“Trump’s America” IS America

It's important for us to understand that "Trump’s America" IS America. There is no differentiating. As a matter of fact, based on the country's history, Trump is about as "American" as it gets - greedy, racist, classist, misogynistic, corrupt, dominating, controlling, sadistic, elitist.

America is a settler-colonial nation that was built on the backs of Native genocide and African enslavement, continuing into modern times through intricate systems of institutional white supremacy. The founders of this country were elitists and aristocrats who used their wealth to dominate others while arranging a system of immense privilege for those like them. It is a capitalist country that has been built from the toil of the working majority for centuries - masses of people who have received very little (and continue to receive very little) in return. It is an imperialist country that has bombed, colonized, and obstructed democratic movements throughout the global south and middle east for over a century. It is a misogynistic country that waited 150 years before allowing women to vote, confined women to second-class status after, and continues to breed patriarchal values that are dangerous to working women in everyday life.

"Trump's America" IS America.

Trump has continued to oversee the corporate coup started under Reagan and carried forward under the Bushs, Clinton, and Obama - a coup that is merely an inevitable late stage of capitalism, whereas wealth and power have been concentrated into a fusion of corporate governance and creeping fascism.

Trump has continued America's illegal and immoral wars abroad, same as his predecessors.

Trump has continued "starving the beast," following the neoliberal blueprint of the last 40 years by siphoning public funds into private hands.

Trump has continued the mass deportation policies implemented under Obama.

Trump has continued the attack on civil liberties started under W. Bush in the wake of 9/11.

Trump, in his role as president, carries the torch of draconian, racist, classist criminal justice policies created under Reagan.

Trump carries the torch of mass incarceration and austerity policies created under Clinton.

Trump has continued serving Wall St. and his pals/donors in the profit industries, like all of his modern predecessors.

Trump, like all presidents before, SERVES CAPITAL - not people.

He may not be the polished statesman that we've become accustomed to - those who exhibit "stability" and "civility" while acting as the figureheads of systemic brutality - but make no mistake: Trump is as American as it gets. However, "America" is largely a myth in itself, something fed to the masses from above by the wealthy and powerful few who have always demanded our loyalty despite their everyday crimes against us and our class counterparts the world over. Most Americans are despised by those who run the country from their pedestals, those who benefit from its brutality, those who gouge us at every turn, those protected by an ever-thinning, reactionary, "middle-class" buffer.

To rid ourselves of Trump and all he represents, we must rid ourselves of "America" as we know it - the myth, the systems it facilitates (capitalism/imperialism, colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy), and all of the severity that comes with it. This is a hard truth to accept, especially since it goes against everything we have been conditioned to believe. But it is a truth that must be understood and dealt with if we are to ever win a just world.

All power to the people.

A Mad World: Capitalism and the Rise of Mental Illness

By Rod Tweedy

Originally published at Red Pepper.

Mental illness is now recognised as one of the biggest causes of individual distress and misery in our societies and cities, comparable to poverty and unemployment. One in four adults in the UK today has been diagnosed with a mental illness, and four million people take antidepressants every year. ‘What greater indictment of a system could there be,’ George Monbiot has asked, ‘than an epidemic of mental illness?’

The shocking extent of this ‘epidemic’ is made all the more disturbing by the knowledge that so much of it is preventable. This is due to the significant correlation between social and environmental conditions and the prevalence of mental disorders. Richard Bentall, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Liverpool, and Peter Kinderman, president of the British Psychological Society, have written compellingly about this connection in recent years, drawing powerful attention to ‘the social determinants of our psychological wellbeing’. ‘The evidence is overwhelming,’ notes Kinderman, ‘it’s not just that there exist social determinants, they are overwhelmingly important.’

A sick society

Experiences of social isolation, inequality, feelings of alienation and dissociation, and even the basic assumptions and ideology of materialism and neoliberalism itself are seen today to be significant drivers – reflected in the titles of a number of recent articles and talks on this subject, such as those of consultant psychotherapist David Morgan’s groundbreaking Frontier Psychoanalyst podcasts, which have included discussions on whether ‘Neoliberalism is dangerous for your mental health’, and ‘Is neoliberalism making us sick?’

Clinical psychologist and psychotherapist Jay Watts observes in the Guardian that ‘psychological and social factors are at least as significant and, for many, the main cause of suffering. Poverty, relative inequality, being subject to racism, sexism, displacement and a competitive culture all increase the likelihood of mental suffering. Governments and pharmaceutical companies are not as interested in these results, throwing funding at studies looking at genetics and physical biomarkers as opposed to the environmental causes of distress. Similarly, there is little political will to combine increasing mental distress with structural inequalities, though the association is robust and many professionals think this would be the best way to tackle the current mental health epidemic’.

There are clearly very powerful and entrenched interests and agendas here, which consciously or unconsciously act to conceal or try to deny this relationship, and which also makes the recent willingness amongst so many psychoanalysts and therapists to embrace this wider context so exciting and moving.

Commentators often talk about society, social context, group thinking, and environmental determinants in connection with mental distress and disorders, but we can I think actually be a bit more precise about what aspect of society is mainly driving it, is mainly responsible for it. And in this context it’s probably time we talk about the c word – capitalism.

Many of the contemporary forms of illness and individual distress that we treat and engage with certainly seem to be correlated with and amplified by the processes and byproducts of capitalism. In fact, you might say that capitalism is in many respects a mental illness generating system – and if we are serious about tackling not only the effects of mental distress and illness, but also their causes and origins, we need to look more closely, more precisely, and more analytically at the nature of the political and economic womb out of which they emerge, and how psychology is fundamentally interwoven with every aspect of it.

Ubiquitous neurosis

Perhaps one of the most obvious examples of this intimate connection between capitalism and mental distress is the prevalence of neurosis. As Joel Kovel, a former psychiatrist and professor of political science, notes: ‘A most striking feature of neurosis within capitalism is its ubiquity.’ In his classic essay ‘Therapy in late capitalism’ (reprinted in The Political Self), Kovel refers to the ‘colossal burden of neurotic misery in the population, a weight that continually and palpably betrays the capitalist ideology, which maintains that commodity civilization promotes human happiness’:

‘If, given all this rationalization, comfort, fun and choice, people are still wretched, unable to love, believe or feel some integrity to their lives, they might also begin to draw the conclusion that something was seriously wrong with their social order.’

There’s also been some fascinating work done on this more recently by Eli Zaretsky (Political Freud), and Bruce Cohen (author of Psychiatric Hegemony), who have both written on the relations between the family, sexuality, and capitalism in the generation of neuroses.

It is significant, for example, that one of the most prominent features of the psychological landscape that Freud encountered in late nineteenth-century Vienna were the neuroses – which, as Kovel notes, Freud saw as being entirely continuous with ‘normal’ development in modern societies – with much of these, he adds, being rooted in our modern experience of alienation. ‘Neurosis,’ Kovel says, ‘is the self-alienation of a subject who has been readied for freedom but runs afoul of personal history.’

It was of course Marx who was the great analyst of alienation, showing how capitalist economics generates alienation as part of its very fabric or structure – showing how, for instance, alienation gets ‘lost’ or ‘trapped’, embodied, in products, commodities – from the obvious examples (such as Nikes made in sweatshops, and sweatshops embodied in Nikes) – to a wider and much more pervasive sense that the whole system of production and creation is somehow alienating.

As Pavon Cuellar remarks, ‘Marx was the first to realise that this alienation actually gets contained and incarnated in things – in “commodities”‘ (Marxism and Psychoanalysis). These ‘fetishised’ commodities, he adds, seem to retain and promise to return, when consumed, the subjective-social part lost by those alienated while producing them: ‘the alienated have lost what they imagine [or hope] to find in what is fetishised.’

This understanding of alienation is really the core issue for Marx. People probably know him today for his theories of capital – how issues of exploitation, profit, and control continually characterise and resurface in capitalism – but for me the key concern of Marx, and one that is constantly neglected, or misunderstood, is his view on the centrality and importance of human creativity and productivity – man’s ‘colossal productive power’ as he calls it – exactly as it was in fact for William Blake, slightly earlier in the century.

Marx refers to this extraordinary world-transformative energy and agency as our ‘active species-life’, our ‘species-being’ – our ‘physical and spiritual energies’. But these immense creative energies and transformative capacities are, he notes, under the present system, immediately taken from us and converted into something alien, objective, enslaving, fetishised.

Restructuring desire

The image he evokes is of mothers giving birth – another form of labour perhaps – with the baby immediately being taken away and converted into something alien, something doll-like — a commodity. He considers what effect that must have on the mother’s spirit. This, for Marx, is the source of the alienation and unease, the sort of profound dislocation of the human spirit that characterises industrial capitalism. And as Pavon Cuellar shows, we can’t buy our way out of this alienation – by producing more toys, more dolls – because that’s where the alienation occurs, and is embodied and generated.

Indeed, consumerism and materialism are themselves widely recognised today as key drivers of a whole raft of mental health problems, from addiction to depression. As George Monbiot notes, ‘Buying more stuff is associated with depression, anxiety and broken relationships. It is socially destructive and self-destructive’. Psychoanalytic psychotherapist Sue Gerhardt has written very compellingly on this association, suggesting that in modern societies we often ‘confuse material well-being with psychological well-being’. In her book The Selfish Society she shows how successfully and relentlessly consumer capitalism reshapes our brains and reworks our nervous systems in its own image. For ‘we would miss much of what capitalism is about,’ she notes, ‘if we overlook its role in restructuring and marketing desire and impulse themselves.’

Another key aspect of capitalism and its impact on mental illness we could talk about of course is inequality. Capitalism is as much an inequality-generating system as it is a mental illness producing system. As a Royal College of Psychiatrists report noted: ‘Inequality is a major determinant of mental illness: the greater the level of inequality, the worse the health outcomes. Children from the poorest households have a three-fold greater risk of mental ill health than children from the richest households. Mental illness is consistently associated with deprivation, low income, unemployment, poor education, poorer physical health and increased health-risk behaviour.’

Some commentators have even suggested that capitalism itself, as a way of being or way of thinking about the world, might be seen as a rather ‘psychopathic’ or pathological system. There are certainly some striking correspondences between modern financial and corporate systems and individuals diagnosed with clinical psychopathy, as a number of analysts have noticed.

Robert Hare for instance, one of the world’s leading authorities into psychopathy and the originator of the widely accepted ‘Hare Checklist’ used to test for psychopathy, remarked to Jon Ronson: ‘I shouldn’t have done my research just in prisons. I should have spent some time inside the Stock Exchange as well.’ ‘But surely stock-market psychopaths can’t be as bad as serial-killer psychopaths?’ the interviewer asks. ‘”Serial killers ruin families,” shrugged Bob. “Corporate and political … psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.”‘

Pathological institutions

These traits, as Joel Bakan brilliantly suggested in his book The Corporation, are encrypted into the very fabric of modern corporations – part of its basic DNA and modus operandi. ‘The corporation’s legally defined mandate,’ he notes, ‘is to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, its own self-interest, regardless of the often harmful consequences it might cause to others.’ By its own legal definition, therefore, the corporation is ‘a pathological institution’, and Bakan helpfully lists the diagnostic features of its default pathology (lack of empathy, pursuit of self-interest, grandiosity, shallow affect, aggression, social indifference) to show what a reliably disturbed patient the corporation is.

Why should all of these contemporary social and economic practices and processes generate so much illness, so many disorders? To answer this I think we need to look back at the wider Enlightenment project, and the psychological models of human nature out of which they emerged. Modern capitalism grew out of seventeenth century concepts of man as some sort of disconnected, discontinuous, disengaged self – one driven by competition and a narrow, ‘rational’ self-interest – the concept of homo economicus that drove and underwrote much of the whole Enlightenment project, including its economic models. As Iain McGilchrist notes, ‘Capitalism and consumerism, ways of conceiving human relationships based on little more than utility, greed, and competition, came to supplant those based on felt connection and cultural continuity.’

We now know how mistaken, and destructive, this model of the self is. Recent neuroscientific research into the ‘social brain’, together with exciting developments in modern attachment theory, developmental psychology, and interpersonal neurobiology, are significantly revising, and upgrading, this rather quaint, old-fashioned view of the isolated, ‘rational’ individual – and also revealing a far richer and more sophisticated understanding of human development and identity, through increased knowledge of ‘right hemisphere’ intersubjectivity, unconscious processes, group behaviour, the role of empathy and mentalisation in brain development, and the significance of context and socialisation in emotional and cognitive development.

As neuroscientist David Eagleman observes, the human brain itself relies on other brains for its very existence and growth—the concept of ‘me’, he notes, is dependent on the reality of ‘we’:

We are a single vast superorganism, a neural network embedded in a far larger web of neural networks. Our brains are so fundamentally wired to interact that it’s not even clear where each of us begins and ends. Who you are has everything to do with who we are. There’s no avoiding the truth that’s etched into our neural circuitry: we need each other.

Dependency is therefore built into the fabric of who we are as social and biological beings, hardwired into our mainframe: it is ‘how love becomes flesh’, in Louis Cozolino’s striking phrase. ‘There are no single brains,’ Cozolino observes, echoing Winnicott, ‘brains only exist within networks of other brains.’ Some people have termed this new neurological and scientific understanding of the deep patterns of interdependency, mutual cooperation, and the social brain ‘neuro-Marxism’ because of the implications involved.

Capitalism is, it seems, rooted in a fundamentally flawed, naive, and old-fashioned seventeenth-century model of who we are – it tries to make us think that we’re isolated, autonomous, disengaged, competitive, decontextualised – an ultimately rather ruthless and dissociated entity. The harm that this view of the self has done to us, and our children, is incalculable.

Many people believe, and are encouraged to believe, that these problems and disorders – psychosis, schizophrenia, anxiety, depression, self-harm – these symptoms of a ‘sick world’ (to use James Hillman’s terrific description) are theirs, rather than the world’s. ‘But what if your emotional problems weren’t merely your own?’, asks Tom Syverson. ‘What if they were our problems? What if the real problem is that we’re living in wrong society? Perhaps Adorno was correct when he said, “wrong life cannot be lived rightly”.’

The root of this ‘living wrongly’ seems to be because we live in a social and economic system at odds with both our psychology and our neurology, with who we are as social beings. As I suggest in my book, we need to realise that our inner and outer worlds constantly and profoundly interact and shape each other, and that therefore rather than separating our understanding of economic and social practices from our understanding of psychology and human development, we need to bring them together, to align them. And for this to happen, we need a new dialogue between the political and personal worlds, a new integrated model for mental health, and a new politics.

Rod Tweedy is an author and editor of Karnac Books, a leading independent publisher of books on mental health and therapy. His edited collection, The Political Self: Understanding the Social Context for Mental Illness, is published by Karnac.

A Tale of Two Cities: The Struggle to Build Generational Wealth Within Baltimore's Black Community

By Valecia Hanna

According to Michael Harriot, from as early as the 1910s minorities have been faced with the challenge of experiencing the downside of segregated housing (2019). Baltimore, one of the most historically black cities, was plagued by this institutionalized inequity which served as one of the main reasons of continued disadvantages for black residents. Redlining was essentially developed by the Home Owner’s Loan Corporations (HOLC) during the Great Depression as a solution to relieve America from its economic drought (Harriot 2019). However, as the government attempted to reconstruct the economy, redlining created disproportionate housing opportunities between whites and minorities. This practice resulted in the biased behaviors by realtors, who instead of concentrating on assessing the value of one’s property, selected to focus their attention on the race of the population of a given area.

Gentrification, which is usually sold as a “beacon of hope,” is now mirroring patterns of segregated housing that blacks thought they had overcome decades ago. As new developments begin to occupy low-income neighborhoods, black renters are not only being displaced by whites, but so are black homeowners. Homeowners are seeing the cultural and historic values of their neighborhood changing, leading to the feeling of being alienated from one’s own home and community. As a result, black homeowners in Baltimore are now searching for new ways to protect their home values in the midst of gentrification.

Shedding light on the systemic racism in housing is critical in the discussion of homeownership disadvantages experienced by blacks. Property values, both historically and currently, are calculated based on the concentration of blacks and whites in a geographical area, rather than the quality of the structure itself. Danyelle Solomon concluded in his 2019 study that the disproportionate rate of property values between blacks and whites is so severe that if the pattern continues the average black family would need over 200 years to match their white counterparts’ value of wealth. These findings are not surprising in light of the decades-long practice of redlining and other discriminatory practices.

In comparing two Baltimore neighborhoods, the relationship between property value and race is evident and shows that blacks are still haunted by the effects of redlining. According to the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance (2017), the Druid Hill area, which is predominantly black, has home values averaging around $127,000, whereas Bolton Hill, adjacent to Druid Hill and predominantly white, has homes averaging at $270,000. Homes in each neighborhood are similar in features, size, and structure; however, presumably, Druid Hill’s racial identity makes it disproportionately less valued. Over time, as values stay low, so too does the potential equity, which pales in comparison to homes in the white Bolton Hill neighborhood. These circumstances are barriers for blacks to move upward in their socioeconomic status and to establish generational wealth for those behind them. And as new development projects begin to flood black neighborhoods, the wealth gap between blacks and whites will remain disproportionate.

Some black homeowners recognize the inequality and are finding ways to beat the system. One unconventional trend that recently developed is anticipating new developments in the community for the sole purpose of increased property value to generate a profit from their home. Longtime resident of Druid Hill, Afrikiia Robertson, reflects on her family’s experience of living in a gentrified area: “I think with the influx of gentrification activities, it has made my family and others in my neighborhood hopeful that with the influx of white residents, [We don’t have a lot, but we have enough], they would help to raise the property value.’

Most news stories about gentrification focus on the impact, ignoring the factors that lead some Black homeowners to sell their homes. “I think my mom’s hope is that she will be able to see a return on a generational investment.” Robertson said, as she describes the tough decision her family plans to make. However, if more black homeowners follow this trend, black neighborhoods will lose both their cultural value and social importance. Unfortunately, the selling of homes provides greater opportunities to some who want to improve their social and economic situation at the expense of something perhaps even more valuable - history.

In city after city, the effects of redlining, and now gentrification, steadily perpetuates racial and ethnic inequality in homeownership. These practices, along with other social factors, devalues the cultural and historical importance of black spaces in major metropolitan areas. This issue is not deemed as a priority because the people impacted often have few options, little influence, and do not realize the extremity of this issue, which is the impact it has on black generational wealth. It can also be that the presence of inequality within neighborhoods limits the opportunity for minorities to have the platform for their voice to be heard. Nevertheless, this issue should be at the forefront of Baltimore’s efforts to defeat institutionalized racism.

Works Cited

Harriot, Michael. 2019. “Redlining: The Origin Story of Institutional Racism.” The Root, 25        April 2019.

Solomon, Danyelle, et al. “Systemic Inequality: Displacement, Exclusion, and       Segregation.” Center for American Progress, 7 Aug. 2019.

Should the Community Invest More Money into North Baltimore's Waverly Village?

By Melanie Hardy

Waverly is one of the coolest, affordable, up-and-coming neighborhoods in North Baltimore. It is home to the year-round 32nd Street Farmers Market, the YMCA, and former home of the infamous Memorial Stadium. For many Baltimoreans and visitors, Memorial Stadium served as the playing field for the Baltimore Colts, Baltimore Ravens (who made their debut in 1996), and Baltimore Orioles. Upon closing in 1997, the economic impact can still be seen and felt in the community, especially from the intersections of Greenmount and 25th Street to Greenmount and 39th.

For starters, Greenmount Avenue is nothing like it once was. In 1940, Greenmount earned recognition from the Baltimore Chamber of Commerce for being one of the most efficiently operated and productive residential shopping districts in the United States. Waverly’s economic prosperity continued until 1997, when Memorial Stadium closed, changing the edifice of Greenmount Avenue. Today, Greenmount, like other parts of the Waverly community, are crime-ridden with reports of home invasions, car thefts, and robberies happening quite frequently.

In 1982, social scientists George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson created the Broken Windows Theory, explaining why some areas have high rates of crime. This ecological explanation of crime asserts that visible signs of crime in urban areas lead to further crime. They used the analogy “broken windows” to explain that neighborhoods with broken windows would attract more crime because of their unkempt appearance. Simply stating, broken windows that are not repaired increase the likelihood for future vandalism or perhaps even more deviant behaviors.

Although this theory is commonly used in the field of criminology, it can be used to make the argument that more money should be invested into Waverly. This neighborhood already has indicators of the signs of decay described by Kelling and Wilson. I recently took a tour of Waverly to see the community for myself.  Using Waverly Elementary Middle School as a reference point, I found an abandoned home two blocks down from the school. The old Waverly Elementary School sits boarded up across the street of the new school. I drove a couple blocks down the street and ended up at Greenmount Avenue - a street filled with abandoned store fronts, graffiti, and vacant homes, and by far the most noticeable display of “broken windows” in the community. Just four streets over from Greenmount and 32nd Street (in Charles Village) is Saint Paul Street, where a commercial strip of stores such as Chipotle, CVS, and Honeygrow can be found.  

Greenmount Avenue has the potential to look like the rows of shops that line St. Paul Street. Despite signs of decay, Waverly is a beautiful community that is home to many historic Victorian style homes and cottages. Some of the scenery in the community is breathtaking. Residents of Waverly care deeply about their neighborhood and want all areas of the community to be aesthetically pleasing.

Community investing has been a source of regeneration for many urban neighborhoods in the United States. Community investing is a way to use investments to create resources and opportunities for disadvantaged people who are underserved by traditional financial institutions. Currently, community investing has been a way to bring better economic opportunities to Chicago neighborhoods like Pullman, Bronzeville, and Englewood, thanks to Chicago Neighborhood Initiatives (CNI). CNI is an organization that is dedicated to coordinating resources, economic development, and neighborhood revitalization efforts in Chicago’s low-to-moderate income neighborhoods. If community investing can work in neighborhoods like these, it could be successful in a neighborhood like Waverly.

To reduce current signs of decay, the Waverly community could start their own Community Investment Fund (CIF). A CIF can help to empower the community by allowing community members (of any economic class) to invest in a community fund which in turn invests in revitalization projects for the community. This is already being done in a larger cities like Chicago, so it could work not only in Waverly, but also in other neighborhoods experiencing similar decay throughout Baltimore. The abandoned homes in Waverly deserve to be renovated and occupied. The old Waverly Elementary School deserves to be turned into a community center. The residents of Waverly deserve to have a neighborhood that reflects how much they care about their homes and their community. Waverly deserves to be space with no “broken windows.”

An Urban Ethnographic Analysis of Baltimore's Lexington Market

By Ahmed Almousa

There is a wealth of sociological research conducted on the behavior and interactions of individuals in public spaces. Areas where persons of different social groups come together are excellent sources for urban sociological analysis, because the interactions within such systems are inherently unique, especially within an urban environment. This has been demonstrated by the works of sociologists Elijah Anderson, Louis Wirth, and Georg Simmel. Essential in understanding the importance of human interaction and space, the theoretical framework of symbolic interaction serves as the basis for urban ethnographers. In Urbanism as a Way of Life, Wirth (1938) states, "the larger the number of persons in a state of interaction with one another, the lower is the level of communication and the greater is the tendency for communication to proceed on an elementary level, i.e., on the basis of those things which are assumed to be common or to be of interest to all (p. 23-24)." Here Wirth merges symbolic interactionism and ethnography in discussing the dynamic interactions displayed when subjects in a public space adhere to a commonly defined social situation.

The best type of public space that captures both the interactions and patterns of subjects in socially unique ways is the urban market. These are "…highly diverse settings in which all types of people come together to shop (Anderson, 2012, p. 16)". In Anderson's The Cosmopolitan Canopy, he describes the particular attitude of general urban dwellers as well as market shoppers as the following: "…people's 'blasé' orientation as they traversed the urban spaces with an impersonal bearing that suggested an attitude of indifference (p. 14)." This characterization of urban dwellers itself is not only unique to urban dwellers, but also to those who visit markets as the public space emits its own rules of behavior and practices.

Lexington Market is historic for both Baltimore City and the United States. As the longest-running market in America, Lexington Market is as old as the nation itself. Founded in 1782 at the site where it stands today, it was named after the historic Battle of Lexington. Today, the Market still has the same address, but has expanded to include approximately 120 vendors. The Market attracts a diverse group of people – racially, socially, and geographically. Food is the major centerpiece of Lexington Market, and the smell is apparent from the outset.  As Anderson (2012) states, “when diverse people are eating one another's food, … a social good is performed for those observing. As people become intimate through such shared experiences, certain barriers are prone to be broken" (p. 17). Therefore, Lexington Market produces a unique experience for those who visit through various types of inter-cultural interaction inherent to Charm City.

City markets carry a plethora of cultural wealth within themselves. Diversity comes about in the form of foreign foods, interactions between persons of heterogeneous cultures, and the commingling of ideas. In order to understand this unique social dynamic found in Lexington Market, ethnography is a special methodological tool used to capture this phenomenon. Public markets allow for robust social interactions to occur because they are simultaneously public and intimate thus adding rich humanizing experiences.

Lexington Market lies in the heart of Baltimore's eclectic and vibrant Downtown area. Upon entering you are greeted by a waft of smells and hectic foot traffic that only reaffirms that you are in the heart of the city. Employing the ethnographic method one is able to decipher and describe the many overlapping themes, symbols, objects, and interactions that otherwise seem chaotic in a place as lively and bustling as Lexington Market. The advantage of using this method of analysis depends solely not on observations, but also the contextualizing of information in relation to space and behaviors. This is further developed though conversations, thus adding a robust explanation and understanding about human activities. From my own observations at Lexington Market, I witnessed colloquial forms of expressions that made me wonder if this was unique to Baltimore City.    

My conversation with the owner and vendor of a vegetable stand added another layer of analysis to my informal ethnography. The vendor, a middle-aged African-American male who was busy dealing with customers, saw and gave me the expression that he would help me after finishing up with the customer. After brief introductions and small talk, we both relaxed a bit, making the conversation about his experiences vending at the Market effortless. I asked him several questions ranging from his customer experiences to the state and future of Lexington Market.

“For the Market as a whole, about 90 percent of the customers were locals from Baltimore,” the vendor said “with the remaining 10 percent being foreign tourists visiting.” This highlighted one of two things: the Market is not well publicized or the Market has a negative reputation which prompted me to ask about safety concerns. The vendor expressed that the market was overall a very safe space at all times, and that several rules were implemented such as, “…a 30-minute time limit imposed on all shoppers,” according to the vendor. Although, not heavily practiced by vendors, one can see how this rule could be used to keep out unwanted foot traffic. Although Anderson’s Cosmopolitan Canopy asserts that public spaces like the market can offer refuge from the everyday hassles of outside and bring different social classes together, this rule encourages the opposite thus producing a new situational social norm.

Boundaries that are normally strictly respected and adhered to anywhere else in Baltimore, Lexington is far less rigid to shoppers and vendors occupying the Market space. The Lexington Market provides an excellent source for urban sociological analysis because it is a public space located within the socially and culturally diverse downtown area. Seeing Lexington Market as a distinct social entity with its own internal social dynamic allows for the observer to witness a clear conception of the underpinnings of a sociological theory of urbanism, an examination into the inner workings of a social environment that uniquely allows for the coming together of people of different sociological background.

References

Anderson, E. (2012). The cosmopolitan canopy: race and civility in everyday life. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company

Wirth, L. (1938). Urbanism as a way of life. American Journal of Sociology

Socialist Feminism in the era of Trump and Weinstein

By Susan Ferguson

Originally published at New Socialist.

It wasn’t that long ago when news outlets were abuzz with the idea that feminism was dead, a relic of the past.

Young women who had reaped the benefits of the Second Wave – access to postsecondary education, non-traditional jobs, boardrooms, and more flexible household arrangements – saw, it was said, no need to fight for more equality, more freedom. It was a “post-feminist” world. (I put that word in scare quotes because, as I explain below, “post-feminism” actually means something else among critically inclined feminists).

Of course, those commentators were dead wrong. But if they could keep their heads in the sand back then, they certainly can’t today.

Just 14 months ago Americans – well 26 percent of eligible American voters anyway – elected a man who has yet to meet a woman he hasn’t ogled, insulted, demeaned or groped.

Then, in 2017, high-profile, powerful men fell like dominos because the women they work with (and generally work in positions of relative power over) have been emboldened to tell their stories of sexual harassment and assault.

And although it gets far less press, it is also the case in 2017 – as it was in the 1980s when the “post-feminist” era was first proclaimed – that millions of women living in the wealthiest nations of the world face poverty, violence and/or discrimination in their everyday lives.

So, the post-feminist era was always a myth.

Even the pundits no longer talk much about “post-feminism.” They’ve actually found a new feminist – Justin Trudeau. And, more appropriately, Time magazine has just named the #MeToo movement its “person of the year.”

Of course, some of us have known all along that there is nothing outmoded about the need for a feminist analysis and politics. We’ve been working throughout the last few decades, advocating in various ways to improve women’s lives.

It is those “various ways” that I want to look at here. For however much one set of feminist politics tends to dominate the public discussion, there’s a rich and diverse tradition from which we can draw our ideas and thinking.

I’m going to comment briefly on three faces of feminist politics that have emerged over these years, which I’m calling:

1. “Fearless girl” feminism

2. Allyship feminism

3. Anti-capitalist feminism from below

While there is plenty of overlap among these, we can trace their roots back to distinct theoretical and political premises – and in so doing, see how they support divergent notions of progress and freedom for women.

To signal where I’m going with this: while all three “faces” of feminism have generated substantive, material changes in women’s lives, it is the third approach – anti-capitalist feminism from below – that orients us to thinking about how to develop a transformative politics that grapples most directly with the systemic nature of oppression.

“Fearless girl” feminism

The title here refers to the bronzed statue of a small girl facing off against “Charging Bull,” the Wall St. icon installed two years after the 1987 market crash. The “fearless girl” statue (created by artist Kristen Visbel) was erected by State Street Global Advisors just as International Women’s Day was rolling around this year. It symbolizes a feminism that promotes women’s “empowerment” through economic independence and labour market opportunities.

State Street Global Advisors is an investment firm which manages $2.5 trillion in assets. It unveiled the statue as the launch of a campaign to add more women to corporate boards of directors. (Apparently, surveys have found deep resistance to the idea that women should comprise even 50 percent of a board, with 53 percent of directors surveyed responding that women should comprise no more the 40 percent of board membership.)

Why would State Street Global Advisors care? Well, it turns out, gender diversity has been shown “to improve company performance and increase shareholder value.”

This is, of course, the dominant face of feminism today. It is what Justin Trudeau trumpets when he fills half of his cabinet seats with women (you’ll remember his flippant but hard-to-argue-with reasoning, “Because it’s 2015”). Or, when he sits down with Ivanka Trump for a roundtable on so-called women business leaders. Or, again, when he insists that any free trade deal with China requires both parties sign on to gender equity provisions.  

And while many of us will roll our eyes at the superficiality of Trudeau’s feminism, few would argue, I suspect, that he shouldn’t take these positions.

In other words, it’s somewhat awkward, and complicated.

The so-called empowerment of women achieved by widening the corporate and political corridors to accommodate them is a result of decades of feminists trying to redress inequality through equal pay and pay equity legislation – legislation that has undoubtedly improved the lives of many, many women.

Yet, where has this gotten us? As the Trudeau/Trump collaboration attests, these feminist initiatives are easily coopted by a shallow exercise in corporate diversity management. And we see the broad societal impact of this uptake of “fearless girl” feminism in the widening gap between wealthy and average-income earning women.

Leslie McCall, a sociologist at Northwestern University, has tracked women’s wages in the US since the 1970s.

From: Leslie McCall, Men against Women: or the Top 20 percent against the Bottom 80, 7 June 2013, Council on Contemporary Families (https://contemporaryfamilies.org/top-20-percent-against-bottom-80/).  

When she started, women with college degrees earned less than men straight out of high school. But then, the effects of equal pay legislation (introduced in 1963 in the US) started to kick in.

Today, women still haven’t seriously dented the ranks of the 1 percent. They are, however, much more often found among top salary earners. Women’s earnings in the top 85th to 95th percentile (yearly incomes of about $150,000) have grown faster than men’s earnings in that category in every decade since the 1970s. For example, they’ve seen a 14 percent growth in the first decade of this century, compared to an 8.3 percent growth for those making average wages.

According to McCall, there have been “strong absolute gains for women in this elite group.”  

Meanwhile, median earnings of all full-time workers (men and women) didn’t change between 2001 and 2010. And the gap between high-earning women on the one hand, and middle- and low-earning women on the other, has been steadily growing.

So, while women who make about $150,000 a year are seeing their salaries continue to grow at robust rates, women (and men) who make about $37,000 or less a year have, for some time now, seen their incomes stall.

To be clear, then, we are talking about a very small proportion of women who have truly been “empowered” here:

• in 2013, according to a JPMorgan Chase researcher, only 3.25 percent of American women wage-earners took home more than $100,000 per year.

• That same year, according the US Social Security Administration, more than half of US wage-earners earned $30,000 or less. And you can bet that women, blacks, Latinos/Latinas, trans people, queers, and immigrants were over-represented in that group.

Yet, yet . . . I defend “fearless girl” feminism’s demand for pay equity and equal pay. One thing these figures don’t tell us – they can’t tell us in fact – is how much lower all women’s wages would have been had feminists not been fighting all along for economic parity and independence.

At the same time, it is awkward because while such policies have improved individual lives, they haven’t, and never could have, challenged the conditions which produce the tendency toward unequal pay in the first place – which is precisely why Justin Trudeau, Ivanna Trump, Hillary Clinton and Wall Street investment firms have no trouble with embracing and promoting them.

“Fearless girl” feminism is entirely consistent with the capitalist world order that Trudeau & Co. represent and defend. That is the same capitalist world order which can be pushed to accommodate some gender and racial equality, but cannot give up its life-blood: a vast and growing pool of low-waged, and no-waged, labour – and the racist, sexist and otherwise oppressive relations that ensure an ongoing supply of the same.

Allyship feminism

If we consider women’s experiences of violence and harassment over the same period that we looked at for changes in women’s wages (the 1970s to 2017), we find much less reliable statistical evidence. That’s because changes in women’s reporting levels fluctuate (recall how a couple high profile complaints at private sector companies led to the recent spike in reporting). It’s also because there have been shifts in how gendered violence is defined.

Still, we learn from a recent StatsCan report the following:

• Women’s reports to police of physical assault have fallen some, while reports of sexual assault are stable.

• The self-reported (on the General Social Survey) rate of violent victimization against women aged 15 years and over has remained relatively stable between 1999 and 2009.

Most significantly, we know that gendered violence and harassment continues at unacceptable levels today. A report by the Canadian Women’s Foundation tells us that:

• Half of all women in Canada have experienced at least one incident of physical or sexual violence since the age of 16.

• Approximately every six days, a woman in Canada is killed by her intimate partner.

• There are upwards of 4,000 murdered and missing Indigenous women in Canada.

• Young women (aged 18 to 24) are most likely to experience online harassment in its most severe forms, including stalking, sexual harassment and physical threats.

While there have certainly been missteps, and there is still much more that needs to be done, feminists have demanded and won resources for those vulnerable to gendered violence. They have also developed policies and practices that make meaningful differences in the lives of women, trans people and queers, allowing many to leave risky, abusive situations, to better negotiate legal systems, and to feel more secure at school, on the streets, and at work.

In recent years, much of that work has been informed by what I’m calling allyship feminism (though other forms of feminism certainly deserve credit too for progress on these fronts). By allyship feminism I mean to identify a politics that is grounded in a critique of intersecting systems of oppression. Similar to anti-capitalist feminism from below, this feminist perspective sees the powerful institutions and practices in our society – schools, courts, law, corporations, healthcare – as implicated in upholding racism, sexism and heterosexism, trans and queer phobia, ableism, settler colonialism, economic exploitation, and so on. [1]  

However, even though many feminist allies hold this radical, often even anti-capitalist, understanding of society, their political work usually stops short of challenging the systemic powers they critique.

The reason for this arguably has much to do with their commitment to the principle of allyship, and the ethos of “privilege” that informs it.

Allyship feminism begins with listening to those who are directly disempowered in this multiple and complex matrix of “interlocking” oppressions (to use Patricia Hill Collins’ term). Listening is integral to a process of building relationships of trust and accountability with those feminists seek to be in allyship with. Once that relationship is on solid ground, then feminist allies engage their financial, organizational or other forms of resources to help strategize ways and means to support and protect the disempowered.

This approach is counter-posed to mainstream feminism, which tends to treat the marginalized as victims or clients, who can be helped by integrating them into existing institutions and systems. By contrast, the goal of allyship feminism is not to “save” or “integrate” people, but to work with them, on terms defined by the marginalized, to “challenge larger oppressive power structures.”

It is also counter-posed to the (presumed masculinist) socialist left. Rather than “impose” their systemic critique on the oppressed, and prioritize political confrontation and social change over meeting the self-defined needs of marginalized communities (as certain – though, significantly, not all – left traditions can be rightly singled out for doing), allyship feminists stress that their own political goals are secondary to those they seek to be allies with.  

Alongside offering resources, feminist allies actively work to recalibrate interpersonal relationships between themselves and marginalized people. This means, in the first instance, identifying and taking responsibility for one’s complicity in the wider social dynamics of oppression – for one’s “privilege,” say, as a white, able-bodied, cis-gendered student who is working with Indigenous women living in poverty.

“Checking one’s privilege” is not an optional or one-time feature of allyship feminism. According to the Anti-Oppression Network, allyship is “an active, consistent, and arduous practice of unlearning and re-evaluating, in which a person in a position of privilege and power seeks to operate in solidarity with a marginalized group.”

Self-consciousness, care and respect when working with vulnerable people is incredibly important. What’s more, there is no doubt that the work of feminist allies has made university campuses, workplaces, homes and streets safer for many women, queers, and trans people vulnerable to sexual assault and harassment. It has contributed to establishing and improving funding for community centres, safe spaces and educational materials about gendered violence. It has led to improved policies and procedures for those reporting sexual assault, and contributed a compelling defense of nongendered language to an often toxic public debate.

But, again, I find assessing allyship feminism to be a bit awkward and complicated. As with struggles for pay equity and equal pay legislation, this approach hasn’t been – and can’t ever be – enough. Allyship feminism comes up against the limits of its own premises.

First, the focus on using resources to support the goals of more marginalized people is laudable of course. But it can – and often does – work to bind feminist allies to the very power structures that perpetuate the inequality of resources that have made them “allies” and not members of the “more marginalized” communities in the first place.

Instead of confronting power, feminist allies tend to define their political work in terms of getting those in positions of authority onside with their agenda. They risk cultivating, that is, either a naïve trust in their bosses or political elites (who they believe they can influence), or a fear of alienating the support of their higher-ups by pushing for more radical demands.

Second, the politics of individual privilege risks diverting attention away from the broader forces sustaining the conditions of inequality and oppression. Feminist allies insist that “checking one’s privilege” is about taking responsibility for one’s own consciousness and behaviour, and not about confessing guilt for occupying a relatively advantageous social position.

But, as critics of this approach point out, the focus here is nonetheless on the individual. And not just any individual. Because it is their “self-changing” which becomes the centre of political work, say the critics, feminists from the dominant (usually white, academic) culture have (once again) made themselves the centre of anti-oppression politics – albeit not intentionally, nor in the same way as “second-wave” feminists did. Still, the irony is hard to miss.

In some ways, privilege politics grows out of another second wave feminist idea, the idea that the personal is political. Understood as a claim that our most intimate relations are conditioned by wider power dynamics, that maxim is, I believe, indisputable. But insofar as allyship feminism focuses on personal privilege as a site of political activism, it suggests something else. It suggests that power is everywhere – an idea most associated with the French political philosopher Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984).

According to this perspective, there is no essential difference between the “power” wielded by individuals caught up in systems of oppression on the one hand, and the power generated and/or sustained by broader political and economic dynamics on the other. Or, if feminist allies do consider these types of power as distinct in some ways, privilege politics tends to obscure the relationship between them. As a result, key questions about systemic change tend to go unanswered: does, for example, challenging individual interpersonal practices and language lead to wider, more systemic, change? If so, exactly how?

The limits of allyship feminism are thus considerable. Yet, it is hardly surprising that many of the most critically minded feminists are drawn to this set of politics today. For those limits reflect the general weakness of the wider left. They reflect a left that has largely lost the capacity to pose an alternative to the broader structures of power that allyship feminism critiques.

My point is not that we need to, or should, abandon the type of work so many feminists with a radical critique of society do. While we should challenge some of their strategies, I think they advance important lessons for the wider left about working for social change within institutions, and about building relationships with disempowered communities.

The key task is to figure out how such work can be part of a broader challenge to the systemic reproduction of multiple oppressions. How can this work help build the societal capacity, confidence and solidarity required to move beyond where we find ourselves today?

Anti-capitalist feminism from below

Of the three faces of feminism, this is certainly the least familiar. That’s in part because, for the last 50 years, socialist feminists have gone from being a coherent presence on the left to working within organizations dominated by other sorts of politics. Unions and labour councils have absorbed many, but so have some activist groups mobilizing around healthcare, education, and poverty. And you’ll still find socialist feminists, like myself, lingering in small left groups like the New Socialists and, of course, in the academy.

By “coherent presence” I mean that anti-capitalist, from-below, principles contributed to and sometimes guided feminist political action in the 1970s and 1980s. Certainly, in Toronto, the struggles to establish childcare centres at the University of Toronto, to get maternity leave provisions in contract negotiations, to demand access to abortion, and to oppose police raids on bath houses are great examples of that.

In all cases, socialist feminists argued for and won arguments about the need to call out and confront those in power through large mobilizations. The idea was not to ask for spaces and services so much as it was to collectively claim them.

I don’t mean to romanticize this. To begin, these gains, like those of all feminisms, are fragile. As well, there were lots of unresolved issues, including a marked inability (and less commonly, a refusal) to seriously deal with the multiple and sometimes contradictory forms of oppression. That failing contributed to the dismantling of socialist feminist organizations and the faltering confidence that a broader vision of freedom from oppression was even possible.

In the last five years or so, though, we’ve seen a smouldering interest in the ideas of a renewed socialist feminism. By renewed, I mean a socialist feminism that doesn’t simply repeat the insights of an earlier era, but learns from its shortcomings, and attempts to move beyond these – namely, to deal seriously with the complexity of oppression.

This renewal, however, has had only a limited political expression. Many anti-capitalist feminists from below working in community and labour organizations today have renewed this face of feminism in practice, by building solidarity among feminists, anti-racists, queers, trans people and others. But they have not often articulated the principles guiding their work in any sort of coherent set of socialist feminist politics.

That task has been taken up largely by those of us in the academy and parts of the organized left. We are now debating and discussing the version of social reproduction feminism that was initially framed by Lise Vogel, in her book Marxism and the Oppression of Women. More on that in a second.

While one might argue that the numbers of US women who rejected Hillary Clinton and her fearless girl feminism, and flocked instead to the Bernie Sanders campaign are a sign that times are ripe for such a feminism, to date, in North America, the most significant political expression of anti-capitalist from below feminist politics came with the March 8, 2017, call for an International Women’s Strike.

The North American organizers of that strike took their inspiration from three mass mobilizations in 2016: the Polish women’s strike, which stopped legislation to ban abortions in that country; the Black Wednesday strike called by the #NiUnoMenos, (Not One Less) movement in Argentina to protest male violence; and the 300,000 Italian women and supporters who mobilized on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.

The organizers also understood that the sea of people donning pussy hats in the Women’s March this past January were not just upset that Trump was in the White House instead of Hillary Clinton. Their chants and placards drew attention to the devastation neoliberalism has wrought on the lives of women, trans people, Indigenous peoples, blacks, queers, immigrants and migrants.

Building upon all this, a group of US-based socialist feminists took up the call (issued first by the organizers of the Polish strike) for an International Women’s Strike. The call for a “strike” was deliberate. It was intended, according to one of its organizers, Cinzia Arruza, “to emphasize the work that women perform not only in the workplace but outside it, in the sphere of social reproduction”. That is, it highlighted the unpaid and/or low-waged work of cleaning, cooking and childminding (among other things) that produces the key thing capitalism needs in order to realize a profit, the worker.

Anti-capitalist feminism from below takes that insight as its starting point – an insight of social reproduction feminism that is articulated particularly well by Lise Vogel. Briefly, Vogel argues that capitalism absolutely requires workers, but bosses do not directly control their production (that is, the daily and generational renewal of labour power). That renewal is organized in patriarchal, heterosexist and racialized ways primarily in households, but also in hospitals and schools, for example, and through migration regimes.

Moreover, the relentless drive to exert a downward pressure on wages (and also on taxes) means that although capitalism needs workers, it also cannot help but undermine the capacity of those workers to reproduce themselves. And it is this unresolvable contradiction between the production of value and the production of life that haunts capitalism, making oppression a systemic feature of its very existence.

The 2017 International Women’s Strike – in recognition of the centrality of women’s work to capitalism – called on women to withdraw their labour not just from the workforce but from sites of unpaid social reproduction too. And women around the world responded. Activists in fifty countries participated.

While mostly symbolic as one-day protests tend to be, the strike as a strategy drives home the point that feminism can have an insurgent face that calls out the systemic nature of oppression.

And if we agree that it is capitalism that limits the possibility of meeting the very real survival needs of people, that puts profits before need not just in the workplace but in our communities and homes, then confronting that system also requires confronting the racism, sexism and all oppressions that work in concert with capitalism and against life.

This means working for greater economic equality between men and women, and to provide safe spaces and adequate resources for marginalized people. But we need to organize the demands for these things in ways that also build peoples’ capacities to draw attention to the ways in which oppression is embedded in the capitalist mandate to put profit over the meeting of human need.

And the only way we will ever be able to challenge that is by drawing more and more people into struggle – building the confidence and capacity of everyone with a stake in a more just society – to claim back not only our workplaces, but also our communities (our hospitals, schools, streets and households).

This doesn’t mean imposing ideas on marginalized groups. It does mean discussing and debating the nature of social power with them – and then strategizing to find ways to build the collective confidence to claim back the economic, political and cultural resources needed to produce a better world.

To my mind, this is the key distinction between working in solidarity with groups and seeking out allyship with them. Building solidarity certainly involves listening and respecting the self-determination of distinct groups. But it also involves moving beyond offering support and help, to articulating shared goals and strategies based on the knowledge that (i) all our lives are organized in and through a broader set of distinct, but nonetheless unified power relations; and (ii) that the capitalist system organizing those relations denies us collective control over the resources required to socially reproduce ourselves and our worlds in a way that meets our (material, cultural, spiritual, physical – in short, human) needs.

Solidarity, then, means standing with those who are willing to disrupt the usual flow of power from top to bottom. Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, the Quebec Student Strike – these are all examples of recent efforts to reclaim social reproductive space and resources (our communities and schools) through movement building.

We can improve lives through influencing those in positions of authority to grant certain things – better services and education, higher wages and benefits. And we should continue to do that. But if we don’t link those struggles with others that also challenge more directly those who hold power over us, the patterns of inequality and oppression that keep far too many women, blacks, migrants, Indigenous and disabled people disempowered, and living in poverty and fear for the last fifty years, will still be evident over the next fifty.

In the era of Trump and Weinstein, we need the face of feminism to be insurgent and transformative.

Notes

[1] The feminist “post-feminism” that I referred to earlier (not to be confused with the media popularization of that term) takes its lead from intersectionality theory. Feminism is considered outmoded not because it is no longer needed or relevant, but because it is too narrow. That is, the implied privileging of gender relations is too narrow to adequately address the multiple, complex interaction of oppressions that more accurately describes people’s experiences.

Sue Ferguson is a member of the Toronto New Socialists, and writes on social reproduction feminism.

This article is based on a talk given on Dec. 8, 2017, sponsored by the Ottawa New Socialists and University of Ottawa PIRG.

Romania: Thirty Years Removed From Socialism

By Patricia Gorky

Originally published at Liberation News.

Thirty years ago, the socialist government of Romania was overthrown in a military coup d’etat.

Industrialization had transformed the lives of millions of Romanians during the country’s socialist period. But the later years were marked by strict rationing and frequent shortages as the government sought to pay off its foreign debt. Romanian people hoped that their lives would improve after 1989. But life today is much worse than even the most economically-deprived times of the 1980s. A 2010 poll revealed that 63 percent of Romanians say that life was better under socialism.

Romania’s capitalist politicians search everywhere for a scapegoat to evade self-incrimination. The Financial Times states that “Romania has evolved into a democracy and strengthened ties with the West, joining EU and NATO. But its transition was always incomplete.” What is meant by “incomplete” is never defined.

Communists, and executed President Nicolae Ceausescu in particular, are the usual targets. As part of the ongoing demonization campaign, former military prosecutor Dan Voinea made a ludicrous statement to the Financial Times: “The communists remain in power until this very day, but without the names.”

A Marxist approach requires us to understand the struggle between the working and owning classes. When the communists came to power, they dispossessed the wealthy nobility, clerics and bourgeoisie of their property. Land was collectivized, as well as all major industries, and the economy was centrally planned. Millions of dwellings were built for workers, and everyone had the right to a job.

The socialist Romanian government transformed a largely agrarian society, and made great gains in industrial production. What’s more, they accomplished this feat within mere decades while under constant attack by the West. The capitalist account of Romania’s history ignores the vast achievements of socialism only to focus on its problems and shortcomings, many of which originated from the global situation at the time.

Romania’s socialist origins: Armed insurrection spurs Red Army’s arrival

Unlike the popular revolutions in Russia, China, Cuba and others that brought communists to power, the key factor to Romania’s socialist transformation was the victory of the Soviet Union in World War II.

During the war Romania had been ruled by a fascist military dictatorship in an alliance with Nazi Germany. General Ion Antonescu was not a passive supporter of Nazi Germany. His support was originally based on the fascist Iron Guard. Antonescu sent hundreds of thousands of ethnic minorities to their deaths in concentration camps. This included Jewish and Roma people, as well as communists. Romania’s military was a key participant in the fascist invasion of the Soviet Union, which eventually took 27 million Soviet lives.

As the war went on, internal resistance to the dictatorship grew even as communists were driven underground. The Soviet Union began to turn the tide of war, delivering defeat after defeat to the fascist alliance. On Aug 23, 1944, a broad anti-fascist coalition led by the Communist Party arrested the dictator-general and locked him in a safe. This insurrection sped the Red Army’s advance into Bucharest days later. The Romanian army switched sides in the war and now fought as an ally of the Soviet Union.

Like so many other countries in Eastern Europe, post-war governments were primarily shaped by the militaries that liberated them from fascism – the Soviet Union in the East and the U.S. / Britain in the West. The U.S. and British governments made clear that they would tolerate no governments other than those specifically chosen by the imperialists in their “sphere.” This was evident in the cases of Italy and Greece in particular, where the British military directly intervened to crush the communists, who had led the partisan resistance to fascism and were already in control of many areas.

But instead of a capitalist government, the Soviet Union oversaw the formation of socialist governments in Eastern Europe that would serve the interests of the working class.

The Soviet Union had been pushed to the verge of annihilation not just by the German military, but by the resources and industrial capacity of essentially all of continental Europe. The Nazi war machine had relied on the militaries of Romania, Italy, Hungary, Slovakia and Croatia, as well as key agricultural and oil output from Romania. Fascist resurgence was a possibility too deadly for the Soviet Union to allow.

After years of fascist dictatorship, there was no pre-war “democratic” government to go back to. The largely-discredited monarchy and bourgeois parties had the support of the West, but these very parties had been responsible for Romania’s fascist takeover.

Key support from the Soviets, whose Red Army remained in Romania after the defeat of the fascists, was given to the National Democratic Front, a coalition led by the Romanian Communist Party (PCR).

The Communist Party’s general secretary, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, had been a railway worker and PCR militant. He was born in 1901, and began working at the age of 11 years old, a situation all too common for youths of his time. For his part in organizing strikes in 1933 he was sentenced to 12 years’ hard labor. While in prison he was elected to the central committee of the PCR.

Nicolae Ceausescu, another party leader, was born in 1918, and was a shoemaker’s apprentice in Bucharest from the age of 10. He began revolutionary activity early, and was in and out of prison organizing strikes and sabotage against the Nazi-allied government. At age 22, Ceausescu was in Jilava prison when it was invaded by members of the fascist Iron Guard, who slaughtered 64 of the other prisoners before they were stopped.

In 1946, nearly 7 million people voted for the National Democratic bloc. This election had the highest number of participants in the country’s history. The new government forced the abdication of the reactionary monarchy. Two years later the PCR would merge with the social democrats to form the Romanian Workers’ Party (PMR).

‘Not just a dream’; industrializing an agrarian society

The tasks of the country were enormous. Industrial output was halved by the war and the population had been reduced from nearly 20 million to less than 16 million. More than 700,000 had died. The vast majority of the people were peasants who worked on farms, and had a life expectancy of 42 years.

At once the government set upon an electrification plan, and laid the foundation for the development of industry. Farmland owned by a small, rich minority was confiscated and collectivized. Extravagant castles and mansions were seized from the parasitic nobility and used for museums and other public institutions.

Four decades of socialist development would transform Romania from a country that imported 90 percent of machinery to a country that manufactured its own. Social services and education radically improved health: life expectancy increased by 30 years. More than 5 million jobs were created, and industrial output rose by more than 650 percent since 1950.

Housing was a major priority for the state. By 1980, the socialist government had built 4.6 million homes for people. Scanteia newspaper reported how a communist of the old underground “felt the need to touch and caress the bricks of the first apartment blocs to be built for steelworkers, so he could convince himself that they were not just a dream”.

Pregnant women and mothers were accorded rights that even bourgeois reviewers noted as “comprehensive and generous.” Women were given fully-paid maternity leave of 112 days. And with no loss to benefits, “mothers were permitted to take a leave of absence from work to raise a child to the age of 6, or they could request half-time work.”

Still a developing country suffering from centuries of underdevelopment, Romania strove to become a medium-developed country and narrow the gap between it and the West. For Gheorghiu-Dej and Ceausescu after him, lessening ties with Moscow was seen as necessary to attain that goal.

Division in the socialist camp

After the war the Soviet Union imposed war reparations on the country (along with other formerly fascist states) to repay part of the immense damage caused by the war. Although the aggregate reparations amounted to just one-fifth the actual cost of destruction suffered by the Soviet Union, these reparations strained the fragile economy of Romania. This likely did not improve the public view of the USSR. There were still Soviet troops in Romania, and Moscow exercised a direct intervention in the economy through the Sovrom joint-stock partnerships over Romania’s major industries.

Stalin’s death in 1953 and the subsequent shifts in the Soviet Union impelled the divide further. Gheorghiu-Dej and Ceausescu negotiated the buyout of the Sovroms at great cost.

But in 1955, Romania joined the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, also known as the Warsaw Pact, with the USSR and other countries of the eastern European socialist bloc.

At the same time, Romania’s leaders began to establish economic ties with capitalist and imperialist countries in order to lessen ties with the Soviet Union. In 1958 with Chinese support, Gheorghiu-Dej negotiated the removal of Soviet soldiers from Romanian soil, the only East European country to do so. As the Sino-Soviet split divided the Socialist Bloc between Moscow and Beijing, Bucharest maintained neutrality.

In 1964 the PMR adopted Gheorghiu-Dej’s theses that emphasized national independence and sovereignty, equal rights, mutual advantage, non-interference in internal affairs, and observance of territorial integrity. When Gheorghiu-Dej died in 1965, Ceausescu redoubled the steps towards nationalism. The PMR renamed itself the Romanian Communist Party (PCR), and the country became the Socialist Republic of Romania to signify a step forward.

1970s and 1980s; ‘Maverick’ Romania turns West

The 1970s was a period of tremendous growth and development for the country. Vast natural resources paired with Western trade concessions and foreign credit brought Romania’s most prosperous years since World War II.

But in many ways the country’s leadership held positions that were reactionary and opportunistic. The “independence” put forward by Gheorghiu-Dej and later Ceausescu became more and more allied with U.S. imperialism. Romania recognized West Germany, and became the only socialist country to maintain diplomatic relations with Israel. When the CIA overthrew the democratically-elected socialist president of Chile, many socialist countries severed diplomatic relations. Yet Romania maintained them.

These steps convinced the U.S. government that Ceausescu could be influenced and worked with to a certain extent. He was labelled a “maverick” by the U.S. press and internal CIA documents. They eagerly sought to distance Romania from the Soviet Bloc. In 1969, U.S. President Richard Nixon made a state visit to Romania, the first visit of a U.S. president to a socialist country, three years before his famed visit to China.

Romania would go on to join imperialist financial agreements including taking loans from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. The U.S. welcomed each of these moves, but other than high interest loans they gave Romania nothing of substance in return. What the U.S. really wanted was the overturn of the progressive social system and the return of capitalist exploitation and oppression.

But the coup d’etat of 1989 could not have succeeded without an accumulation of errors on the part of the country’s leaders. The government’s vacillation between the imperialist and socialist camps was one such example.

The late 1970s and early 1980s ushered in a series of crises that rocked the Romanian economy. A devastating earthquake hit Bucharest in 1977, followed by the global economic crisis. For much of the 1970s the Romanian government had been able to export key commodities like oil at high prices. But when prices slumped, suddenly Romania lost a significant source of revenue. Foreign credit that had previously offered an attractive path to development became an obstacle to the country’s survival.

Romania borrowed from the IMF, whose loan terms are designed to enslave governments in a cycle of debt by imposing crippling interest rates and severe austerity on the people. They remain a key tool for imperialists today that limit a country’s development. For the Romanian government, foreign debt had become a trap from which they desperately worked to extricate themselves.

Beginning in the early 1980s, the Romanian government rationed electricity, heat, gasoline and food – the first time since the early postwar years. Agricultural goods were exported to pay down the loan, rendering certain food items like meat and milk scarce. People arrived home in the cold winter only to have the heat shut off after a few hours. Even radio and television transmissions were restricted to preserve energy.

These were difficult years for the Romanian people. Other countries like Poland and Hungary which had taken out similar loans were not even able to pay the interest. Romania paid back the principal as well.

Meanwhile the capitalist reforms in the Soviet Union gave fodder to reactionary elements across Eastern Europe. At the same time, the West’s cultural cold war continued, particularly enticing young people in the socialist camp with pro-capitalist propaganda.

December 1989 and the military coup d’etat

By April 1989, the Romanian government declared the country free of Western debt. The Grand National Assembly enacted a ban on taking on any further foreign credits. Yet the rationing of food and energy continued. Perhaps this was an effort to impel the economy further, but these austerity measures were self-defeating.

These decisions made by the country’s leaders could only have further isolated much of the working class.

The imperialist media seized upon any sign of discontent in the Socialist Bloc. So did the U.S. government, which had financed counterrevolutionary organizations throughout Eastern Europe since the end of World War II. The imperialists carefully studied each manifestation. A 1987 classified CIA document outlined a number of possible situations that would lead to the downfall of the Romanian government given the prospect of the coming winter. Stunningly, one of the scenarios in this “winter thinkpiece” would play out almost exactly as occurred two years later: In this scenario, a group of striking workers would establish a national organization to coordinate protests. “Pragmatic” opponents of the Ceausescus in leadership would remove him from office, with support of the Securitate or military. The new government would ease restrictions on food and energy to placate most workers.

Instead of a strike in a major factory, the disturbances would arise around a reactionary Hungarian cleric in the western city of Timisoara. And one such “Council of National Salvation” was formed not from any workers’ group but from the top military brass, who began operating as a council six months before the coup.

Timisoara is a cosmopolitan city in western Romania near the Hungarian border. In 1989 there were 1.7 million Hungarians who lived in the region. Bourgeois elements in Hungary long promoted counterrevolutionary propaganda, including alleged grievances against the Hungarian minorities.

The eviction of a counterrevolutionary cleric on Dec. 16 sparked protests in Timisoara. Confrontations ensued between rightwing protestors and security forces, but there were few casualties. There was no massacre as was repeated by the imperialist press. The New York Times published hysterical reports of “mass graves in Timisoara” holding thousands of people, and the Hungarian media claimed that 60,000 had been killed. All of this was later revealed to be false.

Protests grew around the country. On Dec. 20 the military, foreshadowing its coming betrayal, withdrew from Timisoara. This was a boon to the counterrevolution; mobs of people ransacked the local Communist Party headquarters. The unrest was serious enough for Ceausescu to cut short a state visit to Iran and return to the capital.

Up to this time, the clandestine counterrevolutionary Council of National Salvation had been operating for 6 months prior. Their pre-December activities are not known, and there were a number of such councils. The most prominent included a former ambassador to the United States; a disgraced PCR politician who would become the new government’s president; and at least 4 military generals, including a retired general who had made previous attempts against Ceausescu.

On Dec. 21, Ceausescu appeared before a mass rally in Bucharest. He announced considerable increases in the minimum salary, child subsidies and pensions. He denounced the actions in Timisoara of a group who wanted to place the country again under foreign domination. In what would be prophetic words, Ceausescu spoke: “Some would like again to reintroduce unemployment, to reduce the living standards of the people, and in order to dismantle Romania, to dismember Romania, to put our independent people and nation in danger.”

His speech was interrupted by protestors, and his disoriented response to the heckling was disproportionately publicized by the imperialist media. People remained in the streets, and clashes with the authorities took place. Imperialist propaganda outlets like Radio Free Europe broadcasted false reports of a “massacre” in Bucharest, and workers from around the city poured into the streets the next day. Many of the people protesting had legitimate grievances that were built up over years of austerity.

But the protests quickly devolved into fascist violence when the military defected. Rightwing mobs set fire to the National Archives and the university library. Crowds attacked Ceausescu’s home, forcing him and his wife Elena to flee the capital in a helicopter. Their pilot abandoned them on a country road where they were soon captured.

The military-led NSF seized control of the television stations and declared themselves the new government.

Military brass, a historical source of counterrevolution, were at odds with Ceausescu’s plan to integrate them into civilian work. “For years,” wrote rightwing academic Vladimir Tismaneanu in the New York Times, “troops have been forced to engage in such demeaning activities as raising crops and supplying manual labor for grandiose Ceausescu projects.”

Long held at bay by the socialist government, the terror of the bourgeoisie raised its head. On Dec. 25, 1989, a secret military tribunal charged Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu with fabricated crimes that included “genocide” and “destroying the country’s economic and spiritual values.” Moments later as he was led to his death, Nicolae Ceausescu sang the Internationale. He and his wife were executed by firing squad.

Chaos ensued in the following days. The entire leadership of the Communist Party was imprisoned. Communists were disappeared and even lynched in the streets. Some in the Securitate, whose origin came from the peasantry, put up an armed resistance to the military coup. They were hunted and executed.

Privatization and poverty, the American way

Within days the “socialist” NSF outlawed the Communist Party. Addendums to foreign treaties that called for states to guarantee full employment, housing and education were abolished.

The U.S. government was quick to intervene. As early as January 1990, Washington instructed its Bucharest envoy “to take preliminary actions to encourage the process [of privatization].” Special attention was given to the bourgeois media. The U.S. Embassy issued an urgent request for up-to-date video equipment for the television station. Prior anti-communist laws prevented the U.S. government from directly providing the equipment.

Embassy cables gloated over how the counterrevolution “has made it possible to pursue, in numerous heretofore unthinkable ways, our fundamental policy goals in Romania.”

One of those goals was the domination of Romanian polity by U.S. legal norms. The Embassy’s work plan included distributing 10,000 copies of the U.S. constitution in the Romanian language to all members of the new parliament after the elections. U.S. legal experts would “advise” Romania in the creation of the new constitution and legal codes. Newly-minted Romanian politicians would be exposed to representatives from U.S. political parties and private businesses.

Trade and economic meetings would convince Romanian officials that the economic benefits the U.S. can offer were contingent on the new government adhering to the American view of elections and the upholding of so-called individual rights to exploit the collective.

The U.S. military, which already had planned military-to-military contacts, would transform the Romanian armed forces into a “professional and non-political” corps based on a “commander – commanded” relationship.

Overnight, independent and sovereign Romania became a U.S. neocolony. A new law approved 100 percent foreign ownership of investments. State-owned enterprises, which had fueled the country’s generous social services, were sold to foreign capitalists.

Gone was the law banning foreign debt. Negotiations with the IMF began in 1993, with the requirement for the Romanian government to enter its currency into the world market, making Romania more susceptible to the tumult of global capitalism.

By 1994, half of the population lived on less than $160 a month. Price controls over food were removed. Inflation hit 300 percent. Unemployment, which previously did not exist, haunted millions. In desperation, 4 million people turned to a pyramid scheme called Caritas. The pyramid scheme was allowed to operate by the new government, and millions of families lost a collective $1 billion. The leu, Romania’s national currency, sank to 1,748 to one dollar.

Alleged discrimination of ethnic minorities was used to topple the socialist governments. But the new capitalist governments relied on the support of the racist right wing. Fascist violence against Roma, ethnic Hungarians and Jewish people erupted across the country. In a 1993 New York Times article, Henry Kamm detailed the quickly emerging racist attacks on the Roma. Using a slur for the Roma people, Kamm wrote: “The millions of Gypsies of Eastern Europe have emerged as great losers from the overthrow of Communism… Many of the economic and social protections that Gypsies enjoyed in Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia collapsed, permitting a revival of the open prejudice and persecution that have marked the history of the Roma, as Gypsies prefer to call themselves…”

Capitalism restored, social conditions deteriorate

The coup plotters’ aim, despite their claims of “democracy” and “freedom,” was never to improve the standard of living for Romanian workers.

As difficult as the years of rationing were, the quality of life for Romanians today is much worse.

More than 85 percent of all individual work contracts in Romania pay less than the minimum needed for survival, even as costs continue to climb. Many have left the country in search of an economic future. Since 1989 Romania experienced the highest levels of emigration of all European countries: 3.5 million people have fled, more than 5 times the number of deaths in World War II. Today, the diaspora represents one-fifth of the country’s own labor force.

Foreign corporations reap mega-profits from the artificially low wages of Romania. The restoration of capitalism promised wealth and freedom for the country, yet today Romania remains among the poorest countries in the European Union. Romania’s economy and natural resources have been completely opened to foreign capital for exploitation. Almost every industrial measure peaked in mid to late 1980s, and then bottomed out after the 1990s.

The Romanian government today is loyal to U.S. empire. There are now U.S. military bases in the countryside and in Romania’s principal ports. When the U.S. demanded that all NATO countries contribute 2 percent of their GDP, Romania was the first to raise military spending. By U.S. accounts, actions taken by the Romanian government in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks to support U.S. interests have been “almost too numerous to list”.

When the government was toppled in 1989, many Romanian people looked to the U.S. government as a source of hope. They were convinced that the years of austerity were finally over. Some believed that now, they too would have access to abundant consumer goods and an American lifestyle.

This false image of abundance was intentionally cultivated by the imperialists to weaken the Socialist Bloc. If the imperialists could convince workers in socialist states that the U.S. was the “land of opportunity,” they could seriously weaken the stability of socialism. Defeat of the socialists in the cultural war was an important factor in the overthrow of socialist governments.

Faced with the daunting task of industrializing agrarian societies, socialist governments in addition had to produce consumer goods for its population while under technological and economic embargo, and under constant threat of nuclear annihilation. Furthermore, they had to do this within the span of just decades. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, had enriched themselves through centuries of capitalist exploitation, including the enslavement of millions of Africans and the Indigenous.

History did not cease in 1989. Capitalism’s restoration in Romania and the former Socialist Bloc has brought with it all its inherent contradictions. It is bound to reignite mass struggle. The words of the socialist Internationale, written 150 years ago and translated into nearly every language, continue to inspire the fight of the oppressed for emancipation: “The earth shall rise on new foundations; we have been naught, we shall be all.”

Select Bibliography

Marcy, Sam. “Reactionary Coup in Romania”. 4 Jan. 1990. Workers’ World. www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/marcy/1990/sm900104.html. Accessed 16 Dec 2019

Oțetea, Prof. Andrei. A Concise History of Romania. English edition edited by Andrew MacKenzie. London, Unified Printers and Publishers. 1985.

Rotaru, Constantin. Socialism și capitalism în teorie și practică fiscală. Editura Karta-Graphic. Ploiești, 2011.

Serban, Rodica. “A Grand, Historic Accomplishment of the People, for the People––New Modern Homes”. Scînteia. 7 Apr 1989. Quoted in JPRS Report: Eastern Europe. Foreign Broadcast Information Service.

Capitalism and Mental Health

By David Matthews

Originally published at Monthly Review.

A mental-health crisis is sweeping the globe. Recent estimates by the World Health Organization suggest that more than three hundred million people suffer from depression worldwide. Furthermore, twenty-three million are said to experience symptoms of schizophrenia, while approximately eight hundred thousand individuals commit suicide each year.1 Within the monopoly-capitalist nations, mental-health disorders are the leading cause of life expectancy decline behind cardiovascular disease and cancer.2 In the European Union, 27.0 percent of the adult population between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five are said to have experienced mental-health complications.3 Moreover, in England alone, the predominance of poor mental health has gradually increased over the last two decades. The most recent National Health Service Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey illustrates that in 2014, 17.5 percent of the population over the age of sixteen suffered from varying forms of depression or anxiety, compared to 14.1 percent in 1993. Additionally, the number of individuals whose experiences were severe enough to warrant intervention rose from 6.9 percent to 9.3 percent.4

In capitalist society, biological explanations dominate understandings of mental health, infusing professional practice and public awareness. Emblematic of this is the theory of chemical imbalances in the brain—focusing on the operation of neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine—which has gripped popular and academic consciousness despite remaining largely unsupported.5 Moreover, reflecting the popularity of genetic reductionism within the biological sciences, there has been an effort to identify genetic abnormalities as another cause of mental-health disorders.6 Nonetheless, explanations based on genomics have also failed to generate conclusive evidence.7 While potentially offering illuminating insights into poor mental well-being in specific cases, biological interpretations are far from sufficient on their own. What is abundantly clear is the existence of significant social patterns that elucidate the impossibility of reducing poor mental health to biological determinism.8

The intimate relationship between mental health and social conditions has largely been obscured, with societal causes interpreted within a bio-medical framework and shrouded with scientific terminology. Diagnoses frequently begin and end with the individual, identifying bioessentialist causes at the expense of examining social factors. However, the social, political, and economic organization of society must be recognized as a significant contributor to people’s mental health, with certain social structures being more advantageous to the emergence of mental well-being than others. As the basis on which society’s superstructural formation is erected, capitalism is a major determinant of poor mental health. As the Marxist professor of social work and social policy Iain Ferguson has argued, “it is the economic and political system under which we live—capitalism—which is responsible for the enormously high levels of mental-health problems which we see in the world today.” The alleviation of mental distress is only possible “in a society without exploitation and oppression.”9

In what follows, I briefly sketch the state of mental health in advanced capitalism, using Britain as an example and utilizing the psychoanalytical framework of Marxist Erich Fromm, which emphasizes that all humans have certain needs that must be fulfilled in order to ensure optimal mental health. Supporting Ferguson’s assertion, I argue that capitalism is crucial to determining the experience and prevalence of mental well-being, as its operations are incompatible with true human need. This sketch will include a depiction of the politically conscious movement of users of mental-health services that has emerged in Britain in recent years to challenge biological explanations of poor mental health and to call for locating inequality and capitalism at the heart of the problem.

Mental Health and Monopoly Capitalism

In the final chapters of Monopoly Capital, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy made explicit the consequences of monopoly capitalism for psychological well-being, arguing that the system fails “to provide the foundations of a society capable of promoting the healthy and happy development of its members.”10 Exemplifying the widespread irrationality of monopoly capitalism, they illustrated its degrading nature. It is only for a fortunate minority that work can be considered pleasurable, while for the majority it is a thoroughly unsatisfactory experience. Attempting to avoid work at all costs, leisure frequently fails to offer any consolation, as it is also rendered meaningless. Rather than being an opportunity to fulfill passions, Baran and Sweezy argued that leisure has become largely synonymous with idleness. The desire to do nothing is reflected in popular culture, with books, television, and films inducing a state of passive enjoyment rather than demanding intellectual energies.11 The purpose of both work and leisure, they claimed, largely coalesces around increasing consumption. No longer consumed for their use, consumer goods have become established markers of social prestige, with consumption as a means to express an individual’s social position. Consumerism, however, ultimately breeds dissatisfaction as the desire to substitute old products for new ones turns maintaining one’s position in society into a relentless pursuit of an unobtainable standard. “While fulfilling the basic needs of survival,” Baran and Sweezy argued, both work and consumption “increasingly lose their inner content and meaning.”12 The result is a society characterized by emptiness and degradation. With little likelihood of the working class instigating revolutionary action, the potential reality is a continuation of the “present process of decay, with the contradictions between the compulsions of the system and the elementary needs of human nature becoming ever more insupportable,” resulting in “the spread of increasingly severe psychic disorders.”13 In the current era of monopoly capitalism, this contradiction remains as salient as ever. Modern monopoly-capitalist society continues to be characterized by an incompatibility between, on the one hand, capitalism’s ruthless pursuit of profit and, on the other, the essential needs of people. As a result, the conditions required for optimum mental health are violently undermined, with monopoly-capitalist society plagued by neuroses and more severe mental-health problems.

Erich Fromm: Mental Health and Human Nature

Baran and Sweezy’s understanding of the relationship between monopoly capitalism and the individual was significantly influenced by psychoanalysis. For one, they made references to the centrality of latent energies such as libidinous drives and the need for their gratification. Moreover, they accepted the Freudian notion that social order requires the repression of libidinal energies and their sublimation for socially acceptable purposes.14 Baran himself wrote on psychoanalysis. He had been associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in the early 1930s and was directly influenced by the work of Eric Fromm and Herbert Marcuse.15 It is within this broad framework that a theory of mental health can be identified in Baran and Sweezy’s analysis, with the contradictions between capitalism and human need expressing themselves chiefly through the repression of human energies. It was Fromm, most notably, who was to develop a unique Marxist psychoanalytical position that remains relevant to understanding mental health in the current era of monopoly capitalism. And it was from this that Baran, in particular, was to draw.16

While making explicit the importance of Sigmund Freud, Fromm acknowledged his greater debt to Karl Marx, considering him the preeminent intellectual.17 Accepting the Freudian premise of the unconscious and the repression and modification of unconscious drives, Fromm nonetheless recognized the failure of orthodox Freudianism to integrate a deeper sociological understanding of the individual into its analysis. Turning to Marxism, he constructed a theory of the individual whose consciousness is shaped by the organization of capitalism, with unconscious drives repressed or directed toward acceptable social behavior. While Marx never produced a formal psychology, Fromm considered that the foundations of one resided in the concept of alienation.18 For Marx, alienation was an illustration of capitalism’s mortifying physical and mental impact on humans.19 At its heart, it demonstrates the estrangement people feel from both themselves and the world around them, including fellow humans. Alienation’s specific value for understanding mental health lies in illustrating the distinction that emerges under capitalism between human existence and essence. For Marx, capitalism separates individuals from their essence as a consequence of their existence. This principle permeated Fromm’s psychoanalytic framework, which maintained that, under capitalism, humans become divorced from their own nature.

Human nature, Marx argued, consists of dual qualities and we “must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch.”20 There are needs that are fixed, such as hunger and sexual desires, and then there are relative desires that originate from the historical and cultural organization of society.21 Inspired by Marx, Fromm argued that human nature is inherent in all individuals, but that its visible manifestation is largely dependent on the social context. It is untenable to assume “man’s mental constitution is a blank piece of paper, on which society and culture write their text, and which has no intrinsic quality of its own.… The real problem is to infer the core common to the whole human race from the innumerable manifestations of human nature.”22 Fromm recognized the importance of basic biological needs, such as hunger, sleep, and sexual desires, as constituting aspects of human nature that must be satisfied before all else.23 Nonetheless, as humans evolved, they eventually reached a point of transcendence, from the animal to the uniquely human.24 As humans found it increasingly easier to satisfy their basic biological needs, largely as a result of their mastery over nature, the urgency of their satisfaction gradually became less important, with the evolutionary process allowing for the development of more complex intellectual and emotional capacities.25 As such, an individual’s most significant drives were no longer rooted in biology, but in the human condition.26

Considering it imperative to construct an understanding of human nature against which mental health could be evaluated, Fromm identified five central characteristics of the human condition. The first is relatedness. Aware of being alone in the world, humans strenuously endeavor to establish ties of unity. Without this, it is intolerable to exist as an individual.27 Second, the dominance of humans over nature allows for an easier satisfaction of biological needs and for the emergence of human aptitudes, contributing to the development of creativity. Humans developed the ability to express a creative intelligence, transforming this into a core human characteristic that requires fulfillment.28 Third, humans, psychologically, require rootedness and a sense of belonging. With birth severing ties of natural belonging, individuals constantly pursue rootedness to feel at one with the world. For Fromm, a genuine sense of belonging could only be achieved in a society built on solidarity.29 Fourth, humans crucially desire and develop a sense of identity. All individuals must establish a sense of self and an awareness of being a specific person.30 Fifth, it is psychologically necessary for humans to develop a framework through which to make sense of the world and their own experiences.31

Representing what Fromm argued to be a universal human nature, the satisfaction of these drives is essential for optimum mental well-being. As he contended, “mental health is achieved if man develops into full maturity according to the characteristics and laws of human nature. Mental illness consists in the failure of such development.”32 Rejecting a psychoanalytical understanding that emphasizes the satisfaction of the libido and other biological drives, mental health, he claimed, is inherently associated with the satisfaction of needs considered uniquely human. Under capitalism, however, the full satisfaction of the human psyche is thwarted. For Fromm, the origins of poor mental health are located in the mode of production and the corresponding political and social structures, whose organization impedes the full satisfaction of innate human desires.33 The effects of this on mental health, Fromm argued, are that “if one of the basic necessities has found no fulfillment, insanity is the result; if it is satisfied but in an unsatisfactory way…neurosis…is the consequence.”34

Work and Creative Repression

Like Marx, Fromm asserted that the instinctual desire to be creative had the greatest chance of satisfaction through work. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx strenuously argued that labor should be a fulfilling experience, allowing individuals to be freely expressive, both physically and intellectually. Workers should be able to relate to the products of their labor as meaningful expressions of their essence and inner creativity. Labor under capitalism, however, is an alienating experience that estranges individuals from its process. Alienated labor, Marx contended, is when “labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being…therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind.”35 Under capitalism, great efforts are made to ensure human energy is channeled into labor, even though it is often miserable and tedious.36 Rather than satisfying the need to express creativity, it frequently represses it through the monotonous and grueling obligation of wage labor.37

In Britain, there is widespread dissatisfaction with work. One recent survey of employees conducted in early 2018 estimated that 47 percent would consider looking for a new job during the coming year. Of the reasons given, a paucity of opportunities for career advancement was prominent, along with not enjoying work and employees feeling like they do not make a difference.38 These reasons begin to illustrate an entrenched alienation from the labor process. Many people experience work as having little meaning and little opportunity for personal fulfillment and expression.

From such evidence, a claim can be made that in Britain—as in many monopoly-capitalist nations—a substantial portion of the labor force feels disconnected from their work and does not consider it a creative experience. For Fromm, the realization of creative needs are essential to being mentally healthy. Having been endowed with reason and imagination, humans cannot exist as passive beings, but must act as creators.39 Nevertheless, it is clear that work under capitalism does not achieve this. Considerable evidence suggests that far from being beneficial to mental health, work is actually detrimental to it. Although the exact figures are likely to remain unknown due to the intangibility of such experiences, it can be inferred that, for many members of the labor force, it is commonplace for work to provoke general unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and despondency. Moreover, more severe mental-health conditions, such as stress, depression, and anxiety, are increasingly emerging as the consequences of discontentment at work. In 2017–18, such conditions constituted 44 percent of all work-related ill health in Britain, and 57 percent of all workdays lost to ill health.40 An additional study in 2017 estimated that 60 percent of British employees had suffered work-related poor mental health in the past year, with depression and anxiety being some of the most common manifestations.41

Rather than a source of enjoyment, the nature and organization of work under capitalism clearly does not act as a satisfactory means to fulfill an individual’s creativity. As Baran and Sweezy argued, “the worker can find no satisfaction in what his efforts accomplish.”42 Instead, work alienates individuals from a fundamental aspect of their nature and, in so doing, stimulates the emergence of varying negative states of mental health. With around half of the labor force in Britain having experienced work-related mental-health issues, and many more likely feeling a general sense of despondency, there exists what Fromm termed a socially patterned defect.43 It is no exaggeration to argue that the deterioration of mental well-being is a standard response to wage labor in monopoly-capitalist societies. Negative feelings become commonplace and, to varying degrees, are acknowledged as normal reactions to work. With the exception of severe mental-health disorders, many forms of mental distress that develop in response are taken for granted and not considered legitimate problems. As such, the degradation of mental well-being is normalized.

Meaningful Association and Loneliness

For Fromm, there existed an inherent relationship between positive mental health, meaningful personal relationships in the form of both love and friendship, and expressions of solidarity. Acutely aware of their “aloneness” in the world, individuals attempt to escape the psychological prison of isolation.44 Nonetheless, the operation of capitalism is such that it frequently prevents the satisfactory fulfillment of this need. The inadequacy of social relationships within monopoly-capitalist societies was identified by Baran and Sweezy. They argued a frivolity had descended over much social interaction, as it became typified by superficial conversation and a falsity of pleasantness. The emotional commitments required for friendship and the intellectual efforts needed for conversation were made largely absent as social interaction became increasingly about acquaintances and small talk.45 Contemporary monopoly capitalism is no exception. While difficulties in measuring its existence and nature abound, arguably one the most widespread neuroses to plague present-day capitalism is loneliness. It is increasingly considered a major public-health concern, perhaps most symbolically evident with the establishment of a Minister for Loneliness in 2018 by the British government.

As a neurosis, loneliness has debilitating consequences. Individuals may resort to alcohol and drug abuse to numb their misery, while persistent experience increases blood pressure and stress, as well as negatively impacts cardiovascular and immune-system functioning.46 A mental-health condition in its own right, loneliness exacerbates additional mental-health problems and is often the root cause of depression.47 In 2017, it was estimated that 13 percent of individuals in Britain had no close friends, with a further 17 percent having average- to poor-quality friendships. Moreover, 45 percent claimed to have felt lonely at least once in the previous two weeks, with 18 percent frequently feeling lonely. Although a close, loving relationship acts as a barrier to loneliness, 47 percent of people living with a partner reported feeling lonely at least some of the time and 16 percent often.48 Reflecting the dominant scientific constructs of mental health, recent efforts have been made to identify genetic causes of loneliness, with environmental conditions said to exacerbate an individual’s predisposition to it.49 However, even the most biologically deterministic analyses concede that social circumstances are important to its development. Nonetheless, few studies attempt to seriously illustrate the extent to which capitalism is a contributing factor.

Individualism has always reigned supreme as a principle upon which the ideal capitalist society is constructed. Individual effort, self-reliance, and independence are endorsed as the hallmarks of capitalism. As understood today, the notion of the individual has its origins in the feudal mode of production, and its emphasis on greater collectivist methods of labor—such as within the family or village—being surrendered to the compulsion of individuals, who have to be free to sell their labor power on the market. Prior to capitalism, life was conducted more as part of a wider social group, while the transition to capitalism developed and allowed for the emergence of the isolated, private individual and the nuclear, increasingly privatized family.50 Fromm contended that the promotion and celebration of the virtues of the individual means that members of society feel more alone under capitalism than under previous modes of production.51 Capitalism’s exaltation of the individual is made further apparent by its potent opposition to the ideals of collectivism and solidarity, and preference and incentive for competition. Individuals, it is said, must compete with each other on a general basis to enhance their personal development. More specifically, competition is, economically, one of the bases on which the market operates and, ideologically, corresponds to the widespread belief that, to be successful, one must compete with others for scarce resources. The consequence of competition is that it divides and isolates individuals. Other members of society are not considered as sources of support, but rather obstacles to personal advancement. Ties of social unity are therefore greatly weakened. Thus, loneliness is embedded within the structure of any capitalist society as an inevitable outcome of its value system.

Not only is loneliness integral to capitalist ideology, it is also exacerbated by the very functioning of capitalism as a system. As a result of capitalism’s inexorable drive for self-expansion, the growth of production is one of its elementary characteristics. Having become an axiomatic notion, rarely is the idea of expanded production challenged. The human cost of this is crippling as work takes precedence over investing in social relationships. Furthermore, neoliberal reforms have left many workers with progressively more precarious jobs and less protections, guaranteed benefits, and hours of employment—all of which have only aggravated loneliness. Amplifying the proletarianization of the labor force, with ever-more workers existing in a state of insecurity and experiencing increased exploitation, the centrality of work has become greater as the threat of not having a job, or being unable to secure an adequate standard of living, has become a reality for many in a “flexible” labor market.52 Individuals have no choice but to devote more time to work at the expense of establishing meaningful relationships.

The growing attention given to work can be illustrated in relation to working practices. Despite the fact that the average length of the working week increased in Britain following the financial crisis of 2007–09, the broader picture over the last two decades has officially been one of decline. Part-time workers, however, have witnessed the number of hours they work increase, along with the number of part-time jobs. Additionally, between 2010 and 2015, there was a 15 percent rise in the number of full-time members of the labor force working more than forty-eight hours per week (the legal limit; additional hours must be agreed upon by employer and employee).53 Furthermore, in 2016, one employee survey illustrated that 27 percent worked longer than they would like, negatively impacting their physical and mental health, and 31 percent felt that their work interfered with their personal life.54 Significantly, loneliness is not just a feature of life outside of work, but a common experience during work. In 2014, it was estimated that 42 percent of British employees did not consider any coworker to be a close friend, and many felt isolated in the workplace.

Greater engagement in productive activities at the expense of personal relationships has been labeled the “cult of busyness” by psychiatrists Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz.55 While they accurately identify this trend, they nonetheless evaluate it in terms of workers freely choosing such a life. This elides any serious criticisms of capitalism and the reality that the cult of busyness has largely been an outcome of the economic system’s inherent need for self-expansion. Furthermore, Olds and Schwartz fail to accept the trend as a reflection of the structural organization of the labor market, which makes more work a necessity instead of a choice. The avoidance of loneliness and the search for meaningful relationships are fundamental human desires, but capitalism suppresses their satisfactory fulfillment, along with the opportunities to form common bonds of love and friendship, and to work and live in solidarity. In response, as Baran and Sweezy argued, the fear of being alone drives people to seek some of the least fulfilling social relationships, which ultimately result in feelings of greater dissatisfaction.56

Materialism and the Search for Identity and Creativity

For monopoly capitalism, consumption is a vital method of surplus absorption. In the era of competitive capitalism, Marx could not foresee how the sales effort would evolve both quantitatively and qualitatively to become as important for economic growth as it has.57 Advertising, product differentiation, planned obsolescence, and consumer credit are all essential means of stimulating consumer demand. At the same time, there is no shortage of individuals willing to consume. Alongside the acceptance of work, Fromm identified the desire to consume as an integral characteristic of life under capitalism, arguing it was a significant example of the uses to which human energies are directed to support the economy.58

With consumer goods valued for their conspicuity rather than their intended function, people have gone from consuming use values to symbolic values. The decision to engage in popular culture and purchase a type of automobile, brand of clothing, or technological equipment, among other goods, is frequently based on what the product is supposed to convey about the consumer. Frequently, consumerism constitutes the principal method through which individuals can construct a personal identity. People are emotionally invested in the meanings associated with consumer goods, in the hope that whatever intangible qualities items are said to possess will be passed on to them through ownership. Under monopoly capitalism, consumerism is more about consuming ideas and less about satisfying inherent biological and psychological needs. Fromm contended that “consumption should be a concrete human act in which our senses, bodily needs, our aesthetic taste…are involved: the act of consumption should be a meaningful…experience. In our culture, there is little of that. Consuming is essentially the satisfaction of artificially stimulated phantasies.”59

The need for identity and creative fulfillment encourages an insatiable appetite to consume. Each purchase, however, regularly fails to live up to its promise. Rarely is satisfaction truly achieved through consumption, because what is being consumed is an artificial idea rather than a product that imbues our existence with meaning. In this process, consumerism as a form of alienation becomes evident. Instead of consuming a product designed to satisfy inherent needs, consumer goods exemplify their synthetic nature via their manufactured meanings and symbolisms, which are designed to stimulate and satisfy a preplanned response and need.60 Any identity a person may desire, or feel they have obtained, from consuming a product, as well as any form of creativity invoked by a consumer good or item of popular culture, is false.

Rather than cultivating joy, the affluence of the monopoly-capitalist nations has bred a general widespread dissatisfaction as high value is placed on amassing possessions. While consumerism as a value exists in all capitalist societies, in those of greater inequality—with Britain displaying wider wealth disparities than most—the desire to consume and acquire greatly contributes to the emergence of neuroses, as the effort to maintain social status and emulate those at the top of society becomes an immense strain. The impact of this has been demonstrated within British families in recent years. In 2007, UNICEF identified Britain as having the lowest level of child well-being out of twenty-one of the most affluent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development nations. In response, an analysis of British families was conducted in 2011 comparing them to those in Spain and Sweden, countries that ranked in the top five for child well-being.61

Of the three nations, the culture of consumerism was greatest in Britain, as it was prevalent among all families regardless of affluence. British parents were considered more materialistic than their Spanish and Swedish counterparts and behaved accordingly toward their children. They purchased the most up-to-date, branded consumer goods, largely because they thought it would ensure their child’s status among their peers. This was a value shared by the children themselves, with many accepting that social prestige was based on ownership of branded consumer goods, which, evidence suggests, contributed to arising worry and anxiety, especially for children from poorer households who recognized their disadvantage. While a compulsion to purchase new goods continuously for themselves and their children was identified among British parents, many nonetheless also felt the psychological strain of attempting to maintain a materialistic lifestyle and caved to such pressures. Across all three countries, children identified the needs for their own well-being as consisting of quality time spent with parents and friends, and opportunities to indulge their creativity, especially through outdoor activities. Despite this, the research showed that, in Britain, many were not having such needs satisfied. Parents struggled to spend enough time with their children due to work commitments and often prevented them from participating in outdoor activities due to safety concerns. Subsequently, parents compensated for this with consumer goods, which largely failed to meet their children’s needs. As such, the needs of British children to form and partake in meaningful relationships and act creatively were repressed, and efforts to satisfy these needs through consumerism failed to bring them happiness.

Resistance as Class Struggle

While not denying the existence of biological causes, the structural organization of society must be recognized as having serious repercussions on people’s mental health. Monopoly capitalism functions to prevent many from experiencing mental well-being. Yet, despite this, the medical model continues to dominate, reinforcing an individualistic conception of mental health and obscuring the detrimental effects of the present mode of production. This oppresses users of mental-health services by subordinating them to the judgment of medical professionals. The medical model also encourages the suspension and curtailment of individuals’ civil rights if they experience mental distress, including by legitimizing the infringement of their voluntary action and excluding them from decision-making. For those who suffer mental distress, life under capitalism is frequently characterized by oppression and discrimination.

Aware of their oppressed status, users and survivors of mental-health services are now challenging the ideological dominance of the medical model and its obfuscation of capitalism’s psychological impact. Furthermore, they are increasingly coalescing around and putting forward as an alternative the need to accept the Marxist-inspired social model of mental health. The social model of disability identifies capitalism as instrumental to the construction of the category of disability, defined as impairments that exclude people from the labor market. Adopting a broadly materialist perspective, a social model of mental health addresses material disadvantage, oppression, and political exclusion as significant causes of mental illness.

In 2017 in Britain, the mental-health action group National Survivor User Network unequivocally rejected the medical model and planted social justice at the heart of its campaign. As part of its call for a social approach to mental health, the group explicitly denounces neoliberalism, arguing that austerity and cuts to social security have contributed to the increasing prevalence of individuals who suffer from poor mental health as well as to the exacerbation of existing mental-health issues among the population. Recognizing social inequality as a contributor to the emergence of poor mental health, National Survivor User Network proposes that the challenge posed by mental-health service users should be part of a wider indictment of the general inequality in society, arguing that “austerity measures, damaging economic policies, social discrimination and structural inequalities are causing harm to people. We need to challenge this as part of a broader social justice agenda.”62 Furthermore, the action group Recovery in the Bin positions itself and the wider mental-health movement within the class struggle, pushing for a social model that recognizes capitalism as a significant determinant of poor mental health. Moreover, representing ethnic minorities, Kindred Minds vigorously campaigns on an understanding that mental distress is less a result of biological characteristics and more a consequence of social problems such as racism, sexism, and economic inequality “pathologised as mental illness.”63 For Kindred Minds, the catalyst for deteriorating mental health is oppression and discrimination, with ethnic minorities having to suffer greater levels of social and economic inequality and prejudice.

Capitalism can never offer the conditions most conducive to achieving mental health. Oppression, exploitation, and inequality greatly repress the true realization of what it means to be human. Opposing the brutality of capitalism’s impact on mental well-being must be central to the class struggle as the fight for socialism is never just one for increased material equality, but also for humanity and a society in which all human needs, including psychological ones, are satisfied. All members of society are affected by the inhumane nature of capitalism, but, slowly and determinedly, the fight is being led most explicitly by the most oppressed and exploited. The challenge posed must be viewed as part of the wider class struggle, as being one front of many in the fight for social justice, economic equality, dignity, and respect.

David Matthews is a lecturer in sociology and social policy at Coleg Llandrillo, Wales, and the leader of its degree program in health and social care.

Notes

1. ↩ World Health Organization, Fact Sheets on Mental Health (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2017), http://who.int.

2. ↩ World Health Organization, Data and Resources (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2017), http://euro.who.int/en.

3. ↩ World Health Organization, Data and Resources.

4. ↩ Sally McManus, Paul Bebbington, Rachel Jenkins, and Traolach Brugha, Mental Health and Wellbeing in England: Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey 2014 (Leeds: NHS Digital, 2016).

5. ↩ Brett J. Deacon and Dean McKay, “The Biomedical Model of Psychological Problems: A Call for Critical Dialogue,” Behavior Therapist 38, no. 7 (2015): 231–35. Pharmaceutical companies who have identified it as a market opportunity have been the primary beneficiaries of this approach, exemplified by the proliferation of anti-depressants as illustrated by Brett J. Deacon and Grayson L. Baird, “The Chemical Imbalance Explanation of Depression: Reducing Blame at what Cost?,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 28, no. 4 (2009): 415–35.

6. ↩ As exemplified by Jordan W. Smoller et al., “Identification of Risk Loci with Shared Effects on Five Major Psychiatric Disorders: A Genome-Wide Analysis,” Lancet 381, no. 9875 (2013): 1371–79. In this study, five of the most common mental-health disorders, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression, were associated with genetic variations.

7. ↩ Deacon and McKay, “The Biomedical Model of Psychological Problems,” 233.

8. ↩ Social class is one of the most significant indicators of mental health, as evidenced by research within the social sciences dating back to the earlier part of the twentieth century. The first most notable study of this kind is Robert E. L. Farris and Henry W. Dunham, Mental Disorders in Urban Areas (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1939), which identified higher rates of mental disorders in the poorest districts of Chicago. This was followed by, among others in both Britain and the United States, August B. Hollingshead and Frederick C. Redlich, Social Class and Mental Illness (New York: John Wiley, 1958); Leo Srole, Thomas S. Langer, Stanley T. Michael, Marvin K. Opler, and Thomas A. C. Rennie, Mental Health in the Metropolis: The Midtown Manhattan Study (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962); and John J. Schwab, Roger A. Bell, George J. Warheit, and Ruby B. Schwab, Social Order and Mental Health: The Florida Health Study (New York: Brunner-Mazel, 1979).

9. ↩ Iain Ferguson, Politics of the Mind: Marxism and Mental Distress (London: Bookmarks, 2017), 15–16.

10. ↩ Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), 285.

11. ↩ Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 346–47.

12. ↩ Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 346.

13. ↩ Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 364.

14. ↩ Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 354–55.

15. ↩ Paul A. Baran, The Longer View (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 92–111; Paul M. Sweezy, “Paul A. Baran: A Personal Memoir,” in Paul A. Baran: A Collective Portrait (New York: Monthly Review Press, 32–33. The unpublished chapter of Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital, entitled “The Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society II,” drafted by Baran, had included an extensive section on mental health. That chapter, however, was not included in the book because it was still unfinished at the time of Baran’s death. Nevertheless, some elements of the mental-health argument were interspersed in other parts of the book. When “The Quality of Monopoly Capitalism II” was finally published in Monthly Review in 2013, almost sixty years after it was drafted by Baran, the section on mental health was excluded due to its incomplete character. See Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, “The Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society: Culture and Communications” Monthly Review 65, no. 3 (July–August 2013): 43–64. It is worth noting that the treatment of mental health in Monopoly Capital did not go unnoticed and was subject to criticism by Robert Heilbroner in a review in the New York Review of Books, to which Sweezy responded in a letter, defending their analysis in this regard. See Robert Heilbroner, Between Capitalism and Socialism (New York: Vintage, 1970), 237–46; Paul M. Sweezy, “Monopoly Capital” (letter), New York Review of Books, July 7, 1966, 26.

16. ↩ The influence of Fromm is evident in Baran’s work and correspondence. He studied Fromm’s The Sane Society, together with Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization and One Dimensional Man (in manuscript form). He was undoubtedly familiar with the wider body of work by both thinkers. While Baran was not in complete agreement with the details of Marcuse’s analyses, he openly acknowledged the importance and significance of his work, identifying Eros and Civilization as having great relevance to U.S. society and recognizing a psychoanalytical analysis as vital to understanding monopoly-capitalist society. See Nicholas Baran and John Bellamy Foster, The Age of Monopoly Capital: Selected Correspondence of Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, 1949–1964 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 127, 131. See also the “Baran-Marcuse Correspondence,” Monthly Review Foundation, https://monthlyreview.org.

17. ↩ Erich Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Freud and Marx (London: Continuum, 2009), 7.

18. ↩ Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, 35.

19. ↩ Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in a Capitalist Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 131.

20. ↩ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (1867; repr. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), 571.

21. ↩ Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 23–24.

22. ↩ Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (London, Routledge, 2002), 13.

23. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 65.

24. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 22.

25. ↩ Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, 27.

26. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 27.

27. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 28–35.

28. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 35–36.

29. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 37–59.

30. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 59–61.

31. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 61–64

32. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 14.

33. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 76.

34. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 66.

35. ↩ Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1932; repr. Radford, Virginia: Wilder Publications, 2011).

36. ↩ Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, 63.

37. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 173.

38. ↩ Investors in People, Job Exodus Trends: 2018 Employee Sentiment Poll (London: Investors in People, 2018), http://investorsinpeople.com.

39. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 35.

40. ↩ Health and Safety Executive, Work Related Stress, Depression or Anxiety Statistics in Great Britain, 2018 (Bootle, UK: Health and Safety Executive, 2018), 3, http://hse.gov.uk.

41. ↩ Business in the Community, Mental Health at Work Report 2017 (London: Business in the Community, 2017), http://bitc.org.uk.

42. ↩ Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 345.

43. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 15.

44. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 29.

45. ↩ Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 347–48.

46. ↩ Jo Griffin, The Lonely Society? (London: Mental Health Foundation, 2010), 6–7.

47. ↩ Griffin, The Lonely Society?, 4

48. ↩ David Marjoribanks and Anna Darnell Bradley, You’re Not Alone: The Quality of the UK’s Social Relationships (Doncaster: Relate, 2017), 17–18.

49. ↩ Luc Goossens, Eeske van Roekel, Maaike Verhagen, John T. Cacioppo, Stephanie Cacioppo, Marlies Maes, and Dorret I. Boomsma, “The Genetics of Loneliness: Linking Evolutionary Theory to Genome-Wide Genetics, Epigenetics, and Social Science,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 10, no 2 (2015): 213–26.

50. ↩ Michael Oliver, The Politics of Disablement (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Press, 1990); Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life (London: Pluto Press, 1976).

51. ↩ Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, 93.

52. ↩ See Ricardo Antunes, “The New Service Proletariat,” Monthly Review 69, no. 11 (April 2018): 23–29, for an analysis of the evolving insecurity of labor markets within the advanced capitalist nations and the hardening of proletarian divisions.

53. ↩ Trade Union Congress, “15 Per Cent Increase in People Working More than 48 Hours a Week Risks a Return to ‘Burnout Britain’, Warns TUC,” September 9, 2015; Josie Cox, “British Employees are Working More Overtime than Ever Before—Often for No Extra Money,” Independent, March 2, 2017.

54. ↩ David Marjoribanks, A Labour of Love—or Labour Versus Love?: Our Relationships at Work; Relationships and Work (Doncaster: Relate, 2016).

55. ↩ Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz, The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009).

56. ↩ Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 347–48.

57. ↩ Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 115.

58. ↩ Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, 63.

59. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 129-130.

60. ↩ Robert Bocock, Consumption (London: Routledge, 2001), 51.

61. ↩ United Nations Children’s Fund, Innocenti Report Card 7: Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries (Florence: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, 2007), http://unicef-irc.org.

62. ↩ National Survivor User Network, NSUN Manifesto 2017: Our Voice, Our Vision, Our Values, (London: National Survivor User Network, 2017), http://nsun.org.uk.

63. ↩ Raza Griffiths, A Call for Social Justice: Creating Fairer Policy and Practice for Mental Health Service Users from Black and Minority Ethnic Communities (London: Kindred Minds, 2018).

Never Forget the Real MLK

As our state-sponsored celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. commences, let’s not forget some important facts about this great man:

1. He was against the Vietnam War during a time when many Americans were not. Decades later, this view against the war has developed into a mainstream narrative, but in the 1960s, those who spoke out and marched against it (students, Civil Rights leaders) and refused to serve (Muhammad Ali) were beaten, hosed down, killed, and jailed. He would undoubtedly be railing against the US imperialist state and its perpetual war machine today

2. He condemned issues like poverty, inequality, and racism as systemic ills, not merely individual shortcomings. To this day, such broad analyses (those touching on capitalism and white supremacy) are rejected and disregarded by most as “fringe” or “too radical.” In this way, Dr. King would still be viewed as “too radical” by the current mainstream media (the same folks who whitewash and co-opt his legacy, and then celebrate this watered-down version of the man).

3. He was hated and despised by a majority of white America. In 1966, he had a 63 percent negative poll rating. He had rocks thrown at his head and was routinely spat on during marches. This hatred still exists today. Simply turn on TV stations or radio shows or peruse social media comments to see how black liberation movements are ridiculed, loathed, and detested by the thousands. Nazis and white supremacists are marching in US streets and congregating on social media. There is no doubt that Dr. King would be on the front lines of current movements; and, therefore, would still take the brunt of this hatred, ignorance, and disrespect - even today.

4. He was considered to be “an enemy of the state” by various government agencies. The FBI tapped his phone calls, blacklisted him as a “suspected Communist,” and sent anonymous letters demeaning him and encouraging him to commit suicide. Various levels of the government, from the FBI to the Memphis Police Dept, have been found to have some involvement in his death.

5. He initiated the “Poor People’s Campaign” and put forth an economic and social bill of rights that espoused “a national responsibility to provide work for all.” Dr. King advocated for a jobs guarantee and would end unemployment by requiring the government to provide jobs to anyone who could not find one. The bill of rights also included “the right of every citizen to a minimum income," regardless of whether they are employed. Today, these proposals would be laughed at by media pundits, and he would be written off as "crazy" by many of the same folks who pretend to celebrate him.

6. He supported the Planned Parenthood Federation and believed that things like “family planning and contraception” should be fully funded by the government – ideas that are despised by modern conservatives who have no shame in calling on their whitewashed version of Dr. King’s legacy to use for their own agendas.

Celebrating Dr. King’s life and role in the struggle is important, but learning and considering the real man and his real ideas is even more crucial in a time that still needs them.

Let’s celebrate Dr. King for who he really was: a radical people’s champion who confronted the power structure, faced down the defenders of this structure, challenged capitalism, challenged poverty, challenged white supremacy, challenged militarism and war, and challenged the status quo that engulfs all of these elements – a status quo that still exists. A status quo that now shamelessly co-opts his legacy for its own use.

Never Forget.

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.