Marx's Capital for the 21st Century

By Susan Williams

This year marks the 150th anniversary of Volume I of Marx's Capital, a book with the most profound impact on human society of any political work in history. Marxist economic analysis has inspired the freedom struggles of billions of people.

By the 1990s, however, the profit system was staging a comeback in the USSR and China, thanks to decades of Western hostility from the outside and bureaucratic repression and betrayal from within. Socialism was passé; capitalism was the pinnacle of human development. As the world continued to change rapidly - with computers, robotics, the World Bank, hedge funds - Karl Marx seemed even more anachronistic.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the dustbin of history. The global devastation of the 2008 Great Recession underlined accelerating poverty and inequality. It showed that the capitalist monster may have changed its spots, but it was still vicious and hardwired for explosion. Capital turns out to have everything to say to rebels of the 21st century.

Ruthless Criticism of all that Exists

The mid-1800s, when Marx developed his economic theories, was a period with many similarities to ours. People were outraged at injustice, destitution, state violence, the lack of civil rights, and heavy taxation due to governmental debt, conditions caused at that time by the rise of industrial capitalism and the oppressive remnants of feudalism.

In 1848, a revolutionary wave surged across Europe. But the outcome was a series of defeats that left workers and radicals beaten down and believing the capitalist rulers were invincible. Striving to understand why the revolts were crushed and what victory would require, Marx began the economic studies that would occupy the rest of his life.

Before Marx, socialist thought was dominated by utopianism. This was the dream of an ideal society which only had to be imagined "to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power," as Marx's collaborator Frederick Engels wrote. In contrast, Marx and Engels took a scientific approach. Rather than springing from ungrounded wishes and hopes, Marxism analyzes what actually exists in the social and material world.

In his introduction to the first volume of his seminal work, Marx says, "It is the ultimate aim of this work to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society, i.e., capitalist, bourgeois society." He was embarking on the ultimate "know thy enemy" campaign.

Capital begins with the individual cell of the capitalist organism: the commodity (an object made to be sold). Marx explains step by step the process by which human labor-power adds economic value to commodities above and beyond the owner's costs. And he shows how this process inherently steals from the worker. If you know in your gut that you are being robbed at work even though you get a paycheck, Marx demonstrates logically why you are absolutely correct.

Marx laid out how capitalist economy would unavoidably suffer periodic crises worsening over time while the general rate of profit would slow. These factors would drive the ruling class to take from workers an ever greater share of the wealth they produce. The environment would be despoiled. Economic inequality and poverty would grow drastically. Small business owners and family farmers would lose their livelihoods.

In short, Marx predicted conditions today, with nearly half of the world's population living on less than $2.50 a day. His analysis also showed that there is no possibility of bringing into being a kinder, gentler profit system, because every capitalist is subject to a brutal, take-no-prisoners law of competition.

Class Consciousness to the Rescue

Marx wrote his analysis when the industrial revolution was just setting capitalism on its feet. He foresaw the inevitable globalization of the profit system, and concluded that it was then that its nature would be most fully expressed. With the advent of computerization, instant communication, and an international division of production and distribution, the "free market" became truly a world phenomenon.

From the start, capitalism was set on a trajectory leading to the growth of monopolies, dominance of finance capital (banks, stock markets, etc.), and hyper-concentration of wealth. Case in point: over the last several decades, all the additional wealth created by increased labor productivity has gone into the pockets of the owning class, while the share going to the workers has fallen. Capital is even more a book for our time than for the moment in time it was written, because capitalism has grown into a full-blown system dominating the planet.

Perhaps most of all, this is a book for the 21st century because of how desperately people seeking change in our time need to understand class.

This is a time of anger and revolt, but resistance is fractured. The clannish mentality of identity politics too often prevails, traceable ultimately to the racism, sexism, and all the other "isms" fostered by the ruling class to divide and conquer. But the Black activist fighting police brutality, the Trump supporter frustrated with job conditions in a "right to work" state, the teenager who slings hamburgers by day and is an environmental warrior by night: if they all depend on a paycheck to survive, they share much more than they may know. The beauty of Capital is that by understanding its ideas we can come to understand our common exploitation and the power that we have in fighting back together.

More than ever, those who believe a better world is possible need Marx. Scientific socialism offers a reality-based understanding of how capitalism works and the relationships among the people trapped in its net. This makes it possible to develop an effective plan of attack, including, for example, the need for revolutionary parties.

Capital is not an easy read for current generations. But take heart. Marx was writing for the average educated worker of his time, not the ivory tower elite. The early sections are challenging. Once grasped, however, they lay the foundation for an understanding of everything from the meaning of the fight over the length of the working day to why robots are displacing human employees.

David Harvey's A Companion to Marx's Capital is one of several excellent reading guides to Volume I, the most famous and fundamental of the three-volume series. And Freedom Socialist Party educational retreats have developed a detailed introduction to the Marxist analytical method and a study plan for Volume I that you can find at socialism.com; look for "Trotsky School 2015 Curriculum."

The best way to tackle Capital is in a group. If you would like help setting up a study circle, get in touch! And, before too many more anniversaries go by, let's realize the potential of this amazing book as a tool for winning a liberating future.

This was originally published in the Freedom Socialist newspaper, Vol. 38, No. 4, August-September 2017 (www.socialism.com)

Send feedback to Susan Williams, doctors' union organizer and student and teacher of Marxist economics, at drsusan762@gmail.com.

The Nurses' Union That Made Medicine Sick: How the Oligarchs Hypnotized Labor Leaders to Betray Working-Class Communities of Color

By Jon Jeter

Opened in 1889, O'Connor Hospital was the first in the city of San Jose, and the second in California to be chartered and managed by the Daughters of Charity, a 400-year-old Catholic mission founded by St. Vincent de Paul. Its benefactor, Judge Myles P. O'Connor, made his fortune in mining and he and his wife, Amanda, were two of Silicon Valley's first philanthropists. They had originally planned to open an old-age home and an orphanage, but the local Archbishop convinced the couple that the needs of what would grow to become the state's third most populous city were far too prolific to address only that which vexed the very young, and the very old.

For the next 125 years, the Daughters of Charity faithfully served San Jose's sick, pregnant, and poor, the hospital's fortunes rising and falling in tandem with that of Santa Clara County's laboring classes. With paychecks buoyed by postwar productivity and assertive trade unions, the order built a new, state-of-the art campus on the city's east side in 1953, just as Americans were bursting at the seams with hope, and babies.

Similar to the protagonist in Ernest Hemingway's novel, The Sun Also Rises, however, O'Connor went broke, gradually at first, and then suddenly, as good-paying jobs dried up, culminating in the ruinous 2008 recession that left millions of Californians unable to pay their hospital tab. Forced to borrow heavily just to stay afloat, the Daughters of Charity Health System announced in 2014 what would've once been unthinkable: a sale of its network of six hospitals.

More jarring still was the colorful streetscape that greeted morning commuters on Forest Avenue as they approached O'Connor's main gate in the first days of 2015. As the low-watt January sun doused the Santa Cruz mountains in a champagne-colored dew, motorists were visibly puzzled, some even scratching their heads as they passed by.

On the campus' north lawn, nearly 100 protesters clad in robin's-breast red, chanted, cheered and hoisted placards that read: "Nurses and nuns agree: Approve the Sale."

To the south, maybe 20 yards away, stood another 100 or so demonstrators clad entirely in blue, brandishing signs that read: "Save our Hospital; Reject the Sale."

The dueling rallies prefaced a public hearing by California's State Attorney General Kamala Harris, who is legally required to approve the sale of nonprofit hospitals, and pitted one powerful labor union - the California Nurses Association in red - against another - the Service Employees' International Union, in blue.

Dubbed by the Nation Magazine as the country's most progressive trade union, the CNA and its umbrella organization, National Nurses United, endorsed a proposal by Daughters of Charity executives to sell the chain to Prime, a southern California-based healthcare provider with a reputation for ripping off Medicaid, its patients, and its workforce. A 2014 federal audit of Prime hospitals, for instance, found 217 cases of improperly diagnosed kwashiorkor, a form of malnutrition that is seldom seen in the US, and typically found only in the global South. Unsurprisingly, Medicaid reimbursement rate for the the disease is quite high when compared with other maladies.

The SEIU, on the other hand, favored a sale to a Wall Street hedge fund named Blue Wolf with no management experience in the healthcare industry, but a demonstrated proficiency for dismantling businesses and auctioning its parts off to the highest bidders.

But here's the thing: San Jose's working-class communities - a Benetton- blend of Latinos, south Asians, Blacks and Whites - wanted neither, Prime least of all.

Had they bothered to show up for any of the dozen or so community stakeholder meetings held in 2014, the CNA's leadership might have known this. But Bob Brownstein, the executive director of the civic organization, Working Partners USA, could only remember seeing a CNA labor representative at a single meeting, and if he chimed in on the discussion, Brownstein couldn't recall.

Labor representatives for the SEIU, on the other hand, and Blue Wolf executives were fixtures at the stakeholders' meetings.

"I don't think either union did much of anything," Brownstein recalled more than a year later, "but SEIU was clearly more comfortable in dealing with the community. As I recall, there was someone from Blue Wolf and the SEIU at every meeting and they answered every question that everyone put to them. They were clearly trying to generate answers and they even made some changes to the original proposal" to win the community's approval.

"Their offer was more opaque but they did a much better job than Prime did in acknowledging community concerns. We never trusted Blue Mountain but the community was much more worried about Prime."

So much so that a coalition of 15 civic groups wrote a joint letter to Harris urging her to veto the sale to Prime. The stakeholders' clear preference was Santa Clara County which had bid on O'Connor, and whose health care network had a regional reputation for providing quality care to the uninsured that was second only to O'Connor's.

But Daughters of Charity executives did not want to break up the set, so-to-speak, and preferred selling all six hospitals to a single bidder.

"I don't know why the California Nurses Association didn't help us push the county's bid," said Grace-Sonia E. Melanio, Communications Director for Community Health Partnership, which was one of the authors of the letter to the attorney general's office.

"I assume it was because they don't represent county nurses but I don't know that for a fact."

By January of 2015, Brownstein, Melanio and others knew that shifting the conversation from the two labor-backed bidders to the county's bid was a longshot, at best.

Still, Melanio recalls her astonishment at seeing the the tsunami of red and blue as she pulled into the O'Connor parking lot ahead of that January public hearing.

"I was shocked," she said, "to see that the unions had the community outnumbered by roughly 100 to 1."

"You Got to Dance with Them That Brung You"

The question of who killed organized labor in the US has always been something of a whodunit for me, until I went to work as a communications specialist for the California Nurses Association in January of 2015.

The action at O'Connor was my first week on the job and the hospital's ultimate sale to a Wall Street hedge fund was tantamount to an exhumation. After examining the cadaver close up, I can report that all evidence identifies the killer beyond a shadow of a doubt:

It was a suicide.

What proved the undoing of the labor movement was not the bloodlessness of conservatives, but the faithlessness of liberals; not the 1 percent's dearth of compassion, but the 99 percent's failure of imagination; not the corruption of the managerial class but trade union leaders' desertion of the very communities that made the American labor movement a force to be reckoned with in the first place.

"You got to dance," the immortal Molly Ivins once wrote, " with them what brung you." After collaborating with workers of all races to create a middle-class that stands as the singular achievement of the Industrial era, unions switched dance partners mid-song.

In championing Prime Health Care, the nurses' union, and its Executive Director, RoseAnn DeMoro, carried water for a venal corporate class in much the same fashion that the Democratic Party, and its titular leader, Hillary Clinton, runs interference for Wall Street, leaving the people of San Jose to choose from the lesser of two evils, just as voters in next week's presidential ballot have no good options.

This is no coincidence. Beginning in earnest with Wall Street's 1975 takeover of New York City's budget, corporate executives have wooed both Democrats and labor union leaders with increasing assertiveness, in a concerted effort to thwart the interracial labor movement that is the only fighting force to ever battle the plutocrats' to a draw.

To put only slightly too fine a point on it, financiers' courtship of labor in the postwar era mirrors Napoleon's recruitment of Haiti's mulattoes to help put down the island's slave mutiny. Both counter- revolutions drove a wedge through the opposition with a psych-ops campaign that can be reduced to a question of identity:

Are you a worker, or are you white?

No More Beautiful Sight

The Bay area can make a credible claim to being the birthplace of the modern labor movement. When West Coast longshoremen went on strike at the height of the Great Depression, Blacks who had consistently been rebuffed in their efforts to integrate the docks, jumped at the chance to work, albeit for smaller paychecks than their white peers.

Confronted with a failing strike, the head of the longshoremen's union, an Australian émigré named Harry Bridges, toured African American churches on both sides of the Bay bridge, according to the late journalist Thomas Fleming.

From the pulpit, Bridges acknowledged the union's historical mistreatment of Blacks, but promised skeptical parishioners that if they respected the pickets, they would work the ports up and down the West Coast, earning the same wage as white dockworkers.

They did, and the strike's subsequent success triggered a wave of labor militancy that not only imbued the economy with buying power, but connected workers' discontent with broader political struggles for affordable housing, free public education, infrastructure improvements, and civil rights.

"Negro-white unity has proved to be the most effective weapon against the shipowners," the historian Philip S. Foner quoted a dockworker saying in his book, Organized Labor and the Black Worker, "against the raiders and all our enemies."

When Oakland's two chic department stores, Kahns and Hastings, denied pay raises to their mostly women employees in 1946, nearly 100,000 union members - mostly men - walked off the job in solidarity.

But they didn't stop there, shutting down the whole of Alameda County for the better part of two days, ordering businesses to close, and turning back deliveries of everything other than essential medical supplies and beer, which they commandeered to hold a bi-racial bacchanal in the streets of Oakland, dancing, singing, and exulting in the power of the many.

It was the last general strike in US history; within months, Congress overrode President Truman's veto of the Taft-Hartley Act which, among other things, outlawed so-called sympathy strikes, and mandated trade unions to expel Communists from their ranks.

Still, the working class maintained its swagger for another generation.

Invoking eminent domain, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency razed thousands of structures in the city's "blighted" Fillmore neighborhood, forcing nearly 10,000, mostly Black households to relocate, and transforming Geary Street into an eight-lane monstrosity which sealed off the Fillmore from the whiter and wealthier Pacific Heights.

In a 1963 interview with the Boston television station WGBH, about his iconic documentary, Take This Hammer, James Baldwin said this:

"A boy last week - he was 16, in San Francisco - told me on television….He said, "I've got no country. I've got no flag." Now, he's only 16 years old, and I couldn't say, "You do." I don't have any evidence to prove that he does. They were tearing down his house because San Francisco is engaging - as most Northern cities now are engaged - in something called urban renewal, which means moving the Negroes out."

Among those who took notice of the Fillmore's gentrification was Lou Goldblatt, who was, at the time, the second-in-command of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the very same union that had integrated the West Coast's docks.

"There was no reason why the pension funds should just be laying around being invested in high-grade securities, Goldblatt later recalled. I thought there was no reason why that money shouldn't be used to build some low-cost housing."

The ILWU created the Longshore Redevelopment Corporation to pounce on the three city blocks-out of a total of 60- that the city had set aside for affordable housing.

In her 1964 letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, Josephine Solomon described her new digs: "I've just moved into my new home in St. Francis Square…and living here is quite clearly going to be exhilarating and, more important, the best possible place in which I can raise my children. About 100 families have already moved in…and we have representatives of all races and colors living together as neighbors. There is no more beautiful sight in this town than our marvelous, mixed-up collection of white, brown, and yellow children playing together in the sunny community square every afternoon."

Who's The Boss?

"C'mon people, what are some more nurses values?"

I was nearly four months into my stint at the CNA when I found myself in a half-lit, mildewed, second-floor conference room in the union's downtown Oakland office, seated among a clutch of maybe 7 or 8 other communications staffers, all but two of us-an Asian woman and myself-who are non-white.

The task this late April afternoon was to identify "nurses values," which I had assumed meant that I would help pore over the results of a nurses' questionnaire to produce a coherent ad campaign.

Instead, the communications manager, Sarah Cecile, stood astride an easel that leaned like a sprinter at the finish line, her magic marker poised to add to the wan list of nouns that glared accusingly at me, reducing Hegelian dialectical inquiry to a game of fucking charades.

"Wait," I said, "we're telling the nurses what their values should be? Shouldn't we be asking the nurses what their values are, you know, like in a survey, or a poll?"

"That's a bad word for us," said a graphic artist who'd worked for the CNA for several years. "Polling is frowned upon here."

"Maybe they know something I don't," I said sarcastically, "but if we're telling the rank and file what to do, doesn't that make the union just another boss that the nurses have to answer to?

Should communications organize a coup of sorts?" I asked provocatively.

When I returned to my office 30 minutes later, I had an email from De Moro's secretary, summoning me to a meeting with the executive director the following morning.

This was extraordinary for a couple of reasons, not the least of which was that despite sharing the same floor as the executive staff, it was an unwritten rule that communications was to have no contact with top management. This directive went so far as to prohibit communications from either emailing executives directly, or from entering or exiting through the executives' north wing.

Moreover, I was told that both the executive staff, and the board, were almost all lily-white, save for one Latino and one African-American on each.

What I remember most about the next day's meeting is the mirthless half-smile that DeMoro wore like a mask for nearly the entire 45-minutes, reminding me of Sir Richard Burton's description of Lucille Ball as "a monster of staggering charmlessness."

She began by asking me if I had any ideas for trying to improve the union's communications effort, which was odd, since she'd blown off an email with my suggestions for doing exactly that only weeks earlier.

"Anything we could do to make this more of a bottom-up effort would be to the union's benefit," I recall saying. "It seems we spend an awful lot of time trying to talk to people who really aren't interested in what we have to say, and not enough rallying and organizing the community to put pressure on decision makers."

By this time, California's Secretary-of-State, Harris had already, effectively vetoed the sale to Prime by attaching such stringent conditions to the transaction that she knew no corporation would accept the terms. I had publicly predicted as much months earlier; knowing that Harris would rely heavily on Wall Street to finance her US Senate campaign, I'd proposed, unsuccessfully, writing articles interrogating the investment firm's mishandling of other businesses it had acquired.

But DeMoro's communications' director, a walking mediocrity named Chuck Idelson, had all of the imagination of a lamp post, and only half the personality. His idea of media relations was sending out at least one anemic press release per day, then marshaling the entire communication staff for two days to badger journalists we had no relationship with to cover news conferences that were wholly absent any news. A North Carolina rally for the Robin Hood tax on Wall Street transactions was attended by two people, the parents of Cecile, the communications manager.

As presidential hopefuls began campaigning in Iowa ahead of that state's all important caucus, the nurses' union planned to launch an ad campaign against Wisconsin's Republican Governor Scott Walker.

"Why in the world would you do that?" I asked Idelson one day in early 2015 just as the primary season was beginning to take shape.

"Well, Walker is really bad on labor," Idelson said.

"All the Republicans are bad on labor," I said. "All the Democrats too. You're gonna tell the rank-and-file that you spent a quarter-of-a-million dollars to help send union-busting Hillary Clinton to the White House? Why don't they spend that money on organizing, or on an ad campaign to support Black Lives Matter. Police violence against people of color is a public health crisis," I said. "Who is more credible on that issue than nurses?"

Moreover, I said, a California-based trade union buying ads in Iowa with union dues will surely be used as a cudgel with which to beat organized labor upside the head.

I repeated my concerns to DeMoro, but with that awkward smile on her face, she made it clear that she shared neither my faith in the rank-and-file, or the community.

"The nurses have some issues," she said at our meeting. "We need for more of them to support the Democrats and to work the phone banks and things like that," she said. "And frankly," she said, abandoning all pretense now, her smile dissolving into a contemptuous frown, "they need to be more progressive, more radical and to take more chances."

DeMoro's annual salary at the time was $359,000, more than triple the average nurse's yearly pay.

You Ain't White

Portraying Leftists as subversives, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act required trade unions to weed out suspected communists, according to the historian Foner, by asking Black workers questions like:

"Have you ever had dinner with a mixed group?"

And this: Have you ever danced with a white girl?"

Whites were asked if they had ever entertained Blacks in their homes, and witnesses, Foner wrote, were asked "Have you ever had any conversations that would lead you to believe (the accused) is rather advanced in his thinking on racial matters?"

Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women, would later acknowledge that this purge of communists from trade unions was akin to severing the umbilical cord while the baby was still in the womb, starving the most democratizing social movements of a vital fuel-source.

Much of the labor movement's bandwidth however, could not be measured in muscle, or union-dues, but in imagination, as demonstrated by the ILWU's Goldblatt's vision of a Beloved Community, fashioned from the stevedores' pension fund.

"So let's all be careful," United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther once said, "that we don't play the bosses game by falling for the Red Scare."

And then Reuther went on to play the bosses game, expertly, chasing Marxists from the union, isolating Black workers, and reverting to the anodyne reforms that characterized the ineffective, segregated unions before the 1934 San Francisco General Strike. So disillusioned were Black autoworkers with Reuther's tripartite alliance with Detroit's industrialists and the Democrats that by the late 1960s, many had begun to joke that the acronym UAW stood for "U Ain't White."

The tipping point, however, occurred in the midst of the 1975 fiscal crisis, when New York bankers hatched a scheme to recoup their losses on bad real estate investments from the wages, pensions, and subsidies shelled out to city employees and the working class. The facts were not on their side, and so the financiers played the only hand they knew to play: race.

Doubling down on the Birth-of-a-Nation narrative, the city's oligarchs, and their friends in the media, portrayed Blacks as a menace to the civic project, exploiting racial resentment of a Black polity that had found its voice mostly through labor unions.

In a 1976 episode of the NBC television series, McCloud, titled "The Day New York Turned Blue," the stetson-wearing New Mexico sheriff- an avatar for white, male supremacy- almost single-handedly rescues Gotham from ruin, largely by convincing an Italian cop named Rizzo to cross a picket line, and help repel an attack by the mafia, who ambush police headquarters to kill a mob attorney-turned state's witness.

Aside from the mafia, the villains in this urban morality tale are the police union-led by the Bad Nigger that 1970s America loved to hate, Carl Weathers-which refuses to call off a labor walkout in the city's time-of-need, and a prostitute who is drugging her clients-one an accountant visiting New York to audit federal bailout money-with a fatal, suffocating blue paint.

Playing the role of Rizzo in real-life was the head of the city's largest municipal union, Victor Gotbaum. In his book, Working Class New York, the historian Joshua B. Freeman wrote of Gotbaum and his partner, Joe Bigel:

"Having seen the power of the financial community,the hostility of the federal government, and the divisions within the union movement, they shied away from a militant, independent labor strategy which might have led to them being blamed for a city bankruptcy. Instead, they preferred to make concessions and invest their members' pension money in city debt in return for a place at or near the table, where discussions about the city's future were being made by financiers, businessmen, and state and federal officials. Gotbaum became so entranced by the power elite . . .that within a few years he and (investment banker Felix) Rohatyin were calling each other best friends, even holding a joint birthday party in Southampton."

DeMoro is an heir to Gotbaum, not Goldblatt. If she or any of her lieutenants had an ounce of imagination I never saw it. Consider that at no time during the Daughter's of Charity sale, did I ever once hear anyone mention the possibility of pushing for legislation to convert O'Connor to a worker, or community-managed health co-op, similar to the ILWU's response to the Fillmore's housing crisis.

Shortly after Harris nixed the Prime deal, DeMoro called an emergency all-staff meeting in March of 2015, in which she bluntly asked the 65 or so staff members for their suggestions.

"If we don't do something different now, we're going to die," she said.

A young Latina labor organizer raised her hand, and said: "Why don't we start to build partnerships with the immigrant rights community that's politically active and organizing across California," I recall her saying. "We could really strengthen our own organizing capacity and deepen our roots in a community that is looking to join forces with institutional allies."

You could've heard a gnat piss on cotton in Georgia.

Later, the young organizer would tell me privately me that had she been a white, male labor organizer, and replaced immigrant rights community with some off-brand faction of Silicon Valley white liberals, say Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, DeMoro would've been over the moon.

"Everybody knows that RoseAnn loves her white boys," she said.

As for me, I was fired a week after proposing a coup because "you don't seem happy here."

It was May 1, or May Day.

This was originally posted on Jon's personal blog.

Jon Jeter is the author of 'Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People,' and the co-author of 'A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Bright Nights and Dark Days in Obama's Postracial America.' He is a former Washington Post Bureau Chief in southern Africa and South America, a former producer for This American Life, and twice a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.

Race, Solidarity, and the American Working Class

By Edward Carson

The search for solidarity has escaped white, black, and brown working class people, in part, due to white people's historical reluctance to embrace shared experiences that cross racial boundaries. Because of recent political news, mass rallies by Black Lives Matter, and the growing concerns about the economic gap, I aim to resurrect past and present conversations about the "working class." As we know, it is not monolithic. In order to confront working class issues, society must mend the color line through class, which is complex, as the American race question is the real problem.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, expresses the unchanged dimensions of the American color line and class-consciousness among the working class:

"Solidarity is standing in unity with people even when you have not personally experienced their particular oppression. The reality is that as long as capitalism exists, material and ideological pressures push white workers to be racist and all workers to hold each other in general suspicion. But there are moments of struggle when the mutual interests of workers are laid bare, and when the suspicion is finally turned in the other direction - at the plutocrats who live well while the rest of us suffer." [1]

Black lives do matter, but many accept arguments that society operates under the guise of color blindness, a falsity that permits modern day atrocities to black and brown Americans. This argument stands in the way of interracial workers forging unity. Black Lives Matter further elicits a reaction to the present-day injustices that were not wholly resolved via 1960's de jure legislation. Thus, the movement has sought to bring all people together in solidarity against systematic racism and brutality.

Working class people should be unified across racial lines; however, the lack of solidarity and the division capitalism promotes regarding class and race continues to divide them, as noted by the rise of Donald Trump, the 2016 Republican Presidential winner. If the white, black, and brown working class were fully unified - they might grasp their intersectional identities and achieve an understanding of themselves as a wholly marginalized people, often comprised of multiple identities: LGBTQ, people of color, women, etc.

The past and present reflect white people's belief in their own understanding of racism, not the real experiences faced by people of color. Often, they have defined racism in a "neoliberal" sense of saving black people from their own community problems. Rudy Giuliani, following the killings of five police officers in Dallas, referenced how he has saved more lives than Black Lives Matter. He, as well as others, such as Republican National Convention speaker David Clarke, a Milwaukee Sheriff, who too spoke against Black Lives Matter, failed to note the waves of cyclical oppression in cities like Baltimore, a conclusion of America's past Jim Crow policies. White people fail to understand the ubiquitous degree of privilege they hold, a precursor to being an ally to black and brown people. The rejection of "white privilege" is an acceptance of interracial solidarity.

Black Identity and Solidarity

Without privilege and facing racial oppression, American Negroes have long sought solidarity, but without it, focused on their own struggle and revolution. As Malcolm X wrote in Message to the Grassroots,

"The Negroes were out there in the streets. They were talking about how they were going to march on Washington… That they were going to march on Washington, march on the Senate, march on the White House, march on Congress, and tie it up, bring it to a halt, not let the government proceed. They even said they were going out to the airport and lay down on the runway and not let any airplanes land….That was the black revolution."

This revolution was absent of racial solidarity, in part, due to white resistance and disinterest, growing Black Nationalism, and societal failure to grasp the extent of white racism within the working class.

Before the second civil rights period, 1954 - 1965, black Marxist, who pondered their approach to fighting capitalism and Jim Crow in the early 20 th century, witnessed the pervasiveness of racial injustice and the pronouncement of white supremacy as ubiquitous forces in post-bellum America. Thanks to the work of W.E.B. Du Bois and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), black folk sought to address their oppression in a country shaped by de facto racism and Jim Crow. Through such challenges, Negro solidarity continued, though Carol Anderson's book, Bourgeois Radicals, discusses the NAACP's attempt to distance itself from radical Du Bois, whose writings offered a Marxist analysis in the United States and an international call for colonial independence.

Du Bois witnessed the rise of Marcus Garvey and his paradigm, which sought to use capitalism in promoting Black Nationalism in the 1920s. Du Bois, who joined the Communist Party USA in 1961, adopted a Marxist perspective early in his training to challenge racism, while Garvey's use of capitalism was his means of addressing the race problem. And though there was solidarity in addressing the advancement of blacks, Garvey's capitalism offered a contentious anti-Marxist narrative to Du Bois's integrationist approach. After all, it was Du Bois who opposed Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Compromise, even though he shared a desire with them in eradicating Negro oppression.

By the 1950s, the United States government saw a need for change regarding its race problem, due to the Soviet Union and voices from organized movements, such as the International Labor Defense. Black American communists, such as William Patterson, Claudia Jones and Esther Jackson, propagated the left's message questioning American democracy. The United States championed the 1954 court ruling Brown v. Board of Education, which chipped away at Jim Crow, but did not fully resolve legal segregation; it was a clear response to the accusations made by the Soviet Union and American radicals regarding America's race problem. [2]

Marxism and Racial Unity

According to Marxism, the first focus is on class; hence, a desire to unify the oppressed proletariat. Karl Marx assumed class struggle would address the race question. However, both are contentious forces in the United States. This, unfortunately, has historically created troubled interest for white and colored workers in unifying, often because capitalism and white supremacy have maintained a symbiotic relationship. Blacks have long suspected that white working class people were exploited and fed lies about the Negro, in an attempt to prevent solidarity. As Du Bois wrote in The place of Negroes in the crisis of capitalism in the United States,

"This newest South, turning back to its slave past, believes its present and future prosperity can best be built on the poverty and ignorance of its disfranchised lowest masses-and these low-paid workers now include not only Negroes, but Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the unskilled, unorganized whites. Progress by means of this poverty is the creed of the present South… The Northern white worker long went his way oblivious to what was happening in the South. He awoke when the black Southern laborer fled North after World War I, and he welcomed him by riots… They excluded Negroes. It is taking a long time to prove to them that their attitude toward Negroes was dangerous. If Negro wages were low in the South, what business was that of New England white labor?"

Angela Davis, who ran for the vice presidency of the United States on the Communist Party ticket in the 1980s, and recently authored, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement, reminds us of the universal struggle shared by black and brown folk, as she echoed Du Bois's observation that the "problem of the twentieth century is that of the color line." Davis contends "Racism, in the first place, is a weapon used by the wealthy to increase the profits they bring in by paying Black workers less for their work".

Du Bois and Davis touched on the unique struggles of being black and American. They remind blacks that white bourgeois power and racism are instruments to suppress their blackness and social condition. This promulgated Negro distrust of whites, driving later concerns about the Communist Party USA (CP), as reflected in the writings of Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, who critiqued their struggles with the left, due to the reluctance of white communists and the CP to fully address race. Wright showcased his frustration in his essay I Tried to be a Communist.

Those fears should have been allayed by the historical solidarity and support the CP expressed in fighting the racial injustices toward the falsely accused Scottsboro Boys of rape. Not even the NAACP supported them, withdrawing from the case in 1932. Later, in 1955, it was the CP who sought justice for the slaying of Emmett Till, who was murdered in Mississippi by white supremacists.

The Struggle for Unity in Labor

With such efforts at building solidarity by black, brown, and white communists, challenges persisted. A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, pointed to the complexity of America's racial binary relationship, as he noted, "Salvation for a race, nation or class must come from within. Freedom is never granted; it is won. Justice is never given; it is exacted."

Randolph, like Du Bois, Washington, and Garvey, sought first to take care of the Negro race - then use that to advance the race within white America. The commonality of race consciousness and black identity usurped class. Negro awareness of white working class differences was a grave barrier to achieving unity over capitalism. Randolph's approach moved closer to solidarity with whites, as the American Federation of Labor (AFL) granted the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters a charter, but the color line was not mended in a fashion that promoted class-consciousness. Manning Marable's book, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945 - 1990, noted that "The purge of communists and radicals from organized labor from 1947 through 1950 was the principal reason for the decline in AFL-CIO's commitment to the struggle against racial segregation." [3]

Blacks observed white union members still struggling with racial solidarity in the trade union movement decades later. In the 2008 election, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka spent weeks encouraging white workers to support Barack Obama, saying, "While there are many reasons to vote for Obama, there's only one really, really bad reason to vote against Barack Obama. And that's because he's not white."

Racism has long divided the working class, and today is no different. Many white working class people voted for Donald Trump. And much like 2008, race was a reason. While some will salute a strong economy, in truth, wages have flattened for the working class. Because of this, and because white workers have grown suspicious of the burgeoning black power call by Black Lives Matter, the search for solidarity continues to escape a racially divided country, as noted by the current political climate.

Edward Carson is an independent historian who teaches courses on race, religion, United States history, and African American Studies in the history department at the Brooks School, a residential school in North Andover, Massachusetts. He is the current chair of the Communist Party USA Boston. The title of his working manuscript is " W.E.B. Du Bois's Editorial Influence on Western Negro Migration ."

Notes

[1] Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2016), 215.

[2] Daniel Rubin, "James and Esther Jackson: Shapers of History," People's World, December 16, 2006, http://www.peoplesworld.org/james-and-esther-jackson-shapers-of-history/ .

[3] Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945 - 1990 (University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 28.

Explaining the Dollar: How it Became the Global Currency and What it Means For You

By Megan Cornish

Most working people think of the buck as the way they pay their bills. But its use goes far beyond the USA's borders. The greenback is the major world currency for trade and finance. This international role bestows vast power on the U.S. government and the rich. But its status doesn't help ordinary people much.

Fundamentally, the exchange of commodities and investments under global capitalism requires generally accepted forms of money to buy and sell them with. And the notes issued by the largest and richest economies tend to be employed the most. Today, the dollar is the most widely used, followed by the euro, the British pound, the Japanese yen, and since 2015, the Chinese yuan.

These world currencies have many uses. Besides international trade in commodities, there is foreign exchange, which is the buying and selling of the legal tender of different countries. Governments must hold foreign currency reserves to back up their money in case of economic crises, especially massive speculation in their own notes that can cause their value to collapse. In weaker and smaller economies, many everyday transactions take place in dollars or other international bills rather than the official local money. Some countries, like Panama, don't have their own currency, and instead use the dollar.

How the greenback became king.

Dollars backed by the government began (except for a brief unsuccessful run during the Civil War) with the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913. Government-backed notes allowed the USA to compete with Britain and its pound for economic dominance. In World War I, and later World War II, U.S. businesses profited mightily from supplying the combatants, and the country became the center of global finance. In 1944, representatives from over 40 countries met in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, and signed an agreement that the dollar would be the world currency, convertible to gold by central banks at fixed exchange rates.

That arrangement lasted until 1971, when massive deficit spending on the war in Vietnam inflated the greenback and caused other countries to demand its exchange for gold. President Nixon ended this international convertibility, effectively devaluing the dollar.

The other result was that all currencies floated in value relative to each other, and there was no longer one official world paper money. The chaotic capitalist market prevailed, and a whole new arena of finance flourished - currency speculation.

But since the U.S. economy still dominated world finance and trade, the buck retained much of its international financial role. For instance, at the end of 2016, almost 64 percent of known foreign exchange reserves were held in dollars. They still predominate - so far - because of the size and relative strength of the economy of the USA and the dominance of its financial markets.

Who does a strong buck benefit?

To listen to the financial press,workers and business have the same interests. When governments, institutions and rich individuals are buying U.S. securities, stocks and real estate, interest rates tend to stay low and Wall Street booms. But that mainly benefits the rich who live off investments.

A rising greenback is a danger to workers and the overall economy. In this time of economic stagnation, when wealth is flowing almost exclusively to those at the top, the demand to buy dollars as an investment has soared, and so has its value. Between mid-2014 and 2016, the dollar appreciated 20 percent in relation to other main currencies.

This in turn has made the U.S. trade deficit explode. That is because as the buck rises, imports become cheaper to buy (in dollars) and exports to other countries become more expensive. Not only do exports fall, but production for the home market does too, as it becomes cheaper for consumers to buy foreign products.

This results in job cuts. Domestic production shrinks and national businesses try to reduce their costs by increasing automation. The high value of the greenback becomes a drag on the whole economy.

Calls for protectionism tend to increase, often along with xenophobic and racist movements. Witness the Trump phenomenon, and fascist-based movements in Europe. But neither protectionism nor "free" trade is good for workers anywhere. Capitalism is all about pitting working people against each other.

Feeding the war machine

One of the major ways governments and institutions hold dollars is in the form of U.S. Treasury securities. The buyer is lending their money to the government. The buck's high value helps Uncle Sam to sell ever more bonds. Unfortunately, much of the proceeds are plowed into military spending. This process has been funding the war industry since WWII. It has pushed the explosion of military actions that are devastating the Middle East and destabilizing many countries. It has cemented U.S. imperialism and world dominance at the cost of mayhem and misery.

Military spending plays a significant role in the economy of the USA, making large parts of the country's production not for human use, but for destruction. However, it props up the economy only so long as the greenback is an attractive investment. The United States can't maintain this house of cards forever, and it behooves workers here to remember that their interests remain with all the world's workers, not with "our" ruling class.

This was originally published in Freedom Socialist newspaper, Vol. 38, No. 3, June-July 2017 ( www.socialism.com)

Send feedback to author Megan Cornish at fsnews@mindspring.com.

Americanism Personified: Why Fascism Has Always Been an Inevitable Outcome of the American Project

By Colin Jenkins

"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross." This quote, which has often been misattributed to Sinclair Lewis , is wise in its recognizing the authoritarian potential of both nationalism and organized religion. In slight contrast, Professor Halford E. Luccock of the Divinity School of Yale University said in a 1938 interview , "When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled 'made in Germany'; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, 'Americanism.'" Luccock's view was that of a Christian theologian during the height of Nazi Germany, likely meant to not only downplay the role of religion but perhaps more so warning against the false idolatry of nationalistic reverence.

Despite the tidbits of insight offered, both quotes underestimate Americanism as a highly-authoritative and dominating national project in and of itself. At the time of both quotes, America had already cemented strong elements conducive to fascism: an economy based in capitalist modes of production, a geography created through mass extermination of Native American populations, white supremacist ideals rooted in both dominant culture and pseudoscience , and aggressive expansionist and imperialist projects throughout the Western hemisphere. It should come as no surprise that Adolf Hitler studied, admired, and was inspired by the US genocide of Native Americans as well as its subsequent reservation program. "Hitler's concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history," John Toland wrote in his book, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography . "He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination-by starvation and uneven combat-of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity."

This notion of American fascism is certainly nothing new. As Steve Martinot explains in his invaluable essay on " Fascism in the US ," this discussion has been around for a long time:

"In an early, now canonical discussion of racism in the US, Pierre Van den Berghe (1967) pointed out that a prevalent racial despotism coexisted with constitutionality, a confluence he characterized as 'herrenvolk democracy' - 'democracy for white people.' In his book, Friendly Fascism, (1980) Bertram Gross argues that the US under Reagan began moving toward a form of governance closely analogous to 1930s European fascism; he compares the social consequences of corporate influence to Mussolini's 'corporate state.' George Jackson finds no better word than 'fascism' to describe the psychotic use of power and violence by which white prisoners relate to black, or by which the prison administration maintains its hierarchical system -- and which he sees mirrored in white-black relations outside the prison."

As a settler-colonial project steeped in white supremacist domination and capitalist ideals, America is and always has been an ideal fascist breeding ground. The current rise of Donald Trump, the "alt-right," neo-Nazism, and white nationalism is nothing new, it is merely Americanism becoming further personified through the vulnerabilities opened by the failures of capitalism and the weakening of liberal democracy - systems that were constructed on shoddy, hypocritical foundations to begin with.

Fascism as a Capitalist Phenomenon

"People that are more concerned with the trappings of this pseudo mass society and its spectacular leisure sports; parades where strangers meet, shout each other down and often trample each other on the way home will never see the ugly reality of fascism. Amerikkkan fascism is so effective in emotionally appealing to people's desires and fears that when we point out to them that Amerikkkan capitalism has had 200 years to disguise and refine its face, and 50 years to consolidate fascist control of the country, they would simply dismiss us."

- Shaka Sankofa Zulu

Fascism, as a conscious and working ideology, was intentionally constructed to serve as a polar opposite to the materialist conception of thinking that scientific socialism (Marxism) was based in. Benito Mussolini, a former socialist, specifically noted this in his Doctrine of Fascism, which he wrote with Giovanni Gentile. Fascism is a collectivist ideology, much like socialism; however, fascism calls on a societal tie that differs greatly from that of socialism. While socialist collectivism is rooted in an inclusive, communal responsibility to have basic material needs met for all, fascist collectivism is rooted in an exclusive, nationalistic responsibility to dominate and conquer peoples who are viewed as not belonging. While socialist collectivism is based in worker-control of the means of production, fascist collectivism is based in a natural adherence to corporatism, which takes form in concentrated control of the means of production (mimicking that of capitalism). While socialism seeks to undermine and ultimately destroy the capitalist system, fascism seeks to fortify the late stages of capitalist accumulation by merging corporate power with the State.

As socialists view the working-class struggle as the primary vehicle to creating self-determination, fascists flatly reject economic (material) motives as a potential driving force for societal change. The authoritarian nature of capitalism is an ideal precursor to fascism. Because of this, fascism seeks to take the reins of the system and use it to carry out its nationalistic project that is based in a form of heritage or national identity as determined by the fascists. The Doctrine of Fascism explains ,

"Fascism [is] the complete opposite of…Marxian Socialism, [which posits] the materialist conception of history of human civilization can be explained simply through the conflict of interests among the various social groups and by the change and development in the means and instruments of production. Fascism, now and always, believes in holiness and in heroism; that is to say, in actions influenced by no economic motive, direct or indirect. And if the economic conception of history be denied, according to which theory men are no more than puppets, carried to and fro by the waves of chance, while the real directing forces are quite out of their control, it follows that the existence of an unchangeable and unchanging class-war is also denied - the natural progeny of the economic conception of history. And above all Fascism denies that class-war can be the preponderant force in the transformation of society."

The authoritarian nature of capitalism is rooted in its most elemental relationship - that between the owners and the workers - which naturally creates minority class dominance over the majority class. Fascism seeks to transform this class dominance into national dominance. Because of this, parasitic billionaire exploiters of the capitalist class (like Donald Trump) become welcome members of this nationalist project, and exploited workers who embrace fascism are more than willing to overlook the complicity of the creators of their own misery as long as these overseers are willing to repent through an embrace and renewal of ethnic nationalism.

The natural extension from capitalism to fascism is impossible to ignore. In structural terms, as concentrations of wealth and power are created through the mechanisms of capitalism, so too are widespread dispossession for the masses of people who exist under the system. Despite the construction of robust welfare and police states, which have been implemented to prevent this widespread dispossession from transforming into civil unrest, the weight of such unequal power dynamics is bound to crush the experiment we've come to know as "liberal capitalist democracy." This has never been more evident than in the neoliberal era, where both globalization and so-called "free-market" ideology have unleashed the system to do what it is designed to do.

An anarcho-capitalist (American "libertarian") analysis of fascism, presented by Sheldon Richman in the Library of Economics and Liberty, recognizes at least a part of the natural connection between capitalism and fascism, without overtly saying so:

"Where socialism nationalized property explicitly, fascism did so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the 'national interest'-that is, as the autocratic authority conceived it. (Nevertheless, a few industries were operated by the state.) Where socialism abolished all market relations outright, fascism left the appearance of market relations while planning all economic activities. Where socialism abolished money and prices, fascism controlled the monetary system and set all prices and wages politically. In doing all this, fascism denatured the marketplace. Entrepreneurship was abolished. State ministries, rather than consumers, determined what was produced and under what conditions."

While Richman would surely argue that such elements - autocratic control, currency manipulation, and the end of entrepreneurship - are not natural byproducts of capitalism, they perfectly describe the stage of monopoly capitalism (actual existing capitalism) that has inevitably developed as a result of the most basic mechanisms of the system: the labor-capital relationship and the private ownership of land as a means to exploit. In other words, what American "libertarians" like Richman describe as "corporatism" or "crony capitalism" is really just a mature and naturally developed stage of capitalism. The "cronies" are merely the beneficiaries of this inherent process. This point has been illustrated by many economists outside of the establishment , and perhaps most effectively and intensely by the Monthly Review school.

The insurmountable weight that capitalism has brought down on "democracy" has demanded the need for more authoritarian adjustments within government, as societal unrest becomes more likely. This mature stage of capitalism creates a ripe environment for fascism, both in its creation of a highly-centralized State apparatus that has already meshed with corporate power , as well as in its need to recruit masses of foot soldiers from within the systematically dispossessed population. The Fascist Doctrine describes the transfer of the "Liberal State" to the "Fascist State":

"The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State. The conception of the Liberal State is not that of a directing force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording results: on the other hand, the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State."

The transformation that Mussolini and Gentile describe is that of a capitalist state with pluralistic tendencies that are conducive to capitalist growth to one of a corporatist state with homogenous tendencies that are designed to protect and grow nationalist interests. While modern fascists in the United States tend to focus on "multiculturalism" and what they refer to as "cultural Marxism," they fail to realize that the same structure which shaped these social dynamics happens to be a prerequisite for the fascist transition. The Western capitalist system required a massive, intercontinental slave trade to get started, centuries of internationalist/globalist expansion to spur continuous growth, and an imperialist agenda that has displaced entire societies throughout the global South. In other words, the tactics that have been used to feed the capitalist system, most of which could be characterized as crimes against humanity , not only created the incredibly unequal distributions of wealth and power both nationally and internationally, but also created the societal makeups that fascist foot soldiers decry. In this sense, capitalism has not dug its own grave, like Marx once promised that it would; it actually has birthed the inevitability of fascism.

From "Liberal State" to "Fascist State"

Through capitalism's reliance on imperialism, the transition from Liberal State to Fascist State has already begun. In order to be formally transitioned into fascist control, it merely needs time, political direction, and a forceful wresting of power from the entrenched Liberal State. Once completed, the nature of imperialism shifts from one of economic motivations to one of nationalistic motivations. The doctrine discusses this process:

"For Fascism, the growth of empire, that is to say the expansion of the nation, is an essential manifestation of vitality, and it's opposite a sign of decadence. Peoples which are rising, or rising again after a period of decadence, are always imperialist; and renunciation is a sign of decay and of death. Fascism is the doctrine best adapted to represent the tendencies and the aspirations of a people, like the people of Italy, who are rising again after many centuries of abasement and foreign servitude. But empire demands discipline, the coordination of all forces and a deeply felt sense of duty and sacrifice: this fact explains many aspects of the practical working of the regime, the character of many forces in the State, and the necessarily severe measures which must be taken against those who would oppose this spontaneous and inevitable movement of Italy in the twentieth century, and would oppose it by recalling the outworn ideology of the nineteenth century - repudiated wheresoever there has been the courage to undertake great experiments of social and political transformation; for never before has the nation stood more in need of authority, of direction and order. If every age has its own characteristic doctrine, there are a thousand signs which point to Fascism as the characteristic doctrine of our time. For if a doctrine must be a living thing, this is proved by the fact that Fascism has created a living faith; and that this faith is very powerful in the minds of men is demonstrated by those who have suffered and died for it."

While gaining control of the State is formally accomplished through the emergence of electoral movements, it still requires a groundswell of support from the lower classes. The class divisions created by capitalism, especially within post-industrialized societies like that of the US, present the most opportune dynamics for what is sometimes referred to as "right-wing populism." Not only is the emergence of an industrialized middle class a key component in this development, but even more crucial is the subsequent collapse of this middle class. This second stage has been occurring in the US since the 1980s, with the onset of neoliberalism and globalization. Politically speaking, it has manifested itself in Reagan's neoliberal blueprint, the neoliberalization of the Democratic Party, the complete economic abandonment of the American working class by both major parties, the rise of proto-fascist groups like the Tea Party, the triumph of lesser-evilism, and now in the rise of 21st-century neo-Nazism and white nationalism, both of which have helped buoy an actual billionaire capitalist to the White House.

Gaining political support from the working class seems like a difficult proposition for those running for office, since the political parties in power are the same parties which have abandoned most Americans for the past several decades. However, this is where fascism's reliance on emotion and identity, or what Mussolini refers to as "duty," "holiness," and "heroism," over material need becomes so powerful. The structural dispossession of masses of people by macro-systems like capitalism is difficult to pinpoint, especially when systemic understanding is absent. Left-wing populism relies on these understandings, as well as the expectation that material conditions will motivate the working class to act in its own best interests, which are diametrically opposed to the interests of capital, bourgeois politicians from within the liberal democratic system, and of course billionaire businessmen. Fascism makes things easier, focuses on a national/racial identity, and deems all who exist outside of that identity to be enemies of the State. The structural pressure created capitalism, especially against that of the former middle class, or against anyone feeling as though they're losing privilege, creates an environment conducive for recruitment. This process was never explained more succinctly than by George Jackson :

"The shock troops of fascism on the mass political level are drawn from members of the lower-middle class who feel the upward thrust of the lower classes more acutely. These classes feel that any dislocation of the present economy resulting from the upward thrust of the masses would affect their status first. They are joined by that sector of the working class which is backward enough to be affected by nationalistic trappings and loyalty syndrome that sociologists have termed the 'Authoritarian Personality.' One primary aim of the fascist arrangement is to extend and develop this new pig class, to degenerate and diffuse working-class consciousness with a psycho-social appeal to man's herd instincts. Development and exploitation of the authoritarian syndrome is at the center of 'totalitarian' capitalism (fascism). It feeds on a small but false sense of class consciousness and the need for community."

The authoritarian nature of fascism is found in its reliance on identity, a fluid concept that allows for some maneuverability within the minds of its adherents, while also shoring up the herd mentality that becomes rooted in its perceived national agenda. In other words, the individual within a fascist movement may perceive themselves, the movement, and even the ultimate goal of the movement in varying ways; however, when called upon to act, their actions will always fall in line with the national agenda as set by its directors. This is why fascism requires the presence of strong leaders. Much like the Orc armies in JRR Tolkien's famous Hobbit series, the foot soldiers of fascism are easily swayed into violent action for a greater good that is constructed by a strong, charismatic leader. And with this support, those leaders can accomplish electoral feats previously unheard of.

Punching Down: The Fascist Engine of White Supremacy and Xenophobia

Despite the structural failures of both capitalism and "liberal capitalist democracy," American fascism would find difficulties materializing without a strong element of identity. Whereas left-wing populism clearly relies on the material desperation of the working class under capitalism, fascism's reliance on the vague concepts of "holiness" and "heroism" needs a constructed and recognizable identity. In America, the structural and cultural phenomenon of white supremacy serves as this identity, and therefore acts as the engine needed to redirect the widespread angst developed through the systematic dispossession created by capitalism and "democracy" into a nationalistic movement.

It is important to understand that white supremacy is not something only reserved for jackbooted neo-Nazis giving "Heil Hitler!" salutes, but that it is a systemic phenomenon which is heavily seeped in American culture. It is both a conditioned mentality and a material reality. The conditioned mentality that Black lives are substandard has been shaped through centuries of popular culture, from the racist Minstrel shows of the early 19th century, which utilized the " coon caricature" to lampoon Black people as dim-witted, lazy, and buffoonish, to modern TV shows like COPS, which perpetuates the racist stereotype that Black people are more prone to debauchery and criminality. The material reality has been shaped by two and a half centuries of chattel slavery followed by various forms of legalized systems of servitude and second-class citizenship, including sharecropping , convict leasing , Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. This history has built complex layers of institutional racism carried out under the guise of legality, and a systematic ghettoization supported by both " white flight" and widespread discriminatory housing and employment practices, all of which have combined to shape a uniquely intense experience for Black Americans who must face both class and racial oppression.

The two factors (conditioned mentality and material reality) interplay with one another in a way that is increasingly disastrous for the ways in which American society views and treats its Black citizens. Because of the perpetuation of racial stereotypes, people on average are less empathetic toward their Black counterparts. Studies have shown that white children as young as seven years old believe that Black children feel less pain than them; that emergency medical personnel are less likely to give pain medication to Black and Latinx children who are in pain; and that "Caucasian observers reacted to pain suffered by African people significantly less than to pain of Caucasian people." The material reality shaped by institutional racism has created a landscape where Black people are disproportionately poor, unemployed, and in prison. Martinot talks about this seemingly never-ending cycle that is centered within a highly racialized criminal punishment system:

"The social effects of this process are catastrophic, yet familiar. Not only does felonization of a population insure massive unemployment (a general tendency not to hire people with a record), but routine felony charges amount to systematic disenfranchisement (14% of black people by 1998, according to Fellner and Mauer). Recent studies indicate that one out of every three black men under the age of 30 has been through the judicial system in the last 25 years. To continually remove a sizable number of people from a community in this way constitutes a massive disruption of its social coherence. This disruption buttresses its criminalization as a community in white society's eyes, and rationalizes the disinvestment of capital and a general financial obstruction of community asset accumulation. Racial oppression, impoverishment, imprisonment and police impunity are all of a piece.

Ultimately, the increase in prison population has become one of the arguments, in social discourse, for further drug laws and racial profiling. It is a self-generating cycle. What is significant about it is that it is not perceived by white society at large as an extant injustice. Instead, more prisons are called for and accepted, again with a sense form of cultural familiarity ("how else are we going to deal with crime?"). This acceptance euphemizes itself in political campaigns as being "hard on crime" as opposed to addressing the social conditions that generate crime. It inhabits a white consensus in solidarity with the police and prison industry that have allowed for their untrammeled growth -- a consensus whose content is white racialized identity."

When turned on its head, white supremacists can use this current reality to support their arguments that Black people are in these positions because of "poor decisions," "a lack of personal responsibility," "a lack of work ethic," "laziness," or even some type of biological shortcoming, as is argued by so-called "race realists" (the modern term for pseudoscientific racism). Individualizing systemic problems is both a convenient way to blame victims of societal oppression, by basically ignoring history, and the result of a general lack of historical and practical knowledge regarding how systems shape lived realities for people within those systems.

The latter point helps explain why ignorance is naturally drawn to reactionary politics, and why fascism has always been the likely outcome for America. As most Americans suffer from extreme deficits in sociological, historical, economic, and systemic understanding, any reaction against personal misgivings (which are experienced by the working class as a whole under capitalism) will surely default into raw emotion for many. This is fascism's advantage, as it feeds off aimless frustrations. Ignorance is easily swayed; and guiding these frustrations into an intense anger against women, immigrants, Muslims, Black people, Brown people, or LGBTQ people, is easily accomplished.

Ignorance is also a harbinger to cowardice. Due to a lack of general understanding of the world around them, such people grow to see the world as a dangerous place. So they must back themselves into a corner, stockpile guns, become suspicious of any and all who do not look like them, and brace themselves for the globalist, Illuminati-led, Bilderberg-planned, Soros-funded, politically-correct, cultural-Marxist New World Order. Their lack of understanding leads them down a delusional rabbit hole, and their vulnerabilities and insecurities breed a cowardice that drives them to "punch down" at those who appear even more vulnerable than they. This authoritarian stance taken against class peers, and its need to dominate and brutalize marginalized people, is just waiting to get swept up in the fascist tide. And for many Americans, it inevitably has.

The Struggle Against Inevitability

Since the inevitability of American fascism is deeply rooted in both capitalism and white supremacy, any resistance against this fascist tide must be focused on destroying these two systems. Therefore, the only suitable orientation to embrace is one of a left-wing populist, internationalist, working-class, anti-racist ideology. The black-clad, masked anarchists and anti-fascists who have been physically confronting Trump's shock troops in the streets are firmly rooted in this orientation. They are the front lines of this struggle, but their effectiveness will ultimately be dependent on a mass, organized movement that includes political and labor-oriented groups on the left, and most importantly liberation groups that are rooted in justice for people of color and immigrant populations.

The upcoming war against American fascism will occur on multiple fronts. First, ground troops of the left (antifa and others ) are desperately needed to confront the violent, bigoted, gun-obsessed right wing that has formed under the banner of Americanism. These ground troops must be armed and proficient with guns, physically conditioned, and trained in hand-to-hand combat skills. A guerilla orientation influenced by the teachings of Che Guevara and Abraham Guillen , among others, and rooted in the approach of the original Black Panther Party and Fred Hampton's rainbow coalition (the BPP, Young Lords, and Young Patriots) is vital. Included in this need are community defense projects that can protect working-class people from the immediate dangers posed by right-wing militia groups, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and police.

Second, a multi-pronged attack against the capitalist system is needed. This must include a return to militant labor organizing and the inclusion and politicization of low-wage service sector workers. This must also include a left unity project that creates a coalition of anti-capitalist political, labor, and social justice groups that can effectively bring in and give the reins to immigrant laborers, the unemployed and underemployed, and specifically those who are most marginalized due to their racial, gender, or religious identity. A rejection of both capitalist political parties (Democrats and Republicans) is necessary in this struggle, as is a rejection of the lesser-evil approach to electoral politics that has brought the entire system rightward over the past 40 years.

Third, a struggle against government repression is unavoidable. The American government has a brutal history of crushing anti-capitalist dissent: the Haymarket martyrs , the execution of Joe Hill, the targeting and forced exile ofBill Haywood, the Palmer raids, the framing of Sacco and Vanzetti , McCarthyism, Communist blacklists, COINTELPRO , the MOVE bombing , the imprisonment of folks like Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier and Oscar Lopez Rivera, and the forced exile of Assata Shakur , are a few examples. Legitimizing the movement with a formidable, nationally-based political wing can help with this. A third party rooted firmly in anti-capitalism is needed to serve as a vehicle for spreading class consciousness among an American working class that has been strategically and historically shielded from this. While electoral victories would be nearly impossible and largely ineffective in the current structure, political pressure and education is a crucial tool that should be used to create legitimacy and transparency.

This struggle must be carried out with an understanding of the role that liberals and many progressives play in protecting the fascist movement. While conservatives and those on the "alt" and far right represent a clear enemy, liberals can sometimes pose as allies when it comes to mainstream political rhetoric. History shows this is not the case. It shows that no matter how progressive their platforms may appear, liberals will always side with the capitalist system and, most importantly, with their own stability and comfort within the system. This has never been more evident than in their recent support of a proven corporatist and war hawk in Hillary Clinton, their red-baiting propaganda since the election, their blanket condemnation of anti-fascists, their constant cries against counter-violence, and their false equivalencies against "extremists on both sides." The fact that the Democratic Party sabotaged Bernie Sanders, a politician whose platform is nothing more than that of a New Deal liberal, shows how far to the right they have moved since the inception of neoliberalism. Nancy Pelosi's honest proclamation that "we're capitalists and that's just the way it is" while answering an unscripted question from a student at a January "Town hall" appearance perfectly captured the smug elitism of the party, especially when considering Pelosi herself is married to a wealthy "businessman/investor" and has a net worth in the range of $43 to $200 million. Capitalism has been great for her and her family; however, not so great for 200 million Americans. And now we have a war on our hands.

The Pedagogy of Hip Hop: Underground Soundtracks for Dissecting and Confronting the Power Structure

By Colin Jenkins

Disclaimer: The language expressed in this article is an uncensored reflection of the views of the artists as they so chose to speak and express themselves. Censoring their words would do injustice to the freedom of expression and political content this article intends to explore. Therefore, some of the language appearing below may be offensive to personal, cultural, or political sensibilities.

On the 16th track of Immortal Technique's Revolutionary, Volume 2, Mumia Abu-Jamal theorizes on the inherent contradictions between the lived reality of many Americans and the notion of homeland [in]security. In doing so, he explains how the musical phenomenon of hip hop captures these contradictions by displaying "gritty roots" that are bound up in systemic injustice and deep feelings of fear and hatred. These feelings, according to Mumia, engulf entire generations of children who have been betrayed by systems of capitalism and white supremacy, and their intricately constructed school-to-prison pipeline:

"To think about the origins of hip hop in this culture, and also about homeland security, is to see that there are at the very least two worlds in America. One of the well-to-do and another of the struggling. For if ever there was the absence of homeland security, it is seen in the gritty roots of hip hop. For the music arises from a generation that feels, with some justice, that they have been betrayed by those who came before them. That they are at best tolerated in schools, feared on the streets, and almost inevitably destined for the hell holes of prison. They grew up hungry, hated, and unloved. And this is the psychic fuel that generates the anger that seems endemic in much of the music and poetry. One senses very little hope above the personal goals of wealth to climb above the pit of poverty. In the broader society, the opposite is true. For here, more than any other place on earth, wealth is more widespread and so bountiful, that what passes for the middle class in America could pass for the upper class in most of the rest of the world. Their very opulent and relative wealth makes them insecure. And homeland security is a governmental phrase that is as oxymoronic, as crazy as saying military intelligence, or the U.S Department of Justice. They're just words that have very little relationship to reality. And do you feel safer now? Do you think you will anytime soon? Do you think duct tape and Kleenex and color codes will make you safe?"

In his short commentary, Mumia refers specifically to the Black community in the US - a community that has been ravaged from every angle through America's relatively short history: two and a half centuries of chattel slavery followed by various forms of legalized systems of servitude and second-class citizenship, including sharecropping , convict leasing , Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. A history consumed with betrayal after betrayal, complex layers of institutional racism carried out under the guise of legality, and a systematic ghettoization supported by both " white flight" and widespread discriminatory housing and employment practices. Mumia juxtaposes this unique experience to the "broader society," one that is riddled with insecurities stemming from "opulent and relative" wealth, to expose the irony of "homeland security," a term that he views as oxymoronic.

Mumia is correct in characterizing the reactionary temperament of both the American middle and upper classes - sects that both determine and maintain dominant culture. Broader society is molded by this temperament, which is buoyed by small pockets of socioeconomic comfort floating in a vast sea of instability that not only plagues the Black community in its never-ending struggle against both white supremacy and capitalism, but also poor and working-class white communities that have been similarly doomed by their forced reliance on wage labor. Despite what he describes as "bountiful wealth," American society has always been propped up on this hidden base of despair, felt by a majority of the population that exists below the façade. Since the 1980s, this façade has been slowly chiseled away as neoliberalism has successfully funneled wealth to the few at the top while creating a race to the bottom for everyone else, including those once deemed "middle class."

This race to the bottom has exposed the underbelly of instability through its attack on a fast-eroding, mostly-white middle class that now finds itself desperately seeking reasons for its newfound despair. While those of us at the bottom may welcome the company, in hopes that it will bring the critical mass needed to finally confront and bring down the capitalist system, it also signals trying times ahead. In being consistent with similar erosions of "relative and bountiful wealth" throughout history, the American demise brings with it a fairly high probability of a fascist tide. In fact, this tide has already begun to form, largely through millions of white tears dropping from the Tea Party, its Reaganite forerunners, the "alt-right," a surge of neo-Nazism and white nationalism, and Donald Trump's pied piper-like rhetoric that has pooled it all together.

While middle-class America comes crashing down along with the empire, the Black community remains steadfast in its centuries-long defensive posture. Despite facing an acute, structural oppression that is unparalleled in any other modern "industrialized" setting, and in spite of Mumia's sobering analysis, the Black community has in many ways survived and thrived like no other. This survival in the face of intense hatred has been expressed through many musical forms , from the early roots of rock n roll, Blues, and American Jazz to the hip-hop phenomenon that Mumia speaks of. This collective survival is perfectly captured in Tupac's poem,The Rose that Grew from Concrete, which tells the story of

…the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete
Proving nature's laws wrong, it learned how to walk without havin feet
Funny it seems but by keepin its dreams
It learned to breathe fresh air
Long live the rose that grew from concrete
When no one else even cared.

In explaining the meaning of the poem, Pac summed up much of the African-American experience, as well as the reactionary temperament often directed at it from those in more privileged positions:

"You try to plant somethin in the concrete. If it grows, and the rose petal got all kind of scratches and marks, you not gonna say, "Damn, look at all the scratches and marks on the rose that grew from concrete." You gonna be like, "Damn! A rose grew from the concrete?!" Same thing with me… I grew out of all of this. Instead of sayin, "Damn, he did this, he did this," just be like, "Damn! He grew out of that? He came out of that?" That's what they should say… All the trouble to survive and make good out of the dirty, nasty, unbelievable lifestyle they gave me. I'm just tryin to make somethin."

Pac's story also describes that of the entire American working class, as a collection of former slaves, indentured servants, peasants, and poor immigrants set up for failure by a capitalist system designed to exploit us all, collectively. The working-class struggle is tightly intertwined with the Black struggle. The Communist Party knew this long ago. The Industrial Workers of the World did as well. The original Black Panther Party also knew this, as did all those coming from the Black Radical Tradition in America: W.E.B. DuBois, the African Blood Brotherhood, Harry Haywood, the Revolutionary Action Movement, Frances M. Beal, Angela Davis, C.L.R. James, the Combahee River Collective, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Congress of African People, and so many others.

As this struggle commences and intensifies during what appear to be the end days of American Empire, underground hip hop provides us with a soundtrack that is laced with historical context, deep analysis, and valuable knowledge - all of which should be applied while moving forward. The "psychic fuel" that Mumia points to in his brief commentary, which "generates the anger that seems endemic in much of the music and poetry" is far from misguided, and extends far beyond cathartic release. While in the mainstream, the Black Radical Tradition continues to be tragically mocked by identity politics , activist-celebrity tweeters pimping corporate brands , black liberation-themed credit cards , high-dollar-plate events, non-profit organizations, and the Democratic Party, its torch remains lit through the lyrics burning on underground hip-hop tracks. And this underground reflects the pulse of the streets, where tens of millions experience daily life in the underbelly of instability - not on Twitter, Facebook, or fundraising dinners at the Marriott.

Structural Oppression Under Capitalism

As resistance movements gain momentum in the days of Trump, an understanding of the disastrous effects of capitalism is necessary. Party politics are, as John Dewey once explained, the "shadow cast on society by big business (capitalism)." Politicians from both parties work within this shadow, delivering rhetoric to the masses before and after taking orders from their donors, sponsors, and corporate overlords. Regardless of who is in the highest office, whether it's an eloquent black President or a blustering billionaire, "the attenuation does not change the substance." As a popular Internet meme recently noted, the 'hood under Trump is the same as the 'hood under Obama, which was the same as the 'hood under Bush, which was the same as the 'hood under Clinton. Sadly, this sentiment could go on for as long as Presidents have occupied the white house. Politicians and presidents come and go, and nothing changes for most of us; because, quite frankly, it is not supposed to. Politics serve capitalism; and capitalism does not serve us.

"It's like an open-air prison and it remained packed"

Hip hop serves as historiography in this sense, documenting the conditions of neighborhoods throughout the US for the past four decades, examining the histories behind multi-generational poverty, and seeking ways to address the dire situations many find themselves in. Ironically, the rise of hip hop paralleled the rise of the neoliberal era, a period that has been marked by an intensification of the capitalist system. During this time, things for most have at best remained stagnant, and at worst become increasingly disastrous. The hook in Erykah Badu's The Cell (2008) captures this lived experience in sobering fashion:

We're not well
We're not well
We can't tell

Brenda done died with no name
Nickel bag coke to the brain
Will they ever find the vaccine?
Shitty-damn-damn-baby-bang
Rich man got the double barrel
Po' man got his back to the door
Code white stands for trouble
Shots from the po-po (blah blah)

Jean Grae's Block Party , the 4th track on her 2002 album Attack of the Attacking Things, provides an intimate glimpse into the state of Black communities during this time:

I don't wanna preach or come off bitter, this is a commentary auditory
Editorial, about the state of things, state of mind and state of being
What the fuck is goin on? How the fuck we gonna make it out?
It's hectic, from asbestos filled classrooms
To the stench of death that's still in New York
The air is thick with it, but it reaches further
Like the world murder rate

While illustrating the chronic conditions found in many communities, Grae immediately offers insight into possible solutions rooted in consciousness. Without actually saying it, her lyrics brilliantly dip into a structural analysis that calls for abandoning capitalist culture and realizing the tragic ironies in seeking individual materialistic goals. In doing so, there is an underlying theme to escape values that have been implanted into not only predominantly Black communities, but also working-class communities as a whole:

We need to globalize, further spread on this earth
To appreciate the full value of individual worth
To realize how ridiculous the thought of ownership is
And protectin your turf - that's bullshit man
That's how we got colonized
Missionaries create foreign schools and change the native way & thinkin
So in ten years, we can have a foreign Columbine
In some small village in the Amazon, c'mon man

Grae's second verse masterfully ties together a narrative based in seeking a collective consciousness while avoiding a house-slave mentality that aims to, as she puts it, "chill with rich white folks." Again, while directed toward members of the Black community, Grae's commentary is undeniably relative to the working-class struggle in its entirety, especially in terms of how the "rags-to-riches," so-called "American Dream" is framed strictly within individual pursuits of wealth and hyper-consumerism. Ultimately, as Grae suggests, this mentality must be shed through deeper calls for knowledge, community, and shared struggle:

It's every man for himself
That's why the black community is lackin in wealth, there's no unity
We soon to be chillin with rich white folk
And that means that we made it
Let our kids go hungry before our wardrobe is outdated

…If the system's corrupt, then change it
Fought for the right to vote, don't even use it
Forget electoral winnin
The way the world's goin, we in the ninth inning
Heh, and we still aren't up to bat
Niggas is happy just to have the rights to sit on the bench
Like floor seats is alright, and that's as far as we reach
Materialistic values, not morals, that's what we teach
I see it in the youth, hungry for fame and money
Not for knowledge and pursuit of the truth
Pick up a book or a newspaper
Take a free class in politics or human behavior

Talib Kweli and Rapsody's Every Ghetto , the 2nd track on Kweli's 2015 album Indie 500, echoes Grae's track in addressing the systematic ghettoization of the Black community under the intertwined tandem of capitalism and white supremacy. Crucially, the track challenges the often-mistaken attempt to characterize ghetto life as a monolithic existence, seemingly warning against the fetishization of the black struggle while reflecting Pac's poem of the concrete rose and highlighting the unique struggle and persistence of the Black working class. Kweli's bridge builds on Grae's Block Party narrative, celebrating the communal potential of struggling communities:

I'm good walkin' in every ghetto around the world
The hood often embrace ya when you profound with words
I say the shit they relate to, I keep it down to Earth
Other rappers sound like they hate you, them niggas sound absurd
So when they walk through the ghetto they get their chain snatched
They gotta talk to the ghetto to get their chain back
It's like an open-air prison and it remain packed
Nothin' but straight facts

Kweli's initial verse jumps directly into a layered analysis, with the first bar alone touching on chronic malnourishment, poor education, smothering crime, gentrification, and a culture of anti-consciousness:

Every ghetto, every city, like Ms. Hill
They way too used to the missed meals
Hard to concentrate, hard to sit still
Murder rate permanent place in the top 10
We live here, these hipsters drop in
You hear them barrels cockin'
They say consciousness mean a nigga ain't rugged
Until they get beat within an inch of it

Rapsody closes the track with a powerful verse, filled with structural and cultural critiques all tied to capitalism and white supremacy. Her verse is laced with innuendo in a masterful play on words as she illustrates the lived reality of generations of Black Americans who have been systematically targeted by America's settler-colonial project, pointing to everything from police terror and the destruction of the Black family unit to the false promises of individualized pursuits of wealth.

Indie 5, for the people by the people
Ya-ya, giddy up, who got the juice now?
Snatch it out your kiddies cups
The shit you gave us watered down
This one's for Basquiat
They be brushin' with death, uh
Is this The Art Of War for cops?
We double-dutchin' duckin' shots
Every home ain't got a Pops
Every man ain't sellin' rocks
A different will to win here
Different from switchin' cars
They pray that we switch our bars
To a fiend from a metaphor
Worldstar, Worldstar
Lotta love and this life hard
Keep us prayin' like "oh God"
Illegally thievery think us peelin' off easily
Frustrated we hate it
That's why we scream out "nigga we made it"
It's an odd future they ain't know we was all some creators
Somethin' from nothin' was told Kings walk and man you frontin'
For the people and by the people but them over money
I'm on my Viola Davis here, workin' for justice
How you get away with murder? Be a cop and just kill us
How we supposed to not catch feelings?
Innocent lives, boy we got kids in these buildings
I'm on my Viola Davis, it's what you call a defense
For all the drama they gave us I'm spittin' Shonda Rhimes wit
Too high for you like ganja, that's what Shonda rhyme with
I holla back in the Hamptons, you still black if you rich
Spread love ain't just the Brooklyn way, it's universal
360 and the nine lives, whoa, what a circle

"Keep it movin' on"

While systemic oppression has plagued many generations of working-class Americans, especially non-white (as noted by Grae, Kweli and Rapsody), the middle class has only begun to feel the pressure of the capitalist system. The American middle class is an anomaly in history. Its formation defied the internal mechanics of capitalism, a system that is designed to favor the privileged few who have access to enough capital to own the means of production. This anomaly was beneficial for America's capitalist class, in that it allowed for a slick rebranding of capitalism as a system of "freedom" and "liberty." For decades, the American middle class was held up as the ultimate advertisement for a system that we were told allowed for social mobility through "hard work." These fables became so strong that an entire century was spent trying to shape a benevolent form of capitalism through government intervention (Keynesianism) and a robust Welfare State. Because of its relative success, mainly due to US imperial endeavors abroad, the capitalist system was not only propped up, but it was even sold to the masses as "the only alternative." The era of neoliberalism ended all of that. As capitalism's internal mechanics were unleashed during this period, so too were its natural consequences - capital accumulation for the elites, and mass dispossession for the people.

While mainstream media outlets continue to push a tired narrative, hip hop has shed some light on the real effects of capitalism. Vinnie Paz's 2010 track Keep Movin' On provides insight into these effects, and especially how they relate to the American worker. The first verse informs us in two ways. First, Paz illustrates the workers' role in the capitalist system, which is merely to serve as a tool to be used and exploited until no longer needed. In this role, we are not considered as human beings with families, needs, and inherent rights; we are only valuable as long as we provide owners with an avenue of extracting surplus labor from us for their profit. Second, the verse specifically describes the plight of the American manufacturing worker and the demise of middle-class jobs over the past 40 years due to globalization, corporate offshoring, and free trade agreements - all elements of the proliferation of capitalism in the neoliberal era:

I lost my job at the factory and that's disastrous
They said it's due to regulation and higher taxes
They ain't give me no notice. They knocked me off my axis
I can't pay the electric bill. It's total blackness
I suggested some incentives for innovation
But that was met with resistance like it's a sin of Satan
I'm losing my patience over here. I'm sick of waiting
And I ain't never expect to be in this situation
And the manufacturing jobs are fading fast (Damn)
Can't do nothing else. I should've stayed in class
I have to wait till summertime to cut the blades of grass
I have this little bit of money. Have to make it last
I have children to feed. I have a loving wife
I had a hard time coming that was nothing nice
I keep asking myself what am I doing wrong
And they just look at me and tell me "Keep it movin' on"

"Kill my landlord"

Along with massive unemployment and underemployment, the working class is also constantly faced with insecure housing situations. Landlordism is a natural byproduct of a capitalist system which seeks to commodify basic human needs such as food, clothing, housing, and healthcare for profit. Under this system, the few who can afford to own multiple properties are allowed to exploit the many who can barely afford basic shelter for themselves and their families. Because of this, many of us go our entire lives without ever establishing a stable home environment.

As of 2017, this natural housing crisis has reached a point where it's being labeled an epidemic even by mainstream sources. As rent continues to soar , so do evictions. " As of 2015 , more than 20 million renters-more than half of all renters in the U.S.-were cost burdened, meaning they spent at least at least 30 percent of their income on rent. That's up from almost 15 million in 2001. And while rents have risen 66 percent since 2000, household incomes have only risen 35 percent." In 2015, an estimated 2.7 million Americans faced eviction. Median rent has increased by more than 70% since 1995, while wages have stagnated for almost 30 years, and jobs that pay a living wage have disappeared during this same period. Landlords will go to great lengths to throw families and children out in the streets, sometimes even for falling behind one month on rent. "A landlord can evict tenants through a formal court process," explains Matthew Desmond , "or they can choose cheaper and quicker ways" to boot the families, such as "paying them a couple of hundred dollars to vacate by the end of the week" or even by removing the front door of the home. In order to protect this for-profit housing system from total collapse, the federal government uses numerous programs to assist people, including public housing, rental assistance, and even massive tax subsidies for homeowners. Despite this, many families are cold-heartedly exploited and discarded by landlords who want nothing more than to profit off this forced, human desperation. After living such an existence, The Coup's 1993 track Kill My Landlord , which featured the less-known rap duo Elements of Change, is surely to serve as a long-standing anthem for many:

Overlord of the concrete jungle but I'm humble
As I witness my opponent crumble
Like the shack that I live in the house that I rent from him
Roach infested I'm sure that the rats are nesting
The heat doesn't work he still hasn't checked it
Disrespected me for the last time
I loaded up the nine stepping double time
Bullseye, Another point scored
Right between the eyes of my landlord

All who have relied on rental property to live can certainly relate to the undignified relationship between landlord and tenant. Like bosses, landlords exploit us as resources. And the capitalist system not only allows them the power to do this on mass scale, it actually supports their rights with force if necessary. Our collective desperation is their individual gain. And our forced dependency on them leaves us with no leverage against their power. The second verse of The Coup's classic track reflects on this slave-like existence brought on by capitalism and landlordism:

So me I'm chilling at the table with my family
Hypothetically trying hard to keep my mind off the economy
Yeah I know the reason I find it hard to pass the test
Call me a victim cause I'm another brother jobless
Every day it seems like I'm moving closer to the streets
PG&E repo'ed the lights and my fucking heat
The situation's getting hard for me to handle
Had to trade my Nike's to the store to buy some candles
Last to first and I'm a-hunted and a ho I know
The man is going to come and throw me in the cold
Tears in my eye as I'm thinking of place to stay
While I'm staring at the freebie cheese up in my plate
I heard a bang bang bang knocking at my door
I looked up it was my motherfucking landlord, let him in quick
Followed by the sheriff deputy trying to come in
Every po on my property, staring me down
Mugging hard up in my family's face
While they're sitting at the table trying to say grace
But before I make this one my last meal
Any moves, yeah I'm looking for the damn kill
I said it twice in case he didn't hear me though
Sucker made a move evidently when he hit the floor
So now I'm in cuffs for the crimes I've committed
Maybe I'll go to jail, heh, or maybe I'll get acquitted
But the fact still stands I killed my landlord dead
Now I've got three meals and a roof over my head

In the third verse, Boots Riley connects the inherent injustices of landlordism to not only capitalism, but also to European conquest and the process of primitive accumulation that allowed settler-colonists to create wealth from the Atlantic Slave Trade and Indigenous holocaust. There is an overt racial component to this process, as descendants of former slaves are still forced to depend on descendants of former slave-owners for basic needs. Recognizing the injustices and illegitimacy of this system, and seeking revolutionary change, is crucial. Boots delivers knowledge:

Cash is made in lump sums as street bums eat crumbs
So I defeat scum as I beat drums
Rum-tiddy-tum like the little drummer boy song
Here comes the landlord at the door, ding dong
Is it wrong that my momma sticks a fat-ass thong
Up his anal cavity cause he causes gravity to my family
Says we gotta pay a fee so we can stay and eat
In a house with light and heat
The bastard could get beat, stole the land from Chief Littlefeet
House is built on deceit, got no rent receipt
So I'm living in the street and I'm down now
Don't you know to not fuck with the Mau Mau?
Notice of eviction, four knuckle dental affliction
Friction, oh did I mention
You'll be finger licking as I handicap your diction
And you say you're not a criminal like Tricky Dick Nixon?
While we're fixing to impose rent control
We didn't vote on it, this land wasn't bought or sold
It was stole by your great granddaddy's ganking
Osagyefo said they call it primitive accumulation
Plantations, TV stations wealth is very stationary
I learned the game and I became a revolutionary
Scaring the corporate asses cause the masses are a loaded gun
Killing the world banking and international monetary fund
I'm done, we're done with what you've done
For twenty-five score we've got a battle cry
Kill my, kill my, kill my, kill my
Kill my, kill my, kill my, kill my landlord

While representing a main staple of capitalism, landlordism also mimics the dynamics of settler societies in that settlers gain a disproportionate amount of land ownership at the expense of the mass dispossession of native populations. In many ways, modern landlords in the US represent the traditional colonizer, often buying up property in "foreign" communities for the sole purpose of exploiting masses of renters through dispossession and forced reliance. As in the process of gentrification, landlords dispossess thousands of poor and working-class people in their never-ending pursuit for more and more property to commodify. E-Roc finishes the track strong, calling on a figurative Mau Mau rebellion to "kill" the modern version of colonizers.

I need six hundred dollars by the end of the week
My body is cold, dirty socks on my feet
Not a black sheep, but who's the creep
Trying to put me on the street while I'm trying to sleep?
I wanna kill my landlord, murder in the first degree
If there's something wrong he wants to blame me
Wants to be a threat so he carries a gun
Well I pack a 9 cause I can't trust 911
Son of a gun, I'm the one who cuts the grass
Wash the windows and he still wants me to kiss his ass
But I laugh cause America's not my home
My landlord took me away from where I belong
But it's a sad song so I face reality now
Pick up the phone and now here comes the Mau Mau
To the rescue, down with The Coup
Yo landlord, I've got a little message for you
I'm going cuckoo, fuck a machete or sword
E-Roc is on a mission to kill my landlord

How the Capitalist/Imperialist War Machine Works Against Us

On Track 7 of Immortal Technique's 2005 Bin Laden remix album, Mumia Abu-Jamal once again spits knowledge, this time providing brilliantly poetic commentary framing capitalism and imperialism as " a war versus us all ":

The war against us all
This war in Iraq isn't the end; it's the beginning of Wars to come
All around the world at the whim of the Neo-Cons in the White House
This is the Bush Doctrine come to life; War, war and more war!
War brought to you by the big corporate-masters who run the show
This isn't just a War on Iraqis or Afghanis or Arabs, or even Muslims
It is ultimately a War on us all.
That's because the billions and billions that are being spent on this War
The cost of tanks, rocketry, bullets and yes even salaries
For the 125, 000 plus troops, is money that will never be spent on;
Education, on healthcare, on the reconstruction of crumbling public housing
Or to train and place the millions of workers
Who have lost manufacturing jobs in the past three years alone
The War in Iraq is in reality; a war against the nations' workers and the poor
Who are getting less and less
While the big Defense industries and making a killing, literally.
What's next Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela?
We've already seen the corporate media
Play megaphone to the White House, to build and promote a War based on lies
War is utilized by the imperialists first and foremost, to crush internal enemies
We're seeing the truth of its insight
When we see the sad state of American education
The rush of seniors to buy affordable medications from the Canadians
Because American drugs are just too expensive
The threat of privatization of Social Security
And the wave of repression that comes with an increasing Militarized Police;
This is a War on all of us
And the struggle against War is really a struggle for a better life
For the millions of folks who are in need here in this country!
The fight against the War is really to fight for your own interest
Not the false interests of the Defense Industry
Or the corporate media or the White House
Down with the Wars for empire.

Immortal Technique's subsequent track, Bin Laden , is a masterful critique of US imperialism and the corollary effects of government control on American citizens. Written during the W. Bush administration and the Iraq War, the track touches on the fear-mongering that led to the Patriot Act, the hypocrisy of American politicians, and the CIA's dealings in the Middle East during the 1980s, which created and strengthened groups like the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Tech begins by contrasting the lived realities of most American citizens with the artificial realities disseminated from the power structure and its calls for blind patriotic loyalty:

I pledge no allegiance, fuck the President's speeches!
I'm baptized by America and covered in leeches.
The dirty water that bleaches your soul, and your facial features.
Drowning you in propaganda that they spit through the speakers.
And if you speak about the evil that the government does.
The Patriot Act will track you to the type of your blood.
They try to frame you and say you was trying sell drugs.
And throw a federal indictment on niggas to show you love.
This shit is run by fake Christians, fake politicians.
Look at they mansions, then look at the conditions you live in.

He wraps up the first verse by summarizing US foreign policy during the 1980s, specifically referring to the substantial financial and military aid provided to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan during their prolonged war against the Soviet Union. During this time, Osama Bin Laden was a US ally who was a beneficiary of much of this aid, as was Saddam.

All they talk about is terrorism on television.
They tell you to listen.
But they don't really tell you they mission.
They funded al-Qaeda.
And now they blame the Muslim religion.
Even though Bin Laden was a CIA tactician.
They gave him billions of dollars and they funded his purpose.
Fahrenheit 9/11? That's just scratching the surface!

…And of course Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons.
We sold him that shit after Ronald Reagan's election.
Mercenary contractors fighting in a new era
Corporate military banking off the war on terror.

The fact that the US government once supported and funded Bin Laden, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein is not the main point in Tech's lyrical thesis, but rather the context that leads us into deeper analysis on US foreign policy, the military industrial complex, and the rise of Islamophobia and the War on Terror. By showing how loyalties easily sway, Tech is showing us how the purpose of US interventions abroad are not really about "protecting freedom" or "defending us." Rather, US foreign policy is a chess game played by the capitalist ruling class for the purpose of engineering and maintaining the US Empire , which in essence is serving as the forerunner and protector of the global capitalist system. So-called terrorism and "Muslim extremism" are nothing more than a manufactured fears designed to scare a sizable portion of the American public into supporting these destructive efforts abroad. Samuel Huntington's 1996 book Clash of Civilizations is often looked to as the main driver in this farce of a cultural/religious global war. In supporting Tech's message, Noam Chomsky talks about the obvious contradictions of Huntington's thesis here , as Edward Said further discredits it here . A simple search of stock reports for major weapons manufacturers over the past decade shows how profitable the "war on terror" has been. Understanding geopolitics is often as easy as following the money.

Part of Tech's second verse includes a brilliant critique of state nationalism and patriotism, illustrating how and why government and capitalist interests are not the same as the peoples' interests, despite being advertised as such. While these wars spread and intensify, most of us continue to struggle.

They say the rebels in Iraq still fight for Saddam
But that's bullshit, I'll show you why it's totally wrong
'Cause if another country invaded the hood tonight
It'd be warfare through Harlem and Washington Heights
I wouldn't be fighting for Bush or White America's dream
I'd be fighting for my people's survival and self-esteem
I wouldn't fight for racist churches from the South, my nigga
I'd be fighting to keep the occupation out, my nigga

…. 'Cause innocent people get murdered in the struggle daily
And poor people never get shit and struggle daily

In a remixed version of this track that includes hip-hop vets Chuck D and KRS-One, Tech tweaks the lyrics to this verse in order to show how the "clash of religions" narrative, as highlighted by Chomsky and Said, is falsely perpetrated:

They say that terrorism revolves around the Qur'an
But that's stupid, I'll show you why it's totally wrong
Cause if this country was invaded and crumbled
I'd turn Harlem into a Columbian jungle
And I wouldn't be fighting for a Christian nation
I'd be fighting for survival from extermination
I wouldn't fight for Fox News, them racist niggas
I'd be fighting for the hood, for the faceless niggas

Tech also addresses the hypocrisy of America's fundamentalist Christian sect, which strongly supports the Republican Party, the clash of civilizations/religion narrative, the Israeli Apartheid state, and military interventions abroad. Christian fundamentalism in the US plays an important role as a conduit to white supremacy and class warfare, as seen in its common stance against the interests of both the Black community and the immigrant community, as well as the poor and working-class communities altogether. This conduit has shown itself in the Republican Party's four-decade-long Southern Strategy and the rise of Donald Trump's presidency, which has brought with it overt elements of white supremacy, or as Tech puts it, "devils that run America like 'Birth of a Nation,' a popular white-supremacist propaganda film from 1915:

Government front religious, but their heart is empty
Like a televangelist preaching out of his Bentley
Calling abortion murder in a medical building
But don't give a fuck about bombing Iraqi children
Talking like units in the fucking libretto
Look at their mansions and look at your suburban ghetto
The gulag, the new hood where they send us to live
Cause they don't give a fuck about none of our kids
That's why Blacks and Latinos get the worst education
While devils run America like "Birth of a Nation"
Affirmative action ain't reverse discrimination
That shit is a pathetic excuse for reparations

Fake News, Structural Misinformation, and How the Ruling Class Control Politics

The notion of "fake news" has become a prominent theme in American politics due to Donald Trump's constant use of the term to explain what he views as his unfair treatment and misinterpretation by some media outlets. Ironically, the term is also being used by liberal opponents of Trump to claim that Russia had influenced the Presidential election in Trump's favor. The Washington Post even went as far as publishing a report citing "anonymous groups" to list dozens of online news sources that allegedly served as "instruments of Russian propaganda" during the 2016 Presidential race. Despite some backpedaling on the initial article (to include an editor's note and the removal of some websites from the list), liberal-leaning media outlets like the Washington Post and MSNBC have persisted with this seemingly hysterical and bizarre Russophobic angle to attempt to discredit Trump's presidency. As if Trump's personal history, business dealings, fascist rhetoric, narcissism, constant lies, and hyper-capitalist policy platform are not bad enough.

There are some very interesting points to take from this liberal narrative. One is regarding the corporate media itself, which has both perpetuated the allegations of "fake news" and been accused of delivering it. Ironically, Trump is correct in referring to these news sources as fake. But they are not fake for the reasons he claims they are fake - which is only regarding how they portray things related to him. They are fake because they ceased being news agencies decades ago. They are now part of the entertainment industry. They are concerned with ratings and advertising profit, not with delivering information to the public. Information does not sell, sensationalism does. Fox News knows this just as much as MSNBC and CNN know this. To earn profit, you need ratings. To get ratings, you need people to tune into your channel. To get people to tune into your channel, you need drama, controversy, fear, sex, shock, sensationalism; in other words, entertainment.

Another point is regarding corporate news as a de facto fourth branch of government. Often referred to throughout history as the fourth estate, media and press journalism have long been relied on to provide a valuable fourth branch of checks and balances in the US. However, as time has gone on, rather than uncovering conflicts of interest, exposing backroom deals, and delivering investigative journalism, the media in the US has become both complicit and indifferent in and to government corruption. This was never more evident than in the months leading up to the Iraq War, which according to Australian journalist John Pilger , may have never happened if journalists had done their job of uncovering truths in the face of, and in spite of, power:

"…had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children might be alive today; and millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and the infamous Islamic State might not now exist."

Media collusion with the power structure has been a central theme to the work of Pilger, who has consistently tied the media's full institutional compliance to what is properly referred to as "the deep state" or "invisible government" through the proliferation of propaganda . This was also the main theme of Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman's 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, as well as the subsequent 1992 documentary by the same name. According to Chomsky and Herman, mass media in the US "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship , and without overt coercion." Which is to say that profit-driven news not only seeks to appease popular narratives, but also will toe the government line in return for continued access or exclusive scoops, all of which are determined by government officials.

Immortal Technique's 2003 track, The 4th Branch , fortifies the work of Pilger, Chomsky, and Herman by illustrating how the media and its propaganda serve the ruling-class narrative. Released in the aftermath of 9-11 and during the beginnings of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Tech weaves multiple theses into a central theme of propaganda versus reality. The hook sums up the track:

It's like MK-ULTRA, controllin' your brain
Suggestive thinking, causing your perspective to change
They wanna rearrange the whole point of view of the ghetto
The fourth branch of the government, want us to settle
A bandanna full of glittering, generality
Fightin' for freedom and fightin' terror, but what's reality
Read about the history of the place that we live in
And stop letting corporate news tell lies to your children

The opening verse introduces us once again to Huntington's clash-of-civilizations narrative and the role of Evangelical Christians in pushing forth this narrative. Tech focuses on the moral bankruptcy of Christian fundamentalism in the US and how US foreign policy is continuously designed on a base of hypocrisy and misinformation, carried out by agents of the capitalist class:

The voice of racism preachin' the gospel is devilish
A fake church called the prophet Muhammad a terrorist
Forgetting God is not a religion, but a spiritual bond
And Jesus is the most quoted prophet in the Qu'ran
They bombed innocent people, tryin' to murder Saddam
When you gave him those chemical weapons to go to war with Iran
This is the information that they hold back from Peter Jennings
Cause Condoleezza Rice is just a new age Sally Hemings

The remainder of the first verse continues the critique on conservative ideology and Christian fundamentalism, tying them into the ultimate hypocrisies perpetrated in the founding of the United States. The miseducation that most of us are subjected to through years of formal education interplay with Tech's exposure of the public misinformation that disseminates from media sources, all of which combine to produce a hidden history of the US that is a perfectly pliable tool firmly in the hands of the ruling class:

I break it down with critical language and spiritual anguish
The Judas I hang with, the guilt of betraying Christ
You murdered and stole his religion, and painting him white
Translated in psychologically tainted philosophy
Conservative political right wing, ideology
Glued together sloppily, the blasphemy of a nation
Got my back to the wall, cause I'm facin' assassination
Guantanamo Bay, federal incarceration
How could this be, the land of the free, home of the brave
Indigenous holocaust and the home of the slaves
Corporate America, dancin' offbeat to the rhythm
You really think this country, never sponsored terrorism
Human rights violations, we continue the saga
El Savador and the contras in Nicaragua
And on top of that, you still wanna take me to prison
Just cause I won't trade humanity for patriotism

Returning to Vinnie Paz's track, Keep Movin' On, we see the experiences and views of an American soldier, handpicked from the working class to serve in illegal and immoral wars and occupations abroad. The verse touches on everything from the recruitment process and the brainwashing effects of patriotism to the gruesome effects of serving as tools of war for the capitalist ruling class :

I signed up cause they promised me some college money
I ain't the smartest motherfucker but I'm not a dummy
They told me I would be stationed in places hot and sunny
I had a lot of pride. Motherfuckers got it from me
These people over here innocent. They never harmed me
My sergeant tried to convince me that they would try to bomb me
I feel like an outsider stuck inside this army
Everybody brainwashed. American zombies
I ain't realized how much it set me back
Until I lost my leg and then they sent me back
I don't have anything now. I'm left with scraps
From a government who created AIDS, invented crack
People told me not to join. I tried to prove 'em wrong
Now I'm homeless and I'm cold without no food thas' warm
I keep asking myself, "What did I do that's wrong?"
And the government telling me, "Keep it movin' on"

Tech's closing comments on the 4th Branch summarizes the class-component that shapes the military industrial complex, a system designed to create, maintain, and protect private profit. Echoing Paz's verse on the experience of soldiers, Tech illustrates our role in this system while touching on the constant propaganda we are bombarded with, which pushes this narrative of "we," as if "we" have anything in common with the American ruling/capitalist class and their servants in mass media.

The fourth branch of the government AKA the media
Seems to now have a retirement plan for ex-military officials
As if their opinion was at all unbiased
A machine shouldn't speak for men
So shut the fuck up you mindless drone
And you know it's serious
When these same media outfits are spending millions of dollars on a PR campaign
To try to convince you they're fair and balanced
When they're some of the most ignorant, and racist people
Giving that type of mentality a safe haven
We act like we share in the spoils of war that they do
We die in wars, we don't get the contracts to make money off 'em afterwards
We don't get weapons contracts, nigga
We don't get cheap labor for our companies, nigga
We are cheap labor, nigga
Turn off the news and read, nigga
Read... read... read

Tech's final verse is powerfully connected to liberation movements of the past, echoing among other the great Irish socialist, James Connolly, and his call for international, working-class solidarity during the beginnings of World War I. In his A Continental Revolution (1914) , Connolly sums up the profit motive and class-basis of war:

"… [in war] the working class are to be sacrificed that a small clique of rulers and armament makers may sate their lust for power and their greed for wealth. Nations are to be obliterated, progress stopped, and international hatreds erected into deities to be worshipped.

… against the patriotism of capitalism - the patriotism which makes the interest of the capitalist class the supreme test of duty and right - I place the patriotism of the working class, the patriotism which judges every public act by its effect upon the fortunes of those who toil.

To me, therefore, the socialist of another country is a fellow-patriot, as the capitalist of my own country is a natural enemy."

"Fake news" is simply propaganda constructed through ruling-class channels to boost systems and cultures that support the power structure. In other words, it is the status quo. It is nothing new. It happens rather naturally, flowing from concentrations of money and power. Regarding the newfound liberal version of "fake news," the final point to consider relates to the idea of an outside influence on American politics. Long before the Russia hysteria surfaced, the American political system had been bought and sold numerous times over. To suggest that politicians from either major party ever represented the interests of American people is incredibly naïve. Campaign financing and corporate lobbying determine who wins political races and which legislation is introduced and passed in Congress. Long before Russia was accused of influencing elections, Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms were proven to influence elections. Long before Trump supposedly got a boost from Putin, official US policy had been directly shaped by Israeli interests in the Middle East.

Access to oil has always determined foreign policy, access to capital for big business has always determined economic policy, and the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision has ensured that the Kochs', Soros', Gates', and Buffetts' of the world will always hold more political weight within the electoral system than 100 million voters combined, if they so choose. Whether it's Goldman Sachs, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Koch brothers, George Soros, or Putin, the American people have never had a say in what the political machine does or doesn't do. This fact renders the Trump-Russia hysteria as moot. Any real sense of US national interests has long been replaced by the global capitalist order, if they ever truly existed at all. In terms of political empowerment and self-determination for the working-class majority within the US, a foreign president is no different than any number of nameless American millionaire hedge-fund donors.

The Seamless Political Machine and the Failures of Identity Politics: From Reagan to Trump

Within electoral politics, lesser-evilism has become the dominant stance for at least half of the American population. For individual voters, the 2-party duopoly has been mostly abandoned as identifications with either party have reached near-historic lows . As of 2015, nearly half of registered voters identify as something other than Republican or Democrat. However, despite this overwhelming rejection of the 2-party system, many of these voters continue to choose what they view as the "lesser evil" in voting for candidates from one of the two major parties.

Since the Reagan administration and introduction of a seamless political machine based in neoliberalism (an intensification of capitalism), presidential administrations regardless of party have been almost indistinguishable. Despite this seamless identity that's emerged, many voters still insist on claiming differences between the two corporate parties, even if it means choosing what they view as the lesser-evil. The fact that some public radical intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Angela Davis have proposed lesser-evilism lends this direction some undue credence. However, when we step back and analyze the big picture, away from the emotions that often emerge in the heat of electoral moments, it is easy to see that lesser-evilism, as an electoral tactic embraced by the Left, has pushed the entire political system to the right over the past 40 years. Clear evidence of this shift can be seen in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, which carried forth Reagan-esque economic policy, while also gutting welfare (Clinton), facilitating mass incarceration of the Black community (Clinton), escalating US bombing campaigns (Obama), pushing historical levels of deportation of immigrants (Obama), and maintaining the attack on civil liberties that began under W. Bush (Obama). Even more evidence is the emergence of Bernie Sanders as a candidate who is viewed as being an outlier of the Democratic Party, despite an ideological identity that is consistent with run-of-the-mill liberalism of old. Yet, when compared to a Democratic Party that has clearly shifted rightward, toward more hard-line capitalist-friendly policies that have characterized the neoliberal era started by Reagan, as well as highly-destructive imperialist missions abroad, Sanders looks like a radical.

Killer Mike's 2012 track, Reagan, brings us to the start of the neoliberal era. In a social context, specifically regarding the treatment of Black communities throughout the country, the Reagan era merely picked up on hundreds of years of oppression. By implementing an official "war on drugs," this era provided the basis for what Michelle Alexander termed The New Jim Crow , in her book with the same title. It also created a new wing of the military industrial complex through the construction of an extensive for-profit prison system and widespread militarization of domestic police forces. Mike's second verse introduces us to the Reagan environment, as experienced by the Black community:

The end of the Reagan Era, I'm like 'leven, twelve, or
Old enough to understand the shit'll change forever
They declared the war on drugs like a war on terror
But what it really did was let the police terrorize whoever
But mostly black boys, but they would call us "niggers"
And lay us on our belly, while they fingers on they triggers
They boots was on our head, they dogs was on our crotches
And they would beat us up if we had diamonds on our watches
And they would take our drugs and money, as they pick our pockets
I guess that that's the privilege of policing for some profit

The intensification of American policing in poor communities of color served a bigger purpose. As Mike explains in the same verse, it bolstered the cornerstone of US economics and capitalism: free labor. As per the 13th amendment of the US Constitution , "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." In other words, the forced free labor of convicts in the US prison system is still legal. And the "war on drugs" helped to create nearly 1.3 million free laborers for mainstream corporations , as the prison population in the US grew from roughly 300,000 in 1980 to over 1.5 million in 2015 . Killer Mike touches on this:

But thanks to Reaganomics, prisons turned to profits
Cause free labor is the cornerstone of US economics
Cause slavery was abolished, unless you are in prison
You think I am bullshitting, then read the 13th Amendment
Involuntary servitude and slavery it prohibits
That's why they giving drug offenders time in double digits

Mike closes the track by moving the focus from Reagan to the system, telling us that Presidents (and most politicians, for that matter) are nothing more than "employees of the country's real masters," serving capitalist interests rather than the masses of people:

Ronald Reagan was an actor, not at all a factor
Just an employee of the country's real masters
Just like the Bushes, Clinton and Obama
Just another talking head telling lies on teleprompters
If you don't believe the theory, then argue with this logic
Why did Reagan and Obama both go after Gaddafi
We invaded sovereign soil, going after oil
Taking countries is a hobby paid for by the oil lobby
Same as in Iraq, and Afghanistan
And Ahmadinejad say they coming for Iran
They only love the rich, and how they loathe the poor
If I say any more they might be at my door
(Shh..) Who the fuck is that staring in my window
Doing that surveillance on Mr. Michael Render
I'm dropping off the grid before they pump the lead
I leave you with four words: I'm glad Reagan dead

Reagan the man may be dead, but his spirit has survived in symbolic terms through the perpetuation of neoliberalism's capitalist/imperialist order. The actions of our last President, Obama, who may appear to be the polar opposite of Reagan in any superficial analysis, confirms this perpetuation. The 2015 remix, Obamanation 4 , hammers this truth home in magnificent fashion. Opening with excerpts of speeches from Malcolm X, the track sets up a premise of systemic analysis as Malcolm rails against the "international Western power structure (capitalism)," calling upon "anyone, I don't care what color you are, as long as you want to change the miserable conditions on this earth."

Echoing Killer Mike's track, M-1 (from Dead Prez) uses his verse in Obamanation 4 to expose the systemic nature of our political system, illustrating how not only the Democratic Party, but also the first Black President, equal nothing more than cogs in an imperialist machine. His analysis begins by disregarding the propaganda stemming from right-wing sources like Fox News and syndicated radio, all of which claimed Obama represented a diversion from politics-as-usual by having some mythological "radical-left-wing agenda." In reality, Obama's administration continued, and even escalated in some cases, America's imperialist endeavors abroad. M-1 flips this "right-wing propaganda" and puts it back on progressives, rhetorically asking "who you gonna blame" now that the man in charge is no longer a white Republican named Bush:

After you divorce yourself from the right wing propaganda campaign, it's all simple and plain.
America customed the game.
Your President got an African name, now who you gonna blame?
When they drop them bombs out of them planes.
Using depleted uranium, babies looking like two-headed aliens.
Follow the money trail, it leads to the criminal.
Ain't nothing subliminal to it, that's how they do it.

Continuing on this theme, M-1 pinpoints Obama as the new head of the US' global imperialist agenda, even touching on the irony of a Black man carrying out neo-colonialism with white-supremacist underpinnings. M-1's verse is not only insightful in its blanket condemnation of the 2-party machine, but also in its inherent warning about the dangers of a brand of identity politics that seeks to plug folks from historically marginalized groups into the power structure. Ultimately, to M-1, as to all radicals and revolutionaries, it's the system that drives our injustices, not the figureheads chosen to facilitate the system:

See the game they run.
Give a fuck if he's cunning, articulate, and handsome.
Afghanistan held for ransom.
By the hand of this black man, neo-colonial puppet.
White power with a black face, he said fuck it I'll do it.
…. Last stage of imperialism, I ain't kiddin.
In the immortal words of Marvin Gaye 'This ain't living.'

On the same track, Black the Ripper picks up on M-1's analysis, keeping the focus on Obama as nothing more than a figurehead of a system that must be opposed. This particular verse includes a harsh critique, deploying the house-slave mentality in describing Black figures in power, as well as their accomplices:

See it's not where you're from, it's where you're at.
He's sitting in the White House, so who cares if he's black?
And why's there still soldiers out there in Iraq?
Natural resources ain't yours, it's theirs, give it back!
You're just another puppet, but I'm not surprised
Look at Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.
They didn't change shit, house nigga's fresh off the slave ship.

The Obamanation remix includes a verse from Lupe Fiasco's track, Words I Never Said. The verse fits the overall narrative perfectly, keeping focus on systemic operations. Lupe takes the analysis even further, touching on various social aspects stemming from capitalism and imperialism, most notably those which keep the American public in line, agreeable, and ignorant through a process of devalued education, fear-mongering, and mind-numbing celebrity gossip. All of this, Lupe suggests, leads to what Chomsky has referred to as "manufactured consent," which he strongly rejects:

I really think the war on terror is a bunch of bullshit.
Just a poor excuse for you to use up all your bullets.
How much money does it take to really make a full clip?
9/11, building 7, did they really pull it?
Uh, and a bunch of other coverups.
Your child's future was the first to go with budget cuts.
If you think that hurts, then wait, here comes the uppercut.
The school was garbage in the first place, that's on the up and up.
Keep you at the bottom but tease you with the upper crust.
You get it, then they move it, so you never keeping up enough.
If you turn on TV, all you see's a bunch of "what the fucks."
Dude is dating so and so, blabbering 'bout such and such.
And that ain't Jersey Shore, homey, that's the news.
And these the same people supposedly telling us the truth.
Limbaugh is a racist, Glenn Beck is a racist.
Gaza strip was getting bombed, Obama didn't say shit.
That's why I ain't vote for him, next one either.
I'm a part of the problem, my problem is I'm peaceful.
And I believe in the people.

Lowkey concludes the remix with a strong verse on American imperialism, an agenda that has become indistinguishable between various Presidents and both corporate parties. He points to specific missions carried out under the Obama administration, seemingly calling to attention those who continue to portray Obama as a separation from the Bush administration. The verse serves as a prophetic warning about Syria, and nails home M-1's earlier reduction of Obama as just another "neo-colonial puppet" doing the job that every American President is called upon to do, including bombing an African country (Libya) and disposing of a leader (Gaddafi) known for promoting pan-Africanism throughout the continent:

Was the bigger threat from Osama or from Obama?
Military bases from Chagos to Okinawa.
I say things that other rappers won't say.
Cause my mind never closed like Guantanamo Bay.
Hope you didn't build a statue or tattoo your arm.
Cause the drones are still flying over Pashtunistan.
Did he defend the war? No! He extended more.
He even had the time to attempt a coup in Ecuador.
Morales and Chavez, the state's are on a hunt for ya.
Military now stationed on bases in Columbia.
Take a trip to the past and tell em I was right.
Ask Ali Abunimah or Jeremiah Wright.
Drones over Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya.
Is Obama the bomber getting ready for Syria?
First black president, the masses were hungry.
But the same president just bombed an African country.

The false hopes placed in the first Black President highlight the failures and pitfalls of identity politics, a political approach that is grounded in assimilation. This approach to social justice attempts to mold a multicultural, multi-sex, non-gender-descript power elite by simply placing individuals who identify with these hyper-marginalized groups into the existing power structure. Thus, the ultimate goal is more Black bankers, more gay landlords, more transgender politicians, more women Senators, and so on. This approach has led to the creation of what the left-wing publication Black Agenda Report (BAR) has deemed the black misleadership class in the US. Obama was the ultimate product of this class, but not the totality of it. For as long as identity politics seek to assimilate into the power structure, this class will persist, as will the formation of other such classes: the gay misleadership class, the transgender misleadership class, the women's misleadership class (Hillary), etc..., because, ultimately, the power structure does not exist to serve the people, no matter how diverse it is. Nas touches on this in his 1999 track, I Want to Talk to You , which addresses the frustrations of living under a government that does not represent:

Step up to the White House, let me in
What's my reason for being, I'm ya next of kin
And we built this motherfucker
You wanna kill me because my hunger?
Mr. America, young black niggas want ya
I wanna talk to the man, understand?
Understand this motherfuckin G-pack in my hand
Look what happened to San Fran
Young girl hit by policeman
Twelve shots up in her dome, damn
….Dissin us, discrimination different races
Tax payers pay for more jail for Black Latin faces

Coming full circle, Nas closes the track by delivering a prophetic warning against identity politics, characterizing BAR's "black misleadership class" as nothing more than "fake black leaders [who] are puppets, always talking 'bout the city budget (rather than addressing problems that plague their communities)."

What y'all waitin for the world to blow up
Before you hear this rewind this 4 minutes before we timeless
Let y'all niggas bang my shit before Saddam hits
Let Nastradamus tell us what time it is
They try to buy us with doe
Fake black leaders are puppets, always talking 'bout the city budget
The news got it all confused lyin to the public
They eyes watchin stay wise move above it
Water floods predicted, hurricanes, twisters
Its all signs of the Armageddon, three sixes
People reverse the system, politics vs. religion
Holy war, Muslim vs. Christians
Niggas in high places, they don't got the balls for this
People in power sit back and watch them slaughter us
Mr. President I assume it was negligence
The streets upside down, I'm here to represent this

Confronting the Power Structure

Modern working-class resistance is still rooted in Marx's class war analysis, whereas the proletariat (those of us who are forced to depend on our labor to survive) finds itself fighting for its collective life against the bourgeoisie (the owners of the means of production) and the layered power structure created by this economic realtionship. It is also crucially intertwined in the fights against other forms of structural oppression, including white supremacy, patriarchy, and misogyny; because, quite frankly, all forms of oppression that splinter the working class must be effectively destroyed if the working class has any hopes of overcoming the capitalist system.

In echoing Malcolm X's famous "the ballot or the bullet" speech from 1964, working-class resistance must include "action on all fronts by whatever means necessary." Since the police represent the front lines of a criminal justice system inherently designed to enforce class oppression, as well as structural white supremacy, working-class resistance must include a firm stance against not only police brutality and mass incarceration, but also against the very foundation of modern policing, which is rooted in "slave-catching" and strike-breaking. This means standing in blanket opposition to policing as an institution designed to "serve and protect" capitalist property and enforce laws created by a capitalist ruling class with capitalist interests in mind. Reflecting on the Black community's especially intense history of oppression at the hands of police, hip hop has delivered a proper analysis and call to action. From NWA's seminal track Fuck tha Police (1988) to David Banner and Tito Lo's Black Fist (2016), the armed extension of the capitalist state is consistently exposed, as it has left countless Black lives lying in its tracks with no signs of slowing. Banner and Lo's track captures the sheer anger and frustration stemming from this reality:

[Banner]

These crackers got drones. They are flying their saucers
Keep your white jesus, don't pray to your crosses
They are burning our churches, K.R.I.T. pass me the UZI
I know how to work it; I know how to Squirt it
No Martin, No Luther, No King, No Marching No choirs don't sing
The same christian lovers that raped our GrandMothers and hung our GrandFathers from trees
They are enemies!
Blood on the leaves, blood on the streets, blood on our feet
I'm sick of walking, I'm sick of dogs getting sicced on us, I'm sick of barking
I'm sick of spitting written sentences listeners don't get
Don't get, don't get, don't get!
Because they got Chains on their brains and that is not a diss

[Lo]

… I'm staying religious, cause we stay in the trenches
And gotta play where they lynch us, done came to my senses
I bet them crackas never came through my fences
Ya burn up ya cross, and I'll burn up ya corpse
Then I turn and bang and do the same to the witness
Hang 'em and dangle 'em in the street looking up at his feet
So you never forget this we did this for Martin and Malcolm, even Mandela
Jimmie Lee Jackson and then Medgar Evers
For Clyde Kennard, hard labor slaving in the yard
For Huey, for Hampton, for Bobby we GODLY
For Jordan Davis we gon' play this, for Sandra Bland we gon' stand
I'm still out here stomping, for Janaya Thompson, from the Coast to Compton

The video for Black Fist shows a series of events that encapsulate what working-class justice would look like outside the parameters of capitalism and white supremacy. This includes a people's arrest, people's trial, and subsequent execution of a police officer who was acquitted of murdering a Black teenager. The fact that this hypothetical scenario could be remotely controversial illustrates how strong we've been conditioned to equate our current system with any real sense of justice, of which there is very little if any. The environment of injustice that is bred under so-called legalities is masterfully summed up in Lauryn Hill's Mystery of Iniquity (2002):

Ya'll can't handle the truth in a courtroom of lies
Perjures the jurors
Witness despised
Crooked lawyers
False Indictments publicized
Its entertainment the arraignments
The subpoenas
High profile gladiators in bloodthirsty arenas
Enter the Dragon
Black-robe crooked-balance
Souls bought and sold and paroled for thirty talents
Court reporter catch the surface on the paper
File it in the system not acknowledged by the Maker
Swearing by the bible blatantly blasphemous
Publicly perpetrating that "In God We Trust"
Cross-examined by a master manipulator
The faster intimidator
Receiving the judge's favor
Deceiving sabers doing injury to they neighbors
For status, gratis, apparatus and legal waivers
See the bailiff
Representing security
Holding the word of God soliciting perjury
The prosecution
Political prostitution
The more money you pay.. the further away solution

…Blind leading the blind
Guilty never defined
Filthy as swine
A generation purin it's own mind
Legal extortion
Blown out of proportion
In vein deceit
The truth is obsolete
Only two positions:
Victimizer or Victim
Both end up in destruction trusting this crooked system

Running hand in hand with capitalism's version of "justice" is the underlying dominance of white supremacy. In the formation of the United States as a nation, as well as the customs, cultures, and systems we've become accustomed to during this process, white supremacy has played a formidable role. It has created an all-powerful wedge among the working class, rendering its potential limited. Its divisive message is often hidden in powerfully emotional rhetoric regarding "American values" and patriotism, all of which secretly (or not so secretly in the era of Trump) call for protecting the Eurocentrism that has systematically devalued black skin in dominant American culture. In an old-school track from 1991, Ice Cube uses brilliant analogy and powerful lyrics while condemning America's history of white supremacy and challenging the toxicity of patriotic rhetoric, concluding with the need to " kill Sam":

I wanna kill him, cause he tried to play me like the trick
But you see, I'm the wrong nigga to fuck with
I got the A to the motherfuckin K, and it's ready to rip
Slapped in my banana clip
And I'm lookin.. (lookin..)
Is he in watts, oakland, philly or brooklyn?
It seems like he got the whole country behind him
So it's sort of hard to find him
But when I do, gotta put my gat in his mouth
Pump seventeen rounds make his brains hang out
Cause the shit he did was uncalled for
Tried to fuck a brother up the ass like a small whore
And that shit ain't fly
So now I'm settin up, the ultimate drive-by
And when you hear this shit
It make the world say "damn! I wanna kill sam"

…Here's why I wanna kill the punk
Cause he tried to take a motherfuckin chunk of the funk
He came to my house, I let 'em bail in
Cause he said he was down with the l.m
He gave up a little dap
Then turned around, and pulled out a gat
I knew it was a caper
I said, "please don't kill my mother, " so he raped her
Tied me up, took me outside
And I was thrown in a big truck
And it was packed like sardines
Full of niggas, who fell for the same scheme
Took us to a place and made us work
All day and we couldn't have shit to say
Broke up the families forever
And to this day black folks can't stick together
And it's odd..
Broke us down, made us pray - to his god
And when I think about it
It make me say "damn! I wanna kill sam"

…Now in ninety-one, he wanna tax me
I remember, the son of a bitch used to axe me
And hang me by a rope til my neck snapped
Now the sneaky motherfucker wanna ban rap
And put me under dirt or concrete
But god, can see through a white sheet
Cause you the devil in drag
You can burn your cross well I'll burn your flag
Try to give me the h-I-v
So I can stop makin babies like me
And you're givin dope to my people chump
Just wait til we get over that hump
Cause yo' ass is grass cause I'mma blast
Can't bury rap, like you buried jazz
Cause we stopped bein whores, stop doin floors
So bitch you can fight your own wars
So if you see a man in red white and blue
Gettin chased by the lench mob crew
It's a man who deserves to buckle
I wanna kill sam cause he ain't my motherfuckin uncle!

Ultimately, resistance in the 21st century must focus on the inherent inequities created by the capitalist system and the corrollary social hierarchies that support these inequities. There simply is no choice but to destroy and replace this system. Gang Starr's 1998 track Robbin' Hood Theory hammers this home, urging us to "squeeze the juice out of all the suckers with power, and pour some back out so as to water the flowers." Just as reparations are needed to begin to address the history of Black enslavement in America, so too is mass working-class expropriation of the capitalist class. In realizing the illegitimacies of the wealth accumulated under this system , we must formulate bold moves toward recuperating it for all of society. Guru preaches, leaving us with our battle cry:

Now that we're getting somewhere, you know we got to give back
For the youth is the future no doubt that's right and exact
Squeeze the juice out, of all the suckers with power
And pour some back out, so as to water the flowers
This world is ours, that's why the demons are leery
It's our inheritance; this is my Robin Hood Theory... Robin Hood Theory

… They innocent, they know not what they face
While politicians save face genius minds lay to waste
If I wasn't kickin rhymes I'd be kickin down doors
Creatin social change and defendin the poor
The God's always been militant, and ready for war
We're gonna snatch up the ringleaders send em home in they drawers
But first where's the safe at? Let's make em show us
And tell em hurry up, give up the loot that they owe us
We bringin it back, around the way to our peeps
Cause times are way too deep, we know the Code of the Streets
Meet your defeat; this is my Robin Hood Theory... my Robin Hood Theory

…Necessary by all means, sort of like Malcolm
Before it's too late; I create, the best outcome
So I take this opportunity, yes to ruin the
Devilish forces fucking up my black community
And we ain't doing no more interviews
Til we get paid out the frame, like motherfucking Donahue
We're taking over radio, and wack media
Cause systematically they getting greedier and greedier
Conquering turfs with my ill organization
Takin out the man while we scan the information
You wanna rhyme you best await son
You can't even come near, if you ain't got our share
You front on us this year, consider yourself blown out of here
Yeah... by my Robin Hood Theory

Marxism, Psychiatry, and Capitalism: An Interview with Dr. Bruce M. Z. Cohen

By Brenan Daniels

This is the transcript of a recent email interview I did with Dr. Bruce M. Z. Cohen, senior lecturer at the University of Auckland and author of "Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), where we discuss capitalism and psychiatry, and view psychiatry under a Marxist lens.

What made you want to apply a specifically Marxist view to psychiatry and psychology?​ Are you personally a Marxist and how did you come to be one?

That's a good question. I didn't expect to ever be writing such a book, but thanks to my students I realised that someone had to take responsibility for filling a current gap in the literature. I run a postgraduate course on the Sociology of Mental Health, in which my students complete project essays on topics of their own choosing. As it is a sociology course, they are obviously required to apply different theoretical approaches to their chosen issue. I always encourage the students to consider the wide range of theoretical approaches available to them including structural functionalism, labeling, social constructionism, Foucauldian, critical feminist and race theory, as well as Marxist scholarship. Regarding the later, my students complained that they couldn't find anything much out there. As a lecturer, I am always a little skeptical of such claims, but -hats off to my students!- they were correct on this occasion. With all the literature on mental health and illness currently in circulation, I found it astounding that there was no standard Marxist account available. Hence, the main reason for writing Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness.

To answer the second part of your question, yes I am a Marxist! Though I grew up in a very conservative -large as well as small 'c'- part of England in the 1980s, my parents were members of the CPGB (Communist Party of Great Britain). (In fact, my mother became the first communist parish councilor in the area, kicking out a Tory in the process). So I was politically conscious and politically active from a young age thanks to my family, imbued with a strong sense of social justice, and particularly incensed by Thatcher's attacks on the trade unions and the working classes at the time (which most people in my area thought was just fantastic!). But I think being a sociologist has really made me a fully committed Marxist; whichever area you are studying or working in, be it religion, education, health, crime, the family, or whatever, it doesn't take long to uncover evidence that the needs of capital determine the priorities of these institutions- they reproduce inequalities, oppress the majority of the population, and produce surplus value for a privileged minority. Is this a kind of society that, in good conscience, I or any sociologist can accept or support? Of course not! That's why I'm a Marxist. Human beings can do better.

Please discuss the connection between psychiatry, psychology, education, and capitalism and how the former institutions have been influenced by the latter, historically speaking.

Following my point above, the mental health system (I use this as an umbrella term here to bring together psychiatry, psychology, and the various support professions and agencies working in the area of mental health including therapists, counselors, psychiatric nurses, and social workers) and the education system in their contemporary forms are both products of industrial capitalism. Briefly, compulsory schooling developed across western societies in the nineteenth century due to the needs of capital for higher skilled workers as well as to socially control working class youth (through, for example, socializing them into the norms and values of capitalism as the only "correct" way to think and understand the world). As I discuss in my book, the mental health system develops during the same period as another institution of social control: the asylums separate the able from the non-able bodied, it pathologises and confines problematic populations (primarily working class groups).

In neoliberal society, I argue that the connections between the mental health system and the education system (as well as many other areas of public and private life) have become much stronger and more explicit. For example, my socio-historical case study of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in the book demonstrates that the origins of the diagnosis began with psychologists' concern for deviant working class youth who failed to "adapt" to the demands of compulsory schooling. A hundred years later, we can still see in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) that the symptoms of ADHD have nothing to do with having a mental illness but rather denote the requirements for more productive and efficient students and workers (for instance, forgetting or losing homework, failing to complete assigned tasks, poor time-management, and so on). As the demands on young people to stay on at school and go further in education have increased, so we have seen an increase in mental health experts in this area, and thus the increasing medicalization of "at risk" (I would argue, non-conforming) children. The expansion in the use of diagnoses such as autism and "oppositional defiant disorder" by psychiatry can also be theorized as serving a similar purpose here.

In what way does capitalism utilize psychiatry and psychology to demonize and ridicule those who have politics that don't fit with the status quo? (This has been talked about somewhat before and I would be interested in hearing you expand upon it.)

I devote a chapter to this issue in my book, but to be honest I think a whole monograph is required on the subject. It's a fascinating (and, as you do the research, shocking) issue. I can follow many other scholars by reiterating that the mental health system is highly effective in neutralizing threats through pathologising political and social dissent. I think it's more effective than say the criminal justice system because the courts are usually questioning the legality of the person's actions alone, rather than the rationality or sanity on those actions. Imprisonment of a protester, for instance, does not fundamentally undermine his or her actions or beliefs in the same way as being labeled as mentally sick does.

There are many examples of this process in operation. In the late nineteenth century, the suffragette movement was a frequent target for the "hysteria" label. During the civil rights movement in the US, there was a significant increase in the labeling of young Black men with "schizophrenia" (psychiatrists sometimes referred to this as "the protest psychosis"). Similarly, young African-Caribbean protesters in the deprived inner cities of 1980s Britain were theorized by psychiatrists as prone to "cannabis psychosis." As I mention in the book, I think an increasingly popular diagnosis which the mental health system is utilizing to pathologize those involved in civil disobedience or political violence today is antisocial personality disorder (APD): post-9/11, you can see that psychiatry is taking a much greater interest in medicalising any behavior which breaks the legal or moral status quo within capitalist society, particularly acts which involve perceived or actual violence.

How is psychiatry not an actual science in some ways? May people assume it is just by virtue of its utilization of 'experts' and 'quantitative studies'?

This is really at the heart of the matter. To be considered as a valid branch of medicine, psychiatry has to reach the medical "gold standard," which is to observe and identify real pathology on the body. And, though they're tried repeatedly to do this, so far psychiatry has failed in this fundamental goal. Most recently, for example, the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) DSM committee (which was responsible for producing the DSM-5) came to the following conclusion: the causation of mental disease remains unknown (for example, there is no useful biological marker or genetic test that has been identified) and psychiatrists still cannot distinguish between mentally healthy and mentally sick people. And of course without accurate identification of disease, a medical discipline cannot claim proof of causation or evidence of successful treatment, and they certainly cannot predict future cases of that disease.

So, to answer your question, no psychiatry is not a valid medical science. However, I argue in the book that progressing knowledge on madness (if such a thing is even possible) was not the reason for the establishment of the psychiatric profession or the continuation and expansion of the mental health system today. Rather, it's a discipline that has supported capitalism, both in the pursuit of surplus value as well as being an institution of ideological control, responsible for reinforcing the norms and values of this society and punishing deviations from them.

In what ways does this massive increase in the labeling of people having psychological disorders affect us on a personal, familial, and community level? How does this increase the alienation from ourselves and our larger communities that has been going on for some time now?

The biggest issue is that it individualizes what are fundamentally social and political issues in this society. This obviously suits capitalism, it follows a neoliberal ideology that you need to work on yourself and look nowhere else for solutions to your problems. As I argue in the book, this is why the psychiatric discourse has been allowed to become all-encompassing (effectively "hegemonic") over the last few decades; it has become highly useful in de-politicizing the oppressive reality of our lives. The involvement of the mental health system here is only one factor in the bigger issue though, which is of course the way the neoliberal project has attempted to destroy the social and the collective.

What are the negative aspects of self-diagnosing and how does that reinforce the status quo?

As with Marx's famous comments on religion as the opium of the people, I think we can understand self-labeling and people desiring to have such a label as a way of coping with the alienating tendencies of capitalism. It's no solution to the fundamental issues they have, but it can be a means of survival and maybe a limited form of "emancipation" at times. For example, the parents of a child who is underperforming in school may desire a mental illness diagnosis so that they can claim extra funding for study assistance, or someone who doesn't enjoy socializing in large groups may seek a psychiatric diagnosis so that they can legitimately take antidepressants which dull their inhibitions.

There are a number of significant problems with self-labeling: most obviously, you cannot solve the social and political problems of capitalism with a mental illness label or by being subjected to talk therapy, drugs, or electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). It can obviously be dangerous to your health (for example, long-term users of antidepressants tend to die at a considerably younger age than non-users), and it can be stigmatizing. Further, it falsely legitimates the mental health system as a valid medical enterprise.

How do you see the working class overcoming this system?

Ultimately it's a case of abolishing the mental health system and all its supporting apparatus. As with the criminal justice system, this is not an institution that has ever functioned in the interests of the working classes. At the end of my book I suggest a few practical things that can be done immediately to challenge and weaken the power of the mental health experts, these include: campaigning to remove psychiatry's compulsory powers to confine and drug people against their will, withdrawing their prescription rights, and outlawing ECT. I also think it is crucial to form closer alliances between academics, left wing activists, community groups, and progressive psychiatric survivor organizations to build a strong abolitionist alliance against the psychiatric system.

Tell us about your upcoming book and where you and others argue that "the best form of treatment for mental disorder is no treatment at all, and the causation of mental illness itself has yet to be established." It would be great to hear about those last two parts in-depth.

Well, I've hopefully addressed those two specific issues previously in this interview - what passes for "treatment" at the hands of the mental health system is, ironically, very bad for your physical and emotional health. Perhaps that is unsurprising given that mental disorders are fabrications produced by psychiatry without real evidence for their existence.

The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Mental Health (due out later this year) is an edited collection of original contributions from colleagues in the US, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, which systematically problematizes the practices, priorities, and knowledge base of the western system of mental health. Basically, I have constructed a comprehensive resource manual which offers a variety of ways in which to theorize the business of mental health as a social, economic, political, and cultural project. So, for instance, the book provides updates on critical theories of mental health such as labeling, social constructionism, antipsychiatry, Foucauldian, Marxist, critical feminist, race and queer theory, critical realism, critical cultural theory, and mad studies. But it also demonstrates the application of such theoretical ideas and scholarship to key topics such as medicalization and pharmaceuticalisation, the DSM, global psychiatry, critical histories of mental health, and talk therapy. I'm very pleased at how it has turned out.

Is there a way to bring back a form of alternative psychiatry or psychology at all?

Some scholars are positive about the development of a post-revolutionary "Marxist psychology" or similar. I don't think that's possible, and I worry about giving these professions any sort of way out. My analysis points to these professions as agents of social control; they have always been responsible for policing the population not for emancipating them. So my answer to that question is an emphatic "no!"

Bruce M.Z. Cohen is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His other books include Mental Health User Narratives: New Perspectives on Illness and Recovery (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and Being Cultural(Pearson, 2012).

The Question of Hierarchy: An Interview with Colin Jenkins

By Brenan Daniels

This is a recent email interview I did with Hampton Institute founder and Social Economics Dept. Chair, Colin Jenkins, on the nature and problems with hierarchical structures, which he discusses in his article entitled Deconstructing Workplace Hierarchies: On Contrived Leadership and Arbitrary Positions of Power .

Some people would argue that hierarchies are needed as people aren't really capable of leading themselves or that if they did, we wouldn't have a stable modern society. What is your response to that?

First, I would ask where this "stable modern society" is? For a majority of the world's population, life is incredibly unstable. For many, life is dire. Even in a so-called "advanced" society like the US, tens of millions of people suffer from homelessness, food insecurity, joblessness, a lack of reliable and affordable healthcare, and with no means to feed and clothe their children. Tens of millions must rely on government assistance. Tens of millions do not receive adequate education. Tens of millions live paycheck-to-paycheck and can't pay their bills. And millions are terrorized by police forces and government agents in their own neighborhoods. Most Americans have less than $1,000 in savings , if any, and studies have estimated that more than half of all working Americans are one paycheck away from being homeless . And even those who appear to be getting by just fine are actually buried in debt, with credit card debt averaging $16,000 per household , mortgage and car payments that are barely doable, and student loan debt averaging at $49,000 per borrower, many of whom are in no position to ever pay that back. Our collective existence, despite a general appearance of comfort, is extremely fragile. And this economic reality doesn't even begin to touch on the compounded social realities lived by historically marginalized sections of the working class - people of color, women, immigrants, etc… The US is a ticking time bomb on the verge of exploding at any moment. Stability is a mirage.

Second, the idea that "people aren't capable of leading themselves" stems from a need to maintain fundamentally unequal societies where a very small percentage of the population controls most of the wealth and power. This has become part of the dominant ideology of most of the modern world. Because, quite simply, when a very small percentage of a particular population controls everything, there must be various ways to justify and enforce this control.

One way is through brute force or the threat of such force, which the modern nation-state holds a monopoly on. This is accomplished through the mere construction of a criminal justice system that has laws and ways of enforcing those laws. Over time, these laws become equated with some vague form of morality that is not questioned by most. You see the effects of this everywhere. For instance, when people try to condemn political struggles for doing things that are "illegal," they have subconsciously bought into the idea that written laws which have been drawn up by millionaire politicians , who are directly influenced by billionaires, should be revered as some sort of moral code. In reality, many of these laws are constructed to keep our extremely unequal society intact, and are directly tied to protecting those who own this illegitimate wealth and power . They are designed to keep most of us powerless and stuck in our increasingly precarious lives. Under such a society, a person who does not have access to food for themselves or their family is punished for taking food. A person who is homeless is punished for squatting in an abandoned building. A person who does not have medical care is punished (financially, if not criminally) for seeking medical attention. So on and so on… and all of this takes place in a very strict hierarchical arrangement where the appearance of "stability" remains at the forefront. It's an inherently unjust arrangement for so many, and the threat of force is constantly held over our heads to maintain this façade of stability.

Another way to justify and enforce this control is through what Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci referred to as "cultural hegemony," or dominant culture. Ruling classes throughout history have relied on both formal and informal channels to mold a dominant culture (ideology) that supports their rule. This can be established through a formal education system, through media sources, through organized religion and churches, etc… Under capitalism, this doesn't have to be done in a conspiratorial kind of way because the basic inequities stemming from the economic system create a sociopolitical structure that mimics and protects these inequities through social, cultural, political, and "legal" avenues. One of the results of this is a widespread, conditioned belief that we are not capable of caring for ourselves, our families, and our communities; and thus need so-called "extraordinary" people (politicians) to do this for us. It is a lie.

In a social sense, why do you think that social hierarchies and larger societal norms still reign when we don't seem to need them anymore? (Social norms were important in the early days of humanity as if one wasn't part of the group, they often wouldn't survive, but now it is rather easy to flourish alone or find people who you link with.)

Social hierarchies still exist because they are a natural extension from the more tangible/structural economic hierarchy. The dominant culture in this type of society needs such social norms. The Marxist theory of base and superstructure is useful in this regard. A materialist conception of history tells us that society is constructed on an economic base, or is based on the modes of production, because it is this fundamental arrangement that ultimately determines how people fulfill their basic needs. Everything else builds off of that arrangement. In a capitalist system, a large majority of the population is forced to rely on wage labor. This is an incredibly fragile and unstable existence because we are completely dependant on a privileged minority to provide us with jobs and living wages, things that capitalism inherently cannot provide to all. So, most of us are set up for failure from birth. This is why Frederick Douglass recognized that a "slavery of wages [is] only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery." Hence, Marx's focus on exploitation and alienation. This structural oppression created by capitalism explains the need for a Welfare State, because societal unrest would be inevitable without the state supplementing these inherent and widespread inequities.

So, according to this analysis, there is a superstructure that builds from this unequal base, and this includes social, cultural, and political realities. Naturally, the superstructure mimics the base, while it also helps to maintain it. In doing so, these corollary developments tend to take on the same characteristics as the base, which, as already noted, consists of a high degree of alienation and exploitation. This basically means that social systems stemming from an inherently exploitative base tend to become exploitative themselves. One of the best examples of this is white supremacy, which is an artificial system of valuing human worth based on skin color. White supremacy is a modern cultural phenomenon that extends throughout the superstructure in both overt and undetected or insidious ways. And it is a valuable tool used by the capitalist/ruling class to create division within the working-class majority. This is why Malcolm X once proclaimed that "you can't have capitalism without racism."

Other cultural phenomena like patriarchy and homophobia work the same way. These things easily catch on within the working class because they are a source of empowerment for an otherwise powerless group. We're all economically disenfranchised, but poor and working-class white men can still grasp on to whiteness, "manliness," misogyny, and homophobia as sources of power and social dominance. You see this psyche develop not only in white people, but also throughout the working class. Some black men, despite their own intense structural oppression, will become misogynistic or homophobic as a source of empowerment. A particular immigrant community will dehumanize another immigrant community as a source of empowerment. American workers across the board will target and dehumanize immigrants. So on and so on. What we're seeing here is the formation of social hierarchies within the working class, all of which mimic the hierarchy created by the economic base. Tragically, this perceived power over others within the working class is easily accessible, and it's a cheap and toxic source of empowerment. But it is a good thing for the capitalist class, as it keeps working-class angst directed within its own ranks and away from the real culprits - the rich. It's the ultimate distraction.

On a related note, these social hierarchies are worthy of examination to all of us who oppose the capitalist system. When we look at developments within the superstructure, we can strategize and build liberation movements that will ultimately break them down, which will in turn allow us to build a formidable resistance against the economic base. This is why intersectionality is crucial. But intersectionality only works if it is based in a fundamentally anti-capitalist orientation. Because if we don't approach this with the ultimate goal of attacking and destroying the economic base, it won't matter in the end. We'll find ourselves in the same position, only under a multi-cultural, multi-sex, non-gender-descript boot, as opposed to a "white, cisgender, male" boot. And this is the pitfall that identity politics fall into. Capitalism has the ability to accommodate these types of political movements by simply allowing individuals from hyper-marginalized sections of the working class to assume positions of power within these hierarchies. This approach is only about assimilation; and because of this, it only demands that that the power structure become more inclusive, not that the power structure be eliminated. Capitalism can and will seek to appease this kind of tokenism without changing its inherently authoritative and exploitative structure.

People seem to be (at least somewhat) against hierarchy, from having an intense dislike of their bosses to wanting a level playing field. Why do we not see more people moving away or speaking out against hierarchy? So many times, it seems that the very people at the bottom are the ones who argue in favor of it.

Yes, definitely. This is a form of cognitive dissonance that we all experience from time to time, and I reflect on it briefly in the piece: "…organizations are often able to stoke a cognitive dissonance among its workforce, which simultaneously puts forth a healthy dose of faith in the 'team approach' by day while complaining about the incompetent and overbearing bosses by night."

This particular line refers to the contradictions we feel in the workplace. The daytime mentality is one that is a product of constant conditioning, which tells us that hierarchies are needed, that we are naturally dependent on bosses, and that we would be lost without them. The nighttime mentality is more natural and will creep into our heads at times, causing us to question everything we're conditioned to believe during the day. Daily interactions with bosses plant the seed for these realizations, as we recognize their incompetence or at the very least their lack of exceptionalism. This will inevitably bring us to consider that maybe we don't need them, maybe we are just as (if not more) competent, that there really is no meritocracy, and that if they happened to suddenly disappear one day they probably wouldn't be missed.

This is, of course, true. We don't need them. But the conditioning that we are subjected to in most aspects of our lives tells us otherwise, and this makes it difficult for many to realize that truth. To consider the very notion of "supervision" and "management" as anything but insulting is truly amazing, when you think about it, yet most struggle with this dissonance. And understandably so, since the conditioning is intense and begins at such a young age. This reminds me of the notion of " bullshit jobs " that David Graeber has talked about in length, and is in the process of writing a book about. His angle is more focused on working-class jobs throughout the system, but I think this same line of thinking can be applied to jobs that fill the hierarchy just for the sake of filling the hierarchy.

In addition to this conditioning, there is also a mentality that becomes fairly prevalent among those who exist on the lower end of the hierarchy, and it speaks to the old adage, "if you can't beat em, join em." It is the mentality that creates the toadies for bullies, that creates house slaves for the master, etc… it forms whenever someone has been psychologically beaten into submission. These are the folks who have given themselves completely to the system, to the powers, to their bosses and overseers because, quite frankly, they simply have no fight in them, no self-esteem, and no dignity left. They are the first to dish the dirt to the bosses, the first to scab during a strike, the first to call the police on their neighbor, the first to serve the powerful with whatever is needed, and always at the sake of their class peers on the lower end of the hierarchy. These folks will always argue in favor of hierarchy, despite their lowly position in it, because they've decided that it's easier to accept it, support it, and invest in it, rather than fight it. And, in many respects, they're right. Fighting power isn't easy. It often has disastrous personal consequences for those who partake in it. As the Russian anarchist Sergey Nechayez wrote in the opening of his famous Catechism of a Revolutionary, "The revolutionary is a doomed man." There is a lot of truth to this.

How do people reinforce hierarchy in their everyday lives and how can they fight back against it?

I think basic daily human interactions reinforce these cultural hierarchies that the base relies on. There is an ongoing debate within the Left about the power and usefulness of language. This debate is intimately connected with things like "privilege discourse," "political correctness," "call-out culture," and identity politics. Many leftists who are loyal to materialist analysis, and who spend a lot of time railing against post-new left discourse, minimize the importance of language. Many younger leftists, who are more inclined to intersectionality or who enter the Left through a lens of identity politics, place a premium on policing language. While I realize the dangers that are associated with this type of " post-new left discourse " (primarily when it is not based in anti-capitalism), I also agree that there is something to language and how it reinforces the hierarchies that we are ultimately seeking to bring down.

Dominant vernacular is rooted in dominant culture, no? If we are to believe in historical materialism and the reciprocal relationship between the base and superstructure, then it seems consistent to also believe that all of the societal norms that development within this cultural hegemony stem from this same base. Because of this, language tends to be misogynistic, homophobic, white supremacist, and classist. This is reflected in media, Hollywood, advertisement, talk radio, and sports, and as well as in our daily interactions with one another.

It can be very subtle. Using the n-word reinforces white supremacy. Using the f-word reinforces homophobia. Claiming that someone has "no class" reinforces bourgeois culture. Using the term "white trash" reinforces white supremacy by implying that "trash" is defaulted as being non-white. Calling women "hoes" and "whores," while at the same time basing their human value in attractiveness or sexuality, reinforces patriarchy. Praising someone as being "like a boss" reinforces capitalist hierarchy. Worshipping celebrities reinforces a capitalist culture that determines human value based in wealth, or the lack thereof. Being absorbed in consumerism reinforces a culture that determines human value on the brand of clothing or shoes one is wearing, or the kind of car they drive, or the house they live in. These types of things quite literally place varying degrees of value on human lives, thus reinforcing various forms of social hierarchy. And something as simple as language, or the ways in which we interact with one another, emboldens the power structure(s) that we as leftists seek to destroy.

In what ways do you see hierarchy expanding or intensifying now that the US has moved to a 'service economy,' apparently in which there will be an increase in hierarchical authority, compared to when the US was a manufacturing nation? How has the dismantling of unions aided (as of current) or helped to dissuade (in the past) workplace hierarchy?

I am not sure the service economy will necessarily expand or intensify hierarchical arrangements in any structural sense. But you're right in suggesting that a move away from an industrial/manufacturing economy has made workers more vulnerable and powerless within these hierarchies. Service-sector work is much more precarious, is typically low-wage with very few benefits, and often does not include any kind of healthcare coverage or retirement plan. And the service-sector environment leaves workers on a virtual island, in that it doesn't offer the same potential for collectivization as the traditional shop floor once did. Without collectivization, workers are basically powerless.

The dismantling of unions went hand in hand with the offshoring of manufacturing jobs. Since the neoliberal revolution that was ushered in by Reagan, the share of workers who belong to unions in the private sector has fallen from 34 percent to 7 percent. I believe 1 in 3 public sector workers are still in unions. Overall though, union membership has plummeted in the US, which is a very bad thing for the working class. Under capitalism, our only leverage against capital is either (1) the government, or (2) labor unions. The government is now owned by capital, and thus acts solely in its interest. So that's effectively out of the equation. And unions have not only eroded, but many that have endured have taken on a corporate hierarchical structure themselves, where union executives are often completely out of touch with membership. Union leaders tend to be in bed with corporate politicians, an arrangement that is contradictory to the purpose of unions.

We see this contradictory nature when unions routinely endorse corporate Democrats who represent capital. We see it when unions agree to no-strike clauses. We see it when so-called leadership gives concession after concession, year after year, until there's virtually nothing left to bargain for. And we see it in this bureaucratic, corporatized union culture of today, where demands have been replaced by requests. Unions will often take reactionary stands that defy international and universal solidarity. We saw this recently with the AFL-CIO endorsing the Dakota Access Pipeline. You see it with police unions or prison employee unions, all of which side with capital and the social hierarchies that extend from capital, ultimately oppressing large sectors of the working class.

With the erosion of authentic labor unions, we've become much more vulnerable to these extreme hierarchies as a whole. And without these types of unions, workers simply have no chance against the powerful interests of capital. So, yes, the degrees to which we are smothered by these hierarchies will only intensify in this environment, especially if we continue to place our hopes in the government, politicians, and corporatized labor unions. This is exactly why I'm a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, which is "one big union" that is rooted in revolutionary industrial unionism.

How does your argument regarding hierarchy creating a lack of trust square with this modern idea that work places need to be 'open areas' so that people can 'bond?'

That's a good question. We read a lot about this new-age sort of workplace organization stemming from Silicon Valley, Google, Apple, etc… This idea that workplaces should be more carefree, less constrained. I've read about such experiments where workers can take naps, bring their pets to work, have access to fun activities directly in the workplace. And when you look at workplace organization in some European countries, you see that many companies have attempted to do away with traditional hierarchical structures to make workers feel more "at home" in a relaxed environment.

The fact that companies are experimenting with these 'open areas' confirms, at the very least, that they are aware of the archaic and inhumane nature of traditional hierarchical workplaces. This move also reflects some studies that have been done regarding productivity, which have suggested that workers are more productive in environments that are less constrictive, and that workers typically are only productive for a few hours a day. So, if anything, it's an attempt by companies to adjust with the times and do away with old forms of organization.

Unfortunately, attempts like these only tend to create more internal contradictions to capitalism. Attempting to mask the inherent nature of capitalism only goes so far. And the "open-office model" that Google became known for is not really an effort to make hierarchical structures more horizontal. It is concerned only with literal workspace, not with the ways in which the hierarchy operates on a structural level. And while it may appear to be benevolent on the surface, it often has more insidious motives. A 2014 article by Lindsey Kaufman touched on some of these issues, pointing out that "these new floor plans are ideal for maximizing a company's space while minimizing costs," and that "bosses love the ability to keep a closer eye on employees," with less physical barriers obstructing them. Studies cited in the article suggested that these open-office experiments were not beneficial to workers, at least from the workers' point of view. A study found that many workers are "frustrated by distractions" and lack of privacy, both sound and visual. And workers reported that these new floor plans did not ease interactions with colleagues, as intended, because this was never viewed as a problem to begin with.

With these results in mind, it seems such attempts have been a failure. And it makes you wonder why they were attempted in the first place. Was it really to create a "friendlier" atmosphere, or was it rooted in something more sinister? Understanding the way capitalism operates, it's safe to assume the latter. Either way, despite the motivations, the capitalist structure still remains - which means that most workers are creating massive amounts of wealth for executives and shareholders in exchange for wages and salaries that do not equal their contribution. If they make enough to lead comfortable lives, they may be more willing to overlook this structural exploitation. But it still exists. Bosses still remain, and workers are still treated as commodities, no matter how glossed over the physical workplace appears. There are still those who make more, in many cases a whole lot more, for doing much less (the pursuit of "money and idleness" that I referenced in the piece). And some who rake in large amounts of money for doing absolutely nothing, and without even stepping foot in the workplace. That is the fundamental nature of both capitalism and hierarchies. No amount of makeup can change this.

What is your take on the literature and ideas surrounding employee relationship management? What do you think is the actual idea around it on a structural level?

This type of literature is designed to address the inequities by essentially covering them up as best as possible. Their purpose is two-fold: to teach bosses how to get the most from their workers; and to get workers to buy into a "team approach" that convinces them they're vested in the mission in some way. This is accomplished basically through propaganda, or a conscious effort to downplay the coercive nature of this relationship. On the one end it provides bosses, supervisors, and managers with tools and tactics rooted in persuasion, to get workers to think, behave, and perceive themselves in a way that is detached as far from reality as possible. Since human beings don't typically react well to being treated and used as tools, to be manipulated, prodded, directed, etc, employers find its useful to mask this reality as best as possible.

So this type of literature is designed to give bosses ways to obstruct this reality. To interact with their workers in ways that mask the coercive power they wield over them. And they tend to be very successful in doing this… so much so that many workers truly believe they are vested in the businesses they work for, or at the very least will rep that business in a positive way to friends and family, if only to mask their shitty realities to themselves. A shitty reality that basically amounts to us spending most of our waking hours in a place we do not want to be in, doing something we would rather not be doing, so we can get a paycheck every few weeks, so we can pay our bills, so we can scrape out a living for another few weeks. For most of us, it's a never-ending cycle that we'll never escape. It's a miserable, inhumane existence where life is lived a week at a time, or two weeks at a time, essentially from one paycheck to the next. And the best we can hope for is to stay afloat until the next paycheck, so we can start over again. And to add insult to injury, we're told that we "should feel lucky to even have a job." That's the world capitalism brings us.

So this workplace literature, and the management tactics that come from it, plays into the cognitive dissonance that I mentioned earlier. On a structural level, the idea is merely to keep things churning by creating alternative realities that workers can be proud of. To use the plantation analogy, it really is a way to instill the house-slave mentality in each and every one of us. It won't work for some, but it works well enough for most. Even those struck with this cognitive dissonance will often lean toward that which makes them feel vested, secure, proud, respected, appreciated, etc… even though these feeling are not consistent with reality. It is a form of coping for many, and corporate literature will certainly exploit that and drill it home. And we as workers, stuck in our miserable realities, will often accept it if it helps us cope. Because we need that paycheck.

A Brief Inquiry into the History, Logic, and Spatiality of Financial Derivatives

By Jacob Ertel

Capitalism, at its most elemental, is a system of inherent volatility. The character of this volatility is contingent on how a state's political-economic institutions are able to mitigate risk by facilitating the movement of capital. How and where this capital moves is paramount in crisis obviation. Capitalism tends towards a range of interrelated crises-democratic, economic, political, social-but central to them all is the ongoing accumulation of surplus-value. The central risk here is that competition will result in an excess of capital relative to available opportunities to reinvest it. This excess can take a range of forms, from commodities, to money, to labor power (i.e., unemployment). States may attempt to resolve crises of overaccumulation in two ways. The first involves devaluating capital through inflation, commodity gluts on the market and falling prices, diminished productive capacity, and/or falling real standards of living for workers. The second method, known as the 'spatial fix', entails developing new markets in which to invest excess capital.[1] These terrains are often conceived as untapped geographical markets that may be turned into new centers of production, thus allowing for a temporary displacement of overaccumulation. Though productive forces remain indispensible to any mode of accumulation, advanced capitalism today may be characterized above all by an ongoing 40 year shift towards the primacy of the financial sector and the predominance of circulation over production.

Whereas the motive of the production process is the extraction of surplus-value through the exploitation of labor, the circulation process itself does not create value; instead, its profits generally derive from the redistribution of surplus-value. [2] This fundamental shift (the specifics of which will be discussed below) exposes more individuals and firms to financial risk than ever before. While capital seeks out new productive markets for reinvestment in all modes of capitalist accumulation, with financialization have come new kinds of spatial fixes that cohere with the unproductive, fictitious, and redistributive logic of circulation. As both social and historical constructions, the structures that facilitate the displacement of risk undergo periods of relative strength and weakness according to the dynamic between an economy's productive capacity and its exposure to risk. [3] When productive capacity is diminished, speculative capital flows increase as investment shifts from productive to financial capital in the attempt to ensure stability against currency devaluation. With the advent of derivatives, however, risk is not only circulated faster and further, but commodified itself. Building on financialization and derivatives literature, this essay suggests that we may understand derivatives as a spatial fix in their own right, which paradoxically both displaces and amplifies risk. Despite important qualitative differences from older, more established strategies of crisis displacement, however, derivative-based spatial fixes exemplify a core dynamic central to all forms of capitalist accumulation. It will be argued here that while on one hand financial derivatives constitute the separation of the sphere of circulation from the sphere of production and thus from physical localities, they are simultaneously inextricable from them. This tension between production and circulation may in part account for the unique form of contemporary capitalist accumulation.

This essay is divided into four sections. The first section addresses the technical aspects of derivatives: what they are, how they work, and some of the different forms they may take. The second section will present an abridged history of derivatives spanning from their agricultural origins to their current use in financial markets. The third section explains how derivatives are unique from other financial instruments, and asks what these differences indicate for the state of the global economy more generally. The final section analyzes derivatives with regard to two critical concepts in geographical political economy: spatio-temporal fixes and time-space compression.

What Are Derivatives?

At the most general level, a derivative may be understood as a kind of financial contract used to expose counterparties to fluctuations in the market price of an underlying commodity, asset, or event. [4] They may also be thought of as "bilateral contract[s] that [stipulate] future payment and whose [values are] tied to the value of another asset, index, or rate or, in some cases, depends on the occurrence of an event." [5] Whereas other financial instruments may involve an exchange of principal or title, derivatives exist in order transfer value between parties based on an underlying price change or event. In so doing, derivatives exist "to bind and blend different sorts of 'particular' capital together" [6] through securitization and risk commodification. A derivative contract entails that the claim on the underlying asset or the cash value of that asset must be executed at a definite time in the future. Capital is moved until the contract is settled. As opposed to insurance instruments, which protect individuals from risk by requiring policyholders to buy in with some sort of collateral (an 'insured interest') that they could lose in the context of the issuance of the policy, derivatives do not require this kind of collateral; anyone can trade in derivatives regardless of their relation to the underlying asset.[7] As such, derivatives operate solely according to these bilateral contracts between parties with differing perspectives on or vulnerabilities to risk. [8] This is the core feature of derivatives: that a plethora of risk may be traded independent the underlying asset. This development now often comes in form of cash settlement, which frees counterparties from delivering the underlying asset.[9] Cash settlement allows various characteristics of a commodity, asset or security to be separated and traded. In financial derivatives contracts, transactions are purely monetary and do not entail any change in ownership of the underlying assets. [10] Derivatives are assigned a notional value according to the multiplication of its spot price by the number of units of the underlying asset stated on the contract. [11] Pricing derivatives is determined by a rate of interest, specifically the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR). LIBOR is set by an amalgam of banks in the derivatives markets, and is made through the evaluating the average of interest rates submitted by each of these banks daily. [12]

Derivative contracts are supposed to offset volatility in financial markets by separating assets themselves from their price's volatility. [13] This separation constitutes a way to hedge the risks endemic to financial speculation, as speculators believe they can diminish their exposure to volatile asset prices. Because any potential failure to execute a contract at full notional value may be hedged through another derivative contract (valued according to perceived chance of execution of the initial derivative contract), the aggregate value circulating through derivatives contracts is grossly disproportionate to the price of all the underlying assets being traded for. [14] Despite this risk-exacerbating practice, derivatives are generally considered relatively inconsequential to capitalist economies. Because they are not a "real input in the production process nor a means of conveying wealth," and since they "fixate on short-term capital flows rather than longer-term investment," traditionally liberal economic views do not take derivatives seriously as a global threat to the banking system, even with their ability to concentrate a large amount of leverage on a single instrument. [15] Yet whereas they are often considered economically marginal and unrelated to the real economy, in fact derivatives have become the largest industry in the world, such that they themselves are becoming key sites of asset price determination rather than the other way around. [16] What these more traditional views miss, then, is that derivatives are in fact related to the real economy, despite their relative degree of separation from the production process.

Derivatives can be traded either in regulated exchanges or 'over-the-counter' (OTC). Exchanges include institutions such as the London International Financial Futures Exchange and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Whereas derivatives traded on exchanges require money as collateral and for extra margin payments to be made against adverse fluctuations in the market, OTC derivatives are entirely unregulated. [17] Unlike exchange-traded derivatives, which entail a finite transfer of payment between parties, OTC derivatives contracts are kept open through clearing houses that continuously circulate debt instruments. The market for OTC derivatives has expanded drastically in recent decades, bringing with it new forms of risk and volatility. OTC derivatives are cheaper and more flexible than exchange-traded derivatives, but also they carry a higher degree of risk and are not easily sold to third parties due to their relative lack of liquidity.[18] This means that during volatile periods OTC derivatives are more likely to adversely impact the entire financial system. Yet OTC trading has been on the rise despite this predicament, with nearly one third of trading taking place in dealer-to-dealer transactions, and with each transaction tied to at least one dealer bank as a counter party. [19] Dealer banks are highly concentrated, with fifteen to twenty dealers controlling bulk of OTC trading globally.[20] The boom in OTC trading may be exemplified best by the growth of hedge funds, the participation of financial wings of major corporations, and the involvement of commercial and investment banks. [21] All of this signals an increasing predominance of the financial sector of the economy over the productive sector. It also points towards greater susceptibility to economic instability, as the "default by a major institution, a shift in the prices of derivatives in financial markets sufficient to undermine the viability of a major institution, or the inability to net out obligations and receipts" could all trigger a system-wide crisis. [22] With less productive capital overall in the era of financialization, greater exposures to risk likewise threaten the longevity of the productive sector itself, which is now thoroughly integrated into the financial sphere. Taking on greater risks through trading in derivatives raises the likelihood that the investor will profit or lose money. Large losses can result in bankruptcy, engulfing the various individuals, banks, and institutions that lent money to them and exacerbating systemic risk. [23] In this sense, we may begin to better understand the paradoxical connectedness between the 'real' economy and financial markets.

Different Types of Derivatives

Most derivatives traded today take the form of forwards, futures, options, and swaps. The oldest and most intuitive type of derivative is a forward. Briefly, a forward is a contract between two parties codifying the obligation to buy or sell a particular quantity of an item at a fixed price or rate and a definite future point in time. Foreign exchange forwards, for example, obligate both parties to exchange agreed upon amounts of foreign currencies at a specified rate at a future date. These rates are generally traded 'at par' or 'at market,' meaning the value of the contract at the time it is traded is zero and no money need be traded at the contract's initiation. This means that the market value of the contract is zero, but parties can decide to post collateral as a means of insuring the terms of the contract.[24] Because they are specialized according to specific needs, forwards are relatively limited derivatives contracts, and may involve high search costs to find parties with opposite needs (i.e., exposures to risk). [25] Forwards' binding of parties to exchange may also lead to inconveniences for one or both parties after the contract is actually entered into. If one party defaults, significant legal fees may be required to secure the forward price, and this risk prompts both parties to monitor one another's respective viability.[26] Contract terms are often standardized in order to avoid some of these potential issues. Forward contracts that are standardized, publicly traded, and cleared through a clearing house are referred to as futures. As opposed to forwards, futures are traded on organized exchanges and are largely substitutable for one another, which allows for greater trading volume and contributes to higher market liquidity. This new liquidity may improve the price discovery process, or how reflective market prices are of key information.[27]

As opposed to forwards and futures, option contracts allow the buyer or holder (also called the long options position) to buy or sell the underlying asset in the future. More specifically, buyers are purchasing the right to buy or sell the asset at a particular price (known as the strike price) either at a particular date (known as a European option) or at any time between the option's initiation until its expiration date (known as an American option), and can be traded on individual stocks, stock indexes, and even through futures contracts themselves. [28] Options to buy and sell are known as calls and puts, respectively. Buying and selling on options is somewhat trickier than with forwards and futures; if the spot market price of a stock exceeds the strike price during the window in which the option could be exercised, then the holder may buy at a lower strike price by exercising the option. In this case, the option's value would be the higher market price. If the market price remained below the strike price during the period in which the call option could be exercised, however, then the option would expire worthless. [29] An option's price is often a reflection of market interest rates, the time to its maturity, the historical price volatility of the underlying asset, and the proximity of the underlying asset to its strike price. [30] As with other types of derivatives such as foreign exchange forwards, options can concern financial rather than real commodities. For example, interest rate options provide insurance against increases and deceases (caps and floors) and hikes and drops (collars) in interest rates. Cap options create a ceiling to protect against hikes in interest rates, while floor options create a minimum rate to protect against a potential fall in rates. [31] Options are predicated on the tension between selling short and going long. If someone who does not own the underlying asset sells it through a derivative contract in anticipation of buying it back at a lower price or in the open market at whatever price prevails, they are selling it 'short'. Short-selling produces tremendous exposure to risk. As Henwood notes, "short-selling exposes the practitioner to enormous risks: when you buy something-go long, in the jargon-your loss is limited to what you paid for it; when you go short, however, your losses are potentially without limit." [32] Brokers hypothetically are expected to evaluate clients' credit rating in order to justify short-selling, but this practice is not highly regulated.

More recently, derivatives markets have turned towards the proliferation of swap contracts, which differ somewhat from forwards, futures, and options. A swap contract is perhaps most reflective of the contemporary usage of derivatives, constituting an agreement between counterparties to 'swap' two different kinds of payments, each calculated by applying an interest rate, exchange rate, index, or the price of an underlying commodity or asset to a notional principal.[33] Swaps usually do not require the transfer or exchange of the principal. Uniquely, payments based on swaps are done at regular intervals throughout the duration of the contract. In other words, whereas exchange-traded derivatives involve actual claims on an underlying assets, swaps do not; instead, the swap is between two sets of cash flows, which are usually destabilized by positions in other securities such as bonds or stock dividends.[34] Swaps can take several forms. A 'vanilla' interest rate swap, for example, involves one series of payments based on a fixed interest rate and another based on a floating interest rate. A foreign exchange swap entails an opening payment to purchase a foreign currency at a specified exchange rate, and a closing payment selling the currency at a specified exchange rate. A foreign currency swap consists of one set of payments derived from either a long or short position in a stock or index, and another set derived from an interest rate or other equity position,

amounting to a combination of a spot and forward transaction. [35] Currency and interest rate swaps have become especially important in recent decades. The former allows investors to hedge principle and interest payments in one currency against a preferred currency, while the latter allows borrowers to arbitrate between component markets of the international bond market. In this respect, swaps have played an instrumental role in controlling for short-term risk and thus making international bond markets particularly attractive for global investment. [36]

While each type of derivative contract is uniquely structured, they all share important commonalities. Derivative contracts can be settled either through the physical delivery of the underlying asset or through cash settlement with adjustments of margins on financial differences. Cash settlements allow for agents uninvolved in either production or the use of the underlying assets to speculate. Today cash settlement is more common, as most derivatives no longer involve the transfer of a title or a principle; instead, they create price exposure by conjoining their value and a notional amount or principal of the item form which the contract derives.[37] Taking a price position in the market while only putting up a small amount of capital used allows the investor to leverage, making it cheaper to hedge and speculate. Here derivatives are able to cover hedgers' risks on the spot market covering losses or compensating gains. [38] In speculative transactions with derivatives, however, an agents' position does not correspond to the spot market, and is thus exposed to greater risks in price variation.[39] A similar dynamic applies to arbitrage transactions, which occur simultaneously on the spot market and in the derivatives market. Arbitrage transactions, however, involve parties attempting to profit by exploiting price differentials, thus creating the opportunity for gains without risks. [40] All of this shows us that derivatives are used by a wide range of actors (investors, corporations, banks, etc.) to protect themselves against forms of risk. International agencies and banks use derivatives to hedge their loan portfolio positions, and transnational corporations use them to reduce their exposure to risk, with many creating financial divisions to actively speculate in derivatives markets. [41] Investment banks may also trade in derivatives for corporate clients, with the aim of boosting their liquidity by hedging positions in an inter-bank market.

An Abridged History of Derivatives

Some accounts of derivatives date their origins to biblical times in the form of agricultural consignment transactions. While derivatives trading can also be traced to 12th century Venice (exchanges on agriculture), late 16th century Amsterdam (forwards and options on commodities and securities), and 18th century Japan (futures on warehouse receipts and rice), modern derivatives trading began officially in 1849 when a group of grain merchants created the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT).[42] The Chicago Board of Trade was originally designed to coordinate "geographically dispersed agricultural markets." [43] Through its legal framework for standardizing the classification of grain trading, it became the central hub in the United States for pricing grains. The CBOT's centrality during this period was facilitated by the development of new networks of railways and telegraphs in the US, which consequently enabled the CBOT to become first institution with a highly liquid futures market for grain contracts.[44] In so doing, the CBOT set the stage for a new kind of financial system in the late twentieth century, with the first formal set of rules governing futures contracts in forged in 1865. [45] Many farmers initially objected to the CBOT because they believed their products were priced too far away from the point of production. Such prices soon became essential for farmers, processors, and traders, however. As Muellerleile explains, "as grain commerce became more integrated with circuits of credit and capital, and more dependent upon risk-management tools such as futures contracts, the flow of price information became a prerequisite for cash crop farming."[46] This integration into growingly expansive flows of capital allowed the consistency of the price mechanism to become a measurement of the strength of the grain industry, which the US Congress declared in the national interest in 1922.[47]

With the onset of the Great Depression, however, the government adopted a more stringent role towards financial speculation (though the agricultural sector was excluded from this approach). The financial legislation put in place by the New Deal would form the bedrock for these new regulatory efforts, most particularly the Banking Act of 1933, which comprised of Regulation Q (the imposition of ceilings on savings deposits and interest rates that could be paid on time), the Glass-Steagall Act, and the creation of a national deposit insurance system facilitated by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.[48] By the 1970s, however, the Chicago exchanges began to apply their methods for pricing agricultural futures to urban financial instruments. State institutions began to more heavily regulate speculation, marking its first serious effort to do so since 1936. [49] The Chicago Mercantile Exchange created the International Money Market in 1972, which allowed for trading in currency futures and paved the way for more abstract contracts. [50] This development in part signified the dissolution of the boundary between agricultural futures and finance, aided by the expansion of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's (the second largest exchange in Chicago) entrance into new products. [51] Chicago exchanges influenced the passage of the 1974 Commodities Exchange Act that expanded the definition of a commodity from several agricultural products (in the 1936 Commodities Exchange Act) to all goods, articles, services, rights, and interests that can be dealt in futures contracts. [52] At the same time, Congress granted the Chicago Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) sole jurisdiction over futures trading, disallowing any other federal agency or state government entity or law from interfering with the development of futures markets.[53] The CFTC and its related state financial agencies saw it as their duty to promote the spread and hedging of risk, including by the range of non-financial corporations that had traded in derivatives to shield themselves from fluctuating commodity prices, interest rates, and floating exchange rates with the demise of the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1971. [54] These developments were also aided by technological and conceptual innovations during the 1960s, as more economists began to claim that the US stock market was fully efficient in responding to all publicly available information and could be modeled with reasonable accuracy. [55] The popularization of the Black-Scholes pricing formula, for example, changed the character of speculation from advising on option prices to calculating mispriced options or assets, empowering traders to invest on market mispricings with large amounts of borrowed money. [56] Today hedge funds carry out these activities, pooling wealthy clients' investment contributions to arbitrate and trade in derivatives. [57] By the late 1970s in the midst of a crisis of stagnant economic growth and inflation, the Treasury decided it could stabilize currency by raising interest rates to encourage foreign holdings in US Treasury bonds and allowing for the exchange of derivatives on US debt brought to bond markets by the New York Federal Reserve.[58] This move provided the foundation for an unprecedented internationalization of derivatives markets.

Derivatives and Financialization

Derivatives trading has expanded to global proportions since the 1980s. The industry's growth may be attributed most centrally to the development over-the-counter trading for financial derivatives, which corporations utilize to protect themselves from volatility in interest and exchange rates, and which speculators use in their efforts to predict trends in financial markets.[59] The proliferation of financial derivatives during this period is a less frequently discussed but critical component of broader patterns of neoliberal financialization beginning with the gradual dissolution of the Fordist-Keynesian accumulation regime beginning in the late 1960s and taking off in the early 1970s. Keynesianism had provided a unique way of managing risks through stimulating consumer demand with demand-side policy. Its decline gave way to a flexibilization of price relations and the growing importance of market processes in managing financial matters, leading to an influx in derivatives trading. [60] With the deregulation of capital flows, Nixon's move to decouple the US dollar from the gold standard, and the 1973 OPEC oil shocks, price volatility increased in the early 1970s and paved the way for the internationalization of trade investment, exposing firms to greater degrees of risk. With the end of the fixed exchange rate system of Bretton Woods, Panitch and Gindin explain, "the derivatives revolution was crucial to the stabilization of currency markets…and was also immediately linked to the internationalization of the US bond market, which was occurring at the same time as the development of the separate Eurodollar market." [61] More simply, the growth of financial derivatives markets was a requisite for avoiding capital devaluation in a period of economic tumult. The growth of the multinational firm during this period demonstrates the attempts made to mitigate the new volatility endemic to a globalizing derivatives market. [62]As the US bond market opened up, foreign investors began maintain greater holdings in US Treasury securities, above 21 percent by the 1980s. Paradoxically, this uncertainty, "amid the volatility of commodity prices and rising short-term interest rates, actually enhanced the attractiveness of Treasury bills for international investors, who recognized the depth and liquidity of the US bond market despite all the hand-wringing about declining US economic power and strength."[63] Here we can begin to trace a theme of global integration into the financial derivatives market, underpinned by the US dollar-trading on international bonds implicates investors in the volatile movements of currency and interest rates. With investors able to swap various floating and fixed exchange rate obligations in order to better fit their perception of the market direction, the changes in currency levels and interest rates that had traditionally slowed markets down (investment in bonds denominated in suboptimal currencies were deemed too big a risk) began to play a different role in the global economy. [64]

Like the Fordist-Keynesian accumulation regime before it, financialization is a stage of capitalism fraught with contradictions. The term 'financialization' itself is heavily debated, with disagreements over its periodicity, its coherence with or distinctiveness from neoliberalism, and its most essential characteristics. For our purposes here, Kippner's definition is useful. For her, financialization refers to "a broad-based transformation in which financial activities (rather than services generally) have become increasingly dominant in the US economy over the last several decades."[65] The 'financial' here "references the provision (or transfer) of capital in expectation of future interest, dividends, or capital gains," as opposed to productive capital that arises from the production and trade of commodities.[66] This shift towards finance, beginning in the 1970s and expanding in the 1980s and 1990s, provided the state with a means for displacing the rigidities of the Fordist-Keynesian accumulation regime. This displacement occurred first and foremost in the deregulation of domestic financial markets throughout the 1970s, which gradually reduced restraints on the flow of credit. [67] Concurrent spikes in interest rates (most notably Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker's 1981 hike, more notoriously known as the "Volcker Shock") in order to restrain the economy in the absence of regulation on the supply of credit also emerged as a response to deregulation. These higher interest rates attracted remarkably high levels of foreign capital into the US economy, thus allowing for a drastic expansion of domestic financial markets and helping to tie the global economy to the floating US dollar. As strict monetary policy became the preferred tactic for stabilizing US currency during this time (resulting in rising unemployment), the Federal Reserve turned to a greater extent to the market, expanding credit at the same time as it increased interest rate volatility. [68] Above all, however, it was the deregulatory moves of the 1980s-removing controls that had restricted interest rates payable on savings deposits-that shaped the course of financialization. [69]

Financialization with Derivatives

Deregulation increased the price of credit while extending it to a broader constituency.[70] The incorporation of US multinational commercial banks into derivatives trading-in addition to Wall Street-based investment banks-should not be overlooked here. (Whereas investment banks create liquidity by dictating the terms of trading of securities, commercial banks do so by transforming deposits into longer-term assets.) [71] With the first significant derivative bond swap in the early 1980s between IBM and the World Bank, banks such as J.P. Morgan used overseas operations in London to bypass the regulations previously put in place by the Glass-Steagall Act and take advantage of growing derivatives markets. After executing the first credit default swap in the early 1990s, derivative contracts accounted for over half of Morgan's trading revenue. [72] Because derivatives are able to conjoin a variety of forms of capital and convert fixed and floating rate loans and currencies, Panitch and Gindin note, these markets were "able to meet the hedging needs not only of financial institutions (which exchanged 40 percent of all swaps among themselves), but also of the many corporations seeking protection from the rapidly evolving vulnerabilities associated with global trade and investment." [73] By the time the Clinton administration took power in 1993, Streeck explains, financial deregulation had "made it possible to plug the gaps resulting from deficit reduction, by means of a rapid extension of loan facilities for private households at a time when falling or stagnant wages and transfer incomes, combined with rising costs of 'responsible self-provision', might otherwise have jeopardized support for the policy of economic liberalization." [74] This shift may be understood as a kind of 'privatized Keynesianism,' [75] in which the public debt taken on by the state during the Fordist-Keynesian accumulation regime is transferred onto consumers in the form of individualized debt relations in tandem with a dissolving social safety net. This extension of credit to compensate for slipping wages and benefits effectively redistributes capital upwards.[76] With the state shifting debt-driven consumption from public financing to private, credit-based consumption, government debt comes instead from low receipts, or limits to taxation, while corporate interests are empowered to make increasing demands on the state. [77]

Arguably the central paradox of financialization is that while financial institutions, markets, and assets "can secure the return of value in particular instances," they "cannot guarantee the systematic augmentation and return of value in the aggregate." [78] As opposed to a wage labor relation, in which a fixed amount of capital is guaranteed to a capitalist according to the rate of surplus-value extracted from a worker and marks a contribution to the overall amount of real capital in circulation, financial markets operate in the sphere of circulation and can only either redistribute capital or create fictitious value. Financial markets begin to malfunction when the expansion of monetary value across an economy can no longer be guaranteed by participants in financial transactions. Here we can better understand a central contradiction of derivatives: they exist to offset or control this risk but ultimately increase it. Despite this paradox, it is not difficult to understand why derivatives have grown over the past nearly-four decades. They provide investors, corporate treasury departments, and bank risk management departments with the advantage of being able to hedge risk as a measure of insurance against adverse fluctuations in the market. [79] Moreover, they can provide signals to larger financial markets, which could ostensibly reduce uncertainty and unequal access to information. Derivatives also allow investors to more cheaply diversify their portfolios, as managers are able to expose themselves to derivatives according to a larger number of shares. Furthermore, derivatives operate on leverage and are thus cheap to trade in.[80] A liberal economic perspective might claim that derivatives are incapable of affecting the price of underlying assets in conditions of perfect market competition, and that they simply provide greater economic stability by spreading risk between different agents in the market; in reality, however, asymmetric access to information and imperfections in the instruments themselves open markets up to greater degrees of systemic risk. [81] In bypassing the sphere of production, surplus-value in production is replaced by essentially zero-sum casino bets, manufacturing risk through a social logic of mutual indebtedness.[82]

What's New About Derivatives?

As the field of financialized economic activity incorporates greater numbers of people through the financialization of risk, capital circulation becomes decoupled from the labor process. [83] Whereas the labor process relies on the extraction of surplus-value in the sphere of production, financialization means that the appreciation of fictitious capital becomes autonomous relative to productive appreciation, as tradable financial instruments are valued according to expected income flows and discounted by an interest rate. [84] On the other hand, however, this process should be understood as a means of integrating the workforce into financial channels and is thus actually semi-dependent on productive capital. Carneiro et al. assert that the advent of derivatives constitutes a new form of accumulation entirely, which they call the 'fourth dimension'.[85] While historically this fourth dimension of capital has developed in tandem with capital in its monetary form, it also "progressively constitutes an autonomous force in the process of capital appreciation when deep and liquid markets freely negotiate stocks of wealth." [86] In other words, this fourth dimension is linked to the changing role of derivatives in the 1970s, along with fundamental changes in the international financial and monetary systems allowing for more rapid accumulation over greater distances.[87]

At this point it is necessary to clarify two related yet distinct issues. One is the process of financialization, the other the growth of derivatives trading. Carneiro et al. assert that derivatives markets constitute a unique form of accumulation because capital appreciation occurs independent of initial investment. This is markedly different from credit-based capital appreciation. Since the 1970s financial relations have dominated economic policy-making, pushed more individuals into debt, and formed a new mode of accumulation characterized by falling profit rates and real wages, persistent unemployment, and mediocre growth in productive sectors. Yet within financialization, derivatives signify an even greater abstraction of capital from the process of accumulation. [88] Carneiro et al. explain this as "a difference in the nature of the gain from the operation," jettisoning the "need for money as a means of appreciation, or its advance in the beginning of the process." [89] This means that though "money is still an end to the process of valorization," it "loses its relevance as a vehicle of valorization, as well as the credit system." [90] This form of accumulation is intrinsically speculative-gains from derivatives transactions come simply from a bet on a price movement by an asset that is not owned by the speculator. Despite this fundamentally unique character of derivatives, however, it would be unfair to claim that derivatives are actually entirely independent of the production process. When changes in risk perception generate price-adjustments in the market in the form of the inversion of bets and settlements of contracts, "social relations of property and credit are again essential to ensure liquidity and solvency of agents involved in these markets, revealing the real social relations of power, property, and money that appeared previously only in a veiled manner."[91] The remainder of this report will detail the relation between the spheres of production and circulation vis-à-vis derivative-based accumulation.

Derivatives, Time-Space Compression, and Spatio-Temporal Fixes

Though the derivatives market is the most liquid in the world, it is also highly vulnerable to systemic crisis. Of particular concern is that derivatives may be based on practically any asset, including worker debt. As Lapavitsas explains, "these derivatives could be thought of as synthetic bonds," or "securities promising to pay the holder a return (interest) out of a variety of payments made by the workers which are pooled and then divided."[92] Workers' payments on, for example, housing and consumer debts, would entail a payoff for the holder of a given derivative security who has a claim on that personal debt. Despite their separation from the sphere of production, derivatives are in the final instance contingent on it. Labor thus becomes an extension of financial services themselves, vulnerable to risks entailed by the circulation and realization of capital, which it simultaneously empowers through deferred wages and relies upon in order to access necessities such as education and retirement costs. [93] Those that make up the productive sector are both incorporated into and dependent upon these circuits of realization.

Understanding derivatives' functionality helps us evaluate the specificities of contemporary capitalism's tendency towards crisis. As derivatives markets are predicated on the mitigation of risk, it is crucial here to consider how derivatives fit with established theories of capitalist crisis. One of the most notorious theories on this count is David Harvey's 'spatial fix.' Harvey explains that competition between capitalists leads to an uneven accumulation of capital, which threatens the reproduction of both capitalist and working classes. To recall from earlier, this threat takes the form of an excess of capital relative to available opportunities for profitable reinvestment (also known as overaccumulation). Overaccumulation manifests through a surplus of commodities, money-capital, and/or labor power. [94] There are two solutions to this problem. The first involves the devaluation of capital through inflation, gluts of commodities on the market and falling prices, productive capacity culminating in bankruptcy, and falling real wages and standards of living. This solution is not optimal for capitalists. The second solution, however, involves lending surplus capital abroad to create productive powers in new regions. This latter option is the crux of the 'spatial fix'. Crises are temporarily resolved because rates of profit in these new regions incentivize a flow of capital and raise the rate of profit in the system as a whole. The problem here is that higher profits entail an increase in the tendency towards overaccumulation; moreover, this now takes place on an expanding geographical scale. As Harvey writes, "the only escape lies in a continuous acceleration in the creation of fresh productive powers. From this we can derive an impulsion within capitalism to create the world market, to intensify the volume of exchange, to produce new needs and new kinds of products." [95] While capital is ultimately limited through productive capacity (only so many goods can be produced and circulated), derivatives-as instruments whose value is only derived from the asset underlying them-may represent a way of circumventing real barriers to accumulation.

According to Harvey, an irresolvable tension emerges between the devaluation of domestic capital due to international competition (apropos the development of new export-driven regions), and the internal devaluation of capital in these regions (as constrained development also limits international competition and blocks opportunities for profitable export). Productive forces in new regions constitute a competitive threat to the country that introduced the spatial fix, whereas limited development in new productive centers hinders international competition and reduces profitable opportunities for capital export, thus leading to an internal devaluation of capital with immobile overaccumulated capital. [96] Geographical expansion allows overaccumulated capital to be invested into labor surpluses and for the development of primitive accumulation processes in these exterior regions as an alternative to devaluation. Though the spatial fix applies mostly to overaccumulation resulting from competition in the sphere of production, overaccumulation itself is not limited to this dimension of capitalist relations. Beginning in the 1970s, for example, overaccumulated manufacturing capital in cities-in tandem with the influx of capital due to higher petroleum prices-garnered an excess of speculative capital that could not be used to boost industrial production. [97] This speaks to a crucial tension between speculative and productive capital, as this juncture required the freeing of speculative capital from the production process by creating a separation between new derivative instruments and their underlying assets. It is thus argued here, then, that derivatives markets constitute their own paradoxical form of a spatial fix, especially as the underlying assets become currency-related.

Crucial to the spatial fix embodied by derivatives markets is the time-space compression endemic to capitalist accumulation and financialization more dramatically. During the 1970s this dynamic took the form of organizational shifts in production that undid the managerial tendencies of Fordism, generating a more fluid and decentralized mode of production.[98] At the same time, technological innovation during this period allowed for a faster and more geographically distantiated financial sector. With an expanded reach, however, comes an increased tendency towards volatility; the shortened length of time capital takes to move across space facilitates more short-term gratification, but compromises states' ability to engage in long-term planning. This limitation means that financial institutions must either adapt quickly to rapid market shifts, or find ways to control volatility themselves.[99] The rapid and expansive movement of capital under financialization represents a paradox for Harvey, as "the less important the spatial barriers, the greater the sensitivity of capital to the variations of place within space, and the greater the incentive for places to be differentiated in ways attractive to capital," all of which leads to increasingly uneven development "within a highly unified global space economy of capital flows."[100] Though Harvey's "globalized space economy" still primarily refers to the sphere of production, the flexibilization of the financialized accumulation regime entails a fundamental shift in how value is represented as money: "the de-linking of the financial system from active production and from any material monetary base calls into question the reliability of the basic mechanism whereby value is supposed to be represented." [101] In other words, the productive sphere loses power relative to the financial.

Here it is necessary to question more precisely how the migration of capital from the sphere of production to the sphere of circulation may constitute a spatial fix. Bob Jessop, a critic of Harvey, argues that for however important the spatial fix, Harvey's focus on "the production of localized geographical landscapes of long-term infrastructural investments that facilitate the turnover time of industrial capital and the circulation of commercial and financial capital" [102] cannot adequately account for the movements and contours of capital under financialization. By examining spatial fixes solely in terms of the contradiction between the unstable movement of productive capital in the form of profits for reinvestment and the fixity of concrete assets with particular times and places, Jessop explains, Harvey elides a discussion of "the different forms of spatio-temporal fix in relation to the different stages or forms of capital accumulation, nor their articulation to institutionalized class compromise or modes of regulation." [103] While production entails a profit motive (the creation of surplus-value through relations of exploitation), the profits resulting from circulation derive not from any value it creates, but rather from its capacity to redistribute surplus-value. Jessop writes of the importance of 'time-space distantiation'-not just compression-in a globalizing world economy, or the expansion of political-economic relations across time and space such that they may be coordinated over greater distances and scales of activity. [104] For him, the twin dynamics of compression and distantiation indicate that "the power of hypermobile forms of finance capital depends on their unique capacity to compress their own decision-making time…whilst continuing to extend and consolidate their global reach." [105] This tension is present within any individual or interconnected circuit of capital, depending as they do on the relationship between "a physical marketplace and a conceptual marketspace." [106] Despite the altered character of these spatial barriers to accumulation, however, physical territory remains essential to the circulation of capital, as it is contingent on static ensembles in which the means of production and organization necessitate the extraction of surplus-value. [107]

Derivatives markets exhibit a unique spatio-temporal in relation to contemporary capitalist accumulation. As Bryan and Rafferty write, "derivatives, through options and futures, establish pricing relationships that 'bind' the future to the present." [108] Like Harvey's spatial fix centered on productive capital, derivatives markets may be viewed as a spatial fix in and of themselves in their attempt to hedge risk and stave off devaluation as more individuals and institutions become exposed to financial risk. Corporations trade in derivatives markets in order to handle their exposure to risks in a sea of variable rates and prices. Ensuring the value of money is key, and the spatial displacement constituted by derivatives (into cyberspace or digital space, as it were). It purports to facilitate this process in several respects. First, derivatives constitute a unique form of money by providing a universal measure for asset value across space, despite their dependence on nationally-based unequal levels of contestability. [109] In other words, derivatives are ultimately based on US norms of risk value and conceptions of secure financial claims. Second, derivatives markets aim to allow for the limiting of exchange- and interest-rate risks for corporations and for comparing various risk management strategies across time and space, though this may increase systemic volatility even these new strategies do not immediately drain productive capacity. [110] Finally, banks or other financial institutions might engage in securitization and over-the-counter trading in order to mitigate the uncertainties of profiting from credit money. As Soederberg explains, over-the-counter trading on securitized derivatives, particularly credit default swaps, "facilitates temporal and spatial displacements that allow banks to shift loans off the balance sheet by selling them to outside institutional investors, such as pension and mutual funds." [111] By spreading risk and shifting risks on to others, these institutions are able to at least temporarily protect themselves.

Here we encounter some problems, however. In particular, the dominance of credit makes it especially difficult to ensure the quality of money. This is especially true when it is less profitable to expand value production than to provide credit and profit through interest rates. [112] This is what Jessop means when he writes of "a fundamental contradiction between the economy considered as a pure space of flows and the economy as a territorially and/or socially embedded system of extra-economic as well as economic resources and competencies." [113] When capital is able to quickly exploit resources in one area without contributing to their reproduction and then move elsewhere to replicate this kind of circulation, it is compromising the sphere of production and thus the strength of the dollar. The sphere of circulation is particularly vulnerable when debt enmeshed in the web of speculation becomes irredeemable or the gap between the value of credit and that of real money becomes too wide. [114] However, the increasing use of securitization and derivatives markets as a risk management strategy has made regulating banks for capital adequacy unable to guarantee seriously limiting risk exposure. This is why in 2008 the key US financial institutions (the Fed and Treasury, as well as the Bank for International Settlements) all shifted to the same models for assessing risk as the largest banks, in the hope of accessing regulators' "fire codes."[115] Competitive pressures between big banks in derivatives and securities markets can lead to an indifference to these regulative warnings, thus further widening the gap between fictitious and real value. [116] When this occurs, the glut of fictitious values (in the form of privately created credit money) contributes to inflation and devalues currency. This problem was most severe in the crisis of 2008, when the American International Group (AIG)-a financial institution that provided insurance for other financial institutions on the creditworthiness of their derivative holdings-was ultimately unable to honor its insurance contracts and protect against loss.[117] Banks extending mortgages to borrowers turned to commercial banks in order to fund the loan, which would then sell the loan to government-sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae. These institutions consolidate a range of mortgages and sell the resultant mortgage-backed security (MBS) to an investment bank, which repackages the MBS according to its needs and issues other derivatives such as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) to be bought by other lenders, banks, or hedge funds.

The link to the sphere of production is again crucial here. As Wolfson explains, "at the base of this complicated pyramid of derivatives might be a subprime borrower whose lenders did not explain an adjustable-rate loan, or another borrower whose ability to meet mortgage payments depended on a continued escalation of home prices. As the subprime borrowers' rates reset, and especially as housing price speculation collapsed, the whole house of cards came crashing down." [118] Derivatives do not require ownership of the underlying asset, so it is possible to speculate-via credit default swaps with an insurer-on the chance of default on a security without owning it. This property of derivatives means that the volume of insured securities can increase quickly and significantly, such that a relatively small quantity of securities can be insured at a much higher amount.[119] Since consumer credit can circulate only as a claim over a share of future profit, or surplus-value and depends on the stability of creditors to pay their loans, asset-backed securitzation has developed in order to ultimately ensure the quality of real money for speculative interests. [120] The time-space compression that occurs through derivatives trading "entails new actors, new strategies and the continual inversion of time and the expansion of virtual space to continue to fund claims on the fictitious value of credit."[121] It is clear, then, that derivatives are ultimately reliant upon productive capital. And while price fluctuations might trigger financial crises, the fear of devaluation due to an overaccumulation of capital is still at the crux. Because of the global scale of derivatives, it is not just the American state that must ensure the stability of the dollar, but any marginal economy, as a means of guarding against a downturn in their own currency value.[122]

Conclusion: Towards a Typology of Spatial Fixes

This paper has attempted to explain derivatives' instrumental properties, their historical development, and their distinct role in both mitigating and exacerbating crises. The basic premise argued that derivatives markets act as a kind of spatial fix in and of themselves, one that maintains several properties of Harvey's spatial fix of productive capital but that also differs in important ways. In summing up, then, this paper will provide a brief typology of spatial fixes in order to provide some clarity to the question of how these spatial fixes differ analytically.

We can think here of three kinds of spatial fixes. First is Harvey's spatial fix, which pertains to productive capital only. Second are financialized spatio-temporal fixes. These fixes are unique in their supplying of fictitious capital. Last are derivative spatio-temporal fixes which, like financialized spatio-temporal fixes, ultimately are dependent upon the sphere of production (in the sense of its effect on interest rates and exchange rates), but operate abstractly in digital OTC markets and move at an unprecedentedly rapid speed. While maintaining many of the properties of financialized spatio-temporal fixes, derivative spatio-temporal fixes constitute their own category because of their separation from an underlying asset. What unites these three forms of spatial fixes is that they are used in order to solve the problem of overaccumulation, yet ultimately contribute to greater systemic risk. What differentiate them are their respective degrees of separation from the sphere of production and, equally important, how they modify the circulation of capital according to spatial parameters. Each type of spatial fix also affects those linked to them in unique ways. For example, a spatial fix of productive capital mitigates a crisis of overaccumulation by opening up productive markets in new regions, or expanding the means of production. This affects capital by increasing the rate of profit in the system as a whole by incentivizing the flow of capital to these regions and trading on the world market, which ultimately tends again towards overaccumulation. A financialized spatio-temporal fix, in contrast, works by extending fictitious capital to individuals and institutions in exchange for later interest payments. Finance capital may be deployed in tandem with productive capital in order to build industry, procure assets, or pay for goods and services. At the same time, fictitious capital is by nature unproductive and thus its extension can be characterized as a mode of debt-driven accumulation. We can understand this process as a spatio-temporal rather than simply a temporal one because finance concurrently reshapes the landscape for productive capital while maintaining speculative interest due to stable currency. Of course, when expectations are too optimistic and a speculative bubble pops, debts are not repayable and financial institutions experience severe losses. [123]

Derivative spatio-temporal fixes are unique in their ability to commodify risk itself, thus "transform[ing] the temporal horizon of circulation-centered capitalism." [124] Derivatives constitute a fundamental shift in the operations of speculative capital and the internationalization of risk. [125] Whereas financial spatio-temporal fixes constitute a debt-driven accumulation tactic, derivative spatio-temporal fixes commodify the inherent relationship structured by that debt, and may be used for hedging, speculation, and leveraging across infinite space. This movement entails particular political consequences that are unlikely to recede on their own. As risks to capital are speculated on rather than altered and the globalization of risk is further insulated from political pressures, [126] crises such as that of 2008 will continue. Understanding the proliferation of these fixes to capitalist crisis is crucial if we are to consider viable alternatives.

References:

Aquanno, Scott. "US Power and the International Bond Market: Financial Flows and the Construction of Risk Value." In American Empire and the Political Economy of Global Finance, edited by Leo Panitch and Martijn Konings, 119-134. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Bryan, Dick and Michael Rafferty. Capitalism with Derivatives: A Political Economy of Financial Derivatives, Capital, and Class . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Bush, Sarah Breger. "Risk Markets and the Landscape of Social Change: Notes on Derivatives, Insurance, and Global Neoliberalism." International Journal of Political Economy, Volume 45 (2016): 124-146.

Carneiro, Ricardo de Medeiros, Pedro Rossi, Guilherme Santos Mello, and Marcos Vinicius Chiliatto-Leite. "The Fourth Dimension: Derivatives and Financial Dominance." Review of Radical Political Economics, Volume 47, Issue 4 (2015): 641-662.

Crouch, Colin. "Privatized Keynesianism: An Unacknowledged Policy Regime." The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Volume 11, Issue 3 (August 2009): 382-399.

Dodd, Randall. "Derivatives Markets: Sources of Vulnerability in US Financial Markets." Financial Policy Forum, Derivative Study Center (May 2004): 1-25.

Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change . Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991.

Harvey, David. "The Spatial Fix - Hegel, Von Thunen, and Marx." Antipode, Volume 13, Issue 3 (1981): 1-12.

Henwood, Doug. Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom. New York: Verso, 1997.

Jessop, Bob. "The Crisis of the National Spatio-Temporal Fix and the Tendential Ecological Dominance of Globalizing Capitalism." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Volume 24, Issue 2 (June 2000): 323-360.

Krippner, Greta. Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012.

Lapavitsas, Costas. Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All. New York: Verso, 2013.

Mackenzie, Donald and Yuval Millo. "Constructing a Market, Performing Theory: The Historical Sociology of a Financial Derivatives Exchange." American Journal of Sociology, Volume 19, Number 1 (July 2003): 107-145.

Martin, Randy. "What Differences do Derivatives Make? From the Technical to the Political Conjuncture." Culture Unbound, Volume 6 (2014): 189-2010.

Muellerleile, Chris. "Speculative Boundaries: Chicago and the Regulatory History of US Financial Derivative Markets." Environment and Planning A, Volume 47 (2015): 1-19.

Panitch, Leo and Sam Gindin. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire . New York: Verso, 2013.

Soederberg, Susanne. Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry: Money, Discipline and the Surplus Population . New York: Routledge, 2014.

Streeck, Wolfgang. Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. New York: Verso, 2014.

Tickell, Adam. "Dangerous Derivatives: Controlling and Creating Risks in International Money." Geoforum, Volume 31 (2000): 87-99.

Wolfson, Marty. "Derivatives and Deregulation." In Real World Banking and Finance, 6th Edition, edited by Doug Orr, Marty Wolfson, Chris Sturr, 151-154. Boston: Dollars and Sense, 2010.

Citations

[1] David Harvey, "The Spatial Fix - Hegel, Von Thunen, and Marx," Antipode, Volume 13, Issue 3 (1981): 7.

[2] Costas Lapavitsas, Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All (New York: Verso, 2013), 4.

[3] Scott Aquanno, "US Power and the International Bond Market: Financial Flows and the Construction of Risk Value," in American Empire and the Political Economy of Global Finance , ed. Leo Panitch and Martijn Konings (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 121.

[4] Randall Dodd, "Derivatives Markets: Sources of Vulnerability in US Financial Markets," Financial Policy Forum, Derivative Study Center (May 2004), 1.

[5] Ibid, 643.

[6] Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty, Capitalism with Derivatives: A Political Economy of Financial Derivatives, Capital, and Class (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 13.

[7] Sarah Breger Bush, "Risk Markets and the Landscape of Social Change: Notes on Derivatives, Insurance, and Global Neoliberalism," International Journal of Political Economy, Volume 45 (2016), 127.

[8] Bryan and Rafferty, Capitalism with Derivatives, 2.

[9] Lapavitsas, Profiting Without Producing, 6.

[10] Ricardo de Medeiros Carneiro, Pedro Rossi, Guilherme Santos Mello, and Marcos Vinicius Chiliatto-Leite, "The Fourth Dimension: Derivatives and Financial Dominance," Review of Radical Political Economics, Volume 47 (2015), 642.

[11] Lapavitsas, 5.

[12] Ibid, 9.

[13] Carneiro et al., "The Fourth Dimension: Derivatives and Financial Dominance," 644.

[14] Randy Martin, "What Differences do Derivatives Make? From the Technical to the Political Conjuncture," Culture Unbound, Volume 6 (2014), 193.

[15] LiPuma and Lee, 87.

[16] Bryan and Rafferty, 63.

[17] Adam Tickell, "Dangerous Derivatives: Controlling and Creating Risks in International Money," Geoforum, Volume 31 (2000), 90.

[18] Tickell, "Dangerous Derivatives," 90.

[19] Lapavitsas, 8.

[20] Ibid.

[21] LiPuma and Lee, 91-92.

[22] Tickell, 90.

[23] Dodd, 6.

[24] Dodd, 20.

[25] Bryan and Rafferty, 42.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Dodd, 20.

[28] Doug Henwood, Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom (New York: Verso, 1997), 29.

[29] Dodd, 21.

[30] Henwood, Wall Street, 30.

[31] Dodd, 22.

[32] Henwood, 29.

[33] Dodd, 23.

[34] Henwood, 34.

[35] Dodd, 23.

[36] Aquanno, "US Power and the International Bond Market," 131.

[37] Ibid, 19.

[38] Carneiro et al., 643.

[39] Ibid.

[40] Ibid, 644.

[41] LiPuma and Lee, 43.

[42] Tickell, 88.

[43] Chris Muellerleile, "Speculative Boundaries: Chicago and the Regulatory History of US Financial Derivative Markets" Environment and Planning A, Volume 47 (2015), 2.

[44] Ibid, 4.

[45] Tickell, 88.

[46] Muellerleile, 5.

[47] Ibid.

[48] Greta Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 60.

[49] Muellerleile, 8.

[50] Tickell, 88.

[51] Muellerleile, 9.

[52] Ibid, 12.

[53] Ibid, 13.

[54] Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire (New York: Verso, 2013), 150.

[55] Donald Mackenzie and Yuval Millo, "Constructing a Market, Performing Theory: The Historical Sociology of a Financial Derivatives Exchange," American Journal of Sociology, Volume 19, Number 1 (July 2003), 114.

[56] Ibid, 44.

[57] Bryan and Rafferty, 4.

[58] Panitch and Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism, 150.

[59] Bryan and Rafferty, 7.

[60] Ibid, 8.

[61] Panitch and Gindin, 150.

[62] Ibid, 50-51.

[63] Ibid, 151.

[64] Aquanno, 131.

[65] Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis, 2.

[66] Ibid, 4.

[67] Ibid, 52.

[68] Ibid.

[69] Ibid.

[70] Ibid, 58-59.

[71] Lapavitsas, 134.

[72] Panitch and Gindin, 176.

[73] Ibid.

[74] Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2014), 51.

[75] Colin Crouch, "Privatized Keynesianism: An Unacknowledged Policy Regime," The British Journal of Politics and International Relations , Volume 11, Issue 3 (August 2009), 382.

[76] Martin, 195.

[77] Streeck, Buying Time, 66.

[78] Lapavitsas, 108.

[79] Tickell, 89.

[80] Ibid.

[81] Ibid.

[82] Martin, 191.

[83] Ibid, 199.

[84] Carneiro et al., 647.

[85] Ibid, 648.

[86] Ibid.

[87] Ibid.

[88] Lapavitsas, 3.

[89] Carneiro et al., 649.

[90] Ibid.

[91] Ibid, 650.

[92] Lapavitsas, 167.

[93] Martin, 196.

[94] Harvey, "The Spatial Fix," 7.

[95] Ibid.

[96] Ibid, 8.

[97] LiPuma and Lee, 98.

[98] David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991): 284.

[99] Ibid, 287.

[100] Ibid, 295-96.

[101] Ibid, 296.

[102] Bob Jessop, "The Crisis of the National Spatio-Temporal Fix and the Tendential Ecological Dominance of Globalizing Capitalism," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Volume 24.2 (June 2000), 337.

[103] Ibid, 340.

[104] Ibid.

[105] Ibid.

[106] Ibid, 346.

[107] Ibid.

[108] Bryan and Rafferty, 12.

[109] Aquanno, 130.

[110] Panitch and Gindin, 188.

[111] Susanne Soederberg, Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry: Money, Discipline and the Surplus Population (New York: Routledge, 2014), 91.

[112] Ibid, 54.

[113] Jessop, 347.

[114] Soederberg, Debtfare States and the Poverty Industry, 54.

[115] Panitch and Gindin, 266.

[116] Ibid.

[117] Marty Wolfson, "Derivatives and Deregulation," in Real World Banking and Finance, 6th Edition, ed. Doug Orr, Marty Wolfson, Chris Sturr (Boston: Dollars and Sense, 2010), 152.

[118] Ibid.

[119] Ibid, 153.

[120] Soederberg, 43.

[121] Ibid, 91.

[122] LiPuma and Lee, 52.

[123] Wolfson, 151.

[124] LiPuma and Lee, 127.

[125] Ibid, 37.

[126] Bush, 134.

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss: Bracing for Trump's Anti-Worker Corporate Agenda

By Colin Jenkins

This was originally published by Social Justice: a journal of crime, conflict, and world order as part of a series titled, The Possible Futures of the US Under Trump .

Rich people don't have to have a life-and-death relationship with the truth and its questions; they can ignore the truth and still thrive materially. I am not surprised many of them understand literature only as an ornament. Life is an ornament to them, relationships are ornaments, their 'work' is but a flimsy, pretty ornament meant to momentarily thrill and capture attention.

-Sergio Troncoso

In a February speech on his campaign trail, then-candidate Donald Trump lambasted his opponents for their cozy relationships with Wall Street bankers. "I know the guys at Goldman Sachs. They have total, total control over [Cruz]," Trump said. "Just like they have total control over Hillary Clinton." Trump's campaigns for both the Republican candidacy and the US Presidency were heavily themed on this inside-out approach to posing as a whistleblower of the elite, a billionaire businessman gone rogue, eager to feed other members of his exclusive club to the lions. Americans by the tens of millions-ravaged by decades of predatory loan schemes, joblessness, and unfathomable debt-gathered in the den, fevered by this angst-ridden anti-establishment message, thirsting for the flesh he was to heave from the castle on the hill.

Nine months later, Trump was elected to the office of President of the United States. Taking a page from George W. Bush, Trump successfully packaged his billionaire, elitist self into an average dude sitting on the bar stool across from us. Taking a page from Ronald Reagan, Trump successfully molded the chronic economic woes of the American working class into avenues for racial and xenophobic hatred. Trump's infamous wall is the modern-day version of Reagan's mythological "welfare queen"-both masterful mind tricks designed to avert the attention of the understandably ravenous working-class lions away from the ringmasters and toward others in the den. The oldest trick in the book: divide and conquer. The end result: a billionaire businessman buoyed to the highest office of the land by 63 million working-class voters during a time of unprecedented poverty and wealth inequality.

Predictably, Trump's ascension to the presidency has ended his inside-out shtick. Much like Barack Obama in 2008, Trump's anti-establishment marketing assault has culminated into an uber-establishment cabinet. Within six weeks of his election victory, Trump has proceeded to form what some have referred to as the General Billionaires Administration . As of December 7th, Trump's prospective cabinet topped a combined personal wealth of $14 billion , "more than 30 times greater than that of even President George W. Bush's White House." And that represents only half of the total appointees to come. Instead of "draining the swamp" as he promised to do on the campaign trail, Trump has called on his real-estate instincts to expand the swamp into a gargantuan monstrosity of a cesspool. For working-class Americans, this means the President and those surrounding him are even more out of touch with the common struggle than ever before.

Although personal wealth does not necessarily imply the embracing of a blatant anti-worker ideology, it almost always sets this tone through efforts to legitimize said wealth, promote false meritocracies, and push unrealistic narratives rooted in "personal responsibility" and "pulling up boot straps," all of which ignore the material realities of working-class people. Taken on their words and actions, there is no reason to believe that Trump and his cabinet will be anything but disastrous for working-class Americans.

Betsy DeVos, Trump's pick for Education Secretary, wants to privatize education and treat it as an industry among others in a competitive capitalist market. "Let's not kid ourselves that [public education] is not an industry," she told a crowd in Texas , "we must open it up to entrepreneurs and innovators." In other words, run it as a for-profit venture, which inevitably means lowering pay, benefits, and standards for employees (teachers) in order to maximize the bottom line. Not good for working-class Americans who teach for a living, and not good for working-class children whose educations will take a back seat to profit margins.

Andrew Puzder, Trump's pick for Labor Secretary, has proven to be fiercely anti-worker in his role as CEO of CKE Restaurants. NY's Attorney General Eric Schneiderman referred to this appointment as a " cruel and baffling decision by Trump " due to Puzder's presiding over a fast-food chain "that repeatedly stole workers' hard-earned wages." As an employee at one of Puzder's restaurants, Rogelio Hernandez called Puzder " one of the worst fast food CEOs ," adding that his appointment "sends a signal to workers that the Trump years are going to be about low pay, wage theft, sexual harassment and racial discrimination." Not good for tens of millions of working-class Americans who are desperate for living-wage employment.

Ben Carson, Trump's pick to run Housing and Urban Development, has been consistently opposed to government assistance programs like the one he is about to oversee. Rather than viewing such programs as necessities in a capitalist system that leaves many people without the means to fulfill basic needs, Carson sees them as "socialist experiments" that "attempt to infiltrate every part of our lives." Carson even said that trusting the government "to use housing policy to enhance the opportunities available to lower-income citizens" can be "downright dangerous." Ironically, he is now entrusted to do just that. Not good for the millions of working-class Americans who rely on public housing programs to shelter themselves and their families.

While most of Trump's own plans have been hidden in vague political rhetoric ("Making America Great Again," "create a dynamic booming economy" with "pro-growth tax plans" and "new modern regulatory frameworks"), they are mostly taken from the same neoliberal agenda that has shaped American policy for the past three decades, merely repackaged with Trump-speak. If his own business dealings are any indication of how he feels about working people, the Trump presidential agenda will most certainly be anti-worker. Workers have filed numerous lawsuits against Trump over the years, alleging everything from anti-union intimidation to paying below-minimum wages. " In one case , the Trump Organization paid $475,000 to settle a claim with nearly 300 Los Angeles golf club employees in a class-action suit alleging unpaid wages and age discrimination, among other offenses." In another case, the Trump Organization "settled for an unknown sum" regarding the employment of undocumented Polish immigrants who "were paid $5 an hour or less when they were paid at all," and "worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week with no overtime." Earlier this year, workers at Trump's Las Vegas hotel filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging they were "interfered with, restrained, and coerced" in an effort to avoid unionization. Dozens of similar complaints against Trump businesses have come to light over the years, including alarming trends of misogyny against women employees.

Like most marketing slogans, "Make America Great Again" has no real meaning in regards to concrete plans. Its call on some glorious past allows for an embrace of generic change, and its purposeful vagueness speaks to whatever is important to each individual who embraces it, essentially allowing for a wide range of beauties in the eyes of a wide range of beholders. Trump's "pro-growth tax plan" draws on the same neoliberal ideology that was implemented by Reagan and survived by every administration since, proclaiming that lowering corporate tax rates will incentivize American companies to stay in the US, which will create more jobs, and will inevitably allow the increased corporate wealth to trickle down to the rest of us. The only problem is that never happened. Ironically, the implementation of such policies actually paralleled the mass exodus of American companies, partly due to free trade agreements like NAFTA and partly due to the globalization of the capitalist system, which allowed for the formation of an international labor pool to replace the industrialized, unionized labor pools that once existed in countries like the US.

Between 1986 and 1988, Reagan lowered the corporate tax rate from 46% to 34%. To put this move in perspective, this rate had stayed between 46% and 52.8% since 1951. The Reagan rate has barely moved since, despite 16 years of Democratic administrations. And it has done nothing to keep American companies home; rather, it actually complemented massive outsourcing of American jobs. In fact, " manufacturing employment collapsed from a high of 19.5 million workers in June 1979 to 11.5 workers in December 2009, a drop of 8 million workers over 30 years. Between August 2000 and February 2004, manufacturing jobs were lost for a stunning 43 consecutive months-the longest such stretch since the Great Depression." This trend has continued as the US lost 5 million manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2016. According to the Center for American Progress, "US multinational corporations, the big brand-name companies that employ a fifth of all American workers… cut their work forces in the US by 2.9 million during the 2000s while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million." All of this despite historically low corporate tax rates. Trump's solution: double down by cutting corporate tax rates even more.

Remaining consistent with the neoliberal agenda, Trump has also promised to "scale back years of disastrous regulations unilaterally imposed by our out-of-control bureaucracy." Yet another failed policy direction, tried and tested for decades, being recycled to give already reckless corporations even more maneuverability. Trump plans to repatriate trillions of dollars of corporate money that has been hidden in foreign banks for years. By allowing special immunity to these corporations (which have essentially evaded taxes through loopholes) with a temporary reduction in the tax rate (from 35% to 10%), Trump believes roughly $5 trillion will return to the US (although reports estimate closer to $2.5 trillion ). Unfortunately, the last time such immunity was granted, in 2004, "a congressional report noted that some companies used more than 90 percent of the repatriated cash to enrich shareholders , generally through stock buybacks. Corporations that brought home the most cash, in fact, cut jobs."

Trump's recycled economic agenda has proven time and time again to boost corporate wealth at the expense of working-class interests. The widely reported deal made with Carrier recently, which was facilitated by Trump and promises to keep 800 jobs in Indiana, is a perfect example of this misguided approach. The Carrier deal was said to include a tax giveaway, the main tool in Trump's corporate welfare tax plan, which stands to cost about $6.2 trillion in lost federal revenues over a decade. Not only does this approach " starve the beast ," as originally intended by Reagan, it simply does not create American jobs as promised. The past four decades have proven this. The corporate tax rate in the US (which is actually on par with G7 countries, whose rates average over 30% ) is not a tremendous factor in why companies move elsewhere. They avoid taxes because they can. There is no reason to believe they wouldn't avoid them just the same with a lower rate. They also relocate for the "cheap labor," which is near chattel-slavery levels in some places, and for preferable infrastructures. As the New York Times reported shortly after the Carrier deal, "Carrier's parent company, United Technologies , never mentioned taxes as the reason for the offshoring move. Instead, it cited its 'existing infrastructure' and 'strong supplier base' in Mexico. More revealing, United Technologies says it can save $65 million a year by moving operations to low-wage Mexico."

Trump's economic plan does nothing to stray from the corporate-friendly neoliberal agenda of the past three decades. In many cases, it doubles down on it. These strategies have never benefited the working-class majority, and they will continue to represent an abysmal failure for those of us who depend on wages and salaries to live-a reality that Trump and his cabinet have never faced. Their out-of-touch, fairy-tale lives will undoubtedly amount to out-of-touch policies, leaving most of us entrenched in our ongoing struggle for living wages, affordable housing, reliable healthcare, and meaningful educations for our children. This struggle must take place in our communities, at our jobs, and in our children's schools. Rejecting the corporate agenda embraced by Trump will not be easy-but it is a struggle we've inherited from decades ago, only with a new face at the helm.