How Did Capitalists Get So Rich?: On the Marriage Between Capitalism and Government

By James Leach

It is difficult to know what to say to the smug self-satisfaction of the business class who gaze upon the enormous wealth of their country, and then pat their back for the capitalist utopia they have built. In critical analyses of capitalism, considerable weight is put on examining the contradictions in the modes of exchange, the formation of crises, and the tension between labour and capital. But I want to address how capitalism developed, and how the considerable wealth of developed nations was produced, as well as how it became so acutely concentrated within a few pockets. As Marx asks in Wages, Prices and Profit, "how does this strange phenomenon arise, that we find on the market a set of buyers, possessed of land, machinery, raw material, and the means of subsistence… and on the other hand, a set of sellers who have nothing to sell except their labouring power, their working arms and brains?"

"Primitive Accumulation": Enclosures and Erasing the Commons

There is no concrete date which we can mark as the first day of capitalism, or the last day of feudalism, since its development was somewhat gradual. The results of the English Revolution in the seventeenth century, for example, saw movements away from feudal society and towards capitalist society, but it was not until two centuries later, during the Industrial Revolution, where capitalism truly flourished. However, a significant policy which marked a shift towards the dominance of private property is the agricultural enclosures. This involved the fencing of farmland into private property, mostly within the hands of large, propertied landowners. Before this, agricultural labourers either worked on common land within their village, or they were peasants working for a local lord. A portion of the labourer's produce would be seized by the lord as a tax and the labourers would then sell what was left in local markets. Enclosures saw the new dominance of wage labour, the separation of agricultural workers between themselves and their means of production, the formation of the first labour market, and of the first proletariat.

Before enclosures, common land was able to significantly rival wage labour. Jane Humphries essay Enclosures, Common Rights, and Women, published in the Journal of Economic History, explores the results of enclosures, as well as the significance of common land. Humphries finds that the family possession of a single cow on common land could "remain significant compared with landowner's wages" and on an annual basis "the comparison would probably be even more favourable to cowkeeping." Keeping cows communally also had other benefits. The by-product of rearing cows was goods such as skim-milk, which provided a 'gratifying addition to the monotonous diet of the adult farm workers', and was crucial to the healthy development of the labourer's children. However, after enclosures, due to high rents and resistance from farmers, common cowkeeping virtually vanished, and labourers could not often afford to buy milk.

Now that the efficiency of "communing" has been briefly established, to what extent did this communal lifestyle exist? Peter Linebaugh's exceptional text Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance is instrumental in answering these questions. Linebaugh documents the work of the seventeenth century statistician Gregory King, who estimated that were was "twenty million acres and pasture, meadow, forest, heath, moor, mountain, and barren land in a country of thirty-seven million acres', Linebaugh continues to say that 'even if common rights were exercised in only half of these, it means that in 1688 one quarter of the total area of England and Wales was common land.' Such an enormous measure of common land would have been extremely valuable to agricultural workers. Naturally, enclosures reversed this. 'Between 1725 and 1825 nearly four thousand enclosure acts appropriated more than six million areas of land… to the politically dominant land owners.' It does not take a genius to work out the effects on the newly formed working class. Reliance on Poor Relief went up, there was a poverty crisis in the eighteenth century, and as Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis simply puts: 'More than 70 percent of the peasants were thrown out of their houses and off their ancestral lands. It was devastating, brutal, cruel and… highly effective.' E.P Thompson called enclosures a plain case of class robbery.

It is difficult, however, to drill into the minds of a global population that they do not own much besides their labour power. The Indonesian novelist Promoedya Ananta Toer reported on the response from native Indonesians to enclosures in his memoirs: 'The native people had no word for "fence"- the concept was completely foreign to their culture. They didn't recognise such manmade limitations on land-use rights.' How could such a disaster for the global population not be overthrown immediately? Unfortunately, the rich and powerful have 'experts in legitimation', to use Antonio Gramsci's words. Garret Hardin's text The Tragedy of the Commons sought to justify enclosures. Hardin's thesis appears rational. He suggests that the commoners, in their simultaneous desire to profit as much as possible from the land, and the un-fettered access to land, would bring 'ruin to all.' Hardin's misanthropy is de-bunked with plain historical fact by Linebaugh: '… the commons is always governed… [an] officer elected by the commoners will impound that cow, or will fine that greedy shepherd who puts more than his share onto the commons.'

Imperialism

The consequences of imperialism are, and always have been, deeply lodged within the cognitive dissonance of the body politic. For example, it takes the most basic logic to recognise that capitalism developed alongside Transatlantic slavery, and it takes little extra effort to make the connection between them, yet this line of reasoning is often left un-pursued.

Pre- Civil War America is often seen as split between the free-market north and the plantation complex of the south. They were, however, inextricably linked. Forbes, a popular and prestigious business magazine, ran an interesting article on the subject, in relation to Sven Beckert's book Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. It turns out, in contrast to popular fantasy, that the capitalists of the American north were crucial in keeping slavery alive, and, of course, it was crucial to their development. The slave economy effected the north with 'plenty of merchants in New York City, Boston and elsewhere helping to organize the trade of slave-grown agricultural commodities…' The slave production of cotton 'offered a reason for entrepreneurs and investors to build manufactories… thereby connecting… Industrial Revolution to the advancing plantation frontier…' The latter point is particularly poignant. The Industrial Revolution ushered capitalism into a golden age where it could stand with two feet on a fertile ground of free trade accompanied with low tariffs (a subject which I will later address). The swollen shadow which shades the conscience of capitalism, of course, is the fact that it required the possession of human beings to help stimulate its progression. This can not be understated, since, for the first six decades of the 19th Century, raw cotton amounted to more than half of the nation's exports.

It would be tough to go through the entire history of modern imperialism to weigh its effects and thus measure the arms which propped up capitalist development, because there are simply too many cases. But it is worth addressing the very land that is now the 'United States of America'. It goes without saying that before European colonists arrived, there was a Native population who organised themselves locally and communally. It also goes without saying that this way of life has been mostly exterminated with state violence and the commodification of land. In 1845, California was part of Mexico. How did this change? Imperialism. Back in those days, the mainstream press could be more honest about the practices of the state. An article by the Washington Union said: 'Let the measure of annexation be accomplished… For who can arrest the torrent that will pour onward to the Wes? The road to California will be open to us.' In the 19th Century, the establishment did not have to wax lyrical with tales of 'democracy'. There is surely no questioning that such actions are inhuman; they create 'the wretched of the earth', to use Franz Fanon's turn of phrase. But what is the motive? It is rare for humans to be motivated by sheer violence. There must be a reward to legitimize violence. In the case of the United States' invasion of Mexico in 1847, the reward was the rich natural resources of California. Historian Howard Zinn, in his seminal text A People's History of the United States, quotes the Illinois State Register in 1846:

Shall this garden of beauty be suffered to lie dormant in its wild and useless luxuriance?... myriads of enterprising Americans would flock to its riches and inviting prairie's; the hum of Anglo-American industry would be heard in its valleys; cities would rise upon its plains and sea-coast, and the resources and wealth of the nation be increased in an incalculable degree.

This quote goes some way to explain how much the expansionist ethic of the American government meant to slave-owning economy of the south.

We need not go as far back as the 19th Century to look for examples of state force providing for the economy of a nation state. War has always been profitable. The neo-imperial oil wars of the 20 th and 21st Century have meant that the U.S and Britain have had cheap access to oil. Given that state force has brought this about, it has nothing to do with free trade.

Anything but Free Trade, In the Name of Capitalism

If we only pay attention to the dictates of Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and other free-market enthusiasts, we can be easily fooled that (with a few nuances), the un-rivalled wealth of the modern superpowers is owed to its policies of free markets and trade. If we look at economic history plainly, however, we find remarkably different results. Ha- Joon- Chang's tour-de-force Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective , is a good place to start in studying what policies truly led to economic development.

Chang begins by invoking Friedrich List, the 19th Century German economist who fathered the 'infant industry promotion' theory, which proposed that budding industries require state protection from competitive markets which were dominated by experienced and long-standing manufacturing countries. List, in his albeit tediously named 'The National System of Political Economy' is important. He finds that Britain was 'the first country to perfect the art of infant industry promotion' because

[the monarchies of Britain] perceived that their newly established native manufactures could never hope to succeed in free competition with the old and long-established manufactures of foreigners… Hence, they sought, by a system of restrictions, privileges, and encouragements, to transplant to their native soil the wealth, the talents, and the spirit of enterprise of foreigners.

Chang then systematically goes through the historical development of almost every highly-developed nation, starting with Britain, 'the intellectual fountain of the modern laissez-faire doctrines…' The fourteenth century monarch Edward III is known for being the Brit to first actively start developing British wool production. His tactic was to ban imports of raw wool, centralise its trade and bring in Flemish weavers (he also only worse English cloth, to set an example). Naturally, through the most anti- free trade policies possible, Britain became the dominant exporter of wool. It was a hundred years after Henry VIII's import substitution policies of 1489 that Britain decided to be competitive in a market, which consequently drove the industries of the previously dominant Low Countries into the ground.

As already stated, the Industrial Revolution formed the blueprint for un-fettered capitalism. But how was this blueprint written? Britain had 'very high tariffs on manufacturing products as late as the 1820's, some two generations after the start of its Industrial Revolution, and when it was significantly ahead of its competitor nations in technological terms.' As well as tariff protection, Britain felt that for its businesses to develop, it needed to ban the imports of superior products from the colonies, in order for its own industries to remain economically viable. In 1700, for example, Britain banned the import of Indian cotton products, leading to the decline of the Indian cotton industry. It was then totally destroyed by the 'ending of the East India Company's monopoly in international trade in 1813.' Clearly, the economic supremacy of Britain in the 19th Century was not predicated on free trade. There was, however, developing pressure from the business community for free trade, once they had acquired enough wealth from protectionist policies to be competitive in global markets. By the 1850's, considerable steps (such as the eradication of tariffs) set in motion a liberalised capitalist economy. This did not last long. 'By the 1880's, some hard-pressed British manufacturers were asking for protection.' However, the true move away from free trade occurred in 1932, when the manufacturing advantage of Germany of the USA demanded protectionism from Britain.

Conclusion

What can be seen is that there have been gigantic impediments to true laissez-faire economics. These impediments have taken numerous forms: violence, colonialism, protectionism etc. Today, the impediments are slightly different. Enormous taxpayer subsidies to the corporate sector, for example, turn free-markets from fact into fantasy. The state ghosted every step capitalism took; their relationship is fascinating. Capitalism and the state are the main actors in a Sophoclean tragedy in which capitalism cannot function with or without the state. On the one hand, capitalism has considerably relied on the state for the conditions of its development, may that be enclosures, access to the captive markets of colonies, tariff protection, or plain violence to silence the rebelling masses. On the other hand, centralised government can be a leech on the efficiency of business. It has the cheek to demand

for taxes, and occasionally it represents 'we the people', and the interests of 'the people' are at odds with the interests of the capitalists. The government is often accused of being a threat to the freedom of the capitalist class, but history has shown that the latter needs the former to protect its interests. It is within this tragic comedy that we have lived since the origin of capitalism, and that we continue to live in today.

The Immiseration of Labor: Capitalism, Poverty, and Inequality in Philadelphia

By Arturo Castillon

"...the more alien wealth they [the workers] produce, and… the more the productivity of their labor increases, the more does their very function as means for the valorization of capital become precarious."[1]

"...within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of labor are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker; …all means for the development of production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become means of domination and exploitation of the producers..."[2]

The Theory of Immiseration

How are we to understand the contemporary economic situation of most people, who experience increasingly unstable conditions of employment and life?

This essay analyzes the growth of poverty and income inequality within the context of a developed capitalist [3] economy, using Philadelphia as a case study. Some might think that this city is an extreme example; for many years now Philadelphia has ranked the poorest of the 10 largest metropolitan areas in the United States.[4] However, the basic thesis of this essay is that immiseration is not an exception but instead a normal outgrowth of the capitalist economy.

The concept of immiseration is usually associated with Karl Marx, as he insisted that the nature of capitalist production resulted in the devaluation of labor, specifically the decline of wages relative to the total value created in the economy. For Marx, this meant that the proletarian class, [5] or working class, was fundamentally defined by precariousness, i.e. material instability, uncertainty, insecurity, and dependency. This theory stems from Marx's analysis of the changing organic composition of capitalist production and the reduced demand for labor that emerges as technology develops and labor becomes more productive. With increasingly productive machines, less labor produces more commodities at a faster rate, leading to the gradual replacement of labor by machines. Marx observed that the realities of capitalist competition necessitated this tendency towards mechanization and rising productivity. If a factory in the South restructures production to raise its productivity - allowing it to sell more commodities, at a faster rate, and at a cheaper price, while employing less labor-while a rival factory in Philadelphia does not, then after a while the factory in the South will run the factory in Philadelphia out of business. In order to protect their market from more productive competitors, therefore, capitalists must reinvest part of their capital into increasing productivity, or perish in the long run.

As capitalists competed and became more productive, Marx noted that labor became more impoverished: "The growing competition among the bourgeoisie, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious."[6] In other words, increases in capitalist productivity were uneven in their effects-they benefited the capitalists, not the workers. As capitalism became more productive and labor produced more capital in a given amount of time, economic output increased; but at the same time, real wages stabilized and even declined, because the input of human labor stayed the same or declined relative to the output of capital.

This constellation of ideas would later be referred to by Marxists as "the immiseration thesis." However, this term is somewhat misleading since throughout his life Marx developed several theses about the absolute and relative immiseration of labor under different phases of capitalist development. Nonetheless, Marx always theorized the devaluation of labor relative to the self-valorization of capital, and in this sense, he did posit a general theory of immiseration.

An Uneven Economy

Even accounting for periodic crises and recessions, it seems that the US economy is strong and growing, locally and nationally, from the standpoint of those who rule it- the capitalist class.[7] It is still the largest national economy in the world;[8] the world's largest producer of petroleum and gas [9]; the world's largest internal market for goods and services [10]; and the world's largest trading power, [11] with roughly a third of this trade based in the export and import of international commodities, while domestic trade between regions in the US generates even more capital, accounting for roughly two-thirds of US trade.[12]

The majority of this trade is concentrated in the 10 largest metropolitan areas of the US. Those ten metro areas, ordered by largest total trade volume, are: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, San Francisco, and Boston. All the commodities that move throughout the nation, in freight trains, trucks, and shipping containers, flow through a vast transportation infrastructure made up of rail lines, roads, and ports that link these ten metropolitan areas in an extensive network of "trade corridors." New York and Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Riverside, and San Francisco and San Jose are among the largest corridors within the national network.[13] These regional trading networks also provide access to distant markets that allows US capitalists to take part in global commodity chains. Still, the largest single part of capitalist value in the US comes from domestic trade.

Primarily as a result of their complementary industries in energy, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and mixed freight, New York and Philadelphia are the largest trading partners in the national interstate network, [14] making the New York-Philadelphia trade corridor the most valuable in the nation.[15] Because it serves as a crucial node in the national trade network, Philadelphia is home to the 7th largest metropolitan economy in the nation, [16] generating the 4th highest gross domestic product in the nation, and the 9th highest among the cities of the world.[17]

The Philadelphia metropolitan economy, which includes Camden, Chester, Norristown, and other peripheral cities and towns, continues to generate massive profits for those who own it. Still, for most people-who are not capitalists, but workers-wages are low, jobs are increasingly insecure, and poverty continues to grow.[18] Despite regional economic growth, poverty has increased more rapidly in Philadelphia than any other major city since the 1970s. However, this trend is not isolated to Philadelphia; poverty has steadily increased throughout the nation since the 1970s.[19]

During this same period which people became poorer, the national economy has continued to grow and wealth has continued to concentrate in fewer hands than ever before. After two decades of relative stability following World War II, US income inequality once again began to grow starting in the early 1970s and continued to grow despite rising business cycles in the 1980s and 1990s.[20] By 2013, the top 1 percent of households received about 20 percent of all pre-tax income, in contrast to about 10 percent from 1950 to 1980.[21] By 2017, the income of the top 20% of households in Philadelphia was up by 13% since 2007, while the income of the bottom 60% of households was below 2007 levels.[22]

While a strong national economy in the late 1990s helped drive down the number of people living in poverty for the first time in decades, this trend was short-lived. Not long after the 2000s began, the bursting of the dot-com bubble sent the nation into a recession, a regular occurrence in capitalism. Millions of people lost their jobs and incomes during the early 2000s, and poverty continued to grow even as the economy recovered by the mid-2000s. The onset of the Great Recession of 2008-2009 only accelerated this trend, and the number of people living in poverty grew even faster. Even with the end of the Great Recession, poverty continued to grow throughout the nation, and Philadelphia registered declines in typical worker wages during the first five years of the recovery. By 2010-2014, 14 million people in Philadelphia lived in neighborhoods with poverty rates of 40 percent or more-5 million more than before the Great Recession and more than twice as many as in 2000.[23]

Although poverty increased among white Americans in the post-Recession period, for Black and Latino Americans poverty rose even more sharply, locally and nationally. [24] In particular, Black Philadelphians today continue to experience record high levels of poverty [25] and low teen employment.[26] This racial disparity is the result of a longstanding pattern in which white workers, allied with capitalists (who are almost entirely white), exclude Black and Brown workers from the better-paying, more-secure jobs.

The De-Industrialization of Labor

How do we explain this disconnect between growing wealth at the top and deepening poverty at the bottom?

It's obvious in retrospect that the rise of poverty in Philadelphia and other former industrial centers is the result of a shift in the capitalist mode of production-from manufacturing industries to service industries, and from city to suburbs. During most the 19th century Philadelphia was a center of craft-based industrial production, well known for its diverse array of small and medium-sized manufacturing industries-textiles, metal products, paper, glass, furniture, shoes, hardware, etc. By 1900, manufacturing workers made up about one-half of the city's entire labor force.[27] However, manufacturing jobs began to decline in Philadelphia in the 1920s, and by the 1970s, the service industries came to eclipse manufacturing entirely. Rather than manufacturing, most people now work in the service industries-food service, retail, health service, and logistics sub-industries such as warehousing, transportation, and delivery services. This "de-industrialization" of the economy and workforce resulted in a loss of income for most workers.[28]

The de-industrialization of Philadelphia, and the corresponding rise in poverty throughout the region, began earlier than most other cities in the North American Rust-Belt, shortly after the economic upturn that came with World War I (1914-1918), which resulted in growing mechanization, automation, and standardization of production on a national and global scale. In contrast, Philadelphia's manufacturing businesses for the most part continued employing the labor of highly-skilled craftsmen who worked in small and medium-sized firms, known as "workshops," which produced custom goods for niche markets. The "Workshop of the World," as Philadelphia was still known in the 1920s, could not compete with mass industrial production, for mass marketed consumption, by means of the unskilled and disposable mass assembly line workers of the factories in Northern cities like Detroit, Chicago, and New York. The new system of mass industrial production signaled the end of the highly specialized manufacturing processes which characterized most of industrial Philadelphia before World War II.[29]

With the national economic downturn of 1929, major sections of the city's craft-manufacturing base began to collapse. By the 1930s, the only manufacturing businesses that remained in Philadelphia were the few that developed mass production methods-factories along the peripheries of the city in Manayunk, Germantown, Kensington, etc. These were the only manufacturing businesses in the city that could compete on a national level.

Eventually, the demand for manufacturing in Philadelphia would pick up as a result of the revival of the national economy during World War II (1939-1945), when federally-funded factories hired over 27,000 new workers.[30] The wartime economy opened new possibilities for Black workers to join the industrial workforce; while only 15,000 African Americans worked in manufacturing jobs in the city in 1940, their representation rose to 55,000 by 1943. Although this represented an increase in wages and jobs for Black workers, more than half of these jobs were in unskilled positions that offered the lowest wages.[31]

Despite a boost in production during World War II, Philadelphia's manufacturing industries began a steep decline during the peacetime transition. Industrial capitalists continued to face the challenge of superior competition, and this time the competition was increasingly global. International trade grew in the decades after the war, as European and Japanese manufacturers began to compete with US manufacturers. In this context, most factories in Philadelphia either went out of business or left the city. By 1955, fewer than 1,000 workers were employed in the city's formerly expansive textile industries.[32]

Black industrial workers hired during World War II were particularly affected by the loss of manufacturing jobs. A big factor in this process was the seniority system embodied in most union contracts, which meant that when recession, closure, or layoffs happened, those with the least seniority were the first to go. Since Black workers were usually the last hired, they were also usually the first fired.

By the early 1970s, when other major cities throughout the North and Midwest were beginning to experience de-industrialization, most of the manufacturing businesses in Philadelphia had already shut down or relocated to the suburbs, as well as to cities in the South and West of the country. The few industrial firms that remained in Philadelphia were those that invested heavily in automation and raised their standard of productivity.[33]

In the 1980s and 1990s the pattern of de-industrialization became international, as it began to hit most nations in Europe, as well as Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Since the beginning of the 21th century, the Southern and Western cities of the US that once drew manufacturers from the older cities have also struggled with the loss of manufacturing jobs. After the economic crisis of 2008, the effects of de-industrialization only intensified on a global scale, especially in underdeveloped nations in the global South.[34]

Hence, the de-industrialization of Philadelphia, and the concomitant rise in poverty, was mostly the result of capitalist market competition. Industrial Philadelphia was mostly composed of craft-based manufacturers that could not compete with highly-mechanized and increasingly-automated factories elsewhere. The manufacturers that kept up their profits in the face of competitors stayed in business by investing in technology that increased productivity. Some also relocated their businesses to cheaper, less-regulated labor markets. In the process, these transformations led to the devaluation and displacement of labor.

Besides the pressures of market competition, another important factor influencing de-industrialization was the militant resistance of the workers who carried out mass strikes and secured higher wages, pensions, health benefits, and better working conditions during the 1930s and 1940s. With the help of the leadership of the major industrial unions (the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations), the capitalist class responded to the workers movement by shutting down or relocating their facilities to the non-unionized South and West in the 1950s. In this way, de-industrialization undermined the power of the unionized working class, and took back the wages and benefits that the capitalists conceded to the workers in previous decades of struggle.

The Growth of Inequality

As capitalism reorganized itself, the service industries came to supersede manufacturing as the primary source of working-class employment. Today, the number of industrial jobs in Philadelphia represents only 5 percent of the total workforce of the city, while service jobs represent 40 percent of total employment, making the service industries the largest sector of the city's workforce.[35] Even within the few manufacturing businesses that remain in the region, they employ increasingly fewer workers, and those they do employ are increasingly part-time, part-year, and paid less.[36]

The social composition of the service industries is much more diverse than that of the manufacturing industries, which are highly unionized and still dominated by white men. Women make up over half of all service workers, while Black workers form a higher-than-average concentration in lower-paying service jobs. While service jobs have grown by 56 percent since the 1970s, the overwhelming majority of these jobs are part-time, part-year, require few skills, pay low wages, and offer few to no benefits. At the same time, the number of high-salary professional and managerial jobs has grown by 85 percent since the 1970s.[37] This means that de-industrialization has improved the earnings of those in the top-tier of the workforce, while most workers have seen their incomes shrink or stagnate since the 1970s.

Further exacerbating the livelihood of the urban proletariat, jobs have increasingly shifted towards the suburban peripheries of the city, after the pattern of large cities throughout the Northeast and Midwest. This transformation was facilitated by the massive construction of interstate highways in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. While low-income populations in the region concentrate in Philadelphia, Camden, and a number of older urban centers, most jobs are now in the suburbs, often in areas accessible only by automobile, and distant from housing that is affordable to these workers. If city residents do manage to find a job in the suburbs, their wages are effectively lowered because of substantial traveling expenses; if they decide to move to the suburbs, wages are effectively lowered because of higher rent.[38]

The decline of manufacturing jobs was particularly devastating for Black workers, who concentrated in unskilled manufacturing jobs and in service jobs within the city, but were almost completely excluded from professional/managerial jobs and skilled trades. Due to the loss of manufacturing jobs, coupled with the suburbanization of the rapidly expanding service industries, Black workers have seen their incomes and jobs decline dramatically since the early 1970s. Although employment rates declined for both white and Black men since the 1970s, the black decline was twice that of whites. Furthermore, while there was an increase of employment for white women in Philadelphia since the 1970s, the employment rate for Black women hardly changed at all.[39] In this way, de-industrialization eroded the gains made by Black workers in the industrial sector in the decades after World War II.

The Immiseration of Labor

As I've shown, the transformation of the Philadelphia economy-from manufacturing to services, and from city to suburbs-has resulted in a deepening of poverty and inequality for most workers in this city. The question remains, why does capitalism develop itself in such a way that results in the immiseration of labor? This much is clear from the outset: nature does not produce, on the one hand, fewer and fewer rich people, and on the other hand, a growing army of workers who own nothing but their labor, which they must sell for an increasingly lower wage. The immiseration of labor results from the contradictions of what Marx called the "capitalist mode of production."

In brief, Marx argued that capitalism was distinct from all other modes of production in its unique aim: the creation of capital. Whereas other modes of production might find their purpose in producing useful things to satisfy human needs (communal production), or in producing a surplus of luxuries to satisfy a class of nobles (feudalism), capitalism, in contrast, produces the abstraction known as capital. Capital is not produced for the private consumption of its owner, the capitalist. If this were the case the aim of capitalist production wouldn't be the creation of capital but the consumption of things (or what Marx called "use-values"). Under capitalism, however, capital is not produced for use or consumption; capital functions as an end in itself-it is the starting and finishing point of production.[40]

Beginning with the industrial revolution in the late eighteenth century, capitalists made labor more productive by investing a greater part of capital into the instruments of production, introducing newer, more efficient, and more expensive machines. Such an accelerated development of the forces of production did not exist in any other mode of production before capitalism. Theoretically, this heightened level of productivity could raise people's standard of life while reducing the amount of time that they had labor for others. However, Marx was quick to point out that "[capitalist] production is only production for capital and not the reverse, i.e. the means of production are not simply means for a steadily expanding pattern of life for the society of the producers."[41] Under capitalism, labor is only an instrument for the valorization of capital, i.e. capital accumulation, and nothing else. Instead of serving the needs of society as a whole, capitalist production serves the specific needs of capital accumulation, which requires the devaluing of labor in order for capital to expand. The immiseration of labor, therefore, is not an aberration, but a fundamental feature of the capitalist mode of production.[42] Thus, Marx concluded: "On the basis of capitalism, a system in which the worker does not employ the means of production, but the means of production employ the worker, the law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of production may be set in motion by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human power, thanks to the advance in the productivity of social labor, undergoes a complete inversion, and is expressed thus: the higher the productivity of labor, the greater is the pressure of the workers on the means of employment, the more precarious therefore becomes the condition for their existence, namely the sale of their own labor-power for the increase of alien wealth, or in other words the self-valorization of capital."[43] This is a fundamental contradiction of capitalist development: as capitalism becomes more productive, and the means of production become more extensive and technically more efficient, the labor that works up those means of production becomes increasingly devalued and unnecessary.

According to Marx, the drive to accumulate capital at the expense of labor is not based on greed or any other negative psychological trait on the part of the capitalist, but rather survival - in other words, it is in the system's nature to operate this way. If a capitalist does not accumulate capital, if profits are not continually transformed into a further increment of value, then that capitalist is unable to keep up with competitors and eventually goes out of business.[44] This is what Marx refers to as the coercive law of capitalist competition. Workers lose their jobs and their incomes not because of the ill will of particular capitalists, but because the sole aim of capitalism is the valorization of capital, which depends on the maximum extraction of value from labor. In the face of obstacles like market competition and (to a lesser degree) labor struggles, capitalists perpetuate the accumulation of capital by reducing jobs/wages/hours, mechanizing and automating production, and relocating to cheaper, less regulated labor markets.

Marx provided us with the analytical tools for thinking about this internal contradiction of capitalist development-the contradiction between the declining value of labor and rising surplus value, i.e. the basis of capital formation. As capitalist production becomes more productive, the working class can only become more precarious, since the increasing accumulation of capital requires an increasing devaluation of labor. This contradiction is inherent to capitalism-it arises independently of the level of class struggle, fluctuations in wages, state interventions in the economy, or economic crises. At the same time, the relative intensity of the immiseration of labor can rise or drop with the limits set by the accumulation process, depending on the degree of control that workers as a class exert over the economy and the state. At different times in history workers have asserted their interests over and against the drive for capital accumulation, and as a result, have been able to gain a larger share of the total value that their labor produces. Still, for Marx, even if wages and standards of living rise for a time, this does not end the immiseration of labor. That would require the end of capitalism.

Implications for the Future

The story of the immiseration of labor in Philadelphia is particular, but not exceptional; it can serve as the basis for general observations on the dynamics of labor-capital relations within a developed capitalist economy. Capitalists in Philadelphia adapted to the challenges of market competition and labor struggle in much the same way that capitalists did in most mid to large-sized manufacturing centers-by shutting down, relocating, and/or automating production. Over time, the bulk of jobs in most US cities shifted to the services sector and to the suburbs. In every city that these changes took place the results where the same: the decline of wages and regular employment for the urban poor.

After having analyzed the antagonistic nature of capitalist production, we can see that the immiseration of labor is the natural result of capitalist development. Therefore, there is no prospect for a return to a so-called "golden-age" of capitalism characterized by moderate wages, benefits, and full-time employment. The easing of income inequality in the developed nations immediately after World War II was an exception, not the rule, in the history of capitalism. Outside of this brief period in the 1950s and 1960s, capitalism has not delivered on its promise of upward class mobility for most workers, and this promise can only continue to fade as capitalism continues to develop.

Today, most people find themselves within the throes of a drawn-out process of immiseration that shows no signs of reversing itself. Incomes have declined since the 1970s to allow for a greater acceleration of capital formation and accumulation. Even as total economic output continues to increase, and even as the job market continues to grow, working class incomes continue to decline, since most jobs are now in the unskilled, unprotected, low-wage service industries. Under these circumstances, the instability that a developed capitalist system subjects the employment and working conditions of the workers becomes a normal state of affairs.[45] The production process reaches a point of no return, continually reproducing a permanently marginalized mass of low-paid laborers with no hope of a professional career.

Rather than functioning as a site for upward mobility and income growth, the late capitalist megalopolis increasingly functions as a warehouse for low-wage service workers. Over the past fifty years, these structural trends have steadily asserted themselves on global level, especially in the global South.[46] As Mike Davis painstakingly details in his devastating book, Planet of Slums, poverty and occupational marginality are especially prevalent in the cities of underdeveloped nations, where urban existence is increasingly disconnected from mass employment. With unprecedented barriers to large-scale emigration to developed nations, slum populations continue to grow at an unprecedented rate in the global South. For Davis, this is the real crisis of world capitalism: the crisis of the reproduction of labor and the inability of capitalism to stabilize (yet alone improve) the livelihood of the proletariat.

The growing division of the workforce into 1) a small, privileged core of professionals and managers that can expect continuous, high-paying employment, and 2) a large periphery of precarious "floaters," to which capitalists provide little more than a low wage, for as long or as short a time as capitalists require these workers-this division will only widen as capitalism continues to develop. To the extent that most workers have access to increasingly irregular employment and smaller wages, the trend toward racial and class inequalities will persist, globally and locally. Black workers will continue to be the "last hired, first fired." White workers will continue to act as labor aristocracy, allying themselves with capitalists to monopolize the professional and managerial jobs, while relegating workers of color-especially Black workers-to the worst paying, least secure, lowest status jobs.

The housing market will continue to reflect the uneven distribution of income and jobs. The white workers who hold the managerial and professional jobs will continue to predominate in the suburbs, or in some comfortable, tree-lined areas of the city like Chestnut Hill, and in the gentrifying neighborhoods close to center city. In contrast, low-income workers will remain in the vast stretches of row houses in Philadelphia and Camden and in the older suburbs like Chester or Norristown.

The Struggle for a Classless Society

Capital seeks to gain the greatest return on its investment in labor and means of production. In pursuing this end, capital has reorganized the production process and with it the realities of working-class existence. This raises strategic questions from the standpoint of class struggle: what forms of struggle are developing today that point to a different future? If industrial production created a particular conception of class struggle, what do the service industries mean for the future of class struggle? What does working class power look like in the context of a service economy?

These are complex questions that must be explored via further research of the class composition and dynamics of class struggle in specific regions. Unfortunately, this is beyond the scope of this essay, which at the most serves as the groundwork for such an investigation. Still, on a general level, this research makes this much clear: as long as capitalism continues as the dominant state of affairs, the contradiction between capital and labor can only become more pronounced. Therefore, it is not enough to reform capitalism or morally condemn capitalists-we must develop a plan to overthrow the structure of capitalism in its entirety.

Of course, the design and implementation of such a plan would take different forms depending on the conditions of working class existence in different regions. Nonetheless, at its core, this plan must entail the abolition of private property in the mode of production and the organization of a system of production that is no longer carried out with the goal of capital accumulation, but instead in a way that is systematically regulated by society-not the capitalists, not the market, not the state, but society as a whole. The members of such a society would have to reorganize the production process in such a way that frees their labor from the constraints of capital-an external, independent force standing above society.

However, given the contemporary circumstances of late capitalism, it is unclear whether workplace-centered struggle is the primary organizational form for building this social project. Even though capital continues to accumulate in industrial production, employment has shifted from the sphere of direct commodity production (agriculture, manufacturing) to the sphere of circulation (services). In such an economy, workplace struggles pose little to no threat to capitalism. Even if workers took over every McDonalds or Walmart, the economy would continue to operate in highly automated essential sectors like agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and logistics. If a proletarian revolution were to occur in such a context, the communization of production would not entail proletarian control of workplaces-as conceived by the traditional approach to labor struggle-so much as proletarian expropriation and elimination of workplaces, most of which are nonessential (i.e. most of the services industries) and serve no useful purpose outside of the context of capital accumulation.

The critical period in US mass industrial relations, which began about a century ago and saw a rapid growth in the power of industrial workers' unions in the 1930s and 1940s, was followed by capitalist counter-organization and restructuring. By the early 1980s it was clear that the New Deal order of relatively strong labor unions was over in the US. Today, the material basis for workplace oriented struggles has fallen apart, shattered by capitalist automation, deindustrialization, and decentralization.

Despite these difficulties, there is still no logical argument for why a classless society is impossible. Even when such a society can only be achieved with difficulty and struggle-in light of rising poverty and racial inequality; in light of constant imperialist wars; in light of the ecological destruction brought about by capitalism-in light of all that, there are still good reasons to fight for a world beyond capitalism, where production is carried out by an association of free people who collectively regulate their own labor. To be victorious, however, we must build organizations that correspond to the present circumstances, instead of simply inheriting the idealized and ready-made organizational forms of the past.

Notes

[1] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation," 793.

[2] Marx, Capital, "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation," 798.

[3] "Capitalism" is the dominant mode of production in the world. It is defined primarily by the production, circulation, and accumulation of capital. "Capitalists" own the means of producing capital.

[4] Alfred Lubrano, "Throughout the country, incomes are rising. In Philly, their falling," http://www2.philly.com/philly/news/census-data-poverty-income-philadelphia-suburbs-20180913.html

[5] The "proletariat," or "working class," is the largest class in capitalist society. "Proletariats" do not own any means of production ( of their own and therefore must sell their labor-power (their ability to create capital) to those who own means of production (capitalists), in exchange for a wage which is a only fraction of the capitalist value they produce.

[6] Engels, Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 89.

[7] U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, "U.S. Economy at a Glance," https://www.bea.gov/news/glance

[8] "Report for Selected Country Groups and Subjects (PPP valuation of country GDP)" . IMF. Retrieved 29 December 2017. Digital History; Steven Mintz. "Digital History" . Digitalhistory.uh.edu. Retrieved April 21, 2012.

[9] "United States remains the world's top producer of petroleum and natural gas hydrocarbons" . EIA.

[10] "Trade recovery expected in 2017 and 2018, amid policy uncertainty" . Geneva, Switzerland: World Trade Organization. 12 April 2017. Retrieved 2017-06-22.

[11] Katsuhiko Hara and Issaku Harada (staff writers) (13 April 2017). "US overtook China as top trading nation in 2016" . Tokyo: Nikkei Asian Review. Retrieved 2017-06-22. Office of the United States Trade Representative, Executive Office of the President, "Trade and Economy," https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/economy-trade

[12] For overall trade patterns, see: Adie Tomer, Robert Puentes, and Joseph Kane, "Metro-to-Metro: Global and Domestic Goods Trade in Metropolitan America" (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2013). For export statistics, see: Brad McDearman, Ryan Donahue, and Nick Marchio, "Export Nation 2013: U.S. Growth Post Recession" (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2013).

[13] "Trade corridors" are streams of commodities that flow within and through spaces in regular geographic patterns.

[14] Source: Brookings analysis of EDR data.

[15] Adie Tomer and Joseph Kane, "Mapping Freight: The Highly Concentrated Nature of Goods Trade in the United States." Global Cities Initiative. A JOINT PROJECT OF BROOKINGS AND JPMORGAN CHASE. November, 2014. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Srvy_GCIFreightNetworks_Oct24.pdf

[16] "Gross Metropolitan Product" . U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. September 29, 2011. Retrieved November 20, 2011.

[17] "Global city GDP rankings 2008-2025" . Pricewaterhouse Coopers. Archived from the original on May 31, 2013. Retrieved November 20,2009.

[18] "State of Working Philadelphia: An Economy Growing Apart," October 25, 2018, https://www.keystoneresearch.org/media-center/press-releases/state-working-philadelphia-economy-growing-apart

[19] " Philadelphia's Poor: Who they are, where they live, and how that has changed," The PEW Charitable Trusts, November 2017, http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2017/11/philadelphias-poor

[20] "US Census Bureau. (2001). Historical Income Tables - Income Equality" . Archived from the original on February 8, 2007. Retrieved June 20, 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20070208142023/http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/ie6.html

"Shaprio, E. (October 17, 2005). New IRS Data Show Income Inequality Is Again of The Rise. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities" . Retrieved June 20, 2007. https://www.cbpp.org/research/new-irs-data-show-income-inequality-is-again-on-the-rise

[21] Wiseman, Paul (September 10, 2013). "Richest 1 percent earn biggest share since '20s" . AP News . Retrieved September 10, 2013. http://apnews.excite.com/article/20130910/DA8NN7U02.html

John Cassidy (November 18, 2013). "American Inequality in Six Charts" . The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/american-inequality-in-six-charts

[22] "State of Working Philadelphia: An Economy Growing Apart," October 25, 2018, https://www.keystoneresearch.org/media-center/press-releases/state-working-philadelphia-economy-growing-apart

[23] "U.S. centrated poverty in the wake of the Great Recession," Elizabeth Kneebone and Natalie Holmes, March 2016 https://www.brookings.edu/research/u-s-concentrated-poverty-in-the-wake-of-the-great-recession/

[24] " Philadelphia's Poor: Who they are, where they live, and how that has changed," http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2017/11/philadelphias-poor

[25] "U.S. centrated poverty in the wake of the Great Recession," https://www.brookings.edu/research/u-s-concentrated-poverty-in-the-wake-of-the-great-recession/

[26] Brookings, "Employment and disconnection among teens and young adults: the role of place, race, and education." https://www.brookings.edu/research/employment-and-disconnection-among-teens-and-young-adults-the-role-of-place-race-and-education/#V0G0

[27] The Divided Metropolis: Social and Spatial Dimensions of Philadelphia, 1800-1975 (Westport, 1980), 141-168.

[28] Restructuring the Philadelphia Region: Metropolitan Divisions and Inequality, (Temple University Press, 2008) . The Deindustrialized World: Confronting Ruination in Postindustrial Places , (UBC Press, 2017).

[29] Workshop of the World, "Philadelphia's Industrial History: Context and Overview,"

http://www.workshopoftheworld.com/overview/overview.html

[30] John Bauman, Public Housing: The Dreadful Sage of a Durable Policy, 57.

[31] Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided, 99-107, 121-122, 125-133.

[32] Gladys Palmer, Philadelphia's Workers in a Changing Economy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956), page 37.

[33] Philadelphia: Neighborhoods, Division, and Conflict in a Postindustrial City, (Temple University Press, 1991).

[34] David Koistinen, Confronting Decline: The Political Economy of Deindustrialization in Twentieth-Century New England (University Press of Florida; 2013)

[35] Larry Eichel and Octavia Howell, "A Key Driver of Poverty in Philadelphia? The Changing Nature of Work," January 2018, http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/analysis/2018/01/08/a-key-driver-of-poverty-in-philadelphia-the-changing-nature-of-work

[36] Barry Bluestone and Bennet Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America (New York: Basic Books, 1982). http://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/workshop-of-the-world/#sthash.FIcRzwW3.dpuf

[37] Adams, Bartelt, Elesh, Goldstein,Restructuring the Philadelphia Region: Metropolitan Divisions and Inequality, 56.

[38] Restructuring the Philadelphia Region , 37.

[39] Philadelphia , "Economic Erosion," pages 55-56.

[40] Capital , 769.

[41] Capital , vol 3: 358.

[42] Capital , "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation," 772-773.

[43] Capital , 798.

[44] Capital , "Machinery and Large-Scale Industry," 582.

[45] Capital , "Machinery and Large-Scale Industry," 580-82.

[46] "Inequality on the Rise?: An Assessment of Current Available Data on Income Inequality, at Global, International, and National Levels," Servio Vieira, December 2012, http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/policy/wess/wess_bg_papers/bp_wess2013_svieira1.pdf

From Cruze to Cruise: False Consciousness and Dialectical Conflict in the GM Paradigm Shift

By Werner Lange

On Monday, November 26, General Motors publicly announced its decision to shut down all production at five major plants in 2019, including the sprawling Lordstown Assembly Plant in Ohio's Mahoning Valley, home of the Cruze model, and shift major investment to mass production of all-electric autonomous vehicles through its Cruise subsidiary, headquartered in California's Silicon Valley. This grand paradigm shift from traditional cars to autonomous ones marks a major change in GM operations, ones which will leave abandoned communities economically devastated and thousands of terminated workers financially paralyzed, while simultaneously paving a path toward zero-emission cars. Yet the resultant communal and private havoc imposed upon victimized communities will likely not lead, as it should, to a workers' revolt and political uprising; at least not in northeast Ohio. That disappointing but realistic projection is based upon the potency of widespread false consciousness among the masses, the seductive temptation of subscribing to false hopes, and the emergence of a new dialectical conflict uniting labor and management in an existential struggle against climate change.

November 26 marked the second Black Monday brutally imposed upon the Mahoning Valley located in the heart of de-industrialized America. The first one occurred in September 1977 when steel corporations precipitously closed several major plants in Youngstown, a catastrophic economic blow from which this once vibrant, but now largely impoverished, city has never substantially recovered. A similar fate of an accelerated decline now awaits Lordstown and surrounding communities like Newton Falls, my hometown for the past 30 years. During that time, despite sporadic sparks to the contrary, this part of America's broad Rust Belt has gotten collectively more rusted, but nevertheless reliably remained a Democratic stronghold - until 2016. The mass frustration of hard-pressed communities and working families stuck seemingly forever in economic stagnancy spilled over into a passionate desire for qualitative change during the last presidential election. Only one major-party candidate appeared in substance and style to offer qualitative change, whereas the other candidate, unlike her progressive opponent in the primary, painfully projected business as usual. After voting overwhelming by 23 points for Barack Obama in 2012, voters in Trumbull County, home to the Lordstown plant, gave a 6-point victory margin to Donald Trump in 2016. Revealingly, the only other Republican presidential candidate who won Trumbull County since 1960 was Richard Nixon in 1972. Masters of deceit have been able to occasionally tap into pervasive false consciousness within this largely working-class community, but never with the ferocity of the most recent presidential election. This, of course, comes as no surprise to progressive social thinkers familiar with the roots and consequences of false consciousness among labor and working-class communities.

The ability to successfully colonize the mind of the oppressed with the carefully construed values and deceitfully manipulated images of the oppressor characterizes all tyrannies to some extent. The cultural substrate for this common success of mass deception is based upon the objective reality that the ruling ideas of any stable society are the ideas of the rulers. Those who dominate a society economically also do so ideologically. It is their agents of socialization which substantively shape the mindset of the new generations, and it is their institutions which seek to sustain that self-defeating mindset throughout adulthood. Rebels are demonized, deviants dismissed, conformists applauded, and out-groups scapegoated. Fascists, in particular, are adept at creating and manipulating false consciousness and suppressing class consciousness. The very name of Hitler's fascist party, NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party), for example, would have a bitterly frustrated and justifiably angry German citizen think the party promotes socialism and embraces the interests of the working class. Instead it routinely executed socialists (along with communists and many others), turned masses of workers into industrial slaves, and channeled mass frustration into displaced aggression against the vulnerable and marginalized Other. This repressive pattern is largely repeated in Trump's America with his regime's unbridled attacks upon immigrants and journalists, constant invocation of big lies, demonization of liberals, and conversion of the Republican Party, in substance, into what Noam Chomsky recently called "the most dangerous organization in human history." None of this would have been possible if class consciousness (instead of false consciousness) guided the behavior of America's working-class masses. In fact, the antithesis of the Trump regime would now be in power if the working class-in-itself would transform into a working class-for-itself, a work still in progress.

If false consciousness propelled the rise of the Trump regime and aided the fall of GM Lordstown, then false hope is designed to keep victimized workers and communities passive. The emergent false hope is not identical to the false promises made by Trump in his 2017 visit here, claiming the lost jobs were all coming back and "we're going to fill those factories back up." Everyone, except the hopelessly deluded, now knows that to be an outright lie. More pernicious is the emergent, projected hope for a new fossil-fueled product to be allocated to the soon-to-be-idled GM Lordstown plant sometime in late 2019. "Future products will be allocated to fewer plants next year," stated GM's CEO in officially designating the five targeted GM plants as "unallocated," but leaving the door theoretically open for one of the coming "five vehicle architectures" to resurrect perhaps one of these comatose plants back to full life, thus setting up a bitter competition in 2019 among the impacted communities to win this ephemeral prize. In anticipation of this divisive competition, the regional Chamber of Commerce launched its "Drive It Home" campaign, which, according to its website, is a "coalition of local businesses, community, religious leaders, consumers, and workers, as well as their families, coming together to urge GM to support growing their investment at the Lordstown Complex"… and to "create a positive environment and build good relations with local management." This is in stark contrast to the "labor-management wars of the late 60s and early 70s," as one current local UAW leader castigated the strikes, revolts, and progressive activism at Lordstown two generations ago.

Yet that is precisely the type of protest and activism now needed to avoid community devastation. After all, the dialectical conflict inherent to capitalist management-labor relations has lost none of its validity, despite loss of manifested vitality. Maximizing private profit inevitably translates into minimizing community needs; and expanding labor-created surplus value invariably comes at the expense of labor's necessary value. The objective interests of private capital and labor are not identical in the old industrial setting, regardless of projections to the contrary. To create a community-wide "positive environment" in begging GM for a new allocation is tantamount to suppression of any public criticism of the utter corporate greed driving its "vehicle portfolio optimization," as GM characterizes its termination of several models, including the Cruze. Silence in the face of this economic tyranny is the voice of complicity. On its knees begging for a second chance is not the proper posture of organized labor; but rather, it is firmly standing upright and fearlessly speaking truth to power and forcefully demanding justice. For starters, that demand entails full repayment of the $50-billion loan given GM in corporate welfare a decade ago - an outstanding bill of some $10 billion is still owed taxpayers. Better yet would be implementation of corporate alimony, a mandate requiring corporations to justly compensate communities they abandon after benefitting from decades of enrichment there. Yet, to date, not even a murmur along these lines; just a call from community leaders to be hopeful and quietly wait and pray for a miracle. A recipe for disaster.

However, beyond the viability of the labor-management dialectic, there is another dynamic at work in this transition from traditional cars to electric cars which deserves greater attention and analysis. We live in perilous times of grave existential threats to humanity from the growing challenge and increasingly devastating crisis of man-made climate change. The science on climate change is abundantly clear. Unless radical changes are globally and timely implemented to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and keep them exceedingly low, the very future of humanity and other life forms is at risk. This grave environmental crisis creates a new dialectic, one which supersedes and transcends the traditional labor-management one. Required in this dangerously new context is a paradigm shift of consciousness from conflicting class consciousness to harmonious covenantal mindsets within both labor and management and beyond, a unified humanity confronting a common existential threat. The thesis/affirmation of humanity and other life forms in covenantal union are contradicted by the antithesis/negation of climate change producers and deniers. Unlike the economic and particular labor-management dialectic, this new one is an existential and universal one. Whereas the former arrives at a synthesis of higher quality of life through class consciousness converting an objective class-in-itself to a subjective active class-for-itself, the current existential conflict encompasses all humanity - all classes, races, ethnicities, religions, and cultures - on one side of this colossal dialectical conflict and climate changers on the other. Conflicting class relations in this new context are superseded by complementary covenantal relations, ones that unite labor and management as well as all humanity facing a common foe in climate change. That objective covenant-in-itself must be transformed into an active covenant-for-itself if the current existential crisis is to be overcome.

In that regard, General Motors is to be applauded for its explicit goal of zero emissions through its all-electric autonomous Cruise operations which are slated to reach commercialization at scale beginning in 2019. By 2023, GM intends to have at least 20 all-electric models on the market globally in paving the way toward a zero-emission future in the automobile industry. In direct contradiction to a zero-emission future, on the other hand, are potent political and economic forces bonded to fossil fuel extraction and consumption, like the Trump regime and mother earth frackers who foolishly promote the existential threat of climate change and thereby constitute the negation of this new dialectic. America's ruling class is clearly split on this question of energy options, and therein lies real hope for needed qualitative change. While the majority still favors and actively fosters fossil-fuel industries, a growing minority within corporate America, as evidenced by GM's embrace of a zero-emission future, has become enlightened to the urgent need for clean energy everywhere. That enlightenment must expand at all levels of our deeply divided society to ensure sheer survival, let alone safety and security. If and when this new global consciousness based on covenantal relations grips the mind of the masses along with the corporate and political power elite, climate change and global warming will not only be reduced; these existential threats will be negated altogether, and a new chapter in human history will open. The alternative is not only unacceptable, it is unthinkable.

The Social Economy of Rojava: A Primer on the Co-op Model

By Thomas Sullivan

Since the 2011 liberation of the northern Syrian region commonly known as Rojava, the de facto leadership of the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria has begun a program of ground-up direct democracy, women's liberation, and socially-owned means of production (Knapp 2016, 52). This article will examine the economic conditions of Rojava, by way co-operative ownership, so that an evaluation with historical context may be available.

Background on Rojava

After the liberation, the people of Rojava were faced with a post-colonial, monoculture economy with little industry available for refined goods. The Ba'athist regime had limited agriculture in the three cantons to only a single crop and allowed for no means of processing these crops. Around 80% of farm land was held by the government, the rest held by private businesses (Knapp 2016, 192).

With the intent of establishing a social economy, the land was handed over to local, municipal units called communes for distribution for co-operative ownership by workers. 2,500 hectares have been distributed to the co-ops as of 2015, with 1-4 being reserved for individual use. No large land-owners have been allowed access to the seized land (Knapp 2016, 199).

Beyond land and agriculture, co-operatives focused on simple industries have been organized in cities to increase the self-sufficiency of Rojava. These include bread-baking, textiles, clothes production, dairy production, and selling cleaning supplies (Knapp 2016, 200).

Historical Context

To best examine how the co-operatives of Rojava may thrive, we would need to look at past examples as a basis for future predictions. One of the most cited examples of a successful cooperative is the Spanish Mondragon Co-operative Corporation. The organization, which dates to 1956, was founded from several co-operative organizations that joined together in 1991 to form the international corporation it is today. The co-ops showed remarkable staying power, with most of the 100 original co-ops surviving to form the united corporation. Employing upwards of 3% of the Basque region's workforce over multiple industries, the co-operatives showed that alternative corporate models could be successful when they were previously untested on a large scale (Harding 1998, 61).

However, the Mondragon example also points to a critical failing of co-ops. Mondragon has shed many of its original ideals to remain competitive with other international businesses as the globalized, capitalist economy has developed. This includes creating non-co-op subsidiaries abroad and decreasing the number of co-operative employees to 29.5% as of 2007 (Bretos 2017, 155). This example of the most well-known and well-studied co-operative falling back into a more capitalistic model would suggest that the co-op model is not sustainable in the long term.

Mondragon's change did not occur in a vacuum of some static economy. The co-operative began to require modification after the fall of the fascist Franco government, the liberalization of Spain's economy, and the opening of European free trade by way of the European Common Market and later the European Union (Harding 1998, 62). We can see from this mix of pro-capitalist institutional changes that external stress on co-operatives would result in failures or the need for structural changes.

The Rojava Difference

The situation in Rojava currently precludes such stressors. Only 20% of arable land is held by private owners, with a moratorium on any new private landowners (Knapp 2016, 199). There was little to no pre-existing industry, with most small business owners having fled when the revolution began. As such, most of all business is co-operative and directly supported by the local governments. The pressure is on private businesses to offer co-operative grade work or lose the ability to function to co-ops. Moreover, the embargo in place on Rojava by neighboring Turkey and South Kurdistan limits the possibility of inclusion with free-trade economics (Knapp 2016, 196).

Co-operatives within the Rojava system are inextricably tied to the commune system of self-governance. They are specifically forbidden by law from becoming independent private businesses. As such, local communes elect the co-ops' leadership; the economic commissions throughout the administration supports the co-ops' production. In exchange, the needs of the greater society and local commune are served by the co-ops (Knapp 2016, 205).

Local co-ops alone are obviously insufficient to meet every commune's need. They therefore pass their needs on to economic committees at the federal level. Surplus production from other regions is allocated to communes lacking in some areas, while surplus production is likewise given for distribution outside of the native commune (Knapp 2016, 206).

The Movement for a Democratic Society is one of the overlapping organizations that guides the development of co-operatives and other aspects of the emerging social economy. Their Economic Committee issues a pamphlet concerning how these co-ops are to be run (The Movement for a Democratic Society 2016). Of interest is the division of profits. Twenty percent is given over to the commune to handle any needs of the commune, 30% reserved by the co-op to purchase more goods, machines, and other capital, and 50% to shareholders. Workers received a monthly salary as well as their share of the profits yearly or when a major goal is completed.

Those who work in the co-op are considered shareholders and receive the highest allocations from net profits. Members can also contribute capital of some sort to the co-op to receive a payout, but to a lesser extent than workers.

People over Profits

Understanding the difference between this social economy and the ubiquitous capitalist economy will require a recap of labor theory and surplus-value. Karl Marx explains that the value of commodities sold on the market can be separated between the use-value of the item and the surplus-value of it. The surplus is the source of worker exploitation, where the worker is not receiving the whole possible value of their work. Allowing workers to keep the full value of their work eliminates this exploitation. Methods by which the workers can retain surplus value are varied, with no single answer for the best possible way.

For Rojava's co-operative economy, an initial glance would suggest that worker exploitation remains. The co-op pays the workers a wage and sells their production for a value higher than their combined salaries and the cost of production. As Thomas Sekine enumerates in his work, value theory can be formulated in with a simple c + v + s = end value (Sekine 1997, 129). The value c would represent any constant capital, as in the actual means of production, v would represent variable capital, as in labor-power purchased, and s would be surplus value. Sekine explains that only in the application of labor-power, by way of production, does this end value result. Surplus value alone does not contribute to the end value but is a separate part of the value added by labor-power retained by a capitalist or in this case the co-op (Sekine 1997, 130). As such, there is a part of the workers' labor-power being removed that would otherwise represent a degree of exploitation under a capitalist system.

But the Rojava system distributes the profits in a way that favors the worker over non-working members. The workers are paid the highest portion relative to the non-working capital contributors (The Movement for a Democratic Society 2016). As such, surplus value is redistributed back to the workers through yearly payouts and amounts given over to the commune used to improve the workers conditions through improving the commune collectively.

The Future of Rojava and the Co-ops

Understanding the function of the co-ops within Rojava is one step in understanding the complex interaction of municipal direct democracy, the social economy, and libertarian-socialist ideals. Historical context suggests that given a stable and supportive political economy within Northern Syria, the co-ops will prove as beneficial and successful as any capitalist model would be able.

Unfortunately, the situation surrounding this experiment may not allow for this. The Ba'athist regime still holds most of Syria, the rebels are hostile to Rojava's continuation, other Kurdish groups are unsupportive of their efforts, and Turkey has recently begun a campaign of conquest in the most western canton with threats of future invasion. Should Rojava weather this storm, they may face more external pressure from American and European economic imperialism or from neighboring powers such as Iran or Saudi Arabia.

References

Bretos, I., & Errasti, A. (2017). Challenges and opportunities for the regerneation of multinational worker cooperatives: Lessons from the Mondragon Corporation - a case study of the Fagor Ederlan Group. Organization, Vol. 24(2) 154-173.

Harding, S. (1998). The Decline of the Mondragon Cooperatives. Australian Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 33 No. 1 59-76.

Knapp, M., Flach, A., & Ayboga, E. (2016). Revolution in Rojava : Democratic Autonomy and Women's Liberation in Syrian Kurdistan. London: Pluto Press.

Marx, K. (1995, 1999). Capital, Volume One. Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org).

Sekine, T. (1997). An Outline of the Dialect of Capital, Volume One. London: Palgrave Macmillan

The Movement for a Democratic Society. (2016, February 15). The Experience of Co-operative Societies in Rojava. Retrieved from The Hampton Institute: http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/cooperatives-in-rojava.html

Prisoner Prophet: Revisiting George Jackson's Analysis of Systemic Fascism

By Colin Jenkins

The rise of Donald Trump has brought talk of fascism to the forefront. While comparing US Presidents to Hitler is certainly nothing new - both Obama and W. Bush were regularly characterized as such by their haters - Trump's emergence on the national political scene comes at a very peculiar moment in US history. In response to this seemingly hyperbolic trend, Godwin's Law has become a well-known rule of thumb, proclaiming that "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1."

Anyone that has participated in an online political discussion knows Godwin's Law to be reliable. It is almost inevitable that folks will compare modern-day politicians to a perceived authoritarian figure (most popularly, that of Hitler). Claiming this law is a way to shame those who make the comparison, as if it has reached the level of the boy who cried wolf, growing increasingly nonsensical as time goes on.

Enter Trump, a man who reached the highest office of the land by appealing to fascistic tendencies, both through his projections and by the misdirected pool of angst that has accumulated during capitalism's late stage - neoliberalism. Under a neoliberal agenda that has dominated the political landscape since Reagan, capitalism has been unleashed like never in history, leading to massive inequality, obscene amounts of wealth being transferred from public coffers to private hands, and an overall erosion in American life that effects everything from medical care and debt to education and public utilities.

The unleashing of the capitalist system has left many financially desperate and hopeless. And it has left most wondering why things are so bad. Capitalism has shaped every aspect of American culture, including the ways in which we view and think about the world. One of the most penetrating notions is that of individualism. American life has long been tied to ideas of "rugged individualism," "exceptionalism," and "pioneering" and "exploration." Over centuries, the country's collective psyche has owned this - to the point where systemic problems are routinely framed as individual ills, and broad areas of study are reduced to "generalizations" by snarky social media comments. Thus, the most important tool we have as historians, social theoreticians, and activists - systemic analysis - has been essentially shut down by dominant culture.

The term "systemic fascism" may seem redundant to some, but the redundancy has become necessary to combat the individualistic modes of thinking that have trapped much of the American public. This framing tendency has never been more evident than in the liberal obsession with Trump, the individual. Even among sectors of the Left, who have joined in the liberal chorus, everything has become about Trump - Trump the racist, Trump the fascist, Trump is destroying America, Trump is an embarrassment to the highest office in the land, our problems are due to Trump. These sentiments are the result of a collective myopia that is produced by capitalist culture and its hyper-focus on the individual - a key propaganda tool that is used to not only obscure the reasons that most of us struggle, but also to avoid any sort of collective solution to our problems.

George Jackson, Prisoner Prophet

On August 21st, 1971, George Jackson was shot and killed by a prison guard in San Quentin during an alleged escape attempt. He was 29 years old. Jackson, who was imprisoned a decade earlier on an armed-robbery charge, died three days before he was to begin a murder trial stemming from the death of a guard. A year earlier, Jackson made national headlines when his 17-year-old brother, Jonathan Peter Jackson, had attempted an armed insurrection at the Marin County Courthouse in San Rafael, California in order to free the "Soledad Brothers" (George, Fleeta Drumgo, and John Clutchette), the trio of inmates who were accused of killing the guard in retaliation for the murder of three Black prisoners a month prior.

Jackson was a scary figure in the American conscience. On the heels of a tumultuous decade that included a fierce Civil Rights movement, a corollary black power movement, and a series of liberation movements rooted in radical democracy, the country was still reeling. Major figures like Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and Malcolm X were known by all, but many of the radicals working in the trenches of these revolutionary movements were discarded, both through a deliberate erasing from above and a general fear of facing hard truths about American history and society.

During his time in prison, Jackson developed and refined thoughtful analysis through voracious reading that informed his experience as a Black man growing up in a white-supremacist society. While he became known more for the violent incidents that were destined along his revolutionary path, Jackson was a prolific writer and theorist, particularly on the topics of capitalism and fascism. Along with fellow prisoner W. L. Nolen, Jackson founded the Black Guerilla Family, a black liberation organization based in Marxist-Leninist and Maoist theory. Jacksons' ideological formation had taken place with the help of Nolen during the late 60s while in San Quentin. As he later explained in his collection of prison letters, "I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels, and Mao when I entered prison, and they redeemed me."

While other valuable works on systemic fascism - most notably Robert Paxton's 2004 The Anatomy of Fascism - have made their rounds during Trump's political emergence, Jackson's analysis has remained largely uncovered. To continue to ignore it would be a mistake for two reasons. First, it comes from a genuine working-class view, unadulterated and immune from the confines of academia. In other words, Jackson's insight was formed purely from a place of organic class-consciousness and subsequently refined and confirmed through self-study. Second, it comes from the view of a hyper-marginalized member of the working class from within the epicenter of imperialism. As a Black man in America, and thus a subject of America's internal colonization, Jackson could not ignore the powerful, underlying effects of white supremacy on the class nature of systemic fascism. The unique history of American slaves and descendants of slaves makes this inclusion an absolute necessity for any analysis of American fascism.

Capitalism and State Repression

Understanding fascism as the inevitable systemic conclusion to Americanism is crucial. Only then can one realize that Trump is not "bringing fascism to America," but rather that fascism was built into the American project from day one. The most reductive way to view fascism as a process is to gain an understanding of the social and economic systems that breed not only extreme hierarchies, but also extreme forms of domination and subjugation within these hierarchies. In the United States, the most influential system is capitalism. It exceeds all else, including politics and government, because it is rooted in the one thing that dominates all else - money. Capitalism concerns itself with two goals: growth and profit. In its narrow-minded pursuit, things like humanity, democracy, freedom, liberty, Earth, and the environment cannot be considered. They are nuisances to be co-opted or destroyed. And, the late stage of capitalism that we are living through is the culmination of this co-optation and destruction.

In order to understand the systemic fascism that is rising before our eyes, we must understand the historical seeds of Americanism that have provided it with a fertile breeding ground. Jackson understood this better than most, as laid out in his two prominent works, Blood in My Eye and Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. The authoritative nature of capitalism, which relies on inherently dominant mechanisms of private property and labor exploitation, is key in this development, as has been seen in four major phases: (1) capital accumulation that has produced a completely unchecked capitalist class, (2) a formation of the corporate state through the literal purchasing of governmental institutions by the capitalist class, (3) increasing economic hardship for a majority of Americans, and (4) a complete reliance on state violence both home (militarized policing) and abroad (imperialism/war) to control working-class angst and develop new markets outside of the United States to replace living-wage labor.

As early as 1970, Jackson recognized this coming era because he understood America's roots and the historical trajectory of capitalism. More specifically, he recognized the emergence of monopoly capitalism as a formative stage in the transition from bourgeois democracy to the early stages of fascism. "The trends toward monopoly capital began effectively just after the close of the Civil War in Amerika. Prior to its emergence, bourgeois democratic rule could be said to have been the predominant political force inside Amerikan society," explains Jackson. "As monopoly capital matured, the role of the old bourgeois democracy faded in process. As monopoly capital forced out the small dispersed factory setup, the new corporativism assumed political supremacy. Monopoly capital can in no way be interpreted as an extension of old bourgeois democracy. The forces of monopoly capital swept across the Western world in the first half of this century."

This transition opened the door for the neoliberal era, which began shortly after Jackson's death and was designed to cement the capitalist system in a newly formed corporate state. The most obvious elements of this pattern are that of political cooptation and direct state repression.

"Corporative ideals have reached their logical conclusion in the U.S. The new corporate state has fought its way through crisis after crisis, established its ruling elites in every important institution, formed its partnership with labor through its elites, erected the most massive network of protective agencies replete with spies, technical and animal, to be found in any police state in the world. The violence of the ruling class of this country in the long process of its trend toward authoritarianism and its last and highest state, fascism, cannot be rivaled in its excesses by any other nation on earth today or in history."

The ultimate expression of this state repression is, and always has been, found in the nation's criminal justice system. With the advent of laws, so-called rights, criminal procedures, police, courts, and prisons, the illegitimate systems of dominance (such as capitalism and white supremacy) have long been given a façade of legitimacy, and thus have become naturally classist and racist. In the end, these systems of so-called justice only target those at the bottom of socioeconomic hierarchy, serving the same purpose that a head on a spike served in Medieval times - a warning against all those who dare challenge the embedded power structure. Jackson elaborates,

"The hypocrisy of Amerikan fascism forces it to conceal its attack on political offenders by the legal fiction of conspiracy laws and highly sophisticated frame-ups. The masses must be taught to understand the true function of prisons. Why do they exist in such numbers? What is the real underlying economic motive of crime and the official definition of types of offenders or victims? The people must learn that when one "offends" the totalitarian state it is patently not an offense against the people of that state, but an assault upon the privilege of the privileged few. Could anything be more ridiculous than the language of blatantly political indictments; "The People of the State vs. Angela Davis and Ruchell Magee" or "The People of the State ... vs. Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins." What, people? Clearly the hierarchy, the armed minority."

This national system of domination and incarceration mimics its international cousin of imperialism, which exists to serve capitalism by carving out new markets, gaining control of resources, and forcing populations into wage servitude. This process comes full circle from its international face (imperialism and foreign occupation) into a national face (domestic occupation and mass incarceration). Jackson continues,

"In order for capitalism to continue to rule, any action that threatens the right of a few individuals to own and control public property must be prohibited and curtailed whatever the cost in resources (the international wing of the repressive institutions has spent one and one-half trillion dollars since World War II), whatever the cost in blood (My Lai, Augusta, Georgia, Kent State, the Panther trials, the frame-up of Angela Davis)! The national repressive institutions (police, National Guard, army, etc.) are no less determined. The mayors that curse the rioters and' the looters (Mayor Daley of Chicago has ordered them summarily executed in the streets) and ignore the fact that their bosses have looted the world!"

In terms of domestic authoritarianism, the ultimate tool is the prison system. In the United States, especially following a series of 1960s radical grassroots movements once referred to by the ruling class as an "excess of democracy," much of the state's repressive apparatus has transformed from covert (i.e. COINTELPRO) to overt (prison industrial complex, "The New Jim Crow"). Jackson had pinpointed this repressive institution prior to its massive expansion that began in the 1980s, providing insight to both the capitalist underpinnings of the prison system and the cultural baggage that comes with it.

"The purpose of the chief repressive institutions within the totalitarian capitalist state is clearly to discourage and prohibit certain activity, and the prohibitions are aimed at very distinctly defined sectors of the class - and race - sensitized society. The ultimate expression of law is not order - it's prison. There are hundreds upon hundreds of prisons, and thousands upon thousands of laws, yet there is no social order, no social peace. Anglo-Saxon bourgeois law is tied firmly into economics. One can even pick that out of those Vital Statistics. Bourgeois law protects property relations and not social relationships. The cultural traits of capitalist society that also tend to check activity - (individualism, artificial politeness juxtaposed to an aloof rudeness, the rush to learn "how to" instead of "what is") - are secondary really, and intended for those mild cases (and groups) that require preventive measures only. The law and everything that interlocks with it was constructed for poor, desperate people like me."

Jackson recognized the inherent connection between authoritarianism and capitalist modes of production, and most specifically the working class's subordinate relationship to capital. This systemic class analysis is something sorely missing today, further obscured by the focus on Trump as an individual phenomenon capable of shaping society. Uncovering these important roots comes in the deduction of capitalism as an inherently fascistic system, reliant on the forced separation of the masses from the land, and thus feeding on coerced labor since day one. "The nature of fascism, its characteristics and properties have been in dispute ever since it was first identified as a distinct phenomenon growing out of Italy's state-supported and developed industries in 1922," Jackson writes. "Whole libraries have been written around the subject. There have been a hundred 'party lines' on just exactly what fascism is. But both Marxists and non-Marxists agree on at least two of its general factors: its capitalist orientation and its anti-labor, anti-class nature. These two factors almost by themselves identify the U.S. as a fascist-corporative state."

Redirecting Revolutionary Rage Into Empty Outlets

An important part of Jackson's analysis is the role that is played by moderates and liberals within a political system that is arranged for the specific purpose of placing everyone in a war for inches - a war that is fought on a predetermined battleground which benefits the ruling class, whether the capitalists themselves, the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, or the politicians that exist to protect these embedded systems. In other words, electoral and legislative reforms are designed to appear as "progress" atop a landscape where meaningful/revolutionary progress has been rendered structurally impossible. This lesson is perhaps the most valuable for today's Left which, despite decades upon decades of evidence to the contrary, continues to give in to delusions of electoral and legislative potential.

As Jackson tells us, "elections and political parties have no significance when all the serious contenders for public office are fascist and the electorate is thoroughly misled about the true nature of the candidates." This applies to candidates from both capitalist/imperialist parties whom are (knowingly or unknowingly) the products of carefully-constructed systems of dominance. The point of the Constitution, Bill of Rights, three branches of government, and all their "checks and balances" was not to promote and encourage real democracy, a government of and for the people, but rather to obstruct such a thing, therefore "protecting the opulent minority from the majority." Within this arrangement, protest is allowed, voting is allowed, relative free speech is allowed, and even some forms of civil disobedience are allowed because such actions can be contained and rendered harmless from a structural point of view. Thus, fascistic tendencies have been allowed to flourish under the cover of liberal democracy, evidenced by the fact that any activity which develops as a true threat to its growth is brutally shut down.

"Fascism has established itself in a most disguised and efficient manner in this country. It feels so secure that the leaders allow us the luxury of a faint protest. Take protest too far, however, and they will show their other face. Doors will be kicked down in the night and machine-gun fire and buckshot will become the medium of exchange. The establishment does everything in its power to ensure that revolutionary rage is redirected into empty outlets which provide pressure releases for desires that could become dangerous if allowed to progress…

One has to understand that the fascist arrangement tolerates the existence of no valid revolutionary activity. It has programmed into its very nature a massive, complex and automatic defense mechanism for all our old methods for raising the consciousness of a potentially revolutionary class of people. The essence of a U.S.A. totalitarian socio-political capitalism is concealed behind the illusion of a mass participatory society. We must rip away its mask. Then the debate can end, and we can enter a new phase of struggle based on the development of an armed revolutionary culture that will triumph."

Under bourgeois democracy, elections largely represent an illusion of choice but still allow for some short-term concessions from the ruling class, if only as a way to quell inevitable clashes. Since the emergence of monopoly capital and neoliberalism, elections have become even less effective, rarely leading to even minor reforms or concessions. In fact, "with each development in the fascist arrangement," with each vote for representatives within this arrangement, "the marriage between the political elite and economic elite becomes more apparent. The integration of the various sectors of the total economic elite becomes more pronounced." This natural fusion was never more realized than in the early 20th century, a time of historic capitalist crisis and political upheaval. Jackson illustrates the liberal response to the mass desperation that struck the land, ultimately choosing to solidify the capitalist hierarchy at the expense of the revolutionary moment and the prospects of radical democracy:

"There was positive mobilization of workers and the lower class, and a highly developed class consciousness. There was indeed a very deep economic crisis with attendant strikes, unionizing, lockouts, break-ins, call-outs of the National Guard. The lower class was threatening to unite under the pressure of economic disintegration. Revolution was in the air. Socialist vanguard parties were leading it. There was terrorism from the right from groups such as Guardians of the Republic, the Black Legion, Peg-leg White-type storm troopers and hired assassins who carried out the beginnings of a contra-positive suppressive mobilization. Under the threat of revolution, the ruling class, true to Marxian theory, became all the more co-optive and dangerous. F.D.R. was born and bred in this ruling class of families. His role was to form the first fascist regime, to merge the economic, political and labor elites. Governing elites/corporative state/fascism - his role was to limit competition, replace it with the dream of cooperation; to put laissez faire to rest, and initiate the acceptance of government intervention into economic affairs."

The Only Real Resistance to Fascism is Socialism

In discussing the emergence of monopoly capitalism, Jackson echoed the later theoretical developments of Malcolm X by recognizing an inevitable war between the oppressed of the world and their oppressors. "To fight effectively, we must be aware of the fact that the enemy has consolidated through reformist machination the greatest community of self-interest that has ever existed," Jackson tells us. While the forces of monopoly capital, white supremacy, and imperialism gained strength, an "opposite force was also at work, i.e., 'international socialism' - Lenin's and Fanon's - national wars of liberation guided not by the national bourgeois but by the people, the ordinary working-class people."

As capitalism in mature form, fascism can only be effectively countered by socialism - the development of radical democratic economies where the people own the means of production and operate them in a way that benefits all of society, eliminating the brutal competition for basic human needs for which capitalism has thrived on for so long. And socialism must develop in a way that represents a formidable attack against the absurd levels of capitalist brutality we are witnessing, which include an arsenal of weaponry and resources, and the will to cause mass environmental and human destruction like never before. In other words, as the default conclusion to capitalism, fascism can only be countered with deliberate, conscious, and forceful organizing. Jackson elaborates:

"At its core, fascism is an economic rearrangement. It is international capitalism's response to the challenge of international scientific socialism. It developed from nation to nation out of differing levels of traditionalist capitalism's dilapidation. The common feature of all instances of fascism is the opposition of a weak socialist revolution. When the fascist arrangement begins to emerge in any of the independent nation-states, it does so by default! It is simply an arrangement of an established capitalist economy, an attempt to renew, perpetuate and legitimize that economy's rulers by circumflexing and weighing down, diffusing a revolutionary consciousness pushing from below. Fascism must be seen as an episodically logical stage in the socio-economic development of capitalism in a state of crisis. It is the result of a revolutionary thrust that was weak and miscarried - a consciousness that was compromised."

Socialism, as a radically democratic system, must develop from below. It must do so in a way that overcomes the dark forces created throughout dominant culture by capitalist degradation and alienation. As a country defined by a racial caste system which has obstructed class consciousness, we must recognize that any class struggle formed absent a crucial understanding of white supremacy is doomed to fail. Because, without recognizing and eliminating these internal divisions rooted in conditioned fear, the working class will remain a splintered and impotent force against fascist advancement. Ultimately, ours is a material struggle, but it is one that has been fortified on a "psycho-social level." Jackson provides crucial insight,

"We are faced with the task of raising a positive mobilization of revolutionary consciousness in a mass that has "gone through" a contra-positive, authoritarian process. Racism enters, on the psycho-social level, in the form of a morbid, traditional fear of both blacks and revolutions. The resentment of blacks, and conscious or unconscious tendencies to mete out pain to blacks, throughout the history of Amerika's slave systems, all came into focus when blacks began the move from South to North and from countryside to city to compete with whites in industrial sectors, and, in general, engage in status competition. Resentment, fear, insecurity, and the usual isolation that is patterned into every modern, capitalist industrial society (the more complex the products, the greater the division of labor; the higher the pyramid, the broader its base and the smaller the individual brick tends to feel) are multiplied by ten when racism, race antagonism, is also a factor. There is certainly no lack of evidence to prove the existence of an old and built-in character assassination of programmed racism (what class controls the nation's educational facilities, prints the newspapers and magazines that carry the little cartoons, and omits or misrepresents us to death?) has always served to distract and defuse feelings of status deprivation suffered by the huge sectors just above the black one. Then also to account for the seemingly dual nature recognizable in the authoritarian personality (conformity, but also a strange latent destructiveness), racism has always been employed as a pressure release for the psychopathic destructiveness evinced by a people historically processed to fear, to feel the need for a decision-maker, to hate freedom."

In conclusion, Jackson provided us with an optimistic call to action just prior to his death, urging the working-class masses to squash fascistic tendencies and conflicts within our milieus, while keeping our collective eye on the prize - a new society for all people, built on cooperation and a mutual respect for all life.

"There must be a collective redirection of the old guard - the factory and union agitator - with the campus activist who can counter the ill-effects of fascism at its training site, and with the lumpenproletariat intellectuals who possess revolutionary scientific-socialist attitudes to deal with the masses of street people already living outside the system. They must work toward developing the unity of the pamphlet and the silenced pistol. Black, brown and white are all victims together. At the end of this massive collective struggle, we will uncover our new identity, the unpredictable culmination of the revolutionary process. We will be better equipped to wage the real struggle, the permanent struggle after the revolution - the one for new relationships between people."

Understanding the systemic nature of fascism, while certainly daunting, should not be disheartening. It provides us with the truth behind the dark days we are witnessing. It allows us to uncover the roots to our current place in history. And, most importantly, it gives us a material perspective on where we've been, where we are, and where we're heading as a nation - replacing the hopelessness of confusion with the purposefulness of understanding. George Jackson is one of many revolutionary prophets who dedicated his life to passing on the insight needed to take control of our collective future - a future that will be determined by our conscious, deliberate actions from this point forward, and ours alone. A future that must be won through a hardened attack against powerful people guarding centuries-old systems of oppression. Cowardice, inaction, apathy, and infighting may ultimately be our downfall, but George Jackson and others like him made sure that ignorance is not.

In Defense of Tenants: An Interview with Omaha Tenants United

By Devon Bowers

This is a transcript of a recent email interview I had with the organization Omaha Tenants United about their beginnings and the activism the group engages in. Catch them this month in Heartland News, which is running a front page story on OTU and allowing them to write monthly updates from then on out.

Talk about how the organization formed and the work that you all do.

A group of us were aware of housing issues like tenant mistreatment and gentrification, and were inspired by other socialist organizations that help tenants, like those in Seattle or Philadelphia. From initial meetings where we discussed housing issues and read the state tenant-landlord statute, we came up with potential items to organize around. We began to focus particularly around the issue of "slumlords," or low-rent, low-maintenance landlords who skirt legality and mistreat tenants, largely getting away with it due to non-existent local enforcement and a tenant population of marginalized and low-income people, like refugees or immigrants.

We met our first tenant through Feed the People, an organization devoted to food distribution some of us were members of at the time. Since he had moved in to his apartment six months earlier, he did not have hot water despite repeated maintenance requests, with the landlord saying it would cost thousands of dollars and weeks of work. We met with the tenant, and after we went over portions of the state tenant statute and discussed the tenant's options, he made the decision to take a more direct approach to resolving his dispute with the support of our organization. We drafted a demand letter citing the various parts of the statute that the landlord was infringing upon, and demanding that steps be taken to resolve the issues or face escalation. The tenant then signed the letter, and we went together to his landlord's office to deliver it. The landlord wasn't home, but after hearing about the large group who delivered the letter, he contacted the tenant, angrily demanding to know what was going on. The tenant sent him a picture of the letter and explained our involvement. Less than 24 hours later, a maintenance crew repaired what turned out to be only a broken gasket, and the tenant had hot water.

We built our approach on this experience. We try to establish contacts among the working-class people in our neighborhoods, and learn from them about the situation of tenants in the city, particularly tenants of slumlords. Through this process we identify situations we can help resolve through forming demands of landlords, and stepping in to back the tenant up in a confrontation or meeting. It's important to our mission that we serve to empower the tenant themselves rather than be seen as performing a charitable service. Our first tenant, mentioned above, was shocked when we proposed delivering the demand letter as a group with him. He had assumed that we would deliver the letter ourselves, and was delighted to take for himself the action of delivering his demands to his landlord with our support. Typically, non-profit organizations who work in working-class communities are seen as doing things for working-class people or on their behalf.(just to clarify, we're not a "non-profit" in the 501c3 sense, nor do we have any desire to be. We merely use that phrase to draw a line of demarcation between how we operate and how many other organizations do (especially 501c3 nonprofits) and the perceptions surrounding them) We want to work with tenants to support them in doing what they are already capable of doing, and through this process, we hope that the tenants will learn more about their own power and the power of an organized working-class community.

Recently, we helped a tenant win a big fight against one of Omaha's most notorious slumlords in which we occupied the slumlord's office with about 20 people and were able to get over $1,000 in made up move out fees waived and $500 of the tenant's deposit back. (Do you want us to go into greater detail about that here? We recently did a long write up on that story at our Medium which I highly recommend reading. Not sure if you want to just link that or if you'd like us to make additional comments on it here. Definitely the biggest victory we've been a part of so far.

What problems do many of the tenants deal with? Would you say that the legal system is biased in favor of landlords?

A recurring problem is a lack of proper maintenance in a tenant's home. A landlord will only put in to a building what they can get out in profit, and a slumlord, already working with crumbling buildings and tenants paying low rent, lacks motivation to make any repairs at all. Living in such a building often comes with the mentality that "well, at least the rent is cheap," and slumlords take advantage of the expectation that better maintenance is just something that one has to pay more for, rather than a housing right. As a result, many tenants are living in conditions that are not merely uncomfortable, but actively dangerous to their health.

The legal system is definitely biased in favor of landlords. While there is a state statute that outlines a tenant's rights and what a landlord owes them, the only enforcement to be found is in the courts, which tenants with low income and little time cannot afford. In addition, city housing laws were drafted essentially directly by the landlords themselves, and even the ensuing weak laws are not enforced. The statutes are also written in an obtuse, self-referential way that is not easy for a busy person to understand, much less take action based upon. As a result, after reaching some familiarity with the statute, our strategy has been to outline areas in which an offending landlord is in infringement of the statute, because while a tenant can't necessarily afford to go to court, the landlord knows that it is better for them to concede a small maintenance request than to go to court for a case they most likely know they will lose.

How do landlords utilize pricing for their own financial benefit (ie increasing prices in Silicon Valley to kick out current tenants and price gouge techies?)

Gentrification is a continual problem in the city. Landlords will redevelop housing, and/or demolish and build new housing, raising the prices, which cause working-class people to be kicked out of their own neighborhoods. Occasionally a slumlord will allow a property to deteriorate to the point that it is considered "blighted," attracting public funding for redevelopment. Slumlords have used the money they've drained from working-class tenants in dilapidated buildings to redevelop or bulldoze those buildings to make way for a higher-paying demographic.

How do you help people understand that landlord-tenant relationships are not alright and are predatory?

People we talk to already understand that they are being mistreated by their landlord, and that their friends and neighbors are too. But this is seen as the way things are. We don't need to show them that landlords are exploitative, but we can help them to fight back, showing them that it doesn't have to be that way.

It's a matter of class consciousness. The relationship between landlords, particularly slumlords, and tenants, is one of the most obvious examples of class struggle we have. These landlords are profiting by charging working-class people to live in places that they would never sleep in themselves, a property that they rarely maintain, for the most part receiving passive profit for owning a place where others take shelter. It brings up the question of private property. Anyone can see this is unfair, and we try to systematize it when we have conversations with tenants. We don't want to get caught up in individualizing the systemic injustices to a given landlord, focusing on how they are evil individually; rather, we try to have conversations in terms of landlords as a class, and us, the working people, as a class that can fight back through organizing together.

First and foremost, we are an anti-capitalist organization that believes the renter-landlord system, and more generally private property as a whole, should be abolished. In the meantime however, we recognize the need to help tenants get what they can under the current system. We hope these experiences empower our fellow tenants and other working class people to begin to fight back and get organized so that the way can be paved for more fundamental revolutionary change.

Explain the day in the life of someone who is battling their landlord.

For a tenant working with us, a large part of it is about just getting to know us. When we're essentially doing cold calls (knocking on doors of places we know have problems, there's a natural hesitancy from people when random strangers walk up to your door asking about your living conditions, let alone trying when they're trying to convince you to take a big step in actually confronting your landlord about them. So we make sure to take a lot of time attempting to build a relationship with the people we interact with. This helps us build trust in each other, and feel more confident working with each other. Ultimately, we of course want to get them confident enough that they're willing to take the steps needed to get their problems resolved.

Since OTU has kind of blown up, however, we've received a big influx of people reaching out to us with issues they're already having via our Facebook page, so this eliminates some of the initial awkwardness and need for agitation, since they're obviously already agitated enough to feel the need to reach out. At this point, we set up a time to meet in a semi-public place, and learn about their situation in greater detail. Here you sometimes sort of face the opposite issue that we do when cold calling. The people who reach out are typically already pissed off and wanting to do something fast. We really have to be careful to not over promise anything, or lead them to believe that we can just magically help them fix things.

We like to be sober and honest about what our odds are, and if it's something that we might not have the capacity to deal with, we have to be honest about that and be willing to say no to certain cases. In either situation - whether it be a cold call or someone who has reached out to us - we try to be sure to walk people through exactly step by step what all of their options are, so they aren't blindsided by anything later on. We try to explain some possible outcomes, and how we would respond from each one. Based on where the tenant is at in terms of willingness to act, and based on what the situation is, we try to formulate a plan and proceed from there. While many people would maybe like to go straight to the big confrontation method like we did in our story about notorious local slumlord Dave Paladino, we generally try to escalate as necessary.

This means first setting up a meeting with the landlord, the tenant, and maybe two OTU representatives max to read off the tenant's demands in a more low-key setting and seeing how the landlord responds. There's of course always pushback, but we give the landlord a deadline by which we expect these changes to be made. If they're not made in the amount of time given, we escalate things from there. The important part is that at all steps in the process, the tenant is taking the lead.

We don't want to get out ahead of the tenant and get them into a situation they don't feel comfortable with, and on the other hand, we don't want to hold back the tenant or discourage their own initiative, even when we may have to be frank about a situation or explain how being too rash might jeopardize the entire process. We take a lot of influence from Mao Zedong and movements inspired by him that apply what is known as "the mass line", which essentially means everything we do is informed and enacted in a way that is "from the masses, to the masses."

In what ways can people learn more about your organization?

You can find us on Facebook at Omaha Tenants United. We also have Medium, where we'll be publishing our longer-form material summarizing our work and stating our positions on things. We will have our Points of Unity out soon which explain our beliefs that we expect people to uphold in order to join. While we are a multi-tendency organization, we do ask that anti-capitalism be at the forefront of one's politics (amongst other things), and that people are willing to regularly commit time to disciplined work.

Political Automatons and the Politics of Automation

By Bryant William Sculos

What's in a Meme?

While it would be easy to exaggerate the significance of any meme shared on social media, it is widely acknowledged that memes are inherently limited and simplistic. But their value in conveying important political messages is also clear-especially through sarcasm and irony. One need only spend a few seconds on social media to see the creative energy that people put into making and sharing these often-captioned images across various digital platforms. With that said, I came across this meme below (shared in a number of Facebook groups), and it seems like a useful starting point for a discussion about its central claims regarding political-economic change and the overall goals of such change. The meme's central argument (insofar as we can say a meme has an argument) is that consumers should not use the increasingly prevalent self-checkout lines at grocery stores, because the more they are used the fewer people the company will hire to work as cashiers and baggers. If consumers make the ostensibly simple choice to not use these lines and instead use the lines with human cashiers, grocery stores will not only stop installing these automated checkout lines and will even remove the ones they have already put in place-hiring more cashiers to work the in-person lanes that would be needed to service the customers once the automated systems are replaced.

Given the dire life circumstances that unemployment can cause, especially for previously underemployed, low-wage workers, the goal of struggling for more jobs for people is a noble one. However, this essay will show how that goal, as articulated in the context of a grocery store-and in society more broadly-is misguided, rooted in problematic assumptions about capitalism and transformational change, and is ultimately ineffective and an inefficient use of political energy. The core misunderstandings that produce the argument of this meme are two-fold: 1. individual consumer choices are an effective means of resisting the devastating consequences of capitalism (e.g., automation-induced unemployment), and 2. That resisting automation is productive goal.

There is an automated character to these modes of thinking, a kind of superficial intuitiveness that if we (each as individuals) simply behave differently the forces of the market will adjust to the implications of those choices in aggregate-as if neither the forces of the market (of capitalism) were to blame nor the individual choices difficult to make. Politics is not primarily about our individual daily choices. In fact, the least positive political thing you can do is act on your own. This is the liberal-influenced ideology, ensconced in capitalistic assumptions about society and human nature, that "individual choices matter"-and matter more than collective choices. In fact, liberalism doesn't even have the theoretical architecture to think through the concept of collective choices. Neither does capitalism. Aggregating individuals is all they can do. Socialist political praxis-rooted in democratic, egalitarian solidarity- on the other hand, knows better.

Your Choice Doesn't Matter, But Ours Do

In the 1960s, we saw a number of direct-action campaigns utilizing tactics like sit-ins and occupations to fight against segregation, the Vietnam War, and even capitalism itself. While these actions were taken by consumers of a certain kind, it was not primarily as consumers that these actions were conducted. Thinking about student protests specifically, students are often-and increasingly-treated as consumers within more contemporary neoliberal capitalism, but it is worth remembering that this conception of the student-as-customer is relatively new. Despite historically (and too often still being) bastions of elitism, too often excluding the poor and people of color, college campuses in the 60s were communities of radical dissent, often engaging positively with local communities, with people coming together to enhance their political power through collective action as affected (and effected) human beings with moral and practical interest in challenging violence, exploitation, oppression, and antidemocratic politics. They were not exercising political power rooted in "consumer choice."

We see similar, seemingly automatic, consumer-choice arguments made by left-liberal environmentalists. We are encouraged to recycle, to "shop Green," to use reusable bags, to use energy-efficient light bulbs and appliances. But in a world where something like 100 companies account for approximately 75% of carbon emissions and pollution more broadly, I can assure you that what kind of lightbulb you use could not matter less. You could burn all of your recycling daily in a tire pit using 1950s hairspray as an accelerant and it wouldn't matter in the slightest compared to the ecological footprint of just the US military (the single greatest ecologically-criminal entity in human history). We need collective, solidaristic, organized solutions on a massive scale to make a dent in the ecological damage wrought by centuries of extractive capitalism. In other words, fuck your lightbulbs. The planet's biosphere is dying. Maybe, just maybe, it's time to think outside of our individual consumer choices. Choose organized resistance, not Starbucks' Ethos Water.

Marches, protests, occupations, organizational meetings, public talks and discussions, sit-ins, and strikes, on the other hand, are all forms of collective political action that tend to speak better to the depth of the systemic forces that need to be resisted and superseded. They tend to be more effective at rejecting the forces of exploitation and oppression that drive our societies in the contemporary period, because they do not reinforce the underlying logic of automated consumerism produced through manipulative marketing and advertising, themselves driven by the profit-motive. It is not the choice of product on which you spend your almighty dollars that expresses your political power, but instead it is your capacity to act in concert with others. One of these conceptions of politics challenges the status quo-but the other conception is the status quo.

Thinking back to the meme that started this piece, the implied activism here is undergirded by a false alternative: I can either use the self-checkout line or use the human-clerk line. That is all. What should I do? What is the best political decision? First, it is useful to accept the fact that despite this decision taking place within a highly politicized context, in general, this decision is politically irrelevant. The structures involved are deeply political. We may feel that the appearance of our decision is reflective of a certain perceived set of political commitments-but compared to the political character of the political-economic structures that shape the circumstances where we feel like there might be important political consequences of one choice or another-or simply the fact that we have those two choices-the actual choice we make is functionally irrelevant. In aggregate, which is what I take this meme to be expressing, if customers stopped using the self-checkout lines, supermarkets would indeed stop expanding their use; they may even remove some of the ones they've already installed and hire more human cashiers, but given the enormity of the systemic evils we face, we should be thinking much bigger, broader, and deeper about our politics.

Given the degree of forces levelled against us, the severity of the problems we face, and the time and effort and general difficulty of collective action and organizing, it is too easy to think well at least I'm doing something. The problem is, after a long day or week or month or year of alienating labor, raising children, filling out memos, whatever wears you out, it is easy forat least I'm doing my part to become, I'll try again tomorrow. Our political engagement, our reflective capacities are increasingly automated. Like the automated checkout lines, we are (re)produced as (de)politicized subjects with little sense of any activity other than what we've been programmed-conditioned over years and years-to think. My individual choices matter. And, in fairness, to some degree they absolutely do, but some choices matter more than others.

Which choice matters more here: the decision as to which checkout line I should use, or the decision to get involved in a political organization or local social movement? Again, there is a false alternative here. You can do both, but if you're only going to do one, it should be clear that because of the depth of the structures of exploitation and oppression most people face daily, the latter choice-and the content of that choice-is the choice that really matters. It is a choice that, if made in the affirmative (and the choice is made to get involved in an organization that is socialist, anti-imperialist, pro-worker, anti-racist, anti-sexist, etc.), the choice automatically challenges the programmed automated political (un)thinking that is predominant in our society. Building solidarity in collective struggles with others directly challenges the automated, one dimensional, pathological (anti)politics of individualized consumer choice-oriented slacktivism.

With that criticism laid out, it is worth noting that collective consumer-side actions can be effective in short-term, limited circumstances. They can be a productive dimension of a broader strategy which utilizes a variety of tactics. One of the most historically significant examples of this is the Montgomery Bus Boycott. While it was certainly an exceptional example of collective consumer action rooted not in the ideology of individual choices. A boycott is not an individual act, so, if we give the meme a more charitable reading, we could interpret it as a call for collective action against self-checkout lines. Again, that isn't made clear in the meme explicitly, but it still leaves open the broader question of the limitations of consumer actions, even when done collectively, but it also leaves open the issue of whether resisting automation is a good idea for those interested in progressive or socialist political-economic change.

A Robot Could Do Your Job (and It Should)

As for this second dimension of the meme, the opposition to automation itself, I want to suggest here, in line with what has been argued elsewhere by Peter Frase, Nick Srnicek, and Alex Williams, that automation-done democratically and equitably-is a process that we should support. There are, quite simply, jobs, where if there is an opportunity to make them not exist, that is precisely what should be done. Where is the expression of humanity in being a cashier or bagger? In what ways, other than simply engaging in casual sixty-second conversations with customers, do people employed in these kinds of professions express their humanity in any significant way? I want to be clear; I'm not criticizing the people who, for whatever reasons, do these jobs. I'm criticizing the existence of these jobs as such.

Who should feel compelled to clean piss or shit off bathroom walls in order to make some more money to pay for basic human needs, such as: healthy, nutritious food; safe, clean housing; and/or quality health care? Who should feel compelled to pick strawberries or lettuce in 100-degree heat? Who should feel compelled to install roofing in the scorching sunlight day after day? There is nothing wrong with manual labor per se, and certainly many people would prefer it to sitting in a cubical for eight hours per day, but the problem with any of these options is that none are typically chosen freely. Very few people, if any, would actively choose to undertake the most revolting, dangerous, uninteresting, and socially-unrewarding jobs if it weren't for the lack of better alternatives, if it weren't for the fact that freely chosen labor is barely a mythology in our societies (in that we can hardly even fantasize about it).

In an automated political economy, there will be plenty of creative, hands-on, salt-of-the-earth jobs to do. There will also be plenty of time for other, perhaps a bit more sedentary, creative, and productive activities for those of us who are less callously-inclined. The point is that automation driven by democratically-organized movements of working people, everyday people, the 99%, is the best way to make freely-chosen productive, humane labor thinkable again.

Automation in and of itself is neither a positive nor a negative. At its worst, automation deskills jobs so that the cognitive engagement and technical know-how needed to do the job decreases. Sometimes whole job categories disappear. All the while, companies continue to rake in record-breaking profits. These are the very real, if still exaggerated, fears that underlie this meme.

History need not go in that direction though. We can have an automation that increases quality of life for all people. In order for automation to have the liberatory effects that the above meme eschews, there would need to be a corollary supplement in the form of a universal basic income and/or shorter workweeks or job-share programs with no loss in pay - but it is highly unlikely either of those options would be achievable without the kind of mass organized political action that the individualized, automated politics of consumer choice activism undermines.

Automation-only when combined with genuinely democratized workplaces, companies, homes, towns, cities, states, and countries-can set us on a path of increased freedom for all people. Put simply, we want our shitty jobs automated, not our capacities for creative, collective activity. We want to automate toil, not politics. And it is always worth remembering: automation isn't the enemy of working people, their bosses are.

Bryant William Sculos holds a PhD in political theory and international relations. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at The Amherst Program in Critical Theory, contributing writer for the Hampton Institute, and Politics of Culture section editor for Class, Race and Corporate Power. His other work has been published with a variety of academic and non-academic outlets, including: Constellations, New Political Science, Public Seminar, Truthout, Dissident Voice, and New Politics. His most recent article "Minding the Gap: Marxian Reflections on the Transition from Capitalism to Postcapitalism" is in the May 2018 special issue of tripleC commemorating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx. Bryant is also a member of Socialist Alternative-CWI in the US.

Peter Kropotkin's Anarchist Critique of Capitalism

By Jon Bekken

Peter Kropotkin devoted a major part of his prolific anarchist writings to two related themes: examining the actual workings of capitalist economies and developing the broad outlines of an anarchist-communist society. Kropotkin was not satisfied to merely assert that a free society was possible, he sought to show how such a society could be constructed from the materials at hand - realizing that a revolutionary movement that failed to consider the problems of production and distribution would quickly collapse. This installment outlines Kropotkin's critique of capitalist political economy.

Economic Doctrine

For Kropotkin, the purpose of political economy was to study society's needs and the means available (either currently in use, or which could be developed with present knowledge) to meet them.

"It should try to analyze how far the present means are expedient and satisfactory … [and] should concern itself with the discovery of means for the satisfaction of these needs with the smallest possible waste of labor and with the greatest benefit to mankind in general." [1]

It was this task that Kropotkin took on.

Rather than engage in the abstract theorizing that dominated, then as now, the field, he carried out detailed studies of the agricultural and industrial techniques practical in his day (whether they were in general use or not) and their capacity to meet human needs.

Unlike most economists, Kropotkin insisted on subjecting economic theories to the same rigorous inquiry he would apply to any "scientific" theory:

"When certain economists tell us that "in a perfectly free market the price of commodities is measured by the amount of labor socially necessary for their production," we do not take this assertion on faith …. We not only find most of these so-called laws grossly erroneous, but maintain also that those who believe in them will themselves become convinced of their error as soon as they come to see the necessity of verifying the[m] … by quantitative investigation."

While there certainly was a relationship between the price of commodities and the amount of labor necessary for their production, Kropotkin argued, they were by no means proportional to one another (as the Labor Theory of Value would imply). Nor had socialist economists troubled themselves to investigate whether or not the theory was true by actually gathering data to test the alleged relationship. Anyone who took the trouble to engage in such an investigation would quickly learn that the theory was false. We need only consider the price of oil or gold to realize that these prices are set not by the amount of labor power required to extract and process them, but rather by external market and social conditions. Most so-called economic laws, Kropotkin concluded, were mere suppositions. And although socialist economists "criticize some of these deductions … it has not yet been original enough to find a path of its own." [2]

Thus, when Marx argued against Proudhon that all products exchanged at (or, at least, fluctuated around) their labor value, he was implicitly arguing for what has been called the Iron Law of Wages (though Marx later refuted himself by conceding that union activity could decrease the level of exploitation). The Socialist Party of Great Britain and similar tendencies are wholly correct when they maintain that a Marxian analysis requires that all commodities- including labor power-are valued under capitalism at the cost of their reproduction, which in turn is determined by the most-productive available methods. (Thus a shirt that takes 60 minutes to make by hand or five minutes to make by machine sells for the same price on the world market.)

There is, of course, an element of truth to this-which is why the theory was widely accepted by the labor movement. But, as we shall see, it mistakes an association for a causal relationship. The commodity theory of labor would indicate that only by increasing productivity can workers make possible an improved standard of living, and only through socialist revolution can those possible improvements be actually realized. (Otherwise, the benefits merely accrue to the capitalists and their underlings.)

This doctrine leads inevitably to the conclusion that wage struggles are essentially a waste of time and energy (though workers, through hundreds of years of struggle, have proved the opposite), and that the only alternative to competing against each other into ever-greater immiseration is a state-managed, planned economy which can determine labor values and ensure their equitable distribution. But this doctrine is wholly false. I turn, below, to Kropotkin's proof that wage levels have nothing to do with the cost of reproduction. But the essential point is that wage levels, like the price of all commodities, are set not by their cost of production or the amount of labor they require, but by the relative economic, military and social power held by the respective parties. Monopolies, cartels, police clubs, prisons, labor organization, co-operative associations-these and other power relationships skew the relative "value" of commodities, or at least of the price that can be gotten for them. (And it really matters very little whether a canteloupe has a theoretical, labor-derived value of 25 cents if all the stores charge a dollar.)

Capitalism Not Productive

Like most socialists, Kropotkin initially assumed that an abundance of goods was being produced-and thus that the primary problem facing socialists was arranging their distribution. But when Malatesta suggested that this could not be true, Kropotkin investigated the matter, and found that (quoting Malatesta):

"this accumulation of products could not possibly exist, because the bosses normally only allow for the production of what they can sell at a profit … Some countries were continually threatened by shortages."

In fact, there was only enough food on hand in most major cities to sustain the population for a few days. Yet upon further investigation, Kropotkin established that the shortages, economic crises and general distress endemic to his age (and which continue to this day) did not result, as was widely believed, from overpopulation, poor soil, or other such material causes. Rather, they resulted from a failure to utilize the means already at hand to meet society's needs. [3]

Kropotkin presented his findings in Fields, Factories and Workshops- an anarchist classic that proved that people using then-existing technologies could meet all their needs with just a few months of labor per year. Space precludes anything more than the briefest summary of a volume with which every anarchist should have long since made themselves familiar.

He demonstrated that the technical means then existed to produce abundant and healthful food with relatively little effort or expense (a vision quite distinct from today's factory farms-the precursors of which already existed, but which, he noted, destroyed the soil for generations to come, as well as displacing people who might otherwise derive a comfortable living from the land). Contrary to many economists, Kropotkin argued for decentralizing agriculture and industry, noting that huge industrial establishments were both less common than generally believed, and established less to realize largely dubious economies of scale than to facilitate managerial control. The doctrine of national specialization or competitive advantage±then coming into prominence, and which has since been used as an excuse to ravish "third world" economies-was demonstrably harmful to the interests of the population. (As is well known to peasants compelled to grow coffee beans and sugar cane on land that could otherwise feed their families.) If the debilitating influences of capitalist control and ignorance could be ended, abundance for all was well within reach.

"All this has been proved … despite the innumerable obstacles always thrown in the way of every innovative mind …. For thousands of years … to grow one's own food was the burden, almost the curse, or mankind. But it need be so no longer … To grow the yearly food of a family, under rational conditions of culture, requires so little labor that it might almost be done as a mere change from other pursuits … And again, you will be struck to see with what facility and in how short a time your needs of dress and of thousands of articles of luxury can be satisfied, when production is carried on for satisfying real needs rather than for satisfying shareholders …" [4]

And yet, everywhere workers lived in misery. Contrary to the teachings of every economic school, Kropotkin argued that overproduction was far from a problem:

"Far from producing more than is needed to assure material riches, we do not produce enough …. If certain economists delight in writing treatises on over-production. and in explaining each industrial crisis by this cause, they would be much at a loss if called upon to name a single article produced by France in greater quantities than are necessary to satisfy the needs of the whole population …. What economists call over-production is but a production that is above the purchasing power of the worker, who is reduced to poverty by capital and State …" [5]

Only exploiters, he concluded, were in abundant supply. Today, 94 years later, there may well be overproduction of some goods (nuclear weapons, toxic chemicals, and products that must almost immediately be replaced)-but it is just as obscene today to talk of, for example, an overproduction crisis in agriculture when millions face immediate starvation.

Thus, rather than celebrating capitalism's development of society's productive capacity, as Marxists do, Kropotkin demonstrated that capitalism resulted in chronic underproduction and deprivation. Capitalists not only do not equitably distribute the fruits of our production, the entire development of technology is distorted by their short-term profit calculations. Employers faced with the possibility of new labor-saving technologies, for example, often move to drive down labor costs rather than invest in developing the means of production (their historic role, according to Marx). The Social Revolution, then, would not merely expropriate the means of production developed by the capitalists-it would be forced to rapidly develop those means in order to meet even the most basic social needs.

Fortunately, the means for doing so have long been in place, and workers are more than capable of meeting the challenge.

Wage Slavery

Like all socialists, Kropotkin recognized the self-evident truth that workers work for the employing class because they are forced to-without their weekly wages they and their families must starve.

"Whence come the fortunes of the rich[?] A little thought would suffice to show that these fortunes have their beginnings in the poverty of the poor. When there are no longer any destitute there will no longer be any rich to exploit them …" [7]

If people had the means to support themselves-if they were capable of meeting their daily needs without hiring out their labor-no one would consent to work for wages that must inevitably be (if the capitalist is to derive any profit) a mere fraction of the value of the goods they produce. Even an independent artisan, the labor aristocracy of Kropotkin's day, could not hope to do better than to support his family and put together an (almost certainly inadequate) pittance for his old age, should he rely on his own effort and diligence:

"Assuredly this is not how great fortunes are made. But suppose our shoemaker … takes an apprentice, the child of some poor wretch who will think himself lucky if in five years time his son has learned the trade and is able to earn his living. …

Meanwhile our shoemaker does not lose by him; and if trade is brisk he soon takes a second, and then a third … If he is keen enough and mean enough, his journeymen and apprentices will bring him in nearly a pound a day over and above the product of his own toil … He will gradually become rich … That is what people call "being economical and having frugal temperate habits."

At bottom it is nothing more nor less than grinding the face of the poor." [8]

Today, to be sure, workers have after a hundred years succeeded in improving their condition-and the apprentice system, already declining in Kropotkin's time, has all but disappeared. But saving one's earnings is no more the route to real wealth than it ever was-at best workers can hope to buy a house, afford some time off from the hated job, and put a little money aside for retirement or hard times. To become wealthy, in economic term, requires exploitation-either directly, from workers' labor, or indirectly, by exploiting workers' need for the necessities of life.

Under capitalism, "the harder a man works the less he is paid." But the solution to this manifest injustice could not be found in reversing this equation-in payment according to the service each renders to society. For who is to determine the value of another's service?

"We know what reply we shall get … The bourgeois economists-and Marx too-will be quoted … to prove that the scale of wages has its raison d'etre, since the "labor power" of the engineer will have cost society more than the "labor power" of the laborer …

[But] the employer who pays the engineer twenty times more than the laborer makes the following simple reckoning: if the engineer can save him a hundred thousand francs a year on his production costs, he will pay the. engineer twenty thousand. And when he sees a foreman, able to drive the workers and save ten thousand francs in wages, he loses no time in offering him two or three thousand .. He parts with a thousand francs where he counts on gaining ten thousand, and this in essence is the capitalist system.

So let no one come up with this talk about production costs of the labor force, and tell us that a student who has cheerfully spent his youth at a university has a "right" to a salary ten times that of a miner's son who has been wasting away down a mine from the age of eleven." [9]

Wage differentials, whether under capitalism or in some future "socialist" society, must be condemned as unjust. Nor is it possible to determine a "just wage" based on an individual's contribution (even if such a system could be tolerated on ethical grounds, which it cannot). [10]

Production is Social

Production is not carried out by isolated individuals whose economic contribution can be isolated from that of each other worker so that its value can be determined. To illustrate this, Kropotkin turned to coal mining. (At that time, miners worked either individually or in gangs at the coal face, and were paid piece rate. In today's coal mines, of course, the issue of individual production would never arise.)

"One man controls the lift, continually rushing the cage from level to level so that men and coal may be moved about. If he relaxes his concentration for an instant the apparatus will be destroyed, many men killed, and work brought to a standstill. If he loses as little as three seconds at each movement of the lever, production will be reduced by 20 tons a day or more.

Well, is it he who renders the greatest service in the mine? Or is it perhaps that boy who from below signals to him when it is time to raise the cage to the surface? Is it instead the miner who is risking his life at every moment of the day … Or again is it the engineer who would miss the coal seam and have the miners dig into stone if he made the smallest error in his calculations? …

All the workers engaged in the mine contribute within the limits of their powers, their knowledge … and their skill to mine coal. And all we can say is that everybody has the right to live, to satisfy their needs, and even their fantasies, once the most pressing needs of all have been satisfied. But how can one estimate their labors?" [ll]

Obviously you can't-no one but a Marxist would attempt such an absurdity. And yet we still have not identified everyone who contributes to the production of that coal.

What of the construction workers who built the railways to the pit head, without which the coal would sit useless. What of the farmers, who raise the food the coal miners eat? What of those who build the machines that will bum the coal-without which coal is merely a rather useless dirt.

There was a time, Kropotkin concedes, when a family could support itself by agricultural pursuits, supplemented with a few domestic trades, and consider the com they raised and the cloth they weaved as products of their own, and no one else's, labor.

Even then such a view was not quite correct:

"there were forests cleared and roads built by common efforts … But now, in the extremely interwoven state of industry of which each branch supports all others, such an individualistic view can be held no more.

If the iron trade and the cotton industry of this country have reached so high a degree of development, they have done so owing to the parallel growth of thousands of other industries, great and small; to the extension of the railway system; to an increase of knowledge … and, above all, to the world trade which has itself grown up …

The Italians who died from cholera in digging the Suez Canal … have contributed as much towards the enrichment of this country as the British girl who is prematurely growing old in serving a machine at Manchester… How can we pretend to estimate the exact part of each of them in the riches accumulated around us?" [12]

And if there is no individual production, then how can private ownership of property be justified? Just as it is impossible to argue that anyone person created a lump of coal or a bolt of cloth, so it is impossible to justify private ownership of buildings or land. Homes, after all, are not built by their owners. Their construction is a cooperative endeavor involving innumerable workers in forestry, timber yards, brickyards, etc.

Moreover-and it is here that the enormity of the whole proceeding becomes most glaring-the house owes its actual value to the profit which the owner can make out of it.

"Now, this profit results from the fact that his house is built in a town … which the work of twenty or thirty generations has gone to render habitable, healthy, and beautiful." [13]

Like the ground they stand upon, buildings are a common heritage.

"For instance, take the town of Paris-a creation of so many centuries, a product of the genius of a whole nation … How could one maintain to an inhabitant of that town who works every day to embellish it, to purify it, to nourish it, to make it a center of thought and art-how could one assert before one who produces this wealth that the palaces adorning the streets of Paris belong in all justice to those who are the legal proprietors today …. It is by spoliation that they hold these riches!" [14]

That this remains so can readily be seen by examining the value of today's office buildings and shopping complexes. Without even the slightest improvements their value rise so long as the local economy prospers. But no sum of money invested in maintenance or beautification is sufficient to maintain their value when the local economy fails. For their value is not derived from the money invested, or from the bricks and mortar (and plastic, steel and cement) of which they are constructed. Not even the labor of the workers who build and maintain these modem temples to capital determines their value. Their value, in the final analysis, depends almost entirely upon the wealth and prosperity of the greater society. The most luxurious hotel built in a dying city will soon fade with its surroundings, while the meanest hovel increases in value as surrounding properties are developed.

We enrich each other-not only spiritually, but materially as well-as we work, contemplate and play together; and without the efforts of society as a whole, no one prospers.

Private Ownership Absurd

Private ownership, then, is not merely unjust±it is absurd. As early as 1873, when he was only beginning to become active in revolutionary circles, Kropotkin recognized that true equality was impossible under capitalism.

"It is desirable that a person beginning to work not enslave himself, not yield part of his labor, his strength, his independence … to private individuals whose arbitrariness always will determine how great that part should be, then it is necessary that private persons control neither the instruments of labor … nor the … earth … nor the means of existence during work … Thus we arrive at the elimination, in that future society whose realization we desire, of any personal property …" [16]

All property, no matter how it was created, must become the property of all, available to all who contribute to society through their labor. This was, and remains, necessary not only on grounds of social justice, but because all production is necessarily social.

Production for Needs

Kropotkin refused to separate his analysis of what was from what could be. He insisted on asking not merely if the present economic order worked on its own terms but whether:

"the means now in use for satisfying human needs, under the present system of … production for profits, [was] really economical?

Do they really lead to economy in the expenditure of human forces. Or are they not mere wasteful survivals from a past that was plunged into darkness, ignorance and oppression, and never took into consideration the economical and social value of the human being?" [16]

The "economical and social value of the human being," for Kropotkin, was the key to anarchist economics-to the building of a free society.

This was republished from Anarcho-Syndicalist Review .

Notes

[1] "Modern Science and Anarchism," p. 180. In: R. Baldwin (ed.), Kropotkin's Revolutionary Pamphlets (Dover. 1970).

[2] "Modem Science and Anarchism," pp. 177-79.

[3] Errico Malatesta, "Peter Kropotkin-Recollections and Criticisms." In: V. Richards (ed.), Malatesta: Life & Ideas. Freedom Press, 1977, p. 266. Malatesta went on to argue that Kropotkin's revised view was also wildly optimistic in its assessment of what could be realized. History, however has confirmed that agriculture can indeed produce much greater yields than was generally believed at the time-yields that in fact exceed those Kropotkin discussed.

[4] Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow edited by Colin Ward. Freedom Press, 1985, pp 194-97. (This is an abridged and annotated version of Kropotkin's second edition, eliminating whole chapters of statistical data eclipsed in the 91 years since this work first saw print.)

[5] "Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal," pp. 126-27. In: Baldwin.

[7] "Expropriation," p. 162. In: M. Miller (ed, Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution. (MIT Press, 1970)

[8] ibid. p. 166.

[9] "The Wage System," pp. 101, 99. In: V. Richards (ed.), Why Work? Arguments for the Leisure Society. (Freedom Press, 1983)

[10] Many Marxists, and even some who consider themselves anarcho-syndicalists, continue to argue for maintaining the wage system in such a guise. Their arguments will be presented, and refuted, in the next installment. '

[12] "Anarchist Communism: 'Its Basis and Principles," p. 57. In: Baldwin.

[13] "Expropriation," p. 197. In: Miller.

[14] "Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal," p. 125.

[16] Fields, Factories and Workshops, p. 193.

[16]

Fields, Factories and Workshops, p. 193.

A Humanist Capitalism?: Dissecting Andrew Yang's 2020 Presidential Platform

By Charles Wofford

One of the most delightful experiences I've had as a leftist is when I hear someone who has no apparent class consciousness express, seemingly from nowhere, a remarkably perceptive comment on class society. I recall a coworker once mentioning aloud how strange it was that we were all so frightened of the boss and what they might do to us. Entrepreneur and 2020 democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang of Venture for America has given us another example with his essay, " Humanity is more important than money - it's time for capitalism to get an upgrade ." Throughout the article, Yang advocates for a new capitalism, based on three principles: that humanity is more important than money, that the individual person ought to be the unit of the economy rather than the dollar, and that markets exist to serve "common goals and values." In the end, Yang explicitly calls for federal government intervention to "reorganize the economy."

There is little to disagree with in Yang's moral analysis and his point that capitalism does not serve the interests of the great mass of people. To be clear, I also think the government ought to reorganize the society along more egalitarian lines. But Yang also appeals to certain widely accepted economic beliefs about the "invisible hand," and self-interest and competition being the main drivers of economic prosperity. As a result, Yang's case is subject to the same critique that Marx made of the classical political economists in his 1844 economic manuscripts :

"Political economy starts with the fact of private property; it does not explain it to us. It expresses in general, abstract formulas the material process through which private property actually passes, and these formulas it then takes for laws. It does not comprehend these laws - i.e., it does not demonstrate how they arise from the very nature of private property...Precisely because political economy does not grasp the way the movement is connected, it was possible to oppose, for instance, the doctrine of competition to the doctrine of monopoly, the doctrine of craft freedom to the doctrine of the guild..."

Translation: Like the classical political economists, Yang looks at the capitalist world in which we live and simply takes it as a natural order, whose economic tendencies are unchanging laws. Because he does not understand the historical origins of the divisions of labor that make up capitalism, Yang can posit such oxymorons as "human-centered capitalism." Because he sees capitalism in the misleading and pedantic terms of supply-and-demand ("capitalism prioritizes what the world does more of") he thinks we need to merely demand a more just world and capitalism will provide it. Yang is clearly not involved in activist spaces, otherwise he would know that people have been making radically humanist and egalitarian political demands for longer than capitalism has been around, and at no time has capitalism worked toward those goals. If Yang read up on the founding of the United States (particularly Madison's Federalist Paper No. 10), he would know that the founding fathers intended this anti-egalitarianism. If Yang read up on Hamilton, he would know that many founding fathers thought the wealthy were the natural representatives of all people - a complete fabrication and a lie.

Yang argues for a conception of markets that meet human needs rather than compelling humans to meet the needs of markets. But then he talks about how we can change our behavior as economic subjects in order for the market to provide what we want. The contradiction seems lost on him: if markets are to be geared toward human need, then the question is not an economic one, but a political one. The question is not "how do we read the market?" The real question is "how do we get the power to create a human-centric society?" And this is the conceptual problem behind Universal Basic Income (UBI). Yang justifies it in terms of the productivity it may increase. But that's not a humanist concern; it is a capitalist-economic concern.

A brief history of how capitalist relations came to be is in order. Yang never defines exactly what he means by capitalism, but he suggests that it goes back over 5,000 years, conflating it with the invention of money. In reality, the notion of capitalism - private, for-profit ownership of industry with wage labor and commodity production - has its origins in 17th-century England. Over the centuries the city dwellers of the country - who were mostly merchants and exchangers by profession - had acquired so much money, and thereby power, that they were able to appropriate common-owned land in England. Up until the late 18th century, most of the land in England was commons: the people who lived there had rights to the land irrespective of whatever the "owner" may wish to do with it. Modern concepts of ownership did not exist at the time. As the merchants in the cities grew more wealthy, they bought out or often outright stole commons land in order to expand their holdings, and thereby their businesses. By the late 18th century, the merchant class (who Marx called the bourgeoisie, which literally just means "city-dweller") had bought parliament itself, and started passing parliamentary laws of enclosure to finish up the long consolidation process the bourgeoisie had begun over 100 years prior. At the end of this process, a tiny number of people concentrated in the cities owned some 98% of the land and industry in the UK. 99% of the population, formerly peasants, had to go work for them in a condition called "employment" in order to live. They were now wage laborers: the proletariat. This is the origins of what we now call capitalism. It did not come about through some peaceful transition, but through a violent process of robbery by a small class of an entire country. One of the relevant points to take from this history is that the peasants of England did not voluntarily employ themselves to the nascent bourgeoisie. They were compelled to go to work in the factories because they had been robbed of their own access to the means of existence. None of this has anything to do with freedom; it is all coercion.

The standard economic view of money is that it is a neutral means of exchange. However, if any one individual or clique acquires enough money then they may purchase and bribe politicians, control entire fields of media coverage giving them huge influence on political opinion, and they may commit horrible crimes with impunity because no one will take them to court, etc. In short, having enough money allows one to shape society to one's whims at the expense of others. The conclusion is that money is not merely a neutral means of exchange; it is a form of social power. A society focused around human need, and not markets and money, would therefore have, at the very least, strict limits on the amount of money any individual may possess. Ideally, it would abolish money altogether. But this is against the capitalist premise, which is about free exchange.

With this in mind, where does Yang propose that the government get the power to do these things that he suggests? Short of forcibly expropriating the wealth of the 1%, I do not see a way. Money is a form of social power, and the government is a prime target for that power. Yang has perhaps watched one too many episodes of the television show The West Wing, which shows some fairy-tale vision of politics as an honest journey of visionaries. Yang does not seem to understand that it's all about accumulation of wealth, exploitation of resources, the maintenance of power systems, and that capitalist society is unavoidably inhuman.

David Harvey gives a beautiful example that may help to illustrate the point. In almost every major city in the world today one can find thousands of high-rise condominiums existing in the same city as thousands of homeless people. The condos are empty except for a few weeks of the year. They were not purchased to be lived in; they were purchased to be speculated on in a housing market. This housing market grew to such proportions and has been given such reign that it caused a housing crisis which foreclosed some 4 million people of their homes. Those who lost their homes are not the same people who speculated on the housing market; those people are doing just fine. What does this show? Precisely that the market itself, if allowed to grow unchecked, may wreak havoc upon a society; a truism that seems obvious to everyone except business people and economists.

Ok, so we control the market via government regulation. But those market owners do not like that, and they lobby against regulation laws, they bribe politicians, they control the media discourse etc. Those without the money do not have any real recourse within the system to stop them, for the system has been hijacked via its own methods. So it's not as simple as "well, the government can just do this." The government has long ago been bought out by the capitalists, and politics is treated like another market now. Since the 1980s laws have been made such that it is all but impossible to reregulate the markets. The solution is that we need a completely new system, because "capitalist democracy" (so-called) has fallen past the event horizon into unworkability. This means the end of capitalism, and it means a newer, more direct, less representational form of government. It means public banking rather than private banking. It means the redistribution of wealth from those at the top who have robbed from all of humanity through a coercive system. Interestingly, this would also entail smaller government in many ways, as institutions like the FBI, the CIA, the military industrial complex, and others which exist to protect the status quo would be abolished. Just to drive the nail home, it would also mean the abolition of the Constitution and its replacing with something more progressive and centered around human values rather than defending the "minority of the opulent." (Madison)

Harvey rightly blasts the UBI idea as simply a front for Silicon Valley to get more effective demand for their products. The UBI is really a subsidy to Silicon Valley, not a method of providing for the people. That Yang is an entrepreneur from Silicon Valley is no coincidence.

In other ways, Yang's entrepreneurial training implicates him in the very values he attempts to refute. His "human-centered capitalism" is not a society that is in fact based on human need, but simply around the old fallacy of "meritocracy." A moment's reflection would tell us that a truly humane society would not be meritocratic, as the notion of "merit" is inherently politically implicated. Who defines what counts as merit? A truly humanist society would allow all people the means to develop to their fullest potential on their own terms.

Yang proposes a "parallel economy around social good." The capitalist economy would simply allow this parallel economy to get plump before taking it over. That is exactly what the capitalists are currently doing with the internet. If Yang's "parallel economy" were possible, it wouldn't be needed.

Yang writes, "Most entrepreneurs, technologists and young people I know are chomping at the bit to work on our problems." Our problems are known and have been known for at least 100 years. The problem is capitalism: private control over the means of production. The solution is socialism: worker control over the means of production. The means are popular revolution, which is above and beyond electoral politics. Unless and until you are speaking that language, your "human-centric" ideology is just a sham. Technology will not save us on its own; otherwise it would already have done so.

Lastly is Yang's line about how a humanist capitalism could "spur unprecedented levels of social activity without spending that much." This sounds like the opposite of a humanistic anything, and very capitalist. Why? Because Yang is thinking of more ways to get people to work more, produce more, engage in more activity. But we are already working ourselves to death; American worker productivity is higher than it's ever been. We don't need new ways to do more; we need new ways to do less. We need a new concept of what it means to "contribute" to society. A humanist society would not be obsessed with getting people to work, producing, exchanging, etc. but would rather leave them in relative peace while providing at least for their basic needs. But this is what the entrepreneur is trained to do: produce more, take more risks, and be more daring in the market. In this mindset, people are inherently viewed as commodities, tools to be used by the entrepreneur. We need to move beyond capitalist thinking if we are to move beyond the problems of capitalism.

In conclusion, Mr. Yang's proposed solutions are impressive to those armchair theorists and liberals who lack a deeper understanding of capitalism. They will not solve our problems. They may, in fact, empower capitalism to appropriate even more of our lives. I cannot help but suspect that Mr. Yang is just the liberal version of Donald Trump: the "successful" businessman who is "outside the system." Yang is noticing that there is a political market for progressive values and he is attempting to cash in on it.

He is, after all, an entrepreneur. But treating politics like a business is part of our problem. We've seen how capitalism can posture around the idea of "freedom." Do we not think it could do the same with ideas like "humanism?"

Charles Wofford is an activist and PhD student in historical musicology.

Protectionism and Globalization Have the Same Mother: The Crisis of Capital

By Celso Beltrami

Has "globalization", the freedom for capital and goods to move from one end of the planet to the other, with no barriers to limit trade and its miraculous effects, come to an end? Looking at what has happened recently, it seems that an ideology, and, even more so, one of capital's ways of being has reached the end. It seems like the bourgeoisie, or at least a part of it, has taken a suit from its wardrobe which it has not worn for a long time, one which was needed for a tougher climate and the storms that come with it.

Beyond the metaphors, Trump's protectionist turn, which is carried out in a threatening manner and not just aimed at China, constitutes another turbulent factor, both from an economic point of view and that of imperialist relations on a world scale. These two aspects reflect two sides of the same coin, as Trump's economic measures serve an imperialist strategy aimed at both declared rivals and allies who are applying the brakes and who would like the embrace of the stars and stripes, which they have suffered for more than seventy years with varying degrees of enthusiasm, to be less suffocating. In fact, it is very doubtful that the custom duties will really be able to protect the entire US economy from foreign competition. Perhaps they will give a bit of respite to certain sectors of US manufacturing, like steel or aluminum, but many more will be hit and the retaliation will fall upon the workforce (but not just on them), who will probably be the victims of redundancies and worsening working conditions.

As is well-known, after decades of "globalization", it is difficult to disentangle the chain of value, since the productive process involves so many states: you just have to look at the "made in" label stuck on goods to see to what extent their constituent parts are "international". Moreover, it is no mystery that, for example, the large distribution chain Wal-Mart has many articles on its shelves which are entirely made in China. Therefore, "America First" served up in a protectionist sauce threatens to seriously reduce the enormous advantages that the tax reform launched a few months ago is generating for American firms. In this regard the mountain of money given by Trump to his capitalist accomplices is yielding the expected fruit - far from stimulating investment and therefore jobs in the so-called real economy, this mountain of money is mostly employed for speculative purposes, to strengthen financial activities aimed at realizing extra value, at collecting surplus value extorted from the productive process, without taking part in that process.

But, to return to protectionism, perhaps the duties, like those threatened on May 11th for cars produced abroad, are intended, in the creative mind of the New York property speculator, to compel the car manufacturers of Europe and Asia to increase their production in the US, but this would require large investment, more publicly-funded incentives at the expense of the taxpayers (as always) and, not last, conditions of work that approach those imposed on the working class in "offshore" destinations, like, for example, those in Mexico. Which, moreover, has already happened; however, "approaching" does not mean equal to. So as to not pose as prophets, we say that it is very probable that so-called reshoring, the repatriation of productive activity located abroad, will not go that far. But the thinking heads of the US bourgeoisie, and perhaps even those that think like Trump (who a few years ago was considered a buffoon of popular entertainment, good only for rubbish TV, but, who has been propelled to the top of the leading world power by the difficulties in political management generated by the crisis), know this. It is this, the story of the "populists", who have won power or made gains everywhere, that has made (political) life more complicated for the traditional bourgeois political class. The history of the bourgeoisie is not lacking in figures like Trump (remember Italy's national glory, the ex-cavalier Berlusconi?), starting with that Emperor of the spectacle, Louis Bonaparte, to whom Marx dedicated some of his most brilliant and magisterial works.

But, beyond the "unpredictability" of his course, the US President, even if in the badly joined-up and partly disconcerting terms which are characteristic of him, expresses a need, as was said at the beginning, to combat the economic and political growth of the US' competitors (to not say adversaries) on the world imperialist chessboard, or at least to put the brakes on their unhealthy idea (for the US) of, if not striking out on their own, at least carving out more room for autonomy vis-à-vis their burdensome ally. In short, the USA must continue to set the good and the bad tempo over the centuries and the rest should adapt themselves to it. This, however, is more and more complicated, because of the crisis that began 40 years ago, whose development has put China closer and closer to the heels of the USA and pushed the quarrelsome European bourgeoisie to undertake the difficult, and not to be taken for granted, road to a unitary pole of imperialism.

If China has become what it is, this is due in significant part to "Western" capital, including US capital, but now Chinese "market socialism" (that's not a bad joke…) is menacing the first place held by the USA in many economic sectors, starting with hi-tech manufacturing. Behind the duties on steel and aluminum, there is the real objective of harming the "Made in China 2025" [1] project, which aims at developing or accelerating the development of high technology, to make the leap from the "factory of the world" based on products with a medium or low added value (to use bourgeois terminology: in reality, value extorted from the working class), to one that uses the most advanced technologies. Although, according to certain bourgeois observers, the distance between China and the US is still large, and in certain sectors, very large, the gap is being made up very rapidly, even, it seems, more rapidly than forecast, which cannot fail to make the Yankee bourgeoisie think, no matter who their supreme representative is. Washington justifies the duties and the blocking of the acquisition of certain companies by Chinese capital as retaliation against China's supposed addiction to the theft of intellectual property. True or not - something which is anyway judged by the norms of the bourgeois world - it remains a fact that the USA cannot simply dominate the world through its brutal military superiority, which, furthermore, presupposes a military-industrial apparatus second to none, especially in the hi-tech sectors.

In some ways the same considerations can be made with respect to the protectionist "insults" announced against Europe, which, in passing, are supposed to release more money for the maintenance of NATO. Trump, obviously, didn't like Merkel's musing about the fact that Europe (guided by Germany) is starting to walk by itself, without always having to have Uncle Sam holding its hand. Clearly, in the present state of affairs, such a hypothesis is just a hypothesis, and isn't even close, but, if the US trade deficit with the EU, and, in particular, Germany, is added in, then there starts to be more than just something unpleasant.

We are in the first stages of this new phase of imperialist relations, a phase in which diplomatic formalities rooted in good manners still play a role, even if substantially as a façade (see the China-US summit of May 3rd, where practically nothing was decided), but, alongside the fake smiles, weapons are being waved, up to now only economic ones. China, in fact as a first response, has announced that it will stop importing soya from the USA (the world's biggest producer). China is the biggest importer of soya from the US. If this happens, it will hit the agricultural state of the Mid-West, which, among other things, gave majorities to Trump. Some think that the import block on soya "could cost more than 300,000 jobs in the Mid-West and Donald Trump's re-election, not withstanding his tweets on 'America First'."

It is not possible to yet know if, how and how far this protectionist battle will go forward, but it is a type of battle that has historically laid down the preconditions for the birth of acute tensions between states or for the accelerated worsening of these, to the point where they vent themselves in open conflict, no longer on the economic terrain, but on the military one. Already proxy wars have flared up in various parts of the planet and there is no guarantee that sooner or later these will not be fought in more direct fashion. The horizon is heavy with storms and it will be the course of a crisis which isn't going away to write the screenplay for the near future.

Originally published by The Internationalist .

Notes

[1] Without mentioning the new Silk Road, or rather China's geostrategic expansion to the four corners of the World, with the development of ways of communication which favour trade. And one can also add in the US's substantial trade deficit with Peking and the fact that the latter holds a portion of the US public debt that cannot be sniffed at. For more on this in English see leftcom.org