection of delegates was rendered possible.” In essence, the majority of the new nation’s inhabitants and citizens were intentionally excluded from participating in the construction of the United States Constitution.

According to Coffman, when voting rights for citizens of the new nation were being decided, James Madison expressed his concern that if they were extended “equally to all…the rights of property or the claims of justice may be overruled by a majority without property.” John Jay, a Federalist “founding father” and a member of Congress who went on to become the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, is famous for making the intent of the Constitution even more explicit by boldly stating, “The people who own the country ought to govern it.” During deliberations on voting rights, James Madison expressed his belief that “freeholders of the country would be the safest depositors of republican liberty.” Within this context, Madison went on to caution his peers to consider the imminent rise of the industrial working-class and the threat they would pose to the nation’s “opulent” minority:

In future times a great majority of the people will not only be without landed, but any other sort of, property. These will either combine under the influence of their common situation: in which case, the rights of property & the public liberty, will not be secure in their hands.

Madison also expressed his concerns that if given suffrage rights, the ominous industrial masses could be coerced or bribed into doing the bidding of divergent ruling class political ambitions. As Madison put it, the unpropertied, “will become the tools of opulence & ambition.” Clearly one of Madison’s primary concerns was how the expansion of suffrage could undermine his desires to create a republican fiefdom.

Gouverneur Morris was an influential “founding father” and close ally of Madison who is often called the “Penman of the Constitution.” According to legal scholar Jennifer Nedelsky, Morris’s vision of the new nation was similar to his peers in that “public liberty” should not involve “direct participation in government.” Instead, according to Nedelsky, in Morris’s plan “the people… were not, in effect, to govern… they would choose their representatives and have the influence over them that frequent elections brought… [and] ‘in the course of things’ people would elect the great and wealthy as their representatives.”

An enthusiastic student of political economy, Morris was known for tirelessly working to ensure that the interconnected pillars of economic and political power of the new nation would be impermeable. In doing so, Morris envisioned and aggressively advocated for a market economy, one with a federal government that was constituted with the legal framework to ensure its permanency. Nedelsky went on to document how Morris was known for his “unqualified positions” that:

illuminate some of the most important and contested issues in American political thought: the status our Constitution accords… to private property, the relation between the values of republicanism and those of capitalism, and the distribution of economic and political power our system fosters.

While the Constitutional Convention’s secrecy clause conveniently provided cover for its authors’ anti-republican and anti-democratic intentions, Madison’s unapologetic and forthright style reveals how the Constitution was, in its own words, “a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.” Accordingly, Gordon S. Wood, explained, “the source of their difficulties came from too much local democracy, and that the solution was to limit this local democracy by erecting a more aristocratic structure over it.” The designers did allow for a semi-popular lower house of congress, yet counterbalanced with the advent of the U.S. Senate, which was to be elected by state legislatures with rotating terms of six years. The Senate should then be composed of, as Madison put it, “a portion of enlightened citizens whose limited number and firmness might seasonably interpose against impetuous councils.” According to Parenti, the founders often referenced the virtuous qualifications of “enlightened citizens” and “men of substance,” which served as code for those with the right race, gender, aristocratic breeding, wealth, education, and experience that bestowed one with a God given right to rule.

In all, seventy-four delegates were appointed by states to attend the Constitutional Convention while only fifty-five showed up, with many anti-federalists refusing to attend and a number leaving as it progressed, with others refusing to sign in protest. Rhode Island declined to send a delegate. Anti-federalists accused the Federalists of working to reproduce an order similar to the British Crown. In the end, this small group of opulent white men proceeded to draft the U.S, Constitution, which according to historian Gordon S. Wood, “was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period.”

As documented by Wood, a number of Anti-Federalists agreed to ratify the U.S. Constitution only on condition that a bill of rights was included as a means to put limits on federal power. Federalists in Congress begrudgingly agreed, despite their opposition to the idea. Federalists were concerned that by making certain rights explicit “the people” would expect protections for those rights alone, thus limiting future interpretations of the Constitution. James Madison in particular felt that a declaration of such rights would be “parchment barriers” (superficial protections) and wanted to rely on the sturdier measures already in place. According to professor of political science Michael P Federici, by parchment barriers, Madison meant:

…the relationship between the written and unwritten constitutions. There are paper boundaries and limits, what the Framers called “parchment barriers”, and there are unwritten boundaries and limits that are not so much legal as they are cultural, ethical, and religious. The preservation of a constitutional order depends, to a great extent, on the preservation of the unwritten boundaries and limits.

From Madison’s perspective, the great protectors of the private rights of the opulent against an organized majority included the “extent of territory” spelled out in the Constitution which separated people geographically; along with the “multiplicity of interest” between the classes. To Madison these classes included, “those who are without property…those who are creditors, and those who are debtors… [a] landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest…actuated by different sentiments and views.” According to Madison:

If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure…the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.

Always the brilliant political operative, Madison took on the task of drafting a bill of rights with the belief that the disorderly demand for such rights was on the one hand a grave problem, yet also presented an opportunity for a strategic solution. His proposed amendments were jubilantly ratified in 1791, effectively thwarting Anti-Federalist efforts to alter the Constitution while successful garnering loyalty for the Constitution from “the great mass of the people.” According to the U.S. Constitutional scholar Robert A. Goldwin, by engendering a sturdy “national sentiment” in support of the Constitution, Madison:

…took the decisive step toward establishing an independent force in the society, a devotion to the Constitution powerful enough to restrain a malevolent majority. Madison saw that the proposed amendments could make the Constitution universally revered…he saw the Constitution itself, not the amendments, as the sturdy barrier to fend off majority oppression and defend private rights. A bill of rights added to the intact Constitution would bring to it the only thing it presently lacked – the support of the whole people.

Madison not only outwitted the Anti-Federalists, but more ominously, he constructed a highly effective hegemonic instrument whereby the Bill of Rights would be widely considered as a sacred and uncontestable scroll embodying the epic virtues of U.S. democracy.

A Government “Over the People”

According to Goldwin and Kaufman and Blau and Moncada at its core, the U.S. Constitution outlines all the things the federal government cannot do, known as negative rights. Paul Finkelman describes the difference between negative and positive rights as being “freedom from” versus “freedom to.” According to Charles Fried, “a negative right is a right that something not be done to one, that some particular imposition be withheld.”

Simply, the founders encoded negative rights into the U.S. Constitution to ensure that government would protect the property rights bestowed upon “the minority of the opulent” by divine authority. In doing so, according to Cass Sunstein, negative rights bolster the ideology and rule of law of free-market capitalism. In terms of the founders’ Constitution, Sunstein interprets the intent of negative rights in important ways:

Most of the so-called negative rights require governmental assistance, not governmental abstinence. Consider, for example, the right to private property. As Bentham wrote, “Property and law are born and must die together. Before the laws, there was no property: take away the laws, all property ceases.” As we know and live it, private property is both created and protected by law; it requires extensive governmental assistance. The same point holds for the other foundation of a market economy, the close sibling of private property: freedom of contract. For that form of freedom to exist, it is extremely important to have reliable enforcement mechanisms in the form of civil courts.

Cornell professor of law Laura Underkuffler also emphasized in 2003 that the “idea of the Constitution as a charter of negative rights – and of the right to the protection of property as simply one of those rights – is an entrenched feature of American political and legal discourse.” New Jersey Deputy Attorney General Gezim Bajrami confirmed in 2013, “Time and time again, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the government has no affirmative constitutional obligations to the public.”

According to Finkleman, positive rights necessitate “affirmative obligations on the part of government to fulfill the right.” Therefore, positive rights enable a nation-state’s constitution to guarantee a political economy that prioritizes egalitarianism in the social, political, cultural, economic and environmental realms. Positive rights enable government to proactively intervene to ensure universal and equitable access to a living income, housing, holistic education, health care, nutritious food, clean water and a healthy and sustainable environment. Positive rights can empower (not hinder) government to forcefully protect individuals and groups of people from forms of domination and targeted violence. As CeÂcile Fabre emphasizes, a nation-state constituted by positive rights would need to guarantee “that a democratic majority should not be able to repeal these rights and that certain institutions, such as the judiciary, should be given the power to strike down laws passed by the legislature that are in breach of those rights.”

Instead, the founders constructed the U.S. Constitution to forever deter emancipatory strivings and collective interests that are inherent to egalitarian societies.

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The Bill of Rights only reinforced negative rights based prohibitions on Congress concerning intervention in the press, speech, religion, assembly, bearing of arms, etc. By doing so, these purported “civil liberties” fortify the Constitution’s undemocratic foundations and its primary function of harnessing the majoritarian menace to further buttress, both legally and ideologically, the primacy of property rights. As Judge Richard Posner of the United States Court of Appeals stressed in 1983, “the Constitution is a charter of negative rather than positive liberties… The men who wrote the Bill of Rights were not concerned that Government might do too little for the people but that it might do too much to them.”

According to Daniel Lazare, the Constitution and its Bill of Rights assign responsibility for civil liberties to the Supreme Court, essentially relieving the semi-elected branches of government, chiefly Congress “institutionally irresponsible” and civil liberties “de-politicized.” Lazare went on to explain:

Thus was born the peculiar rhythm of American politics in which politicians or the people at large go on periodic rampages in which they lynch, terrorize, and generally trample democratic rights until they are finally brought up short by the courts. Then everyone involved congratulates themselves that the system has worked, that the abuse has been corrected, that the majority has been reined in— until some new eruption sets the cycle going again.

Furthermore, the rights of speech, press, assembly, etc., are the means by which the commercial and propertied class instills their ideological, political, economic and social agenda via a free-marketplace of ideas; whereby access is determined by one’s wealth, race, gender, religion and influence. Not coincidentally, the Bill of Rights only applies to federal and state government action, not to the actions of private business and its agents. All in all, “the commons” became the property of the opulent.

According to Michael Parenti, the U.S. Constitution created a form of government and a political system that prevented “the people” from finding horizontal cohesion and instead “was designed to dilute their vertical force, blunting its upward thrust upon government by interjecting indirect and staggered forms of representation.” To do so, according to historian Morton White, a system of checks was constructed to safeguard against Madison’s expressed fears of “agrarian attempts” and “symptoms of a leveling spirit” by “the proportion of those who will labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings.”

The Autocratic First Amendment

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is widely heralded as the foundational gem of the Bill of Rights and the unambiguous signifier of “American Freedom and Democracy” It reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

However, it can also be regarded as one of the most duplicitous instruments of U.S. hegemony.

In 1799, Supreme Court Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth made it clear that based on English common law, “this country remains the same as it was before the Revolution.” Eight years earlier, with this understanding, the founders applied English common-law when drafting the First Amendment, specifically in terms of the doctrine of “no prior restraint.”

In 1769 William Blackstone, the celebrated “compiler of English law” and major influence on the founding fathers, explained the doctrine of no prior restraint:

The liberty of the press is indeed essential to the nature of a free state; but this consists in laying no previous restraints upon publications, and not in freedom from censure for criminal matter when published. Every free man has an undoubted right to lay what sentiments he pleases before the public; to forbid this, is to destroy the freedom of the press; but if he publishes what is improper, mischievous or illegal, he must take the consequences of his own temerity.

Thus, the First Amendment follows the directive of no prior restraint by prohibiting government from forbidding a “free man” from expressing the “sentiments he pleases before the public.” Yet, if the government determines such “sentiments” to be seditious libel after the fact, prosecution is permissible under the U.S. Constitution. As Howard Zinn put it, to this day the First Amendment under no prior restraint has an important caveat in that:

You can say whatever you want, print whatever you want. The government cannot stop you in advance. But once you speak or write it, if the government decides to make certain statements “illegal,” or to define them as “mischievous” or even just “improper,” you can be put in prison.

This little known yet significant twist on American freedom of expression not only criminalizes dissent after the fact, it also serves the purpose of having a powerful chilling effect in advance. Zinn goes on to explain how, “An ordinary person, unsophisticated in the law, might respond, ‘You say you won’t stop me from speaking my mind–no prior restraint. But if I know it will get me in trouble, and so remain silent, that is prior restraint.”

Yet, in the subsequent two centuries, the U.S. federal government (including the Supreme Court) has also successfully restricted freedom of expression in advance under the rationale of “national security,” most often relating to those who attempt to expose the nation’s nefarious covert and undemocratic activities around the globe. While the First Amendment is explicit in that “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech,” just seven years after Congress passed the amendment, Congress turned around and did just that in 1798 with the Alien and Sedition Acts.

President John Adams and other Federalist leaders expedited the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts under the rational that French and Irish revolutions would spark an egalitarian revolution at home, incited by French and Irish immigrant agitators and foreign spies. Feeding this narrative, a Federalist newspaper of the time claimed Jacobin (egalitarian) French tutors were attempting to corrupt America’s youth, “to make them imbibe, with their very milk, as it were, the poison of atheism and disaffection.” Long-time Massachusetts politician and Federalist Harrison Gray Otis declared in 1797 that he “did not wish to invite hordes of wild Irishmen, nor the turbulent and disorderly of all parts of the world, to come here with a view to disturb our tranquility, after having succeeded in the overthrow of their own governments” and landing in the U.S. “to cavil against the Government, and to pant after a more perfect state of society.”

The Alien Acts included “An Act Concerning Aliens” (enacted June 25, 1798, with a two-year expiration date) which authorized the president to deport any resident alien considered “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.” The Alien Acts also included “An Act Respecting Alien Enemies” (or Alien Enemies Act), which was enacted on July 6, 1798 (with no expiration date), authorizing the president to detain and deport resident aliens whose home countries were at war with the United States.

Enacted July 14, 1798, with an expiration date of March 3, 1801, the Sedition Act applied to U.S. citizens, authorizing the prosecution, imprisonment or large fine of any person who:

…shall write, print, utter or publish, or shall cause or procure to be written, printed, uttered or published, or shall knowingly and willingly assist or aid in writing, printing, uttering or publishing any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the said President, or to bring them, or either of them, into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them, or either or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States, or to stir up sedition within the United States, or to excite any unlawful combinations therein, for opposing or resisting any law of the United States, or any act of the President of the United States, done in pursuance of any such law, or of the powers in him vested by the constitution of the United States, or to resist, oppose, or defeat any such law or act, or to aid, encourage or abet any hostile designs of any foreign nation against United States, their people or government.

As Zinn pointed out, “the Sedition Act was a direct violation of the Constitution. But here we get our first clue to the inadequacy of words on [“parchment”] paper in ensuring the rights of citizens.”

The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 was revised and further codified by Congress with the passing of the Espionage Act of 1917. This reaffirmation of the duplicitous nature of the founders’ Constitution and governing structures was intended to stifle growing resistance against social conditions domestically and the expansion of U.S. imperialism, particularly on the eve of the U.S. entry into World War I. The Espionage Act of 1917 in part read:

Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall wilfully make or convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies and whoever when the United States is at war, shall wilfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States, or shall wilfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States, to the injury of the service or of the United States, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both.

As a means to more effectively crush growing dissent domestically, in 1918 (after the U.S. entered WWI) the Sedition Act was passed as an amendment to the Espionage Act, further restricting free expression. It read in part:

Whoever, when the United States is at war… shall willfully make or convey false reports, or false statements… or incite insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States, or shall willfully obstruct… the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States, or… shall willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States… or shall willfully display the flag of any foreign enemy, or shall willfully… urge, incite, or advocate any curtailment of production… or advocate, teach, defend, or suggest the doing of any of the acts or things in this section enumerated and whoever shall by word or act support or favor the cause of any country with which the United States is at war or by word or act oppose the cause of the United States therein, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than 20 years, or both.

During World War I, federal prosecutors enacted the Espionage Act in over 2,000 cases. While no convictions resulted from charges of spying or sabotage, 1,055 convictions resulted from prohibitions on free speech under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, largely targeting labor leaders, civil rights activists, Black and leftist journalists and publishers, war critics, pacifists, anti-conscription activists, socialists, communists, anarchists and civil libertarians.

In 1919 the Supreme Court actively safeguarded the Espionage Act against constitutional challenges in Schenck v. United States. This case involved Charles T. Schenck, the secretary of the Socialist Party of America, who was convicted by a lower court under the Espionage Act after engaging in counter military recruitment activities by distributing leaflets that encouraged prospective military draftees to refuse military service. The first side of Schenck’s leaflet argued that the Conscription Act (the draft) violated the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition on involuntary servitude and was a “monstrous wrong against humanity in the interest of Wall Street’s chosen few.” It urged recipients to “petition for the repeal of the act” because the war was being spun by “cunning politicians and a mercenary capitalist press.” Schenck appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court, arguing that his First Amendment rights were violated. The Court ruled against Schenck, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. stating:

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic… The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

Thus, the well-known legal rationale against “falsely shouting fire in a theatre” became a metaphor for the limits of free speech in America, namely serving as code against dissent that disrupts U.S. hegemony. Schenck went on to serve six months in a federal prison.

During the same period, the U.S. Supreme Court also upheld the conviction of labor leader and Socialist Party of America presidential candidate Eugene Debs, who was charged under the Espionage Act for making an anti-war speech in 1918. Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison. This was not the first time Debs had been imprisoned for his “un-American” activities, yet the Espionage Act served its purpose in making it easier to silence Debs (and other dissidents), hopefully once and for all.

The Supreme Court case of Stokes v. United States (1920) involved the prosecution of reproductive rights and labor activist Rose Pastor Stokes, who was given a ten year prison sentence for simply writing in a local newspaper, “No government which is for the profiteers can also be for the people, and I am for the people, while the government is for the profiteers.”

In 1917 Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph, the publishers of the Black political and literary magazine The Messenger, were arrested under the Espionage Act when they wrote:

Our claim is to appeal to reason, to lift our pens above the cringing demagogy of the times… Patriotism has no appeal to us; justice has. Party has no weight with us; principle has. Loyalty meaningless; it depends on what one is loyal to. Prayer is not one of our remedies; it depends on what one is praying for. We consider prayer as nothing more than a fervent wish; consequently, the merit and worth of a prayer depend upon what the fervent wish is.

Some Supreme Court decisions that reinforced the Espionage and Sedition Acts did not target radicals or dissidents. One such case involved the United States v. Nagler in 1918, which led to the conviction of the Assistant Secretary of State for the State of Wisconsin, Louis B. Nagler. Nagler was prosecuted after simply telling a group of YMCA or the Red Cross canvassers for the war effort who showed up at his office door, “I am through contributing to your private grafts. There is too much graft in these subscriptions. No, I do not believe in the work of the YMCA or the Red Cross, for I believe they are nothing but a bunch of grafters.”

In the case of the United States v. The Spirit of ’76, Robert Goldstein, the producer of the patriotic Revolutionary War movie The Spirit of ’76, was charged under the Espionage Act in 1917 for his film’s graphically unfavorable portrayal of Great Britain, which was America’s primary World War I ally. Federal prosecutors charged that Goldstein had deliberately made a pro-German movie to impugn America’s ally, incite disloyalty and obstruct military conscription. Goldstein who was Jewish (Anti-Semitism was rife in the U.S.) and of German descent, claimed that his intent in making the film was to make money and boost the patriotic mood of the country. He was given a ten-year prison sentence and fined $5,000.

The Sedition Act was repealed in 1921 while the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and the Espionage Act of 1917 have endured into the 21st century. According to Emily Peterson, “The Espionage Act is so vague and poorly defined in its terms, that it’s hard to say exactly what it does and does not cover.”

Diluting the Impact of Popular Sentiments

The Constitution dictates that an Electoral College, not the general electorate or a majority of citizen voters, will choose the U.S. president. Within this undemocratic scheme, voters are actually casting a vote for presidential “electors” tied to the major elite political parties of each state, the numbers of which are based on the number of state Congressional seats. These electors are collectively known as the Electoral College. According to Article II of the Constitution, “Each state shall appoint, such manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the state may be entitled in the Congress.” Translation: state legislatures, not citizens within a state, decide which presidential candidate will receive the state’s electoral votes. These appointed electors, who make up the anonymous Electoral College, are in essence political establishment insiders, who are subject to lobbying efforts, and in many states can roguely decide who they vote for, or if they will even vote at all. According to FairVote, for a presidential candidate to win an election within this system, one must receive over half of the Electoral College votes (in the 21st century, that would be 270 electoral votes out of the 538 national electors). The result is that presidential elections are largely symbolic exercises intended to keep the masses tied to the established order, where the democratic principle of one-person one-vote is prohibited.

As Dahl and Lazare point out, the U.S. Supreme Court was established to exist outside of any form of democratic deliberation and public scrutiny. Instead, imperious and impervious Supreme Court justices are appointed for life by a president and confirmed by a semi-aristocratic Senate (to this day), of which was chosen by state legislatures until 1913. The more popularly elected (yet also largely wealthy) House of Representatives were excluded from these deliberations. This leaves the Supreme Court—the least democratic branch of government—responsible for deciding if and how the rights of the masses are recognized and dispersed, while “elected” representatives stand idle. Accordingly Lazare notes, “rallying behind the Supreme Court” means “rallying behind the Constitution in toto” and “ignoring the constitutional system’s many unsavory aspects.”

The founders’ crafty and abstruse power-sharing arrangement made it difficult to determine where true authority lay, be it in Congress, the Presidency, the Supreme Court or the citizenry at the municipal, state or federal level. As Lazare put it, instead of having a form of government that would serve as “an instrument that ‘We the People’ would create and shape to further our own rule” the Constitution solidified a system of government intended to “create and shape the people in order to further its own rule.” Instead of being a government “of the people” it would be a government “over the people.” Parenti goes on to explain that in keeping with their desire to disenfranchise the majority, the founders included these “auxiliary precautions” that were “designed to fragment power without democratizing it.” Parenti goes on to explain:

In separating the executive, legislative, and judiciary functions and then providing a system of checks and balances among the various branches, including staggered elections, executive veto, Senate confirmation of appointments and ratification of treaties, and a bicameral legislature, they hoped to dilute the impact of popular sentiments. They also contrived an elaborate and difficult process for amending the Constitution.

Article 5 of the U.S. Constitution plays a crucial role in the founders’ undemocratic design by requiring a process whereby a proposed Constitutional amendment has to first pass a two-thirds majority in both the House and the Senate, or through a convention called by Congress based on a request from two-thirds of the states. If a proposed amendment successfully traverses its way through either pathway, it then has to be ratified by three-quarters of state legislatures. As University of Chicago Law School professor Eric Posner describes it, “Any proposal to amend the Constitution is idle because it’s effectively impossible… an amendment requires a supermajority twice—the pig must pass through two pythons.” Two hundred years later, after 11,539 proposed amendments, only 27 have been ratified. The 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments which expanded status rights to former slaves, passed only because the defeated and occupied South was strong-armed into ratifying them, yet as examined later, were not compelled to enforce them. Between 1870 and today only 12 amendments have been enacted, with the last one taking 203 years to be ratified. Posner goes to point out how this labyrinth has led to a reliance on begging the Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution in new ways by hiring “lawyers to formulate their proposals as already reflected in the Constitution rather than argue that the Constitution got the position wrong and so should be changed.” According to Gordon Wood, the very concept of democracy was hijacked and appropriated by the U.S. Constitution in that:

By the end of the debate over the Constitution, it was possible for the Federalists to describe the new national government, even with its indirectly elected president and Senate, as “a perfectly democratical form of government.” The houses of representatives lost their exclusive connection with the people. Representation was now identified simply with election; thus, all elected officials, and, for some, even those not elected, such as judges, were considered somehow “representative” of the people. Democracy rapidly became a generic label for all American government.

In addition to the undemocratic federal government, all 50 states would, in time, establish state constitutions modeled after the federal constitution (to varying degrees), with legislative and executive branches that are semi-popularly elected to develop and administer policies and laws; with state Supreme Courts that preside over legal appeals. State constitutions also establish mechanisms for local governance at the county, municipal or township level where voters popularly elect some variation of town or city managers and/or councils to make and administer local policies and ordinances. It is at the municipal level that the more direct forms of democracy were possible, at least for white men. The town meeting model, where all eligible voters meet to make local governance decisions and elect officials to implement their decisions, was a common form of local governance during the 18th and 19th centuries. State and municipal governments also have a sordid history concerning suffrage rights, often disenfranchising groups of people based on race, ethnicity, religion, class and gender.

The original Constitution left complete discretion to individual states in determining voter qualifications, rules on absentee voting, polling hours and election funding. In most states there is a lot of leeway given to counties in crafting their own ballots, designing and implementing their own voter education programs, deciding how they will handle overseas ballots, the ability to hire and train poll workers, choosing polling locations and in how to maintain their voter registration lists.

Over time (between 1870 to 1972), with the enactment of the 14th, 15th, 19th 23rd, 24th and 26th Constitutional Amendments, various forms of legal discrimination were explicitly prohibited when establishing qualifications for suffrage. It is still legally permissible for states to deny the “right to vote” for other reasons and many have effectively done so as a means to continue to disenfranchise groups of people based on race, ethnicity and class. The 17th Amendment, which enabled U.S. Senators to be directly elected, did not result from popular democratic strivings. Instead, it resulted from pundit and legislator frustrations over corruption, instability, conflict and deadlock due to the indirect process hampering legislative efficiency. In her book Electoral Dysfunction: A Survival Manual for American Voters, Victoria Bassetti sums up suffrage rights this way:

The original document establishing our government acknowledges and weaves slavery deeply into our society. Women cannot vote. Two of the three major federal officers, President and Senator, are not voted on by the people. And there is not a right to vote in the Constitution. The word ‘vote’ appears in the Constitution as originally drafted only in relation to how representatives, senators, and presidential electors perform their duties. Representatives vote. But the people’s vote is not mentioned.

The Bill of Rights did not change this fact. Over two hundred years later the Supreme Court appointed George Bush to be president, and in the process reaffirmed this point in their decision by stating, “The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States.” The double rub here is that the court was referring to a citizen’s rights to vote for Electoral College electors, not the right to vote directly for a presidential candidate.

While allowing citizens to feel as though they have a voice in the political system, the form of “democracy” outlined in the Constitution is clearly designed to impede the citizenry from determining both domestic and foreign policy. Ultimately, the founders crafted a system that allowed select groups of people to have the right to citizenship, privileging a smaller proportion of them to indirectly choose the best “men of substance,” filtered through narrowly prescribed partisan commitments as a means to preserve the wealth and power of the post-revolutionary ruling class. Within this constitutional framework, hegemonic cultural scripts tied to institutional authority perpetuate systemic inequities. In a constitutional republic without positive constitutional rights that mandate parity of political participation and economic redistribution, whilst remedying existing cultural prohibitions on recognition and representation rights; social equity and economic equality will persistently be denied, undermined and contested.

“Unfit to associate with the white race”

One can choose to believe the various cultural myths about how the freedom loving founders despised slavery, but did not work to end it based on a variety of factors, including: timing, not wanting to disrupt a widely accepted and profitable institution, and the need to accommodate the southern plantation system. No matter the rationale, the truth is that it was not in the founders’ political and economic interests to do so, nor is there evidence that they had the moral capacity to end one of the most horrific enterprises in human history. What is clear is that the U.S. Constitution was written to protect slavery while empowering slaveholders in numerous ways. This was demonstrated by General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney’s boastings in front of the South Carolina House of Representatives following the Constitutional Convention about how slavery was secured within the Constitution:

We have a security that the general government can never emancipate them [slaves], for no such authority is granted and it is admitted, on all hands, that the general government has no powers but what are expressly granted by the Constitution, and that all rights not expressed were reserved by the several states.

As documented by Barbara Fields, the Constitution’s three-fifths clause, states were allowed to count three-fifths of their slaves in apportioning representation in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Electoral College. This effectively increased the political power of southern states and thus granted greater protections for the institution of slavery. This disproportionate political power through the Electoral College led to Thomas Jefferson’s 1800 presidential win. The Constitution also had a provision (fugitive slave clause) that aided slaveholders in recovering fugitive slaves, particularly those who sought sanctuary in “free” states and territories. It protected slave-owners rights to human property and made the act of aiding a fugitive slave a constitutional offense. The Second Amendment is also considered to have been, in part, a means to protect slave-owners from slave insurrections.

Another Constitutional provision focused on the highly lucrative enterprise that was the Atlantic slave trade. It read in part, “[t]he migration or importation of such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year 1808.” It also allowed for “a tax or duty” to be “imposed on such importation…” for as long as the trade remained legal. This did not mean that slavery was to be abolished in 1808, but only that the import of new slaves would be discontinued.

As with settler colonialism, America’s domestic slave trade is the story of the founding of the United States. As many scholars have documented, including Du Bois, McInnis and Finkelman, the slave trade was a major economic engine, which fueled the prosperity of the new nation, with profits from enslaved people flowing to many locations in the North and South. Traders and slave owners throughout the South profited by selling human property while others profited from the forced labor it provided in the cotton and sugar fields. So did intermediary suppliers along with carriers in the steamboat, railroad and shipping industries. Naturally, northern capitalists profited as investors in banks in the exchange of money for people as did the companies that provided insurance for the owners’ investments in enslaved labor. So did foreign investors in Southern securities, some of which were issued on mortgaged slaves. The hub of the nation’s cotton textile industry was based in New England, where “enlightened” gentry enriched themselves from the misery of southern slave labor.

Following its Constitutional mandate, the Act of 1807 was the legislation that officially ended U.S. participation in the international slave trade, but not the domestic slave trade. It levied heavy fines and possible imprisonment on those who attempted to import slaves to the United States. This piece of legislation was underfunded and often not enforced, and when it was enforced, it was another source of revenue with its stiff fines and valuable legal merchandise. These realities enabled a smaller yet profitable human smuggling industry to exist in the U.S. until the middle of the 19th century. When illegal smugglers were caught, their human merchandise was seized and sold to U.S. slave owners (Du Bois, Fehrenbacher and Finkelman). The Constitution would continuously be used until the Civil War to defend the institution of slavery from federal intervention and actions taken by an increasingly militant abolition movement.

In 1857 the Supreme Court ruled on the Dred Scott v. Sanford case, based on Scott’s lawsuit to gain his and his family’s freedom in the slave state of Missouri after they had previously lived in a free state and territory. In delivering the majority decision against Scott, Chief Justice Roger Taney held that under the terms of the U.S. Constitution, Black people “could never be citizens of the United States.” Taney explained that when the Constitution was ratified, Blacks were “regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights that the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his own benefit.”

The standing of free Black Americans under the Constitution remained vague for decades to come. The Bill of Rights did not defend free Black Americans from municipal and state laws intent on depriving them of (parchment barrier) Constitutional rights. This cultural and legal reality set the stage for Jim Crow laws in the South and its manifestations nationwide into the 21st century.

In an 1852 Fourth of July speech, the formidable Fredrick Douglas called out the true nature of the institution of slavery in the United States:

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

Conclusion

While the Bill of Rights and a few subsequent amendments have provided some democratizing effects, they have strictly been limited to affirmative remedies for injustices (instead of transformative remedies associated with dismantling). These tend to be reformist in nature and as Nancy Fraser frames such measures, are “aimed at correcting inequitable outcomes of social arrangements without disturbing the underlying framework that generates them.” Affirmative “remedies” are thus akin to negative rights and often come from state and private powers making limited and ultimately temporary accommodations to justice-seeking collective struggles, frequently through the utilization of disruptive tactics and strategies. In contrast, the inherently violent cultural, political and economic structures that are protected by the U.S. Constitution prohibit transformative remedies intended (analogous to positive rights) to eliminate the root causes of social inequity and economic inequality. According to historian Howard Zinn the American Revolution and its resulting Constitution, “was a work of genius” in that it “created the most effective system of national control devised in modern times, and showed future generations of leaders the advantages of combining paternalism with command.”

At its core, the U.S. Constitution was designed to safeguard a settler colonial society overseen by the supreme laws of capitalism, Christianity, white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. By doing so, it entrenched deep structural disparities in participation that subvert collective strivings for social, economic and political justice. This denial of the basic means and opportunities for all inhabitants of a society to directly contest and deliberate as equals violates the very nature of public reason, the principle by which liberal democracies define themselves (as the U.S. defines itself). Moreover, for a society to be authentically democratic—as an essential determinant of justice—parity of participation is required to serve as the idiom of public contestation and deliberation whereby status equality and the equitable distribution of wealth can be attained. This would require a constitutional framework derived from the principles and practices of participatory parity, where positive rights as well as equality of opportunity and equality of outcome are indisputable.

With the advent of the U.S. Constitution and its consolidation of cultural, political, and economic power; slave owners and “captains of industry” alike were made to feel more secure knowing that a state or territorial governor could rely on a swift federal response when domestic disturbances was beyond the control of local police and state militia (Beard).

With the arrival of the 19th century, mercantilism and the smaller agrarian economy of the settler colonies of the U.S. were quickly being toppled, largely influenced by the 1776 publication of Scottish economist Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Smith’s magnum opus became the recipe for free-market capitalism, and is said to have been enthusiastically embraced by the founders of the new republic, and became the ideological and structural framework for the U.S. political economy. In Wealth of Nations Smith affirmed, over a decade prior to the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, that a, “Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”

Decades after the drafting of the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams proudly declaring, “from 15 to 20 legislatures of our own, in action for 30 years past, have proved that no fears of an equalization of property are to be apprehended from them.” Indeed, the U.S. Constitution was serving its purpose in guaranteeing that inequality would remain the supreme law of the land—at an increasing rate—far into the future. In the decades ahead, as industrial capitalism flourished and the settler colonial empire expanded, so would U.S. nationalism, constructing a base and superstructure Jefferson and his peers could have only dreamed of; one that would perfectly buttress the despotic structures they deeply embedded within their beloved Constitution.

Of Acorns and Martyrs: Reno 911, Police Violence, and the Prospect of Reform

By Owen Symes

Cop shows have been around since TVs first gained popularity in the 1950s. From the 1970s onwards, they’ve weighed heavily upon the popular imagination, making up around 20% of the scripted output of major US television networks even as recently as 2020. From the beginning, shows like Dragnet, Police Story, Law & Order, or SWAT have often advertised their authenticity, claiming to entertain audiences with at least somewhat plausible or realistic stories. But most of these shows are little more than copaganda. Despite the occasional episode involving police misconduct, only a few procedurals have focused on criticizing the police, most notably The Wire in the early 2000s. But as recent news has amply demonstrated, the most realistic cop show isn’t that prestigious HBO drama, but rather an oft-overlooked mockumentary that began airing around the same time: Reno 911.

Bad Boys, Good Cops

If you’re not aware, Reno 911 began as a parody of the reality TV show Cops, a pioneer of the genre which presented audiences with half-hour episodes filled with vignettes of officers out on patrol. In the world of Cops, the streets are usually dark, the civilians uncooperative and suspicious, the law enforcers competent, knowledgeable, worldly, sometimes even philosophical. The shaky footage and pitch-black vistas of the show are given meaning by the explanatory narration of the police themselves. Their perspective is the truth.

Reno 911 took the same cinematic techniques employed by Cops but used them to skewer, rather than valorize, the police. Instead of presenting the cops with some baseline of professional competence, as even critical dramas like The Wire typically do, Reno 911 deflates its cops, bringing them down from the mythic cultural pedestal they’ve occupied for nearly a century. In so doing, the show highlights aspects of policing that we rarely see on US television: the stupidity, cupidity, timidity so common in real departments. Nothing illustrates this better than the opening scene of the pilot episode.

While on evening patrol, deputy Garcia hears on the radio that there is an officer down and shots fired. He flares his lights and speeds to the address provided. Arriving on scene, Garcia makes for the entrance and, gun drawn but without backup, lunges into the domicile. He shouts into the darkness, “Sheriff’s department!” The lights come on and we see a wall of cops starting to yell Surprise! It’s clearly a birthday party for Garcia. Already keyed up for action, however, Garcia discharges his weapon and hits an officer. The other cops look at their fallen comrade, then back at Garcia, then begin to scan the room awkwardly as they murmur surprise. The camera zooms in on deputy Jones, who sheepishly radios: “We have an officer down…”

The cops of Reno 911 are fundamentally fearful creatures: afraid of losing respect at least as much as they are of losing their lives. Recent news out of Okaloosa County, FL and Washington, DC has made the reality of this fear abundantly, maddeningly, clear.

Acorn Comes Into Frame

As detailed by a recently-released police report on the incident, early on the morning of November 12, 2023, police arrived at a woman’s house in the Florida suburbs responding to a call about a missing car and a threatening boyfriend. Soon after the police arrived at the woman’s house, the boyfriend appeared. He offered no resistance while he was searched. He was then handcuffed and placed inside the vehicle of one deputy Hernandez, a non-combat military veteran who had recently become a cop.

When news arrived that the girlfriend’s car had been found, Hernandez began moving back to his SUV in order to search the boyfriend again. As he later recounted, Hernandez approached his vehicle and heard:

…what I believe would be a suppressed weapon off to the side. Definitely heard this noise. At the same time, I felt an impact on my right side, like upper torso area…Um, so I feel the impact. My legs just give out. Um, I don't know where I'm hit. I think I'm hit.

He then summersaulted away from his vehicle in a desperate attempt to gain some distance from the shooter. Now on his back, Hernandez panicked like a flailing turtle, drew his service pistol, and discharged the entire magazine into his own vehicle.

Nearby, the experienced and long-serving sergeant Roberts saw Hernandez fall, saw his terror-stricken face, and heard him screaming that he had been shot. Without taking any time to understand what was happening around her, Roberts immediately went for her gun. She fumbled the quickdraw, accidentally dislodging her spare magazine from its pouch. As it struck the ground, she began firing haphazardly in the direction she thought the shooter was. Afraid of being struck by friendly fire, Hernandez crawled to cover.

When the smoke cleared, the officers belatedly began to assess the situation. Miraculously, the hapless boyfriend, still handcuffed inside the vehicle as it was being pulverized, survived unscathed. No other civilians (or police) were harmed during the fusillade. Medical staff later confirmed that Hernandez had never suffered a gunshot wound. What had happened?

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During the subsequent investigation, Hernandez gave his statement and was allowed to watch his bodycam footage. Then he was shown a still photograph from that footage. Investigators pointed out a tiny object striking the officer’s vehicle. Gears turned within the deputy, then clicked into place, prompting him to ask a vital clarifying question: “Acorn?”

An Investigator responded with appropriate brevity: “Acorn.”

Amid stutters and pauses, Hernandez tried but failed to articulate a response, eventually admitting that it was possible that an acorn had made the inciting noise. An investigator followed up with a question I’m sure every civil servant dreads: was Hernandez, “…in general…familiar with the sound of acorns striking vehicles?” He answered in the affirmative.

Investigators now offered him a chance to watch the footage again, that he might analyze the evidence anew and judge if the acorn had in fact been the mainspring of his actions. He declined.

Deputy Hernandez resigned from the department before the investigation concluded. Ultimately, the investigators found that Hernandez had acted unreasonably. They also determined, however,  that sergeant Roberts, the other officer who discharged their weapon at the scene, had behaved within reason. The investigating officers concluded that Roberts had acted under the impression that another officer had just been shot, thus justifying the (haphazard and panicked) use of her firearm.

Why Don’t FireFighters Carry Guns?

On February 25th, 2024, Air Force member Aaron Bushnell self-immolated outside the Israeli embassy in Washington DC in protest against the Gaza Genocide. Having just received a call about potentially “distressing” behavior, uniformed Secret Service officers were already on the scene when Bushnell began his protest. The Secret Service response was captured by Bushnell’s livestream.

The video begins with Bushnell matter-of-factly explaining that he is about to engage in an extreme act of protest. Having done so, he calmly sets his camera down, walks into center frame, douses himself in accelerant, and lights himself on fire, yelling Free Palestine. Off screen, we hear responding officers trying to communicate with him. Once the flames appear, they begin shouting that a man is on fire, that they need fire extinguishers. But we also hear someone repeatedly yelling for the young protester – already aflame – to get on the ground. We hear this over and over: Get on the ground! Get on the ground!

Officers then appear on camera. One rapidly engages his extinguisher, befogging the area. Despite the cloud of extinguishant, Bushnell’s fire still rages. Another officer appears on camera with his service weapon drawn and pointed at the protester. As officers move around Bushnell – and through this Secret Service agent’s field of fire – we hear further pleas for extinguishers. An officer, I think it’s the one who’s been calling for extinguishers the whole time, finally exclaims, “I don’t need guns. I need fire extinguishers!”

When later asked to comment on the officer pointing his weapon at a dying man, the Secret Service told a journalist at Reason: "The armed officer was ensuring the safety of the two Secret Service officers who were working to extinguish the fire and render aid to the individual." Once again, the police had judged their own actions to be reasonable.

“Get some cops to protect our policemen!”

- Intertitle from Buster Keaton’s 1922 short Cops

From their origins in the 19th century up through the 1920s, cops were not respected in the popular imagination. They only achieved a degree of social respect in the 1930s thanks to PR campaigns by the likes of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and LAPD chief William Parker, with the cooperation of radio and TV producers like Phillips Lord and Jack Webb. Despite this new-found respectability, however, cops could never shake their fear of losing status. As a group, they remain afflicted by a Napoleon Complex, wanting to be treated as professionals on par with doctors and lawyers but fearful that people will cease to honor their authority and expertise. We see this anxiety manifest in the innumerable small indignities and petty punishments meted out at traffic stops and metro turnstiles. Sometimes we see it explode in bouts of comic farce or deadly violence.

In achieving professional credibility, cops have built for themselves another world, one where they are the put-upon sheep dogs defending the ungrateful and ignorant sheep from the wolves of society. So whenever embarrassments or fiascos occur, many cops fall back on the an refrain: we have tough jobs; it’s a dangerous world out there; we’re doing the best we can with the meager resources you give us! Secret Service communications chief Anthony Guglielmi echoed this rhetoric when he defended the February 25th response, claiming: "[T]his situation was unpredictable and occurred rapidly. In that instant, the level of threat to the public and the embassy was unknown, and our officers acted swiftly and professionally." The swiftness of the response is undeniable, but it can only be characterized as professional if we take that to mean, as the police themselves do, that cops have a primary professional duty to defend themselves from any threat, regardless of its actual potential to inflict harm upon them, and regardless of the cost to the public.

Reformers, well-meaning but naive, recognize some of the shortcomings of police and recommend improved training, stricter use-of-force policies, better equipment. These reforms are stillborn, however, because cops don’t take them seriously. They can’t. Simply put, they don’t think that outsiders are qualified to judge police behavior. They’re happy to accept additional funding and resources, and maybe the savvy police executive will tow the reformist line during budget meetings, but once they have a greater share of the budget, cops will invariably do whatever they want. More money for reform simply results in more cops to protect policemen. 

Right after World War 2, sociologist William A Westley imbedded himself in the department of a mid-sized US city for about a year. The book that resulted, Violence and the Police: A Sociological Study of Law, Custom, and Morality, remains a seminal work in the study of police culture. He identified the police as a society in miniature, with its own customs and its own moral code. Paramount to that code was – and remains – a determination to repel critics and outsiders. Thus, he observed, while most cops did not engage in violence, and a surprising number actively tried to avoid it, the brutes and the thugs that did exist were given a wide berth. Sadism was met with silence, badges deployed as a shield wall against the slings and arrows of ignorant critics.

Westley summarized the world of the cop:

The policeman’s most significant contact is with the law-evading public, which defines him as a malicious and dangerous intruder into their business and acts accordingly. His resolution of this problem includes an insistence on his will and on obtaining respect, by the use of violence, if necessary…He is exposed to public immorality. He becomes cynical. His is a society emphasizing the crooked, the weak, and the unscrupulous. Accordingly, his morality is one of expediency and his self-conception one of a martyr. [Emphasis mine]

Deputy Hernandez, the yet-unnamed Secret Service officer, and all the other members of that copper fraternity are given power, a gun, and a chip on their shoulder, so to go out and do battle with the demons of their own mind and making: with the hiss of acorns and the crackle of a true martyr’s flames. Our stories often bolster this state of affairs. They can do better. Reno 911 showed us how.

Why Do We Oppress Women?

By Wonder Louis

Since the dawn of civilization, women have been treated as second-class citizens. This condition pervades every stage of history and virtually every culture and region. Under capitalism, the phenomenon of gender inequality is observable through tangible acts of oppression such as unequal pay, fewer educational opportunities, domestic violence, and more. However, these observable acts are not exclusive to capitalism, as they were prevalent in different modes of production. To understand capitalist gender inequality specifically, we must examine the social relation and position that women hold under capitalism. 

Marxist analysis reveals that, just as capitalism divides bosses and workers, it treats men and women differently based on their relationship to production. The sexual division of labor both in and outside the household is caused by and produces gender inequality in all aspects of life. As Marxism informs us, the base of society is its economic system. In our current order, everything flows from capitalism and the asymmetric social relations it demands. 

Under capitalism, people — especially women — lose their humanity and become commodities. Workers  must sell the only commodity the bank can’t take from them, their labor, to not just accumulate wealth but survive. Granted, most female labor falls outside the commodity market and is instead directly consumed. But women are also often reduced to their exchange value. Sex trafficking and dowries are examples.

The view that capitalism encourages gender inequality is hardly universal.  Some argue that capitalism promotes female wellbeing through technological advancements in women’s health. Others claim capitalism must encourage gender equality because women are supposedly worse off in “traditional… non-capitalist societies.” These cultures are usually quite religious. People believe that their women are worse off because they suffer from lower life expectancy, poverty, and stricter gender oppression. Capitalism allegedly improves these maladies via constant and rapid technological innovation. It is the best system for social innovation, its proponents say. No other structural arrangement better facilitates social mobility or individual rights.

Whatever capitalists say, the fact remains: gender inequality exists under capitalism, and we must change that. This can occur in a number of ways. But lasting, fundamental change requires targeting the structure of the economy and superstructure of society. By altering these two elements of social life, women can defeat gender oppression once and for all.

Addressing the economy calls for more affirmative action. These policies can ensure minorities receive equal occupational and educational opportunities. Affirmative action has helped many women access institutions they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. In 1995, for example, female employment increased by  15% at jobs with affirmative action requirements compared to 2 percent at jobs without. 

The second task is changing traditional gender culture. We can do this through education — namely, by introducing egalitarian concepts to children at a young age.  Curricula should teach how harmful sexist and gender stereotypes are. Educators should be prepared to call out and challenge misogyny whenever it arises in the classroom.   

Capitalism is driven by the accumulation of wealth and capital. It lays waste to all other values — chief among them, gender equality. Under capitalism, women face financial  and cultural oppression, physical violence, and lower living standards than men. To combat these inequities, women need fair treatment in the workforce, especially equal pay, and in society as a whole, free from misogynist norms.  

Wonder Louis is an aspiring historian and political theorist. Holding a Bachelor of Arts in History, Wonder aims to promote revolutionary thought and educate the masses on all forms of social inequality.

Art and Artificial Intelligence: A Pivotal Moment for Unions

[Pictured: Striking writers and actors picket outside Paramount studios in Los Angeles on Friday, July 14, 2023. Credit: AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)

By Bavand Karim

Last summer, the premiere episode of Marvel's Secret Invasion featured opening credits crafted by artificial intelligence. While reviews were mixed, the credits were objectively effective for exploring AI’s potential as a storytelling tool. Perhaps more importantly from the studio’s perspective, the production costs were likely much less than an agency like The Mill or an artist like Daniel Kleinman would demand.

It’s no coincidence that Marvel’s use of AI occurred amid union-led strikes by Hollywood’s writers and directors. And as studios were negotiating with creative unions, they were simultaneously rolling out the tools that might eventually replace many of those creatives. At the time of the negotiations, it was unclear what impact AI would have on the entertainment industry. But the prevailing wisdom seemed to support the general anxiety among insiders that an industry-wide shift was coming.

By November 2023, Dreamworks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg predicted that AI will replace 90% of artists on animated films within three years. It may even be sooner. In December, Google released Gemini, its most advanced AI tool to date. One of Gemini’s advancements is the ability to process up to an hour of video and 11 hours of audio in mere minutes. Although Google warns that processing times vary, their demonstration of long-context understanding analyzes a 44-minute video in under one minute. Earlier this month, OpenAI released Sora, a powerful new tool that generates one-minute video clips based on text prompts. Sora is what is known as a diffusion model. It converts text to videos that resemble static noise, and then removes the noise over several passes. While these emerging AI video tools are not perfect, they are compelling enough in their first-generation iterations to provoke meaningful questions about the future of all creative industries.

It was less than a year ago that we began speculating whether AI visualization tools would disrupt the artistic foundation of Hollywood. Now, it appears the event horizon is upon us.

Last year’s strikes were a watershed moment for unions who were forced to acknowledge the wide uncertainty that the looming threat of AI has introduced into Hollywood. The Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers’ (AMPTP) agreement with the the Director’s Guild of America (DGA) defines AI as “not a person” and clarifies that it will not replace the role of any DGA member. However, it allows studios to use AI as long as a “consultation” takes place with the director, which has stirred debate around the validity and integrity of the agreement.

The Writer’s Guild (WGA) similarly resolved their dispute with new guidelines prohibiting the use of AI in creating written source material such as scripts for films or TV shows.

No other artistic guild or technical union has yet defined how AI will be regulated within their respective domain. The Art Director’s Guild (ADG), which represents title and graphic artists, one of hundreds of International Association of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE) chapters nationwide that could potentially be impacted by AI, released a statement expressing concern over AI video generators, but the path forward remains unclear. While animation industry professionals are unionizing at a record rate, IATSE Local 839 — the Animation Guild — still has fewer than 10,000 members, meaning that the vast majority of the animation industry’s workforce of more than 200,000 artists, assistants, coordinators, and managers are not unionized.

As more major studios utilize AI, the inevitable result will be a wave of disenfranchised and marginalized artists. This industry shift will produce a flood of new independent content as those artists attempt to find their own audiences. While studios like Dreamworks and Pixar are cutting costs in the short term by exploring the benefits of AI, they are also creating a new generation of pissed-off indie competitors.

It feels nefarious of Disney, which owns Pixar, to use the stories most beloved by audiences to sideline workers. The most popular tentpole story franchises like Marvel and Star Wars likely won't be impacted too seriously by viewer backlash. Diehard fans love those stories and they pass that love through generations. So audiences will continue to watch those films and TV series even if they incorporate AI. Disney is surely hoping so. And they probably don't consider those disenfranchised artists, taken independently or collectively, to pose any kind of real economic threat to their business model.

Can human artists use AI to produce their own creative work? Sure. But they can't sell it in the same way. The independent market is nothing like a studio job, which typically offers long-term stability, training, networking and advancement opportunities, health and retirement benefits, and — most importantly — an audience. Copyright laws prevent indie artists from accessing the most desirable story franchises without the impending doom of litigation, and the privatization and monopolization of distribution outlets prevent all artists, disenfranchised or not, from ever being compensated equivalent to the true value of their labor. 

The next three years will be pivotal for the entertainment industry and will test the power of America’s labor unions. Will Disney’s move toward AI produce a greater awareness of, if not a fully-fledged social movement against, these AI tools exactly because of the threat that they pose to human labor? Right now, there is little stopping major studios like Disney from engaging AI across the range of artistic disciplines involved in media production — titles, graphics, story generation, script writing, character design, 3D modeling, environment design and lighting design, editing, visual effects, sound design, music composition — potentially impacting hundreds of thousands of people around the globe.

Disney’s strategy is nothing new. Corporations have always primed consumers to accept socially deleterious but profitable change. During the Industrial Revolution, automobile manufacturers sold individuals on independence and freedom, and gave them an entire infrastructure built around private individual transportation with little regulation resulting in disconnected, unwalkable, traffic-plagued communities. At the dawn of the information age, technology companies promised us enhanced efficiency, connectedness, and socialization. Now it’s apparent how modern electronics and software invade our privacy, harvest and sell our personal information, micromanage our productivity, and erode democracy. The proliferation of AI into mainstream life — even through such an innocuous injection point as entertainment — has the potential for much more destructive erosion of our personal freedoms. Will society nonetheless embrace it, only to later realize the damage done? Or is Disney betting that, as in the past, we will grow to love the chains that bind us?

Make no mistake: once major corporations establish a model for displacing human labor with AI, it will be a global phenomenon. Workforce reduction will occur in every industry to satisfy capitalism’s demand for infinite growth. The Big Four consulting firms will justify it and The Wall Street Journal will report that it was great for the economy while thousands of Americans find themselves unemployed. As they have throughout history, the powers that be are reforming the economy to their own benefit. The rest of us will be left to deal with the consequences.

Multinational corporate monopolies determined to undermine workers’ and human rights in the name of profit must be met with equivalent, equally resolved multinational resistance. Indie artists should leverage as much power as possible and cooperate with unions across the globe to foster government support against the ongoing exploitation and oppression of the working class. Society’s hope may be that in the face of continued oppression, America is able to form a new political party that represents and protects workers, and promises them an equal share of a company’s revenue as if they were shareholders.

We must fight for a world in which technology, including AI, is liberatory — socially and economically — and not corrosive. AI must be a tool for the greater good, not for the profit of the few at the expense of the many.

For an industry that markets and congratulates itself for telling authentic human stories, the result of film’s shift to AI will ironically be narratives about humanity produced with minimal human input through a process that economically disenfranchised as many humans as possible for the sake of profit. This cataclysm will force us to question not just the impact of late-stage capitalism on human creativity but whether creation is a uniquely human trait at all.

Soon, audiences will pack theaters to watch a film produced exclusively by AI. On the screen, a long-deceased Harrison Ford will star as a young Indiana Jones. As he holds up a copy of the original Raiders of the Lost Ark, written by a human and produced with practical effects, the AI Indy flashes a sardonic smile and says, “This belongs in a museum.”

Bavand Karim is a creative executive and academic residing in Los Angeles, California. He is the founder and chairperson of CINE and Lost Winds Entertainment, and co-director of the film program at the College of the Canyons.

The Stranglehold of Capital and Why We Must Break Free

[Photo Credit: Doug Mills / AP]

By Nathaniel Ibrahim

The village of Yellow Springs, Ohio, like much of the United States, has an affordable housing shortage. To address this, the Village Council considered rezoning 53 acres for higher-density homes. This was controversial among Yellow Springs residents including comedy superstar Dave Chapelle, who threatened to pull his investments from the town:

”If you push this thing through, what I’m investing in is no longer applicable… I am not bluffing. I will take it all off the table.” 

It was never guaranteed that the Village Council would pass the rezoning without Chapelle’s interference, or that the plan would even make housing more affordable. But it was hardly a fair fight. Losing millions in investment dollars would transform the economic landscape of Yellow Springs. Municipal representatives could never consider the housing project on its own merits.

Strongarm tactics by capital happen on the national stage too. Shortly after Barack Obama won the presidency on a platform of “hope and change,” Emerson Electric CEO David Farr said his company would only expand in the United States if government got “out of the way.” 

Barclays CEO Robert Diamond claimed corporations wouldn’t “have the confidence to hire in the United States… until we… believe… the government, the private sector, and financial institutions are working together and connected again.” 

Bausch + Lomb CEO Brent Saunders warned that, because of Obama, multinationals are “more tentative on whether… to…invest.” 

The Wall Street Journal synthesized these sentiments, lamenting that Obama wasn’t doing enough to encourage “U.S. businesses to unleash the $2 trillion in capital they are holding.” 

Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner summarized it well the following year:

“Job creators in America basically are on strike.” 

It isn’t novel to point out the political influence of the wealthy. Even former president Jimmy Carter called the United States an “oligarchy with unlimited political bribery.” Research shows that better-funded candidates generally win. There are basic fundraising thresholds candidates must meet to have a chance of winning. This allows the wealthy to influence who runs and wins. Even when donations don’t outright guarantee electoral success, candidates still value them and allow donors to influence policy. 

Just as ultra-wealthy benefactors control elections, a handful of companies dominate our media. “Big Tech” dictates culture by moderating the flow of information and “marketplace of ideas” that informs our political process. Corporate giants make it more difficult for voters to make informed decisions and allow relatively few people to curate and regulate public discourse. 

These problems are serious, and make our political system less democratic. They reinforce the privileged interests of the white and wealthy while disenfranchising the non-white and poor. This inequity is rooted in the undemocratic nature of our economic system, which grants certain groups not mere influence or political advantage but the ability to wield pure, unchecked power.

Who Controls Capital?

In the United States, the three richest white men hold as much wealth as the bottom 50% combined. Capital, which refers not to personal property but investment assets, is also unequally distributed. The top 1% of Americans own a majority of the country’s stocks and private businesses. The poorer you are, the more of your resources you must spend on your needs, and the more fully you rely on other people’s capital to have a job. 

Within individual companies, if an investor controls over half the voting shares, they fully control the company, rendering other investors’ capital powerless. Capital is where the real power lies, and it is controlled by a miniscule group. 

How Does Capital Work?

This tiny class of capitalists will only invest capital under certain conditions. Generally, profits are the fundamental precondition for investment, but it’s ultimately down to the investor. They can choose to do nothing with their capital or invest it in some other market, thereby exercising tremendous leverage on the rest of society.

To maintain access to goods and gainful employment, electorates are under pressure to placate capital. This immediate pressure often conflicts with voters’ long-term interests, or any political priorities beyond meeting their basic needs. Thus, politicians under capitalism must serve their constituents’ short-term demands by serving owners and investors. Otherwise, their constituents will suffer, blame them, and vote them out. 

Capitalists directly affect government activity too. First and foremost, tax revenues are almost entirely dependent on investment. Jobs are needed to generate income taxes, while businesses must sell goods and services in order to generate sales taxes. Investment is required to maintain property values and thus property taxes. When governments cannot fund their activities through taxation and turn to borrowing, they become dependent on banks and other potential creditors.

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Often, private capital directly pays law enforcement to do its dirty work. Major corporations funnel millions of dollars into police activities through police foundations. Companies including DTE, Meijer, The Home Depot, and AT&T all have representatives on the board of the Detroit Public Safety Foundation. Across the country, the largest companies in finance, tech, fossil fuels, and other industries funded the police and were represented in the institutions that raise private funds for them. 

The Power of Capital in Action

When a group of capitalists forego investing together — a capital strike — they can quickly cripple the economy. When they have common interests, and frequently voice their concerns through the business press, little direct coordination is required to set off a chain reaction of capital flight.

“Capital strike” and “capital flight” are not commonly used terms, and they almost never come up in election discourse. Capital flight is recognized as an economic phenomenon, one that can often come about as a reaction to political developments, but its political implications are rarely discussed. Some economists characterize capital flight as a “symptom of macroeconomic mismanagement” to be solved with “sensible, credible” policies.

This straightforward narrative is actually quite common when it comes to businesses’ reactions to policies. The policies are never “not what businesses prefer.” They are simply “bad policies,” which “lead to bad outcomes.” Capitalists are treated like they bear no responsibility for the consequences of their actions. The class character of capital strikes is completely mystified and ignored. While it’s possible for certain policies to be bad for both the rich and the poor, that is not always the case. 

There are numerous examples of large-scale capital strikes forcing national governments to abandon progressive, widely-supported policies. The aforementioned strike against the Obama administration strike is one such example. Other capital strikes happened under Franklin D. Roosevelt. 

Capital strikes are not limited to the United States. In the 1970s, the Swedish Trade Union Confederation and members of the Social Democratic Party sought to transcend social democracy via the Meidner Plan, which would have taxed corporate profits to achieve workers’ ownership of major corporations. Fearing a capital strike, the Social Democrats diluted the plan. The plan’s namesake, economist Rudolf Meidner, described the implemented version as “a pathetic rat.” 

In France, after decades of uninterrupted conservative rule, Socialist Party leader Francois Mitterand was elected president in 1981. He was allied with the French Communist Party, called for a “rupture” with capitalism, and embarked on a radical program of nationalization, wage hikes, and union empowerment. Displeased investors pulled their capital, punishing the French economy. Mitterand abandoned his radicalism, purged Communist ministers from his government, and pursued more conservative policies. 

A similar thing happened in Chile. In 1970, Salvador Allende — Latin America’s first democratically elected Marxist head of state — became president. Over the next three years, wealthy Chileans and international businesses reacted with capital strikes, capital flight, and hoarding to destabilize the government and protect their own power. Allende responded with concessions to the Right but was eventually overthrown in a US-backed military coup that was justified as a response to economic instability. 

In Venezuela, the election of Hugo Chávez in 1999 was followed by dramatic increases in quality of life. Chávez lifted nearly one fifth of the population from poverty. Even opponents like the Washington DC-based Organization of American States recognized this achievement and “the eradication of illiteracy… and the increase in access by the most vulnerable sectors to basic services such as health care.”

The massive wealth held by Venezuela’s elite was being slowly redistributed, and the oil revenues that the country had relied on for decades were being directed toward the poor. As this happened, Venezuelan and international businesses began pulling their capital out of the country or holding back certain economic activities. The current Venezuelan economic crisis is, of course, complex, with an overreliance on oil, imperialist sanctions, and political instability of various origins all playing a role. However, capital flight preceded and contributed to these issues, starting at a time when the lives of Venezuelans were improving at the expense of capitalist profits and power.

Of course, national capital strikes are the exception — a “nuclear option” of capitalist control. 

Every day, capitalists and their managers make decisions regarding where to allocate resources within their businesses, or who to do business with. Whether by reflexively chasing profits or strategically leveraging their wealth, they shift wealth toward those who serve their interests.

Voters may begin to “learn their lesson,” and vote in ways that investors will reward them for, even if they end up voting for policies they do not ultimately prefer. Voters may blame some inherent flaw in leftist policies, saying things like “socialism is great in theory, but doesn’t work in practice.” And while left-wing governments have in many cases brought improvements for their people, capital strikes negatively affect their track record.

Others may recognize the power of capital over the economy, but believe it to be justified or necessary, and consciously vote in a way that reinforces this power. When left-wing governments make concessions to capital, their supporters may see it as a betrayal of the policies they ran on, and become politically inactive or shift their allegiance to another party, as happened in Sweden and France. Whether they blame the failure on economic realities, unreliable politicians, or the business owners themselves, voters will respond rationally to actions by capital, and vote in ways that avoid offending investors in the first place.

Legalized Bribery

The coercive power of capital strikes is extremely important in explaining why the rich and large corporations often get their way. But they have numerous other tools at their disposal for directing the political process:

• Rent out a lavish compound to a sitting president (or let him stay for free) 

• Spend hundreds of thousands of dollars at businesses owned by politicians

• Loan politicians’ companies hundreds of millions of dollars

• Pay politicians millions of dollarsf or speeches

• Hire lawmakers and top officials as lobbyists or consultants

• Give politicians seats on corporate boards

• Give them a high-paying job at a think tank

• Sign massive book deals with Supreme Court Justices, or give them free trips

• Take a powerful judge on multiple luxurious vacations,

• Buy their mother’s home and let her live in it rent-free, pay their family member’s expensive boarding school fees, pay for their wedding reception, give them VIP access to sporting events, fund the dedication of a library wing in their honor, and fund a hagiographicmovie about them (This is all the same person)

• Own stocks while being a politician, and reap all the benefits if your political actions favor your stocks or investors at large

What Can We Do About it?

To recap, capitalism results in a tiny minority of the population controlling the means of production and distribution. This control is leveraged to reward or punish voters and governments based on how accommodating their policies are toward capital. These capitalists coordinate not just through institutions and relationships, but need not coordinate at all when their interests align. If a government threatens their profits, they will remove their capital from the government’s jurisdiction, even if the people believe they should sacrifice their profits for the benefit of society. The bounds of what is politically possible are set by the corporate sector.

Those who control wealth use it in more targeted ways to shore up this power. They systematically direct their wealth to individual politicians, or the political class as a whole, to buy their loyalty and give the politicians a stake in the power of capital.

Private businesses control the media that we consume, and the wealthy bend political campaigns, think tanks, charities, and universities to their will with donations. These institutions allow the wealthy to mask and justify their economic power, and articulate their demands to a target audience. They also give them the tools to act even when their economic power is effectively curbed.  

Considered fully, the power of capital appears unassailable, and if we work within the mainstream definition of politics, it is. Our ability to exercise political power is often reduced to participating in elections. However, electoral politics are, in many ways, a manifestation of power wielded by people outside of it, and any movement that devotes all its energy to the electoral sphere will ultimately fail when they are outmaneuvered in the economic sphere. However, understanding the ways that this capitalist power works is the first step to breaking it. 

In order to fight back against this system, ordinary people need to expand their definition of politics and operate in the same fields that the wealthy do. Recognizing that democracy is still something worth achieving is vital. Winning political power will be a bottom-up struggle. Radical labor unions will be a necessary tool for workers to challenge capital in an effective way and wield material leverage toward their political goals.

The specifics of overcoming capitalist power are far from clear. The people of this planet will have to organize themselves and develop plans for effective resistance through international collaboration and dialogue. What’s clear, however, is that no form of capitalism will allow us to experience genuine democracy. Whoever controls economic production and distribution controls everyone dependent on that production and distribution. Self-determination and democracy therefore require economic democracy.

Nathaniel Ibrahim is an organizer and elected leader in the Young Democratic Socialists of America at the University of Michigan.

Colonialism and Capitalism as Determinants of Modern Health

By Cory Bhowmik

“The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” is an ideal we try to espouse, but the field of medicine can be rightly accused of not telling “the whole truth” on many occasions throughout history. The Tuskegee syphilis study [1] and the involuntary sterilization of Native American women [2] are a couple examples. A particularly damning example is when we invoke “social determinants of health” upon encountering disparities healthcare that are based on race, sexuality, gender, etc. This invocation—though a statement of fact—is not “the whole truth”, as it doesn’t identify the reason why social determinants of health exist. In fact, the term “social determinants of health” is a placid moniker for the violent systems that have resulted in today’s healthcare disparities.

The advent of colonialism and capitalism

When we start a family, we make appropriate accommodations to ensure everyone is fed, housed, and taken care of. Even non-human animals do the same. So, it isn’t surprising that many societies throughout history have been based in community, with communal systems of food distribution, housing, and education. [3] Of course, there have been empires and kingdoms that have invaded other peoples and sequestered wealth—but not as pervasively as in today’s society. [4]

Today’s shift away from communal society is attributed to the system, originating in western Europe in the 16th century, wherein a small group of the elite can rule over a lower class. Upon the creation of a system in which there were virtually no bounds on individual profit, European merchants began a violent race for spices, minerals, and other goods—including people. And so western Europe began to plunder civilizations around the world, instituting hierarchies that forced indigenous people into the lower class—thus beginning the brutal era of colonialism. [5,6]

Colonialism was made possible by the economic system of exploitation that is capitalism. Capitalism, by definition, requires the existence of a lower class. [7] That fact, regardless of any other, should allow us to abolish it. But, of course, capitalism continues to be promoted by the promise of innovation, even though innovation has since been shown to occur at similar rates in socialist societies. [8] It should be noted that another key piece of propaganda in the promulgation of colonialism and capitalism is God. Colonialism was justified by branding indigenous people as uncivilized and unChristian. For example, the pursuit of religious freedom for western Europeans was used to justify their original settlement into the 13 colonies of the United States. [9] And “manifest destiny” was used to justify their westward expansion and continued genocide of Native American people. [10]

For capitalism to thrive, it requires a source of people to serve as the lower class. And so, it is not surprising that western Europeans invented the concept of race science, which led them to enslave millions of people from Africa. [11] Indigenous people in other colonies were also seen as less-than-human, resulting in indentured servitude and isolation from resources. This concept of racism and capitalism being mutually beneficial for the purpose of exploitation is called racial capitalism, and it has been vital to the violence of colonialism. [12]

Unfortunately, there is a system that can rival the violence of colonialism—and that is settler colonialism: a brutal form of colonialism that involves settlers taking land and establishing residence in the occupied society, with the goal of expulsion and/or alienation of the occupied indigenous people. Examples of settler colonies include the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. [13]

Resultant Impact on Health

Descriptions—mere definitions, even—of colonialism, setter colonialism, capitalism, and racial capitalism should instill in anyone feelings of disgust, and it should be obvious how these violent systems result in adverse health outcomes, but let’s lay it out with some examples:

During the height of colonialism, many famines were levied onto colonized people. One example is the Bengal famine of 1943 in India (along with tens of other famines across South Asia), which resulted in adaptations of the body to a state of starvation. Today, this adaptation—within a mere 1-2 generations—has resulted in increased rates of cardiovascular disease in South Asian populations. Studies have shown that the presence of a famine in one generation doubles the subsequent generation’s risk of diabetes and obesity. [14,15] So, is this just a social determinant of health, or is this better described as a violent result of colonialism and capitalism?

In the settler colonies of Australia (where the Aboriginal people have been displaced) and New Zealand (where the Māori people have been displaced), both groups of indigenous people have less access to land, higher rates of discrimination, and higher rates of mental health related disease. [16,17] Is this just a social determinant of health, or is this a result of colonialism and capitalism?

In the settler colony of the United States, millions of enslaved people from Africa have been under brutal physical and mental stress for hundreds of years. Today, evidence shows that there are increased levels of stress in descendants of enslaved people, likely originating from the stress of oppression and slavery via a harrowing phenomenon called Post-Traumatic Slavery Syndrome (PTSS). [18,19] Is this just a social determinant of health, or is this a result of colonialism and capitalism?

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In the United States government, the Indian Health Service (IHS) exists to provide healthcare services for Native Americans. (Pause, for a moment, to consider how dystopian it is for the Indian Health Service to exist. This makes it seem as though it is a special service, for a people who are indigenous to this land.) In the 1970s, the IHS was responsible for the nonconsensual sterilization of more than 25% of Native American women of childbearing age. And in 2020, Native Americans had some of the highest COVID rates, partially due to the underfunding of federal reservations. [20] And so, is this just a social determinant of health, or is this a result of colonialism and capitalism?

What does this mean?

Food insecurity in predominantly Black areas, increased disease rates in prisons (which incarcerate 4 times as many Black people as are in the general population [21]), increased work hours to maximize profit, lower quality of healthcare due to insurance, and the creation of “third-world” countries secondary to resource extraction and servitude—it would not be a stretch to say that these phenomena, along with the above examples, and almost all “social determinants of health” are secondary to colonialism and capitalism.

Of greatest import, these systems have not disappeared. There are colonial (and neocolonial [22]) powers even today, and capitalism continues to perpetuate violent healthcare disparities. If we are to eliminate healthcare disparities—as medical school curriculum advocates—then colonialism and capitalism must go. Any lesser solution is mere symptom management.

References

1.       Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2022). The untreated syphilis study at Tuskegee – Timeline. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/timeline.htm

2.       Blakemore, E (2019). The little-known history of the forced sterilization of Native American women. JSTOR Daily. https://daily.jstor.org/the-little-known-history-of-the-forced-sterilization-of-native-american-women/

3.       Taylor, I (2018). Pre-colonial political systems and colonialism. African Politics: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford Academic. https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9780198806578.003.0002

4.       Khilnani, S (2022). The British empire was much worse than you realize. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/04/the-british-empire-was-much-worse-than-you-realize-caroline-elkinss-legacy-of-violence

5.       PBS NewsHour (2015). How the West got rich and modern capitalism was born. PBS NewsHour. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/west-got-rich-modern-capitalism-born

6.       DuBois, WEB (1976). The world and Africa: An inquiry into the part which Africa has played in world history. Kraus Reprint Co.

7.       Marx, K (1991). Capital: A critique of political economy. London Penguin Books in Association with New Left Review.

8.       Rodney, W (1972). How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Verso.

9.       Foster, J, Taylor, M, Boecklin, D, Tanner, M, & Luyken, J (1998). America as a religious refuge: The seventeenth century, Part 1 - Religion and the founding of the American republic. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel01.html#:~:text=Beginning%20in%201630%20as%20many,far%20as%20the%20West%20Indies.

10.   Getchell, M (2023). Manifest Destiny. Khan Academy. https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/us-history/the-early-republic/age-of-jackson/a/manifest-destiny#:~:text=Manifest%20Destiny%20was%20the%20idea

11.   ‌Harvard University (2022). Scientific Racism. Harvard Library. https://library.harvard.edu/confronting-anti-black-racism/scientific-racism

12.   Laster Pirtle, WN (2020). Racial capitalism: A fundamental cause of novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic inequities in the United States. Health Educ Behav. 2020 Aug;47(4):504-508. doi: 10.1177/1090198120922942.

13.   Wolfe, P (2006). Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research. 8:4,387-409. doi: 10.1080/14623520601056240

14.   Bakar, F (2022). How history still weighs heavy on South Asian bodies today. HuffPost UK. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/south-asian-health-colonial-history_uk_620e74fee4b055057aac0e9f

15.   Brown University (2016). Famine alters metabolism for successive generations. (n.d.). Brown University. https://www.brown.edu/news/2016-12-12/famine

16.   McGlade, H (2023). First Person: Aboriginal Australians suffer from “violent history” and ongoing “institutional racism”. UN News. https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/04/1135827

17.   ‌ Harris, RB, Cormack, DM, & Stanley, J (2013). The relationship between socially-assigned ethnicity, health and experience of racial discrimination for Māori: Analysis of the 2006/07 New Zealand Health Survey. BMC Public Health, 13(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-13-844

18.   ‌ Scott-Jones G & Kamara MR (2020). The traumatic impact of structural racism on African Americans. Dela J Public Health. 2020 Nov 7;6(5):80-82. doi: 10.32481/djph.2020.11.019.

19.   Halloran, MJ (2019). African American health and posttraumatic slave syndrome: A terror management theory account. Journal of Black Studies, 50(1), 45-65. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021934718803737

20.   Williams, R (2021). Native American deaths from COVID-19 highest among racial groups. Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. https://spia.princeton.edu/news/native-american-deaths-covid-19-highest-among-racial-groups#:~:text=After%20adjusting%20their%20data%20for‌

21.   Wertheimer, J (2023). Racial disparities persist in many U.S. jails. Pew. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2023/05/racial-disparities-persist-in-many-us-jails

22.   Halperin, S (2020). Neocolonialism. Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/neocolonialism

A Brief and Imperfect Explanation of Dialectical Materialism

[Pictured: Konstantin Yuon’s painting, New Planet, which commemorated the Bolshevik-led October Revolution in Russia.]

By Peter F. Seeger

Dialectical Materialism is a foundational principle of Marxism. This concept, along with Historical Materialism and Marxist Economics, are known as the three “component parts of Marxism.” Surprisingly, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels did not write extensively on the idea of “Dialectical Materialism” during their lives. It was long after Marx’s death and only after Engels’ death that manuscripts could be compiled into Engels’ “The Dialectics of Nature.”

Materialism

Materialism is the philosophical opposite of idealism, which grounds itself in the concept of only one material world. Idealism believes that existence is inseparable from human perception and that reality stems from the mind. A helpful example of this Idealist thinking is Rene Descartes’ quote, “I think; therefore, I am.” In this idea the subjective thought is what confirms existence and subjective thought precedes objective existence. A materialist would rather say “I am; therefore, I think,” showing that the objective existence precedes the subjective perception of reality. Like Dialectics, the philosophy of materialism can be seen as far back as the ancient Greeks of Anaxagoras (c.500 - 428 BC) and Democritus (c.460 - c.370 BC). Marx was known to have been inspired by early materialists like Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke.

Materialism posits that matter objectively exists independently of whether we subjectively perceive it. “Materialism in general recognizes objectively real being (matter) as independent of consciousness, sensation, experience… consciousness is only the reflection of being, at best an approximately true (adequate, perfectly exact) reflection of it.”[1] Since matter exists whether we perceive it or not, then matter must precede subjective perception. Although Marx’s materialism, is not a rigid materialism and must be combined with dialectics to form the full theory followed by Marxists.

Dialectics

The concept of dialectics has existed for centuries. Philosophers like Plato demonstrated an idealist form of dialectics which functions like a conversation. One person presents an argument (a “thesis”), and another presents a counterargument (an “antithesis”). Through conversation, dialogue, and counterargument, the two achieve a better understanding and more correct solution to their issue, a “synthesis.” The “synthesis” then becomes the “thesis” again and will always have an “antithesis” to counter it. This simplified explanation is often used to explain idealist dialectics but is not true to the dialectics that Marx would have been familiar with as a member of the Young Hegelian Society.

Marx and Engels were followers of Hegel and learned an immense amount from the philosopher. Vladimir Lenin also praised Hegel for his ideas on dialectics and even encouraged the reading of Hegel for all Marxists. Although Hegel is the basis for Marx and Engels’ dialectics, Hegel is an idealist and therefore dissimilar to Marx’s Dialectical Materialism in that way. Dialectics, to Marxists, "is nothing more than the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and thought."[2] There cannot be a slave without a master, an exploited without an exploiter, nor a proletariat without a bourgeoise; therefore, they must appear at the same time due to their dependency on the other and in a unity of their opposites.

Dialectical Materialism

Engels’ writings on Dialectical Materialism are where Marxists receive the bulk of this concept. Engels determined three laws of Marxist Dialectical Materialism: (1) The unity and struggle of opposites, (2) the transformation of quantity into quality, and (3) the negation of the negation.[3] Briefly going through these one by one is useful for this complicated theory.

(1) The Unity and Struggle of Opposites:

“The law of contradiction in things that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the basic law of materialist dialectics.”[4] Every object is made up of two contradictory aspects that together make up the whole in unity and in contradiction. This constant state of opposites is never ending, in constant motion, and always changing; this is also known as the law of contradiction. This is, to Marxists, scientific and can be observed in nearly every field of science. “In mathematics: plus, and minus; differential and integral. In mechanics: action and reaction. In physics: positive and negative electricity. In chemistry: the combination and dissociation of atoms. In social science: the class struggle” between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.[5] This leads Marxists to look to the material world around them and find the core contradictions within society to best understand how it functions.

A contradiction is “when two seemingly opposed forces are simultaneously present within a particular situation, an entity or an event.”[6] Within a contradiction there are aspects of the contradiction, which are the two forces that both function in opposition and unity. The term “Contradiction,” itself is rarely used in Marxism in the singular form because there is a never-ending number of contradictions found in everything, not just capitalism. A common misconception is the belief that Marxism believes in a one size fits all approach to societies and cultures, but inherent in the concept of a contradiction is the understanding that everything has its own internal and external contradictions that determine its resolution.

An example of this complex idea may be found using contradictions as applied to a rock and an egg. Within both objects there are internal contradictions inherent to each’s existence, (erosion or the need for specific conditions for a healthy birth) but both would react and resolve differently when acted upon by the same external contradiction. If you apply the specific temperature to the rock and the egg you may end up with a chicken or a warm stone. The resolutions of these contradictions are dependent on not just the aspects of the contradiction, but the contradictions within the aspects themselves.

The final point on contradictions is that while the concept is universal, i.e., it can be applied to areas outside Marxism such as in nature, it also comes with the belief that there is a “principal” or “primary” contradiction[7] that determines or influences the current or “secondary” contradictions in the world. This “principal” contradiction, according to Marxists, is the class contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. An example of a “secondary” contradiction influenced by the “principal” contradiction could simply be the competition between businesses for profits.

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(2) The Transformation of Quantity into Quality:

Gradual quantitative changes in society give rise to revolutionary qualitative changes. Since all matter is always in motion and changing, these changes function as a quantitative change until it gives rise to a qualitative change which fundamentally alters the matter into something materially different. The implications of this concept show the basis for why or how revolutions occur.  True change only comes from qualitative change. For example, water remains a liquid while it gradually cools down, but there is a certain point where the quantitative change of the temperature creates a qualitative change when the water becomes ice. When applied to the social sciences, according to Marxists, the quantitative changes represent the contradictions in capitalism and the qualitative change would be a revolution. Marxists view matter as interconnected, in perpetual motion, and always changing. Darwin’s theory of evolution grounds this idea in the sense that evolution shows the interconnectedness of matter and its perpetual change. Not only does Darwin’s theory of evolution imply the interconnectedness and constant change of all matter, but also shows that this process has been ongoing for billions of years, processes of dialectical development between contradictory or opposing forces.

Qualitatively different contradictions can only be resolved by qualitatively different methods. For instance, the contradiction between proletariat and the bourgeoisie is resolved by the method of socialist revolution; the contradictions between the working class and the peasant class in socialist society is resolved by the method of collectivization and mechanization in agriculture; contradiction within the Communist Party is resolved by the method of criticism and self-criticism.[8]

(3) The Negation of The Negation

This concept can be simply explained as when the new supersedes the old. Before the quantitative changes lead to the qualitative transformation, this is the first negation. The second negation occurs at the time of the qualitative transformation.

The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual property, as found in the labor of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of nature, its own negation. It is the negation of the negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era: i.e., on cooperation and the possession in common the land and the means of production[9]

This “negation and transformation” is not meant to mean that the “new” is devoid of any aspects of the old. This is paramount in understanding the ongoing struggle that will continue during a socialist transition. Marxism believes that in the social sciences, once societies have qualitative changes, remnants of the old society will still exist and will have to be governed by the laws of the new society. After feudalism, slavery was still within the society although the new system was built from the old system of slavery for labor. Further, once feudalism was superseded by capitalism old remnants of feudalism remained including landlords and slavery. Even under socialism, the remnants of capitalism will still exist in society. This shows that the qualitative change is also in constant motion and in contradiction with itself which must be resolved for the long-term goal of communism.

These laws make up the foundations of dialectical materialism: all matter is interconnected and always changing due to the dialectical forces of contradictions within society, and this posits the inevitability of a qualitative change from capitalism to socialism.

Notes

[1] Vladimir Lenin, The Collected Works of V. I. Lenin, Collected Works 38 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/cw/pdf/lenin-cw-vol-38.pdf. pp. 266-67

[2] Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, Foundations 26 (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2021), https://foreignlanguages.press/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/C26-Anti-Duhring-1st-Printing.pdf. pp. 152

[3] Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature (Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers, 1954).

[4] Mao Zedong and The Redspark Collective, Mao Zedong’s On Contradiction: Study Companion, New Roads 4 (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2019), https://foreignlanguages.press/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/N04-On-Contradiction-Study-2nd.pdf. pp. 2

[5] Lenin, The Collected Works of V. I. Lenin. pp. 136

[6] David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (London, England: Oxford University Press, 2014). pp. 1

[7] In Marxism the principal contradiction is not fixed. Through history the principal contradiction will change and be foreign to contemporaries.

[8] Zedong and The Redspark Collective, Mao Zedong’s On Contradiction: Study Companion. pp. 28-29

[9] Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, III vols. (UK: Penguin Classics, 1990). pp. 929

Is Marxism "Leftist"?

By Kate Woolford

Republished from Challenge Magazine.

A Marxist approach to leftist moralism

Many self-styled communists view Marxism-Leninism more as a set of moral and ethical values than a science firmly grounded in material reality. To them, Marxism is the ultimate embodiment of liberal and ‘progressive’ values, while those with more conservative values are nothing more than ‘chauvinists’ who should be excluded from the cause. 

However, this moral interpretation of Marxism is inconsistent with Marx’s own understanding, which asserts that the driving force behind human society is contradictions between classes, rather than a moral dichotomy of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’. In this respect, Marx did not abstract capitalism outside of its historical context but instead showed that it could be both historically progressive and regressive depending on its stage of development. Within its early stages, the progressive nature of capitalism is tied up with its need to constantly revolutionise the instruments of production, the relations of production, and therefore also the whole relations of society. This, in turn, replaces the scattered, less-effective feudal mode of production with capitalist production and allows production to be carried out at an unprecedented scale. Nevertheless, as capitalism matures, and the proletariat grows into a fully developed class concentrated together in huge numbers, a contradiction arises between the social process of production and the private ownership of production. 

The contradictions inherent within capitalism are demonstrated through recurrent crises, during which huge amounts of goods and machinery are needlessly destroyed and wasted. Capitalism’s incompatibility with the future development of society can only result in a revolution led by the class capable of bringing about a higher mode of production, that is, the modern working class. Therefore, the inevitability of the socialist revolution is not tied up in capitalism’s moral shortcomings, but on the objective laws governing the development of human society. 

In a similar vein, Engels criticised, “every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatsoever as an eternal, ultimate, and forever immutable moral law on the pretext that the moral world too has its permanent principles which transcend history and the differences between nations”, and disapproved of a theory of morals “designed to suit all periods, all peoples, and all conditions” arguing that “precisely for that reason it is never and nowhere applicable.” Both Marx and Engels upheld that the communist movement unified workers based on the material conditions of their life; their nation, their workplace, and their commonly experienced exploitation as proletarians, not on the basis of a shared set of moral values.

Therefore, those within the communist movement who uphold their personal morals as eternally and indisputably correct, or, even worse, seek to elevate their personal morals to the position of communist morals in general, clearly do not view morals in a materialist way. Nor do they approach it in an anti-imperialist way, with notions of moral superiority giving way to imperialist interventions on the countries alleged to be morally inferior, often on the basis of their cultural and religious values.

What is Marxism?

Marx understood that changes in society, like changes in the natural world, are far from accidental and follow certain laws. This understanding made it possible to work out a scientific theory of human society; to study why it is the way it is, why it changes, and what changes are to come. The scientific method of Marxism, dialectical materialism, regards the world as both a living organism in a state of constant development and composed of matter existing beyond human perception. 

Like all sciences, Marxism is based on the material world around us. Therefore, it is not a finished theory or a dogma, but must be continuously applied to new conditions, new problems, and new discoveries to draw from them the correct conclusions. The value of Marxism lies in its ability to form conclusions capable of changing the world, just as all scientific discoveries can be used to change the world. 

Defining Left and Right 

While Marxism historically belongs to the definite left tradition, that is, it finds much of its origins in the Jacobin radical left of the French Revolution, today’s leftism is understood more as an indefinite set of moral values than a clearly defined ideology. 

Delineating what values belong to the left and what values belong to the right is a challenging task given that these terms mean different things within different contexts. One study found that conservatism can be associated with a left-wing or right-wing orientation depending on the cultural, political, and economic situation of the society in question. Another study found that, within the former Soviet republics, “traditionalism, rule-following, and needs for security are more strongly associated with the old (left-wing) ways of doing things than with right-wing preferences. It is also possible that openness would be associated with a right-wing political orientation in Eastern Europe, rather than with a left-wing orientation, as in the West.” In other words, in the former Soviet republics, the Soviet Union is often associated with values the West considers to be right-wing. 

In this respect, understandings of left and right are subjective and vary widely depending on time and place. Therefore, it is important to clarify that this article will be considering values associated with modern “leftism” in the West today. The cultural values considered in this article are liberation through love, openness, and equal rights, and the policy matters considered are equality, government intervention, and high taxes. 

Love and inclusivity

Notions of love as an all-liberating force find popularity among leftists, an outlook prevalent among 18th and 19th-century philosophers and revitalised during the counterculture movement of the 1960s and 70s. Engels, however, criticised the “religion of love” and, in the End of Classical German Philosophy, denounced Feuerbach’s idea that mankind could be liberated through love alone instead of the economic transformation of production. To Engels, the idea that love could function as a reconciling force for all differences “regardless of distinctions of sex or estate” had no plausibility. 

Despite what leftists proclaim, the act of loving one another, including beyond traditional boundaries, does not inherently constitute a revolutionary act. Engels reinforced this idea in On the History of Early Christianity, which disapproved of the pacification of Early Christianity and its transformation from a revolutionary, working-class religion of “undiluted revenge” into a petit-bourgeois religion of “love your enemies, bless them that curse you.”

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The same principles Engels applied to the “religion of love” can be applied to the leftist values of openness and inclusivity. The proponents of these ideas suggest that the working class should be accepting and accommodating to the ideas, values, traditions, and mindsets of everyone, including the class exploiting them. In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels deemed this position as belonging to the “socialistic bourgeoisie,” and criticised the belief “that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.” Therefore, Marxism has little to do with absolute ‘inclusivity’ and notions of ‘liberation through love’, making it distinct from the leftist counterculture movement borne out of the 1960s and 70s. 

Equal rights

One of the most misunderstood aspects of Marxism is its stance on the concept of equal rights. Despite the prevalent use of ‘equal rights’ as a leftist buzzword, Marx’s work, the End of Classical German Philosophy, outlines that, within bourgeois society, equal rights are, in fact, formally recognised. However, social satisfaction does not depend upon equal rights but material rights – and “capitalist production takes care to ensure that the great majority of those with equal rights shall get only what is essential for bare existence.” In this respect, if the interests of classes in conflict are irreconcilable, the material rights of one class impede on the material rights of another. Therefore, better conditions are not brought about through platitudes of equal rights, but through material rights and the abolition of classes. In Anti-Dühring, Engels traced the origins of the demand for “equal rights” to the bourgeoisie’s struggle against feudalism. During this period, the bourgeoisie called for the abolition of “class privileges” and the proletariat demanded the abolition of classes themselves. 

Furthermore, while leftists uphold equal rights on the basis that all people, by virtue of being human, should be treated the same, Marxism recognises that, within class society, individuals do not relate to each other solely as humans but also as members of a class. In this respect, during the epoch of capitalism, the bourgeoisie uses the state apparatus to suppress the working class. Likewise, during the epoch of socialism, the new state apparatus is used by the working class to suppress the bourgeoisie. 

Moreover, socialism and communism does not seek to enforce complete equality in the everyday life of members of society regardless of how driven and hardworking one might be compared to another. As per Marx and Engels in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, “Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations.” Thus, Communism allows for individuals to enrich themselves over others, so long as this enrichment does not come at anyone else’s expense. Therefore, it is a widespread misconception that hard works reaps no reward under socialism and communism – in fact, hard work can only truly be rewarded under socialism and communism.

The state and taxes

Another policy often associated with leftists is ‘big government’, that is, that the government should play a more active role within society. However, as Marx and Engels explained in the Communist Manifesto, as the proletariat raises itself to the position of ruling class, it sweeps away the conditions of class antagonisms and classes generally, abolishing its own supremacy as a class. At this stage, the state, which functions as an organ of class domination, becomes obsolete as classes do not exist. Consequently, communism does not necessarily involve government intervention into the personal lives of members of society. While the early stage of socialism requires a strong state to centralise production and defend the gains of the revolution, as socialism develops, the state is increasingly stripped back.

In practice, efforts to shift power away from the state into the hands of the people is reflected within Mao Zedong’s little red book, which was published and distributed with the aim of strengthening the peoples understand of Marxism, thus empowering them as the real movement in charge of building a communist society – bottom up, not top down.  

Leftists also often advocate for high taxation as the grand solution to all domestic problem without realising, however, that the scale and direction of taxation is determined first and foremost by the class characteristic of the state. 

Under capitalism, the state serves the interests of the bourgeoisie, and is parasitic in that it sustains a superfluous class of individuals who do not produce material value for society such as the bourgeois police; the military; the whole judicial apparatus; members of parliament, who get paid disproportionately high salaries; etc. Additionally, the state revenue necessary for war and overseas military bases is generated through taxing the working class, while monopolies pile up war profits. Only a fraction of revenue is allocated to production, and to things like the maintenance of roads, railways, buildings, hospitals, schools, etc. 

On the other hand, under socialism, the state serves the interests of the working class and functions mainly to administer economic life. The socialist state is concerned with the production and distribution of goods, the advancement of the wellbeing of working people, and the maintenance of a limited military apparatus to protect the gains of the revolution. 

In the Civil War in France, Marx described the Paris Commune as having made the “catchword of bourgeois revolutions – cheap government – a reality by destroying the two greatest sources of expenditure: the standing army and state functionalism.” The ‘cheap government’ of socialism is financed partly through state owned industry and trade, money which would overwise be retained as private profit under capitalism, and partly through taxation. However, as the state becomes stripped back to the minimum of its functions, taxation is still considerably low as there is no superfluous, parasitic class living off the state as there is under capitalism. 

Furthermore, in the Critique of the Gotha programme, Marx stated that “taxes are the economic basis of the government machinery and of nothing else.” Therefore, as socialist society progresses towards communism and the state, along with its government machinery, gradually withers away, high taxes cease to have an economic basis. For example, no great war machinery is necessary under communism as the international community has a shared future with common interests. In this respect, while a heavy income tax serves as a progressive demand within capitalist society, socialism and communism eventually leads to a society free from the burden of high taxes on working people. 

As the writings of Marx and Engels do not align with, or go beyond, many leftist cultural and economic values, the idea that Marxism is a leftist ideology in the popular understanding of the term should, at the very least, be questioned. Marxism should instead be upheld by communists as a scientific method of analysis existing outside of the political spectrum.

Kate Woolford is the editor of Challenge.