Ending the Epoch of Exploitation: Pantherism and Dialectical Materialism in the 21st Century

By Chairman Shaka Zulu

Lots of people aren’t familiar with the term “bourgeoisie” or for that matter with thinking in terms of the different classes—even though we live in a class-based society. Moreover, we live in an epoch of history that is based upon class exploitation and class dictatorship. In this “Epoch of Exploitation,” there have been different ages each with their own distinctive class structures based upon the relationship each class had to the mode and means of production.

These can basically be defined as: Slavery, Feudalism, and Capitalism. In each of these periods, there was an exploiting ruling class, an exploited laboring class, and a middle class. Under slavery, there were Freemen as well as Slaves and Slave Owners. These might even be slave traders or hired men of the slave owners.

Under Feudalism, the lower class were the Serfs or poor peasants, and the ruling class were the landed nobility, the Lords, and Ladies. The middle class were the Burgers or Bourgeoisie, who lived in independent towns or burgs, which were centers of trade and manufacturing. These “freemen,” who governed their towns more or less democratically, waged a struggle with the Lords to maintain their independence and this culminated in a wave of Liberal Bourgeois Democratic Revolutions that overthrew Feudalism and replaced kingdoms with republics.

The bourgeoisie became the new ruling class and the petty bourgeoisie (little capitalists) became the new middle class, and a new class--the Proletariat—the urban wage workers and the poor peasants were the lower class. As the Industrial Revolution took off, the bourgeoisie got richer and the petty bourgeoisie more numerous, while the proletariat were formed into industrial armies to serve in the struggle with Nature to extract raw materials like coal and iron ore and transform them into steel and goods of all type.

In this Bourgeois Era, the bourgeoisie reconstructed society in their own image and interest. Under this Bourgeois Class Dictatorship, the state exists to maintain the inequality of the class relations and protect the property and interests of the ownership classes. Bourgeois Democracy is basically a charade to mask over the reality of class dictatorship. The masses may get to vote, but the ruling class calls the tune. Money talks and the government obeys.

The charade is for the benefit of the Petty Bourgeoisie who are the voters and hopers that the government can be made to serve their class interests. The dream that they will one day climb into the upper class and share in the privilege and opulence motivates them to subordinate their own class interests to those of the bourgeoisie. A greater challenge to the bourgeois class dictatorship is getting the working class to adopt its world view and politics that clearly do not serve their interests.

This is where the middle class are of use, and where some proletarians find their niche and a point of entry into the petty bourgeoisie as promoters of bourgeois ideology and politics. I’m talking about all manner of jobs and positions from union boss to preacher and news commentator to teacher. These hacks and hucksters sell us the illusion that this is the best of all possible systems and all is right with the world so long as we do as we are told.

They serve the ruling class by playing the game of “divide and rule” and throwing water on any sparks of resistance. They feed the masses disinformation and “fake news” and feed people’s idealism and false hopes to prevent them from identifying and thinking about their true class interests.

The job of our Party is to help the masses cut through this BS and to arm the people with an understanding of revolutionary science on which our political-ideological line is based. We call this Pantherism, and it is based on application of revolutionary science—dialectical materialism—to the concrete conditions we face in the 21st Century.

We make no bones about it, we are revolutionary socialists determined to bring the Epoch of Exploitation to and end and empower the common people. In other words to advance the evolution of human society to Communism.

DARE TO STRUGGLE DARE TO WIN… ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

Shaka Zulu is chairman of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party's prison chapter.

How the Rich Plan to Rule a Burning Planet

By James Plested

Originally published at Red Flag News. Republished from Monthly Review.

The climate crisis isn’t a future we must fight to avoid. It’s an already unfolding reality. It’s the intensification of extreme weather–cyclones, storms and floods, droughts and deadly heat waves. It’s burning forests in Australia, the Amazon, Indonesia, Siberia, Canada and California. It’s melting ice caps, receding glaciers and rising seas. It’s ecosystem devastation and crop failures. It’s the scarcity of resources spreading hunger and thirst. It’s lives and communities destroyed, and millions forced to flee.

This crisis is escalating at a terrifying rate. Every year, new temperature records are set. Every day, new disasters are reported. In Australia, we’re living through a summer of dust and fire. Hot winds from the desert are sweeping up dirt from the parched landscape and covering towns and cities hundreds and thousands of kilometres away. Creeks and riverbeds are being baked dry. Our cities are shrouded in smoke from fires burning for weeks on end, while on the hottest and windiest days the flames grow, devouring everything in their path.

Do our rulers–the political leaders and corporate elites who, behind the facade of democracy, make all the important decisions about what happens in our society–understand the danger we face? On the surface they appear unconcerned. In September, after millions of school students participated in the global climate strike and Greta Thunberg gave her “How dare you!” speech at the United Nations, prime minister Scott Morrison responded by cautioning “against raising the anxieties of children”. And when, in November, hundreds of homes were destroyed and four people killed by bushfires in New South Wales and Queensland, he told the ABC there was “no evidence” that Australia’s emissions had any role in it and that “we’re doing our bit” to tackle climate change.

Is Morrison stupid? Somewhere along the line it appears his words have become unmoored from reality, and are now simply free-floating signifiers, spinning out of control in a void of unreason. As the empirical evidence of the devastation being caused by climate change in Australia and around the world mounts, so too does the gulf between this reality and the rhetoric of conservative coal-fondlers like Morrison grow into a seemingly unbridgeable chasm.

But something is wrong with this picture. To believe that someone in Morrison’s position could genuinely be ignorant of the dangers of climate change is itself to give up on reason. The prime minister of Australia is among the most well-briefed people on the planet, with thousands of staff at his beck and call to update him on the latest developments in climate science or any other field he may wish to get his head around.The only rational explanation is that Morrison and his like are aware of the dangers posed by climate change but are choosing to act as though they’re not.

On first appearances, this might seem like a fundamentally irrational standpoint. It would be more accurate, however, to describe it as evil.Morrison is smart enough to see that any genuine effort to tackle the climate crisis would involve a challenge to the system of free market capitalism that he has made his life’s mission to serve. And he has chosen to defend the system. Morrison and others among the global political and business elite have made a choice to build a future in which capitalism survives, even if it brings destruction on an unimaginable scale.

They are like angels of death, happy to watch the world burn, and millions burn with it, if they can preserve for themselves the heavenly realm of a system that has brought them untold riches. This is language that Morrison, an evangelical Christian, should understand. What might be harder for him to grasp is that he’s on the wrong side.

When seen from this perspective, everything becomes clearer. In the face of the climate crisis, the main priority of the global ruling class and its political servants is to batten down the hatches. Publicly, they’re telling school kids not to worry about the future. Behind the scenes, however–in the cabinet offices, boardrooms, mansions and military high commands–they’re hard at work, planning for a future in which they can maintain their power and privilege amid the chaos and destruction of the burning world around them.

**********

We’re not, as some in the environment movement argue, “all in this together”. There are many ways in which the wealthy minority at the top of society are already protected from the worst climate change impacts. Big corporations can afford to spend millions on mitigating climate change risks–ensuring their assets are protected so they can keep their business running even during a major disaster. Businesses and wealthy individuals can also protect themselves by taking out insurance policies that will pay out if their property is damaged in a flood, fire or other climate-related disaster.

The rich are also protected from climate change on a more day to day level. They tend to live in the leafiest suburbs, in large, climate-controlled houses. They have shorter commutes to work, where, again, they’re most often to be found in the most comfortable, air-conditioned buildings. They’re not the ones working on farms or construction sites, in factories or warehouses–struggling with the increasing frequency of summer heatwaves. They’re not the ones living in houses with no air conditioning, sweating their way through stifling summer nights. They have pools and manicured lawns and can afford their own large water tanks to keep their gardens green in the hot, dry summer months.

What about in the most extreme scenarios, where what we might call the “natural defences” enjoyed by the wealthy are bound to fail? What happens when the firestorms bear down on their country retreats or rising seas threaten their beach houses? Money, it turns out, goes a long way. In November 2018, for instance, when large areas of California were engulfed in flames, and more than 100 people burned to death, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian hired their own private firefighting crew to save their US$50 million Calabasas mansion.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the city’s wealthiest residents evacuated well in advance and hired a private army of security guards from companies such as Blackwater to protect their homes and possessions from the mass of poor, mainly Black residents who were left behind. Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill went to the city in the aftermath of the hurricane and witnessed first-hand the highly militarised and racialised nature of the response. One security contractor, hired by a local businessman, told Scahill his team had been fired on by “Black gangbangers”, in response to which the contractors “unleashed a barrage of bullets in the general direction of the alleged shooters … ‘After that, all I heard was moaning and screaming, and the shooting stopped. That was it. Enough said’”.

In the event of disaster, the response of the rich hasn’t been to work with others to ensure the collective security of all those affected. It has been to use all resources at their disposal to protect themselves and their property. And increasingly, as in New Orleans, this protection has come in the form of armed violence directed at those less well off–people whose desperation, they fear, could turn them into a threat.

The most forward thinking of the super-rich are aware that we’re heading toward a future of ecological and social break-down. And they’re keen to keep ahead of the curve by investing today in the things they’ll need to survive. Writing in the Guardian in 2018, media theorist and futurist Douglas Rushkoff related his experience of being paid half his annual salary to speak at “a super-deluxe private resort … on the subject of ‘the future of technology’”. He was expecting a room full of investment bankers. When he arrived, however, he was introduced to “five super-wealthy guys … from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world”. Rushkoff wrote:

After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own … Which region will be less affected by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? … Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked: ‘How do I maintain authority over my security force after the Event?’

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr Robot hack that takes everything down … They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for survival.

There’s a reason these conversations go on only behind closed doors. If your plan is to allow the world to spiral towards mass death and destruction while you retreat to a bunker in the south island of New Zealand or some other isolated area to live out your days in comfort, protected by armed guards whose loyalty you maintain by threat of death, you’re unlikely to win much in the way of public support. Better to keep the militarised bunker thing on the low-down and keep people thinking that “we’re all in this together” and if we just install solar panels, recycle more, ride to work and so on we’ll somehow turn it all around and march arm in arm towards a happy and sustainable future.

The rich don’t have to depend only on themselves. Their most powerful, and well-armed, protector is the capitalist state, which they can rely on to advance their interests even when those may conflict with the imperative to preserve some semblance of civilisation. This is where people like Morrison come in. They’re the ones who have been delegated the task, as Karl Marx put it in the Communist Manifesto, of “managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”. In the context of climate change, this means taking the steps necessary to ensure the continued ability of the capitalist class to profit even if the world may be unravelling into ecological breakdown and social chaos.

There are three main ways in which Australia and other world powers are working toward this. First, they’re building their military might–spending billions of dollars on ensuring they have the best means of destruction at their disposal to help project their power in an increasingly unstable world. Second, they’re building walls and brutal detention regimes to make sure borders can be crossed only by those deemed necessary to the requirements of profit making. Third, they’re enhancing their repressive apparatus by passing anti-protest laws and expanding and granting new powers to the police and security agencies to help crush dissent at home.

Military strategists have been awake to the implications of climate change for a long time. As early as 2003, in a report commissioned by the Pentagon, U.S. researchers Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall argued that “violence and disruption stemming from the stresses created by abrupt changes in the climate pose a different type of threat to national security than we are accustomed to today. Military confrontation may be triggered by a desperate need for natural resources such as energy, food, and water rather than conflicts over ideology, religion, or national honor. The shifting motivation for confrontation would alter which countries are most vulnerable and the existing warning signs of security threats”.

More recently, a 2015 U.S. Department of Defense memorandum to Congress argued: “Climate change is an urgent and growing threat to our national security, contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows, and conflicts over basic resources such as food and water. These impacts are already occurring, and the scope, scale and intensity of these impacts are projected to increase over time”.

The Australian military has also been preparing for an increasingly unstable geopolitical environment driven in part by the impact of climate change. The 2009 Defence White Paper included a section, “New Security Concerns: Climate Change and Resource Scarcity”, which pointed to the vulnerabilities of many countries in our region. The paper was explicit in linking these to a possible increase in “threats inimical to our interests” and suggested that military capabilities would need to be strengthened accordingly. A 2018 Senate inquiry into the implications of climate change for “national security” drew similar conclusions.

Although discussions about military preparedness are often pitched in terms of the need for increased development assistance, disaster relief and so on, the practice of the U.S., Australian and other military powers over the past few decades leaves little room for doubt as to what their role will be. When they’re not invading countries on the other side of the world–killing hundreds of thousands, reducing cities to rubble and imprisoning and torturing anyone who opposes them–to secure access to fossil fuels, they’re acting as the enforcers of capitalist interests closer to home.

The response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 is again a good example. When troops from the U.S. National Guard joined the army of private contractors sent to establish “security” amid the death and destruction of the hurricane’s aftermath, the Army Times described their role as quashing “the insurgency in the city”. The paper quoted brigadier general Gary Jones as saying, “This place is going to look like Little Somalia. We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control”. A similar dynamic was at work in Australia when, in 2007, the Howard government sent troops to establish “order” in remote Indigenous communities as part of the racist Northern Territory Intervention.

The idea that the military could be a force for good in the context of environmental catastrophe and social breakdown is laughable. Whatever the rhetoric, the role of the military is to secure the interests of a nation’s capitalist class amid the competitive global scramble for resources and markets. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman had it right when he argued in 1999: “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist–McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps”. The military are gangsters for capitalism. And in the future, they’re likely to double down on savagery.

The next way in which the world’s most powerful capitalist states are preparing for climate catastrophe is by massively increasing what’s euphemistically called “border security”. In 2019, Germany celebrated 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event supposedly ushering in a new age of freedom and democracy. In the decades since, however, European countries have built around 1,000 kilometres of new border walls and fences–six times the length of that hated symbol of totalitarianism in Berlin. Most have been constructed since 2015, when millions of Syrians were forced to flee and seek sanctuary in Europe amid a brutal civil war that was triggered in part, at least, by climate change.

A 2018 report by the World Bank, Groundswell–Preparing for Internal Climate Migration, found that just three regions (Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South-East Asia) could generate 143 million climate migrants by 2050. Australia’s immediate neighbourhood will be affected severely, with several Pacific island nations forecast to disappear completely under rising seas. Already, in response to the relatively small numbers of refugees who have managed to reach Australia by boat in the past few decades, the Australian government has established one of the world’s most barbarous detention regimes. Other governments are now following suit.

So far, the measures discussed have been those primarily directed outwards by states seeking to defend the interests of their capitalist class in the international sphere. This is in part designed to create an “us and them” mentality within the domestic population. In Australia, this has been a staple of both Labor and Liberal governments for decades–the idea that the outside world is dangerous, full of terrorists and other bad people whom we should trust the government to protect us from. In the context of growing global instability associated with climate change, we can expect governments everywhere to double down on these xenophobic scare campaigns.

This should be resisted at every step. Not only for the sake of those “others”–civilians in Afghanistan, refugees imprisoned on Manus Island and so on–whose lives the government is destroying in the name of our security. But also because the racist fear of the outsider promoted by our governments is designed in large part to draw our attention away from the increasingly direct and open war being waged against the “others” within.

In the years since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, Western governments have expanded and strengthened the state’s repressive apparatus. Today we’re seeing, as many predicted, how the crackdown on basic freedoms carried out in the name of the “war on terror” has created a new normal in which anyone opposing the government’s agenda becomes a target. Environmental protesters, and anyone else standing up against the destructive neoliberal order, are now firmly in their sights.

In the U.S., the battle to halt the construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline provides the most extreme example to date. In November 2016, the Native American blockade at Standing Rock was broken up by a police operation so heavily militarised that it looked like something out of the invasion of Iraq. In sub-zero temperatures, blockaders were attacked with water cannons, tear gas, rubber bullets and concussion grenades. Hundreds were injured and many hospitalised. Two women who were involved in the blockade and who later vandalised the pipeline are now facing charges under which they could be jailed for up to 110 years.

In Australia, we’ve seen those protesting peacefully outside the International Resources and Mining Conference in Melbourne face an unusual level of police violence and mass arrests. In Queensland, the state Labor government has passed new laws targeting environmental activists. In early December, three members of Extinction Rebellion were jailed when a magistrate refused them bail–something without precedent for charges related to acts of non-violent civil disobedience.

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Perhaps nothing provides a better metaphor for the future our leaders are steering us towards than a picture, taken during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, of the New York city skyline shrouded in the darkness of a blackout–all except one building, which remained lit up like a Christmas tree. That building was the headquarters of global banking giant Goldman Sachs, where, protected by a mountain of sandbags and using a back-up generator, the company was able to keep the lights on and the profits flowing even while the city was inundated by a three-metre storm surge and hospitals, schools, the subway and most other services were forced to close.

If you imagine this picture as the world, and the Goldman Sachs building as the gilded realm inhabited by the world’s super-rich and the political class that serve them, all you’d need to add is some heavily armed guards around the building and you’d get a pretty good sense of what’s ahead.Our rulers’ apparent lack of concern about climate change is a ruse. They hope that, if they can just head off dissent for long enough, they will succeed in building this future, brick by brutal brick, and there will be nothing the rest of us can do about it.

We need to fight for something different: a system in which our economy isn’t just a destructive machine grinding up human and natural resources to create mega-profits for the rich. One in which the productive life of society is managed collectively by those who do all the work, and where decisions are made not in the interests of private profit, but in the interests of human need. We need socialism–and the fight for it is the great challenge of our generation. At stake is nothing less than the world itself.

The Importance of Political Education and Class Analysis in the Struggle for Black Liberation

By Erica Caines

This piece was originally published at Hood Communist.

What does organizing look like when Black radicals are being pushed out of spaces for ‘progressiveness’ that makes uncontested room for the centrist, right-wing and fascist narratives driving most platforms?  When examining the conflicts between those fighting oppression under capitalism and the capitalist state’s ruling class alongside those who subscribe to “success” and riches obtained at the expense of the oppressed, few things strike me as obvious disconnects and contradictions.

I am often asked about my relationship with the analytical science of Marxism-Leninism as it pertains to my studies, teachings, and praxis because it’s somehow shocking that a Black woman would align herself with a political ideology that’s been presented as predominantly white and male. I once used these moments as opportunities to flex my knowledge on the historical relationship between socialism/ communism and Black people (particularly Black women) as if I were a fact sheet. While it is important to highlight how many of those we’ve come to know as simply “civil rights activists” were politically and ideologically aligned with socialism/communism, what does that mean? Furthermore, why is that important? 

“Knowledge is power” is a familiar mantra. The Marxist Theory of Knowledge describes knowledge, or the idea of it, as socially constructed. Karl Marx details “power” (economic, intellectual and political) as something that stems from the ownership of the means of production. Simply put, a lot of what we *know* is predicated on the interests of the ruling class. It is in this country’s best interest to keep us ignorant. 

One way we combat ignorance is through active study and dialogue. One of the more frustrating things is the way reading is discussed as a pastime of the elite. That, in itself, highlights how comfortably ahistorical we’ve all become. We discuss accessibility and ability to study —-and by extension, obtain knowledge—- in bad faith. We fail to admit to our own intellectual laziness. It also highlights a misunderstanding of how knowledge and education should be used. 

Marx’s Dialectics of Theory and Practice assumes that none of us are “all-knowing”, but the practice of becoming politically educated, both understanding theories and using them in praxis to better conditions, ultimately improve and transform our conditions. One of the more famous examples of having done this can be found by studying members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. 

The BPP implemented collective actions that not only included providing much-needed resources but, more importantly, a political education. They believed in active study and debate and with that belief, went on to educate others enough to advocate for themselves. 

When communities advocate for themselves through breakfast programs, liberation schools and providing healthcare (the more prominent examples of the BPP’s work), ‘the group’ is prioritized over the individual. These small actions that result in transforming realities (material conditions) are what the practice and principle of collectivism are rooted in.

This differs from individualism, which is dependent solely on the best interest of the individual. Black people, in mass, seem to be engulfed in a state of individualism. Many have actively disconnected from our history of collectivism (and other tenets of socialism/ communism). This is made obvious with ‘celebrity culture’, the fixation on Black Capitalism as liberation and blatant misrepresentations of our “ancestors wildest dreams”. 

The lack of implementing class analysis (recognizing the significance of class) to understand our material conditions are major factors of the collective distortion of our material realities. I am not speaking on the problematic and dangerous ways white leftists ignore “whiteness” as a class issue to generically state “race and class” and ignore their innate racial prejudices. I am speaking on how our confrontations with racism, as Black people, have disallowed us to interrogate the Black people that exist within different class statuses. 

We live in a white supremacist capitalist imperialist patriarchy so Black people are, undoubtedly, confronted with how oppressions manifest, particularly racism. Unfortunately, we do not leave room to have any introspection on how oppressions manifest through class. All Black people may experience racism, but not all Black people experience poverty. When overwhelming many experience poverty, combatting racism, solely, causes us to turn a blind eye to capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism.That “blind eye” results in a failure to [not want to] understand or implement a class analysis.

The purpose of class analysis is to clarify the agendas between classes. When we discuss the class structure of capitalism in Marxist theory, the capitalist stage of production consists of two main classes: the bourgeoisie (the capitalists who own the means of production) and the proletariat ( the working class who must sell their own labor power). If we are applying class analysis to our material conditions we are acknowledging how these class groups work and function within our realities. When applying it to our communities it is evident that the [almost non-existent] middle class would much rather align with the bourgeoisie (the rich) than the working class. This presents huge contradictions. Not just in organizing, but the way that we view liberation. 

In order for the bourgeois class to thrive, there must be an oppressed working class to exploit. If there are Black people who would much rather align with the rich, what does that mean for the Black people under the thumb of economic oppression? How does that manifest when we are talking about Black political power? 

Capitalist state ruling classes resist change. They disguise their arbitrary privileges and power behind lies, dogma, half-truths, and fallacies. This is most evident through the use of celebrity-driven and identity reductionist activism that uses “socialist” rhetoric to push neoliberal agendas that don’t seek to transform realities but make them easier to digest and not disrupt the status quo. 

In a society plagued by communities of individualists, how can we approach collectivism in substantial ways? We must have a principled commitment to political education, cooperation, and concern for the welfare of each other. 

Workers Unite. 

Passing Judgement: A History of Credit Rating Agencies

By Devon Bowers

Credit rating agencies can be useful institutions as ideally they allow lenders to know the likelihood of a borrower repaying loans or if they should even be loaned to at all. In the current era, though, such agencies now have global power and can affect economies the world over, most notably with the 2007 financial crisis where bundled mortgages that were junk received AAA ratings.[1] Given that, it would be prudent to understand their history, how they operate, and the effects that they have had historically and currently, especially as a new financial crisis may be looming.[2]

Credit scores began to form somewhat in the 1800s due to the risks of borne by creditors. This led to several attempts to standardize creditworthiness. One of the most successful experiments occurred in 1841 with the formation of the Mercantile Agency, founded by Lewis Tappan. Tappan wanted to “systematize the rumors regarding debtors’ character and assets,”[3] utilizing correspondents from around the nation to acquire information, report back, and then organize and disseminate that information to paying members. Yet, this was done in response to the Panic of 1837, an economic calamity that would have wide-reaching effects not only for Tappan, but the nation as a whole.

The Bank of the United States

Before delving into the Panic of 1837, there needs to be an examination of The Bank of the United States [BUS], as it set in motion events that would create the Panic.

Alexander Hamilton was the Treasury Secretary under President Washington at the time the idea of a national bank was being floated, with a report being done on the matter in 1790. He supported the creation of a government bank on the grounds that it would allow for the US to ascend economically and therefore politically on the international stage.[4] This didn’t come out of thin air, however, there was some precedent regarding such a bank, found in the Bank of North America, established in Philadelphia in 1781.

Hamilton was primarily concerned with the fact that the Bank of North America “had made money for its investors and [had] operated under a charter granted by the Continental Congress, whose funds had made its establishment possible,”[5] yet, there were severe issues with the bank that would be a foreshadowing of the problems to come decades later, mainly regarding speculation. While the bank enjoyed support from businessmen, farmers were staunchly opposed to it as not only were they forced to deal with high interest rates on loans, which could range from 16 to as high as 96 percent annually, but there was also criticism of the bank being rather flagrant in loaning out money for land speculation.  

In Congress, debates began over the question of creating a national bank. James Madison, representing Virginia’s 15th district, argued that the entire idea was unconstitutional as he couldn’t find anywhere in the Constitution which allowed Congress to grant charters or borrow money. Strangely enough, he had previously proposed an amendment to the Article of Confederation which explicitly noted implied powers. His amendment read:

A general and implied power is vested in the United States in Congress assembled to enforce and carry into effect all the articles of the said Confederation against any of the States which shall refuse or neglect to abide by such determinations.[6] (emphasis added)

This was a rather serious about-face on the issue for Madison.

Massachusetts Congressman Fisher Ames countered those who were against the bank by echoing the findings of Hamilton’s report, “that the bank would improve commerce and industry, [insure] the government's credit, [and aid] in collecting taxes.” He “saw no purpose in the power of Congress to borrow if the agency of borrowing was not available and if the power to establish such an agency was not implied.”[7]

Opposition to the bill proved in vain and it passed Congress and was signed by President Washington, being approved for a 20-year charter, until 1811.

During its initial run, the bank’s purpose was to “make loans to the federal government and [hold] government revenue.”[8] (This was all in the context of a gold and silver-backed currency system.) When state banks were presented with notes or checks from BUS, state banks would exchange the amount noted in gold and silver, something rather unpopular due to making it more difficult for state-based banks to issue loans.

Many in the business community supported the BUS on the grounds that it kept state banks in check by preventing them from making too many loans “and helping them in bad times by not insisting on prompt redemption of notes and checks.”[9] New businesses would finance themselves by borrowing money from the BUS and when economic hardships occurred, the businesses would have some breathing room as the government didn’t demand repayment on scheduled times.

After the bank’s charter expired in 1811, the push to create another bank would be caught up with the War of 1812 and the financial circumstances that it had placed the country in.

In the first year of the War of 1812, the US saw $7 million of foreign investment leave and about a 161% increase in the amount of bank note circulation (from $28.1 to $45.5 million) due to the increase in state banks (from 88 to nearly 200).[10] The US was seeing large amounts of inflation in a war that had just begun.

Businesses were generally concerned about the amount of inflation and lack of a stable currency to the point that some began to become intimately involved with arguing for a renewal of the BUS, among them David Parish, Stephen Girard, John Jacob Astor, and Jacob Barker. There was also the politician John C. Calhoun, the Congressional Representative of South Carolina’s sixth district, who would become involved with creating a second national bank.

In addition to financiers and politicians, there was Alexander James Dallas, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and friends with Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin. Dallas had help to coordinate a meeting in April 1813 between Parish, Astor, Girard, and Gallatin which resulted in them closing out a deal in which the financiers formed a syndicate and purchased $9,111,800 of government bonds at $88 a share, which allowed the government to obtain the $16 million it needed to continue funding the war.[11] Still, many businessmen were concerned about the general economic situation of the country so heartily pushed for the creation of a second BUS.

Initially, there was a bit of stumbling about. In January 1814, Calhoun proposed a poorly received scheme in which the bank would be set up in Washington D.C. and that each state would be able to buy into it voluntarily, with the number of bond subscriptions corresponding with each state’s respective representation in the House, as a way of getting around those who saw the BUS as unconstitutional.

Seeing Calhoun’s failed attempt only made Barker push harder for the establishment of a national bank, arguing such in the National Intelligencer, a daily newspaper read by many in the nation’s capital. This pushed Astor, Parish, and Girard to discuss the situation in greater detail via correspondence and, after writing up an outline, they began to quietly disseminate it among other capitalists and urging Congressional representatives to take up the cause.

In April 1814, the Madison Administration, realizing that the impossibility of raising $25 million for the war effort, reluctantly gave in to the creation of a second BUS, with the House passing a motion with a 76 to 69 vote..[12] Shortly after this was announced, Parish and Astor corresponded with one another, with Parish noting that the time to increase the pressure on politicians was ripe.

Both men followed through, but kept their contacts quiet until they knew that the administration was all in. Parish contacted Dallas who offered his services as to defend the constitutionality of the Bank, doing so in the form of writing letters to Senators as well as  Acting Treasury Secretary William Jones, who had become such after Gallatin went to help aid in establishing a peace treaty with the British.

Dallas, in part, wrote that the constitutionality of the bank was disputed “only by a few raving printers and rival banks”[13] and that it should be established. However, within one week of the aforementioned House motion, rumors began to circulate that Britain was looking to negotiate an end to the war. This provided an opening for Madison, who only passively supported the implementation of the Bank, the opportunity to withdraw his support, as did the House promptly afterward.

In February 1813, Acting Treasury Secretary William Jones, working on behalf of the President, offered Dallas the full position of Treasury Secretary, which he declined on the basis of it being too much of a financial sacrifice to do so. The situation changed however in 1814, as with knowledge of Astor’s plan to base the new bank’s capital in real estate, Dallas contacted Secretary of War James Monroe to say that he was now interested in the position, if it were still available and in letters with Jones pushed heavily for the creation of a national bank to predict and collect revenue.

While this conversation was going on, Jones “predicted that the government would have a deficit of almost $14,000,000 by the end of 1814, declared that $5,000,000 more revenue must be provided if the war were to continue through 1815, but made no recommendation as to sources of additional revenue.”[14] This was quickly followed by his resignation. Realizing that Dallas was one of the few people who were on good terms with both his administration and the business community, Madison submitted Dallas’ name for Treasury Secretary on October 5, 1814, with Congress ratifying his nomination the following day.

Immediately after Dallas got into the position, he began to plan for the creation of a national bank that was similar to its predecessor, but with some significant differences: it would be chartered for 30 years, operate out of Philadelphia, and it’s capital would be $50 million of which $20 million would be owned by the government with the rest being up for grabs. In addition, the government would choose only 5 of the banks 15 directors, the remainder being chosen by those private individuals holding government stocks.

When presented before the House Ways and Means Committee, though, there were some minor changes made to accommodate the financial and political realities, with the proposal that the bank be charted for 20 years, $6 million of the bank’s capital being in coins, and that the bank would immediately loan the government $30 million. Dallas moved to garner support not only with the House Committee, but also talking to a special Senate committee on the matter of the bank along with Parish and Girard going to Congress to lobby in favor of it.

Strangely enough, one of the bank’s biggest opponents was Congressman John C. Calhoun, who devised his own plan that he thought would unite both sides.

The Calhoun plan called for the creation of a national bank with a capital base of $50 million, one-tenth of which was to be paid in specie and the remainder in new treasury notes. […] To satisfy the Calhoun supporters, the bank would have to pay in specie at all times, and would not be required to make loans to the government. To gain the support of the Federalists, the government was prohibited from participating in the direction of the bank, and there was to be no provision that subscriptions be made only in stock that was issued during the war.[15]

It would seem that the situation had come to an impasse, yet Dallas had a trump card: maturing Treasury bonds. He announced to Congress “that the government would have $5,526,000 due in Treasury notes on January 1, 1815, with at most $3,772,000, including unavailable bank deposits to meet them.”[16] This convinced the Senate to pass the bill, but it failed in the House due to the anti-bank elements, led by New Hampshire Congressman Daniel Webster, pushed back heartily against the bill and killed it.

On February 13, 1815, news reached Washington that the US and Britain had signed a peace treaty at Ghent, Belgium the past December. The ending of the war allowed the differences between Treasury Secretary Dallas and Congressman Calhoun to thaw as there was now not a need to try to unite everyone, but rather push forward with the bank. The two men got together and hammered out an outline and plan for the bank, which soon passed in Congress and was signed into law on April 10, 1816, with the bank being chartered for 20 years.

The Death of the Second Bank

The bank was set to expire in 1836. Yet it was when the Bank was nearing the end of its life, did a struggle occur over its renewal, led by Andrew Jackson.

In his earlier years, Jackson had a business situation involving paper currency go south, leaving him with a bad taste in his mouth. In 1795, Jackson sold 68,000 acres to a man named David Allison in hopes of establishing a trading post, taking his promissory notes as payment and then using the notes as collateral to buy supplies for the trading post. When Allison went bankrupt, Jackson was left with the debt of the supplies.[17] It would take him fifteen years to finally return to a stable financial situation.

There were also deeper reasons for his anti-bank stance than personal animosity. Jackson was among those people who thought that banking

was a means by which a relatively small number of persons enjoyed the privilege of creating money to be lent, for the money obtained by borrowers at banks was in the form of the banks' own notes. The fruits of the abuse were obvious: notes were over-issued, their redemption was evaded, they lost their value, and the innocent husbandman and mechanic who were paid in them were cheated.[18]

This mistrust of banks would put him in a direct, confrontational path with the BUS and its president, Nicholas Biddle.

Nicholas Biddle was a former Pennsylvania state legislator who became President of the BUS in 1823. Considered a good steward of the bank, he ensured that it “met its fiscal obligations to the government, provided the country with sound and uniform currency, facilitated transactions in domestic and foreign exchange, and regulated the supply of credit so as to stimulate economic growth without inflationary excess.”[19] However, he was also undemocratic as he “not only suppressed all internal dissent but insisted flatly that the Bank was not accountable to the government or the people."[20] Actions such as these simply reinforced Jackson’s disdain for the institution.

Jackson became vehemently anti-Bank in 1829 when Biddle, attempting to gain Jackson’s friendship, proposed a quid pro quo deal. The Bank would purchase the remaining national debt, thus eliminating it, something Jackson greatly wanted done and in exchange, the bank would be re-charted years earlier than expected. An early re-charting would allow for stocks to grow and thus provide a major increase in the dividends of the shareholders.[21] Instead of seeing this as an olive branch though, Jackson viewed it as the institution attempting to utilize bribery and corruption to ensure its continued existence, turning Jackson wholly against the Bank.

It was in 1832 where both these individuals would come to a head over the continued existence of a federal bank.

The National Republicans, a group that split off from the Democratic Party due to anti-Jackson sentiment, nominated a Kentucky Senator by the name of Henry Clay as their presidential candidate in 1831. Convinced that he could utilize the issue of the Bank to beat Jackson, Clay convinced Biddle to seek renewal of the Bank’s charter in 1832 rather than 1836.

Clay did have some backing as the House’ and Senate’s respective financial committees issued reports in 1830 “finding the Bank constitutional and praising its operations[.It should be noted that] Biddle himself had drafted the Senate report[and the] Bank paid to distribute the reports throughout the country.”[22] Clay supporters and allies pushed a bill through in both the House and Senate which would reauthorize the bank, but on July 10, 1832, Jackson vetoed the bill, with the Senate failing in an attempted override.

The Bank was now no more, but what of the Treasury surplus?

After the re-chartering of the Bank of the United States was successfully vetoed, Jackson decided to take the Treasury surplus and split it up among certain favored banks, ‘pet banks’ as they came to be known. However, such a term isn’t fully accurate as while funds did go primarily to banks that were friendly to the administration, “six of the first seven depositories were controlled by Jacksonian Democrats,”[23] there were also banks that whose officers were anti-Jackson that received funds such as in South Carolina and Mississippi.

This divvying up of the Treasury’s surplus funds would set the stage for the Panic of 1837.

Panic of 1837

Due to the massive cash influx, people began to set up their own banks, hoping to get a slice of the government pie. From 1829-1837, the number of banks increased by 56%, from 329 to 798. Many of these new banks were wretched, being “organized purely for speculative purposes [with] comparatively little of the capital required by law [actually being paid and] many of the loans [being] protected by collateral of fictitious or doubtful value[.]”[24]

This led to a fight between banks for deposits and meant that large amounts of money was going all over the country, with no regard for if those funds were being put in places with viable markets and stable economies, where the money could be lent out with confidence that it would be invested and repaid.

With the debt being paid off in January 1835, a surplus created due to rising cotton prices, and an increase in public land sells,[25] and newly collected tax money being sent to banks, it created a situation where these banks were effectively getting an interest free loan which they could make money off of by lending at interest.

Such lending practices would have major repercussions in the western US. Due to the Indian Removal Act of 1830, huge swaths of land were opened up to settlers to come and claim, but it was also open to speculators. These individuals would go westward and purchase large amounts of land to sell to new coming settlers at massively marked up rates. They found themselves empowered by the banks as due to the Treasury giving funds to state banks, banks loosened their lending policies, thus giving speculators the access to credit needed to buy up much of the land. So much had the west become infested by speculation that one Englishman went so far as to say “The people of the West became dealers in land, rather than its cultivators.”[26]

There also existed the problem of professional land agents who worked for capitalists in the East. These agents would go out west, charging some type of fee, whether it be a share of the transactions to take place or a flat five percent fee, and purchase land for their employers, in some cases not even physically seeing the land and basing it off of books. This land would then be rented out and in the meanwhile, further money would be made by loaning funds to frontiersmen at rates ranging from 20 to 60 percent.

This real estate bubble was heavily impacting the nation’s currency. The recognized currencies were gold and silver coin, known as specie. Seeing as how there wasn’t enough of such coinage to go around, paper money supplemented the money supply, which was technically redeemable for specie. Effectively, the US dollar was backed by gold and silver.[27] Due to the moving of money from the US Treasury to state banks which in turn loaned it to western speculators, there was a major increase in the paper money supply to the point that it there wasn’t enough specie to back it and created inflationary concerns, thus prompting the Specie Act of 1836 in an attempt to curtail the problem.

To this end, the Specie Circular of 1836 was introduced which  “required that only gold or silver be accepted from purchasers of land, except actual settlers who were permitted to use bank notes for the remainder of the year.”[28] The entire structure, which was based on paper currency and credit, came tumbling down, with land speculation halting almost immediately.

The credit collapse caused a run on the banks as the citizenry, “alarmed by the money stringency, by the numerous failures in the great commercial centers, by reports that the country was being drained of its specie by the English, and convinced by the Specie Circular that the paper money which they held would soon become worthless,”[29] led people to go to banks and redeem their paper money for specie. Due to so many people wanting specie, banks didn’t have enough to meet demand and suspended all such payments.

All of this caused the Panic of 1837 to come about which shattered credit markets as the nation fell into a painful recession, primarily due to the aforementioned lending policies where literally anyone could get a line of credit given to them.

It was in the aftermath that led to the creation of some of the first credit reporting agencies.

Credit Reporting

Early 19th merchants relied mainly on personal ties to decide with whom to conduct business as many of them would travel from the west and south to eastern coastal cities and purchase goods from the same people again and again. As trade and the economy increased, merchants began to want to give lines of credit to people they didn’t know and in order to get some information on the creditworthiness of these individuals, they “would turn to traveling salesmen to appraise those asking for loans, however, this proved to be a problem as the salesmen, wanting to increase his sales, would paint bad creditors as good, thus allowing for loans to be given.”[30] This led some businesses to, in searching for less biased reports, seek out information from agents whose only job was credit reporting. Baring Brothers was the first to do this in 1829 and were followed by another international banking house, Brown Brothers, both of whom developed systematic credit reports.[31]

The first person to start up an agency where the only objective was credit reporting was Lewis Tappan, “an evangelical Christian and noted abolitionist who ran a silk wholesaling business in New York City with his brother Arthur.”[32] Coming out of the Panic of 1837 almost bankrupt, Tappan decided to launch the Mercantile Agency in 1841 in order to create a national system of credit checking, which utilized both residents and credit agents to judge a person or company’s creditworthiness.

Tappan began the work of his agency by sending a circular to lawyers and others in faraway locations, inviting them to become his correspondents with the hope of  ”[securing] sufficient data regarding the standing of traders in other cities, towns, country hamlets, and trading posts to enable New York City wholesalers to determine what amount of credit, if any, could safely be accorded."[33]

There were credit problems for New York wholesalers. They would generally give a line of credit to local distributors to distribute their product(s) in a given area. Rather than asking for cash payment for the goods, wholesalers gave distributors a discount price and the wholesaler would be reimbursed with the money made from the difference of the discounted and regular pricing, which included an interest rate and covered the wholesaler for risk.

In order to get the risk correct, wholesalers relied on agents reports to their employers about the financial trustworthiness of local borrowers, but they could be deceived as the agent could be falsify information regarding the employer or both the agent and shop could conspire against the creditor.

Tappan’s Mercantile Agency gave a slight fix to these problems in the form of being a de facto surveillance system on borrowers by being an independent source of information from which creditors could gauge the reliability of borrowers. Correspondents would send bi-annual reports to the Tappan’s New York office in early August and February, ahead of the spring and fall trading seasons, which were then copied into large ledgers. Those who subscribed to the ledgers would call the Mercantile Agency’s office to inquire of a current or potential recipient, where the clerk would read the report aloud.[34]

While this helped, there were major weaknesses in the system as the “correspondents [many of them part-time] relied on their general, personal knowledge of businessmen and conditions in the town or area of their responsibility,”[35] which was subject to being influenced by gossip and rumor. During the 1860s changes were made which increased professionalism by bringing on paid, full-time reporters and by the 1870s most major cities had full-time reporters. Methods also changed and was based on direct interviews and financial statements that were signed by borrowers, the latter improving greatly in the 1880s after the courts ruled that such individuals could be charged with fraud if they knowingly provided false information to credit reporters.

The industry would evolve with the ushering in of the 20th century, which would see the origins of the current three major ratings agencies: Moody’s, Standard and Poor’s, and Fitch Group.

Notes

[1] Matt Krantz, “2008 crisis still hangs over credit-rating firms,” USA Today, September 13, 2013 (https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/09/13/credit-rating-agencies-2008-financial-crisis-lehman/2759025/)

[2] Larry Elliot, “World economy is sleepwalking into a new financial crisis, warns Mervyn King,” The Guardian, October 20, 2019 (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/oct/20/world-sleepwalking-to-another-financial-crisis-says-mervyn-king)

[3] Sean Trainor, “The Long, Twisted History of Your Credit Score,” Time, July 22, 2015 (https://time.com/3961676/history-credit-scores/)

[4] H. Wayne Morgan, “The Origins and Establishment of the First Bank of the United States,” The Business History Review 30:4 (December 1956), pg 479

[5] Ibid, pg 476

[6] Sheldon Richman, TGIF: James Madison: Father of the Implied-Powers Doctrine, https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/tgif-james-madison-father-of-the-implied-powers-doctrine/ (July 26, 2013)

[7] Morgan, pg 485

[8] Jean Caldwell, Tawni Hunt Ferrarini, Mark C. Schug, Focus: Understanding Economics in U.S. History (New York, New York: National Council on Economic Education, 2006), pg 187

[9] Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, A History of Central Banking in the United States, https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about/more-about-the-fed/history-of-the-fed/history-of-central-banking

[10] Raymond Walters Jr., “The Origins of the Second Bank of the United States,” Journal of Political Economy 53:2 (June 1945), pg 117

[11] Walters Jr., pg 118

[12] Walters Jr., pg 119

[13] Ibid

[14] Walters Jr., pg 122

[15] Edward S. Kaplan, The Bank of the United States and the American Economy (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999) pg 50

[16] Walters Jr., pgs 125-126

[17] The Leherman Institute, Andrew Jackson, Banks, and the Panic of 1837, https://lehrmaninstitute.org/history/Andrew-Jackson-1837.html

[18] Bray Hammond, “Jackson, Biddle, and the Bank of the United States,” The Journal of Economic History 7:1 (May 1947), pgs 5-6

[19] https://lehrmaninstitute.org/history/Andrew-Jackson-1837.html

[20] Ibid

[21] Daniel Feller, “King Andrew and the Bank,” Humanities 29:1 (January/February 2008), pg 30

[22] John Yoo, “Andrew Jackson and Presidential Power,” Charleston Law Review 2 (2007), pg 545

[23] Harry N. Scheiber, “The Pet Banks in Jacksonian Politics and Finance, 1833–1841,” The Journal of Economic History 23:2 (June 1963), pg 197

[24] Vincent Michael Conway, The Panic of 1837, Loyola University, https://ecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1469&context=luc_theses (February 1939), pg 21

[25] https://lehrmaninstitute.org/history/Andrew-Jackson-1837.html

[26] Paul Wallace Gates, “The Role of the Land Speculator in Western Development,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 6:3 (July 1942), pg 316

[27] Robert Samuelson, “Andrew Jackson Hated Paper Money As Is,” RealClearMarkets, April 27, 2016 (https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2016/04/27/andrew_jackson_hated_paper_money_as_is_102137.html)

[28] Gates, pg 324

[29]Conway), pg 22

[30] James H. Madison, “The Evolution of Commercial Credit Reporting Agencies in Nineteenth-Century America,” Business History Review 48:2 (Summer 1974), pg 165

[31] Madison, pg 166

[32] Josh Lauer, “From Rumor to Written Record: Credit Reporting and the Invention of Financial Identity in Nineteenth-Century America,” Technology and Culture 49:2 (April 2008), pg 302

[33] Lewis E. Atherton, “The Problem of Credit Rating in the Ante-Bellum South,” The Journal of Southern History 12:4 (1946), pg 540

[34] Madison, pg 167

[35] Madison, pg 171

How Many Types of "Good" Capitalism Are There?

By Shawgi Tell

It is no secret that capitalism has been in trouble for some time. This outmoded economic system constantly increases tragedies and inequalities of all kinds and cannot extricate itself from the perpetual crisis it finds itself in. It is thus no surprise that in the recent period many writers have produced books and articles that discuss alternatives to capitalism.

It is also unsurprising that, in an attempt to prettify, legitimize, and extend the life of this transient economic system, many capital-centered thinkers have put forward various types of “good” capitalisms to disinform the polity. These include:

1. accountable capitalism

2. managed capitalism

3. ethical capitalism

4. progressive capitalism

5. conscious capitalism

6. friendly capitalism

7. people’s capitalism

8. regulated capitalism

9. stable capitalism

10. fair Capitalism

11. sustainable capitalism

12. inclusive capitalism

In reality, these are oxymorons, irrational conceptions, false dichotomies, and apologies for the status quo. They are an attempt to portray capitalism as something other than capitalism - as something desirable and worth preserving. Such descriptors reveal an aversion to theory.

While capitalism has evolved and changed over time, it has always been about major owners of capital exploiting labor-power to maximize profit as fast as possible for themselves, resulting in economic and political power becoming more concentrated in the hands of fewer people. This is what is at the base of the capitalist mode of production. Capitalists cannot accumulate capital without exploiting labor-power, which is the only source of new value. Redistributing profits is not possible without new value produced in the productive sector, simply because what is not produced cannot be distributed.

While capitalists constantly invent new ways to counter the law of the falling rate of profit, there are no new economic models of capitalism per se. The laws of value, accumulation, and profitability all stand; they have not disappeared. Greater monopolization of economic sectors, more “financialization,” casino capitalism, disaster capitalism, and the rise of the so-called “rentier” economy are not new forms of capitalism as such, but direct products of the fundamental contradiction of capitalism between social production and private ownership. “Financialization,” irrational stock market speculations, printing phantom money, and toxic and exotic financial instruments that bear no relationship to the productive sector of the economy are natural expressions of capitalism at a particular stage of economic development, not aberrations or anomalies.

The aforementioned oxymorons and false dichotomies are largely ideological devices which strive to hide the fact that capitalism as a system is exhausted and cannot be “reset,” “renewed,” or “improved.” 

As the end draws nearer for capitalism, irrationalism, disinformation, parasitism, violence, and all manner of treachery will intensify. In futile attempts to save capitalism, bizarre ideas and arguments will increase. Twisted logic and absurd statements is all the ruling elite can offer in the final and highest stage of capitalism. The rich are compelled by inexorable circumstances to continue escalating disinformation about capitalism so as to convince people that there is no alternative to this outdated system that cannot provide for the needs of the people. Indeed, major owners of capital and their political and media representatives work hard every day to persuade everyone that, while capitalism is rotten in many ways, it is still “the best” history has to offer humanity. They want everyone to believe that capitalism is the only future for humanity. This is why it is easier for capitalists to imagine the end of the world than it is for them to imagine the end of capitalism. A good example of this retrogressive tendency is the work of  Branko Milanovic, a leading “expert” on inequality. Milanovic was a former chief economist at the World Bank. He recognizes that capitalism has serious problems but believes that the task at hand is to “improve” capitalism and make it “sustainable.” Milanovic has no interest in an alternative to capitalism and believes one does not exist.

To be sure, global, national, and local private interests are not going to cede power voluntarily and support an alternative to capitalism. They are not going to suddenly become enlightened and embrace democracy and affirm the rights of all, including the right of the working class and people to reorient the economy to serve society and the people. This is not how things work in class-divided societies filled with many forms of violence, chaos, and vicious rivalries. The rich are concerned only with their narrow egocentric financial interests, no matter the cost to society and the environment. They are opposed to a pro-social agenda that fosters social consciousness, unleashes the human factor, modernizes the human personality, and humanizes the natural and social environment.

In this dangerous context that keeps deteriorating, the working class and people need to become more vigilant, organized, and pro-active in order to fend off present and future attacks on their rights. The working class and people must use well-established methods, as well as new and creative ways to deprive the rich of the power to deprive everyone else of their rights. 

A society made up of an empowered polity directing the economy and all the affairs of society is urgently needed, a historical necessity. Decision-making power must not rest with the financial oligarchy if society is to move forward and human rights are to be affirmed. Major owners of capital are unfit to rule and care only about their own narrow economic interests.

The working class and people are not interested in this or that type of capitalism. It is not about “bad” capitalism versus “good” capitalism. The working class and people are the negation of this anachronistic economic system. 

People want and need an alternative to capitalism, an alternative to perpetual crisis and instability. At home and abroad, capitalism is certainly working for some people, but not the majority. The need for change that favors the people will intensify as a massive amount of social wealth and power becomes even more concentrated in the hands of a tiny ruling elite. History is demanding new pro-social, human-centered relations free of exploitation and injustice. 

Shawgi Tell, Ph.D., is author of the book, Charter School Report Card. He can be reached at stell5@naz.edu 

The War on Poverty in Austin, Texas

By Camille Euritt

Austin, Texas recently undertook a policy change, the reversal of bans on behaviors which affected the homeless population, that has great potential for ending the costly cycle of incarcerating and disenfranchising the homeless with tickets for living in public places. Unfortunately, the individuals opposing the change focus on their aversion towards poverty rather than on any benefits for the homeless under their “decriminalization.” The recommendation of this brief if for the calculation of an exact estimate on affordable housing which would end Austin’s homeless problem, the utilization of outreach workers as first responders, and the formation of a task force in city government on ending homelessness.  

The War on Poverty in Austin, Texas

Despite the stigma of undeservingness towards the visibly homeless, no one wants the abject poverty of an unsheltered existence for themselves or loved ones. Yet, city codes on public spaces effectively criminalize the indigent for their socioeconomic status. Considering homelessness a choice is unreasonable, because homelessness results in lowered life expectancy, increases the risk of criminal victimization, and contributes to worsened symptoms of mental illness (Henwood et al., 2015). Unfortunately, the rising cost of living, stagnating wages, and the disappearance of affordable housing for low-income people all contribute to the financial instability positioning many individuals on the verge of losing their housing (Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, 2019). In addition to economic conditions, family violence, mental illness, and job loss are all evidenced as reasons for loss of permanent housing (Henry et al., 2018). The reality is that the criminalization of homelessness does not increase the welfare of men and women in need, but further disenfranchises individuals whose circumstances leave them with no choice but violating municipal law. 

Policy Landscape

The decriminalization of homelessness in Austin, Texas in 2019 made the welfare of the community members in extreme poverty more visible which is uncomfortable and fearful for many people. Concerns about homelessness’ adverse effects on business and tourism are the impetus for those opposing the reversal of the city’s ban on sitting, lying down, and camping in public (Goard, 2019). Ortiz, Dick and Rankin (2015) also posit that a fear of responsibility for the welfare of others when the obvious nature of their need is so visible undergirds the laws on public spaces and marginalized groups. Furthermore, a social innovator employed by the city of Austin noted that the backlash toward the repeal is a result of the offense many people feel when sensing homelessness as a violation of the norms on public space (D. Cullota, personal communication, October 22, 2019). Additionally, Homes Not Handcuff’s lead organizer, the advocacy group which campaigned for decriminalization, Chris Harris, spoke about how widespread public disapproval influenced policing behaviors to an even greater degree than the new policy (Goard, 2019; personal communication, October 19, 2019). Accordingly, the actions and inactions of police exacerbated the backlash against the city’s new position on homelessness. For example, Harris described how police now neglect enforcing even legitimate sanctions against the homeless like public urination and intoxication, often responding to concerned citizens to the tune of “blame it on the city council.” 

These attitudes at the local level are analogous with a statement from President Trump on homelessness in West Coast cities: “We have people living in our best highways, our best streets, our best entrances to buildings, where people in those buildings pay tremendous taxes” (Bittle, 2019). Subsequently, Texas’ governor proposed a “sweep” of homeless camps in Austin dependent upon what action the city takes in responding to complaints. Both the attitude of the elected officials and incensed locals in Austin indicate the desire for the removal of the homeless, because homelessness affronts the status quo and housed people do not consider the homeless equal members of the community.    

Political scientist Stone (2011) presents a framework on policy that contrasts the different political ideologies in conflict on any issue as fundamentally different perspectives about the means of reaching the five major goals of all policy: equitability, efficiency, public security, liberty, and welfare. One’s position is either underscored by an approach that every person’s opportunity is equal in a free market and therefore civic intervention is unnecessary for public welfare or that there are social determinants of quality of life that necessitate intentionally providing opportunities for the disenfranchised. Opponents of the city’s “No sit, lie, and camp” ban reversal have claimed that homelessness is a choice which justifies the existence of the criminalization laws, because homeless individuals had the freedom of choosing from alternatives, but preferred the transient lifestyle (D. Cullota, personal communication, October 22, 2019). Analysis of Stone’s framework on political thinking is useful in this case, because the “equal opportunity” ideology underscores this emphasis on “choice” while the recognition of systemic causes of homelessness like poverty and mental illness lend support for treating the issue as a common problem concerning all in the community.     

Policy Implementation

The Supreme Court once ruled that homeless criminalization’s first predecessor, Vagrancy Laws or prohibitions on transient behaviors during the colonial period, violated peoples’ rights to freedom from “cruel and unusual punishment,” because sanctioning a homeless person’s public existence is the same as punishing individuals for their socioeconomic status, a complex circumstance not totally in personal control. Furthermore, the justices ruled that these laws gave policing authorities too much discretion in enforcement to the point where citizens could not realistically comply thereby delimiting the right to “due process” (Ortiz, Dick, & Rankin, 2015). The modern form of Vagrancy Laws, which criminalize the homeless, have become more specific which has generally distanced regulation further from the obvious unconstitutionality of the preceding era while maintaining the same discriminatory effects. However, a recent ruling in the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the constitutional rights of homeless men and women in Western states and negated many of the criminalization ordinances in city codes influencing the policy making in Austin (D. Cullota, personal communication, October 22, 2019; Egelko & Fagan, 2018).          

Recommendation

The city should determine the exact amount of affordable housing needed to end homelessness in Austin. Studies have shown that the cost of housing is less to taxpayers than the cost of the emergency services and incarceration of the chronically homeless (Chalmers McLaughlin, 2011). Besides, definitive city action may mitigate the public’s strong feelings of outrage. Secondly, outreach workers rather than police are the first responders to all matters of the homeless. These workers will have the benefit of crisis intervention training as well as expertise in directing individuals towards services. Also, utilizing an alternative to police helps diversion from the criminal justice system. Finally, Austin should create a task force to end homelessness. Currently, there is only one position on homelessness with the city and a task force is a best practice of problem-solving in city governments (D. Cullota, personal communication, October 22, 2019). 

Conclusion

The fact of the matter is that neither visible homelessness nor displacement under criminalization is the best solution for society. Regardless of a homeless individual’s complicity in their status as a displaced person, there is a shortage of more than 800 beds in Austin’s emergency shelters which leaves this many without even the option of a nonpublic setting. Besides, ticketing the homeless creates criminal records preventing an exit from homelessness further exacerbating the issue (Herrera, 2018). Clearly, the unfortunate fate of the many visible homeless necessitates a greater tolerance as well the legal protection providing a better outcome for society’s most vulnerable. 

Recommended Resources

Bauman, T., Rosen, J., Tars, E., Foscarinis, M., & Fernandea, J. (2014). No safe place: the criminalization of homelessness in US cities. National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty.

Henry, M., Mahathey, A., Morrill, T., Robinson, A., Shivji, A., & Watt, R. (2018). The 2018 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress, part 1: Point-in-time estimates of homelessness. Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Herrera, N. A. (2018). Homes not handcuffs: How Austin criminalizes homelessness. Austin, TX: Grassroots Leadership. 

Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. (2019). The state of the nation’s housing: 2019. Retrieved from https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Harvard_JCHS_State_of_the_Nations_Housing_2019.pdf

National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. (2018, July). Scoring points: How ending the criminalization of homelessness can increase HUD funding in your community. Washington, DC: Author. 

National Low Income Housing Coalition. (2019). Out of reach. Washington, DC: Author

References

Bauman, T., Rosen, J., Tars, E., Foscarinis, M., & Fernandea, J. (2014). No safe place: the criminalization of homelessness in US cities. National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty.

Bittle, J. (2019, September 18). Trump’s plan to solve homelessness is horrifying. The Nation. Retrieved from http://www.thenation.com

Chalmers McLaughlin, T. (2011). Using common themes: Cost-effectiveness of permanent supported housing for people with mental illness. Research on Social Work Practice, 21(4), 404-411.

Egelko, B. & Fagan, F. (2018, September 5). Homelessness ruling: Sleeping on streets can’t be a crime when on shelters are available. Governing. Retrieved from http://www.governing.com 

Goard, A. (2019, July 1). Starting Monday, homeless people will be able to sleep on city sidewalks. KXAN. Retrieved from http://www.kxan.com

Henry, M., Mahathey, A., Morrill, T., Robinson, A., Shivji, A., & Watt, R. (2018). The 2018 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress, part 1: Point-in-time estimates of homelessness. Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Henwood, B.F., Wenzel, S.L., Mangano, P.F., Hombs, M.,Padgett, D.K., Byrne, B., Rice, E., & Uretsky, M.C. (January 2015). The Challenge of Ending Homelessness. Grand Challenges for Social Work Initiative, Working Paper No. 9, 1-22, American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare.

Herrera, N. A. (2018). Homes not handcuffs: How Austin criminalizes homelessness. Austin, TX: Grassroots Leadership. 

Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. (2019). The state of the nation’s housing: 2019. Retrieved from https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Harvard_JCHS_State_of_the_Nations_Housing_2019.pdf

Lurie, K., Schuster, B., & Rankin, S. (2015). Discrimination at the Margins: The Intersectionality of Homelessness & Other Marginalized Groups. Available at SSRN 2602532. 

Ortiz, J., Dick, M., & Rankin, S. (2015). The Wrong Side of History: A Comparison of Modern and Historical Criminalization Laws. Available at SSRN 2602533.

Stone, D. (2011). Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making. (3rd ed.). New York: Norton.

Pacifying the Moral Economies of Poverty in an Era of Mass Supervision: An Interview with Brendan McQuade

By Nick Walrath

Dr. Brendan McQuade is an Assistant Professor of Criminology at the University of Southern Maine. His work centers on the study of police power, abolitionist politics, pacification, and the critique of security. McQuade's first book Pacifying the Homeland - Intelligence and Mass Supervision, released through UC Press, provides an in-depth look into the secretive, often poorly-understood world of intelligence fusion via a radical critique of the discourse that informs and guides the culture and ideology of security-what he terms the "prose of pacification." McQuade's overarching point is that pacification as both process and theory involves not only instances of brute force including tear gas and the bludgeon of the police baton on the one hand and softer tactics such as "negotiated management" of protest on the other, but also draws upon a specialized discourse of depoliticizing language. This terminology -including security advice such as "If you see something, say something," "Report suspicious activity," "We are all on duty," and "Be vigilant"- seeks the consent and participation of the pacified in the own subjugation as well as in the hunting of the enemies of capital. I thank Dr. McQuade for his thorough responses to my questions regarding the contemporary landscape of political policing, mass incarceration, the politics and ideology of security, and the logic that guides and informs its never-ending police-wars of accumulation.

What is the critique of security and what are the key concepts of this discourse?

The critique of security is an effort to understand and write about security without being subsumed by security. We often talk about security as if it was an unassailable good. Who doesn't want to be secure? How could anyone possible have a problem with security? But the problem isn't so much what "security" promises but how it packages that problem. If we buy into the premise of "security," then we accept the idea that the world is dangerous … that crime and terrorism are real threats. It's then a logical step to say we need some entity-the state-to protect us by providing this magical entity called "security."

When we talk about security, we often to forget to ask why people are driven to the violence we call crime or terrorism. Rather than accepting these assumptions, my goal was to examine how a particular security practices emerged and with what effects. Rather than assuming that security is good and asking how it can be more effective or more sensitive to the limits of law, I sought to examine what "threats" are being targeted and whose "security" they preserve. While security discourses rest on assumption of risk and mutual hostility (a war of one against all, waged among both individuals and nations), the critique of security invites to us consider what relations produce these conflicts and how they have been managed.

Here, I build on the work a group of scholars, the anti-security collective organized by Mark Neocleous and George Rigakos. One the key concepts we use is pacification. The basic idea here is that capitalism is an order of insecurity-"all that is solid melts to air"-that demands a politics of security. Instead of talking about security as transcendental good, we view it as an ideological claim articulated within particular types of societies, capitalist societies. To avoid the trap of security, we talk about pacification. The turbulence and conflict created by capitalism must be pacified. This isn't just the work of repressing rebellions and resistance of those on the losing end of capitalist society polarizations of wealth and power. It's more subtle work of continually reproducing capitalist social relations. In other words, the work pacification entails consent and participation as much as it connotes coercion and repression.

One the key mechanisms of pacification is policing. We usually think of policing as the police, the uniformed men that enforce law and order. However, the actual history of the police idea is something different. Policing was a pre-disciplinary discourse that united English liberals and Continental philosophers in a shared discussion about how to build strong states and wealthy societies. It was one of the most important concerns of political theory and philosophy in the early modern period, the time between the Renaissance and the French Revolution. At this time, policing meant a comprehensive science of social order that tried to cover all of life, from the minutiae of personal behavior to the loftiest affairs of state. By end of the 19th century, however, the meaning of "police" contracted to the police, the uniformed officers "enforcing the law." This narrowed meaning reflected the growing influence of liberalism, in which the individual and the market supplanted the sovereign and the state as the theoretical wellspring of social order. These philosophical shifts masked capital's reliance on the state to fabricate social relations, but it did not end the structural necessity of such work. In this context, police science gave way to criminology, public health, urban planning, and various other administrative discourses, which sought to regulate different domains of life in a manner consonant with the class biases of the old "police science." In this sense, the different genres of social policy are also and always police discourses.

Many Marxists have made similar points, though they have not connected it all back to to the deeper history of policing. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis in Schooling in Capitalist America, for example, detail what they call the "correspondence principle" where the nature of social interaction and individual rewards in public schools mirror the workplace. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, in Regulating the Poor likewise, conclude that social welfare policy regulates the labor market. Public benefits expand during economic crisis to dampen working class militancy and contract during times of economic expansion to cheapen the cost of labor. Howard Waitzkin in The Second Sickness analyzes healthcare from the same perspective. He shows access to healthcare expands and contracts with the ebb and flow of popular unrest, creates capitalist markets through public subsidies, and depoliticizes politics of health with an individual approach to health and reductionist biomedical paradigm. In other words, your teacher is cop. Your social worker is a cop. Your doctor is a cop.

For this reason, I use the term the prose of pacification. As I mentioned earlier, pacification isn't just about physical violence. It's also about popular participation in the politics of security. This is what the prose of pacification is all about. We're constantly told every day to participate in the politics of security. It's not just ham-fisted campaigns like "if you see something, say something." It's also the buying into that idea of security. It's the culture and ideology of security: the belief that the world is dangerous and the state is here to protect us from ourselves and others. This idea totally pervades popular culture and political discourse so that it can be hard to even acknowledge it, let alone think past it. The prose of pacification is my attempt to name this aspect of the problem. There's a huge body of ideas that constitute security cultures. It's the rituals of bureaucratic compliance: the documents created to administer us from cradle to grave. It's the lyrical exaltation of security in popular culture and political discourse. It's the internalization of the politics of fear that cause many of us to greet each other with fear and distrust or lend our energies to the police wars against our official enemies: so-called criminals, terrorists, illegals, delinquent youth, and whatever else.

You studied two fusion centers for this book -New Jersey's Regional Operations Intelligence Center (ROIC) and the New York State Intelligence Center (NYSIC). How has the prose of pacification been essential in guiding their mission, but first, what exactly are fusion centers? What work do they -or do they not- perform and how have they shaped the criminal legal system including policing?

As a general concept, fusion centers are interagency intelligence hubs. Intelligence analysts at fusion centers "fuse" together disparate pieces of information in order to provide useful analysis for state managers. Much of the data comes from government records, chiefly data from the criminal legal system but also from other entities like the DMV or social service agencies. This information will be supplemented by the records of private data brokers, social media, and other forms of "open source intelligence." New technologies like automated license plate readers, and facial recognition also create new forms of data that are often accessible to or managed by fusion center staff.

Fusion center analysts will analyze and combine this data in all sorts of ways. Often times, it can be simple case support, analysts will perform basic searches for police investigators who call into the fusion center to get more information about suspect: address, criminal histories, known family members and friends. This is fusion centers as Google for cops. Sometimes, case support is more technical. With specialized software, analysts can take wiretap data-unintelligible and interminably long lists of phone calls-and turn it into a pattern of use, and, from there, a social network analysis. They can transform cumbersome masses of data, such as geospatial data drawn from police files, the census, and other public records, into useful information like "predictive" heat maps to anticipate where the next shooting is likely to occur. Sometimes analysts will work with police teams for weeks and months as part of longer term investigation. For these projects, fusion center analysts will complete multiple rounds of data analysis and may even get deeply involved in intelligence collection. I'm not just talking about trolling social media platforms or working on wiretaps either. Some fusion center personnel are involved the collection of what's called "human intelligence" or the information that's obtained by working with informants or interrogating persons of interest. This is fusion centers as an outsourced intelligence division, a little CIA or NSA on call for the cops.

At the same time, it's important not to overhype fusion centers. They bring together all this data but how it is all used? No doubt, all of it isn't used. Fusion center analysts complained to me that their police supervisors didn't make full use of their capabilities. A lot people on receiving end of fusion center products claim that a lot the intelligence produced isn't that useful. "Intelligence spam" is term that I heard from quite a few interviewees. There's also a lot of liberal hand wringing about data retention, concerns that fusion centers are holding on too much information for too long.

At the end of the day, understanding what a given fusion center is an empirical question that requires investigation. Each fusion center has their own mission, which orients their work. The term "fusion center" is associated with what's called "the National Network of Fusion Centers" recognized by DHS. There are 79 of these fusion centers. The first were set up for counterterrorism, although their mission quickly broadened out to an "all crimes, all threats, all hazards orientation." These fusion centers will do counterterrorism analysis and all hazards preparedness in addition to criminal intelligence work. There's another set of fusion centers created in the 1990s for the drug war-the 32 investigative support centers set up under the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Program. There's even older interagency intelligence centers like the DEA's El Paso Intelligence Center and the six multistate Regional Intelligence Sharing Centers administered by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which date back to the 1970s. All of these fusion centers sit in their own little political space of interagency coordination and conflict. There's a phrase in the fusion center community: "if you've seen a fusion center, you've seen a fusion center." Each one has their own dynamics. Some might be doing very aggressive criminal intelligence work, supercharging the drug war with high tech surveillance and intelligence analysis. Others might be spamming state and local officials with counterterrorism intelligence of limited value.

How have fusion centers changed the criminal legal system? The first important point to know is that fusion centers aren't just a story about DHS and the war on terror. What we can retroactively call the institutionalization of intelligence fusion is part of much longer larger story of change in policing, the criminal legal system, and political economy. Fusion centers are part of the same general punitive turn in the criminal legal system that we associate with the war on drugs and mass incarceration. Scholars like Reuben Miller have started to talk about "mass supervision," as a complementary set of legal, policing, and administrative arrangements that developed alongside mass incarceration and manages "problem populations"-the poor, racial, religious, and sexual minorities, formerly incarcerated and otherwise criminalized people-outside of the prison. I argue that intelligence fusion is now the center of gravity of mass supervision. The varied fusion centers pull policing, community supervision, and the courts together in shared project to pacify criminalized surplus populations. Mass supervision has become more important in the recent period bookended by the Dot Com Crash of 2001 and the Great Recession of 2008. Meanwhile, mass incarceration is now viewed as too expensive. Prison populations are contracting, but we're not getting a return to any rehabilitative ethos of punishment. Instead, we get more massive supervision, a police - and surveillance - intensive form of control turns disinvested communities into open air prisons. The change is not just limited to how the state manages surplus populations.

The rise of intelligence fusion is also part of new pattern of administration. Intelligence fusion subjects police agencies to a new form of workplace discipline, the same systems of statistical management and algorithmic decision making that increasingly manage labor across sectors. Rank and file cops are now chasing numbers and trying to meet quotas. Investigators are increasingly the human link in automated networks of surveillance and data analysis. It's the era of "big data policing." Things have changed in some real and significant ways. Still, these changes are institutionally and politically mediated. We're not living in 1984 ¸ even though we now have the technical capacities to make Big Brother look quaint. To understand exactly how these changes institutionally and politically mediated, I consider the institutionalization of intelligence fusion in relation on-going processes of state formation and related shifts in political economy.

I see fusion centers as part of what the Greek Marxist Nicos Poulantzas called authoritarian statism. By this he means new type of state and practice of administration that curtails formal liberties, expands the executive, and creates special bodies that make the decisions outside of democratic channels. Fusion centers are part of this trend in the general sense that they're a product of this post-9/11 security surge that restricts the freedoms that ostensibly provide liberal democracies their legitimacy. In so doing, they also expand the powers of executive bodies like the police departments. Fusion centers are also an example of authoritarian statism in the sense that they take political power away from popular control. Fusion centers are a product of a distinct era of public policy formation, where efficiency is considered to be more important than the standardization. The key policies that shape fusion centers are not binding regulations written by legislators or agency heads. They were drafted as "recommendations" and "baseline capabilities" in large working groups of "stakeholders," including the police professional associations.

These changes in the state are, of course, grounded in wider shifts in political economy. Here, the basic argument is that globalization and financialization have decisively shifted power to global capital at the expense not just of the working class, but also at the expense of the state itself and other segments of capital. In this hyper competitive economy, where money moves quickly and everyone competes in a global economy, it's hard to have a welfare state, the type of strong state that can both protect less competitive sectors of capital and provide a good bargain with workers. Instead, the hegemonic compact shifts toward coercion and more disciplinary aspects of security take over. Under authoritarian statism, we get more prisons and cops and less "social security" measures like investments in welfare, public health, and education. Pacifying the Homeland situates the institutionalization of intelligence fusion in relation to these trends. From the 1970s to the 2000s, authoritarian statism consolidated, in large part, through the punitive turn in criminal justice that produced what we now call mass incarceration. One of my claims -the balance of police strategies to administer population has shifted away from incarceration and more toward surveillance and intelligence-led policing- I'd like to think this passing development, a morbid stage as authoritarian statism withers and dies and we build a new type of economy and society. Whether it's the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning, however, is a matter of politics.

The recourse to privacy is a common argument and familiar appeal within liberal discourse to not only ostensibly combat the ramifications of surveillance technologies' tendency to mission creep beyond their stated intent and purpose, but to reign in the way these objects and practices strengthen the edifice of authoritarian statism. However, the parameters of the private sphere have always been shifted and made malleable to the requirements of capital [as well as police]. In your book, Pacifying the Homeland, you make very clear the point that, as part of liberal ideology, privacy functions as pacification. Would you elaborate upon this critique?

Privacy is an insufficient response to concerns about surveillance and police power. Scholars of surveillance often focus narrowly on the implementation of privacy policies and their inadequacy. Civil libertarians assert privacy as a universal right that can be defend against the encroachment of outside parties. They position "the right to privacy" or "the state" as independent entities that stand apart from the social relations and political processes that, historically, created them and still imbue them with meaning.

This way of thinking turns historically specific social relations and the ideas that animate them into abstract "things." "Privacy" is not a natural condition that is always and already in opposition to "the public." Instead, "privacy" is a particular claim made within a particular context: 16th century liberal theory. A concession that the consolidating administrative state made to "the public," privacy has no essential essence. Instead, its boundaries set and reset by the state.

Rather than a basis of resistance, privacy is a tool of regulation: privacy as pacification. In a social world already governed by the commodity form and wage relation, privacy reinforces the very divisions between people that make capital accumulation and its security regimes possible. Privacy promises a life of individuals who live apart and choose to do so. Since we lack access to the means to any autonomous means of subsistence, we're coerced into selling our labor and buying our lives back at price that we don't set. Ideas of like privacy are part of a liberal ideology that tell us this is a natural and desirable state of affairs.

For this reason, privacy, as sole or even primary means of defense against surveillance and police power, is a politically counterproductive. Consider the stance of the premier civil liberties organization, the ACLU, toward fusion centers. In 2008, they identified a series of problems with fusion centers-ambiguous lines of authority, private sector and military participation, and wholesale datamining and excessive secrecy. They recommended that US Congress and state legislatures work to increase oversight of fusion centers, regulate the flow of information between fusion centers and the private sector, clarify "how and when" military personnel can collect intelligence for law enforcement purposes, and strengthen open records laws. The ACLU did not demand an end to these problematic practices. Instead, they sought to regulate and, thus, codify them. Challenging intelligence fusion on these terms will, at best, produce limited public oversight (an ACLU representative on the fusion center's executive board) and some modest restrictions on intelligence gathering (three month retention periods for certain kinds of data), which would only be contravened in exceptional circumstances (an emergency warrant or administrative subpoena).

Getting back to intelligence fusion. In what manner has it shaped a key ritual of the police power, the power of the manhunt in capturing, documenting, and dominating the enemies of capital? Who are these enemies, or "terror identities," that garner the most attention from intelligence analysts?

The order of capital is predicated on the imposition of the necessity of a particular kind of work, work for the wage. In a capitalist economy, you're not offered a great job. Instead, you're denied access to the means of subsistence and forced to find some way to survive. The first proletarians resisted the imposition of work. They clung to the last vestiges of the feudal economy or tried to find some way to survive beyond submitting to new regime of labor. For their refusal to work, they were criminalized as vagabonds and forced to labor through by a series of state interventions that Marx famously described as "grotesquely terroristic laws" that imposed "the discipline necessary for the system of wage-labour."

In other words, capital was formed through a manhunt for pliant laborers and it was the police powers of the state that organized this hunt. It's not just manhunts against vagabonds in this early moment. It's the witch hunts in both Europe and Americas that Silva Federici wrote about, the slave trade (and the attempts to re-capture runaways and destroy maroon societies) and the lynch mobs and pogroms that historically have kept marginalized groups at the bottom of different societies. It's the perpetual police-war against "the criminal element." Today, the newest enemies are so-called terrorist, migrants, and refugees.

In many ways, intelligence fusion just puts a high-tech gloss over this old conflict. The main target of fusion centers are poor people, just like the main target of policing remains poor people. Plain and simple. Intelligence fusion is not about fighting terrorism, whatever that even means, and it's only about combating drugs insofar as the so-called "war on drugs" is just the contemporary manifestation of capital's police-war against labor. As a project of police power, intelligence fusion is about terrorizing the population into accepting the conditions of wage labor. This is the main claim of Pacifying the Homeland. The book details the particulars of today's intelligence-led manhunts: compliance checks, warrants weeps, chronic offender initiatives, and saturation patrols. All of these are police operations that begin with intelligence analysis and end with teams of police hunting the population that lives of the borders of the formal and informal economies and bounces back and forth between sites of imprisonment and disinvested, hyper-policed communities.

The poor may be the main subject of intelligence fusion but they're not the only ones. Fusion centers are mixed up in political policing but not in the way that many people imagine. Fusion centers aren't the center of a new COINTELPRO, an aggressive and centrally coordinated crackdown on dissent. The attack on dissent in the US today is no were near what happened in the 1960s and 1970s and it's not possible for someone to step in and play the role of a 21st century J. Edgar Hoover.

Of course, there is political policing happening the US today. The book traces the evolution of political policing. It starts with this new concern with "terrorism" that first became salient not after 9/11 but in the 1980s. The opening act was the FBI's creation of the Joint Terrorist Task Forces to go after the ultra-left splinters of the mass movements of the long 1960s, the urban guerilla movements like May 19th communist organization. Also immediately, the JTTFs targeted non-violent movements like the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, Witness for Peace, and AIDs Coalition to Unleash Power. In the 1990s, the big concern was eco-terrorists. In the last two decades, more "terror identities" have proliferated: anarchist extremists, black identity extremists and the like.

Most of what's happening is surveillance and reporting. There haven't been too many examples of active counter-subversion, where infiltrators sow discord and do everything they can to destroy movements and organizations. There have dramatic confrontations like the crackdown on Occupy and the showdown at Standing Rock, but even these are organized through different means. Rather than J. Edgar Hoover's centrally directed countersubversion campaign, we have a complicated patchwork. Political policing operates through overlapping interagency intelligence networks, including the DHS-recognized National Network of Fusion Centers. This decentralized model is more permeable to local political pressures. Indeed, private interests-not politicians or government officials-appear to have been the leading actors during the crackdown on Occupy and the showdown over the Dakota Access Pipeline. In many other cases, secrecy and organizational complexity complicate a clear parsing of events and actors. This decentralized system produces diverse outcomes. It is also harder to expose and redress than the highly centralized COINTELPRO program and, as a more supple system, may be a more effective means to pacify class struggle.

In any case, what we often talk about as "political policing" only targets the self-conscious mobilization of a class-for-itself, the efforts of organized movements. Intelligence fusion-and police power in general-also attends to less explicit manifestations of class struggle: the ill-understood and often illegible survival strategies of disarticulated segments of the working class. These practices are usually dismissed as the moral failings of the "criminal element." The varied genres of the prose of pacification code it as "crime" or "the street economy." Sometimes, it explodes as a "riot." Here, we find the surplus populations who are not (fully) incorporated within capitalist social relations, the structurally excluded people whose needs and desires cannot be (fully) satisfied within the constraints of capitalist social relations. This social space is privileged domain of police power, where the state's role in producing and maintaining the most basic social relations that define capitalism are laid bare. I think this is one of central contradiction of capitalist civilization and I try to discuss and develop in terms a dialectic between police power and moral economies of poverty.

Would you elaborate upon this central contradiction of capital that exists between the police power and the moral economies of poverty it targets under the aegis of the war on drugs? What is the moral economy of poverty and what does this tension illustrate about not only state formation, but the state's active engagement in the (re)production of the working class?

I use the concept of moral economy to try to understand "crime" without reproducing the class biases of security. I ended up here to make sense of the war on drugs. From the outside and from a certain class position, the drug trade might looks like pathological violence that is so harmful to poor communities. Today, the illegal trade in drugs is huge business that provides real incomes for a lot people. This means there are entire communities where the drug trade is tacitly accommodated because it's understood as some of the best work available. The book opens with the example of Camden, NJ, a city where a third of population lives below the poverty line and, at one point, there was one open air drug market for every 440 residents. The violence of drug trade, paradoxically, produces a particular kind of social order, it's a moral economy of poverty. A lot of Camden residents don't like but many still recognize that the drug trade helps keep the city afloat.

The moral economies are dialectically related to police power. The prose of pacification codes the unauthorized violence of moral economies as pathological violence-"bad neighborhoods filled with bad people"-and invites a security response. As always, the politics of security erases the history that produced problem. Scholars have long established that segregation and discrimination first and later the uneven impacts of deindustrialization and welfare state retrenchment produced the de-facto apartheid boundaries of American city but we ignore all that and reduce it down to a simple problem for the cops and courts to manage. The police can't resolve these social problems but that's not the point. Instead, the current police-war against them provides legitimacy to police-"they're protecting us from violent drug traffickers"-and organizes how the state administers the working class.

The war on drugs is a mechanism to regulate and tax criminalized labor in an era where inequality is increasing and huge swaths of population participate in informal economies. Asset forfeiture laws allow police to tax these illicit economies. Money and property seized in criminal investigations can be expropriated by police agencies. For example, police in New York State, from 1990 to 2010, seized nearly $244 million in cash alone and distributed over $88 million of these assets to police agencies. In some jurisdictions, the conflict of interest generated by this for-profit policing is blatant. In New York's Nassau County, the intelligence center, the Lead Development Center (LDC), sits under the Asset Forfeiture and Intelligence Unit of the Nassau County Police. The LDC operates at no budgetary cost for the department. It is funded exclusively through asset seizures and grants. This is an extreme example but it underscores the role drug operations play in regulating a criminalized market that cannot be suppressed.

The deeper issue here, however, is a structural one: the administration of particular form of the working class. The war on drugs isn't about stopping drugs. It's about regulating criminalized labor. We have all these people who are involved in the accumulation of capital and circulation of goods but it's happening outside of legal channels. When the police arrest people for drugs they impose legal forms of subjectivity on surplus populations that are weakly connected to formal labor markets. Historically, the recognition of organized labor pacified the working class by incorporating them within capitalist states. This administrative subsumption of labor is one the primary ways state administration continually (re)produces capitalist social relations. Policing accomplishes this same process for the criminalized workers of the drug economy. Instead of subsuming legal labor within the confines of "labor law," it envelopes criminalized labor within the "drug war." Police surveillance and intelligence gathering track the drug trade and identify its key players. Arrest and prosecution imposes legal subjectivities on both individual and collective actors: people involved in the drug economy and the "criminal conspiracies" they create. The prohibition of drugs creates a caste of criminalized labor that policing regulates and taxes. Cumulatively, these efforts pacify class struggle by dividing the working class into a profaned "criminal element" and "decent" people.

Returning to your comments on the extent of contemporary political policing -or lack thereof- through intelligence fusion, can you speak to any scenarios where fusion center staff took a noninterventionist, hands-off approach toward a political movement and/or protest in conflict with local law enforcement?

During Occupy, some fusion centers did want anything to do with monitoring the protest. They viewed it as political speech and steered clear. During fight over Dakota Access Pipeline, some local law enforcement agencies wouldn't arrest people for trespassing, which bothered the private sector company that had been hired to crush the protests. The reasons for these incidents, and several others which the book also details, is a shift in the nature of political policing.

After the exposure of COINTELPRO and Watergate, there were investigations and some reforms. The investigations paradoxically re-legitimized security agencies by demonstrating their apparent accountability, while simultaneously allowing controversial practices to continue by covering them with a patina of legality. The result was a seemingly limited version of human rights compliant political policing, a strategy that endeavors to protect political rights and facilitate peaceful protest, while still combating "extremism."

As I mentioned earlier, we don't see the aggressive infiltration and active countersubversion that characterized COINTELPRO. However, we do see wholesale surveillance and intelligence gathering, including the use of informants (who often work to entrap people in manufactured terrorism plots). I fear all of this may be more subtle and effective mode of political policing. Instead heavy headed repression-the whip of the counterrevolution that polarizes and escalates the struggle-we have a more subtle repression-accommodation dialectic. A certain amount of protest is allowed and even encouraged. The police are here to help you exercise your rights and weed out the troublemakers who may be planning more militant action that can be criminalized as terrorism or violence.

Just by way of an anecdote: In 2017, Los Angeles Police Department was revealed to have spied on the anti-Trump group Refuse Fascism with an informant attending meetings ostensibly to gather intelligence that would tip authorities off to any upcoming freeway shutdowns. No violent, far-right groups were spied on by LAPD during this time. Granted, we know little to the extent of fusion center involvement in this particular instance, but it wouldn't surprise me given the numerous cases of law enforcement collaborating with neo-Nazis and white nationalist types.

Have fusion centers taken the threat of far-right violence seriously (given that the FBI seems more predisposed to spy on Black Lives Matter, "Black Identity Extremists," anarchists and other leftist persuasions than neo-Nazis)? How aware and/or vigilant are they of this threat in the age of Trump and a resurgent white nationalism?

This is a difficult question to answer because events are still unfolding and information is spotty. I think there is an important political struggle happening within the security apparatus over the status of white supremacists and other extreme right formations. My sense is that the liberal reformers-the professionalizers, people who want "better" policing-are losing power to fascists or proto-fascists-the people who to hunt for enemies.

Before we get into the specifics of any example, however, it should go without saying that the police are the police. They're the physical embodiment of the state's monopoly on violence. As an institution, there's a baseline conservativism that's ingrained in the police. In more conventional sociological terms, they're a hierarchy-reinforcing institution. We should never expect the police to be anything but enemies of the project revolutionary social transformation. It should never surprise us when the individual police officers or whole departments become surveillance and disrupt social movements. It should never surprise us when individual officers or departments conspire with individuals or groups on the extreme right. These are expected.

At the same time, the specificities of how these dynamics occur matter tremendously. We can't just string together the crimes of the state and assume that it all means that it's a seamless machinery of oppression and that is ready to squelch all political challenges. We're talking about many headed administrative apparatus that's often beset by organizational pathologies and riven by internal conflicts. How the state really operates and this more specific question about the position of the security apparatus toward the extreme right is tremendously very important because it gets at two important points: a theoretical one about the nature of state apparatus and political one about the strategic alignment of power. What's at stake is our understanding of social power and change and how assess the political opportunities of the moment. That said, there are two dynamics that explain much of what we're seeing: the constraints of human rights compliant political policing, and the internal struggle within state around the far right and their efforts to infiltrate the security apparatus.

First, human right's compliant political policing. This what liberals and politics of privacy and legality gets you. If we look at policing in relation to the rest of security apparatus and not just prisons, then, we see that the period of mass incarceration is also this post-Watergate, post-Vietnam period, where liberal professionalizes sought to legitimate the security apparatus through reform. This reform current extended into policing with measures like the Handschu guidelines, which constrained political policing in New York City. Later, it became generalized as response to police brutality in the 1990s, when the DOJ began taking over police departments and overseeing reforms to eliminate racial profiling and police brutality. It continues with calls for procedural reforms and technocratic solutions like body cameras. A lot of the people involved may be earnest and some of these policy changes may blunt some of the sharper edges of oppression but they're structural effect is to reaffirm the legitimacy of the state security and preserve its power and discretion.

So let's get into specifics, human rights compliant political policing, as a general rule, treats all political activity the same, regardless of its content. White supremacists advocating genocide and an ethnostate have the same rights to freedom of speech and assembly as leftist calling for a borderless world and a transition to socialism. This ethos is entrenched in police agencies. It was even put forward as official policy, when I observed a Fusion Liaison Officer training conducted by one of the senior managers at New Jersey's fusion center. The section of the training on civil liberties demonstrated showed a high degree of self-awareness. The officer explained many of the concerns with fusion centers, citing the 2007 ACLU report on the subject. He then discussed how the fusion center dealt with large protest actions. He referenced their monitoring of Occupy to show how limited reporting for situational awareness and officer safety was appropriate but anything more would have violated constitutional rights and ROIC's privacy policy. He also brought up a 2011 Neo-Nazi rally in Trenton as an example. While the trooper presented Occupy in a neutral tone, he described Neo-Nazis as "scum" and "the worst people you can possibly imagine." However, he noted that their protest was permitted and, even though the rally was advocating odious positions, the fusion center could only take the same limited measures they took toward Occupy. With both examples, the intended point was that investigation required a "nexus" to crime or terrorism.

This dynamic provides perspective on recent clashes between Antifascists and far right groups. When left counter-protesters disrupt a white supremacist rally, this registers as an attack on white supremacists right of assembly. After all, the title of the controversial intelligence report on "anarchist extremists" released days before the infamous Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville was "Domestic Terrorist Violence at Lawfully Permitted White Supremacists Rallies Likely to Continue." In short, humans compliant political policing is real. It's a different form of CONTELPRO-era countersubversion and it can help explain why police tolerated both Occupy encampments and Neo-Nazi rallies.

At the same time, there is also a political struggle within the state around the far-right. Throughout the Obama Administration, the status of far-right movements as domestic terrorists was point of bitter controversy. In April 2009, DHS predicted an increase in far-right violence and identified four causes: prolonged economic downturn, the election of a Black president, renewed debates over gun control and the return of military veterans to civilian life. The report was leaked to the press and right-wing media had a field day. Eventually, then-DHS secretary Janet Napolitano shut down the unit that produced the report, leaving DHS with no analysts focusing on the far-right. Primary author of report eventually went public. Some Congressional Representatives pressured the Obama Administration to do more and they threw some money at counter-radicalization but did not re-commit DHS to reporting on the far right. As expected, the Trump Administration quickly rolled back this half measure.

That said, DHS-the federal agency-has no or at least very few analysts reporting on the far right but the fusion centers, which are run by state and local law enforcement, still are reporting on neo-Nazis, White Supremacists and other far right groups. The FBI is also still actively investigating the far right. There's lots of documents that journalist have obtained through FIOA that show this and the book gets into some of these examples and finer detail.

What these episodes underscore, however, is that there is a real battle happening within the state over the meaning of "domestic terrorism." There's plenty of people in law enforcement who want and are going after the far right but there's probably just as many or even more that sympathize with the far right. In 2006, the FBI produced an internal intelligence assessment document concerning the far-right's attempts to infiltrate police agencies and influence officers. While almost nothing is known about the FBI's efforts to address this issue, it is apparently a cause of some concern.

The limitations of human rights compliant political policing and efforts of the far-right to infiltrate law enforcement cast an ominous shadow over the violence in Charlottesville and similar clashes. Although there is no evidence that white supremacist infiltrated the Charlottesville Police or the Virginia State Police, the lead agency at the Virginia Fusion Center, an independent review of the response to the Unite the Right Rally by a former federal attorney shows that police downplayed the white supremacist threat. The report documents several intelligence analyses received by the Charlottesville Police that predicted violence from far-right militants. It also provides some anecdotes of individual law enforcement officers downplaying the threat from the far-right and positioning left counter-protestors as more problematic.

These battles are important because help us understand the political dynamics of our moment. To return to an earlier point, the implication for our understanding of the state is that the state is arena of this struggle but it's not the agent of the struggle in any direct and simple way. The institutional condensation of political power. It's continually reshaped by struggles within and outside the state apparatus to define policy and distribute resources. It's also shaped by larger forces, as I tried to explain in my comments on authoritarian statism and globalization. In short, the state is neither a thing to be seized nor smashed. It's an institutional condensation of power to approached, politically, at the level of strategy. This returns me to my other point about the strategic alignment of power. These battles of over status of white supremacists within the security apparatus and related questions of police collaboration with far-right groups speaks to wider political process. The balance of social forces since the 1970s-call it neoliberalism, the carceral state, whatever-is clearly unraveling. There's a three-way fight going on right now between the collapsing neoliberal center, the fascist right and the nascent left. We need to think about the security apparatus, we confront hard questions. The left position isn't to demand the police go after the fascists. Both the police and the fascists need to be defeated politically.

To conclude, one overarching imperative I noticed while reading your book -one the key struggles abolitionists must surmount- is to abolish not only the police, but the police power. How might we challenge a purposefully vague, capillary, patriarchal power that occupies nearly every nook and cranny of the state and that permeates the broader society down to the level of individual subjectivity?

To come up with solutions, it necessary to understand the specific nature of the problem and Pacifying the Homeland is my effort to name some the very particular problems of our times. You're right that one of the main problems the book names is police power. It's not just the police, the bodies of armed men in squad cars and frisking black and brown people on street corners. It's the way the police powers of the state administer our lives in ways to the benefit of capital. I think taking this expanded concept of police power expands the horizon of abolitionist politics.

Consider the divest-reinvest strategy toward abolition that came out The Vision for Black Lives policy report and was endorsed by the Democratic Socialist of America. Divesting from the police and the military and reinvesting in education and social services sounds great but I think it could be easily co-opted. Reinvest into what exactly? Social services as they currently exist? Shrink the armed uniformed police and expand soft social police? While such efforts certainly would make a meaningful difference in the lives of those most victimized by police, it would hardly challenge the rule of capital and the modern state. Instead, abolishing police power requires rethinking "social services" on terms that explicitly challenge the basic social relations that police power, in its myriad forms, maintains: private property, the commodity form, and the wage relation. In other words, the positive project of abolition would require a "reinvestment" in care and reconstruction the commons.

From this perspective, Medicare for All should be advanced as an abolitionist demand. By de-commodifying healthcare and transforming into a universal public good it could be part of reinvigorated social democratic commons Left organizations could organize political power to redirect resources from police, prisons, and the security apparatus and reinvestment in a series of socialist programs, a "common" decency that should afforded to all by virtue of their inalienable humanity: universal right to cradle-to-grave care (universal healthcare, free education, etc.), and basic right to life (housing, a job or basic income guarantee).

The horizons of what we could call "abolition socialism" could also help confront other difficult questions that historically have plagued socialist movements. The reconstitution of the commons would also require requires a reckoning with histories of colonial violence and dispossession. Capital emerged through the disproportionate destruction of particular cultures. It created hierarchy of peoples. The modern capitalist world-system created through various the projects of policing and pacification is also and always racial capitalism. In other words, a meaningfully abolishing police power and recreating the commons would also require addressing historic injustices that divided the global working class into mutually antagonistic nations and races. In this way, reparations for slavery, for colonial dispossession, and for unequal North-South relations can be thought of as necessary part of both the transition to socialism and abolition of police power.

“The Neoliberal Project Is Alive But Has Lost Its Legitimacy”: An Interview with David Harvey

By Jipson John and Jitheesh P. M.

British scholar David Harvey is one of the most renowned Marxist scholars in the world today. His course on Karl Marx's Capital is highly popular and has even been turned into a series on YouTube. Harvey is known for his support of student activism, community and labour movements.

In an interview with The Wire, he talks about the problems arising out of the neo-liberal project, the resulting surge of populist politics and right-wing movements. He also talks about the relevance of Marx's critique of capitalism in the present context and the threat to labour from automation.

The interview has been edited slightly for style and clarity.

Could you trace the origin of neo-liberalism? What were the structural reasons for its emergence?

The idealist interpretation of liberalism rests on a utopian vision of a world of individual freedom and liberty for all guaranteed by an economy based on private property rights, self-regulating free markets and free trade, designed to foster technological progress and rising labour productivity to satisfy the wants and needs of all.

In liberal theory, the role of the state is minimal (a "night-watchman" state with laissez faire policies). In neo-liberalism it is accepted that the state play an active role in promoting technological changes and endless capital accumulation through the promotion of commodification and monetisation of everything along with the formation of powerful institutions (such as Central Banks and the International Monetary Fund) and the rebuilding of mental conceptions of the world in favor of neoliberal freedoms.

These liberal and neo-liberal utopian visions have long been critiqued as inadequate because as Marx so clearly shows in practice, they both support a world in which the rich get richer at the expense of the well-being and exploited labour of the mass of the population.

Keynesian policies and the redistributive state after 1945 proposed an alternative utopian vision that rested on the increasing empowerment of the working classes without challenging the power of private property. In the 1970s, a counter-revolutionary movement arose in Europe and the Americas organised by the large corporations and the capitalist classes to overthrow the Keynesian system and to replace it with a neo-liberal model (along with all its ideological baggage) as a means for the capitalist class to recuperate its waning economic strength and its fading political power.

This is what [Margaret] Thatcher, [Ronald] Reagan, [Augusto] Pinochet, the Argentinian generals etc did throughout the 1980s. It is continuing today. The result has been rising economic and political inequality and increasing environmental degradation across the globe.

You describe accumulation by dispossession as one of the most important characteristics of neoliberalism. How does it work and what are its structural consequences?

Capital can accumulate in two ways. Labour can be exploited in production to create the surplus value that lies at the basis of the profit appropriated by capital. Capital can also accumulate by thievery, robbery, usury, commercial cheating and scams of all sorts.

In the theory of primitive accumulation, Marx points out how so much of the original accumulation of capital was based on such practices. These practices continue but have now been supplemented by a mass of new strategies.

In the foreclosure crisis in the USA of 2007-8 maybe 6-7 million people lost the asset values of their homes while Wall Street bonuses soared. Speculation in asset values (land and property for example) provides a non-productive avenue for accumulation.

Bankruptcy moves by major corporations (e.g. airlines) deprives employees of their pension and heath care rights. Monopoly pricing in pharmaceuticals, in telecommunications, in health care insurance in the USA provide lucrative avenues for profiteering. Increasing extraction of wealth through indebtedness is evident. Rentier extractions based on accumulation by dispossession (e.g. acquiring land or mineral resources illegally or at cut rates) have become more common because the rising mass of global capital is finding increasing difficulty in procuring productive uses for surplus capital.

Even during Marx's time, there were several critiques of capitalism. How do you differentiate Marx's critique from these strands?

Many of the critiques of capitalism were based on moral categories (evil and greedy capitalists versus impoverished and badly treated workers or more recently, environmentally callous capitalists versus the ecologists). Marx's critique is systemic. Moral and ethical objections remain, but Marx treats them as secondary to the systemic problem of why and how to replace the capitalist mode of production and its disastrous laws of motion by some other way of meeting human wants and needs.

Do you think capitalism has reached a dead end, especially in context of the 2008 crisis? Can capital recover?

Capital is not at a dead end. The neo-liberal project is alive and well. Jair Bolsanaro, recently elected in Brazil, proposes to repeat what Pinochet did in Chile after 1973.

The problem is that neo-liberalism no longer commands the consent of the mass of the population. It has lost its legitimacy. I already pointed out in The Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005) that neo-liberalism could not survive without entering into an alliance with state authoritarianism. It now is moving towards an alliance with neo-fascism, because as we see from all the protest movements around the world, everyone now sees neo-liberalism is about lining the pockets of the rich at the expense of the people (this was not so evident in the 1980s and early 1990s).

Marx believed that capitalism would die out due to its internal contradictions. You don't agree with this. Why?

Marx sometimes makes it seem as if capital is destined to self-destruct. But in most instances, he looks on crises as moments of reconstruction for capital rather than of collapse. "[C]rises are never more than momentary, violent solutions for the existing contradictions, violent eruptions that re-establish the balance that has been disturbed," as he says in Volume 3 of Capital.

Where he does see capital ending, it is because of a class movement. I believe my position is in agreement with Marx. Capitalism will not end of its own accord. It will have to be pushed, overthrown, abolished. I disagree with those who think all we have to do is wait for it to self-destruct. That is not, in my view, Marx's position.

You consistently argue that Marx talked not just about value at the production level but also the arena of realisation. Could you elaborate this in the present context?

In the first chapter of Capital, Marx recognises that value is created in production and realised in the market. If there is no market, then there is no value. So value is dependent upon the contradictory unity between production and realisation. Realisation depends upon the wants, needs and desires of a population backed by the ability to pay.

The history of capitalism has been about the production of new wants, needs and desires (e.g. consumerism of various sorts and the production of daily forms of life to which we must conform in order to live reasonably such as automobiles and suburban living). I now teach an audience where everyone has a cell phone (which did not exist twenty years ago). To live in most US cities, you need an automobile which pollutes.

Marxists have paid a lot of attention to production, but have neglected issues of realisation. In my view, it is the contradictory unity of the two (which Marx mentions as crucial but does not elaborate upon) that should be the focus of our attention. Extraction and appropriation of value (often via dispossession) at the point of realisation is a political focus of struggle as are the qualities of daily life.

German socio-economist Wolfgang Streeck has identified five problems of capitalism in his How will Capitalism End. Instead, you identified 17 contradictions, not problems, of contemporary capitalism. What is the difference between problems and contradictions regarding the crisis of capitalism?

Problems have solutions. Contradictions do not: they always remain latent. They can only be managed and as Marx points out, crises arise when antagonisms are heightened into absolute contradictions. The contradiction between productive forces and social relations cannot be solved. It will always be with us. The contradiction between production and realisation will always be with us, etc.

I listed seventeen contradictions in order to emphasise that crises can arise in many different ways and that we need to develop a theory of crises which understands their multiple sources so we can get away from the "single bullet" theory that too often haunts Marxist thinking.

Under capitalism, automation causes significant job loss all over the world. Even the World Bank has raised concerns regarding automation. What is the challenge of automation under capitalism? What effect will it have on working class politics?

The parallel with automation in manufacturing and AI in services is useful. In manufacturing, labour was disempowered by tech change. Plus, offshoring with tech change is much more important. But manufacturing did not disappear. It continued to expand in different ways (e.g. fast food restaurants that produce hamburgers rather than factories that produce automobiles).

We will see much the same thing in services (we check ourselves in or out in supermarkets and airlines now). The left lost the battle against automation in manufacturing and is in danger of repeating its dismal record in services. We should welcome AI in services and promote it, but try to find a path towards a socialist alternative. AI will create new jobs as well as displace some. We need to adapt to that.

What do you mean by 'new imperialism'? What is its basic characteristic? How is it qualitatively different from classical imperialism?

I called it "the new imperiliasm" since it was an explicit theory advanced by the neo-conservatives in the US in the run up to the Iraq war. I wanted to critique that, not to get back to Lenin's theory, but to point out that the neo-liberal world order was sucking out value in all kinds of ways from all manner of places (e.g. through commodity chains). This was, of course, the topic of Brief History of Neoliberalism, which followed on from The New Imperialism. The two books should be read together.

There is an argument and belief, even among left intellectuals in the West, that the global south delinking from globalisation will result in a return to pre-modernity. What is your take on this? What should constitute the development agenda of the global south?

I think the idea of a total delinking would be disastrous. But I think selective delinking and the search for autonomous regionalities though bioregionalism is a good idea. The idea is to build alternative geographies of interrelations, but the global perspective (e.g. on global warming) is critical.

Study on cities is one of your areas of interest. You analyse cities as spaces of surplus appropriation. How does this work, especially in the context of neo-liberal cities? What is the importance of the right to city?

Urbanisation and capital accumulation go hand in hand and that is one of the aspects of Marxist thought that has been historically underdeveloped. Now half of the world's populations live in cities. So questions of daily life in environments constructed for purposes of capital accumulation is a big issue and a source of contradiction and conflict. This is emphasised politically by the pursuit of the right to the city: e.g. class struggle in and over the qualities of urban life. Many of the major social movements in recent decades have been over such questions (e.g Gezi Park in Istanbul).

Your condition of post-modernity looks into its material base. On a philosophical level, what is the larger influence of post-modernism on social life? What about the idea of post-truth?

Like many other broad-based, and to some degree incoherent cultural movements, the post-modern turn created positive openings along with absurdities and retrogressive impacts. I liked the fact that it opened up perspectivism and emphasized space, but I could see no reason why this would be antagonistic to Marxism, since in my own work, I emphasize how to integrate space, geographies and perspectivism into Marxism.

At the end of the day, as Eagleton pointed out at the time, the movement went too far in seeing "no difference between truth, authority and rhetorical seductiveness" such that "he who has the smoothest tongue and the raciest story has the power." It "junked history, refused argumentation, aestheticized politics and staked all on the charisma of those who told the stories." Donald Trump is a product of this post-modern excess.

In the initial stage, we thought internet as the great liberating force. But over the course of time, big monopolies emerged, profiting from the digital space. Cases like Cambridge Analytica reveal how personal data is being manipulated by these monopolies. What is the danger it poses? How to liberate internet as a public utility?

There is no such thing as a good and emancipatory technology that cannot be co-opted and perverted into a power of capital. And so it is in this case.

How do you locate the emergence of Donald Trump? How can the rise of populism in different parts of the world be addressed?

He is a post-modern president of universal alienation.

Does the growing popularity of Bernie Sanders and Jermy Corbyn in the U.S. and UK elections respectively make you hopeful? Were they just election mobilisations? What should be the form and content of present day socialist politics?

There is a big difference between mobilisation and organisation. Only now, we are beginning to see elements on the left that see that building an organisation is crucial to gaining and holding political power.

In the British case, the rise of momentum alongside a resurgence of party building provides hopeful signs, as does the manifesto for bringing key elements of the economy into the public domain (which is different from nationalisation) as a political strategy. But the problem is that many in the parliamentary Labour party are as yet unsupportive. As yet, we do not see enough of this sort of thing in the U.S.

There is surge of right-wing politics across the world. The latest is example is the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Is the world moving towards fascism, similar to the 1930s and 40s? What is the political economy behind the sudden rise of ultra right-wing politicians like Bolsonaro in a Latin American country which was famous for left politics?

Alienation produced by neo-liberalism managed by the Workers Party, coupled with widespread corruption, produces a mass base prone to be exploited by neo-fascist delusions. The left failed to organise and now has to do so in the face of repressions.

Your course on Marx and Marxism has been very popular worldwide. How relevant is Marxism today? What do you think are Marx's contributions?

Marx wrote the beginnings of a stunningly perceptive analysis of how capital works as a mode of production. Capital was developed in Marx's time in only one minor part of the world. But it is now everywhere, so Marx's analysis is far more relevant now than it was in his time. Everyone who studies Marx carefully recognises this, which in some ways, explains why political power is so desperate to repress this mode of thought.

There exist significant despair and dissatisfaction among the common masses under neo-liberal capitalism. Where does the hope for a better world lie? What sustains your hope?

In spite of all the attempts at repression, people are increasingly seeing that there is something wrong with not only neo-liberalism, but also capitalism. It plainly does not and cannot deliver on it promises and the need for some other form of political-economic organisation is becoming ever more obvious.

This interview originally appeared at The Wire .

The Capitalist Coup Called Neoliberalism: How and Why It Went Down

By Colin Jenkins

Rich people have always had class consciousness because... they want to stay rich. This collective consciousness led the "founding fathers" of the United States to set up systems of governance that would, first and foremost, protect them (the wealthy, landowning minority) from the landless, working majority (slaves, indentured servants, laborers). Since then, the rich have had undue influence on every aspect of US life: housing, food production and distribution, education, media, and politics. As capitalism has developed well into its late stages, this has led to large concentrations in wealth and power, and thus influence.

In order to maintain control, the rich have learned over time that minimal concessions must be given to the working class to avoid societal unrest. Marxist theorists like Antonio Gramsci and Nicos Poulantzas described this process as using the state to steady the "unstable equilibrium." This instability is produced by capitalism's tendency to pool wealth at the top while dispossessing the majority. For much of the 20th century, capitalists in the US were successful in maintaining an internal equilibrium, mainly due to their ravaging of the so-called "third world" through colonialism and imperialism. With this massive theft of resources throughout the global South (Africa and Latin America), a robust "middle class" was carved out from a mostly white sector of the US working class. This "middle class" consisted of workers who were provided a greater share of the stolen loot than their class peers, and thus awarded the "American Dream" that was widely advertised.

The US "middle class" was a crucial development for the rich because it provided a buffer between them and the masses. Due to the relative comfort they were allowed, "middle-class" workers were more likely to support and collaborate with capitalists, even at the expense of their fellow workers who were left struggling for scraps from below. After all, for there to be a middle class, there must be a lower class. Under capitalism, the lower class is the invisible majority by design. The capitalist class shapes dominant culture from above, the middle class serves as the standard bearer of this culture, and the lower class clings to survival mode in the shadows of society. The key for the rich is to keep the invisible majority in check. The "middle class" has always played a crucial role in this.

Despite this balancing act that was maintained for decades, capitalism's internal contradictions became predictably volatile heading into the latter part of the century, culminating into what economist Michael Roberts refers to as the profitability crisis of the 1970s . As the capitalist system was approaching this crisis, US society had already begun confronting social ills stemming from systemic white supremacy, patriarchy, and the Vietnam war. Naturally, this moved into the economic sphere, as workers and students began to successfully tie together the array of social injustices to the widespread economic injustice created by the capitalist system. The existence of an invisible majority, the victims of capitalism and its corollary systems of oppression, was uncovered. This scared the rich, enough to where they felt the need to fortify their previously unshakable privileges. After the groundswell of liberation movements that formed during the 60s, which was fueled by a wave of (working) class consciousness from below, the rich decided to organize and weaponize their own (capitalist) class consciousness to protect their assets, collectively, from the threat of democracy.

In examining what had gone wrong in the 60s and why so many people had the audacity to demand more self-determination, the notorious Trilateral Commission convened in 1973, bringing together economic and political elites from North America, Europe, and Japan. The Commission, as described by Encyclopedia Britannica , "reflects powerful commercial and political interests committed to private enterprise and stronger collective management of global problems. Its members (more than 400 in the early 21st century) are influential politicians; banking and business executives; media, civic, and intellectual leaders."

In 1975, Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki published a report for the Commission, titled: "The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies." In assessing the various movements that gained momentum in the 60s (racial justice, economic justice, anti-war, etc.), the report determined that these "problems" stemmed from an "excess of democracy." Huntington specifically noted that, "the vitality of democracy in the United States in the 1960s produced a substantial increase in governmental activity and a substantial decrease in governmental authority." The solution to this, according to the report, was to reverse direction - decrease "governmental activity" and increase "governmental authority" to restrict democratic impulses from the masses and maintain the capitalist power structure internally, while retaining "hegemonic power" internationally. In other words, rather than government serving people and regulating capitalists, government should serve capitalists and regulate people.

Since maintaining a "middle class" had become such a fragile proposition, the capitalist class forged a new direction. Rather than rely on this historical buffer and continue the concessionary and fickle balancing act , they decided it would be more effective to simply take ownership of the legislative and judicial process. This process began when executive officers from several major corporations joined together to form private groups like the Business Roundtable, for the purpose of "promoting pro-business public policy." In other words, to make sure that the "excess of democracy" which occurred during the 60s would never return. Why? Because any such mass movement toward relinquishing power to the people is a direct threat to capitalist profit and corporate America's existence as a collection of unaccountable, authoritarian, exceptionally powerful, private entities. The Business Roundtable, which included executives from corporations like Exxon, DuPont, General Electric, Alcoa, and General Motors, gained instant access to the highest offices of the government, becoming extremely influential in pushing for corporate tax cuts and deregulation during the Reagan era.

Since the 1980s, the Business Roundtable has run roughshod over American workers by using the federal government to:

- reduce consumer protections,

- obstruct employment stimuli,

- weaken unions,

- implement "free trade" agreements that spur offshoring and tax havens,

- ease environmental protections,

- increase corporate subsidies,

- loosen rules on corporate mergers and acquisitions,

- open avenues of profit in the private healthcare system,

- privatize education and social programs,

- and block efforts to make corporate boards more accountable.[1][2][3][4] [5]

As political momentum developed within corporate America, additional players jumped aboard this strategic and highly coordinated capitalist coup. While groups like the Business Roundtable targeted legislation, the US Chamber of Commerce (CoC), a "private, business-oriented lobbying group" which had already served as a popular vehicle for turning (capitalist) class consciousness into action since 1912, shifted its focus onto the court system. Since then, the CoC has used its immense resources to influence US Supreme Court decisions that benefit big business, a tactic that has become increasingly successful for them over time. The CoC's business lobby had " a 43 percent success rate from 1981 to 1986 during the final years of Chief Justice Warren Burger's tenure," a 56 percent success rate from 1994 to 2005 (the Rehnquist Court), and boasted a 68 percent success rate (winning 60 of 88 cases) during John Roberts first seven years as Chief Justice. The CoC improved even more on its pro-corporate, anti-worker attack in 2018, winning 90 percent of its cases during the court's first term. As Kent Greenfield reported for The Atlantic ,

"One measure of the [2018 term's] business-friendly tilt is the eye-popping success rate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the self-proclaimed "Voice of Business." The Chamber filed briefs in 10 cases this term and won nine of them. The Chamber's victories limited protections for whistleblowers, forced changes in the Securities and Exchange Commission, made water pollution suits more difficult to bring, and erected additional obstacles to class action suits against businesses. Only the geekiest of Supreme Court watchers monitor such cases. But the Chamber pays attention, and it pays off."

Groups like the Trilateral Commission, Business Roundtable, and Chamber of Commerce have taken prominent roles on the front lines of the 40-year, capitalist slaughter of American workers, but if there was a single, powerful element that solidified this coup it was a memo written in 1971 by Lewis Powell. The Powell Memo, or Powell Manifesto, as it has come to be known, made its rounds among corporate, economic, and political elites during this crucial time. Powell, a corporate lawyer, board member of nearly a dozen corporations, and soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice, sent the memo to the Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Eugene Sydnor, Jr., as a call to action for corporate America.

Powell's memo was a diatribe against any and all elements that would dare to question capitalism. While giving mention to "Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system, both political and economic," the memo focused on what was viewed as the most immediate threat - the same "excess of democracy" referred to in the Trilateral Commission's report. "What now concerns us is quite new in the history of America," wrote Powell. "We are not dealing with sporadic or isolated attacks from a relatively few extremists or even from the minority socialist cadre. Rather, the assault on the enterprise system is broadly based and consistently pursued. It is gaining momentum and converts" throughout the working class. Powell took special interest in those "from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians" whom he regarded as small in size but "the most articulate, the most vocal, the most prolific in their writing and speaking."

Powell's memo laid out a blueprint for the capitalist coup that is now referred to as neoliberalism , including everything from identifying and listing the enemies pushing for self-determination, criticizing the business community for its apathy and lack of urgency in recognizing this growing threat, suggestions for how business executives and the Chamber of Commerce may proceed in obstructing these democratic impulses from below, and even laying out detailed plans on how to infiltrate campuses, the public, media, the political arena, and the courts with pro-capitalist action and propaganda.

Reclaim Democracy, an activist organization based in Montana explains,

"Though Powell's memo was not the sole influence, the Chamber and corporate activists took his advice to heart and began building a powerful array of institutions designed to shift public attitudes and beliefs over the course of years and decades. The memo influenced or inspired the creation of the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Accuracy in Academe, and other powerful organizations. Their long-term focus began paying off handsomely in the 1980s, in coordination with the Reagan Administration's "hands-off business" philosophy."

At a time of monumental capitalist regrouping and coalescing against the "dangerous rise" of self-determination, the influence of Powell's manifesto is difficult to underestimate. It provided ideological fuel to the birth of a substantial corporate lobbying industry, which produced immeasurable pro-business and anti-worker legislation for decades to come. The memo also served as a wake-up call to capitalists throughout corporate America, supplementing the formation of groups like the Business Roundtable and urging forceful actions from the US Chamber of Commerce. The results, according to Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, were undeniable:

"The organizational counterattack of business in the 1970s was swift and sweeping - a domestic version of Shock and Awe. The number of corporations with public affairs offices in Washington grew from 100 in 1968 to over 500 in 1978. In 1971, only 175 firms had registered lobbyists in Washington, but by 1982, nearly 2,500 did. The number of corporate PACs increased from under 300 in 1976 to over 1,200 by the middle of 1980. On every dimension of corporate political activity, the numbers reveal a dramatic, rapid mobilization of business resources in the mid-1970s." [6]

The real-life effects of this capitalist coup have been disastrous for most. US workers have experienced declining or stagnant wages since the 1970s. As a result, many must rely on credit (if lucky enough to qualify) even to obtain basic necessities, which has resulted in skyrocketing household debt across the board. The debt-to-disposable income ratio of American households more than doubled from 60% in 1980 to 133% in 2007. Meanwhile, any hope of saving money has disappeared. While the household "savings rate roughly doubled from 5% in 1949 to over 11% in 1982, it looks like a downhill ski slope since then," and registered in negative territory by 2006. Conversely, as designed, the rich have benefited immensely, to the point where income inequality has increased to pre-Great Depression levels . Those who orchestrated the coup (the top 1%) claimed about a quarter of all wealth during the 1980s, and now own over 40% of all wealth in the country. To put this in perspective , the bottom 90% of all Americans combined account for barely half of that, claiming 21% of all wealth.

And, perhaps most importantly, the coup helped fund the growth of a massive capitalist propaganda machine to convince the working class to support our own demise. This includes everything from a co-opted and recalibrated liberal media, a rise of right-wing talk radio, and the birth of the Fox News network - all designed to do one thing: "inform and enlighten" workers on the wonders of capitalism and American exceptionalism, the friendly nature of big business, and the "excessive" dangers of self-determination.

As Powell noted in 1971, "If American business devoted only 10% of its total annual advertising budget to this overall purpose (of marketing and selling the idea of capitalism), it would be a statesman-like expenditure." And statesman-like it has become, running interference and garnering " manufactured consent" for a capitalist coup that has been cemented over the course of four decades, six presidential administrations, a Wall Street run amok, and a massive transfer of generations (including future) of public revenue into private hands.

Notes

[1] "The Business Roundtable and American Labor," a report by J. C. Turner, General President International Union of Operating Engineers, AFL-CIO (May 1979). Accessed online at http://laborrising.com/2013/07/union-organizing-and-the-business-roundtable-and-american-labor/

[2] "The Anti-Union Game Plan," Labor Notes (July 2, 2018). Accessed online at https://labornotes.org/2018/07/anti-union-game-plan

[3] Lafer, G. (October 31, 2013) "The Legislative Attack on American Wages and Labor Standards, 2011-2012," Economic Policy Institute. Accessed online at https://www.epi.org/publication/attack-on-american-labor-standards/

[4] Gilbert, D. (2017) The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality (SAGE publications)

[5] Goldfield, M. (1989) The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States (University of Chicago Press), p. 192

[6] Hacker, J.S. & Pierson, P. (2011) Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer - And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (Simon & Schuster)

Historical Shifts in the Ideology of Work: From Artisanship to Prison Labor and Back

By Valerie Reynoso

The ideology of work has shifted through time by material changes imposed by capitalism-imperialism, an ongoing process that forms the condition of the working class and the social order that indoctrinates them. James R. Farr, Catherine W. Bishir, Karl Marx, John Ruskin, William Morris and Erin O'Connor are authors who have explored the relationships between work, history, and people. The historical shifts in the ideology of work are rooted in class struggle, in the synthesis of the thesis and antithesis of the proletariat (working class) and the bourgeoisie (capitalists), reminiscent of the former synthesis between the serf and feudal lord. Work becomes a practice of resistance when the proletariat realizes its socioeconomic value and moves toward seizing the means of production from the bourgeoisie. But before this can happen, workers must experience an ideological awakening of sorts - something that creates the realization that our constant struggle to survive under a system of wage labor is not only unnatural, but is an artificial arrangement made by a very small percentage of people who seek to make a perpetual fortune from our exploitation. In doing so, we must also recognize the various and ever-shifting forms of labor that we are systematically coerced into. Breaking from this coercion is the key to our liberation.

Lessons in Assimilation

The key concepts from Bashir's Crafting Lives: African American Artisans in New Bern, North Carolina are slavery, race, class, gender, and segregation. These concepts are engaged with the empirical experience at hand of Black artisans given that their professions were informed by their race and socioeconomic status, or was part of their oppression if they were enslaved. In the Bishir text, details are given on a free Black plasterer and brickmason named Donum Montford who was forty years old in the year 1810, a master craftsman with apprentices for children and a slaveowner who also owned real estate and was qualified to vote. Montford had lost a diamond tool with a monogrammed handle that was used to score precise lines to cut and install windowpanes as part of his trade[1]. Ownership of craft tools was central to artisan identity and following 1776, it was common for urban white craftsmen to brandish their craft tools as a symbol of their elevated socioeconomic status and to display patriotism. New Bern, the town where Montford lived, was considered to be a hub of opportunities for Black artisans and racial integration between white and Black artisans in the workplace.

In this given context, craftsmanship was being implemented to the benefit of the white supremacist social order through which upwards social mobility necessitates the subordination of the lower classes. Montford is emblematic of a Black free man who had become assimilated into the bourgeois class. He became essentially an enemy to his own people via aligning with the white bourgeoisie through usage of artisanship, ownership of private property such as real estate, and becoming a slave master himself, despite having been enslaved for approximately half of his life. The importance of craft tools to socioeconomic status of craftsmen informs Montford's bourgeois assimilation, seeing that he had a diamond-head tool monogrammed with his name, a practice that has been prized and rooted in colonialism from the US partition from Britain, despite the figures of the US revolution having been colonizers and enslavers as well. This also plays into respectability politics, since in order to fully fit Anglo-Saxon constructs of masculinity as a formerly enslaved and Black man, having a prized craft tool would make Montford seem more respectable and "manly" in the eyes of white craftsmen.

Montford's elevated socioeconomic status as a Black free man is also an instance of bootstrap theory. Bootstrap theory posits that if one simply works harder, they can achieve their goals, and an inability to achieve this goal is a product of individual failure rather than systemic oppression. This rhetoric is idealist and anti-materialist, as it implies that changing one's attitude in itself will elevate one's socioeconomic status when this is not the case under capitalism-imperialism due to racism, classism and other discriminations that make it nearly impossible to shift the status quo unless one is already categorized as a first-class citizen. Montford being a wealthier, free Black man who was also a slaveowner was the standard held for African-American craftsmen and enslaved persons during that time period; that poor and enslaved people can simply work their way out of slavery and excel to the point where they, too, can become an oppressor who maintains the capitalist-imperialist social order through their capitalist conception of work.

Bootstrap theory and justification of capitalism-imperialism is also found in the section titled "Artisan Trades in Wartime" of the Bishir reading. Bishir details that the liberated city of New Bern had provided Black artisans with profitable employment opportunities in catering to soldiers and refugees during wartime with limited competition from whites. Cooks, gardeners, butchers, drivers, housekeepers and barbers also experienced an augment in their earnings during the war. Skilled workers took advantage of every new opportunity to advance their business and increase their wealth [2]. This example Bishir provides demonstrates that the income of the Black working class was reliant on industries that imperialist wars spearheaded by the U.S. necessitated. Similar to Montford, this instance is also emblematic of bootstrap theory given that Black people were inciting themselves to accumulate more wealth by working more, which is not always realistically the case as poor people usually work without any significant increase on the socioeconomic ladder due to capitalism-imperialism.

Understanding the Layers of Proletarian Exploitation

Capitalism-imperialism produces hierarchies reliant on exploitation and submission, which disproportionately affects proletarian women and children. Moreover, Marx and Engels believed that women and children were being used as tools for more capital for the bourgeoisie. In Engels' The Origin on the Family, Private Property, and the State, he argued that the subordination of women is a product of social relations, as opposed to biological disposition, and that efforts made by men to achieve demands for control of women's labor and sexual faculties had become institutionalized in the nuclear family. Engels stated that the shift from feudalism to private ownership of land had a great impact on the status of women, given that women who do not own land, nor means of production, are enslaved and obligated to work for landowners in a system founded on private ownership [3]. Capitalism has separated private and public spheres and has provided disproportionate access of waged labor to men. The gender oppression of women is directly related to class oppression given that the institutional relationship between men and women is comparable to that of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; the former profits off of and benefits from the systemic oppression of the latter under capitalism and patriarchy.

In his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx argued that the societal position of women could be used to indicate the development of society as a whole. He stated that new social relations based on individuals seeing each other as valuable in themselves, as opposed to only worth what one individual can provide to another, would have to be formed in order for society to transcend from its capitalist form [4]. Women, especially nonwhite women, would be particularly important in this regard given that they are a marginalized group in virtually all societies. In Marx's Capital, women and children are rendered valuable under capitalism since they can be pressured and obliged to work for less - which then results in more capital gain for the upper class [5].

The condition and perception of the feminized and racialized proletariat is also informed by the science of dialectical materialism throughout history. The Marxist concepts of dialectical materialism and historical materialism may accurately describe the situation of colonized people through analyzing previous historic events that led to the present, even in a so-called post-colonial world. Dialectical materialism refers to the objective reality independent from the mind and spirit; it describes the tangible consequences of class struggle and life under a capitalist system. Historical materialism refers to the idea that all forms of social thought and institutions are a reflection of economic relations modified by class struggle. Karl Marx incorporates these ideas into his text Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In this text, Marx analyzed the development of the 1848 revolution in France through usage of historical materialism. He had written this book with the purpose of explaining how the 1848 revolution in France led to a coup headed by Louis Bonaparte in 1851.

In Brumaire, Marx states that "Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living" [6]. Today, globalization necessitates the constant expansion of markets in search of infinite profit extracted from the finite resources of the planet and its populations. Due to this, the bourgeoisie must settle everywhere and expand its empires in the name of capitalism-imperialism, and perpetually exploit low-cost labor from the underclass and the Global South in order to do so.

Historical materialism also insinuates that history is a movement of ideas and the unfolding of the relations of production. History is the expansion of the natural, which cannot exist outside of external modifications of it in order to turn it into capital. The material is always embedded in the relations of production and all relations of society are modified by class struggle. As stated by Marx in Brumaire, "History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a farce" [7]. History is a spirit that unfolds as a phenomenon, the continuous synthesis and antithesis of ideas that accumulate through time.

Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto and Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts illustrate how the worker under capitalism suffers alienated labor and exploitation from the bourgeoisie. In Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx specifies that the worker under capitalism suffers from three types of alienated labor: alienation from the product, where work is experienced as torment; alienation from our own humanity as we produce blindly, not in accordance with ourr truly human powers; and alienation from other people, where relation of exchange replaces satisfaction of mutual need. Marx showed how the economics of the bourgeoisie are derived from the presence of alienation and that people reinforce their own structures of oppression. Therefore, we must have an urge to move beyond said condition and take control of our destiny in order to eradicate the bourgeoisie from power [8]; this is the moment when work is realized as a practice of resistance.

Domination attains submission from its subjects not only through oppression, but it also requires a resistance, a reaction, signifying that the domination is undesired and exploitative in the eyes of the marginalized. Classism is organized by violence under capitalism, which James R. Farr details in his book Artisans in Europe, 1300-1914. In this text, he explains that "Violence and conflict often functioned as means to make inclusion and exclusion in these groups clear" [9]. Farr emphasizes that violence is used to keep the workers in submission and deter them from disobedience. The motif of worker mistreatment is emblematic of how workers, especially workers of oppressed backgrounds, are rendered mediums for ongoing exploitation; hence, dehumanized under a capitalist-imperialist system that does not value our lives. This deterrence enforces proletarian support for the capitalist social order that oppresses us and prevents us from transforming our work into a form of resistance.

This relates to the points made by William Morris and John Ruskin in the Preface to The Nature of Gothic, where Morris states "For the lesson which Ruskin here teaches us is that art is the expression of man's pleasure in labour; that it is possible for man to rejoice in his work, for, strange as it may seem to us to-day, there have been times when he did rejoice in it" [10]. The pleasure of the proletariat in their labor is desensitized under capitalism, which turns labor into an experience of torment, as Marx claimed, driven by the sole purpose of producing more capital for the bourgeoisie to extract. As stated by Erin O'Connor in her yet to be published "Breathing Work: Time, Space and The Vessel in Glassblowing," "The way we understand "body" is via the objective perspective of the sciences…If accepted as the first and most important site of the "education" of the individual, the body became much more than a sum of its natural functions; it was a set of relations - habits, gestures, expressions, etc. - a system of meaning, sculpted by society" [11]. As the body of a worker goes beyond its biological component, it is informed by social constructs that are artificially implemented by capitalist society. The labor alienation of the worker reduces us to a vessel through which the upper class obtains its profit. Despite this, as Marx said, the proletariat can move beyond capitalist exploitation and seize the means of production, which necessitates an expansion of awareness that goes beyond individualism and the single existence of a worker.

Modern Prison Labor

An example of labor and craft movement that directly ties to the readings by Marx and Farr is contemporary studio craft in US prisons. Prison labor is argued to be a form of modern slavery due to the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery with the exception of usage as a punishment for a crime. This loophole has been implemented within the US prison industrial complex, particularly in regards to furniture artistry. Two popular arguments made about prison labor is that it is a way for incarcerated people to learn valuable skills to enable them to contribute to society once released, or that it is a means to exploit incarcerated people. Some prisoners in the states of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Texas are not paid at all for their labor in government-managed facilities. In addition to this, the national average for the lowest wage incarcerated people receive for prison labor is 14 cents per hour [12].

Prison labor and craft is an important factor in the US economy, yet incarcerated people are typically paid either minimum wage or well below it. Prison labor has no real substance in granting incarcerated people useful skills but is only another force of opposition. Many of the incarcerated people have claimed that the work has no value for them besides the possibility of a shorter sentence. Even to those prisoners who are actually learning useful skills, the reintegration process can be intimidating. Some states uphold policies that bar ex-convicts from obtaining licenses for skills they learned in prison. For instance, there was a New York State prisoner who applied for a barber's license but was denied because "owing to state law, La Cloche could only practice his trade … if he remained behind bars" [13]. The skills La Cloche learned had been confined by a policy that is practiced by several US states, which renders skills gained from prison labor useless outside of prison. This undermines the presumption that prison labor is valuable to the incarcerated. On the other hand, prison labor is indeed valuable to capitalist institutions, seeing that "Virginia Code § 53.1-47… stipulates that all 'departments, institutions, and agencies of the Commonwealth' supported by the state treasury must purchase 'articles and services produced or manufactured by persons confined in state correctional facilities'" [14]. Prison labor can only do this because it exploits its incarcerated people. In addition to this, incarcerated people make a low wage in the Commonwealth of Virginia by earning $0.55 to $0.80 an hour [15].

Farr argues that work was often tied to moral systems of authority. Likewise, it has also been argued that prison labor and craft often gain psychological authority over incarcerated people - as Marx also contests, when he details that labor alienation of the worker reduces them to a vessel for the bourgeoisie to exploit. Farr believes that while labor relations differ depending on the type of workplace, control of the labor market emerged as the most issue dividing masters and journeymen [16]. Similarly, prisons tend to deduct costs of living from wages so that many of their incarcerated people earn cents per hour.

The impact of prison labor and craft on social change is that conviction results in social death for formerly incarcerated people: "To be sentenced to prison is to be sentenced to social death. Social death is a permanent condition. While many people integrate themselves back into the society after imprisonment, they often testify that they permanently bear a social mark, a stigma" [17]. This ensures a life filled with detriment for incarcerated people, especially those who are non-white. In August 2018, incarcerated people across the US initiated strikes to protest poor conditions and exploitative labor practices that many of them considered to be "modern slavery". According to the NAACP, over 2.2 million people are incarcerated in the US, which is an increase of 340% compared to 1980 [18]. With the rise of incarceration, prison violence, sexual violence and other issues have also increased. Protesters addressed these issues in their demands. Additionally, incarcerated labor is used to manufacture furniture and other assets with an hourly wage of between 33 cents and $1.41, provided by the National Correctional Industries Association (NCIA) [19].

Private prisons are a billion-dollar industry, which exploit prisoners who are predominantly non-white for profit. These prisons are run by private companies and have been on the rise since the mid-1980s, especially following the crack epidemic during the Reagan administration. Over half of US states as of 2017 depend on for-profit prisons in which approximately 90,000 inmates are held each year [20]. Incarcerated people are paid slave wages: "Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labor, and estranged labor is the direct cause of private property. The downfall of the one must therefore involve the downfall of the other" [21]. Labor alienation and modern prison slavery, the productivity of the incarcerated craftsmen, is solely based on accumulating capital for the bourgeoisie.

Artisanship as Subversiveness

Despite the modern prison scenario, craft and other forms of artisanship can represent radical forms of labor and engines of social movement because, historically, they have been initiated in direct resistance to the status quo imposed by capitalist society. An instance of this is the usage of guilds in Medieval Europe. Guilds formed a central component in a theoretical system that arose in the late Middle Ages which historians label corporatism. Corporatist theory of the 14th Century intertwined with the demographic and economic forces to solidify a political and juridical system that would function until the 19th Century. Corporatism was informed significantly by confraternity associations, which was also the means through which craft guilds were established. The confraternities included work activity as their association developed despite the social security, morals, political identity and sense of place being the most paramount aspects provided to its members [22].

Jurists from the 12th and 13th Centuries alluded guilds to the collegium of the late Roman Law and enabled constituted authority to form and regulate this. As a result, the jurists had imposed a Roman legacy of hierarchical political authority onto the guild organization. Despite this, guildsmen continued to adhere to their theoretical legacy of autonomy stemming from the Germanic custom of sworn, voluntary association and self-governance. Although medieval guilds continued to serve their main purpose as mutual aid societies, their connotation to governance and regulation of economic aspects also grew [23]. Johannes Althusius of Emden, author of the "Systematic Analysis of Politics" which was first published in 1603, was a German Calvinist who incorporated economic exchange into the moral foundation of guild values. He elaborated that exchange is rooted in mutual need and thus, reciprocity is vital to exchange [24]. Following France and Prussia, Germany was most associated with corporatism with its "hometowns" populated by less than 10,000 citizens [25].

Leather shoe cups are usually associated with craft guilds in which members would pass the cup in a circle to drink in allegiance to the guild. Jobs such as shoemaking were associated with men, hence the usage of shoe cups as a symbol of allegiance to the guild is akin to a reinforcement of a rite of passage into this representation of proletarian German brotherhood. This also interrogates authority in light of the Roman legacy of hierarchical political authority onto the guild organization, which the guildsmen, and particularly the German ones, would reject by continuing to adhere to their Germanic custom of sworn, voluntary association and self-governance.

German guilds that used leather cups also represented self-authority, self-determination, and autonomy in the face of growing Roman influence and the incorporation of guilds into societal hierarchies and classism. The act of sharing the drink is representative of the main function of guilds as a structure that upholds mutual aid. It was marked by Calvinist influence inspired by the teachings of Emden, since the exchange of the leather shoe cup among the guildsmen is emblematic of reciprocity.

In the Middle Ages, European societies were marked by the idea that life was a struggle over classification, over accession to or preservation of a hierarchical status, especially given the growing influence of Roman and Calvinist thought on their societies. The hierarchical status of artists and craftsmen was represented by their position through a guild, which represented their securing of communal living as well as formed their social identity in relation to their place in the social order [26]. The leather cup represented the guildsmen's collective identity as craftsmen and celebration of their role despite their pending degradation in Medieval society, where they were eventually doomed by the classist hierarchy.

Ultimately, the historical shifts and evolution of work is informed by class struggle and the historical-materialist process. Work becomes a practice of resistance in the moment when the proletariat realizes they are alienated from their labor and begin to go against the capitalist social order. Craft and artisanship, especially those that operate on the fringes or in the so-called underground market, are radical forms of labor and initiate social change because they reject the parameters of systemic exploitation set up by the capitalist system. Such work can serve as both a catalyst and a supplemental force of class consciousness.

Notes

[1] Catherine W. Bishir, Crafting Lives: African American Artisans in New Bern, North Carolina, 1770-1900 . University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Friedrich Engels, The Origin on the Family, Private Property, and the State ( Hottingen-Zurich: 1884).

[4] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Paris: 1844).

[5] Karl Marx, Das Kapital (Verlag Von Otto Meisner, 1867).

[6] Karl Marx, "Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," Die Revolution, No. 1 (1852).

[7] Ibid.

[8] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Paris: 1844).

[9] James R. Farr, Artisans in Europe, 1300-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

[10] William Morris, "Preface to The Nature of the Gothic by John Ruskin" (1892).

[11] Erin O'Connor, "Breathing Work: Time, Space and The Vessel in Glassblowing" (2017), pp. 5.

[12] Daniel Moritz-Rabson, "Prison Slavery: Inmates are Paid Cents While Manufacturing Products Sold to Government," Newsweek, August 28, 2018.

[13] David R. Jones, "Ex-Prisoners and Jobs," GothamGazette, May 24, 2006.

[14] Katherine Smith, "Smith: Sleeping on Exploitative Prison Labor," The Cavalier Daily, April 19th, 2018.

[15] Ibid.

[16] James R. Farr, Artisans in Europe, 1300-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

[17] Joshua M. Price, "Prison and Social Death," Critical Issues in Crime and Society. Rutgers University Press (2015).

[18] Emily Moon, "Modern Slavery: The Labor History Behind the New Nationwide Prison Strike," Pacific Standard, August 22 nd, 2018.

[19] Daniel Moritz-Rabson, "Prison Slavery: Inmates are Paid Cents While Manufacturing Products Sold to Government," Newsweek, August 28, 2018.

[20] Valerie Reynoso, "The Politics of Mass Incarceration," Counterpunch, October 12, 2017.

[21] Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Paris: 1844).

[22] James R. Farr, Artisans in Europe, 1300-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 20.

[23] Ibid. pp. 20.

[24] Ibid, pp. 24.

[25] Ibid. pp. 31.

[26] Ibid. pp. 22.