"Spider Webs for the Rich and Mighty": A Libertarian-Socialist Critique of Criminal Law

By Colin Jenkins

As human societies have developed over the course of history, so too have corollary systems of order. In the most basic sense, the often informal development of customs, norms and ethics become inevitable in spaces where groups of human beings come together to interact with another. However, as the scales of human interaction have grown - from tribes to communities to nation-states - these informal codes of conduct have become formal systems of rule and order which have taken on physical identities in the form of states and governments.

In his influential essay, Politics as Vocation, Max Weber provided one of the most important analyses regarding the sociological development of the state. Weber introduced the concept of rational-legal authority in his attempt to explain the rise and justification of the modern bureaucratic nation-state. As a self-described "bourgeois theorist," Weber provided a strong breakdown of the modern state, tended towards justifying its purpose, and recognized the inherently forceful nature of its existence:

"'Every state is founded on force,' said Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk. That is indeed right. If no social institutions existed which knew the use of violence, then the concept of 'state' would be eliminated, and a condition would emerge that could be designated as 'anarchy,' in the specific sense of this word."[1]

Perhaps most crucial was Weber's notion of a "monopoly of violence" for which he viewed as a legitimate power of the state:

"Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Note that 'territory' is one of the characteristics of the state. Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the 'right' to use violence."[2]

Weber's justification is predicated upon two important assumptions: (1) that a distinction between authority and coercion exists, and that authority becomes legitimate when "individuals accept and act upon orders that are given to them because they believe that to do so is right;" [3] and (2) that rational-legal authority itself is legitimized, via the political process, by the people under its rule. Despite the questionable nature of these assumptions, Weber's hierarchical structure has come to dominate our world. The formation of criminal law, while not just a modern phenomenon, has provided further justification for rational-legal authority. And the formidable development of modern criminal justice systems equipped with the means to carry out this "monopoly of violence" on a daily basis has assured the maintenance of Weber's state.

These legitimized systems of violence, authority and coercion have reached a point where they are accepted by most without hesitation: a common acceptance that begs to be questioned.

Law as Morality

"Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them."

- Assata Shakur

There has been an ongoing, centuries-long societal experiment to equate written laws with morality. The historical development of human societies have made laws necessary for reasons that will be discussed below, and the need to house these laws in justifications centered within authority and domination (also discussed below) have relied on an institutional "rebranding" of these hierarchical relations. One of the main tools in this rebranding process has been the inclusion of morality-based conditioning, which exists everywhere from parenting to public education. This is not a new phenomenon, but yet persists as a main tool in shaping customs and norms which are amenable with living under systems of domination. In his 1886 classic, Law and Authority, Peter Kropotkin touches on this deep conditioning process used to create an obedient population:

"We are so perverted by an education which from infancy seeks to kill in us the spirit of revolt, and to develop that of submission to authority; we are so perverted by this existence under the ferule of a law, which regulates every event in life - our birth, our education, our development, our love, our friendship - that, if this state of things continues, we shall lose all initiative, all habit of thinking for ourselves.

Indeed, for some thousands of years, those who govern us have done nothing but ring the changes upon "Respect for law, obedience to authority." This is the moral atmosphere in which parents bring up their children, and school only serves to confirm the impression. Cleverly assorted scraps of spurious science are inculcated upon the children to prove necessity of law; obedience to the law is made a religion; moral goodness and the law of the masters are fused into one and the same divinity. The historical hero of the schoolroom is the man who obeys the law, and defends it against rebels." [4]

This cultural conditioning seeks to establish widespread consent, or at least the appearance of such, through the construction of an artificial system of morality. As opposed to ethics and morals which are innate attributes of the human race - live and let live, treat others as you would expect to be treated, cooperate and co-exist, etc - these artificial systems of morality have been designed to make "rights" synonymous with things like authority, order and obedience, and "wrongs" as being synonymous with any and all dissent from this established order.

Governments play a major role in this cultural process, and modern systems of liberal democracy aid in this construction. In The Individual, Society, and the State, Emma Goldman sheds light on this phenomenon:

"Political government and the State were a much later development, growing out of the desire of the stronger to take advantage of the weaker, of the few against the many. The State, ecclesiastical and secular, served to give an appearance of legality and right to the wrong done by the few to the many. That appearance of right was necessary the easier to rule the people, because no government can exist without the consent of the people, consent open, tacit or assumed. Constitutionalism and democracy are the modern forms of that alleged consent; the consent being inoculated and indoctrinated by what is called "education," at home, in the church, and in every other phase of life.

That consent is the belief in authority, in the necessity for it. At its base is the doctrine that man is evil, vicious, and too incompetent to know what is good for him. On this all government and oppression is built. God and the State exist and are supported by this dogma." [5]

This artificial notion of morality, and the modern creation of "manufactured consent" via systems of "constitutionalism and democracy," is what Howard Zinn aptly referred to as The Conspiracy of Law. In transitioning the deliverance of authority from the "rule of men" to the "rule of law," according to Zinn, the power brokers have not only created their own sets of "Natural law," but have also made such laws nearly impossible to question:

"The modern era, presumably replacing the arbitrary rule of men with the objective, impartial rule of law, has not brought any fundamental change in the facts of unequal wealth and unequal power. What was done before - exploiting men and women, sending the young to war, putting troublesome people into dungeons - is still done, except that this no longer appears as the arbitrary action of the feudal lord or the king; it is now invested with the authority of neutral, impersonal law. Indeed, because of this impersonality, it becomes possible to do far more injustice to people, with a stronger sanction of legitimacy. The rule of law can be more onerous than the divine right of the king, because it was known that the king was really a man, and even in the Middle Ages it was accepted that the king could not violate natural law. (See Otto Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, Notes 127-134.) A code of law is more easily defied than a flesh and blood monarchy; in the modern era, the positive law takes on the character of natural law."[6]

The repackaging of authority into morality (written law as natural law), and the arbitrary nature of this new authority, also make it nearly impossible to target:

"Under the rule of men, the enemy was identifiable, and so peasant rebellions hunted out the lords, slaves killed plantation owners, and radicals assassinated monarchs. In the era of the corporation and the representative assembly, the enemy is elusive and unidentifiable; even to radicals the attempted assassination of the industrialist Frick by the anarchist Berkman seemed an aberration. In The Grapes of Wrath, the dispossessed farmer aims his gun confusedly at the tractor driver who is knocking down his house, learns that behind him is the banker in Oklahoma City and behind him a banker in New York, and cries out, 'Then who can I shoot?'" [7]

Law as Authority

"As long as some specialized class is in a position of authority, it is going to set policy in the special interests that it serves."

- Noam Chomsky

The need for written laws is something that is rarely, if ever, questioned. It is a common belief that such laws are necessary, and that "the need for law lies in the history of the human race."[8] In popular college textbooks like Essentials of Criminal Law, this common acceptance is housed in a rationality that can be summarized by the following: 1) People are individuals, and their desires, needs, and wants differ from those of others; 2) These differences cause conflict; 3) When people began to live in groups, communities, and societies, laws became necessary; and 4) Law became necessary as a means of social control, either to alleviate conflicts or to settle them in a manner most advantageous to the group.[9]

When viewed in this manner, laws are presented as a mechanism designed to serve the community for which they are applied. The assumptions for applying them under this rationale are numerous: for example, we must assume that all individuals within a given community/society are allowed equal access to basic necessities; we must assume that all individuals are treated equally under the law; and we must assume that material conditions (or the base economic system for which society rests) allow for free association among all members. Without this foundation, as summarized by these basic assumptions, the justification widely used in support of written laws becomes null and void.

Therefore, when applied to societies that are shaped by flawed economic systems - systems that disenfranchise members and fail to allow many to fulfill basic needs - laws no longer serve the community, but rather serve the most powerful members of that community. In this instance, laws are transformed from statutes designed to enhance the common good to statutes designed to control the disenfranchised members. When this transformation occurs, laws become weapons of authority, essentially losing their legitimacy within a given community or society. Kropotkin describes this transformation which is based in the need to establish the domination of the minority over the majority:

"The desire to dominate others and impose one's own will upon them; the desire to seize upon the products of the labour of a neighbouring tribe; the desire to surround oneself with comforts without producing anything, whilst slaves provide their master with the means of procuring every sort of pleasure and luxury - these selfish, personal desires give rise to another current of habits and customs. The priest and the warrior, the charlatan who makes a profit out of superstition, and after freeing himself from the fear of the devil, cultivates it in others; and the bully, who procures the invasion and pillage of his neighbours, that he may return laden with booty, and followed by slaves; these two, hand in hand, have succeeded in imposing upon primitive society customs advantageous to both of them, but tending to perpetuate their domination of the masses. Profiting by the indolence, the fears, the inertia of the crowd, and thanks to the continual repetition of the same acts, they have permanently established customs which have become a solid basis for their own domination." [10]

The establishment of authority and domination becomes necessary when a minority section of society decides that it is deserving of owning wealth and land far beyond the purpose of its own use. This development naturally leads to the disenfranchisement of a multitude of members whose size grows in a perpetual manner alongside the constant pursuit of more wealth and land by the elite. As this development continues, laws are reduced to serving this dominant minority. Kropotkin explains:

"But as society became more and more divided into two hostile classes, one seeking to establish its domination, the other struggling to escape, the strife began. Now the conqueror was in a hurry to secure the results of his actions in a permanent form, he tried to place them beyond question, to make them holy and venerable by every means in his power. Law made its appearance under the sanction of the priest, and the warrior's club was placed at its service. Its office was to render immutable such customs as were to the advantage of the dominant minority." [11]

As time goes on, these laws become customs that are widely accepted even by the majority-population for which they are designed to control, and to prevent from accessing basic human needs, through violence and coercion. This gradual process has led to the modern justifications given above, all of which ignore the historical process of minority rule via the disenfranchisement of the majority, to the point where the legitimacy of such laws are no longer questioned. As Kropotkin concludes:

"Such was law; and it has maintained its two-fold character to this day. Its origin is the desire of the ruling class to give permanence to customs imposed by themselves for their own advantage. Its character is the skilful commingling of customs useful to society, customs which have no need of law to insure respect, with other customs useful only to rulers, injurious to the mass of the people, and maintained only by the fear of punishment.

Like individual capital, which was born of fraud and violence, and developed under the auspices of authority, law has no title to the respect of men. Born of violence and superstition, and established in the interests of consumer, priest and rich exploiter, it must be utterly destroyed on the day when the people desire to break their chains."[12]

Criminal Law in a Capitalist System

"Ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread."

- Emma Goldman

As with all societies, written laws become the primary mean of maintaining the status quo. The most fundamental purpose of such laws is to create and maintain a minimal degree of stability or at the very least a semblance of stability within certain areas of society. In the modern United States, the status quo has been shaped by a base economic system of capitalism that is characterized by multi-generational poverty, extreme inequality, and high concentrations of wealth and power. Therefore, when applied to this base, criminal laws are essentially statutes that are developed by legislators who either come from or are tied to those concentrations of wealth and power, and are placed upon the at-large population which has already been disenfranchised by the economic system. Because of this, a critical theory of criminal law becomes vital in deconstructing the nature and purpose of such laws.

In his essay Crime Control in Capitalist Society, Richard Quinney provides us with important assertions that must be understood before moving forward with this breakdown:

· American society is based on an advanced capitalist economy.

· The State is organized to serve the interests of the dominant economic class, the capitalist ruling class.

· Criminal law is an instrument of the State and ruling class to maintain and perpetuate the existing social and economic order.

· Crime control in capitalist society is accomplished through a variety of institutions and agencies established and administered by a government elite, representing ruling-class interests, for the purpose of establishing domestic order.

· The contradictions of advanced capitalism - the disjunction between existence and essence require that the subordinate classes remain oppressed by whatever means necessary, especially through the coercion and violence of the legal system.

· Only with the collapse of capitalist society and the creation of a new society, based on socialist principles, will there be a solution of the crime problem.[13]

The process of transforming laws into weapons of authority to be wielded by the wealth and land-owning minority over the disenfranchised majority, as touched on by Kropotkin, has reached its current stage via the promulgation of this "advanced capitalist economy" in the United States. This system, as an economic base, has allowed for the historical continuation of separating the masses from access to basic needs, while also fusing the law-making apparatus (the government) nearly completely with the wealth-owning elite (the former private sector).

When examining criminal justice systems found under capitalism, Marxist gatekeeper theory is invaluable. The most basic application of this Marxian analysis proves helpful in illustrating the positions of those who commit crimes versus those who create and enforce laws. Basic tenets of this theory include:

· Deviance (as determined by the artificial morality described above) is partly the product of unequal power relations and inequality in general.

· Crime, as established by the ruling class (with their own interests in mind) is an understandable response to the situation of poverty and mass disenfranchisement.

· Crime is often the result of offering society demeaning work with little sense of creativity.

· The base (economic system) disenfranchises the working-class majority; the superstructure (government and law creation) serves the ruling-class minority.

· The capitalist class (minority) co-opts the capitalist government to create laws that seek to maintain its power through coercing and controlling the working-class majority.

· "The heart of the capitalist system is the protection of private property, which is, by definition, the cornerstone upon which capitalistic economies function." Thus, written law reflects this fundamental value of property and profit over people. [14]

In the United States, the dominant ideology that espouses "individualism" and "exceptionalism" has been successful in merging manufactured morality and consent to the economic "virtues" of capitalism and patriotism, which are also manufactured in the same ways. Goldman explains the cultural effects of this process:

"This 'rugged individualism' has inevitably resulted in the greatest modern slavery, the crassest class distinctions, driving millions to the breadline. 'Rugged individualism' has meant all the 'individualism' for the masters, while the people are regimented into a slave caste to serve a handful of self-seeking 'supermen.' America is perhaps the best representative of this kind of individualism, in whose name political tyranny and social oppression are defended and held up as virtues; while every aspiration and attempt of man to gain freedom and social opportunity to live is denounced as 'unAmerican' and evil in the name of that same individualism."[15]

This merger serves to not only fortify the justification for written laws as tools of authority and domination over the majority, but also the unquestioned consent of those (in this case, the alienated working-class majority) being controlled and oppressed by such laws.

In direct contrast to a common belief in the need for law to address "natural" conflict in human societies, it is crucial to recognize the manufactured conflicts created by capitalism. The justification presented in the dominant paradigm possesses two fundamental flaws in this regard: the first of which lies in the view that conflict is in fact "natural" within all human societies; and the second being in the exclusion of material conditions as a factor in creating conflict. In order to be legitimized, this justification must rely on basic assumptions related to material conditions, most specifically the presence of an economic system which allows for equal and broad access to basic necessities such as food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, etc. Much like the false assumptions in Weber's analysis of the modern state, any premise that fails to consider the manufactured conflict stemming from the material conditions of a society's mode of production finds itself lacking legitimacy and justification.

In reality, capitalism creates widespread conflict by alienating the majority. Therefore, in such a system, "crime" (especially regarding that which is routinely enforced) represents the actions of people who have become dehumanized, dispossessed, stripped of human creativity, and left without the means to fulfill basic human needs.

Conclusion

"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

- Audre Lorde

If human beings are in fact individuals with "different desires, needs, and wants," as described even by the dominant criminological paradigm, then we must question the existence of hierarchical societies based in authority and domination. Such societal arrangements persist and have been accepted as "common sense" despite the inherent contradictions they impose. Within these arrangements, written laws have been identified as "social controls" needed to "alleviate natural conflict" and settle such conflict "in a manner most advantageous to the group (society/community)." However, when applied to societies that have been shaped by flawed economic systems (like capitalism) and historical processes that have led to wealth and land-owning minorities "governing" disenfranchised majorities, laws have taken on a different identity, mainly one that serves as a weapon of unquestioned authority.

Authority, in itself, is not a wholly illegitimate concept. Authority as a measure of competence or expertise may be extremely useful when serving society. However, when it becomes a means of social control, of domination by one over another, its legitimacy should come into question. Mikhail Bakunin perhaps explained this best in his treatise, What is Authority:

"Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the boot-maker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the boot-maker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognize no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others." [16]

Because they are constructed for the purpose of controlling the disenfranchised masses of people, modern laws represent authority of the illegitimate kind. Speaking of such laws, the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon famously proclaimed:

"I recognize none of them: I protest against every order which it may please some power, from pretended necessity, to impose upon my free will. Laws! We know what they are, and what they are worth! Spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the weak and poor, fishing nets in the hands of the government."[17]

In the modern United States, Proudhon's vision plays out every day. Under capitalism, laws are created by millionaire legislators who are financially supported by billionaire interests, enforced by hired guns of the working class (police), and ruled on by wealthy elites in black robes who are largely detached from their subjects. As capitalism naturally leads to greater concentrations of wealth and power, along with greater numbers of dispossessed citizens, crime and punishment becomes solely directed at the most marginalized of these masses. In the US, this includes the poor, the working poor, and people of color.

This correlation has never been more evident than in the neoliberal era (roughly 1980 until now), which is widely recognized as an intensification of the capitalist system. Since 1980, the total adult correctional population (those in prison/jail and on probation/parole) has increased from two million to seven million.[18] During this time, the prison population itself has increased 470 percent (from 320,000 in 1980) to 1.5 million in 2013.[19] Those scooped up by ruling class "fishing nets" and placed in "steel chains" are disproportionately poor and black.[20]

This scenario that has developed over the course of centuries has delegitimized any attempt to establish state authority, coercion, and its "monopoly of violence" via the criminal justice system. As long as capitalism is used to shape the social relations that are to be monitored and controlled, the state remains as nothing more than a tool to be wielded by the wealth and land-owning minority. And as long as the state remains a coercive extension of these social relations, the notion of criminal law will remain nothing more than a camouflaged totalitarianism designed to keep its boot on the neck of the disenfranchised majority.

References

[1] Weber, Max (1919), "Politics as a Vocation." Accessed online at http://anthropos-lab.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Weber-Politics-as-a-Vocation.pdf

[2] Ibid

[3] Best, Shaun (2002), Introduction to Politics and Society (Sage Publications) Accessed online at https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/9547_017533ch2.pdf

[4] Kropotkin, Peter (1886), Law and Authority. Accessed online at the Anarchist Library on November 12, 2015 @ http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-law-and-authority

[5] Goldman, Emma (1940), The Individual, Society and the State. Accessed online at the Anarchist Library on November 12, 2015 @ http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-the-individual-society-and-the-state

[6] Zinn, Howard (1971), "The Conspiracy of Law." Appeared in The Rule of Law, edited by Robert Paul Wolff (New York: Simon and Schuster)

[7] Ibid

[8] Chamelin, N. & Thomas, A. (2009) Essentials of Criminal Law, 11th edition (Prentice Hall)

[9] Ibid

[10] Kropotkin (1886)

[11] Ibid

[12] Ibid

[13] Quinney, Richard (1975), "Crime Control in Capitalist Society: A Critical Philosophy of Legal Order." Appeared in Critical Criminology, edited by Ian Taylor (Routledge)

[14] Covington, Jeanette (2000), Marxist Perspective on Crime. Accessed on November 29, 2015 at http://www.sociology.org.uk/

[15] Goldman (1940)

[16] Bakunin, Mikhail (1871), What is Authority? Accessed online at the Anarchist Library on November 12, 2015 @ http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/michail-bakunin-what-is-authority

[17] Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1851), General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century. Republished by Courier (2013)

[18] Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), US Office of Justice Programs (2014). Accessed online at http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p13.pdf

[19] The Sentencing Project: Research for Advocacy and Reform (2014). Accessed online at http://www.sentencingproject.org/template/page.cfm?id=107

[20] BJS (2014)

Bank Crimes Pay: Under the Thumb of the Global Financial Mafiocracy

By Andrew Gavin Marshall

On Nov. 13, the United Kingdom's Serious Fraud Office (SFO) announced it was charging 10 individual bankers, working for two separate banks, Deutsche Bank and Barclays, with fraud over their rigging of the Euribor rates. The latest announcement shines the spotlight once again on the scandals and criminal behavior that have come to define the world of global banking.

To date, only a handful of the world's largest banks have been repeatedly investigated, charged, fined or settled in relation to a succession of large financial scams, starting with mortgage fraud and the Libor scandal in 2012, the Euribor scandal and the Forex (foreign exchange) rate rigging. At the heart of these scandals, which involve the manipulation of interest rates on trillions of dollars in transactions, lie a handful of banks that collectively form a cartel in control of global financial markets - and the source of worldwide economic and financial crises.

Banks such as HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, Bank of America, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS anchor the global financial power we have come to recognize as fraud. The two, after all, are not mutually exclusive. In more explicit terms, this cartel of banks functions as a type of global financial Mafia, manipulating markets and defrauding investors, consumers and countries while demanding their pound of flesh in the form of interest payments. The banks force nations to impose austerity measures and structural reforms under the threat of cutting off funding; meanwhile they launder drug money for other cartels and organized crime syndicates.

Call them the global Mafiocracy.

In May, six major global banks were fined nearly $6 billion for manipulation of the foreign exchange market, which handles over $5 trillion in daily transactions. Four of the six banks pleaded guilty to charges of "conspiring to manipulate the price of U.S. dollars and euros exchanged." Those banks were Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland, while two additional banks, UBS and Bank of America, were fined but did not plead guilty to the specific charges. Forex traders at Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and other banks conspired to manipulate currency prices through chat room groups they established, where they arrogantly used names like "The Mafia" and "The Cartel."

The FBI said the investigations and charges against the big banks revealed criminal behavior "on a massive scale." The British bank Barclays paid the largest individual fine at around $2.3 billion. But as one trader at the bank wrote in a chat room conversation back in 2010, "If you aint cheating, you aint trying." The total fines, while numerically large, were but a small fraction of the overall market capitalization of each bank - though the fine on Barclays amounted to some 3.4% of the bank's market capitalization, the highest percentage by far among the group.

Despite the criminal conspiracy charges covering the years 2007 through 2013, the banks and their top officials continue to lay the blame squarely at the feet of individual traders. Axel Weber, the former president of the German Bundesbank (the central bank of Germany), who is now chairman of Switzerland's largest bank, UBS, commented that "the conduct of a small number of employees was unacceptable and we have taken appropriate disciplinary actions."

Looking at the larger scale of bank fines and fraud in the roughly eight years since the global financial crisis, the numbers increase substantially. In addition to a 2012 settlement for mortgage-related fraud in the U.S. housing market, which amounted to some $25 billion, several large banks paid individual fines related to mortgage and foreclosure fraud - including a $16 billion fine for Bank of America, and $13 billion for JPMorgan Chase. Added to these are fines related to the rigging of the Libor rate (the interest rate at which banks lend to each other) and the Forex rigging, as well as money laundering, violating sanctions, manipulating the price of gold, manipulating the U.S. electricity market and assisting tax evasion, among other crimes.

According to a research paper published in June, the total cost of litigation (fines, penalties, settlements, etc.) paid by 16 major global banks since 2010 has reached more than $300 billion. Bank of America paid the most, amounting to more than $66 billion, followed by JPMorgan Chase, Lloyds, Citigroup, Barclays, RBS, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, BNP Paribas, Santander, Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, UBS, National Australia Bank, Standard Chartered and Société Générale.

Virtually all of these banks also appear on a list of data, compiled through 2007, revealing them to be among the most interconnected and powerful financial institutions in the world. This core group of corporations forms part of a network of 147 financial institutions that Swiss scientists refer to as the "super-entity," which, through their various shareholdings, collectively control and own each other and roughly 40% of the world's 43,000 largest transnational corporations.

In other words, the big banks - along with large insurance companies and asset management firms - do not simply act as a cartel in terms of engaging in criminal activities, but they form a functionally interdependent network of global financial and corporate control. Further, the banks work together in various industry associations and lobbying groups where they officially represent their collective interests.

The largest European banks and financial institutions are represented by the European Financial Services Round Table (EFR), whose membership consists of the CEOs or Chairmen of roughly 25 of the top financial institutions on the continent, including Deutsche Bank, AXA, HSBC, Allianz, RBS, ING, Barclays, BNP Paribas, UBS, and Credit Suisse, among others.

In the United States, the Financial Services Forum (FSF) represents the largest American along with some European banks and financial institutions. The Forum's membership consists of less than 20 executives, including the CEOs or Chairmen of such firms as Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, UBS, HSBC, AIG, Bank of New York Mellon, State Street Corporation, Deutsche Bank and Wells Fargo, among others.

And on a truly global scale, there is the Institute of International Finance (IIF), the premier global association representing the financial industry, with a membership of nearly 500 different institutions from more than 70 countries around the world, including banks, insurance companies, asset management firms, sovereign wealth funds, central banks, credit ratings agencies, hedge funds and development banks.

In addition to these various groups and associations, many of the same large banks and their top executives also serve as members, leaders or participants in much more secretive groups and forums - for example, the International Monetary Conference (IMC), a yearly meeting of hundreds of the world's top bankers hosted by the American Bankers Association, which invites selected politicians, central bankers and finance ministers to attend their off-the-record discussions. In addition, there is the Institut International d'Etudes Bancaires (International Institute of Banking Studies), or IIEB, which brings together the top officials from dozens of Europe's major financial institutions for discussions with central bankers, presidents and prime ministers in "closed sessions" with virtually no coverage in the media.

These financial institutions are major owners of government debt, which gives them even greater leverage over the policies and priorities of governments. Exercising this power, they typically demand the same thing: austerity measures and "structural reforms" designed to advance a neoliberal market economy that ultimately benefits those same banks and corporations. The banks in turn create the very crises that require governments to bail them out, racking up large debts that banks turn into further crises, pressuring economic reforms in return for further loans. The cycle of crisis and control continues, and all the while, the big banks and financial institutions engage in criminal conspiracies, fraud, manipulation and money-laundering on a massive scale, including acting as the financial services arm of the world's largest drug cartels and terrorists organizations.

Welcome to the world governed by the global financial Mafiocracy - because if you're not concerned, you're not paying attention.

We Are More Than Commodities: False Consciousness and Why It's Still Relevant

By Colin Jenkins

"It is not consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness." - Karl Marx [1]

In Robert Tressell's literary classic, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, a significant scene occurs in Chapter Seven when some of the book's main cast of characters, a group of English laborers at the turn of the 20th century, gathers during a break in their work to discuss matters of labor, technology, unemployment and poverty. A lengthy conversation ensues:

'I don't see no sense in always grumblin',' Crass proceeded. 'These things can't be altered. You can't expect there can be plenty of work for everyone with all this 'ere labour-savin' machinery what's been invented.'

'Of course,' said Harlow, 'the people what used to be employed on the work what's now done by machinery, has to find something else to do. Some of 'em goes to our trade, for instance: the result is there's too many at it, and there ain't enough work to keep 'em all goin'.'

'Yes,' cried Crass, eagerly. 'That's just what I say. Machinery is the real cause of the poverty. That's what I said the other day.'

'Machinery is undoubtedly the cause of unemployment,' replied Owen, 'but it's not the cause of poverty: that's another matter altogether.'

The others laughed derisively.

'Well, it seems to me to amount to the same thing,' said Harlow, and nearly everyone agreed.

'It doesn't seem to me to amount to the same thing,' Owen replied. 'In my opinion, we are all in a state of poverty even when we have employment--the condition we are reduced to when we're out of work is more properly described as destitution.'

'Poverty,' continued Owen after a short silence, 'consists in a shortage of the necessaries of life. When those things are so scarce or so dear that people are unable to obtain sufficient of them to satisfy all their needs, those people are in a condition of poverty. If you think that the machinery, which makes it possible to produce all the necessaries of life in abundance, is the cause of the shortage, it seems to me that there must be something the matter with your minds.'

'Oh, of course we're all bloody fools except you,' snarled Crass. 'When they were servin' out the sense, they give you such a 'ell of a lot, there wasn't none left for nobody else.'

'If there wasn't something wrong with your minds,' continued Owen, 'you would be able to see that we might have "Plenty of Work" and yet be in a state of destitution. The miserable wretches who toil sixteen or eighteen hours a day--father, mother and even the little children--making match-boxes, or shirts or blouses, have "plenty of work", but I for one don't envy them. Perhaps you think that if there was no machinery and we all had to work thirteen or fourteen hours a day in order to obtain a bare living, we should not be in a condition of poverty? Talk about there being something the matter with your minds! If there were not, you wouldn't talk one day about Tariff Reform as a remedy for unemployment and then the next day admit that Machinery is the cause of it! Tariff Reform won't do away with the machinery, will it?'

'Tariff Reform is the remedy for bad trade,' returned Crass.

'In that case Tariff Reform is the remedy for a disease that does not exist. If you would only take the trouble to investigate for yourself you would find out that trade was never so good as it is at present: the output--the quantity of commodities of every kind--produced in and exported from this country is greater than it has ever been before. The fortunes amassed in business are larger than ever before: but at the same time--owing, as you have just admitted--to the continued introduction and extended use of wages-saving machinery, the number of human beings being employed is steadily decreasing. I have here,' continued Owen, taking out his pocket-book, 'some figures which I copied from the Daily Mail Year Book for 1907, page 33:

'"It is a very noticeable fact that although the number of factories and their value have vastly increased in the United Kingdom, there is an absolute decrease in the number of men and women employed in those factories between 1895 and 1901. This is doubtless due to the displacement of hand labour by machinery!"

'Will Tariff Reform deal with that? Are the good, kind capitalists going to abandon the use of wages-saving machinery if we tax all foreign-made goods? Does what you call "Free Trade" help us here? Or do you think that abolishing the House of Lords, or disestablishing the Church, will enable the workers who are displaced to obtain employment? Since it IS true--as you admit--that machinery is the principal cause of unemployment, what are you going to do about it? What's your remedy?'

No one answered, because none of them knew of any remedy: and Crass began to feel sorry that he had re-introduced the subject at all.

'In the near future,' continued Owen, 'it is probable that horses will be almost entirely superseded by motor cars and electric trams. As the services of horses will be no longer required, all but a few of those animals will be caused to die out: they will no longer be bred to the same extent as formerly. We can't blame the horses for allowing themselves to be exterminated. They have not sufficient intelligence to understand what's being done. Therefore they will submit tamely to the extinction of the greater number of their kind.

'As we have seen, a great deal of the work which was formerly done by human beings is now being done by machinery. This machinery belongs to a few people: it is worked for the benefit of those few, just the same as were the human beings it displaced. These Few have no longer any need of the services of so many human workers, so they propose to exterminate them! The unnecessary human beings are to be allowed to starve to death! And they are also to be taught that it is wrong to marry and breed children, because the Sacred Few do not require so many people to work for them as before!'

'Yes, and you'll never be able to prevent it, mate!' shouted Crass.

'Why can't we?'

'Because it can't be done!' cried Crass fiercely. 'It's impossible!'

Anyone who has ever taken part in a similar conversation with fellow workers knows that this fictional account couldn't be any more real, even over a century later. While it occurred in an imaginary, 1900-ish English setting, it surely resonates in a 21st-century American reality where collective working-class dissonance - what is referred to in Marxist circles as "false consciousness" - remains ignorant to the casual effects of capitalism. The conversation is packed with the typically tragic ironies of impoverished, insecure workers searching for any reason to explain their collective plight absent of blaming a system, let alone the faces of that system, which uses and discards them as it pleases. The lone conscious worker, Owen, does his best to enlighten the bunch. The main opposition comes from Crass, a character who symbolizes the epitome of false consciousness, not only in his ignorance of the system but perhaps even more so in his ill-informed, emotional pushback, which echoes the misleading narrative so often presented through mainstream channels. When pressed toward realizing the truth of his existence - and more importantly, the reason for it - Crass' dissonance hardens into an acceptance of hopeless despair summarized by those fatal words we've become all too familiar with - "that may be the case, but there's nothing we can do about it... it's just the way it is."

Such dissonance is expected in a highly divisive and unequal class society, especially when the prospect of a highly-conscious working class represents the single biggest threat to the few that benefit from this artificial arrangement. The key in forging this collective dissonance is found in turning a blind eye to material conditions and replacing the physical reality created by these conditions with a worldview shaped directly by ruling-class interests, which are accepted as being in line with the interests of all - a phenomenon which Antonio Gramsci referred to as cultural hegemony. In The German Ideology, Marx emphasized this cultural dynamic which inevitably stems from capitalism:

"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch." [2]

The false consciousness that is theorized by Marx and exposed in this particular scene of Tressell's book has real effects that continue to plague the working class. Unemployment, underemployment and poverty have characterized the typical working-class existence for the past four centuries; and, rather than being correctly viewed as manufactured realities, have gradually become accepted as an inescapable part of human life on earth. However, they are hardly inescapable or necessary. And this understanding may only be realized through an assessment of the mechanisms of capitalism.

Feudalism to Capitalism, Peasant to Worker

Unemployment has been a staple of the capitalist system since its birth from the remnants of feudalism. In purely mechanical terms, it is easy to see why this is the case. Since capitalism rests on a fundamental relationship between capitalist and worker, whereas the worker's labor is used to extract profit for the capitalist, its foundation is characterized by exploitation. However, this exploitation may only be realized if the masses of people are placed in a position where they are transformed into a commodity to be bought and sold. Since humans are inherently autonomous beings, artificial material conditions must be constructed in order to separate them from the rights of basic necessities, such as housing, food, water, etc., so they are then compelled to offer themselves on the labor market to be used as the owners of the means of production (capitalists) see fit. This is not a natural process; hence, the reason why wage-labor is historically viewed as not much different than chattel slavery. In Capital, Marx tells us:

"But in order that our owner of money may be able to find labour-power offered for sale as a commodity, various conditions must first be fulfilled. The exchange of commodities of itself implies no other relations of dependence than those which result from its own nature. On this assumption, labour-power can appear upon the market as a commodity, only if, and so far as, its possessor, the individual whose labour-power it is, offers it for sale, or sells it, as a commodity. In order that he may be able to do this, he must have it at his disposal, must be the untrammelled owner of his capacity for labour, i.e., of his person. He and the owner of money meet in the market, and deal with each other as on the basis of equal rights, with this difference alone, that one is buyer, the other seller; both, therefore, equal in the eyes of the law. The continuance of this relation demands that the owner of the labour-power should sell it only for a definite period, for if he were to sell it rump and stump, once for all, he would be selling himself, converting himself from a free man into a slave, from an owner of a commodity into a commodity. He must constantly look upon his labour-power as his own property, his own commodity, and this he can only do by placing it at the disposal of the buyer temporarily, for a definite period of time. By this means alone can he avoid renouncing his rights of ownership over it." [3]

This is not an intended or natural element of human life; rather, it is an artificial arrangement constructed by those who wish to own the world. "One thing, however, is clear - Nature does not produce on the one side owners of money or commodities, and on the other men possessing nothing but their own labour-power," explains Marx. "This relation has no natural basis, neither is its social basis one that is common to all historical periods. It is clearly the result of a past historical development, the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older forms of social production." [4] The capitalist epoch is surely not the first to base itself on such arrangements, but it is the latest.

The transition between feudalism and capitalism was not seamless, according to Marx, but rested on similar dynamics. "In England," he writes, "serfdom had practically disappeared in the last part of the 14th century. The immense majority of the population consisted then, and to a still larger extent, in the fifteenth century, of free peasant proprietors, whatever was the feudal title under which their right of property was hidden." [5] This period of transition, which was neither feudalistic nor capitalist, facilitated the transformation from an obligatory, formal dependence which characterized the relationship between lord and peasant to an informal dependence that materialized under capitalist relations. "The economic structure of capitalistic society," Marx writes, "has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former." [6]

While the hierarchical dynamics remained intact during this transition, the possibility of forging a collective resistance developed alongside the new relationships that were introduced under capitalism. This was noted by Marx on many occasions, perhaps most clearly in his take on the peasantry in revolutionary France in 'The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon':

"The small peasants form a vast mass, the members of which live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with one another. Their mode of production isolates them from one another, instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is increased by France's bad means of communication and by the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small-holding, admits of no division of labour in its cultivation, no application of science, and, therefore, no multiplicity of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient; it itself directly produces the major part of its consumption and thus acquires its means of life more through exchange with nature than its intercourse with society ... Insofar as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that divide their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of other classes, and put them in hostile contrast to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no unity, no national union, and no political organisation, they do not form a class. They are consequently incapable of enforcing their class interest in their own names, whether through a parliament or through a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented." [7]

This strain in Marxist thought continued for decades. In a 1919 edition of L'Ordine Nuovo, Gramsci remarked on what he perceived as the mentality shaped by the peasant experience in feudal settings:

"The psychology of the peasants was, in such conditions, uncontrollable; real feelings remained hidden, implicated and confused in a system of defence against exploitations, merely egotistical, without logical continuity, materialized in sham indifference and false servility. The class struggle was m ixed up with banditry, blackmail, burning forests, laming livestock, kidnapping women and children, with attacks on the municipality: it was a form of basic terrorism, without steady and effective consequences. Objectively then the psychology of the peasant was reduced to a tiny sum of primordial feelings caused by the social conditions created by the parliamentary-democratic state: the peasant was left completely at the mercy of the landowners and of their sycophants and corrupt public officials, and the main worry in their lives was to defend themselves physically against unexpected natural disasters, against the abuses and barbaric cruelty of the landowners and public officials. The peasant has always lived outside the domain of the law, without a legal personality, without moral individuality: he has remained an anarchic element, the independent atom in a chaotic tumult, held back only by fear of the carabiniere and of the devil. He did not understand discipline; patient and tenacious in the individual struggle to take scarce and meagre fruits from nature, capable of great sacrifice in family life, he was impatient and wildly violent in the class struggle, incapable of posing a general aim and of pursuing it with perseverance and systematic struggle." [8]

Long before false consciousness became a concern within the capitalist working classes, the consensus idea in Marxian circles warned against this "narrow-minded" mentality carried forth from the peasantry of feudal society. While the societal structures between feudalism and capitalism largely remained the same, especially in regards to how the subaltern related to the power structure (peasant to lord, tenant to landowner, worker to capitalist), the individualistic, survivalist posture of the peasant was confronted with the possibility of a collective resistance that would present itself under the newly-formed structures of capitalism, where workers would be corralled together in packs. Gramsci noted this inevitable transition and its effect on consciousness, especially in regards to the working classes in what he described as "capitalistically backward" nations like Russia, Italy, France and Spain:

"In reality large ownership has remained outside free competition: and the modern state has respected its feudal essence, developing juridical formulae such as holding in trust, which maintain in fact the existence and privileges of the feudal regime. The mentality of the peasant has thus remained that of the servant of the soil, who revolts violently against the "bosses" on particular occasions, but is incapable of thinking himself part of a collective (the nation for the owners and the class for the proletarians) and of developing systematic action and permanent revolt to change the economic and political relations of social existence." [9]

With the arrival of capitalism came the reality of a collective struggle and, subsequently, the capability of the peasant-turned-worker "thinking himself part of a collective" - something that, as Gramsci noted, was impossible on the sporadic and disconnected feudal landscape.

Overcoming False Consciousness

"Only if false consciousness is transformed into true consciousness, that is, only if we are aware of reality, rather than distorting it by rationalizations and fictions, can we also become aware of our real and true human needs." - Erich Fromm [10]

As capitalism evolved in the United States, so too did the probability of widespread, working-class consciousness. This was evident throughout the first half of the 20th century, which birthed a radical labor movement that garnered many key victories. However, despite this period of working-class progress, capitalism ultimately prevailed. The late-1900s brought higher concentrations of wealth, tax schemes beneficial to the wealthy, increased inequality, and an overall deterioration of the industrialized working classes which, after fighting for decades to carve out a piece of the pie, were decimated by globalization.

Our new reality is now shaped by crippling and lifelong debt, poverty wages, chronic underemployment and unemployment, and rampant insecurities regarding access to basic necessities. The problems faced by Owen, Crass, and the entire working crew showcased in Tressell's book are the same problems we face now. They are the same fundamental problems faced by working-class people centuries over: a lack of autonomy, a lack of control, and a near-total absence of self-determination. And, ironically, with the onset of globalized capitalism, the ownership class has become more connected than ever, while the working class has become more disconnected than ever. This disconnectedness, and the reversal of many of the hard-fought gains won by organized labor, has created an environment that breeds false consciousness.

The modern, disconnected working class has become less reliant on one another and more susceptible to the corporate culture directed from the top. This hegemonic culture now influences everything from public schooling to advertising and marketing to entertainment to the workplace. Naturally, the isolation and "social dislocation" that has accompanied this culture (and the material conditions shaped by globalized capitalism) "breeds a reactionary form of nostalgia." [11] This cultural effect helps explain the tendencies of members of the working class to embrace divisive (and ultimately self-destructive) ideologies such as racism, misogyny and homophobia, to vote against their best interests, to worship wealth and celebrity culture, and to gravitate toward proto-fascist elements such as the Tea Party. In this sense, the persistence of false consciousness is directed, or at least stimulated, from above. "To deny this," as Michael Parenti wrote, "is to assume there has been no indoctrination, no socialization to conservative values, no control of information and commentary, no limitation of the topics to be considered in the national debate… and that a whole array of powers have not helped pre-structure how we see and define our own interests and options." [12]

False consciousness is, at its core, an ideological problem; but it is shaped by the realities created by capitalism - exploitation, isolation, and dehumanization - as well as the mechanisms that force capitalist culture upon us, mainly derived from the privatization and profitization of elements that influence thought, such as education systems and media. Thus, the hegemonic culture that dominates working-class thought serves as a deceptive foundation whereas the appearance of conscious thought, and even the conscious seeking of knowledge, is not as free-flowing as it appears to those who actively engage in this process. Friedrich Engels explains:

"Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives. Because it is a process of thought he derives both its form and its content from pure thought, either his own or that of his predecessors. He works with mere thought material which he accepts without examination as the product of thought, he does not investigate further for a more remote process independent of thought; indeed its origin seems obvious to him, because as all action is produced through the medium of thought it also appears to him to be ultimately based upon thought." [13]

Overcoming false consciousness will require a complete rejection of hierarchical relationships from within the working class, especially in regards to education. Since public education is trending in an opposite direction, with highly-structured and authoritative elements being introduced through legislation like No Child Left Behind, programs like Common Core, and privatization efforts centered in the charter school movement, informal programs must develop. This will require interaction. This will require a willingness to discuss difficult topics, and attempts to cut through hardened and callused dissonance, ala Tressell's protagonist, and a rejection of traditional notions of education as being characterized by formal, top-down, dictating interactions. This will require an understanding that "there is no such thing as a neutral educational process," and that "education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world." [14] This will require the realization that we are more than just commodities.

Notes

[1] Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859). Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm

[2] Karl Marx, The German Ideology. Part 1: Feuerbach, Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook, The Illusion of the Epoch. Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm

[3] Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1, Chapter Six. Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch06.htm

[4] Ibid

[5] Marx, Capital: Volume 1, Chapter 27. Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm

[6] Marx, Capital: Volume 1, Chapter 26. Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch26.htm

[7] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), Chapter 7. Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch07.htm

[8] Antonio Gramsci, Workers and Peasants. L'Ordine Nuovo, 2 August 1919. Translated by Michael Carley. Accessed at
https://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/1919/08/workers-peasants.html

[9] Ibid

[10] Erich Fromm, Marx's Concept of Man, (New York, NY: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1961), 1-85. Accessed at http://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/index.htm

[11] Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000)

[12] Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths: Reflections on Politics, Media, Ideology, Conspiracy, Ethnic Life and Class Power (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1996), 210.

[13] Friedrich Engels in a letter to Franz Mehring, July 14, 1893. Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1893/letters/93_07_14.htm

[14] Richard Shaull, Preface to Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Paulo Freire). (2000) New York : Continuum

The Black Lives Matter Schism: Towards a Vision for Black Autonomy

By Joel Northam

The Black Lives Matter movement exhibited a schism since the first few days following the first Ferguson rebellion. I remember watching live streams of the rebellion early on as Ferguson's youth waged small scale urban combat armed with little more than rubble and glass bottles. The heroic resistance to state power, against all odds of victory in forcing a retreat of the occupying militarized police, and in the face of material consequences in the form of a brutal crackdown, was a demonstration of courage that we all should aspire to.

The repression by the armed apparatus of the state in Ferguson ( and Baltimore months later) provoked another popular response. But this response took on a different character. It seemed to want to place distance between itself and those who were engaged in combat with the police. Cloaked in a veneer of inclusiveness, it drowned out the original spirit of resistance that the rebelling youths exhibited nights before. The message was "we don't want to be associated with them and we will 'resist' within the confines of rules and regulations given to us by established power".

The latter trend did what it set out to do. It attracted a vast segment of the liberal left, respectable quasi-radicals, nonprofit organizations and sympathetic politicians. There were denunciations of riots, looting, and property destruction as these tactics were considered "infantile" and "alienating" to potential supporters and allies. Think piece after think piece was written about the merits and demerits of various tactics of resisting police occupation. The ones who fought back against the police in Ferguson and Baltimore were touted as "misguided" and "lacking in overall strategy" and they were ultimately left with virtually no material support to continue their organic, grass roots, militant struggle.

This schism between militant resistance and respectability has since become more acute. The mass movement has become amorphous, and what should have been channeled into organic revolutionary energy has dissipated under the weight of having an incoherent structure and lack of a declarative revolutionary political program that includes building international, intercommunal alliances with other Black left movements and anti-imperialist organizations worldwide. This flaw was seized upon by petit bourgeois elements, who have seen fit to reduce the Black Lives Matter movement to a "New Civil Rights Movement", hell bent on simply effecting policy changes rather than assigning it the character of a revolutionary liberation struggle that requires a coherent strategy and a diversity of tactics for its success.

This notwithstanding, there have been enormous organizational strides made my local chapters of Black Lives Matter that have challenged the status quo at an operational level. It shouldn't be overlooked that the overall indictment of institutional racism that the movement has reintroduced into mainstream discourse has indeed had an effect on the consciousness of various strata of the population. The question at hand is whether or not this indictment can be carried through to its ultimate conclusion: that those invested in maintaining our systemic oppression are not fit to rule and should be removed from power. The longer Black Lives Matter waits to answer this question, the more vulnerable it is to co-optation, derailment and ultimately, dissolution.

Naturally, within a power structure that is programmed to halt all revolutionary advances and counter all threats to its existence, the reformist trend within the Black Lives Matter schism obviously picked up the most steam; grant offers from foundations, visits to see liberal capitalist politicians and airtime on CNN and MSNBC ensured that. Now we have the ultimate bastardization of militant resistance manifested in the form of Campaign Zero, a series of policy proposals that seek to end police violence in America, as if it's possible that an institution founded in order to capture and torture runaway slaves and to protect slave masters' property can be reformed.

Campaign Zero was proposed by so called leaders of the movement and twitter celebrities alike, with virtually no consultation with the mass base of people who put themselves on the line in the streets against the armed apparatus of the state. It is an arbitrary and piecemeal attempt to synthesize militant resistance with the "progressivism" of the Democratic Party, which ultimately leaves white supremacist institutions intact. This overt display of conciliatory politics is nothing short of a betrayal by Black petit-bourgeois liberals who legitimately hate the system, but couldn't garner the fortitude to imagine what they would do without it. It is opportunist defeatism in writing.

Anyone who has a halfway decent grasp of history knows that the wanton destruction of social movements spurred on by establishment liberals is not a new phenomenon. At this point it's formulaic. The Democratic party exists to adapt to the ebbs and flows of social changes in this country in a manner that provides concessions while maintaining the current political economy of white supremacist, capitalist society. This is the Democratic party's only real demarcation from the outward and openly bigoted reactionary Republican party. Both preserve the system. It is not far off to suggest that the rapid resurgence of white nationalist fascism that is currently being nurtured by the political right wing is a safeguard should the liberal wing of the political establishment fail to disrupt the movement and quell Black radicalism entirely.

With Campaign Zero and the corresponding frantic search for support within the current bourgeois political milieu, the reformists within Black Lives Matter are holding their breath for the 2016 elections, where the US ruling class will ultimately decide whether the reactionary or "humanitarian" wings of ruling power will respond to the political unrest in a way that guarantees their continued existence. While this anticipation may signal a decline in movement activity, it should be primer to those activists (who don't have to be reminded that the white supremacist capitalist power structure will remain in place no matter who wins the presidency) to begin to nurture the elements within the movement that are not seeking to coexist with the system.

"Black Lives Matter" should not be declared as an appeal to ruling power or racist white America to accept us as human. They don't and they won't. Our value in this country has always been directly proportional to the amount of profit we produce. With the advent of financial mechanisms that no longer rely on Black labor to produce wealth, we have now become disposable. The increase of extrajudicial murders by the state and relative impunity that racist vigilante murderers of our people seem to have are indicators of this. We say "Black Lives Matter" as a reminder to us as Black people that our lives matter regardless if we're accepted as human by white society or not, and is said as a declaration of resistance to our condition as beasts of burden for capital.

But a declaration is not enough. Neither are policy reforms, symbolic political actions and awareness campaigns. What is needed right now is an entire shift in orientation. A complete overhaul of all of the resources we have and can acquire at our disposal dedicated to the purpose of relinquishing our dependency on the economic system that exploits us; the building, maintenance, and defense of our own institutions and organs of power, channeled for the general uplift of our people, for our people, and by our people. The institutions that the state uses to oppress us must have their diametrical counterpart built by us for liberation purposes and must function to fill the void that has been left by the excesses and crises of transnational capitalism. Responsibility for the defense of our institutions rests with us, and this defense will also serve the purpose of resisting any and all attempts to put us back on the capitalist plantation.

We must strive for nothing less than the goal of complete self-determination and autonomy of African descended people in the US and abroad, working hand in hand in communal fellowship with other oppressed peoples who have their own contradictions with the power structure. Only by aligning ourselves with the international anticolonial, anti-imperial movement can success be achieved, as we represent only a little less than 13% of the national population.

Our organs of power will create a situation in which dual power will give rise to all manner of reactionary fascism and their corresponding weapons, as we are under siege on two sides: one side by the state that wants to continue our exploitation or annihilate us, and on the other side by the nation's white nationalist and white supremacist silent majority which simply just wants to annihilate us. Organization, preparation, and development of the means to combat these threats is paramount and should be considered an immediate priority.

This is our reality. We do not live in a reality whereby those who are materially invested in our subjugation will suddenly come to their senses, take pity on us, pay us reparations while we ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after like the reformists tacitly imply by their attempts at negotiating with US elites. The rest of the colonized and neo-colonized world is ready to shake off their yoke of oppression the moment it becomes clear that we've made our move. Evidence is seen in the way that African Jews in Israel were inspired by videos of Baltimore's youth overrunning riot squads. The comrades shutting down traffic arteries and battling police in Tel Aviv were hardly inspired by paid activists with forty thousand dollar a year salaries and 401Ks, but by those who heroically abandoned all respectability and asserted their identity as a threat to the establishment.

US fascism would not have established itself so securely, with every safeguard in place and every mechanism utilized at its disposal to stifle the growth of revolutionary consciousness of Black people in the US were we not innately and at our deepest core threatening to the white power structure. Acknowledgement of this orientation puts US fascism on the defensive. A movement of angry Black people should be threatening. It should heighten contradictions, it should make those invested in the status quo uneasy, and it should provoke raging emotions in ourselves as well as our class enemies.

The movement for Black Autonomy, although nascent, is the inevitable outgrowth of a decaying strategy of reformist appeals to power. We know Black lives matter. The question is whether or not we have the capacity to check any attempts at devaluation by counterrevolutionary elements from the outside and from within. The autonomous movement is building this capacity, synthesizing elements of anarchism and revolutionary socialism. Modern examples of this type of political self-determination include the Kurdish PYD/PKK in Syria and Turkey and the Zapatistas and Autodefensas in Mexico.

The autonomous movement explicitly rejects of the kind of separatist reactionary nationalism which is unfortunately endemic to many formations within the Black Liberation movement. It rejects the hetero-patriarchal ethos that women should be relegated to servant status. It rejects the demonization of Black queer and trans people and instead uplifts them as leaders. We hold that one immediately relinquishes the role of "vanguard" if one subscribes to Eurocentric authoritarian hetero-patriarchal standards of gender and their corresponding roles as the norm.

The movement for Black autonomy does not include coexistence with white supremacist authority in its platform. We understand that the development of a scientific, intersectional revolutionary political theory that is applicable to our specific material conditions in the US, and our development of a praxis that tangibly counters the power of white supremacist institutions that control our lives, is the difference between being victims of genocide or soldiers at war. We understand that the striving for autonomy means provoking violent reactionary resistance to our advances. We accept this. We understand that Black liberation means human liberation, so we act in solidarity with the oppressed. Long live the Black resistance. We have nothing to lose but our chains!

Gentrification is a Feminist Issue: A Discussion on the Intersection of Class, Race, Gender, and Housing

By Cherise Charleswell

An Overview: What is Gentrification?

From a socioeconomic standpoint, gentrification may be defined as a gradual process of renewal and rebuilding that involves the influx of upper-income or affluent - usually white people - into existing urban districts that are often viewed as being deteriorating areas. This process causes the displacement of the low-middle income working-class, and often long-time, residents due to the increase in rents and property values and changes in the district's overall character and culture. The "rent gap" is often noted as the underlying mechanism of gentrification. The following is an overview of the cyclic nature of this rent gap put into historical perspective:

• By the close of the Second World War there was a movement of capital to the suburbs. This movement was fueled by greater amount of open land, lower cost of land, little existing development, and opportunities for profit.

• Capital and resources left the city - and followed urban migration (white flight) to the suburbs

• Racist housing practices, including legislation that forbid selling homes and renting to non-White residents helped to uphold de facto segregation.

• By the 1960s many of these urban areas, with the loss of capital, jobs, and so on; began to deteriorate, and property values fell.

• Currently with the higher costs of property in the suburbs and other communities, there are fewer and fewer opportunities to invest small and gain a big profit; thus making the once "undesirable" urban properties with their low property values and costs, more "desirable."

• By the 1980s gentrification was in full-swing.

• Reinvestment in the urban communities causes the cost of property to rise quickly and long-standing residents who were once able to afford to live in these once "undesirable" areas, find themselves unable to afford the higher cost of rent and home mortgages. Further, they are unable to afford to patronize the new and costly stores that have replaced the shops that they used to frequent.

This rent gap is facilitated by a number of agents and practices, and "retenanting" is a professional euphemism given to the commercial real estate agents whose job is to study a community and help to make change -- gentrification -- happen quickly. Their work involves helping to kick out commercial tenants who are paying extremely low rent, and then finding tenants who will pay higher rates for the same spaces. The following expose was released discussing the work of one of these agents working in Highland Park, a hilly area northeast of downtown Los Angeles that has been a target for gentrification for residents fleeing even higher home prices and rents in neighboring Hollywood, Silver Lake, and Echo Park. Then there was the 2012 release of the documentary film "My Brooklyn," directed by Kelly Anderson and produced by Allison Lirish Dean, which offers detailed examples of this rent gap and an even broader analysis of the many factors behind gentrification. Brooklyn itself is home to some of the most rapidly gentrifying areas in the United States, and is among the most expensive cities to reside in.

Viewing the complex matter of gentrification through a feminist lens helps to uncover how multifaceted it is; in that gentrification involves the oppression, marginalization, displacement of vulnerable populations, particularly women and children who are often already negatively impacted by the effects of classism, sexism, and racism. Gentrification threatens to erode the communities and livelihood maintained by these women because their displacement becomes a precondition for the total transformation of the area.

When considering the complex definition and various factors involved in this process, one thing must remain clear -- it is driven by the private sector and is the result of capitalism's relentless pursuit of profit. The very sector of society that has control and influence over all levels of government in the United States, and is thus able to create policies that help to facilitate and increase gentrification in communities around the country --- as well as those outside the United States. This far-flung reach is due to the nature of multinational corporations which wield their power and influence globally. I was reminded of this while on vacation in Portugal this past Spring. As I was walking along a typically narrow, winding street in Vila Nova de Gaia, which is just South of Porto, a resident of the city pointed out how many of the original homeowners and families that lived along the street for many, many years, were becoming displaced. Their homes and shops were being bought up and replaced with hotels. Already, I could begin to see how the character of the community was changing. These new hotels used color schemes and architectural design styles that seemed completely out of place with the homes in the area, which were decorated with world-renowned, intricate and vibrant Portuguese ceramic tiles. I asked where these families went, and the response was that they were relocated to areas much further away from the city center.

And this seems to be a common theme on both sides of the Atlantic -- the lack of consideration that goes to displaced residents. Truly considering these residents would mean that factors which led them to these areas, which were previously viewed as being undesirable, should be taken into account. Thus, the argument can be put forth that gentrification may be viewed as new-wave colonialism, having economic, social, and public health repercussions for women, communities of color, and the poor. In this sense, it is a feminist issue, and should be interrogated, at least partly, as such.

Feminization of Poverty & the Cost of Housing

In the most simplistic terms, the feminization of poverty refers to the fact that women represent a disproportionate share of the world's poor. Further, the feminization of poverty is not only a consequence of lack of income, but is also the result of the deprivation of opportunities and gender biases present in both society and government. For women of color, the loss of opportunities are also a result of institutional-level racism and discriminatory practices. It is these biases that have helped to create the gender-wage gap and all of the socioeconomic consequences of inequity.

So what does the gender-wage gap look like?

So, how does the feminization of poverty relate to the discussion of gentrification?

For more than 30 years, women in the United States have had to deal with not only stagnant wages , where average wages have barely kept pace with inflation since 1979, but also with the persisting gender-wage gap. Even more troublesome is that these wages have remained stagnant despite an exponential growth in worker productivity.

For myself, and those born the generation after me, the 80s and 90s babies, this means that our overall standard of living is probably reduced by 50% in comparison to previous generations; and this includes college educated women who may also find it difficult to afford the loftier rental prices in gentrified neighborhoods. Salaries are simply not keeping up with the cost of living; especially the cost of housing.

Further, the gender-pay gap helps to ensure that those who are more likely to be impoverished and coping with issues of food insecurity, homelessness, etc. are women and children. Working-class and low-income women are the group who are most vulnerable to gentrification in that they live in the areas that are being targeted by this process. In essence, the sexist, racist, discriminatory and biased practices, beliefs, and policies that have helped to create the gender-pay gap also help to facilitate their removal from areas that they were once able to afford.

Having lower wages means that these working-class women will be unable to resist or withstand the process of gentrification and remain in their homes and neighborhoods. This is due to the fact that lower wages means that an increase in the amount on rent or mortgage costs is extremely difficult for women who are already dealing with wage deficits. To put this into perspective, a Latina woman who on average makes only $0.56 to a white man's $1.00 hourly, would be least likely to be able cope with a marked increase in rent, as well as the higher cost of groceries and other goods which occur when an area undergoes gentrification. In comparison, a white man, who make higher wages on average, would be more capable of remaining in a neighborhood that is undergoing gentrification.

Intersections: Communities of Color

When taking a look at the definition of gentrify, the root word of gentrification, one can readily discern what is implied, especially when considering the change in demographics of these neighborhoods:

" To change (a place, such as an old neighborhood) by improving it and making it more appealing to people who have money ."

The term "appealing" harkens back to the language used by banks, realtors, and others who wanted to ensure that certain neighborhoods would remain devoid of people of color. The American suburbs were actually built out due to this phenomenon of White flight from urban centers which, without resources and investment, were left to decay. In fact, post-New Deal communities actually received federal subsidies for home ownership, while others, that had Black residents or other people of color, did not. This process was called "red-lining", and it often barred any neighborhood with more than 5% of Black people/people of color from receiving subsidies for home ownership and wealth building. This process helped to keep Compton, California, the birthplace of gangster rap, completely White up until the early 1950s. This process led half a million whites to move out of Brooklyn in the 1970s.

The following statements shared by Zach Behrens in his essay , Before the 1950s, the Whiteness of Compton was Defended Vehemently, explains why these covenants manifested.

"Covenants across the country began in the late 1910s and early 1920s in response to the increasing black population in American cities, namely Northern and Western ones that saw the rise during World War I during the so-called great migration from the South. In Los Angeles, however, the move of African Americans was slow until World War II. Still, that slow growth in the 1920s was enough for white homeowners to become concerned about declining property values because of the black influx."

These discriminatory housing practices were - or continue to be -- used against other people of color around the US, and one can argue that at its roots, and according to the terminology used in its definition, gentrification is a racist practice that seeks to make a neighborhood more appealing to those who are deemed desirable - in other words, white people, or more specifically, wealthy white people. Women of color, particularly those who are working class and thus subjected to oppressive systems of racism, classism, ableism, and sexism, are deemed the most undesirable and are consequently marginalized. The rising cost of living, escalating rents and mortgages, stagnant wages, and gender wage-gap literally force them out of their neighborhoods, despite many having community ties for multiple generations.

Ultimately, the process of gentrification sits on a historical legacy of oppression and discrimination, and has only worsened with the shrinking of the middle class and transfer of wealth to the smallest percentage of the US population over the past 40 years. Furthermore, it has left women, especially women of color, as the most vulnerable in this process of systematic displacement. It is a matter where race, class, and gender intersect. And, for this reason, gentrification must be recognized as a feminist issue.

Monopoly Capitalism in the 21st Century: Neoliberalism, Monetarism, and the Pervasion of Finance

By Colin Jenkins

The following is the third part of a multi-part series, "Applying Poulantzas," which analyzes the work of Greek Marxist political sociologist, Nicos Poulantzas, and applies it to the unique political and economic structures found under neoliberalism and post-industrial capitalism.


With industrial or "competitive capitalism," it was the "separation and dispossession of the direct producers (the working class) from their means of production" which created this multi-layered, class-based societal structure. [1] Globalization has resulted in a massive shift of national economies. Former industrialized nations are now considered "post-industrial" due to the ability of large production-based manufacturers to move their operations into "cheaper" labor markets. International and regional trade agreements have facilitated this shift. With post-industrial capitalism and the widespread destruction of "productive labor," or labor that produces a tangible product and is thus exploited through the creation of surplus value, it is the complete reliance on a service economy which produces no tangible value that allows for strict control through wage manipulation. The ways in which the working class interacts with the owning class has changed significantly, if only in regards to their physical worlds. In the US, financialization has replaced industrialization as the main economic driver. Alongside this shift, monopoly capitalism has effectively replaced "competitive capitalism," and globalization has ushered in the neoliberal era. These developments have rearranged the superstructure and forced capitalist states to develop new methods in maintaining a societal equilibrium that is constantly being pushed to the brink of unrest at the hands of a capitalist system that breeds concentrations in wealth and power, while simultaneously driving the working-class majority towards a state of functional serfdom.

The emergence of monopoly capitalism was inevitable. "The battle of competition is fought by cheapening of commodities," explained Marx. "The cheapness of commodities depends, ceteris paribus, on the productiveness of labor, and this again on the scale of production. Therefore the larger capitals beat the smaller."[2] Whether we are referring to technology and automation, the relation of finance and the varying degrees of access to capital, or merely the all-encompassing process of "cheapening commodities" which Marx refers to above, it all works in tandem to create a funneling effect whereas capital becomes concentrated. And with this concentration of capital comes the concentration of wealth, which in turn inevitably breeds concentrations of other forms of power, i.e. political. In this sense, what many have come to refer to as "corporatism" is more correctly viewed as a mature stage of capitalism, rather than a differentiation from capitalism. The "marriage of corporation and state" that Benito Mussolini once referred to is merely a byproduct of capitalist advancement - the natural consequence of concentrated interests relying on the state apparatus to both facilitate its progression and protect its assets.

The consequent development of financialization could also be seen as an inevitable late stage of capitalism. As Paul Sweezy explains, while paraphrasing Marx, "Further, the credit system which 'begins as a modest helper of accumulation' soon 'becomes a new and formidable weapon in the competition in the competitive struggle, and finally it transforms itself into an immense social mechanism for the centralization of capitals.'"[3]

In the US, the creation of the Federal Reserve and the use of government-approved, macroeconomic policy-making has been a crucial tool in maintaining the equilibrium that is a central theme of Poulantzas' work. It has, in a sense, represented a Captain's wheel on a chaotic ship rolling over rough seas. The Keynesian model that dominated the American landscape from the late-1930s until the late-1970s relied on fiscal policy to supplement private sector instability, mainly by stimulating and supplementing this sector through infusions of money.

A shift to monetarism in the late-1970s paralleled the arrival of the neoliberal era, an intensification of privatization, and deregulation. While the all-encompassing policy-direction found under neoliberalism extended into the geopolitical realm to include "free trade" agreements and far-reaching international policies directed by the IMF and World Bank, it was this newfound reliance on monetary policy that created more ground between the standard operations of capitalist economy and the development of a " corporate-fascistic model." In other words, it allowed for greater returns on corporate profit in spite of wage stagnation, an overall degeneration of employment, increased poverty, and a consequent decline in expendable (consumer) income from within the working class. With regards to the equilibrium, direct manipulation of the money supply has allowed for a tightly-controlled mechanism that safeguards this extension and intensification of systemic inequities. Neoliberal economist Milton Friedman echoed the call for monetarism through his analysis of the Great Depression:

"The Fed was largely responsible for converting what might have been a garden-variety recession, although perhaps a fairly severe one, into a major catastrophe. Instead of using its powers to offset the depression, it presided over a decline in the quantity of money by one-third from 1929 to 1933 ... Far from the depression being a failure of the free-enterprise system; it was a tragic failure of government." [4]

Friedman's assessment wasn't critical of the existence of the Fed, or even of the Fed's ability to manipulate the money supply, but rather quite the opposite; it was critical of the Fed's failure to increase the money supply in times of crisis. In this sense, Monetarists did not oppose the Keynesian approach of intervention, but rather the nature of that intervention -fiscal policy (government spending) versus monetary policy (Quantity Theory of Money). The former provides money to the government, which in turn creates public programs and/or increases public spending that directly affects the population. The latter provides money to the financial industry and/or government, which in turn provides money to "power players" (corporate interests, big business, bank bailouts, etc...) in the hopes that such money will make its way through the population, hence "trickle down." Modern monetarism (Post-2008 financial crisis) has intensified through multiple bouts of QE (Quantitative Easing), which has reaped tremendous growth for the financial industry and big business (see the Dow Jones Industrial Average) while having no positive effect on the population, which continues to struggle through stagnation, chronic unemployment, and impoverishment.

It is no surprise that financialization found a perfect bedfellow in neoliberalism . "The neo-liberal bias towards de-regulation, which widened the space for financialization, was more often linked to an institutional fix that relied (and still relies) on 'unusual deals with political authority', predatory capitalism, and reckless speculation - all of which have fuelled the global financial crisis," explains Bob Jessop. "As the limits to 'more market, less state' emerged, there was growing resort to flanking and supporting measures to keep the neo-liberal show on the road. This was reflected in the discourse and policies of the ' Third Way ', which maintained the course of neo-liberalization in new circumstances, and is linked to the North Atlantic Financial Crisis (witness its eruption under 'New Labour' in Britain as well as the Bush Administration in the USA)." [5]

While conducted and carried out on different spheres, and for different reasons, financialization and expansionary monetary policy have emerged in parallel to one another. Because of this, they have maintained a loose relationship in the era of neoliberalism, with one (financialization) creating massive rifts and chaotic patterns of accumulation, and the other (monetary policy) attempting to manage the aftermath of this chaos. This has added yet another element to what Poulantzas saw as the inevitable rise of the authoritarian nature of State Monopoly Capitalism (SMC), whereas the capitalist state is forced to become more and more involved in maintaining equilibrium. In the economic realm, this amounts to monetary policy; in the political realm, this amounts to steadying the superstructure (balancing austerity measures with the welfare state); and in the social realm, this amounts to increased militarization of domestic police forces and a gradual erosion of civil liberties, features that become necessary when society's equilibrium is pushed toward a breaking point (civil unrest).

In the era of finance-dominated accumulation, and especially following periodic, systemic crises, governments have extended their reach to deal with unprecedented volatility. This was seen following the financial crisis of 2008-09, as capitalist states the world over scrambled to right their ships which had been steered into a perfect storm of financialized accumulation (many guided by illegal schemes; see the mortgage-backed securities scandal). Since then, it has become commonplace for governments, through monetary policy, to "intervene periodically to underwrite the solvency of banks, to provide extraordinary liquidity and to guarantee the deposits of the public with banks." [6] This is not to suggest that government intervention in the capitalist system is a new phenomenon; only that its methods have changed as capitalism has changed. Poulantzas explains:

"In the competitive capitalist stage, the capitalist state (the liberal state) always played an economic role; the image of the liberal state being simply the gendarme or night watchman of a capitalism that 'worked by itself' is a complete myth… From taxation through to factory legislation, from customs duties to the construction of economic infrastructure such as railways, the liberal state always performed significant economic functions..." [7]

With monopoly capitalism and the onset of financialization, the tendency toward extreme developments in both accumulations of the dominant classes and dispossession of the dominated classes requires higher degrees of state intervention. These interventions inevitably extend far beyond the economic base. Poulantzas contrasts this development with its former stage of 'competitive capitalism':

"If it is possible to speak of a specific non-intervention of this state into the economy, this is only in order to contrast it with the role of the state in the stage of monopoly capitalism, the 'interventionist state' which Lenin already had in mind in his analysis of imperialism. The difference between this and the state of competitive capitalism is not, as we shall see, a mere quantitative one. In the stage of monopoly capitalism, the role of the state in its decisive intervention into the economy is not restricted essentially to the reproduction of what Engels termed the 'general conditions' of the production of surplus-value; the state is also involved in the actual process of the extended reproduction of capital as a social relation." [8]

The emergence of expansionary monetary policy, most notably in the US Federal Reserve's use of Quantitative Easing, has become the go-to method of addressing the chaotic effects of financialization. This has become a necessary component for embedded capitalist interests that have taken advantage of a system that privatizes gains and publicizes losses. For the working classes, the reliance on consumer credit for not only luxury goods but necessities has illustrated how financialization has penetrated everyday life. To the former industrialized working classes (like that in the US), this is due to the emergence of both globalization and neoliberalism, which "favour exchange- over use-value" and "treat workers as disposable and substitutable factors of production," and "the wage (including the social wage) as a cost of (international) production." [9]

The permeation of this trifecta (Globalization, Neoliberalism, and Financialization) is not lost on the working classes. "Neoliberalism tends to promote financialization, both as a strategic objective and as an inevitable outcome," Jessop writes. "As this process expands and penetrates deeper into the social and natural world, it transforms the micro-, meso- and macro-dynamics of capitalist economies." [10] For the economic base and its power players, the state's use of expansionary monetary policy becomes a lifeboat, providing eternal life to corporate accumulation. For the working-class majority, whose existence is more and more precarious due to declining wages, consumer credit (often predatory) becomes a necessity to satisfy basic needs. Jessop concludes:

"The primary aspect of the wage is its treatment as a cost of (global) production rather than as a source of (domestic) demand; this is linked to re-commodification of social welfare in housing, pensions, higher education, health insurance, and so on. This leads to growing flexibility of wage labour (especially increasing precarization), downward pressure on wages and working conditions, and cuts in the residual social wage. A further result is the financialization of everyday life as the labour force turns to credit (and usury) to maintain its standard of living and to provide for its daily, life-course, and intergenerational reproduction. Combined with the increased returns to profit-producing and interest-bearing capital, this also intensifies income and wealth inequalities in the economies subject to finance-dominated accumulation, which now match or exceed their levels in just before the 1929 Crash (Elsner 2012; Saez 2013)." [11]

Monopoly capitalism in the 21st century has become ever more reliant on capitalist states to serve as facilitators, protectors, and a damage control mechanism. Former industrialized nations have shifted the remnants of "competitive capitalism" to global labor markets (which are also state-supplemented) and replaced them with service-sector economies based in finance schemes that seek to reproduce "fictitious capital" at alarming rates. Capitalist states, in adjusting to this shift, have embraced expansionary monetary policy as a means to address the ensuing chaos by supplementing and protecting financial institutions (the dominant classes in the age of neoliberalism/financialization). Will the volatility created by this shift finally bring capitalism to its breaking point? Will the prospect of automation force governments to develop radically new welfare states that include basic income guarantees? Will highly-exploited, global labor markets radicalize and collectivize, and bring the neoliberal era to its knees? The future brings many questions.

Notes

[1] Poulantzas. Classes in Contemporary Capitalism. Verso, 1978, pp. 97-98.
[2] Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume 3. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1894.
[3] Sweezy, Paul M. "Monopoly Capital." Monthly Review, Volume 56, Issue 5. October 2004.
[4] Friedman, Milton & Friedman, Rose. Two Lucky People: Memoirs, University of Chicago Press, 1998.
[5] 'Finance-dominated accumulation and post-democratic capitalism', in S. Fadda and P. Tridico, eds, Institutions and Economic Development after the Financial Crisis, London: Routledge, 83-105, 2013.
[6] Lapavitsas, C. (2013) Profiting without Producing: How Finance Exploits All, London: Verso.
[7] Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, p. 100.
[8] Ibid. p. 100.
[9] Bob Jessop. (April 1, 2014) "Finance-Dominated Accumulation and Post-Democratic Capitalism."
http://bobjessop.org/2014/04/01/finance-dominated-accumulation-and-post-democratic-capitalism/
[10] Jessop, 2014.
[11] Jessop, 2014.

Works Cited

Elsner, W. (2012) 'Financial capitalism - at odds with democracy: The trap of an "impossible" profit rate', Real-World Economics Review, 62: 132-159. http://www.paecon.net/PAEReview/issue62/Elsner62.pdf

Saez, E. (2013) 'Striking it richer: The evolution of top incomes in the United States (Updated with 2011 estimates)', at http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/.

Zombie Apocalypse and the Politics of Artificial Scarcity

By Colin Jenkins

Dystopian narratives have long been an alluring and thought-provoking form of entertainment, especially for those who take an interest in studying social and political structures. From classics like Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World to the current hit, The Hunger Games, these stories play on our fears while simultaneously serving as warning signs for the future.

Their attractiveness within American society is not surprising. Our lives are driven by fear. Fear leads us to spend and consume; fear leads us to withdraw from our communities; and fear leads us to apathy regarding our own social and political processes. This fear is conditioned as much as it is natural. The ruling-class handbook, Machiavelli's The Prince, made it clear: "Since love and fear can hardly exist together, if we must choose between them, it is far safer to be feared than loved."

The idea of apocalypse is a central tenet of human society. We've been taught about Armageddon, Kali Yuga, Judgement Day, Yawm ad-Dīn, nuclear holocaust, the end times, the four horsemen, and the Sermon of the Seven Suns. Hierarchical societal arrangements leave us feeling powerless. Exploitative systems like capitalism leave us feeling hopeless. And the widespread deployment of fear ultimately keeps us in our place, and out of the business of those who own our worlds.

The last half-century has brought us the zombie apocalypse - a fictional world where the human race has largely been transformed into a brainless, subhuman horde of flesh-eaters, with only a few random survivors left to carve out any semblance of life they can find in a barren landscape. The emergence and immense popularity of the TV show The Walking Dead is the latest, and perhaps most influential, piece in a long line of narratives centered within themes of survival, human interaction, and scarcity.

Human Nature and Interaction

Behind all political battles, social critiques, and theoretical inquiries lies the most fundamental question: when left to our own accord, how will we interact with one another? How one answers this question usually goes a long way to how one perceives the world, and how issues are viewed and opinions are formed. To our dismay, potential answers are typically presented in dualities. Are we good or evil? Competitive or cooperative? Generous or greedy? Violent or peaceful?

A common theme among religion has been that human beings are "born into sin" and heavily influenced by "evil forces" to do harmful things. One who embraces this theme will tend to have less faith in humanity than one who does not. For, if we really are engaging in a daily struggle to resist the powers of evil, it is reasonable to assume that evil will take hold of many. How can we trust anyone who, at a moment's notice, could potentially lose the ability to act on their own conscience? The common theme of our dominant economic system - capitalism - is that human beings are inherently competitive and self-centered. When combined, it is easy to see how such ideologies may create intensely authoritative and hierarchical systems. After all, people who are influenced by strong and evil metaphysical forces while also being drawn toward callous, self-interest certainly cannot be trusted with free will.

This lesson is drilled deep into our psyches with each episode of The Walking Dead, where the potential threat of flesh-eating zombie hordes become an afterthought to the clear and present danger of "evil" humans who are out to get one another. Whether it's a sadistic governor charming an entire town with violent gladiator events, an outlaw gang with the obligatory pedophile, or a pack of hipster cannibals salivating at the thought of eating their next visitor, the intended theme is clear - human beings are not capable of co-existing, even in a world where they rarely interact.

But is this idea accurate? Are we really drawn toward conflict? Must we compete with one another to survive? Is it appropriate to apply Darwin's evolutionary theories in a social sense where the "fit" are meant to gain wealth and power over the "weak"? Or are we, as Peter Kropotkin theorized in his classic Mutual Aid, more inclined to mimic most other species on Earth, which have been observed over the course of centuries to exhibit "Mutual Aid and Mutual Support carried on to an extent which made me suspect in it a feature of the greatest importance for the maintenance of life, the preservation of each species, and its further evolution?"

There is ample evidence that we are drawn to cooperation. "Caring about others is part of our mammalian heritage, and humans take this ability to a high level," explains neuroscientist Sandra Aamodt. "Helping other people seems to be our default approach, in the sense that we're more likely to do it when we don't have time to think a situation through before acting. After a conflict, we and other primates-including our famously aggressive relatives, the chimpanzees-have many ways to reconcile and repair relationships." Studies have shown that in the first year of life, infants exhibit empathy toward others in distress. Evolutionary Anthropologist Michael Tomasello has put "the concept of cooperation as an evolutionary imperative to the test with very young children, to see if it holds for our nature and not just our nurture. Drop something in front of a two-year-old, he finds, and she is likely to pick it up for you. This is not just learned behavior, he argues. Young children are naturally cooperative."

So, if we are truly inclined to cooperate with one another, why is there so much division and turmoil in the world? The answer to this question may be found by assessing not only the mechanisms of capitalism, but more importantly in the creation of artificial scarcity as a means to maintain hierarchies.

Capitalism and Artificial Scarcity

It is no secret that capitalism thrives off exploitation. It needs a large majority of people to be completely reliant on their labor power. It needs private property to be accessible to only a few, so that they may utilize it as a social relationship where the rented majority can labor and create value. It needs capital to be accessible to only a few, so that they may regenerate and reinvest said capital in a perpetual manner. And it needs a considerable population of the impoverished and unemployed - "a reserve army of labor," as Marx put it - in order to create a "demand" for labor and thus make such exploitative positions "competitive" to those who need to partake in them to merely survive. It needs these things in order to stay intact - something that is desirable to the 85 richest people in the world who own more than half of the world's entire population (3.6 billion people).

But wealth accumulation through alienation and exploitation is not enough in itself. The system also needs to create scarcity where it does not already exist. Even Marx admitted that capitalism has given us the productive capacity to provide all that is needed for the global population. In other words, capitalism has proven that scarcity does not exist. And, over the years, technology has confirmed this. But, in order for capitalism to survive, scarcity must exist, even if through artificial means. This is a necessary component on multiple fronts, including the pricing of commodities, the enhancement of wealth, and the need to inject a high degree of competition among people (who are naturally inclined to cooperation).

Since capitalism is based in the buying and selling of commodities, its lifeblood is production. And since production in a capitalist system is not based on need, but rather on demand, it has the tendency to produce more than it can sell. This is called overproduction. Michael Roberts explains:

Overproduction is when capitalists produce too much compared to the demand for things or services. Suddenly capitalists build up stocks of things they cannot sell, they have factories with too much capacity compared to demand and they have too many workers than they need. So they close down plant, slash the workforce and even just liquidate the whole business. That is a capitalist crisis.

When overproduction occurs, it must be addressed. There are multiple ways to do this. Marx addressed three options: "On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones." Another is through the destruction of excess capital and commodities. Whichever measure is taken, it is paramount that the economy must emerge from a starting point that is different from the ending point where the crisis began. This is accomplished through creating scarcity, whether in regards to labor, production capacity, or commodities and basic needs.

Maintaining scarcity is also necessary for wealth enhancement. It is not enough that accumulation flows to a very small section of the population, but more so that a considerable portion of the population is faced with the inherent struggles related to inaccessibility. For example, if millions of people are unable to access basic needs such as food, clothing, shelter, and healthcare, the commodification of those needs becomes all the more effective. On the flip side, the mere presence of accessibility - or wealth - which is enjoyed by the elite becomes all the more valuable because it is highly sought after.

In this sense, it is not the accumulation of personal wealth that creates advantageous positions on the socioeconomic ladder; it's the impoverishment of the majority. Allowing human beings access to basic necessities would essentially destroy the allure (and thus, power) of wealth and the coercive nature of forced participation. This effect is maintained through artificial scarcity - the coordinated withholding of basic needs from the majority. These measures also seek to create a predatory landscape - something akin to a post-apocalyptic, zombie-filled world where manufactured scarcity pits poor against poor and worker against worker, all the while pulling attention away from the zombie threat.

Control through Commodification

A crucial part of this process is commodification - the "transformation of goods and services, as well as ideas or other entities that normally may not be considered goods, into commodities" that can be bought, sold, used and discarded. The most important transformation is that of the working-class majority who, without the means to sustain on their own, are left with a choice between (1) laboring to create wealth for a small minority and accepting whatever "wages" are provided, or (2) starving.

In The Socioeconomic Guardians of Scarcity, Philip Richlin tells us that:

"When society deprives any community or individual of the necessities of life, there is a form of violence happening. When society commodifies the bare necessities of life, they are commodifying human beings, whose labor can be bought and sold. Underneath the pseudo-philosophical rationalizations for capitalism is a defense of wage slavery. For, if your labor is for sale, then you are for sale."

We are for sale, and we sell ourselves everyday - in the hopes of acquiring a wage that allows us to eat, sleep, and feed our families. In the United States, the 46 million people living in poverty haven't been so lucky. The 2.5 million who have defaulted on their student loans have been discarded. The 49 million who suffer from food insecurity have lost hope. The 3.5 million homeless are mocked by 18.6 million vacant homes. And the 22 million who are unemployed or underemployed have been deemed "unfit commodities" and relegated to the reserve army of labor.

The control aspect of the commodification of labor comes in its dehumanizing effect - an effect that was commonly recognized among 18th and 19th century thinkers. One of those thinkers, Wilhelm Von Humboldt, when referring to the role of a wage laborer, explained "as whatever does not spring from a man's free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness, suggesting that "we may admire what he (the laborer) does, but we despise what he is," because he is essentially not human.

The worker, in her or his role in the capital-labor relationship, exists in a position of constant degeneration. This is especially true with the onset of mass production lines and the division of labor - both of which are inevitable elements within this system. "As the division of labor increases, labor is simplified," Marx tells us. "The special skill of the worker becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple, monotonous productive force that does not have to use intense bodily or intellectual faculties. His labor becomes a labor that anyone can perform." As automation and technology progress, such specialized task-mastering even seeps into what was once considered "skilled" labor, thus broadening its reach.

In this role, workers are firmly placed into positions of control within a highly authoritative and hierarchical system.

A World beyond Profit

Dystopian narratives are no longer fiction. From birth, we are corralled into a system that scoffs at free will, stymies our creative and productive capacities, and leaves us little room to carve our own paths. The constructs directed from above are designed to strip us of our inclination to care and cooperate, and make us accept the need to step over one another to get ahead. This is not our nature. Whether we're talking about Kropotkin's studies in "the wild" or Tomasello's experience with children, observable evidence tells us we've been duped.

Another world is not just possible; it is inevitable if we are to exist in the long-term. In Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Murray Bookchin offers a glimpse into this world not constructed on labor, profit, and artificial scarcity:

"It is easy to foresee a time, by no means remote, when a rationally organized economy could automatically manufacture small "packaged" factories without human labor; parts could be produced with so little effort that most maintenance tasks would be reduced to the simple act of removing a defective unit from a machine and replacing it by another-a job no more difficult than pulling out and putting in a tray. Machines would make and repair most of the machines required to maintain such a highly industrialized economy. Such a technology, oriented entirely toward human needs and freed from all consideration of profit and loss, would eliminate the pain of want and toil-the penalty, inflicted in the form of denial, suffering and inhumanity, exacted by a society based on scarcity and labor."

The barren landscape for which we've been placed has a future beyond Hershel's overrun farm, the confines of a prison, the Governor's creepy town of Woodbury, and the trap known as Terminus. It has a future beyond the artificial constructs of capitalism and hierarchy. Human nature is talking to us… and we're starting to listen.

The Great Recession, Six Years Later: Uneven Recovery, Flawed Indicators, and a Struggling Working Class

By Colin Jenkins

In July of this year, Barack Obama boasted of an impressive recovery the US has undertaken since the Great Recession of 2008, proclaiming, "We've recovered faster and come farther than almost any other advanced country on Earth." To support this claim, the White House released a report showing that, out of 12 countries identified as "advanced" (France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Ukraine, United Kingdom and United States), the United States is "one of only two (the other being Germany) that experienced systemic financial crises in 2007 and 2008 but have seen real (gross domestic product) per working-age person return to pre-crisis levels."

Reports such as these have become commonplace in 2014, not only from those in the White House, but also from multiple media sources. Within mainstream circles, the recovery has generally been lauded by the Democratic wing of the media (MSNBC, Huffington Post, and of course reports from the White House) and questioned by the Republican wing (Fox News, the Wall Street Journal). Since the reports stemming from these sources are almost always politically-charged, they have a tendency to be misleading in at least some manner. In the rare instance where genuine information or analysis leaks from the mainstream, it is usually the unintended result of a media spin.

Ultimately, the intended purpose of these reports are reduced to either showing Barack Obama and the Democratic Party in a good light (by focusing on seemingly positive statistics) or showing Obama and the Democrats in a bad light (by focusing on seemingly negative statistics). Often times, the same statistics may be used; however, spun differently. Neither side is interested in formulating meaningful analysis, but rather in swaying voters one way or the other. Still, in this media tug-o-war, facts are sometimes used to support political arguments, and thus may be useful from time to time if one is able to pick them out of the fray. But, even when we catch a glimpse of fairly reliable statistics, how do we cut through the politically-charged spins to give them meaning?

Take Obama's July statement for instance. It suggests that the US has experienced a strong recovery since the 2008 economic crisis, right? Well, not necessarily. What it says is that the US has experienced a better recovery than 11 out of 12 of its "advanced" counterparts that "experienced systemic crises," which (it's important to note) were handpicked by the White House. According to the International Monetary Fund, there are actually 36 countries that are considered to have "advanced economies." And considering the global nature of the economy, it's difficult to claim that 67% of them avoided systemic crisis. When compared to the 36, the US ranks 12th in GDP growth and 9th in unemployment rate recovery. Not necessarily bad, but certainly not as good as suggested.

Which brings us to some other questions: How accurate are GDP and unemployment rates when assessing the overall economic well-being of a country? Why are such macroeconomic indicators used so frequently in mainstream analyses? Do they accurately represent the well-being of the working-class majority, or do they simply represent convenient fodder used to supplement political spins? Let's take a look.

Gross Domestic Product and the Dow Jones Industrial Average

Two major indicators used to determine the overall health of the economy are the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA).

US GDP growth rates over the past six years suggest a strong recovery. Since falling more than 16 percent during the Great Recession of 2008-09, the GDP has experienced growth in 19 out of 21 financial quarters.

2013 was especially successful in terms of GDP growth, averaging over 3 percent for the first time since the recession. 2014 started out slow, dropping a little over 2% in the first quarter (Q1 2014); however, this was written off as an irregularity by analysts, including PNC Senior Economist Gus Faucher, who attributed the drop to " bad weather " that "was a significant drag on the economy, disrupting production, construction, and shipments, and deterring home and auto sales." Since that time, the GDP has been growing at a rate of 4.1% over the past six months.

The DJIA has shown even bigger signs of recovery. After being cut in half between September 2007 (15,865) and February 2009 (7,923), the DJIA has experienced an almost unfathomable boom.

It hit its highest point ever in November 2013, nearly five years after the recession, at 16,429, and has been breaking records ever since. Heading into November of 2014, it stands at 17, 390 - the highest point in its 128-year history.

Corporate Profits

Not surprisingly, the cumulative amount of corporate profits in the United States have paralleled the success of the stock market. American Enterprise Institute economist Mark J. Perry has illustrated a sharp correlation between the S & P 500 Index and after-tax corporate profits in the chart below:

Perry explains this phenomenon:

"Starting about 2009, a one-to-one relationship between stock prices and after-tax corporate profits has once again re-emerged, and both the S&P 500 and corporate profits have increased by the exact same 119% at the end of 2013 from their cyclical, recessionary lows. The all-time record highs for the S&P 500 Index in 2013 were being driven by record-high corporate profits as the chart shows, and it's almost certain that the ongoing bull market rally in 2014 continues to be supported by record-high corporate profits."

The corporate landscape has rarely been as conducive to generating profit as it is right now. As a result, the post-recession years have been dubbed "a golden age of corporate profits" by those in both mainstream and alternate media. Specifically, "corporate earnings have risen at an annualized rate of 20.1 percent since the end of 2008." As a percentage of national income, "corporate profits stood at 14.2 percent in the third quarter of 2012, the largest share at any time since 1950."

To put the significance of this growth in perspective, at the end of 2008, during the peak of the recession, US corporate after-tax profits totaled $671.40 Billion. At the end of June 2014, that total has nearly tripled to $1.842 Trillion.

Unemployment Rate and Job Growth

Another major indicator used to gauge the state of the economy is the unemployment rate. In October of 2009, after the residual effects of the recession had settled, the US unemployment rate officially hit 10% for only the second time since 1940 (10.8% in 1982). After hovering around 9% through 2011, the rate has steadily decreased over the past few years, dropping below 6% in September of 2014 - a level untouched since July of 2008.

This new 6-year low in the rate includes 1.9 million people dropping from the ranks of the unemployed, and the number of "long-term unemployed" falling 1.2 million over the past year.

According to the US Department of Labor, "employers added 248,000 jobs in September (2014)" and "payrolls have expanded an average 227,000 a month this year, putting 2014 on track to be the strongest year of job growth since the late 1990s." The job growth rate in 2014 included a 300,000+ jump in April. And much of this expansion has been fueled by the private sector, which "has now added 10.3 million jobs over 55 straight months of growth" since the recession.

Flawed Indicators

Based on assessments which focus on macroeconomic indicators like the GDP, DJIA, and Unemployment Rate, one could reasonably come to the conclusion that not only has the US fully recovered from the "Great Recession," but it has actually surpassed pre-recession levels in economic well-being. However, this begs the question: whose well-being? And a closer examination uncovers plenty of contradictions.

The contradictions that arise from such assessments are largely due to the inherent flaws of these indicators. According to the New Economy Working Group, "Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has many deficiencies as a measure of economic well-being. Most often noted is the fact that it can only add, which means it makes no distinction between beneficial and harmful economic activity." Also, GDP analyses focus solely on total growth, and do not attempt to assess levels of wealth distribution:

"There could be complete income equality with everyone's purchasing power growing equally. Or the society may be divided between a small minority of the extremely affluent and a majority of the extremely destitute - or anything in between. GDP gives no clue one way or the other. Growth in the incomes of a few billionaires can produce impressive growth in GDP even as a majority of people starve."

In fact, during the past half-century, the DJIA has lost almost all of its credibility as a reliable indicator of economic well-being. And since the rise of globalization in the late-1990s, it has become increasingly irrelevant to economic activity on a national level. "The Dow's biggest flaw, perhaps, is that it doesn't help us to make sense of an increasingly interconnected global economy - one in which what's good for GM isn't always good for the country," explains Adam Davidson. "GE, IBM and Intel, for example, all make more than half their profits in other countries. And while this may be great for their shareholders, it means little for most Americans."

The ever-increasing gap between corporate profit and workers income has also served as a death knell to the DJIA indicator. "In the postwar boom of the 1950s, the economy was growing so fast, and the benefits were so widely shared (throughout the socioeconomic ladder), that following 30 large American companies was a solid measure of most everyone's personal economy," Davidson adds. Back then, "what was good for GM really was good for the country." In a modern economic environment that rewards CEOs 331 times more than the average worker, and 774 times more than minimum wage workers, this is no longer the case. (In 1983, this ratio was 46 to 1)

Historically, the unemployment rate has been considered a fairly weak indicator of economic well-being, and for good reason. Its two major flaws lie in its failure to gauge levels of income, and its inability to consider things like "underemployment" and "hidden unemployment."

These lost categories include "people who have given up looking for jobs or work part time because they can't find full-time position." In 2014, as unemployment statistics suggest a vast improvement in labor participation, "more than 9 million Americans still fit into these categories, about 60 percent - or 3.5 million - above prerecession levels, according to the Labor Department."

Evan Horowitz explains:

"Let's say there are 100 people either working or looking for work. If 94 of those people have jobs, and six are seeking jobs, then the unemployment rate is 6 percent.

Notice that a lot hinges on people 'working or looking for work.' Say you want to work, but the job market is bad and you decide to put off the search until conditions get better. You're still unemployed, just not counted as unemployed by the government.

To return to the example, if three of those six people looking for work get discouraged and give up, the unemployment rate would fall to about 3 percent."

Furthermore, the unemployment rate completely ignores income. In other words, even rates that are considered to represent "full employment" (4-5%) essentially mean nothing if a considerable number of jobs pay poverty wages.

State of the Working Class

Because macro-indicators like the DJIA, GDP, and unemployment rates are severely flawed in their ability to reflect standards of living and economic well-being for a population, it is important to evaluate how the majority is fairing in this so-called recovery.

Since the US population throughout is largely driven by consumerism, a telling statistic is the market-based core personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price index, a measurement used to determine the amount of expendable income the average consumer possesses at a given time. According to Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute, "the market-based price index for core PCE (i.e., excluding food and energy) rose just 1.3% over the past year, well below the Fed's 2% inflation target." This supports further evidence that impressive gains in GDP and corporate profits are simply not reaching (or trickling down to) a majority of Americans.

Despite recent and steady job growth, there are still 1.4 million fewer full-time jobs in the US today than there was in 2008. A recent survey conducted at Rutgers University reports that more than 20 percent of all workers that have been laid off in the past five years still have not found a new job.

When considering workers who have given up on job searches, the unemployment rate is estimated at more than 12 percent.

A more accurate indicator than the unemployment rate may be the actual employment rate. When looking at this, we see that roughly 80 percent of " prime-age workers " (those between 25 and 54) had jobs in 2007. "That bottomed out at around 75 percent during the worst of the downturn, but has risen to only 76.7 percent since."

Despite steady job growth, new jobs simply do not stack up to the jobs that were lost. In sectors that experienced severe job losses due to the recession, workers are earning 23% less today. The average annual salary in the manufacturing and construction sectors - a particularly hard hit area - was $61,637 in 2008. It has now plummeted to $47,171 in 2014. Similar adjustments to income levels imply that $93 billion in lower wage income has been created during the recovery - meaning workers, across the board, are receiving a much smaller share than they were before 2009.

A report by the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM) also showed that "the majority of metro areas - 73 percent - had households earning salaries of less than $35,000 a year," hardly a living wage for families facing ever-rising commodity prices.

Despite increased productivity and corporate profits, most workers' wages have actually fallen. Biven reports, "From the first half of 2013 to the first half of 2014, real hourly wages fell for all deciles, except for a miniscule two-cent increase at the 10th percentile. Underlying this exception to the general trend at the 10th percentile is a set of state-level minimum-wage increases in the first half of 2014 in states where 40 percent of U.S. workers reside."

"As a percentage of national income, corporate profits stood at 14.2 percent in the third quarter of 2012, the largest share at any time since 1950, while the portion of income that went to employees was 61.7 percent, near its lowest point since 1966,"reported Nelson Schwartz in 2013. Dean Maki, chief US economist at Barclay's reports that "corporate earnings have risen at an annualized rate of 20.1 percent since the end of 2008, but disposable income inched ahead by 1.4 percent annually over the same period, after adjusting for inflation," adding that "there hasn't been a period in the last 50 years where these trends have been so pronounced."

In the midst of impressive GDP growth, the US working class is experiencing a legitimate hunger crisis that does not seem to slowing down. "As of 2012,49 million Americans suffer from food insecurity, defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) as lack of access to 'enough food for an active, healthy life.' Nearly one-third of the afflicted are children. And millions of them don't even have access to food stamps, according to a new report from the anti-hunger organization Feeding America."

In May of 2014, there were 46.2 million Americans on food stamps, a slight decrease from a record 47.8 million in December 2012. According to the US Department of Agriculture, 14.8% of the US population is currently on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Prior to the recession, the percentage of the population requiring such assistance hovered between 8 and 11 percent.

According to the US Census Bureau, "in 2013, there were 45.3 million people living in poverty" and "for the third consecutive year, the number of people in poverty at the national level was not statistically different from the previous year's estimate." The official poverty rate is at 14.5 percent.

Conclusion

Between 2008 and 2013, the number of US households with a net worth of $1 million or more increased dramatically, from 6.7 million to 9.6 million. Households with a net worth of $5 million and $25 million respectively also increased. "There were 1.24 million households with a net worth of $5 million or more last year, up from 840,000 in 2008. Those with $25 million and above climbed to 132,000 in 2013, up from 84,000 in 2008."

The US government, or more specifically, the Federal Reserve, has been instrumental in this uneven recovery that has been characterized by massive corporate profits and booming millionaires on one side (a small minority), and falling wages, increased poverty, and frequent reliance on food stamps on the other side (a large majority).

According to a September 2014 study by the Harvard Business School, the widening gap between America's wealthiest and its middle and lower classes is "unsustainable," and "is unlikely to improve any time soon." The study points the finger at "shortsighted executives" who are "satisfied with an American economy whose firms win in global markets without lifting US living standards" for American workers, and therefore create an extremely polarized population where a majority of workers are disenfrachised from the business world.

The practice of quantitative easing (QE) - "An unconventional monetary policy in which a central bank purchases government securities or other securities from the market in order to lower interest rates and increase the money supply" - has become common during the recovery. Essentially, this practice "increases the money supply by flooding financial institutions with capital in an effort to promote increased lending and liquidity." After three bouts of QE, all occurring since the recession, the Federal Reserve has acquired $4.5 trillion in assets , while adding at least $2.3 trillion of additional currency into the economy.

Robert D. Auerbach - an economist with the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee for eleven years, assisting with oversight of the Federal Reserve, and now Professor of Public Affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin - estimates that 81.5% of this money has not been used to "stimulate the economy," but rather " sits idle as excess reserve in private banks."

Others have reported that, rather than sitting idle as Auerbach suggests, the money has actually funneled through to major corporate players, creating massive personal wealth for a select few. CNBC's Robert Frank reported just last week that "the world's billionaires are holding an average of $600 million in cash each - greater than the gross domestic product of Dominica," which "marks a jump of $60 million from a year ago and translates into billionaires' holding an average of 19 percent of their net worth in cash."

When considering the top-heavy recovery numbers, and increased misery for the working class, this comes as no surprise. And it certainly comes as no surprise to political economist Doug Henwood, who reported such trends back in 2012:

"Despite the strong recovery in cash flow, to record-breaking levels, firms are investing at levels typically seen at cyclical lows, not highs. Some cash flow is going abroad, in the form of direct investment, but still you'd think returns like these would encourage investment. Instead, they've been shipping out gobs to shareholder. Here's a graph of what I call shareholder transfers (dividends plus stock buybacks plus proceeds of mergers and acquisitions) over time:

Though not at the preposterously elevated levels of the late 1990s and mid-2000s, transfers are at the high end of their historical range. Instead of serving the textbook role of raising capital for productive investment, the stock market has become a conduit for shoveling money out of the 'real' sector and into the pockets of shareholders, who besides buying other securities, pay themselves nice bonuses they transform into Jaguars and houses in Southampton."

The Great Recession - like the 2001 recession before it, the 1990-91 recession before that, the 1981-82 recession before that, the 1973-75 recession before that, and so on - was the result of deeper systemic deficiencies. While the emergence of financialization opened the door for manipulative and predatory finance tricks (credit default swaps, mortgage-backed securities, NINJA loans, etc...) and helped to construct an impressively profitable house of cards, it is only part of the story. Ultimately, it is the boom & bust, cyclical nature of capitalism, along with its perpetually falling rates of profit (not cumulative profit), that are truly responsible, though almost always ignored.

The nature of this latest recovery suggests that the final nail in the working-class coffin, whose construction has been underway since the birth of neoliberalism, has been secured into place. Despite desperate measures used to pump massive amounts of currency into the economy through QE, virtually none has trickled down to the 99%. It's like déjà vu, all over again. And again… And again…

Calibrating the Capitalist State in the Neoliberal Era: Equilibrium, Superstructure, and the Pull Towards a Corporate-Fascistic Model

By Colin Jenkins

The following is Part one of a multi-part series, "Applying Poulantzas," which analyzes the work of Greek Marxist political sociologist, Nicos Poulantzas, and applies it to the unique political and economic structures found under neoliberalism and post-industrial capitalism.

Since the capitalist formation of relations between what is perceived as the 'public sector' and the 'private sector,' traditional nation-states and their governing bodies have played a major role as facilitators of the economic system at-large. This became a necessary supplemental component as localized economies, which were dominated by agrarian/plantation life, gave way to industrialization and subsequent mass migration into urban centers, thus introducing new industrial economies based in the manufacturing/production process. With the advent of wage labor came predictable outcomes of capital accumulation and a perpetually increasing polarization between the owning class and working class. And with this growing inequality came the notions of worker collectivization and unionism which, absent any equalizing measures taken by the State, were the only sources of hope for workers who quickly found themselves, their livelihood, and their family's well-being at the mercy of a rapidly fluctuating and exploitative labor market. Work was often hard to come by and, when it was available, the wages "earned" were barely enough to cover basic necessities like food, clothing and shelter - provisions which had long been commodified to create expanding avenues of profit for the owning class.

The inherent instabilities created by this economic system — a system that exists for the sole purpose of creating or maintaining individual/personal wealth (as opposed to preserving collective/societal wealth) — require components that act solely as stabilizers. Despite its shunning, the existence of society — or "the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community" — not only remains, but actually serves as the casing for which this system must rely on, or more aptly, capitalize from within. And because of this reliance, the instabilities and contradictions that simultaneously represent natural byproducts and threats become common growths as the result of a counterintuitive and inhumane arrangement, and must be kept in check through a delicate (though not necessarily intricate) balancing act.

In order to "balance" competing interests - in this case the "dominant" and "dominated" classes - the political sphere, a major element of the State apparatus, assumes a vital role. As such, Nicos Poulantzas, building upon earlier theoretical contributions from the likes of Antonio Gramsci, details the dynamic process whereas the state serves as a facilitator to the unstable equilibrium that is produced by the internally antagonistic capitalist system. Ultimately, through this act of facilitating, the state (by deploying its political power) negotiates a perpetual series of "compromises" in the form of economic "sacrifices" which are accepted as a necessity by the dominant classes; and which are precisely aimed at creating a limited equilibrium that ensures a minimal degree of social stability (maintained by the political superstructure) atop the inherently asymmetrical economic base.

Poulantzas explains:

"…political power is thus apparently founded on an unstable equilibrium of compromise. These terms should be understood as follows: 1) Compromise: in the sense that this power corresponds to a hegemonic class domination and can take into account the economic interests of certain dominated classes even where those could be contrary to the short-term economic interests of the dominant classes, without this affecting the configuration of political interests; 2) Equilibrium: in the sense that while these economic 'sacrifices' are real and so provide the ground for an equilibrium, they do not as such challenge the political power which sets precise limits to this equilibrium; and 3) Unstable: in the sense that these limits of the equilibrium are set by the political conjuncture." [1]

Gramsci tells us, "The life of the state is conceived of as a continuous process of formation and superseding of unstable equilibria… between the interests of the fundamental group and those of the subordinate groups - equilibria in which the interests of the dominant group prevail, but only up to a certain point, i.e. stopping short of narrowly corporate interest."[2] In other words, as the capitalist system naturally bends toward a corporate-fascistic state of being through the simultaneous developments of capital accumulation and mass alienation - thus forming structures of domination that extend from the economic base and into the political, social, and cultural realms - there develops a need to stabilize the fragile nature (in the sense that such imbalance is a constant threat to the societal structure at-large) of this system.

The need to maintain this equilibrium exists as long as a wholly functioning society is requisite for capitalist expansion - or, as long as worker-consumers represent viable targets of exploitation. In Political Powers and Social Classes, Poulantzas identifies certain measures that represent embedded concessions on the part of the owning class, carried out by the state apparatus through a systematic process that is relatively fluid and effortless (though, as Poulantzas points out, competing interests exist even within this elite bureaucracy). In recognizing the function of the state and its role atop the capitalist formation of relations, Poulantzas explains, "The notion of the general interest of the 'people', an ideological notion covering an institutional operation of the capitalist state, expresses a real fact: namely that this state, by its very structure, gives to the economic interests of certain dominated classes guarantees which may even be contrary to the short-term economic interests of the dominant classes, but which are compatible with their political interests and their hegemonic domination."[3]

Political systems based on grand "democratic" narratives like "representative democracy" and "republicanism," as well as Rousseau's "social contract," are ideal enablers for this societal arrangement. This is the very reason why liberalism and the modern adaptation of the "liberal politician" play such a crucial role in their opposition to the proto-fascist nature of "conservatism." Their superficially adversarial relationship represents the ultimate stabilizer as its reach is limited to the confines of the political superstructure. And, because it deals primarily with "social issues" (including passive measures of economic redistribution), it is ultimately relegated to directing the aforementioned "compromises" of the dominant class. It does not and can not transform the economic base (the capitalist hierarchy) as these compromises, while representing "real economic sacrifices" that are necessary to provide the ground for equilibrium, "do not as such challenge the political power which sets precise limits to this equilibrium."

"Democratic" systems which involve periodic elections of "representatives" to "public" office accomplish two important tasks in this regard. First, they create a façade of civil empowerment - a form of political compromise which gives the dominated classes the appearance of choice vis-a-vis universal suffrage. Second, they create a political sphere that, while completely fused with the long-term interests of the dominant classes (through its sole purpose as a facilitator), operates as a separate entity existing outside the economic base - a separation that is, as Poulantzas explains, both an exclusive and necessary element to the capitalist system. It reminds us of John Dewey's claim that, "As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance." In the US, the two-party political system has proven extremely effective in this regard. Aside from differences on social issues like abortion and gay marriage, as well as socioeconomic issues like unemployment insurance and public assistance, both parties ultimately embrace capitalist/corporatist interests in that they both serve as facilitators for the dominant classes: The Republican Party in its role as forerunner, pushing the limits of the capitalist model to the brink of fascism; and the Democratic Party in its role as governor, providing intermittent degrees of slack and pull against this inevitable move towards a "corporate-fascistic state of being."

The distinction made between 'the political' and 'the economic' is important to consider, though these boundaries have seemingly blurred in the age of neoliberalism and the intensification of the merger between "public" and "private." And while Poulantzas insists this separation is inherent and theoretically unbreakable, he (along with Gramsci) may have underestimated the extent to which compromises may be reined in without destabilizing the equilibrium beyond repair. During the neoliberal era, there have been many developments which have pushed this long-standing balance to the verge of "narrow corporatism" and beyond, including factors related to technology and government surviellance, growth in the banking industry, the development of corporate media and intricate propaganda, financialization's role in supplementing monopoly capitalism, and the maturation of the international economic system and all of its mediating components, to name a few; but that discussion is for another place and time.

For the purpose of this analysis, we are focused on national electoral politics and political parties, and the specific role they play in maintaining the status quo - in this case, not only the capitalist hierarchy, but also the stage of monopoly capitalism which has come to fruition over the past few decades. The distinction between base and superstructure allows us to see how the political apparatus, through the actions of political parties, exists solely as a tool for the "power bloc." Furthermore, it allows us to divert from reductionist theories which attempt to highlight a singular cause, and move towards a more nuanced critique of the capitalist state, especially in the "pluralist" form that we see in the US and other "western democracies."

"As far as the terrain of political domination is concerned, this is also occupied not by one single class or class fraction, but by several dominant classes and fractions," explains Poulantzas. "These classes and fractions form a specific alliance on this terrain, the power bloc, generally functioning under the leadership of one of the dominant classes or fractions, the hegemonic class or fraction."[4] In this instance, even with a government that includes separate branches - legislative, executive, and judicial - and represents several interests, as in Robert A. Dahl's "polyarchy," the state still exists and operates on the foundation of a capitalist system that creates its own hierarchy. The members of this "political terrain" are not necessarily synchronized with one another when it comes to geography, special interests, localized interests, and priorities when maintaining the equilibrium, and they don't have to be. Despite these various pieces which make up the power bloc, in its own formation the base forces the political "superstructure" to adjust accordingly. This is why modern practices like "blanket financing" of political campaigns, which consists of corporations or private interests providing monetary support to opposing candidates and political parties in a particular election, have become so prevalent. Politicians, despite what their personal beliefs or aspirations may be, are put into power by the very hierarchy that depends on the economic base. Their positions of power cater to and are reliant on not only the power bloc which put them there, but the maintenance of the very system that allows them to stay there. Therefore, while they may possess some leeway in terms of pushing superficial agendas, their ability to do so is granted by the hierarchy extending from the economic base. Ultimately, in order to maintain its own existence, the political apparatus must protect the base - and is essentially designed (or is ever-evolving) to do so despite its "relative autonomy" which is "inscribed in the very structure of the capitalist state."

According to Poulantzas, by recognizing both the autonomy of the "state machine" as well as the existence of a "power bloc" which mimics society's pluralist form, it will "enable us to establish theoretically, and to examine concretely, the way in which the relative autonomy of the capitalist state develops and functions with respect to the particular economic-corporate interests of this or that fraction of the power bloc, in such a way that the state always guards the general political interests of this bloc - which certainly does not occur merely as a result of the state's and the bureaucracy's own rationalizing will."[5] This understanding includes "firmly grasping the fact than an institution (the state) that is destined to reproduce class divisions cannot really be a monolithic, fissureless bloc, but is itself, by virtue of its very structure (the state is a relation), divided."[6] Poulantzas continues:

The various organs and branches of the state (ministries and government offices, executive and parliament, central administration and local and regional authorities, army, judiciary, etc.) reveal major contradictions among themselves, each of them frequently constituting the seat and the representative - in short, the crystallization - of this or that fraction of the power bloc, this or that specific and competing interest. In this context, the process by whereby the general political interest of the power bloc is established, and whereby the state intervenes to ensure the reproduction of the overall system, may well, at a certain level, appear chaotic and contradictory, as a 'resultant' of these inter-organ and inter-branch contradictions.[7]

This "division," and these "contradictions," were never more evident than with President Dwight Eisenhower's 1961 farewell address and sobering warning against the rising "military industrial complex," which publicly displayed a major fission within the power bloc. According to Poulantzas, this splitting is irrelevant in the capitalist scheme of things because it remains, by design, autonomous from the base; and, therefore, will naturally work itself out to accommodate that base, whether through conscious coordination or through inherent process. In the age of neoliberalism and monopoly capitalism, the state has become highly concentrated out of necessity. In this sense, C. Wright Mills' assessment rings true:

As each of these domains becomes enlarged and centralized, the consequences of its activities become greater, and its traffic with the others increases. The decisions of a handful of corporations bear upon military and political as well as upon economic developments around the world. The decisions of the military establishment rest upon and grievously affect political life as well as the very level of economic activity. The decisions made within the political domain determine economic activities and military programs. There is no longer, on the one hand, an economy, and, on the other hand, a political order containing a military establishment unimportant to politics and to money-making. There is a political economy linked, in a thousand ways, with military institutions and decisions. [8]

This intertwined political economy exists within the superstructure. It's increased centralization, coordination, and synchronization over the past half-century has undoubtedly pushed the US government to the brink of a "corporate-fascistic state of being." In this development, the equilibrium has never been more delicate and fragile. The two-party system, thriving from the pluralist nature of both the electorate and power bloc, has proven efficient in carrying out trivial "concessions" that give "the economic interests of certain dominated classes guarantees which may even be contrary to the short-term economic interests of the dominant classes, but which are compatible with their political interests and their hegemonic domination."[9] The expansion of domestic militarization and the intensification of "austerity measures" have introduced a degree of "corporate-fascistic" torque unseen before from within a mature capitalist state. How far these embedded "compromises may be reined in without destabilizing the equilibrium beyond repair" remains to be seen.

References

[1] Poulantzas, Nicos (Timothy O'Hagan translating). Political Power and Social Classes. Verso, 1975, p. 192.

[2] Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks, p. 182.

[3] Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes, p. 191.

[4] Poulantzas, Nicos. Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (Translated from French version by David Fernbach). Verso, 1978, p. 93.

[5] The Poulantzas Reader: Marxism, Law and the State. Verso Books: London/New York, 2008, p. 284.

[6] Ibid, p. 285.

[7] Ibid, p. 285.

[8] C. Wright Mills. The Power Elite, New Edition. Oxford University Press: 2000, p. 76.

[9] Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes, p. 191

On the Front Lines of Class War: Why the Fight for a Livable Wage is Everyone's Fight

By Colin Jenkins

"There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class - the rich class - that's making war, and we're winning."

- Warren Buffett (2006)

In the spring of 2004, amid the thaw of a frigid New York City winter, a brave group of Starbucks baristas began organizing. Like most service-sector employees in the United States, they were faced with the daunting task of trying to live on less-than-livable wages. Inconsistent hours, inadequate or non-existent health insurance, and less-than-dignified working conditions paled in comparison to their inability to obtain the most basic necessities. Apartment meetings, backroom discussions, and after-hours pep talks - all fueled by a collective angst - culminated into a sense of solidarity, the natural bond that occurs when workers take the time to realize their commonalities and shared struggle. On May 17, 2004, they officially announced their affiliation with the Industrial Workers of the World, an all-encompassing union with an impressive history of labor activity in the US. A petition for unionization followed suit. Their demands were simple: Guaranteed hours with the option for fulltime status, an end to understaffing, a healthier and safer workplace, and increased pay and raises.

"Solidarity Unionism," Grassroots Organizing, and the Formation of a New Front

It is only fitting that such a daring endeavor would fall under the banner of the IWW. Proudly asserting itself as "One Big Union" and "A Union for All Workers," the "Wobblies" shun hierarchical and highly-bureaucratic union models that have dominated the American labor scene for much of the past half-century, instead promoting and utilizing direct action that is member-run and member-driven. Deploying what they refer to as "solidarity unionism," as opposed to "business unionism," the preamble to the IWW's constitution echoes an old-school, militant, trade-union tone, boldly (and correctly) proclaiming, "The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people" - a far cry from the timid and capitulating modus operandi of the modern adaptation. However, it is not just a much-needed infusion of labor militancy that makes the IWW attractive, it is its grassroots approach to labor organizing. In a post-industrial landscape that is overrun with underemployment, the IWW's model represents accessibility and a sense of empowerment for disconnected workers who find themselves on virtual islands - outside the potentially radical confines of a traditional shop floor. And when considering that wages have either dropped or remained stagnant in the midst of ever-growing costs of living over the past 30 years, it is no surprise that American workers are reaching their collective breaking point and seeking refuge in the form of a shared struggle.

After decades of a disastrous neoliberal agenda that has placed the American working class in an all-out sprint to the bottom, the growing needs of low-wage workers coupled with the "wobbly way" to create a perfect storm. As such, the Starbucks Union captured a vibe and sparked a movement. 2007 saw the arrival of Brandworkers, "a non-profit organization bringing local food production workers together for good jobs and a sustainable food system." Following a similar grassroots blueprint, the NYC-based organization was founded "by retail and food employees who identified a need for an organization dedicated to protecting and advancing their rights," and stands on "a simple principle: that working people themselves, equipped with powerful social change tools, were uniquely positioned to make positive change on the job and in society." Their direct-action, "Focus on the Food Chain (FOFC)" initiative specifically targets "the rapid proliferation of sweatshops among the food processing factories and distribution warehouses that supply the City's (NYC) grocery stores and restaurants" and that of which "increasingly relies on the exploitation of recent immigrants of color, mostly from Latin America and China." In an unprecedented effort, FOFC "creates space for the immigrant workers of NYC's industrial food sector to build unity with each other, gain proficiency in the use of powerful social change tools, and carry out member-led workplace justice campaigns to transform the industry." Ultimately, "Focus members and their allies are using organizing, grassroots advocacy, and legal actions to build a food system that provides high-quality local food and good local jobs."

Groups like the Starbucks Workers Union and Brandworkers created momentum. In 2010, six years after baristas came together in Manhattan, a band of sandwich makers gathered 1,200 miles westward, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Thus, the next wave of grassroots, low-wage labor activity - this time stemming from the fast-food industry and, more specifically, the corporate brand of Jimmy John's sandwiches - took hold. Sporting T-shirts that read, "Wages So Low You'll Freak" - a mockery of JJ's corporate slogan, "Subs So Fast You'll Freak" - JJ workers, also under the direction of the IWW, embarked on the first ever unionization drive for fast-food workers. Emily Przybylski, a bike delivery worker at the restaurant chain, captured the spirit of the moment. "A union in fast food is an idea whose time has come," she told reporters. "There are millions of workers in this industry living in poverty, with no consistent scheduling, no job security and no respect. It's time for change." As Labor Day 2010 approached, JJ workers at one Minneapolis store filed for a union election, and actions such as leafleting and picketing were coordinated at stores in 32 states, "from Clovis, California to Miami, Florida."

The embryo created by baristas in NYC, and nurtured over the better part of a decade by the likes of the Brandworkers and Jimmy John's workers in Minneapolis, came to a head in 2012. On Thursday, October 4th, 2012, the spread of low-wage discontent struck the epicenter of corporate exploitation, as "more than 70 Los Angeles Wal-Mart workers from nine stores walked off the job." These walkouts accompanied over "20 charges of unfair labor practices" filed with the National Labor Relation Board. A week later, Wal-Mart workers across 28 stores in 12 states, staged labor protests in the form of strikes and walk-outs. The first workers' strike in the company's 50-year history spread to stores in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Dallas, Miami, Washington, D.C., and Orlando. This movement, much like its predecessors, was largely formed out of grassroots organizing efforts that were over a year in the making. In June 2011, "OUR Walmart," a workers advocacy organization supported by and coordinated with store associates from across the country, dispatched "nearly 100 Associates representing thousands of OUR Walmart members from across the United States to the Walmart Home Office in Bentonville, Ark., and presented a Declaration of Respect to Walmart executive management." The Declaration included a list of requests: Listen to us, the Associates; Have respect for the individual; Recognize freedom of association and freedom of speech; Fix the Open Door policy; Pay a minimum of $13/hour and make full-time jobs available for Associates who want them; Create dependable, predictable work schedules; Provide affordable healthcare; Provide every Associate with a policy manual, ensure equal enforcement of policy and no discrimination, and give every Associate equal opportunity to succeed and advance in his or her career; and provide wages and benefits that ensure that no Associate has to rely on government assistance.

In November of 2012, merely weeks after Wal-Mart workers took a courageous stand, fast-food workers from McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King, Taco Bell and KFC staged protests in various locations around New York City, "demanding $15 an hour in pay and the right to form a union." A few months later, in the spring of 2013, fast food strikes gained momentum with numerous walk-outs across the country. In April, NYC workers - backed by labor, community and religious groups - staged protests at more than five dozen restaurants. Over the course of the next month, similar actions were carried out in Pennsylvania and Chicago. In Chicago, the actions spread from the fast-food industry to retail, with low-wage workers from Macy's, Sears, and Victoria's Secret also participating. On Friday, May 10th, "400 workers at more than 60 fast-food restaurants in the Detroit metro area walked off the job" in what may have been "the largest fast food strike in American history." The Detroit event was significantly effective as it "shut down multiple restaurants entirely, including multiple McDonald's outlets, a Long John Silver's, a Burger King, two Popeye's restaurants, and a KFC." "One McDonald's worker, Jay Robinson, told reporters that when he started at McDonald's over two years ago, he was paid $7.40 an hour,"writes Aaron Petkov for Socialistworker.org. "Robinson has gotten raises since then - and now makes $7.48 an hour." In his efforts to care for himself and a 2-year-old daughter, "It's a day-to-day struggle," he told reporters. "And the owners make millions." At another McDonald's restaurant, "management attempted to avert a shutdown by bringing in replacement workers, but those replacement workers (in a moment of incredible solidarity) then promptly joined the strike." This wave of low-wage labor militancy continued through the summer. On Thursday, August 29th, workers at numerous fast-food chains participated in coordinated strikes in nearly 60 cities nationwide. Citing poverty wages and the need for more rights in the workplace, "a dozen workers didn't show up for their shift at a McDonald's on 8 Mile Road (in Detroit), forcing the closure of the dining room." In Raleigh, N.C., about 30 workers picketed outside a Little Caesars location. One employee, Julio Wilson, expressed the discontent of his peers, saying the $9-an-hour he was paid was not nearly enough to support himself and his 5-year-old daughter. "I know I'm risking my job, but it's my right to fight for what I deserve," Wilson said. "Nine dollars an hour is not enough to make ends meet nowadays." In Indianapolis, "several employees walked off the job from a McDonald's outlet at 16th and Meridian streets." "Most people here have a family to support, and most people here barely make enough to make ends meet,'" employee Dwight Murray said. "We're here today because we feel like McDonald's is a $6 billion entity and it's not unfeasible for them to pay $15 an hour.

Corporate Greed, Propaganda, and Union-Busting

Despite the obvious needs for livable wages, there is much opposition. Union-busting has become a staple of employee orientations throughout the corporate landscape, with retail giants like Target and Wal-Mart regularly unleashing "aggressive anti-union push (es), and distributing pamphlets and other propaganda to employees." Corporations like Target have become notorious for making employees watch dramatized "training videos" on the so-called "dangers" of unionization in an attempt to convince workers that higher wages, more benefits, and an overall sense of dignity at the workplace would somehow not be good for them. This concerted effort to maintain a grip on poverty wages has led to the formation of intricate networks of union-busting firms that employ corporate lawyers and "anti-union strategists" to offer "continuing education" for business owners and executives. "At these seminars," writes Kim Phillips-Fein, "lawyers and labor relations consultants from the nation's top union-busting law firms come to speak to rapt, intimate groups of executives, advising them on how to beat union election drives, do end runs around the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and decertify unions, all the while hawking their own firms' services." Of course, "union members are expressly banned." To complement this behind-the-scenes movement, corporate mouthpieces like Fox News have taken up the propaganda charge against unions by referring to them as "monopolies" that prevent non-union workers from securing jobs, coining terms like "union thugs" as a fear tactic, displaying video snippets of supposed "union violence," utilizing doublespeak like "right to work" to suggest that accepting low wages is somehow a right that should be fought for, and airing modern-day snake oil salesmen to convince its working class viewers that unions are given extra benefits at their expense. In addition to ideological propaganda, special interest groups, wealthy donors, and Super PACs fueled by the Supreme Court's infamous Citizens United decision - such as Koch Industries PAC - have placed virtual ATMs in Governor's mansions and Congressional offices to ensure political opposition to workers' needs while remaining corporate (and thus profit)-friendly.

Starbucks' corporate response to the organizing efforts made by those fateful NYC workers in 2004 was fierce. "Faced with the first serious effort in decades to unionize one of its stores, Starbucks launched what a former worker called 'a scorched-earth campaign' against pro-union employees," reported Josh Harkinson. "The union busting has just been absolutely relentless," says the worker, Daniel Gross, who was fired in 2006 due to his involvement in the initial organizing efforts at the Manhattan store where he worked. The Minneapolis Jimmy John's workers were met with similar tactics, which included bizarre personal attacks from store owners and management through social media. On March 22, 2011, after lobbying for sick days from the restaurant chain, six workers - all of whom were "key figures" in the union organizing efforts - were fired for "defaming the brand and disloyalty to the company." Shortly thereafter, another "pro-union" employee was berated and humiliated on social media by owners and managers, some of whom went as far as posting the employee's personal telephone number on a public Facebook page and asking people to text the employee to "let him know how they feel." An Assistant Manager then posted disparaging personal comments about the pro-union employee, making fun of his appearance and including a picture of the employee for all to see. In addition to these reactive measures deployed by some companies, corporate behemoths like Wal-Mart have relied on proactive union-busting programs for years. In 2007, Washington-based Human Rights Watch released an extensive report accusing the retail giant of "routinely flouting its workers' human rights through a sophisticated strategy of harassing union organizers, discriminating against long-term staff, and indoctrinating employees with misleading propaganda." The report includes examples of "workers forced into unpaid overtime and an alleged strategy of squeezing out long-serving staff who are more costly than low-wage, temporary, younger workers," highlights "elaborate tactics to stop staff from coming together to fight for better conditions," and even describes detailed measures such as "focusing security cameras on areas where staff congregate and shifting around loyal workers in 'unit packing' tactics to ensure votes for union recognition are defeated." The report also found that each store manager, as a part of their training, receives a "manager's toolbox" manual which instructs them on "how to remain free in the event union organizers choose your facility as their next target," and that managers are also given access to and instructed to call a 'union hotline' if they suspect staff are discussing unionization - an action that would deploy corporate specialists from the company's headquarters to "address the situation."

The reasons for such opposition are clear. Corporate profits remain at an all-time high because companies are able to pay poverty wages to their employees and rely on government welfare programs to cover the rest (ironically, while also enjoying historically low corporate tax rates ). Additionally, the economic storm that has lingered over the heads of the American working class for the past five years has equaled a virtual paradise for corporate America. Three simple facts highlight this current economic landscape:

• Corporate profit margins just hit another all-time high as companies are making more per dollar of sales than they ever have before.

• Wages as a percent of the economy just hit another all-time low as companies are paying employees less than they ever have as a share of GDP.

• Fewer Americans are working than at any time in the past three decades as companies don't employ as many workers as they used to. As a result, the employment-to-population ratio has collapsed.

Maintaining this environment has become a top priority for wealthy investors, the corporations themselves, and the politicians who are funded by both. By gutting the middle class through the destruction of unions (as of 2011, only 11.9% of the American workforce was unionized - a 70-year low) over the past three decades, corporations have enjoyed a relatively clear path towards establishing these beneficial conditions of today - where 20% of the population owns 89% of all "privately held wealth;" and where the top 1% of the population owns 42.1% of all "financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one's home)." In addition to corporate-friendly policies that became commonplace starting with the Reagan years and continuing through both Bush', Clinton, and now Obama, the emergence of globalization has allowed for the replacement of American workers through the process of offshoring and the subsequent exploitation of extremely impoverished populations of workers abroad. Therefore, this latest surfacing of labor militancy from within the ranks of the domestic, low-wage, service-sector workforce represents the biggest threat - not only in its tangible fight for economic justice in the form of a livable wage, but also in its potentially revolutionary orientation which identifies with the modern working class and, most notably, the working poor - that corporate hegemony has faced within the geographic confines of the U.S. in decades. "If these guys are seen to succeed, it could really light a fire, because the dissatisfaction is unquestionable," labor historian Peter Rachleff explains. "The corporation knows that, and they have a lot of resources [and] plenty of lawyers" to combat these working class movements.

Workers' Victories and Building Momentum

Despite a well-funded and highly-coordinated opposition, there have been many victories and positive developments along the way. The mere emergence of a new labor resistance - let alone the fact that it has developed from within the low-wage service-sector and from one of the most disenfranchised demographics of the working class - is very encouraging. While some have questioned the roots of the movement and the extent of the involvement of more traditional, hierarchical unions like SEIU (Service Employees International), there is no denying the politicization and sense of empowerment that is being internalized by the involved workers themselves. Considering the near-death of working class consciousness in the U.S., this development simply cannot and should not be underestimated. The infusion of a direct-action model that insists on a worker-controlled approach to labor battles (i.e. the IWW) is certainly a leap forward. And this method has proven effective in more ways than one. On Tuesday, December 28, 2008, NYC Starbucks baristas were vindicated by National Labor Relations Board judge, Mindy E. Landow, when she ruled that Starbucks had "illegally fired three workers and otherwise violated federal labor laws in seeking to beat back unionization efforts at several of its Manhattan cafes" and ordered Starbucks "to pledge to end what she said was discriminatory treatment toward workers who supported the union at four of its Manhattan shops: 200 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, 145 Second Avenue at 9th Street, 15 Union Square East and 116 East 57th Street." Two years later, the IWW Starbucks Workers Union, following a "determined campaign of grassroots actions in Starbucks stores and communities all over the country," secured another victory when the company's corporate office gave in to demands for workers to receive time-and-one-half pay for working on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. "We're deeply moved to have been able in our modest way to increase respect for Dr. King's legacy while ensuring that Starbucks employees who work on his holiday are fairly compensated," said Anja Witek, a Starbucks barista and SWU member in Minnesota. "This is a great example of what baristas and all low-wage workers can achieve by getting organized and taking direct action in support of workplace justice issues." In February of 2012, after a long and drawn-out battle with Jimmy John's, a federal judge ruled the company illegally fired the six employees who had campaigned for sick time, and ordered the company to "reinstate the workers with back pay within 14 days." In a spirited testimony, Erik Forman, one of the fired employees, remarked:

"It has already been over a year since we were illegally fired for telling the truth. For all the hard work and dedication of the NLRB's civil servants, employers like Jimmy John's prefer to break the law and drag cases through the courts for years rather than let workers exercise their right to win fair pay, sick days, and respect through union organization. The dysfunctional U.S. labor law system gives Mike and Rob Mulligan (JJ franchise owners) and their cronies in the 1% carte blanche to trample on workers' rights. Jimmy John's workers, and the rest of the 99%, will only be able to win a better life by taking our fight from the courtroom back to the shop floors and the streets."

The latest low-wage workers strike, which took place on December 5th across "100 cities through the day," signified, according to the Guardian's U.S. affiliate, "a growing clamour for more action on income inequality." In front of a Walgreen's in downtown Chicago, nearly 200 protestors chanted, "We can't survive on eight-twenty-five…Walgreen's, Walgreen's, you can't hide. We can see your greedy side!" In Washington, D.C., dozens of workers carrying signs singing loudly, "Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way, it's no fun, to survive, on low low low low pay." "In New York City, about 100 protesters blew whistles and beat drums as they marched into a McDonald's chanting "We can't survive on $7.25." This collective outrage has empowered workers while also placing the problem of income inequality back on the public agenda. Major media sources that had barely uttered a word about such inequality in recent decades have now begun to showcase it. The Catholic Church's latest Pope, Francis, has made waves during a near-month-long tirade exposing the flaws of capitalism, recently asking, "How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market drops 2 points?" and referring to the "widening gap between those who have more and those who must be content with the crumbs." And calls for a federal minimum wage increase have gained steam with U.S. Labor Secretary, Thomas Perez, writing on his blog, "To reward work, to grow the middle class and strengthen the economy, to give millions of Americans the respect they deserve - it's time to raise the minimum wage." Though, of course, the Democratic Party's proposal to raise the current rate from $7.25 to $9.00, or even $10.10 in other proposed legislation, would hardly equal a significant change for tens of millions of working poor. Still, despite reformist-based rhetoric from politicians, the agenda is being shaped by the brave workers who have risked all to take a stand.

The battle cry "Fight for $15" has stuck. Numerous small and localized labor organization like Detroit 15 - a group of fast-food and retail workers from the Detroit area fighting "for fair wages and the right to form a union without interference" - and Fast Food Forward - a movement of NYC fast-food workers coming together to "build community engagement, hold corporations and their CEOs accountable, and to raise wages so that all Americans can prosper" - have sprung up amidst the movement-at-large, helping to form collaborative efforts with community and religious organizations which possess built-up social capital to be used, and to make the collective decision-making process more accessible to the workers themselves. Socialist candidate, Kshama Sawant, who made the "Fight for $15" cause a key part of her election campaign, made history by winning a seat on the Seattle City Council in November. Sawant's victory was significant not only for working class interests that have been in dire need of a true "left wing" for decades, but also for the fact that her platform was able to pull local Democrats toward a more authentic (though still reformist), left-wing, working-class agenda. As Seattle Times columnist, Danny Westneat, reported:

"You can't look at the stagnant pay, declining benefits and third-world levels of income disparity in recent years and conclude this system is working. For Millennials as a group, it has been a disaster. Out of the wreckage, left-wing or socialist economic ideas, such as the 'livable wage' movement in which government would seek to mandate a form of economic security, are flowering."

The Future of the American Working Class

If you're reading this article, chances are you are a member of the working class - not because the article specifically pertains to your interests but because, by definition, a large majority of us are compelled to work for a wage or salary to survive. The Occupy slogan which may seem a bit hyperbolic on the surface - breaking society into two camps: the 99% and the 1% - is actually not far off. The 99% essentially refers to the working class - those of us who are underemployed, unemployed, making minimum wage, making an hourly wage, working multiple jobs, earning a salary, working as "salaried professionals," working "under-the-table," etc.. In other words, if you weren't born with enough privilege and generational wealth to carry you through life, you are likely working for a wage in some form or another, or would be compelled to do so if left to your own means.

Jay Robinson, Julio Wilson, Dwight Murray, and their fellow employees are correct in their estimation: Multi-billion dollar corporations can and should pay their workers a livable wage. Considering how far removed we are from the age-old concept of workers "enjoying the fruits of their labor," a seemingly minimal expectation of earning a livable wage for fulltime work has become a revolutionary notion. But it shouldn't be. This issue is not just a low-wage problem - it's a working class problem. It's a middle class problem. It's a societal problem that destroys living standards for everyone outside of elite circles. And, while it is nowhere near the end-all, be-all of solutions to a toxic system, the premise of "a chain being only as strong as its weakest link" is certainly an improvement over the neoliberal, "greed is good" mantra which has dominated monetary and governmental policy over the past thirty years. For low-wage workers themselves, besides allowing the dignity of "earning a living," a livable wage infuses more expendable income into the economy while allowing for the opportunity to live without a chronic reliance on public assistance. "If you earn your money through wages (unlike many of the 1 percent, who earn through things like investments and a tax system biased in favor of capital gains over income) then a higher wage, minimum or otherwise, would mean that you'd spend the additional dollars, creating jobs for other workers," explains market analyst Marshall Auerback. "You'd pay down your mortgages and car loans, getting yourself out of debt. You'd pay more taxes - on sales and property, mostly - thereby relieving the fiscal crises of states and localities. More teachers, police and firefighters would keep their jobs. America would get a virtuous cycle toward higher employment and, more importantly, the cycle would be based on a policy which creates higher incomes, not higher debt via credit expansion." Furthermore, the establishment of livable wages eases the burden placed on the rest of the working class, which has contributed approximately $7 billion per year to fund public assistance programs that serve as a form of subsidization for Fortune 500s. That figure, from an October 2013 report by UC Berkeley's Labor Center, includes four major social benefits programs that low-wage workers are forced to use in order to provide basic necessities for themselves and their families. Specifically, the amount is broken down to Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program ($3.9 billion), the Earned Income Tax Credit ($1.9 billion), food stamps ($1 billion), and Temporary Aid for Needy Families ($200,000), and doesn't include other publicly funded programs like child care assistance, WIC, or section 8 housing, among others.

For those who see low-wage workers protesting for higher pay and think, "why don't they just get a better job" or "why don't they go to college, like I did, and earn a degree?" - think again. In 2012, nearly 300,000 Americans with college degrees were working minimum wage jobs. Furthermore, nearly one-half of all recent college graduates with jobs are underemployed. "Of 41.7 million working college graduates in 2010, about 48 percent of the class of 2010 work jobs that require less than a bachelor's degree, and 38 percent of those polled didn't even need high school diplomas." Even worse yet, 40% of recent college graduates are unemployed. In other words, the idea that earning a degree guarantees a livable wage is exactly that - an idea, no longer based in reality. For those who see low-wage workers striking for a livable wage and think, "what do they expect, they're working at McDonald's" or "these aren't careers we're talking about" - think again. Fact is, since the arrival of globalization, American manufacturing companies - the traditional suppliers of a livable wage - have jumped ship, moving their operations overseas to exploit impoverished workforces that are compelled to labor for next-to-nothing. Since this shift, America's working class has become largely reliant on the service industry. In other words, low-wage, service sector jobs are now careers - not by choice, but by necessity. The 2008 economic crisis and subsequent "recovery" only intensified this shift as "mid-wage occupations ($13.84 to $21.13 per hour) constituted 60 percent" of job losses during the 2008 recession, but only 22 percent of the job gains during the recovery. In contrast, "low-wage occupations ($7.69 to $13.83 per hour) constituted 21 percent" of job losses during the recession, while representing 58 percent of new jobs created during the aftermath. This is a staggering displacement that has seen once-livable employment virtually replaced by now-unlivable wages. As a result, the "characteristics of minimum wage workers" are changing, as 75 percent of them are now adults, many of whom have dependents to care for, and 70 percent of who have at least a high school degree.

The American working class has found itself in a breakneck "race to the bottom" during the corporatist era. However, recent developments stemming from "solidarity unionism," low-wage worker revolts, and a backlash against neoliberal policies and the extreme income inequality which they have bred have shown that American workers are, in fact, beginning to "rise like lions after slumber." If the thundering wave of low-wage labor militancy that has swept the country is any indication, the slumber is officially over. And if the "dramatic actions by and on behalf of workers" in places likes Seattle the past few months - including a "defeat of concessions at major grocery chains, Boeing workers' big 'no' vote on concessions, a $15 minimum wage voted in for airport workers, and election of a socialist (a candidate who made a city-wide $15 minimum wage the centerpiece of her campaign) to city council" -represent a microcosm of things to come, the proverbial race to the bottom - whether it has struck bedrock or not - is over. Because of their emergence as a viable sector of embedded labor, courageous, low-wage workers in the service industry now represent the front lines of an ongoing class war. They represent, as Dave Frieboth notes, "a general uprising of young, displaced workers trapped in low-wage jobs;" people who "looked at the wage disparities and saw that, as a simple matter of fact, the system isn't working." The further they can be kept down in terms of wages, benefits, and overall standards of living, the more effectively their lowly presence may be used as leverage to drive all working Americans' standards down. Thus, their status affects the status of the working class as a whole. They are not only fighting for themselves - they are fighting for all of us. In this sense, "an injury to one" truly is "an injury to all." Their fight is everyone's fight.

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