Learning Marx in the Podcast Era: A Review of “Reading ‘Capital’ with Comrades”

By Peter McLaren

Karl Marx’s Capital is a book that keeps me going, thinking, organizing, writing, teaching; it’s a book that might even keep me alive. The trenchant analysis, the clarity of the exposition, and most importantly the insights that are crucial to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism energize me. It’s a book that radically transformed my own life, one that made me move from working toward “social justice” and within “critical pedagogy” to working toward communism and within “revolutionary critical pedagogy,” a praxis I and comrades have been developing for over two decades now. Reading Capital with Comrades, a new Liberation School podcast series — now available on Spotify, Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, and other platforms — advances that project in significant ways. It’s an amazing offering to not only revolutionary critical pedagogy and education, but the overall struggle to overthrow the capitalist mode of production and institute a new one that is organized for people and the earth, not for the profits. The class series makes the book incredibly accessible but—and this is an important qualifier—without sacrificing any of the richness of the text.

The series consists of 12 episodes that go through each chapter from beginning to end. Derek Ford, a revolutionary Marxist organizer and one of the brightest minds and leading figures in radical educational theory, teaches the entire course. It’s intimate, as if he’s in the room speaking with you. This is no doubt due to the high production quality, with superb audio mixing by Nic de la Riva, editorial direction by Mike Prysner, original music and sounds by Anahedron, and the show’s host and listener advocate, Patricia Gorky. Her introductory remarks to each episode are clarifying and encouraging, and she interjects throughout the episodes with questions that help the listener better grasp the more difficult concepts and their applications.

Peter McLaren

Even though I’ve extensively written about, taught, studied, and discussed the book—along with companions, commentaries, extensions, and debates about it—Reading Capital with Comrades still helped me uncover new ideas and applications in Marx’s magnum opus. This is because the course takes the same standpoint that allowed Marx to write the book in the first place: that of the oppressed and exploited. In the first episode, Ford emphasizes this when discussing the afterword to the 2nd German edition, where Marx insists that “so far as such criticism represents a class, it can only represent the class whose vocation in history is the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the final abolition of all classes—the proletariat.” [1] The standpoint isn’t that of an isolated academic idealist, but a fighter for liberation. As someone who's spent a life in the university, it’s refreshing and rare. In my own academic career, I’ve had to struggle not only against the myriad of “progressive” anti-Marxists but also the armchair Marxists who critique without investigation and action. As Ford observes in episode 8 on technology, Marx approached the Luddite movement with revolutionary optimism. He understood the reasons they attacked machinery and the capitalists producing it, and asserted that experience eventually taught them the correct enemy: the capitalist system. Similarly, being educated in the 1980s I was initially a “critical postmodernist.” It was through befriending Paulo Freire in 1994, learning from Marxists like Paula Allman and Glenn Rikowski, and working with the Bolivarian government, Zapatistas, and various social movements that my own realizations came about.   

The 1990s were a period of intense reaction. In the first episode, Ford cites Brian Becker’s thesis about the break in ideological continuity in the U.S. Becker writes that “The greatest danger to a revolutionary process is not the experience of a political downturn, such as we have experienced during the past decades. In fact, it is not uncommon at all for the working-class movement to experience periods of decline, setback and retreat. If one examines the history of the class struggle, the periods of downturn and reaction are more common than revolutionary advances.” [2] Instead, the main obstacle is the fact “that revolutionary Marxism and the very idea that the working and oppressed classes can take power is no longer prominent in the movement and that many activists and fighters today are no longer familiar with Marxism.” That’s what I’ve dedicated the last decades of my life to, and I’m ecstatic that we’re advancing step by step. When I embraced Marxism, many attacked me for “economic reductionism” or ignoring identities. But even before I was a Marxist I was working against identity-based oppression. What Marxism did was let me see that we can take power and change society. [3]

Overview

This podcast makes an enormous contribution to that task. Let’s be real: Capital is a long and dense book written in specialized and dated language. It’s hard to read. Yet it’s also a lively read once you get past the first few chapters, and Gorky’s supportive introductions really make you feel like you can do it. Both Gorky and Ford remind us, too, that we shouldn’t expect to understand everything. We just keep pushing through. In episodes 2 and 3 we cover these rich but dense chapters with contemporary examples to help us relate it to today. In episode 2 we also get Marx’s first sketch of a possible communist future—a thread Ford weaves throughout the entire class. This sketch is of freely associated laborers working in common and thus, according to a centralized plan. This tension—between freedom and centralization—will return throughout the series. [4]

In episode 4 we move on to the search for surplus-value, which brings us to episode 5 where Mr. Moneybags finds that special commodity of labor-power, special in that its use value is that it produces value and special in that its part of actual people. This is a foundational contradiction of capitalism: it needs labor-power but it can only acquire it through actual people. Episode 6 is all about chapter 10, that glorious exposition on the class struggle. What’s noteworthy here is how Ford attends to the dual function of the state Marx articulates: that it manages inter-class and intra-class conflicts; how the ability to command time is central to the struggle; the way capital transforms and exacerbates slavery and colonialism in capitalism, and the call for such a modest reform at the end. He asks us to keep this in mind for our later episodes. The next episodes, which cover chapters 11-15, show how capitalism comes to stand on its own feet as a mode of production, how the means of production in handicraft and manufacture lag behind the capitalist relations of production, and then how machinery transforms capitalism into a proper mode of production. The key here is that with machinery dead labor rules over living labor and, as such, capital’s dictatorship strengthens. Yet so too does resistance. Class struggle frames the development of technology. Yet we also pay attention to Marx’s articulated historical materialist approach to technology in a footnote, with Ford providing another contemporary example, this time of noise-cancelling headphones.

Episode 9 covers chapters 16-22, where Ford clarifies Marx’s oft-misunderstood definition of productive labor and how it relates to organizing and then transitions from the value of labor-power to its wage forms. In addition to revealing the ideological role that wages play in capitalism–what Ford calls a “wage fetish”–we think through different forms of wages and the distinct functions each form embodies for capitalists and workers in the class struggle. We learn how piece and time wages embody different strategic function and agitational possibilities for both classes before looking briefly on national differences in wages and the relevance this has for analyzing imperialism and international trade.

Episode 10: Reproduction

Episode 10 is on reproduction, chapters 23 and 24, the build-up to Marx’s big look at capitalist production as a whole. What I found most intriguing here was how reproduction lets us see that the reproduction of capital is the reproduction of the class relationship and that the working class—even those unemployed—are still essential to capital. Ford returns us to the definition of productive labor here as an opening to social reproduction theory. And episode 11 is the main event in many ways: the general law of capitalist accumulation, which Ford tells us should be called the general laws, because Marx mentions two: the general law (pursuit of surplus-value) and the absolute general law (the production of unemployment), all while emphasizing these are tendencies or laws that vary. This episode also provides the clearest explanation of the different compositions of capital, and Ford is also intent on showing how Marx includes everyone oppressed and exploited under capitalism as part of the proletarian class, an exposition that clarifies the relationship between anti-colonial and socialist revolutionary projects.

Then we get to the end, the last episode that covers chapters 26-33. Here we get Marx’s critique of the capitalist ideologue’s notion of primitive accumulation and his demonstration that the capitalist mode of production was founded on force: the individual and state-sanctioned thefts of land, the repression (including incarceration, whipping, branding, and execution) of the dispossessed, slavery, and colonialism. Along the way, Marx presents a brief but important summary/overview of the rise of capitalism and the potential rise of socialism, as well as some quick hints about what exactly revolution might entail—and how it relates to the reform proposed in chapter 10. Noting that Marx never relegated this form of accumulation to a bygone era, we go over some examples of how it shows up today and how it continues to be important to capitalism. Finally, Ford proposes that the reason Marx ends with a rather dull examination of a theory of colonialism is because he anticipated capital’s transition into imperialism.

Revolutionary critical pedagogy

Revolutionary critical pedagogy operates from an understanding that the basis of education is political and that spaces need to be created where students can imagine a different world outside of capitalism’s law of value (i.e., social form of labor), where alternatives to capitalism and capitalist institutions can be discussed and debated, and where dialogue can occur. It’s not just about critique, but about imagination and experiencing that we’re more than the skills capital demands, more than the commodity of labor-power. It’s about realizing that we’re not exchangeable. It’s a pedagogical project that can happen in different spaces (classrooms, streets, protests) and times (lunch breaks, classes, when the moon’s visible). It is theoretical and practical, contingent and necessary. [5]

Reading Capital with Comrades is, in my estimation, a manifestation of this pedagogy. It focuses on analysis, imagination, and the daily struggles of the international working class. There are other podcasts and videos and guides out there, but they’re generally academic or lacking a revolutionary perspective. They’re about understanding and analyzing. This podcast is about transformation. It’s about discovering that within capitalism grows the proletarian class that can abolish capitalism and, with it, class society as a whole. It’s organized around a revolutionary perspective, which means it embodies and spreads the belief in the necessity of revolution. Go listen to it today and I guarantee you’ll not only learn something new, but gain new insights on how to apply that new knowledge to the struggles of the day—the tactics, strategies, goals, programs, alliances, slogans, and more. and more importantly, you’ll be motivated to hit the streets. Go over to Liberation School today!

Notes

[1] Karl Marx, Capital: A critique of political economy (Volume 1: An analysis of capitalist production), trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1867/1967), 25-6.

[2] Brian Becker, “Theory and revolution: Addressing the break in ideological continuity,” Liberation School, September 28, 2016, https://liberationschool.org/theory-and-revolution-addressing-the-break-of-ideological-continuity.

[3] See, for example, Peter McLaren, Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the pedagogy of revolution (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).

[4] See also Derek R. Ford, “Making Marxist pedagogy magical: From critique to imagination, or, how bookkeepers set us free,” Critical Education, 8(9), 1-13.

[5] Marc Pruyn, Curry Malott, and Luis Huerta-Charles, eds. Tracks to infinity, the long road to justice: The Peter McLaren reader, volume II. Charlotte: Information Age Publishing, 2020.

Peter McLaren is Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire Democratic Project and International Ambassador for Global Ethics and Social Justice. In 2005, a group of scholars and activists in Northern Mexico established La Fundacion McLaren de Pedagogía Critica to develop a knowledge of McLaren's work throughout Mexico and to promote projects in critical pedagogy and popular education. On September 15, 2006 the Catedra Peter McLaren was inaugurated at the Bolivarian University of Venezuela.

American Antipodes: Tales of Discord and Unity

By Jason Hirthler

A few weeks ago an image surfaced on social media. It featured three convergent triangles, their central nexus including parts of all three. Each triangle represented a prominent characteristic of what the right call, “Mask Nazis.” The first triangle represented the virtue signaler aspect of this group. Millions of social selfies feature individuals with their masks over their mouths, or lately their arms bandaged after their vaccine shot. The second triangle represented the patronizing element of the group, when they indicate they are “more informed and intelligent” than you. The final triangle represented the martyrdom mentality of the group, in which they claimed to be masking and vaccinating on your behalf, not theirs.

The Backstory

It is admittedly an amorphous and inexact thing to use the word, “right” to describe the community of people that would like the above diagram, versus the community of those who would revile it. But more than ever in modern memory the sides have been starkly divided. It was partially initiated by the Gingrich ‘revolution’ in the late 90s when Republicans adopted an attitude of intransigence and noncompliance toward their Democratic colleagues, an attitude sparked largely by a deep-seated antipathy and animus for Bill Clinton. Clinton had used his ‘triangulation’ model to successfully appropriate Republican policy positions and claim them as his own. This was part of Clinton’s effort to penetrate the deep-pocketed donor class that has previously been the province of the conservative right. It worked and Clinton shifted the Democrats away from a party that at least plausibly represented the working class toward one that served monied constituencies and retained only a patina of pathos for empty-handed workers. This led to the Republican revolt.

The presidency of George Bush further divided a once-collegial Congress and its national segments of popular support. The 2000 election scandal, 9/11, the Iraq War, Afghanistan, the 2004 election, climate change, the collapse of the housing market all provided blistering talking points for liberals and conservatives as they blamed one another for these traumatizing events.

The presidency of Barack Obama further polarized the left from right, when shrieking Tea Party zealots, in an eerie foretaste of resistance liberals, clamored for their guns, sure that the Hawaiian-born Obama was a closet Marxist Muslim scheming to infect America with theocratic socialism. But it was the election of Donald Trump that delivered the hammer blow to any thoughts of reconciliation. The Covid19 pandemic that followed at the end of the Trump era gave the citizenry fuel to continue the partisan bickering once Trump had been ejected from the Oval Office, to the delight of 80 million, the fury of 75 million, and the frustrated resignation of the rest. 

Now, Joe Biden has assumed the mantle of power, and opened his presidency by supposedly dashing off 72 revisions to Trump’s egregious policies. It’s all enough to convince even the most cursory observer that the left and the right are eternal enemies.

Perceptions of Fascism and Mutual Complicity

Searching Google’s text corpora through its Ngram Viewer reveals that the usage of the word ‘facism’ has seen a 100 percent rise this century in American English. This will surprise few, but questions of what fascism is and who embodies it will immediately trigger quarreling between left and right. For the liberal and left sides of the spectrum (they are not the same), Donald Trump is the de facto embodiment of modern fascism. For the right and libertarian side of the spectrum (they are not the same), fascism is better represented by censorious tech monopolies and the global public health apparatus that has led the battle against the coronavirus.

Could both sides have a point? Not if you ask either side. A recent poster on leftist Twitter warned of the dangers of dramatically dichotomizing the left/right ideological divide and argued that neither side had a monopoly on truth. Many readers liked a reply that dismissively claimed that “yeah, no, the right is categorically wrong on [just] about everything.”

But might it be true that neoliberalism, a class-based project to dismantle representative government, as described by David Harvey, is fascist at its core and animites Trump Republicans but alo Biden Democrats?

An article by Joshua Briond published by the Hampton Institute makes the interesting observation that, “The misunderstanding of fascism begins with the deliberate political positioning of [neo]liberalism as in opposition or an alternative to the fascist order.” This false opposition expects to see an older, imagined fascist order (principally Nazism or Italian fascism with its telltale nationalistic trappings) rather than what some describe as a corporate fascist order that exists now in less visibly overt fashion.

As Briond continues, “It has never been more apparent that liberal democrats are the stabilizers and upkeepers of fascist rule--who exist to provide an illusion of “opposition” to the material actualities and consequences of liberal democracy, western capital(ism), and the white power structure at-large--while actively upholding the neoliberal fascist order and inhibiting even the slightest possibilities of progress. Left radicals, or anyone who has divested from bourgeois electoralism, are constantly punched down on and condescended to for daring to demand more than mild concessions (“reforms” that’ll just be poked, prodded, weakened and rendered obsolete the moment the next Republican gets into office) and milquetoast, uninspiring, career-imperialist Democrat candidates.”

“The White liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative. The liberal is more hypocritical than the conservative. Both want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro’s friend and benefactor. And by winning the friendship, allegiance, and support of the Negro, the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or tool in this political ‘football game’ that is constantly raging between the white liberals and white conservatives.”

-        Malcolm X

Briond here unmasks the quiet complicity of liberals in the stabilizing of corporate fascism. This is partly owing to the fact that Boomer liberals, a huge contingent of the political active, see the values they sometimes bravely supported in the tumult of the Sixties--anti-racism, anti-war, anti-establishment--have been enshrined or otherwise spun by the establishment, cleverly enough to convince most liberals that their original war has been won. After all, we’ve had a black president, the #MeToo movement has outed countless misogynists in positions of power, gay rights are further along than we’d ever have imagined before Stonewall, and a new generation of Social Justice Warriors are manning the barricades of bigotry by the day.

Yet look at the subtlety with which an imperial capitalist establishment has incorporated these elements. Racism is alive and well. Blacks have a penny in a jar for every dollar in the calf-skinned wallet of a white man. Obama was only elected by internalizing the hegemonic ideals of establishment ideology. Jennifer Matsui notes how the #MeToo movement diverts attention from institutional foundations of sexism and retrains our focus on individual cases, which can be profitably resolved without addressing the larger structural barriers to equality of the sexes. Indeed, gays have made progress, but they are embraced by a corporate world that merely sees another wallet to mine. It makes no difference to WalMart whether the man or woman in the checkout line is LGBTQ+ or a racist cis homophobe. A dollar is a dollar.

What we see here is that the imperial establishment will actively co-opt any value set that does not meaningfully threaten its bottom line. If profits are unaffected, or if new revenue streams can be viably pioneered, a popular or trending movement will be absorbed by the corporate facist establishment for just that purpose.

Obscure and Abjure

This co-optation is mirrored in the identitarian politics that fuel the left-right divide and consume so much activist fuel. In the drafts for a lecture series that cultural theorist Mark Fisher was to give before his suicide in 2017, he unearthed the sinister root of the left-right war: it buried class as the bedrock subjugation on which all other forms of oppression were built.

“In disarticulating class from the identitarian struggles of the day, capitalism no longer appeared to be the enemy. We were, instead, all too prone to impotently turning on one another.”

He anticipated the lynch mob mentality of social media whose current dimensions Fisher himself might find unimaginable: “As individuals squabble over who has the most privilege on Twitter, for instance, turning on each other, the true enemy — capitalism itself — is left completely off the hook.”

This regrettable disarticulation of class leads well-intentioned citizens on left and right to battle over identity gains that, while often majestic and necessary, will doubtless founder on the shores of economic inequality. They do not cut into the profit potential of the monolithic imperial system that underpinned the identitarian subjection in the first place.

Undervalued, Overlooked

Briond returns to drive home this point about liberal complicity even as the state undermines the communities it campaigns on behalf of: “The fact that so much state-sanctioned violence, political repression, mishandling and neglect of the most marginalized--especially incarcerated, immigrant, and houseless populations--in the face of COVID-19, an ongoing housing crisis, unemployment, and economic turmoil, is happening in “liberal” cities and cities led by Democrats nationwide, should very much inform our understanding of the situation at hand.”

It is no small thing to point out that liberals typically have what appears to be a naive faith that the government cares about them, prioritizes their health above profits, that Big Pharma does the same (at least in times of crises), and that their cherished mainstream media would not knowingly deceive them. This despite the volumes of evidence that the government and media have wittingly lied to and misled populations for decades. (See Taking the Risk Out of Democracy and Manufacturing Consent for foundational works on media bias in favor of corporate interests.)

This almost surreal and childlike trust in the good intentions of government is reminiscent of Josef K., in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, who when arrested without apparent cause is relieved to finally have an opportunity to address himself to the chief inspector, fully confident this is a reasonable man with whom he will have a reasonable conversation, quickly resolving the misunderstanding of his arrest. The conversation quickly reveals to K. the confounding absurdity of the apparatus in which he is ensnared.

One might suspect this naive faith is the consequence of, as journalist Cory Moringstar has said, the monetization of left-liberal activism since the untutored riot of the Sixties. After which capital rightly surmised that activism ought not to be suppressed but co-opted. Hence the explosion of NGOs and their role as a kind of para-state reifying the conditions of the corporate state. Liberals have too much skin in the game to meaningfully resist. A rhetoric of empathy eases them into compliance.

The Invisible Horizon

Add to this domestic squall the almost incomprehensibly vast horizon of foreign aggressions perpetrated by a U.S. establishment whether led by Democrats or Republicans. Hence a scenario arises with Donald Trump repeating conjuring nationalistic and racist tropes reminiscent of the great fascist scourges of the 20th century, while at the same time the lockdown regimes cheered on by liberals and perpetrated by western governments in the name of public health have come to mirror characteristics of what one might call ‘public health fascism’ or ‘medical tyranny.’ In a further irony, Trump appeared to express a desire to continue to promote imperial hegemony and capitalist exploitation through the less public apparatus of drone war and special forces, much like Democrats have done.

“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

-        Abraham Lincoln, debate with Stephen Douglas, Sept. 18, 1858

End Games

If both left and right have been in some sense co-opted by the subtle ideology of the neoliberal establishment, is there not now reason to at least temporarily shelve the policy disputes that animate their hatred of one another, in the service of a collective effort to deny the realization of an authoritarian plutocracy as described above? Set aside the horizontal perspective of a left-right war and consider the world from the verticality of a top-down class war, that missing ingredient Fisher perceptively identified.

Yet the human urge to dichotomize and demonize is almost uncontrollable in our modern moment. Each side sees the other as a herd of rule breakers: conservatives break all the pandemic rules established to keep people safe; but in obeying these rules, liberals trash the bill of rights. In spite of, or amplified by, the relentless efforts of advertisers to sound social rallying cries meant to bring people together (while simultaneously opening their wallets), there now exists a continental divide between two halves of the country. It is a yawning crevice not likely to be mended by an American grit Bruce Springsteen Jeep commercial claiming that “the very soil we stand on is common ground,” as though sophomoric platitudes penned by 25-year old copywriters will heal us (but we can dream). Efforts like these only illuminate the abyss.

Violating the Myth

This is this collective void—a void of collective spirit—that Fisher laments. He argues that perhaps the ultimate subjugated group is “group consciousness,” that prevents the collective from seeing the totality of the system at large—capitalism—while at the same time being too divided to propose a full-scale replacement system.

As part of Fisher’s solution, he proposed “implementing a counterlibido to capitalist desire — a postcapitalist desire.” He was principally interested, “in the ways that radical political messages could be smuggled into collective consciousness through popular culture.” Considering that popular culture is where huge swathes of common opinion tend to coalesce around cultural figures and trends, it is an interesting proposition. After all, one simply can’t compete at the level of invective--the assembled armories of the mainstream media are too plentiful, ranged too far and wide, and are too able to actively suppress counter-narratives. And artificial cultural tropes spawned by Madison Avenue only salt the wound.

But what if Michael Jackson had been a communist? What if Elvis had befriended Castro? What if more films smuggled into the cinema the anti-consumerist manifesto of Fight Club? Could a graphic novel whose hero was a BIPOC socialist gain traction? One would expect the blind avarice of corporate capitalism to allow these ideas so long as the product produced significant return on investment. A recent graphic novel called The Ministry of Truth mines the deep vein of discontent with American media-propagated mythologies. It proposes that belief has more to do with reality than fact, a theme that is both comical and somehow true. It makes one think of how much more effective fiction might be than invective in a post-truth world.

Such works are at least potentially profitable avenues of discovery, their potential guided by their profit. (You see how even the language is co-opted.)

Paradoxically it seems to be the hidden factor of class that inhibits social cohesion around a narrative of collective uplift. As author John Steppling (frustratedly) noted on his excellent podcast Aesthetic Resistance, propaganda cuts across class lines. Workers are often hugely skeptical of MSM storylines. Haute bourgeoisie, white, liberal, educated professionals tend to buy the official line uncritically. A large up-from-below shift in consciousness, from individuated consumer desire to a potentially militant desire for collective prosperity, would doubtless frighten the haute bourgeoisie and elite capital into the kind of concessions obtained in the New Deal era. It has often struck me as not categorically necessary to take power--and that often wielding power beyond the official precincts is not a bad place to be. To be pitted against overwhelming odds is also of course the root scenario of great fiction.

Someone whose name I’ve forgotten once perceptively noted that communism out of power is galvanized by a collective vision that has a clear enemy that must be toppled for that vision to be realized. Once they’ve taken power, the original force of will continues for a time and produces great positive change, but as one generation slides into the next, the militancy and urgency of that original class consciousness bleeds out, lacerated by the very surplus it distributed. The material lived experience of the next generations is simply different than the original generation. The revolutionary urgency fades as a kind of bureaucratic and defensive mentality ascends. What is gained must be defended rather than gained.

One sees the same dynamic at work in capitalist societies. Small fledgling entrepreneurial businesses, always a few weeks away from running out of money, produce tremendous innovations in different industries and roar into market share and wealth on the backs of their inventions. But once they are market leaders, their entire attitude changes: they become principally interested in defending and growing market share, not through innovation, but through the mass dissemination of their original invention. They begin to act as border guards, patrolling the limits of their empire, ready to acquire and absorb any entrepreneurial challengers to their dominance. They become the staid, status-quo establishment they once sought to overthrow.

It is the same with politics. The principled antiwar activists and civil rights fighters from the Sixties made inroads into the national consciousness and won concessions from the establishment, but were then absorbed into it, undergoing a transformation that eventually spat out those longhairs and militant marchers as comfortable liberals who merely rehearsed a well-memorized lexicon of labor-friendly rhetoric, while the machinery of exploitation they once abhorred marches on under cover of the co-opted language of progressivism.

And so, staying out of power is perhaps a way to avoid the corruptions of power and retain the power of first principles, a persistent vital threat to authority, which must ultimately acknowledge that its power is, at best, nominal.

In that light, a bottom-up class consciousness aiming at collective prosperity could isolate the fake partisanship of the neoliberal duopoly as a permanent enemy of the people, exerting a permanent pressure and threat against it that would force the kinds of vast concessions necessary for it retain even a semblance of power. It would have to be a permanent threat in a way that taking power undoes. And perhaps that class consciousness is best transfused into the popular mind through scripts rather than screeds, drawn stories instead of funded studies. And best perpetuated by a marginal class far from the precincts of power, not the “rogue” vehicles sold to bourgeois families but rogue narrators wildly at odds with the fictions pumped out of the imperium. Apolitical and peripheral—a strange place to pen an origin story of revolution. But maybe not so strange in a cultural wasteland overrun with mainstream half-truth.

After all, until the war of the top against the bottom is recognized and the diversionary spectacle of right-left combat is set aside, we will continue on a horizontal plane, never climbing in metrics of prosperity or equality. Only by recognizing the ladder of prosperity has been kicked away—supposedly for our benefit—will we begin to invoke the “great weapon” of mass dissent, which is the hinge point of an awakening world.

Jason Hirthler is a writer, social critic, and veteran of the media industry. He has published widely on the progressive left including at Dissident Voice, The Greanville Post, and CounterPunch. His latest essay collection is The Conquest of Reality.

Automation Represents the Second — Not ‘Fourth’ — Industrial Revolution: Just as the First Necessitated Capitalism, the Second Necessitates Socialism

By Ted Reese

Republished from the author’s blog.

Humans have longed to be free from toil. The Greek poet Antipater, a contemporary of the Roman statesman Cicero, welcomed the invention of the water mill, which worked “without labour or effort”, as the foundation of a “Golden Age” and the liberator of slaves.

Now in the epoch of late-stage capitalism, after a long and painful evolutionary road, the possibility of a ‘post-work’ world — with the ongoing development of robotic machinery, artificial intelligence (AI) and other forms of increasingly sophisticated automation — seems like a tangible reality. Decades of relatively small, quantitive innovations (with computing power, for example, tending to double every two years) have led up to a point now promising huge qualitative technological leaps.

At the same time, the global workforce has been increasingly ‘deindustrialised’ — moved from manufacturing to services. The proportion of manufacturing workers in the total workforce in the US fell from 26.4% in 1970 to 8.51% in 2018.[2] Even Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa have been deindustrialising in the past decade, from a much lower starting point than Asia.[3] Whereas industrialisation peaked in western European countries at income levels of around $14,000, India and many Sub-Saharan African countries appear to have reached their peak manufacturing employment at income levels of $700 (both at 1990 levels).[4]

As McKinsey Global Institute Director James Manyika said in June 2017: “Find a factory anywhere in the world [our emphasis] built in the past five years — not many people work there.”

The ‘fourth’ industrial revolution?

The bourgeois (capitalist) narrative trumpets the automation revolution as the ‘fourth’ industrial revolution.[5] Is this accurate?

The evolution of production is a process of developing man’s mastery over nature, of harnessing nature to serve our needs. New technologies give rise to new needs. For centuries — comprising the primitive communal, slave-owning and feudal systems — manual labour determined the technological basis of society. As the continual improvements and specialisations of the implements of labour reached their limits and slavery and feudalism became fetters (restraints) on the further development of the productive forces (technology and humans) as a whole, mechanisation (machine-aided production) necessarily replaced manual labour. Man was no longer the source of power which wielded the implements of labour.

Consolidating capitalist relations of production, this was the first industrial revolution — it marked a radical change in the technological mode of production, i.e. the mode of combining man and technology. Where man had controlled and wielded the inanimate elements of work, machines now dictated the inputs of man and relieved him as, in Marx’s words, “chief actor”;[6] but, in creating a division of labour, did not free him. “The hand tool makes the worker independent — posits him as proprietor. Machinery — as fixed capital — posits him as dependent, posits him as appropriated.”[7]

Dominant versions of history tell the story that — since it was the most obvious contrast between machine production and the handicrafts and ordinary manufacture of small ‘cottage industry’ workshops — the upgrade of the steam engine made by Scottish engineer James Watt around 1775 was the fundamental catalyst of the first industrial revolution. By extension, it was considered the primary factor behind the rise of British capitalism and the ensuing industrial and economic dominance of its Empire. All thanks to the supposed individual genius of Watt (or was it his ‘Britishness’?).

This is an example of idealism, the theory that man’s ideas or ever-improving rationality determine the course of history. Marx’s method of dialectical materialism — that history is driven by ongoing conflict or interaction between material and social forces — enables the understanding of history per se, rather than individual versions of it. (Indeed, it also explains man’s ever-improving rationality.) That it was Watt who made this innovation is merely a ‘historical accident’ — if he had never been born someone else would have realised this inevitable evolutionary development.

Behind this ‘accident’ lay the driving necessity to develop machinery and liberate industry from the confines imposed by nature in terms of a power source. The development of steam power removed the reliance on water power and therefore enabled industry to be moved to other locations more freely. With steam power, the primary factor became access to coal, the source of the energy needed to generate steam, which in turn enabled greater access to coal. With the development of electrical power, industry was further liberated, and has therefore invariably moved to wherever the cheapest labour can be found.

The origins of the steam engine can actually be traced back to the ancient Greek mathematician Hero of Alexandria. Within a system of slavery, though, it could not be utilised. Marx therefore argues:

“The steam-engine itself, such as it was at its invention during the manufacturing period at the close of the 17th century, and such as it continued to be down to 1780, did not give rise to any industrial revolution. It was, on the contrary, the invention of machines that made a revolution in the form of steam engines necessary. As soon as man, instead of working on the object of labour with a tool, becomes merely the motive power of a machine, it is purely accidental that the motive power happens to be clothed in the form of human muscles; wind, water or steam could just as well take man’s place.”[8]

In his 1967 book Era of Man or Robot? The Sociological Problems of the Technical Revolution, Russian Soviet philosopher Genrikh Volkov writes that what made an industrial revolution for Marx

“pivoted on finding the correct methodological approach. His examination focused on changes in the joint working mechanism and the combination of the inanimate and human elements of the process of production. Whether the machine is driven by an animal, a man or steam, Marx showed, is immaterial. The source of power, being part of the machine, only serves the system of working machines.”[9]

What is defined as the second industrial revolution by bourgeois scholars was therefore merely the ongoing development of the first. Taking place in the decades before World War I, it saw the growth of existing industries and establishment of new ones, with electric power enabling ever-greater mass production. Major technological advances included the telephone, light bulb, phonograph and the internal combustion engine.

The ongoing digital revolution — with the emergence of digital record-keeping, the personal computer, the internet, and other forms of information and communications technology — is considered to be the third industrial revolution. This is, perhaps, more arguable. The instruments described certainly amplify man’s mental capacity. But the digital revolution is a technological revolution and actually part of the automation revolution; not an industrial revolution by itself:

“Mechanisation begins with the transference to technology of basic physical working functions, while automation begins when the basic ‘mental’ functions in a technological process actually materialise into machines. This becomes possible with the appearance in production of supervising, controlling or programming cybernetical installations.”[10]

The productivity of machines is slowed down by the physiological limits of human bodies, and so automation becomes necessary; man is increasingly excluded from direct production and now works alongside fully mechanised machines, calling forth a radical change in the man-technology relationship. As Marx said of automation:

“Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself.”[11]

This therefore means that capitalism “works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production,”[12] says Marx, since capital’s exploitation of human labour is the source of profit and exchange-value (the worker keeps less value than they create, with the surplus value appropriated by the capitalist and realised as profit through commodity sales).

The point of automation, therefore, says Volkov,

“should be to remove the contradiction between the inanimate and human elements, between man and machine, to break the shackle that made man and machine a single working mechanism, to act as Hercules setting Prometheus free to perform his great deeds. Potentially, automation can enable man to become Man with a capital letter, and the machine to become Machine in the full sense of the word. Freedom for man’s development is, at the same time, freedom for technological progress.”[13]

Defining automation

In Automation and Social Progress (1956), English socialist Sam Lilley defined automation provisionally as “the introduction or use of highly automatic machinery or processes which largely eliminate human labour and detailed human control”.[14]

The term is of course applied to a very broad field ranging from semi-automatic machinery to automatic factories. These are qualitatively different notions and so must be understood carefully. Volkov writes:

“Semi-automatic technology (semi-automatic machine-tools and lines, so-called cyclic automatons) represents a transitional form from ordinary to automatic machines. In this form, ‘automation’ is usually affected by mechanical means without, as a rule, recourse to cybernetical devices. The worker is still directly included in the process, which he supplements with his nervous system, intellect and, partly, muscular energy (loading and unloading of machines). At this stage, the new technology does not yet constitute automation proper and lacks its most characteristic features. As a matter of fact, semi-automatic technology stretches to the limit the adverse aspects of mechanisation by simplifying things still more, robbing working operations of all their creative content and contributing to their further fragmentation.”[15]

Automation proper can therefore be subdivided into three stages:

1. Initial or partial automation (separate machine-tools fitted with programme control, separate cybernetically controlled automatic lines). Here, the worker has relative freedom of action. They are included in the process only in so far as their duties include the overall supervision of operations, maintenance and adjustment of the machines.

2. Developed automation, e.g., automatic factories equipped with overall electronic control of all production processes, regulation of equipment, loading and unloading, transportation of materials, semi-finished and finished products. In this stage of automation the worker takes no direct part in the production process.

3. Full automation, which ensures automatic operation of all sections of production, from planning to delivery of finished products, including choice of optimum conditions, conversion to a new type of product, and auto-planning in accordance with a set programme. The planning of production as a whole and the overall control of its operation are also to a considerable extent transferred to automatic installations. “Automation of this kind is equivalent to automatic production on the scale of the entire society,” says Volkov. “Here, not only the labour of workers, but that of technicians and, to a considerable extent, of engineers as well, is excluded from the direct technological process. This does not mean, of course, that such work disappears altogether. It is only shifted to another sphere, becomes more creative and closer related to scientific work.”[16]

Base and superstructure

Under capitalism in the first part of the 21st century, we are still a fair way from achieving a singular fully automated system of production (The production process includes the transport of commodities to the point of sale/consumption, so workers who transport commodities (such as Deliveroo and other courier drivers) and check-out/till-point workers add value to a commodity. Drones, autonomous vehicles and self-serving tills are therefore automating the last stage of production.) That does not mean we are not moving relatively rapidly towards that outcome or witnessing an industrial revolution. McKinsey and Co expects “the near-complete automation of existing job activities” somewhere between 2060 and 2100, with the “most technologically optimistic” scenario putting the date at 2045.[17]

The first industrial revolution began before and necessitated the rise of capitalism (the printing press being the first generalised example of machine-aided mass production), just as the second begins before and necessitates the rise of socialism.

Marx recognised that the technological-economic base of a society determines its political and class superstructure. (Although the two of course interact and influence each other, the former dominates.) An industrial revolution has far-reaching consequences that go beyond the framework of technology and even beyond that of material production.

The first affected the character of labour (manual to mechanised); social structure (artisan and peasant turning into worker/proletarian);[18] the correlation of economic branches (agriculture being supplanted by industry); and, finally, the political and economic field (capitalist relations superseding feudal relations). Volkov spells out the most characteristic features of the second industrial revolution.

1) The production of material wealth has a tendency to turn into fully automated production “on a society-wide scale”. The second industrial revolution therefore “marks the completion of the establishment of industry”. At first, large-scale machine industry had a relatively limited area of diffusion, having taken the place of handicrafts and ordinary manufacture. But with the second industrial revolution, “industrialisation tends to spread also to the whole of agriculture, beginning with mechanisation, followed by comprehensive mechanisation and, eventually, by automation. Industrialisation is spreading to house-building, distribution, the community services (eg public catering) and even intellectual, scientific work. In this way, industry becomes the universal form of producing material wealth.”

2) While the first industrial revolution was local in character, being limited to a few developed European countries, the second industrial revolution “tends to involve all the countries of the world” as newly industrialising countries begin by installing the most up-to-date industrial equipment involving comprehensive mechanisation and automation. “This presents features of the first and second industrial revolutions at one and the same time. Consequently, the second industrial revolution is global in character, laying the groundwork for a subsequent economic and social integration of nations.”[19] (Our emphasis .)

3) The modern industrial revolution leads to substantial structural changes in the various spheres of social activity. Because of the ever-decreasing need for manpower for material production, scientific production increases both quantitatively and qualitatively and tends to assume priority over the direct production of material wealth. “Hence, science is the helmsman of the modern industrial revolution.”[20]

4) The dominant feature of the automation revolution concerns its social implications. As we know, the first industrial revolution led to the consolidation of capitalist exploitation. Large-scale industry spelt wholesale ruin for artisans and peasants, longer working hours, intensification of labour and narrow specialisation (the breaking down of the production process into a series of repetitive, monotonous tasks). In contrast, the modern industrial revolution in the socialist nations “leads to a shortening of working hours, an easing of labour, a modification of its nature (work becoming more creative and free), and to the elimination of the essential distinctions between town and countryside, and between mental and manual labour. While yielding the industrial basis for an abundance of material wealth and to distribution according to need, it also opens up possibilities for unlimited spiritual improvement of man’s personality.”

Volkov adds:

“The second industrial revolution resolves the contradiction between the machines and those who operate them, i.e. the contradiction within the joint working mechanism. By completing the automation of production, it paves the way for the implementation of the principles of socialist humanism in society. Hence, the very logic of the second industrial revolution strengthens man’s personality and humanism.

“In capitalist countries, however, this logic and the above-mentioned features of the second industrial revolution contradict the very essence of the relations of exploitation. All the same, mechanised labour gives way to automation, the antithesis between mental and physical labour tends to disappear. And the cultural and technical standard of the workers tends to rise. Substantial changes also occur in the social structure and in the relation between the various economic branches. In other words, many of the essential elements of an industrial revolution are distinctly on hand.

“The fundamental difference between the revolution in capitalist countries and its counterpart in the socialist states consists in its leading to the breakdown, [our emphasis] instead of the consolidation, of the existing relations under the conditions of the private ownership of the means of production. The modern industrial revolution has strained to the utmost all the contradictions of capitalism…. It does not reform capitalism. Instead, it creates the material preconditions for a social revolution and paves the way for the eventual replacement of capitalist relations of production by communist relations.”[21]

The automation revolution cannot be consummated under capitalism — socialism must be established to finish what capitalism started.[22]

The technological determinists who see automation as the ‘fourth’ industrial revolution do not put the development of technology in its proper socio-historical context, but instead in isolation from the human component of the productive forces. They fail to see “the genuine dialectics [interactions] of the forces and relations of production, [and] deny the inverse influence of the relations of production on the productive forces and the development of science and technology”.[23]

Recap

To summarise: over many centuries, manual labour determined the technological basis of society. The technological mode of production, the mode of combining inanimate and human elements, was subjective.

The next stage, paved by the specialisation of implements in manufacture, began when the main working function — control of partial implements — of the ‘living mechanism’, the worker, transferred to the mechanical mechanism, the machine. From human-inanimate, the working mechanism became inanimate-human. The technological mode of production became objective and labour became mechanised. This is then the first industrial revolution.

Finally, the third historical stage in technological development is ushered in by automation. The working mechanism becomes fully technical and the mode of combining man and technology becomes free and labour itself is automated. This then is the second industrial revolution.

Marxists therefore reject the bourgeois definition that posits the automation revolution as the fourth industrial revolution.

Towards a Single Automatic System

The maturity of technology that socialism will inherit in the 21st century means that the problems of planning associated with the 20th century Soviet Union will be much easier to overcome. (Indeed, in hindsight it is arguable that the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 proved to be somewhat ‘premature’, given that the Bolsheviks thought capitalism was entering its final crisis at that time.)[24] Thanks to contemporary computing power, ‘big data’ and stock coding, the dominant ‘command and control’ military style planning that overlooked the finer details is no longer necessary.

As Volkov writes:

“Let us anticipate the future and suppose that it has attained its zenith and that its characteristic features… have reached full development. We shall then have a society with fully automated production of material wealth, ensuring abundance. Such production will form a Single Automatic System which, for the sake of maximum efficiency, will incorporate all the branches of industry and agriculture, centrally controlled according to a single plan.

“From the social point of view, this will be a single society, because there will no longer be any workers or peasants previously associated solely with physical labour, and because the distinction between mental and manual labour, and between town and countryside, will have vanished. Creative work incorporating intellectual, emotional and manual activities will predominate. The life of society will be governed by the laws of free, instead of working, time, and so on.”[25]

The direction of history towards turning world productivity into a Single Automatic System shows that the final stage of socialism before the higher stage of communism is a de facto single world state. To get there each nation-state obviously needs to become socialist, with its own governing structure and centrally planned system working towards full automation in that country. A Communist International would be required to oversee development and trade between each socialist state — making sure, for one thing, that the plan incentivises the sharing of technologies and material wealth (including human resources) — which would act with the same semi-autonomy in relation to the International as a region of a country does to its central government or a state to federal level (or a local soviet to its regional soviet, and so on).

As this system develops, the Single Automatic System and a de facto one-state world would come into being, with borders being rejected as fetters on productivity — there being no transfer of ownership when it comes to trade in a socialist political union, anyway — and individual nation-states withering away in all but regional name.

We can see then that, whereas capitalism in the long run has a historically centralising tendency, socialism in the long run has a historically decentralising tendency. This then is the path to a borderless, stateless world, not the fantasy anarchist one, which, with its desire to introduce federations of fully autonomous communes, would effectively introduce new borders and undermine internationalism. The necessary aim of communism is to unite — to un-divide — the working class and humanity as a whole.

Conclusion

The essential point that must be grasped about automation is that it is abolishing the source of profit and exchange-value, i.e. capital’s exploitation of commodity-producing labour. This process is not reversible. Innovation and the tendency for machinery to grow relative to labour continues throughout history, under any mode of production. Under capitalism, the process is driven by the needs of capital accumulation.

Commodity-producers must continually expand production to overcome the inherent contradiction contained in the commodity: it is both a use-value, a utility; and an exchange-value, containing surplus value and sold for profit. The quicker and more abundantly commodities are made, the less labour, exchange-value and therefore profit tends to be contained in each commodity, compelling the capitalist to expand production yet further, only to continually intensify the contradiction. All production under capitalism is governed by this, the law of (exchange-)value.

This contradiction is also expressed in an overaccumulation of capital (a surplus that cannot be (re)invested profitably, resulting also in the equivalent surplus labour (unemployment)) and a contraction in economic output. This is at the same time an underproduction in surplus value. The necessary reaction for capital is to expand and cheapen the labour base and raise its productivity through innovation, only to increase the underproduction of surplus value in the long-run, since the amount machinery and capital employed tends to rise relative to the total surplus-value-producing labour employed.

Commodity-producers continually have to attract greater investment to turn a profit. As a company gets bigger, though, its costs get larger and more unsustainable, and so greater profits need to be generated than before (hence the dominant tendency towards the ever-greater monopolisation of industry, for economies of scale (efficiency)).

Since wages eat into thinning profit margins, expenditure on wages must be slashed. Robots do not need toilet/rest/lunch breaks, sick or holiday pay, and are therefore much more productive and cheaper to employ. (There is no such thing as ‘technological unemployment’, though; people go unemployed when capital can no longer afford to employ them (so socialism, capable of permanent full employment, would take advantage of automated production by training and employing far more scientists, doctors, teachers, etc). Even police and soldiers, who do not produce surplus value and are therefore paid out of the surplus produced by commodity-producing workers, are increasingly being replaced by surveillance technology and autonomous weapons, since one effect of shrinking profit margins is shrinking government tax bases, at least in relative terms per capita.)

Innovation is necessary to continually raise the productivity of labour, to meet the demands of accumulation — only the size of the ever-expanding total capital eventually becomes too large for the ever-dwindling pool of surplus-value-producing labour to renew and expand. The underproduction of surplus value becomes insurmountable. The system comes up against a historical limit of accumulation and breaks down into barbarism, necessitating socialist revolution.[26] Indeed, interest,[27] GDP and general profit rates have all trended historically towards zero,[28] along with commodity prices.[29]

As with previous modes of production, the contradictions between the productive forces (the means of production) and the productive relations (the ownership of production) are being driven into irreconcilable conflict by sheer historical force. While this contradiction has always been expressed under capitalism by the private appropriation of the products of collective, socialised labour, it is now increasingly expressed by automated labour and a diminishing source of profit, tending ever-closer towards the self-abolition of the law of value.

Just as capitalism matured in the womb of feudalism through the concentration of industry, socialism has matured in the womb of capitalism through the further concentration and monopolisation of industry and the deindustrialisation, servicisation, automation and digitalisation of labour. The new technological-economic base demands a new, applicable superstructure; ie public ownership of the means of production; an all-socialist state (a people’s democratic republic); centrally planned production on a break-even basis; and the replacement of money by digital (non-transferable) vouchers pegged to labour time.

Indeed, fiat money is becoming more and more worthless — pound sterling having lost more than 99.5% of its purchasing power during its lifetime, for example. Worldwide hyperinflation is already on the horizon.[30]

The age-old arguments about which system works better, capitalism or socialism, are quite redundant — the answer has of course always been socialism, but the point that now has to be stressed is that, for the first time, socialism is becoming an economic necessity.

As Volkov concludes:

“As the mass of exploited manual workers decreases due to scientific and technological progress, particularly automation, the mass of exploited intellectual workers, i.e. white collar employees, engineers and scientists [who increasingly contribute to commodity production] also increases in reverse proportion (or even more rapidly)…[31]

“Capitalism in the age of automation increasingly turns the majority of the population into proletarians and, in doing so, creates all economic, social and political prerequisites for the system’s downfall.”[32]

Ted Reese is author of Socialism or Extinction: Climate, Automation and War in the Final Capitalist Breakdown.

The Commercialization of Music: How Rock Lost Its Roll

By John Mac Ghlionn

For years now, the world of hip hop has received a lot of attention. From Kendrick Lamar’s lessons on humility, to Cardi B’s damp nether regions, to Lil Nas X’s molestation of Satan, hip hop is very much alive.

The same, sadly, can’t be said for the world of rock. It’s thirty years since the release of two of the finest rock albums ever created: The Black Album, Metallica’s magnum opus, and Nevermind, Nirvana’s work of existential art. In fact, 1991 was very much rock’s year. Pearl Jam released Ten, another thoroughly exceptional album; U2 released Achtung Baby; R.E.M released Out of Time; and Dinosaur Jr. released Green Mind.

Fans of rock were spoiled for choice.

Thirty years on, rock music is on life support, or maybe it’s dead. Who knows? A more gifted writer would surely insert a joke involving Schrodinger’s cat, but we have more pressing matters to discuss.

What happened to rock music? Well, to answer that question, one needs to ask another question: what are the ingredients needed to make great rock music?

Originality is a must.

Sadly, musicians are no longer awarded for originality. Today, as I have written elsewhere, an artist is more likely to be judged on the quality of their video, rather than the quality of their music.  Quality music takes time to write. Could the likes of “Sad but True” and “Nothing Else Matters,” two of the finest rock songs ever written, thrive in today’s market?

Perhaps, but I have my doubts, and these doubts are justified.

This is the attention economy, and our attention spans continue to shrink dramatically. To truly appreciate the artistry of a band like Metallica requires dedication and commitment. Most importantly, it requires a level of deep concentration. No distractions, just you and the band. Interestingly, songs are now well over a minute shorter in duration than they were two decades ago.

Furthermore, rock music requires an element of roguishness. The history of rock is replete with stories of musicians doing the wildest of things. Mötley Crue, Black Sabbath, Guns N Roses, to name just three bands, had reputations that preceded them, and these reputations, along with the music, helped cement their legacies.

Now, though, a “bad” reputation is no longer desirable, nor is it permissible. In March of this year, Mumford & Sons’ Winston Marshall announced that he would be stepping away from the band. Why? The banjoist praised a book authored by Andy Ngo, a controversial cultural commentator.

Today’s culture is tame and lame, and that’s a genuine shame.

However, there is also another factor at play, and it involves a dilution of authenticity. Let me explain.

In the world of rock, 1994 was the year things really started to change.  A handful of multinational companies took control of the music industry. Interestingly, the likes of Sony and EMD, two of the biggest players in the music industry, also had very close ties with the movie industry. All of a sudden, suit and tie executives were using different metrics to judge music.

In the animal kingdom, mutualism describes a type of mutually beneficial relationship between organisms of different species. By the mid-90s, mutualism was an integral part of the entertainment industry, with music and movies, and to a lesser extent TV, engaged in a symbiotic, commercially driven romance.

In 1995, Batman Forever became the highest grossing movie of the year. Of all the song’s to feature on the movie’s soundtrack, U2’s Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me was by far the most popular. Though it’s a fantastic song in its own right, it blurs the line between pop-rock and pure rock. Nevertheless, the success of the movie helped the song, and vice versa. This was commercial mutualism in its purest form. Movies and music had always enjoyed a relationship, but now they were inextricably linked.

However, what was good for profit wasn’t necessarily good for authentic artistry. The mid 90s, I argue, was when authentic artistry began to wither away.

It’s important to remember that moves like Mission Impossible (1996) and Independence Day (1996) were made with an international audience in mind.

This explains why soundtracks had a manufactured, generic sound. Nuance, the very thing that bands like Metallica and Pearl Jam prided themselves on, was rendered redundant. As music is a cultural carrier of sorts, it became much easier to sell movies with “safe” soundtracks.

The mid 90s also saw the explosion of manufactured pop groups; The Backstreet Boys, N-Sync, and The Spice Girls started to dominate the musical landscape. At the same time, the dilution of rock music continued. Bands like Sum 41 and Good Charlotte arrived on the scene, and it wasn’t long before they, along with Blink-182 and Green Day, became the representatives of rock. The unkempt rock stars of the late 80’s and early 90’s were replaced by young men who could have easily formed boybands of their own.

Yes, genuine rockers still existed, but the purification process was in full effect. A band like System of a Down, as popular as they were (and still are), simply couldn’t compete with Maroon 5. This was the age of colorful clothing, rollerblading, and Tamagotchis. Such inanity was incompatible with angst ridden lyrics. It became far more profitable to sing about generic things like “hooking-up” and finding “the one.” Why be serious when you could be silly?

Shows like Friends and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air dominated the airwaves, and movies like Dumb and Dumber and Happy Gilmore lit up cinema screens around the world. This was silly-season, and in many ways a negation of the early 90s, when the rawness of rock music truly resonated.

The erosion of rock music’s authenticity carried on from there. With the arrival of Snowpatrol and Nickelback, rock came in the form of catchy, radio-friendly tunes. Then, in 2005, with the creation of YouTube, the commercialization of music was complete. Videos now mattered just as much, if not more, than the music itself.

Some 15 years later, what are we left with?

Whatever it is, it’s nothing like 1991. Of course, rock music can still be found, but it’s a pale reflection of what it once was. If in doubt, just ask Winston Marshall, a man who had the audacity to read a book.

Dialectics of Hope

(Photo: Ekaterina Bykova/Shutterstock.com)

By Yanis Iqbal

The situation of the world is grim. Decades of neoliberalism - marked by the privatization of social life, deregulation of markets, increasing income inequality, labor flexploitation - has finally culminated in a politically regressive wave of right-wing resurgence. What we have now is “neoliberal fascism” - a new social formation in which the principles and practices of a fascist past and neoliberal present have merged, connecting the worst dimensions and excesses of neoliberal capitalism with the fascist ideals of ultra - nationalism and racial supremacy. Thus, in contradiction with the Right’s populist discourse, brutal processes of surplus-value extraction still occur; it is just that they have been politically re-packed through the use of archaic religio-cultural symbols to whip up mass hysteria against manufactured enemies.

The rise of the Right reflects the relations of forces in today’s world. With the technocratization of the state and party as mere appendages of neoliberal regulation, the scope for alternatives within electoral competition was drastically reduced. This led to an inter-party consensus on neoliberal orthodoxy. In this way, parties were reduced to different shades of the same economic policy with slightly varying promissory propagandas. Electoral competition, therefore, was exponentially abridged to signify a process through which people could choose different parties, all geared towards imposing austerity packages. Aijaz Ahmad calls this phenomenon the emergence of “mature liberal democracy in the neoliberal age” in which competing parties “function as mere factions in a managing committee of the bourgeoisie as a whole”. 

In a context like this - characterized by a shift in the balance of forces within the state in favor of the bourgeoisie and the installation of “policies without politics” - many people on the Left are understandably pessimistic about the prospects for socialism. The primary question reverberating loudly through the terrain of struggle is this: what grounds do we have for continuing the hard labor of sustaining a revolutionary movement in highly adverse conditions? Insisting on the indispensable presence of hope is perceived as playing with fire. However, hope is what we need. Without hope, there is no possibility of sustained engagement in a revolutionary movement. Moreover, hope for a radical re-constitution of existing societal conditions is present in the very movements of capital. In other words, we need to discover the material determinations of hope in its present mode of existence as a hidden potentiality and turn it into actuality through conscious revolutionary action.

The Origins of Capitalism

A highly schematic look at the origins of capitalism helps us to ground hope in a material soil. The present system we have was not a result of the operation of quasi-supernatural forces. Rather, it was the outcome of a (continuing) conflict between the logic of capitalist accumulation and other logics stemming from the resistance of social forces that suffer the effects of such economic processes. The separation of the direct producer from the means of production, the consequent transformation of labor power into a commodity, and the concentration of the means of production in the hands of the buyer of labor power were the contingent results of concrete antagonisms and social struggles. The interpretation of capitalism as a social form composed of unstable conjunctions of domination and resistance is elaborated by Etienne Balibar in his preface to “Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities”.

In the preface, Balibar writes: “The capitalist division of labor has nothing to do with a complementarity of tasks, individuals and social groups: it leads rather…to the polarization of social formations into antagonistic classes whose interests are decreasingly ‘common’ ones. How is the unity (even the conflictual unity) of a society to be based on such a division? Perhaps we should then invert our interpretation of the Marxist thesis. Instead of representing the capitalist division of labor to ourselves as what founds or institutes human societies as relatively stable ‘collectivities’, should we not conceive this as what destroys them?... If this is so, the history of social formations would be not so much a history of non-commodity communities making the transition to market society or a society of generalized exchange (including the exchange of human labor-power) - the liberal or sociological representation which has been preserved in Marxism - as a history of the reactions of the complex of ‘non-economic’ social relations, which are the binding agent of a historical collectivity of individuals, to the de-structuring with which the expansion of the value form threatens them. It is these reactions which confer upon social history an aspect that is irreducible to the simple ‘logic’ of the extended reproduction of capital or even to a ‘strategic game’ among actors defined by the division of labor and the system of states.”

Insofar that class struggle has a primacy over classes, the structure of a mode of production is constituted by the antagonisms it contains, notably the systemic contradiction between the forces and relations of production, and the contradiction internal to the relations of production between exploiters and exploited i.e. social conflicts between classes generated by antagonistic relations of production. If we extrapolate from our understanding of capitalism’s origins as one unified not by the uniformity of its components, but through their contradiction, inconsistency, and incommensurability, we are given the following general statement about the motion of history: history is not the working out of some plan imprinted in the nature/essence of humans. It is the result of the struggles between different and opposed classes. These struggles are structurally conditioned, but history leaves their result open. There is no natural necessity which decides which class will be victorious.

Understanding Capitalist Society

As in the origins of capitalism, the workings of a capitalist society are also deeply cut by the friction and tensions of class struggle. Following the schema developed by Karl Marx in his book “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”, we can say that a capitalist society is made up of the economic “base” and the ideological “superstructure”. It needs to be emphasized that the base-superstructure metaphor is only a heuristic device; the division of capitalist society into these two segments is only present at the analytical level. In reality, base and superstructure are inseparably intertwined; one can’t be conceptualized without the other. Can capitalism’s predatory mechanisms of exploitation survive in the absence of specific ideological codes that make human subjects accept that exploitation as being in the “nature of things”? The answer is in the negative.

The inextricable intertwinement of base and superstructure was also stressed by Marx through the conceptualization of the economy as an essentially social and historical entity, the unity of the social relations of production and the productive forces, rather than that of the technological conditions of material production. Thus, in Capital, Volume I, Marx shows how the technological development of the productive forces, rather than providing the motor for the growth of capitalism was a result of the emergence of capitalist social relations of production. The inter-imbricatedness of base and superstructure means that capitalist society is a complex totality comprising various relatively autonomous yet interrelated structural instances. The economy (which is ultimately determinant) exercises its effects indirectly, by determining the specific efficacy of other instances.

Insofar that the political and ideological instances are relatively autonomous from the economy, the formative influence exercised by the functional requirements of reproduction is neither simple nor unilateral; it is mediated by the complex, uneven and contradictory logic of the class struggle. Therefore, what we define as “structures”, namely relations that tend to be reproduced, materialized and interiorized, are also internally contradictory because of the effectivity of class antagonism and antagonistic social relations. In other words, the state and various politico-ideological apparatuses used for the reproduction of capitalism are “fields” (to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term) of conflicts. In a field, agents and institutions constantly struggle, according to the regularities constitutive of this space. Those who dominate in a given field are in a position to make it function to their advantage, but they must always contend with the resistance and contentions of the dominated.

From what we have discussed so far, it is evident that a capitalist society is a social formation of conflicting, differential, and multilayered forces constantly in flux. Furthermore, the structure of society is immanent within that uneven balance of forces, rather than transcendent on them. There are no guarantees about any practice or variation in the formation. Changes in social formations over time develop unevenly through these forces, the movements of all the combined practices and articulations of practices. Rather than a transcendent or mechanical structure imposed upon individuals and groups, the social structure in this case is tightly contained within the practices individuals and groups enact. The structure emerges. There is thus no teleogy or supervening subject in history. This view of immanent change is opposed to an understanding of capitalist society as an “expressive totality”, which involves treating the different aspects of social life as expressions of some core or basic principle. The effect is reductionism: these different aspects possess no life and movement of their own, but merely exist as indices of their underlying essence.

Marx was in favor of an immanentist theory of change. In Vol. 3 of Capital, Marx wrote: “[in] the division of…social labour and the reciprocal complementarity or metabolism of its products, subjugation to and insertion into the social mechanism, is left to the accidental and reciprocally countervailing motives of the individual capitalist producers. Since these confront one another only as commodity owners, each trying to sell his commodity as dear as possible (and seeming to be governed only by caprice even in the regulation of production), the inner law operates only by way of their competition, their reciprocal pressure on one another, which is how divergences are mutually counterbalanced. It is only as an inner law, a blind natural force vis-à-vis the individual agents, that the law of value operates here and that the social balance of production is asserted in the midst of accidental fluctuations.” Here, we can observe that structural patterns emerge not because of external regulation or command but as the result of the operation of an inner law - an immanent process. General trends, historical tendencies and regularities are not solid, law-like phenomena; they are constituted and reproduced by the daily activities of human beings. Capitalism perpetuates its existence not due to self-sustaining structures but due to the contradictory unity of myriad class-rooted practices performed by living individuals.

Reclaiming Hope

Our discussion of the origins of capitalism and nature of capitalist society should make it clear that (1) capitalism is a historically specific totality, a result of class struggle; (2) a capitalist society is a structured whole consisting of the economic base and other quasi-autonomous yet interrelated levels, with the interaction between these elements generating the matrix of the social formation. The interaction is made possible by acting individuals who reproduce structures through recursive social practices. Both these conclusions are situated in a common problematic: they emphasize the fact that history is ultimately made by individuals.

The material determinations of hope derive from this fundamental fact. Since individuals create their own history, structures can’t be considered as unsurpassable obstacles. Structures are themselves the result of social practices. To overcome structures, critical consciousness needs to be combined with revolutionary action; the glue binding them together is hope. In the current conjuncture, hope needs to be reclaimed so that the struggle to achieve socialism can be revitalized. Once this is done, the political praxis of the Left will gain the ability to appropriately problematize our structural conditionedness and pierce through the open-ended nature of history.

The Black Struggle, the Communist Movement, and the Role of Black Women: An Interview with Dr. CBS

By Chris Dilworth

Republished from Liberation School.

This first Liberation School Interview with Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly focuses on the historical and contemporary links between the Black and Communist strug...

Editor’s note: The editorial collective is excited to release the first in our new series of Liberation School Interviews. Through video and text, these interviews with leading militant scholars, organizers, and activists, discuss their research and activities, concepts and approaches, and more. This doesn’t imply that the PSL endorses or shares every viewpoint or idea expressed; it means that we think they can provide us and others in the movement with new ideas, concepts, reference points, histories, approaches, contexts, and more.

This first Liberation School Interview is with Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly and focuses on the historical and contemporary links between the Black and Communist struggles, the ways anti-communism and white supremacy reinforce one another, and why we must resist both. We get Dr. CBS’s thoughts on the relationship between capitalism, race, and gender, focusing on the contributions of Black women communists to various struggles.

About Dr. CBS

Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly, or Dr. CBS. She is a critical Black Studies scholar of political theory, political economy, and intellectual history. Her research primarily focuses on transnational entanglements of U.S. racial capitalism, anticommunism, and antiblack structural racism. Together with Gerald Horne, she co-authored W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History (ABC-CLIO, 2019). She is currently working on a book titled Black Scare/Red Scare: Antiblackness, Anticommunism, and the Rise of Capitalism in the United States. She also has a forthcoming book, co-edited with Jodi Dean, titled Organize, Fight, Win: Three Decades of Political Writing by Black Women Communists (Verso, 2022)

Dr. CBS is a member of the Coordinating Committee and the Co-Lead of the Research and Political Education Team for the Black Alliance for Peace. She is also the host of the podcast “The Last Dope Intellectual,” which is part of the Black Power Media Network.

She’s interviewed by PSL Indianapolis member Chris Dilworth.

Paywall or Open Book?: Power Dynamics in Academia and Higher Education

By Marcus Kahn

Academic spheres have a reputation among progressive and radical groups as being out-of-touch and disconnected from grassroots activist efforts. There is a long and troubling history of exclusion and deference to power leading right up to the present that lends weight to this perspective. Academic culture is deeply entrenched within networks of institutional decision-making power and is structured in ways that reinforce interlinking brands of elitism (classist, patriarchal, nationalist, ableist, and racist), despite optimistic rhetoric to the contrary. There are obvious systemic flaws in the U.S. higher education system, from the racial and socioeconomic inequities that selectively distribute resources and access, to the ways in which prestigious universities are implicated in the reproduction, growth, and maintenance of concentrated power. These sharp divisions rely upon the impermeability of academic spheres and the public’s inability to access knowledge and participate in knowledge production. By breaking down the physical, digital, and cognitive walls that keep knowledge contained, and opening doors for the public to participate in the closely guarded world of ‘intellectuals’, academic work can start to disentangle and detach from the constraints on perspective and action that limit its social relevance and reinforce social division, and take concrete steps towards the transformative deconstruction of existing power systems.

Barriers to Entry

The National Center for Education Statistics noted that in the U.S., “Of all full-time faculty in degree-granting postsecondary institutions in fall 2018, some 40 percent were White males; 35 percent were White females; 7 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander males; 5 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander females; and 3 percent each were Black males, Black females, Hispanic males, and Hispanic females.” Furthermore, “among full-time professors, 53 percent were White males, 27 percent were White females, 8 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander males, and 3 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander females. Black males, Black females, and Hispanic males each accounted for 2 percent of full-time professors.”

To enter into academic discussion, individuals need to ascend through a series of clear-cut stages. Attaining a PhD is a prerequisite for participation in academic discourse, which takes an investment of time and money most cannot afford. Of course, to get a PhD you need to have at least a bachelor’s or master’s degree. Huge segments of the population are effectively filtered out at each successive stage based off of the closely intertwined pressures surrounding wealth, gender, ability, nationality, and race, or else face the prospect of a completely unsustainable lifestyle.

Academic discourse tends to exist in its own world apart from the general public, filtering only indirectly into public awareness. Noam Chomsky cites the work of an early 20th century ‘pioneer’ in the field of communications often referred to as the ‘father of public relations’, Edward Bernays. Bernays distinguished the ‘bewildered herd’ (the public) from a ‘specialized class’ who understands their needs and the ways to provide for them. This viewpoint may not always be articulated as explicitly as it was by Bernays but emblemizes common attitudes within ‘intellectual’ circles.

Needlessly complex language and highly theoretical content can further serve to ostracize people who don’t devote their time to deciphering dense and convoluted academic texts. Chomsky has suggested that for the most part, core concepts and arguments in the social sciences can be conveyed at a high school level. The supposed complexity and impenetrability of social issues serves to exclude the majority of the population that isn’t highly versed in academic jargon, so that ‘laymen’ are unable to participate in the discussion of issues that pertain directly to their lives. This separation ultimately serves to disempower the public in determining its own affairs, since elites can justify their decisions and leadership roles through claimed ‘expertise’.

Institutional Interlocking

Academic research and higher education often conform to and serve the interests of dominant configurations of power. To take a few symbolic examples, Stanford was founded by a proto-Bezos, construction at UC Berkeley was funded by William Randolph Hearst, Princeton’s policy school is named after Woodrow Wilson, and Harvard’s political science school is named after John F. Kennedy. Academic institutions interlock with other dominant institutions in the public and private sectors, maintaining a mutualistic relationship which limits the ability of researchers and educators to examine institutional power with critical clarity and work towards meaningful social transformation.

Centers of concentrated power directly impact the research objectives of even the most seemingly ‘objective’ or value-free sciences. Highly technical fields such as physics, engineering, and computer science require intensive years-long training in university education systems. Major consulting firms, financial institutions, multinational corporations, and government agencies recruit talent from what essentially serves as a farm system to fill institutional ranks. Curriculum and the dominant intellectual culture that guides it are heavily instrumentalist, preparing students to enter uncritically into institutional roles with the ‘correct’ skills and mindset, so that by the time an engineer is developing ICBMs or an economist is assessing trade policy they have learned not to question or resist the ultimate impact of their work.

Research questions are often determined by the needs of these interlinked institutions, and research efforts within universities have consistently and directly informed the development of high-octane tools of oppression. Scientists trained and employed in U.S. universities have played critical roles in developing military and communications technology, as resources are continuously re-devoted to the pursuit of institutional objectives. Fields such as political science, history, economics, communications, and sociology are far from immune to the distorting effects of power on the trajectory of research and pedagogy. In the Science of Coercion, Christopher Simpson investigates the parallel development of communications research and government efforts to fine-tune methods of psychological warfare. Simpson maintains that “the U.S. government’s psychological warfare programs between 1945 and 1960 played either direct or indirect roles in several of the most important initiatives in mass communication research of the period.” He identifies a “positive feedback cycle” of funding, prestige, and participation that “tends to confine intellectual innovation to established formats.”

Breaking Down Silos

Library Genesis, an open-access online repository of books, published a Letter of Solidarity in 2015 that reads, “This is the time to recognize that the very existence of our massive knowledge commons is an act of collective civil disobedience.” This sentiment reflects the critical role of knowledge distribution and knowledge production in effecting transformative social change. Opening access to education and knowledge is a vital aspect of participatory public spheres in a democratic society. The artificial scarcity of instruction and resources is a means of enabling and exacerbating preexisting social divisions in a society that purports to provide equal opportunity, but ultimately filters out marginalized groups from attaining not only wealth and prestige, but also knowledge and participation in knowledge production. To continue quoting LibGen, “We have the means and methods to make knowledge accessible to everyone, with no economic barrier to access and a much lower cost to society.” In their critique of limited access, LibGen further argues that the current system “devalues us, authors, editors, and readers alike. It parasites on our labor, it thwarts our service to the public, it denies us access.” With these points in mind, there are very direct ways to increase public access to academia to the benefit of both academics and the public.

1.      Universal access to higher education

2.      Aggressive affirmative action in both admissions and faculty hiring processes

3.      Open-access digitized libraries like LibGen

4.      Lowering paywalls on academic journals and databases

5.      Recording and uploading all lectures onto the Internet

6.      Public participation in review and publication of articles and books

7.      Reducing technical language when unnecessary or simultaneously publishing parallel versions for public consumption

It’s no secret that higher education is artificially expensive and highly exclusive. This seemingly a priori late-stage capitalist reality is even more apparent in an era of skyrocketing college debt and overpriced digital education. Paywalls serve to reinforce barriers to entry and maintain the rigid stratigraphy of a society that can easily afford to distribute knowledge. The profit-driven world of academic publishing works in tandem with academic institutions that thrive on exclusion. Yet the focused and systematic pursuit of knowledge is critical to our collective well-being, and the resources of universities and publishers can be redirected to the benefit of the population. In order to advance transformative change, we need to enable knowledge redistribution, and take pragmatic steps towards enhancing the discourse between academics and the public, rather than allowing the public to remain the passive object of inquiry. Academic work can be invaluable or profoundly harmful depending on the interests driving research and pedagogy. At its worst, academia has unabashedly and effectively served elites. Increasing public access and participation can help flatten intersectional social hierarchies and transform how the public goes about solving its most pressing problems. 

The Necessity of Dismantling the U.S.: A conversation with Ajamu Baraka

By Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

On February 26th, I interviewed Ajamu Baraka for my podcast. Baraka is a veteran grassroots organizer whose roots are in the Black Liberation Movement and anti-apartheid and Central American solidarity struggles. He is an internationally recognized leader of the emerging human rights movement in the U.S. and has been at the forefront of efforts to apply the international human rights framework to social justice advocacy in the U.S. for more than 25 years. He is a National Organizer for the Black Alliance for Peace, whose activities we discussed.

Baraka has taught political science at various universities and has been a guest lecturer at academic institutions in the U.S. and abroad. He has appeared on a wide-range of media outlets including CNN, BBC, Telemundo, ABC, RT, the Black Commentator, the Washington Post and the New York Times. He is currently an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and a writer for Counterpunch.

What follows are excerpts from our conversation, edited for clarity. You can listen to the entire interview here.

Kollibri terre Sonnenblume: [In terms of foreign policy], it seems like this last election was just Trump or not-Trump and so there was no discussion about how a Biden administration might be different.

Ajamu Baraka: There really wasn’t. Within the context of the bourgeois press, during the so-called debates, the number of minutes devoted to foreign policy was less than one hour, total. But yet you see that once the Biden administration takes power, some of the first initiatives that they engage in have foreign policy implications. So it’s really incredible that, because of the weight of responsibility that the executive has, that there was so little conversation around foreign policy…

The result was that basically Biden got a pass and there was no real discussion in the campaign and even among civil society. There was an assumption that you just had to get rid of Trump and everything would be just fine. It would be a return to normal. No one talked about what did normal look like and whether what was so-called normal was really in the best interests of not only the people of the US but the people in the global south, who find themselves constantly in the cross-hairs of aggressive US policies.

Sonnenblume: It seems like one untouchable topic these days, both in politics and in civil society, is the US military budget, which as we know takes up over 50% of discretionary spending. It’s obscene. It’s ten times as much as Russia’s is. It’s more than the next ten countries combined. When the conversation comes up of, “How do we pay for Medicare for All?” that’s the perfect opportunity to be like, “Let’s cut that military budget” but then it never comes up…

Baraka: One reason people are not talking about it is because, again, there seems to be bipartisan consensus that the military would get not only what it wants, but even more so. When Donald Trump came into office, that first budget he submitted to Congress included a $54 billion increase in military spending. It’s very interesting because Donald Trump just didn’t know how to filter himself so every once in a while he would say something that was brutally honest, so be blurted out that he thought that that $54 billion was in fact crazy. At first, even Democrats were raising questions about the increase, until a couple months later, I guess they got the memo, and all of a sudden it went quiet. And not only did they give Donald Trump $54 billion increase, they increased it by almost another $30 billion that first year. So that’s been a bipartisan consensus…

The issue we have, as the people, is to make that an issue. To in fact demand that our resources are redeployed to address the objective human rights needs of the people. Because who is benefiting from this 750 billion, or really, over a trillion dollars, spent on defense? It’s the fat cats making the money. These military-industrial complex executives. Everybody’s making money off of this but the people. The people are the ones suffering, so we have to demand that they reduce the spending, that they close down these over 800 military bases worldwide, transfer those resources back to the people. Back to providing housing. Back to providing some decent healthcare. Cleaning up the environment. Creating a first class educational experience for our young people.

But as long as the interests of the rulers prevails, then you’re going to have this obscene behavior, this obscene budget…

We are trying to make people aware of the fact that we have this [global military] basing system, these command structure, and we’re asking a very simple question: Whose interests are being carried out with this enormous expenditure of the public funds? To have these troops, to have these bases that are being built in various parts of the world. Is that helping your family to get a better education? Is that helping you to have some healthcare? A rec center in your community? Do you have access to more capital if you want to start a business? Where is the emphasis? And see, those questions—if the Democrats had been raising those kinds of questions, or pursuing policies that were more in alignment with working class people and the lower elements of the middle class (what we call the petite bourgeoisie)—perhaps the conditions would not have been in place that would have allowed Trump to win the presidency.

These basic questions of whose interests are being served by these policies are the kind of questions that have to be raised on the liberal part of the equation. Because they’re being raised among the radical right and you see a radicalization taking place that culminated in terms of behavior on Jan. 6th.

So there’s a real disadvantage on the part of liberals because they have surrendered their political positions to the neoliberal bourgeoisie and they have disarmed themselves politically and ideologically. As a consequence, they have ceded significant ideological space to the radical right. They’re playing a game that’s very dangerous. Not only are they losing, but all of us are losing as a consequence.

Sonnenblume: You made a reference to neoliberalism being a form or expression of neofascism. I heard you speak about this recently, I believe it was on Black Agenda Radio, and this was new for me to think of it this way. [See Black Agenda Radio 1/25/21.]

Baraka: …What you see is this dangerous coalition of forces, of ruling class forces—Silicon Valley, the military industrial complex, the corporate media companies that control 90% of news and entertainment, and elements of the state: the intelligence agencies—you see the foundation there. We already have the dictatorship of capital. If we want to think about the liberal bourgeois process, it provides a shell for the dictatorship of capital. The shell is not becoming almost an impediment for the neoliberal bourgeoisie. So they are slowly conditioning the US population to accept open fascistic kinds of rule. That’s why they flaunt democracy. That’s why Biden can talk about how he wants to center democracy and human rights, but then turn around and support fascism in Haiti or right-wing elements that are trying to take power in Venezuela.

So not only do I talk about neofascism as having a neoliberal character, it’s important to understand that within the context of the global system, for many years this fascism that we have in the US has been disguised. Because you can have forms of democracy, of democratic practice, at the center, while the connected economies and societies that the empire was connected to, are basically fascism.

When we look at these relationships from the point of view of the oppressed, of the colonized, we say: “Someone explain to us how we didn’t have fascism.”

So for me, I’m hoping that people are alerted to this friendly fascism that’s being developed because in many ways it’s more insidious because it’s not being recognized. So for four years they had us fixated on the theatrics of Donald Trump with his incoherent and clownish behavior, while they were systematically tightening up the national security state, the conditioning of the population to accept an Orwellian-Big-Brother-doublespeak-newspeak kind of environment. It’s very troubling what’s unfolding now because elements who you think would be hip to it, and in opposition, they’ve been helping to go along with it. Just yesterday, the Nation jumped on this whole Facebook thing and called Mark Zuckerberg a danger to democracy. Why? Because they want to engage in even more censorship. To me, it’s kind of crazy.

Sonnenblume: You’ve made a point about this particular topic of social media before, where you’ve talked about how our public space has been privatized.

Baraka: Exactly. It’s been privatized. It’s been colonized. And as a consequence it’s becoming more and more difficult for alternative information to be disseminated. Look, they’ve been wanting to do this for quite some time. Ever since they saw the possibilities and the dangers of the internet and social media. You might recall that at one point, they were attacking what people were referring to as “citizen journalists.” That they weren’t authoritative. That they were just making things up, blah blah blah. It’s always been a concern that information not approved by the authorities would be disseminated and be the source of real political opposition in this country and throughout the entire West. But they never had the nerve to engage in open censorship. But with Russiagate, they had that opportunity to begin laying the ideological foundation and they did it and they did it with a vengeance. So now, four years later, you can have the Nation calling for censorship and no one bats an eye.

Sonnenblume: Within the context of decolonization, do we need to dismantle the United States?

Baraka: Well the short answer is, yes.

Because the United States is a settler-colonial project, a settler-colonial state. It’s had a continuity since 1791, once the new constitutional process was finalized, and that process just basically resulted in the consolidation of the power of the colonists that were on the land since 1619. Even with the Civil War, there’s been continuity, because the US national state won that conflict with the Confederacy. The very fact that the material basis of the US was the conquering of this land and then the confinement of Native peoples to concentration camps that we refer to as “reservations,” provides not only a moral critique but it provides a moral foundation for how a just resolution has to look.

That is, we can’t just be saying, “I’m sorry” and that’s it, or even reparations whatever that’s supposed to be, but it in fact has to be a dismantling of this power, a dismantling of the settler-colonial state.

And that process of dismantling the settler-colonial state and the colonial system requires a decolonization of one’s consciousness. It goes hand-in-hand. That process of decolonizing one’s consciousness is a process in which you root out the ideological foundations of white supremacy. In this society—in this white supremacist, settler-colonial society—everyone who was born—no matter what your ethnicity, nationality or race or whatever—you are subjected to it, and become in essence a white supremacist. It’s part and parcel of the DNA of the US experience. You are taught white supremacy from the very first moments… It’s so pervasive, it’s not even recognized. It becomes just common sense.

So you have to go through a process of purging oneself. Of not seeing Europe as the apex of civilizational development, of understanding that there are other people on this planet who have civilizations, who should be recognized and respected, who have value just as much as the lives of Europeans. You have to rid yourself of Euro-centrism because it’s so pervasive you can’t even see it. So the process of decolonization structurally requires a simultaneous process—maybe even a prior process—of decolonizing one’s consciousness, decolonizing knowledge, decolonizing the very basis of being.

That is the simultaneous process we need to engage in, in this country, and throughout the Western world, because the very notion of modernity, of what is human development, has to be re-thought. Part of that re-thinking is part of the decolonization process. De-centering Europe. De-centering the entire process of modernity.

Sonnenblume: So this makes me wonder: To what degree is the modern technological and industrial state dependent on white supremacy then? Because the wealth that makes it happen comes from these structures. We look at our phones and our other technologies and it’s a colonial and white supremacist process that’s extracting those materials. We know about the child slave labor that’s happening in Africa. Is it even possible to have modern life without it? Can we make a cell phone without colonialism, I guess I’m asking?

Baraka: That’s a very important and profound question. The relationships of colonialism are such that they when they are separate, there has to be a change in what we consume, how we consume, how we relate to nature. That’s part of the process. Now we can’t turn back the hands of time. We have these industrial processes, but right now those industrial processes and the technologies being developed are such that they are almost instruments against collective humanity.

So part of the decolonization process is to take hold of those technological innovations and industrial processes, and reorganize them in a way that makes more sense, that helps to elevate life, and to protect life. And that means a lot of profound changes. For example, what that might mean for these megacities that we have? Can we continue to afford these megacities? When we take hold of the industrial base, maybe we will be able to reorganize agriculture in a different way that will allow people to leave these cities and go back to the countryside and engage in small plot farming, for local and national markets.

The whole logic and rationale of capitalist society has to be looked at in a new way. There are a number of movements that are in fact doing that. That make an argument that we’ve got to completely reorganize every aspect of society if we’re going to be able to survive, because one of the obvious contradictions and consequences of the industrial processes we have is that we’re basically destroying the ability of human beings to sustain themselves on this planet. Mother Earth is going to survive. She might be altered in many ways, but we are the ones who are going to destroy our ability to live on this planet.

So until we’re able to seize power from this minority of the human population that is invested in production processes and social relations that force all of to have to work for them, that put profit over the planet, and over people, then that kind of irrational production will continue, to our detriment. So we have a vested interest in a global revolutionary process.

The major contradiction that Marx identified was between the capitalists and the workers. And that’s a continuing contradiction, but at this stage of monopoly global capital and the irrationality of these processes, the major contradiction today, in my opinion, is between capitalism—the capitalist class—and collective humanity. We have to take power from these maniacs if we’re going to survive. So there’s an objective, material need for us to recognize that we have an interest in taking power back from the capitalist class if we want to survive for ourselves and for our children.

These are the kinds of things we have to look at. When we take power, what kind of societies do we build? That is the other part of the conversation, because you have some people that will argue that there’s some models being developed that represent how a post-capitalist society might look. Well, maybe. But there’s some things in some of these models that some of us don’t want to follow. So what would be created remains to be seen.

But we’ve got to find a new kind of ethical framework, a framework that is based on cooperation, based on equality, based on rationality and decency. I think we will collectively be able to figure out how to reorganize society in ways that will ensure we can survive and live as decent human beings in a new kind of world. I think we can do that.

Listen to the entire interview here.

The Stimmy and the State

By Tyler Zimmer

Republished from Rampant Magazine.

In a recent piece in Jacobin, Matt Bruenig hails the new stimulus bill as a “watershed moment” in the fight against poverty in the United States. This dramatic “ideological reversal,” “a revolution in welfare state thinking,” as he describes it, has shattered a “25-year bipartisan consensus” against direct cash payments to the poor. “The fact that we had this debate and the pro-welfare side won is something to be happy about.”

Certainly there are provisions in the bill that benefit poor and working class people. But is this a major turning point in an ideological battle over the legitimacy of welfare state policies? Hardly.

It would be nice if our system of government was a forum for debating the merits of various ideological proposals to advance the common good. But this is simply not how the state under capitalism functions. 

Other things being equal, the state tends to promote the interests of the capitalist class at the expense of the working class majority. 

It does this for at least two reasons. First, the capitalist class spends enormous amounts of money influencing politicians—and this is why the two parties that dominate U.S. politics prioritize the interests of their corporate donors, not the majority of voters. 

Indeed, the 2020 election was the most expensive election in history, with more than $14 billion spent up and down the ballot, most of it paid for by super-PACs and extremely wealthy individuals. As Kim Moody noted in January, “the nation’s rich paid for the 2020 election, and they will be its major beneficiaries.”

Secondly, we’ve got to keep in mind that the state under capitalism depends upon tax revenue generated by capitalist economic activity—and this, in turn, puts governments under enormous pressure to promote a profitable investment climate for the ruling class. Because when profitability dips too low, capitalists lay people off, stop investing, tax revenues drop and a crisis ensues. 

This is a powerful barrier against reform absent sufficient pressure from below. 

These two reasons, then, are why capitalist states tend to consistently prioritize the interests of capital above those of workers. This explains, among other things, why huge banks were given enormous bailouts in 2008 whereas working class homeowners were left high and dry.  

Seen in this light, then, we have to ask: why has the government, which as we know is awash in corporate cash, recently decided to spend money on cash transfers and tax credits for the poor? And why has the ruling class itself been so vocal in supporting these measures? 

Context is important. As Bruenig himself points out, the most recent stimulus bill is not the first, but the third time in the last year that the government has sent out direct cash transfers, the first two coming when Donald Trump was still in the White House and Mitch McConnell was still Senate Majority Leader.

So, rather than representing a dramatic shift, the newest stimulus bill builds on what the previous ones already did. And far from having poverty reduction as their goal, these measures seemed quite obviously aimed at propping up demand and keeping the corporate profits afloat amidst the disruptions caused by the pandemic.

Let’s not forget that each infusion of stimulus had the effect of boosting the stock market—and, last I checked, these markets respond not to ideology as such but to expectations of profit. Indeed, at moments when deliberations over stimulus bills began to stall, markets often took a sudden plunge downward. 

There is indeed a shift going on, but it’s not an ideological shift in politician’s attitudes toward poverty—instead, what we’re seeing is better described as a shift in ruling class attitudes toward government spending and deficits as a way of stabilizing corporate profitability. 

This shift was well underway before Biden took office. As Robert Brenner pointed out months before Trump left office, “some $4.586 trillion, roughly 75 per cent of the total $6.286 trillion derived directly and indirectly from CARES Act money, [went to] the ‘care’ of the country’s biggest and best-off companies.” 

That’s “revolutionary” in a certain sense, but not in the sense that we (socialists) like. 

Still, the question remains: what explains the shift? The background is crucial: long-term stagnation and historically low rates of profit, combined with the sudden shock of the pandemic, caused the U.S. economy to shrink by 4-5% in 2020—the largest contraction since the 1930s. In these circumstances, the ruling class has come to prefer government deficit spending to the thin gruel of austerity, but not because they’ve experienced a sudden conversion to the cause of welfare and poverty reduction. On the contrary, massive infusions of cash from the government—whether in the form of fiscal or monetary policy—appear to be all that’s propping up their economic position. 

Of course, these inconvenient facts haven’t stopped the political boosters of the Biden Administration from engaging in a full-court press to tout the progressive credentials of the stimulus bill. Why they should be so eager to paint it as a historic move to eliminate poverty is obvious: the Democrats, in control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, have reneged on a slew of promises they made to voters in November. For example, they declined to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, they have more or less maintained most of Trump’s draconian anti-immigrant measures—we could continue. 

Meanwhile, economic inequality continues to soar as billionaires get richer; rates of unionization continue to stagnate or fall; unemployment and underemployment remain persistently damaging to millions of workers; and come September when the temporary measures from the stimulus will have run their course, bills, rent, mortgages and debts will still be there.

The only way to turn things around is to increase the organization and disruptive power of the working class. Hoping shifts in elite opinion about fiscal policy will morph into a new era of social democratic renewal is not going to cut it. 

Now, someone might reply that insurgent left politicians—like Bernie Sanders and “the Squad”—are the reason this shift in elite opinion is occurring. The idea would be this: Because Sanders ran a campaign that popularized certain pro-worker policies, politicians have been forced to make concessions to our side and reluctantly pass bills sending cash transfers to the poor.  

This strikes me as thoroughly unconvincing. Sanders relentlessly campaigned on a $15 minimum wage and even helped force Biden to give rhetorical support for the measure as a way of securing votes in the November election. But the $15 federal minimum wage is currently dead in the water, despite Sanders’s dogged support for it and despite the fact that the measure is enormously popular with voters. Denying a raise to tens of millions of underpaid workers isn’t exactly what you expect from a government that has been allegedly won over to the imperative of poverty reduction. 

It’s instructive to think about Amazon here. Certainly, Amazon’s owners don’t want a minimum wage hike, since this would dramatically increase their wage bill and eat into profits. But government deficit spending that temporarily boosts the purchasing power of the poor during a recession is clearly worth supporting. 

And let us not forget, of course, that Amazon is a major donor to the Democratic Party—as are similarly large corporations that would suffer a dip in profits if wages were suddenly hiked to $15/hr. Though unions donated a measly $100 million to support Biden’s campaign, the corporate employers who profit on the backs of non-union, low-wage workforces gave much, much more. 

The moral of the story, then, is that we should probably hold off on celebrating the stimulus bill as a major ideological shift to the left or as a substantial victory for our side. After all, capitalist economic expansion often results in some benefits for workers in the way of decreasing unemployment and rising wages—but we don’t celebrate cyclical upswings as victories for the left. 

Victories for the left occur when workers and the oppressed organize themselves, confront the powers that be and force them to grant us concessions. Genuine victories don’t simply make the lives of ordinary people better: they also teach them that, collectively, they have the power to push back against the ruling class and win. 

Though I’m happy that there are self-avowed socialists in Congress making arguments in favor of reform, this layer is currently small and lacks the power to veto policy or force through measures that the corporate-friendly majority opposes. And, outside the halls of government, the organization and combativity of social movements is not presently at a high enough level to wrest concessions from the ruling class. This means that we aren’t in a position to exert a strong influence on policy-making at the moment. 

To change that, we need more power. So in its relative absence, it doesn’t do the left any favors to pretend that we’re winning. And it certainly isn’t good to pretend, when it plainly isn’t true, that the Biden Administration and the Democratic establishment are our allies. 

What, then, is the alternative? 

There aren’t any shortcuts that I can see. But we’ve got to continue to recruit people to join socialist organizations. We’ve got to keep building on the explosion of activism against white supremacy from last summer. We need to find a way to renew the labor movement and spark a drive to organize the unorganized. And we’ve got to elect more self-avowed socialists to government. 

But none of these goals are well served by pretending that the current administration is sympathetic to our cause. The way forward has to include a sober assessment of the obstacles we face. 

What's Their Endgame?

By Steve Lalla

Republished from Orinoco Tribune.

Invariably, in a conversation about environmental destruction, war in the Middle East, or the pandemic, someone eventually asks the question: “yes, but what’s their endgame?”

Behind this question is the assumption that an elite cabal of capitalist overseers controls everything and foresees the outcome of all their decisions—that they possess an unassailable plan that can never be defeated. Behind this question lurks capitalist realism, characterized by Zizek and Jameson as the mental state in which it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.

“We find ourselves at the notorious 'end of history' trumpeted by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall,” wrote Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? “Fukuyama's thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious.”

This mindset is so common that many of us don’t think twice before asking “what’s their endgame?” We believe that in posing the question we’re making a meta-critique of capitalism. The mere formulation of the question supposes that there’s such a thing as organization—a system—a concept that in itself is truly revolutionary for many of us, who don’t even realize that we live within a system, and that alternate ones are possible.

The question “what’s their endgame?” is often posed in the context of the pandemic. In this case the assumption behind the question is that capitalism, if it wanted to, could have reacted better to the pandemic, and could have saved more lives. Therefore, the pseudo-intellect wonders, was there perhaps not a master plan behind letting hundreds of thousands die? Perhaps the US colluded with the leaders of Brazil, Britain, China, Cuba, and the United Nations, and they all agreed on a plan to usher in a police state? The theory falls apart when we accept that various communities had divergent responses to COVID-19. It’s more likely that the agenda behind allowing mass death was the same that capitalists always have: to make as much money as possible with little thought for the consequences.

On the topic of environmental destruction, we aver that billionaires are building spaceships to colonize Mars; that they’ve already planned for the destruction of planet earth and its ecosystems. Whether it’s the singularity, or life on Mars as imagined in books and film, we’ve internalized the idea that the contamination of earth and humanity’s exile into space—or at least an elite fraction of humanity—is actually an ingenious plan devised by the super-intelligent billionaires, not the inevitable result of an economic system that ignores the most basic principles of nature in order to line the pockets of the oligarchy.

Global war? We’re supposed to believe that the imperialist wars in Syria, Afghanistan, or Yemen, are going exactly as planned; that the US withdrew from Iraq in 2011 strategically—the US actually won the war. We’ve internalized the fallacy that Vietnam’s Resistance War Against America went according to US plan; that powers beyond our control act unilaterally on our beings, that we’re not actors in history.

I’m reminded of a comment someone posted on my Facebook wall this week: “if one wishes an answer, there is none, to war and chaos. When it all spills over it becomes a world war, and history repeats itself, over and over.” There are elements of truth to these ideas, which is why they’re so appealing.

“This malaise, the feeling that there is nothing new, is itself nothing new of course,” wrote Fisher.

History repeats itself: an appealing idea

Perhaps the root of this idea is the oft-repeated saying that “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” It turns out that this is really an altered version, or a misquote, of the original written by Spanish philosopher Jorge Santayana in 1905: “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

From this deeply ingrained idea we extrapolate the idea that history repeats itself—but that’s not at all what Santayana wrote. Neither of these maxims is meant to teach us that history repeats itself. Santayana’s statement warns us that if we don’t learn from history, we won’t be involved in the making of the future. While cyclical elements are certainly involved in both nature and in human history, to believe that either nature or history truly repeats itself is simply to bow out of the game—to quit before we’ve even played. A similar logic is at play when we ask “what’s their endgame?”

The reasonable alternative is to recognize that reality is always changing, and will continue to change; to recognize that humans play an active role in creating the future. Our realities are not determined by forces entirely outside of our control. This recognition gives us both strength and optimism.

 “For revolutionary hope to come into being, we need to discard determinism,” writes Yanis Iqbal. “Instead of dialectically locating an individual in the interconnected economic, political and cultural systems, institutions and structures, determinism considers him/her to be unilaterally influenced by it. A determinist conception is based on the dichotomous division of existence into an ‘external world’ and ‘human consciousness.’ In this conception, the external world and consciousness are two different components of human existence.”

In truth, humans are not separate from the world around us. It’s self-evident that we’re part of it. We require air, water, and sustenance to live and to think. Conversely, we alter and metabolize the world around us by our existence. The oligarchy and the elite, while they may live in ivory towers, are subject to the same forces of nature as we are, with the same powers and limits of agency. They may have various plans, and diverse strategies, but none of this ensured that their plans worked perfectly in the past, nor will in the future.

Despite its popularity in academia—particularly in philosophy, cultural studies and postmodernism—it’s easy to demonstrate that capitalist realism is incorrect. One only has to imagine other mental states or cultural tropes such as apartheid realism, feudalist realism, or hunter-gatherer realism.

Understanding and analyzing the plans of our opponents or enemies is important. The assumption that we are powerless before them is fallacious and futile.

Often, what lies beneath the question “what’s their endgame?” is conspiracy theory. Yes, many elements of conspiracy theory are certainly true and yes, groupings of like-minded people marshal increased power to guide events. However, blind adherence to conspiracy theory ignores the self-evidence of the greatest conspiracy of all: that we, as humans, all conspire together to create the future.