What would be different about a socialist economy?

By Ben Hillier

Republished from Red Flag.

The New York Stock Exchange is perhaps the premier institutional expression of the capitalist economy. It’s hard to conjure an image of American capitalism without including the Wall Street sign at the corner of Broad, or the stone streetscape of the exchange with its US flags, or the bronze “charging bull” statue at Bowling Green. 

Wall Street is for some a wondrous emblem of American exceptionalism. For most of us, it is a picture of moral desolation and criminality. Indeed, since it became the centre of US finance in the nineteenth century, Wall Street has repeatedly been the target of protests by workers who recognise it as a place where their enemies organise to rip them off and destroy their lives. 

So when you think “socialism”, you might, not unreasonably, conjure images of the storming and burning of stock exchanges everywhere. Yet a socialist economy would likely retain the machinery of Wall Street, albeit for refashioned ends. To understand why, and how a socialist economy might work, it’s important first to grasp just how remarkable the capitalist economy is. No human society before it has come close to developing the science, technologies and industrial capacities that we now take for granted.

Take the production of one of the most important things for human survival: food. Prior to capitalism, economies were primarily agrarian, the continued existence of any given population being almost entirely dependent on seasonal crop yields. Survival was a year-by-year proposition, famine just one flood, one drought, one failed harvest away. “A bad year such as 1817 could, even in tranquil Switzerland, produce an actual excess of deaths over births”, the late historian Eric Hobsbawm noted in his 1962 book The Age of Revolution. 

Today, thanks to capitalism, scarcity is a thing of the past. The amount of food available to an individual in France, for example, is estimated to be more than double what it was prior to the revolution of 1789, even though the population has more than doubled, from 28 million to 68 million. Across the world, the volume has increased by nearly 50 percent in the last 60 years, from fewer than 2,200 calories per person per day to more than 2,900, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. The recommended daily caloric intake being between 2,000 and 2,500 per day suggests that there is more than enough food available for everyone on the planet.

There’s an obvious problem, though, isn’t there? All around the world, billions of people are going hungry. At the extreme end, the humanitarian organisation Action Against Hunger estimates that more than 800 million people are undernourished. Even in the richest of countries, there’s an issue. In Australia, for example, more than one in six adults and more than 1 million children routinely miss meals, according to Foodbank, a charity.

This minor detail—more than enough being produced but billions of people struggling—is replicated in almost all areas: housing, incomes, health care, education etc. The problem is that, while capitalism excels in producing masses of things, it fails dismally in distributing them in any equitable way. 

“The workman is the source of all wealth”, an article in the Lancashire Co-operator noted of nineteenth century England. “Who has raised all the food? The half fed and impoverished labourer. Who built all the houses and warehouses, and palaces, which are possessed by the rich, who never labour or produce anything? The workman. Who spins all the yarn and makes all the cloth? The spinner and weaver ... [Yet] the labourer remains poor and destitute, while those who do not work are rich.”

Things haven’t changed much from those early years of capitalism. According to the financial group Credit Suisse, the richest 1 percent of adults on the planet together own nearly A$300 trillion in personal wealth—which is about 46 percent of the world’s total personal wealth. But the poorest 55 percent, close to 3 billion people, have just 1.3 percent of the wealth—on average less than A$2,000 per person.

It’s not just that the distribution of personal wealth is unequal, it’s that the productive infrastructure—the factories, the mines, the office blocks, the arable land, the telecommunications systems, the transport networks and so on—is owned and controlled by the rich and used to enrich them further.

One of the first goals of a socialist economy would be to put all of these important economic resources under the collective ownership and control of workers. By doing so, the majority of the population would gain the ability to decide what the priorities of production and distribution should be.

This brings us back to those stock exchanges. Every day, the Australian Securities Exchange in Sydney executes nearly 2 million trades. The system is remarkably efficient in pairing buyers and sellers of a diverse array of financial instruments. By and large, this is just wealthy people making themselves wealthier by buying and selling claims to the ownership of companies and other things. They, or their brokers, simply get online, look at what’s available to purchase, and trade away. 

In a socialist economy, this sort of technology, instead of being used to link capitalist traders around the world, could be used to link every workplace and every suburb in a city, every city in a country, and every country in the world. Instead of endlessly trading claims to ownership of different companies, the trades would be simple declarations of needs and availabilities. That is, any given region would let the system know how much it had produced of certain goods and how much of certain other goods its population needed for the week (or the day, whatever the case may be). The system would then balance out all the claims and society would immediately know where there were excesses and where there were shortages and alter production accordingly.

It sounds so simple as to be utterly utopian. But this is basically the way the world works already. Take the extensive global supply chains linking farms with ports with food manufacturers with warehouses with supermarkets—everything is coordinated down to the last kilogram between buyers and sellers. When it comes to this sort of distribution, capitalism is in general incredibly efficient. 

So as you read this, somewhere a supermarket line manager is scanning a series of barcodes and entering a corresponding quantity of units for each item; tomorrow a truck will turn up with several pallets of whatever it was that they ordered. It’s as simple as that. If you went back in time 200 years and tried to explain this to someone, they would likely consider you utterly mad. Yet here we all are, living in a world in which a stranger in a truck turns up with a mountain of goods after someone points a laser gun at a series of black lines on a small piece of paper. Marvelous. 

The process today is overseen by the small number of owners of the production and distribution chains who allow their workers to make orders and process deliveries only if they believe their company will make money. That’s the limit to the capitalist economy and its efficiency. But there’s no technical reason that this operation couldn’t be run instead to meet human need. The whole process is already carried out by workers—from producing the food to driving the trucks to stacking the shelves in the shops. All that would need to happen is for production and distribution to be put under the democratic control of the people who do all the work. 

Under capitalism, bosses like Jeff Bezos reap the rewards of their impoverished, exploited workers, then turn around and say, “I want to go to space”—and it happens. Under socialism, working people would reap the rewards of their own labor and communities would turn around and say, “We need a hospital”—and it would happen. It’s not materially or technically different; it’s just a different set of priorities and beneficiaries.

Along with its inability to distribute things equitably, capitalism generates a huge amount of waste. First is the mountain of things that are thrown out because they aren’t sold. Again take food. According to the United Nations Environment Programme, nearly half of all fruit and vegetables produced globally are wasted. In the United States, it’s about 30 percent of all food. Of that, up to a third of wastage happens at the farm and one-quarter at the retail level. It’s actually extra work to keep people starving—food producers and sellers have to put extra time into organizing to dump or remove unsold produce, rather than simply allow it to be distributed, in the usual way, to those who need it. Plus they wasted all the labor producing it in the first place only to see it rot. It was also a massive waste of soil nutrients and precious water resources. 

Second is the huge amount of planned obsolescence in capitalist production: many things are designed to fall apart or with short lifespans so that people come back and buy them over and over again. Industrial-scale planned obsolescence reportedly originated in the early twentieth century with the Phoebus Cartel in light globe manufacturing, which decided to limit the lifespan of bulbs to around 1,000 hours. The idea is now embedded in pretty much every industry. It’s such a waste of labor and resources, but it’s the production model that makes companies the most money. In many cases, it is cheaper to drive wages lower and just produce more and more new things than it is to create durable or serviceable products. (Did you know that some 24 billion pairs of shoes are sold every year?) 

Third is the monumental waste of entire industries and the labor associated with them: things like the legal profession or sales and marketing. One estimate of the cost to end global hunger (using existing capitalist economic means) is about US$33 billion per year over ten years. Compare that to the investment in marketing: US consulting and research firm Forrester predicts that it will reach US$4.7 trillion in 2025. That’s trillions of dollars and millions of labour hours, every year, outlaid by companies trying to convince us to buy their products, which will soon fall apart, rather than their competitors’ products, which are generally the same and also fall apart.

It’s madness.

A socialist economy would get rid of most of this waste almost overnight by starting with simple questions that the whole population can respond to: “First, what do we all need? Second, what do we want? Third, how many resources do we have? Fourth, what are our priorities?” A huge amount of office space, factory space, fertile land, machinery and, above all, labour time, would be freed up by starting with those questions, rather than the capitalists’ questions (“How do I make people want to buy this product, how can I generate a profit?”). 

Think of all the millions of hours of wasted labour that could otherwise be used to increase the production of things in short supply, or to reduce the working week by either producing things to last (therefore reducing the need to produce so much) or by bringing in a greater number of workers into productive industries and reducing everyone’s working hours, while still providing for everyone’s needs. 

Finally, a socialist economy would be more rational. Defenders of capitalism always talk about how innovative their system is. As noted above, it is. But again, this has serious limitations. Take the ongoing economic addiction to oil, coal and gas. How innovative is it, really, to be wedded to energy sources from the nineteenth century? The problem again is profits: the huge companies already invested in and determined to squeeze every cent out of the fossil fuel economy just won’t let go. A socialist economy, being run by the majority in the interests of all, simply would not allow our planet to be trashed so that a few of us could live better than the rest.

Getting to a socialist economy will not be simple—we need a workers’ revolution to get past capitalism. But once we are there, it will be quite easy using existing technologies and processes to run the world according to the maxim, “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need”. The poet Bertolt Brecht put it best in his poem “In praise of communism”:

It is reasonable. You can grasp it. It’s simple.

You’re no exploiter, so you’ll understand.

It is good for you. Look into it.

Stupid men call it stupid, and the dirty call it dirty.

It is against dirt and against stupidity.

The exploiters call it a crime.

But we know:

It is the end of all crime.

It is not madness but

The end of madness.

It is not chaos,

But order.

It is the simple thing

That’s hard to do.

Ben Hillier is the author of Losing Santhia: life and loss in Tamil Eelam and The art of rebellion: dispatches from Hong Kong.

Capitalism and the “Feminization of Poverty”: A Marxist Perspective on Ending Women’s Oppression

By Radhika Miller

Republished from Liberation School.

Sexism is so endemic today that it can be difficult to imagine a society that does not degrade and devalue women. Modern capitalist society is a form of class society, and in today’s capitalist society women face sexism everywhere we turn — within our own homes and personal relationships, in school and in our professional careers, even as we walk down the street.

But this is not the way things always have been and, despite its prevalence in today’s society, the oppression of women is not a part of human nature. Sexism is not natural, which means we can eliminate it.

The oppression of women is rooted in a hierarchical system that values men over women, a system organized around patriarchal norms but that is much broader than patriarchy, in which the oppression of people is not based simply on sex but on class.

Class society the root of women’s oppression

For the vast majority of human history, society was organized around communal groups, and women were not specially oppressed. It was the emergence of class society that formed the foundation for patriarchal norms and the oppression of women.

Class society is the organization of society based on economic exploitation. People are separated into two classes with opposing interests: one is the group of people who own the means of production, who use this ownership of resources and productive forces to accumulate wealth unto themselves — the ruling class; the other class is the group of people who do not own the means of production, but who, through their labor, in fact produce the wealth of society — the laborers. The ruling class exploits the laboring class in order to amass wealth.

Feudalism and capitalism are two examples of class society. In a feudal society, serfs and peasants worked the land, but they did not own the land, and they did not keep the full value of what they produced. Much of the fruits of their labor were handed over to the lords, the landowners that were members of the ruling class that became rich off the land. In a capitalist society, workers produce goods and provide services, but they do not own factories and corporations. The capitalists who own the factories, banks and corporations, members of the ruling class, become rich by paying workers less than the value of the goods produced and lining their pockets with the difference — the profits.

Communal society

If we think of all of human history as one year, or 365 days, the duration of class society and patriarchy would be only five days — less than one week. For the vast majority of our existence, we lived in communal societies. In those societies, women and men performed different work, but all people were valued for their contributions to the survival of the group.

For thousands of years, humanity struggled together for survival in the face of scarcity and deprivation. There were no social classes based upon wealth or power, and no individuals or families amassed wealth; everything was owned by the communities as a whole. Each task was critical to survival and considered a communal responsibility. Hunting, gathering, building homes, child rearing and caring for elders — each of these tasks was valued as critical and was accomplished by members of the group working together rather than by individuals or individual familial units. An individual’s value to society was not based on their gender but rather on their ability to contribute to each of these critical tasks, tasks which may have been performed by different genders but were held in high esteem regardless.

In “The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State,” Frederick Engels outlined the material reasons for why people lived communally:

A division of the tribe or of the gens into different classes was equally impossible. And that brings us to the examination of the economic basis of these conditions. The population is extremely sparse; it is dense only at the tribe’s place of settlement, around which lie in a wide circle first the hunting grounds and then the protective belt of neutral forest, which separates the tribe from others. The division of labor is purely primitive, between the sexes only. The man fights in the wars, goes hunting and fishing, procures the raw materials of food and the tools necessary for doing so. The woman looks after the house and the preparation of food and clothing, cooks, weaves, sews. They are each master in their own sphere: the man in the forest, the woman in the house. Each is owner of the instruments which he or she makes and uses: the man of the weapons, the hunting and fishing implements, the woman of the household gear. The housekeeping is communal among several and often many families. What is made and used in common is common property — the house, the garden, the long-boat.

Society at this stage was matrilineal: women, the organizers of food, shelter and child rearing, were the center of life. The lineage of any person was traced through the mother’s line. Children were not the sole responsibility of the biological mother and/or father but rather were linked by kinship to what we now refer to as extended family.

Class society produces inequality

As Engels explained, inequality emerged for the first time only after millennia of this communal, shared existence. With the emergence of surplus, wealth, and class society came the emergence of patriarchal society and the oppression of women. Over time, as the development of the tools and methods of production produced a surplus, one sector of society, primarily men as the primary hunters and organizers of animal husbandry, could hoard and accumulate wealth as private property.¹ Before the advent of private property, there was no special power or privileges associated with this type of labor. As explained above, all types of labor were valued as critical to survival of the community.

As the capacity to produce continued to grow beyond the minimum for survival, the social and productive relations of matrilineal pre-class societies weakened.

Mother-right was overturned, and men came to control the wealth and resources, using organized violence and redefined family institutions in the form of monogamous marriage to maintain their new position in society.

Engels describes the magnitude of this historical development:

The overthrow of mother-right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children. This degraded position of the woman, especially conspicuous among the Greeks of the heroic and still more of the classical age, has gradually been palliated and glossed over, and sometimes clothed in a milder form; in no sense has it been abolished.

The origins of violence against women and the denial of women’s right to control reproduction can be traced to this development. The overthrow of mother-right resulted in women essentially becoming the property of men. Female sexuality, once freely expressed, was now severely restricted in order to assure the “legitimate” line of descent from father to son for the purposes of inheritance. This was, in turn, tied to the emergence of class society itself, initially on the basis of slavery through warfare.

Engels explained:

The increase of production in all branches — cattle-raising, agriculture, domestic handicrafts — gave human labor-power the capacity to produce a larger product than was necessary for its maintenance. At the same time, it increased the daily amount of work to be done by each member of the gens, household community or single family. It was now desirable to bring in new labor forces. War provided them; prisoners of war were turned into slaves. With its increase of the productivity of labor, and therefore of wealth, and its extension of the field of production, the first great social division of labor was bound, in the general historical conditions prevailing, to bring slavery in its train. From the first great social division of labor arose the first great cleavage of society into two classes: masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited.

Previously, the victors in war either killed or adopted those they defeated into their own tribes to contribute critical tasks of survival, but now, they enslaved the losers in order drive production and create wealth. Slavery was an early form of class society. The development of productive forces and advent of private property set into motion: (1) the emergence of the male-controlled family; (2) the emergence of class society itself. These are closely related, and in the modern form of capitalism, inextricable.²

Women’s oppression in capitalist society

Women’s oppression has changed over time as economic exploitation has changed. Slavery, feudalism and capitalism all demonstrate the exploitation of people in class society. The oppression of women under capitalism manifests in a myriad of ways.

Capitalism is a class society driven by the generation of profits. The capitalist class owns the means of production. This includes the factories and resources required to produce material goods, which run the gamut from shoes to houses. Resources include the means to access fuels, like oil, and even necessities like water. Capitalist production requires the employment of both male and female laborers. Since its inception, working-class women have been drawn out of the isolated atmosphere of the home and into collective production. Some of the first factory workers were women.

And since its inception, capitalism has generated profits by exploiting and undervaluing women in the workplace to a greater degree than men. This directly affects economic status, both by underpaying women and by excluding them from higher paying positions — relegating them to “gendered” positions that are typically service-oriented and lower-paying.

In the United States, women work longer hours and make less money than men. Even though equal pay for equal work has been federal law since 1963, when compared to men with similar education, skills and experience, women earn less than 76 cents to the dollar. For women of color, this is closer to 50 cents. In fact, the average 25-year-old working woman will lose almost $500,000 due to unequal pay during her lifetime as a worker. Yet, she will pay the same for rent, food, utilities and services as her male counterpart. In addition, she is likely to pay more for necessities like health care and more likely to lose money when she is sick. In the United States, among working women earning less than $40,000 per year, up to half are without basic benefits, including secure, affordable health insurance, prescription drug coverage, pension or retirement benefits, or paid sick leave.

This inequality allows capitalism to thrive. Lower pay for a sector of workers — women — plays two critical roles: (1) This directly translates to greater profits because capitalists keep more of the value of the good or service by not paying as much to workers. (2) It also creates a division within the working class, pitting women and men against each other in the workplace because the availability of cheaper labor by women is a bargaining chip that allows capitalists to pay men less as well.

Beyond being underpaid in the workplace, women carry out a great amount of unpaid labor in capitalist society. This is because work like childcare, preparing food in the household and other similar work that was greatly valued in pre-communal society is not assigned a monetary value in capitalist society. Moreover, this work has been de-socialized. Often referred to as “the second shift,” what used to be a communal responsibility has become the onus of individual women to complete on top of the work they perform for pay outside the home. Of course, these tasks are no less necessary to survival to the workforce, regardless of gender. As critical tasks performed at no cost to the capitalists, this unpaid labor — the exploitation of women — is a great source of profit in capitalist society.

All of this makes women more likely to be poor. In 1978, professor Diana Pearce used the term “feminization of poverty” to describe trends in the standard of living in the United States. The fact that women perform unpaid labor, are more likely to perform lower-paying jobs, and that even when performing the same job are paid less means that under capitalism, women will always be poorer than their male counterparts simply because they are women. In the United States, almost 60 percent of adults with an income of less than half the poverty line are women. Black and Latina women have a much higher poverty rate than white women (generally two to three times as high).

In addition, the violence against women we see in today’s capitalist society is a vestige of women’s historic status as property — a status that emerged with and is inextricably tied to class society. Rather than a random or individual crime, violence against women is a symptom of women’s subordinate position in modern class society. The sheer magnitude of violence against women around the world, including in the most advanced capitalist societies speaks to this. In the United States, every two minutes a women is sexually assaulted and every six minutes one is raped. This amounts to about 200,000 victims per year, with 17 percent of women having survived a complete or attempted rape. Domestic violence is the greatest form of injury to women in the United States, more than all other causes combined.

Moreover, the emergence of “global capitalism” has meant that all of these manifestations of women’s oppression are being incorporated into business practices and imperialist military strategies worldwide.

Globally, women earn about 50 percent of what men earn and are the majority of the 1.5 billion people who survive on a dollar or less a day. In transnational sweatshops doing business under free-trade agreements like NAFTA, young women working for slave wages are routinely abused at work. Since 1993, more than 1,000 women and girls have been killed in Juarez, Mexico. Most were workers in the “maquiladora” factories in the free-trade zone in the U.S.-Mexico border. Around the world, one in three women has been beaten, forced into sex or abused in her lifetime.

Despite militant struggle and the many hard-fought gains of the women’s liberation movement, oppression continues on a broad scale, and every gain faces the threat of being rolled back. In the United States, one of every two women experience sexual harassment at school or work; homicide is the leading cause of death for pregnant women; women’s health care rights, including reproductive rights, are increasingly under attack; and although abortion is legal, there are no abortion providers in 83 percent of U.S. counties. Critical programs like childcare, housing, education and health care are constantly under attack, if not outright denied or zeroed out.

In cases of violence against women, the police and the courts find every excuse to avoid punishing the perpetrator. Every stage is a struggle: to have it recorded as a crime, to force an investigation, to force a prosecution, to force a trial, to win a conviction. Even when a woman wins at all of these stages, her subjugation by society remains ever apparent. That is what happened in the recent and notorious Stanford rape case, in which, despite his conviction by a jury for raping an unconscious woman and a request by prosecutors for six years, Judge Aaron Persky sentenced Brock Allen Turner to only six months in jail. Persky’s reason: a prison sentence would have a severe impact on Turner, and he would not be a danger to others.

Under capitalism, feminists fight for — and can win — important rights and equality under the law. But capitalism relies on the subordination of sectors of the working class, including women. Without a state and society determined to enforce equal rights, and determined to deem the subordination of women and violence against women unacceptable — in the eyes of society and in the demonstrated enforcement of law — women will remain oppressed. This is exactly why a woman becoming president of the United States does not signal the liberation of women. The state she would lead is a capitalist state. It is a state constructed to uphold, what is necessary to uphold capitalism — exploitation, inequality and oppression — not to eliminate them. This is exactly why the full liberation of women is not possible within the capitalist system.

Socialism lays the basis for women’s liberation

Socialism lays the basis for two necessary steps toward women’s liberation: (1) removing the inextricable motivation for women’s oppression — the need to exploit workers in order to generate profits; and (2) building a society and state committed to combatting oppression, and not just recognizing but also enforcing the equality of all workers.

In regards to this Sarah Sloan noted at a Party for Socialism and Liberation conference in 2014:

Socialist revolutions have not happened in rich societies but in the poorest parts of the world. At the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Russian economy was one-twelfth the size of the U.S. economy. By eliminating the profits for a tiny handful of capitalists, even a poor country like the Soviet Union, managed by the 1930s, to provide every worker with the right to a job and the right to free health care.

By 1960, the Soviet Union had emerged as the second-biggest economy in the world. There was no unemployment and there was a right to housing — to pay no more than 6 percent of your income for rent. Evictions were illegal because there were no landlords. It was your housing.

Women had a right to free childcare and one year’s paid maternity leave, and they had the right to put their child in child care facilities at no cost. Women in the Soviet Union had the right to retire at 55 years of age at half pay. And remember, they had free health care, so retirement didn’t mean being plunged into poverty. They had a month’s paid vacation.

It doesn’t mean that there were no problems in the Soviet Union, or that we agree with all the policies of different leaderships. But the Soviet Union proved, just as Cuba proves today, that when you take the wealth out of the hands of the capitalists, it can be used to meet people’s needs.

Socialist Cuba has made enormous strides in combatting women’s oppression since its revolution in 1959, which was declared socialist in 1961. And, as women leaders there often state, there is still much work to be done to achieve full equality.

In 1966, Fidel Castro spoke at the fifth national plenum of the Cuban Women’s Federation. Aware of the challenges that face a new socialist society after the overthrow of the ruling class, he described the fight against women’s oppression as a revolution within the socialist revolution. The vestiges of capitalist society’s special oppression of people based on race and gender cannot be simply swept away with a revolution. The revolution begins the work of undoing those vestiges.

However, there is no comparison between the capitalist society of the United States and the socialist one of Cuba. Cuban women are guaranteed housing, health care, education and employment. Men and women are guaranteed parental leave for up to one year. Reproductive rights, abortion and birth control, for example, are legal and provided for by the national health care system. These are just a few examples but they are illustrative.

The United States has no guaranteed paid parental leave. Reproductive rights are constantly under attack. Housing, education, health care and employment are not considered rights.

We fight for reforms and struggle for full liberation through socialism

What, then, is women’s liberation? The term evokes images of women leading marches, rallies, strikes and hunger strikes to demand the right to vote, to demand safe working conditions, to demand equal pay, the right to abortion and reproductive freedom; women standing together to demand an end to sexism and against sexual assault. It is marked by militant struggle in the face of extreme repression and by victories in the recognition of rights and changes in societal attitudes. The women’s liberation movement militantly struggles for equal rights and status for women.

As revolutionary feminists, we must embrace the militancy of the women’s liberation movement and carry it forward. We must remain strong and unwavering in our demand for equal rights. It is critical to fight for as many rights recognized by law, for as many legal reforms, for as many changes in society thought and action as possible. All of this eases the oppression faced by women.

As socialists, we also understand that while militant struggle can win important rights in capitalist society, the women’s liberation struggle reaches beyond the goal of equal rights. It is telling that after centuries of struggle, women still do not have equal rights under the law. What is even more telling is the other component of the struggle — that capitalist society continues to subject women to patriarchal norms; that in capitalist society, women remain oppressed.

When a society is built upon exploitation, as capitalism is, equality is contradictory to the system. This is the very reason why — even in the face of militant struggle — women do not have equal rights, and why even the rights we do have are rarely enforced and continuously threatened and eroded by legislatures and courts, instruments of the capitalist ruling class. Capitalism relies on social constructs, such as race and gender, to support the exploitation of groups of people that is necessary to generate profits froms the labor of workers. By reclaiming political power from the capitalists, we attack the root of all bigotry and inequality based on these social constructs. In doing so, we lay the basis for the full liberation of women and all oppressed people.

Endnotes

1. Women also participated in hunting, but men were the primary hunters and controllers of the process of the domestication of animals.

2. The emergence of class society not only led to the oppression of women, it is also the root of LGBTQ oppression and bigotry. Maintaining the concentration of wealth in the upper class requires children who can inherit that wealth — same-sex relationships became valueless, although they naturally have continued. As is the oppression of women, the oppression of LGBTQ people is inextricably tied to today’s capitalist society.

Woke Antiracism: It's a Gospel According to John McWhorter

By Marc James Léger

Republished from Blog of Public Secrets

There are many facets to today’s woke culture wars and many ways of approaching the subject. Disciplines like sociology, psychology, anthropology and political science would make use of standard methods of analysis, as would subdisciplines and interdisciplinary clusters find something to say about it. Political tendencies treat the subject differently, depending on their principles and orientation. And the mass and social media that could be referred to as the field of communications find their own uses for social tensions. 

When a difficult subject with intractable social characteristics — like for example fascism or police violence — combines clear characteristics with dreadful implications, its analysis often calls for extra-disciplinary efforts. The Frankfurt School, for example, explained the failures of the twentieth-century workers’ movement by recourse to psychoanalysis and theology. A similar challenge has preoccupied the critics of recent trends like woke-washing and cancel culture. 

Since the rise of Black Lives Matter and MeToo, the political nihilism and eclectic materialism of the postmodern theories that had been challenged by the successes of the anti-globalization movement and movements of the squares have returned under the guise of new academic trends like intersectionality, privilege theory, decoloniality, and critical race theory. While some may argue that they never disappeared and that to think so is a form of intellectual regression, there is nevertheless the sense that the spread of postmodern ideas beyond the academy and into popular culture, and now also into public policy, is cause for concern and resistance. That is the tenor of John McWhorter’s Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. In reviewing McWhorter’s book, the question for us is: What is the political orientation of this concern and what forms of resistance are advocated? 

Before publishing Woke Racism, McWhorter had gained an online media presence by appearing alongside Glenn Loury on the YouTube Glenn Show at Bloggingheads.tv. A Columbia University linguist with a considerable list of book publications and magazine articles, McWhorter is a long-time advocate of (black) capitalism and critic of (black) radicalism. This is important to keep in mind when listening to McWhorter’s forays into what seems to be common sense about race and social aspiration. 

After a private school education and degrees at Rutgers, New York University, and Stanford, McWhorter taught at Cornell and UC Berkeley. He then worked as a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI) from 2003 to 2008. Although he identifies as a liberal democrat, McWhorter’s affiliation with the MI allows us to appreciate the conservative political orientation of his diagnosis of woke antiracism. Formerly known as the International Center for Economic Policy Studies (ICEPS), the MI is a libertarian think tank that was co-founded by Sir Antony George Anson Fisher, an advocate of neoliberal free-market theories who established no fewer than 150 similar institutions around the world. These corporate-funded and right-wing think tanks, like the Atlas Network and the International Policy Network, support hundreds of similar think tanks in dozens of countries. 

ICEPS was at one time headed by former CIA Director William Joseph Casey, who in 1977 established the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, which promotes the same ideological principles that characterize McWhorter’s critique of civil rights activism: individual freedom, private initiative, personal responsibility, welfare reform, privatization, supply-side economics, free markets, and limited government. The MI was co-founded by Casey, an advocate of the Truman Doctrine and aid to the Nixon, Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations. Casey was a fixture of American Cold War policy and was implicated in the Iran-Contra affair.

The MI promotes its anti-communist propaganda through books, articles, and publications like City Journal. Neoconservative MI ideologues argue that Keynesian welfare programmes cause poverty and offer non-scientific, social Darwinist “alternatives” to social spending. They advocate monetarist economic policies, budget cuts, low corporate taxes, low wages, urban gentrification, the charterization schools, pharmaceuticals, tough-on-crime policing, fossil fuel extractivism, climate change denial, economic inequality for the sake of prosperity and social mobility, the security state, and the promotion of corporate capitalism through business schools. Affiliates of the MI have included Daniel Patrick Moynihan, William F. Buckley, Rudy Giuliani, Rupert Murdoch, Henry Kissinger, Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush and Charles Murray. 

Not that a scholar is guilty by association, but McWhorter’s colleague Glenn Loury is likewise an advocate of entrepreneurialism and individual responsibility. Loury has also been a fellow of the Manhattan Institute and has links to the Heritage Foundation, a Washington D.C. think tank founded by right-wing conservatives, anti-communists and the Christian Right. The Heritage Foundation has closer ties to the military apparatus than even the MI and has been implicated in foreign policy “defense” initiatives in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Nicaragua, and Iraq. 

When it comes to race issues, Loury’s conservative politics advocate socioeconomic mobility through the expansion of the black middle class. Like McWhorter, he rejects the black leftist critique of bourgeois America as well as the definition of blacks as victims. For Loury, social justice does not require government reform but rather the protection of freedoms. While both of these black conservatives acknowledge that racial disparities are due to the history of racial discrimination, they argue that liberation from this legacy is a matter of individual freedom and responsibility. According to them, black politics and leadership should privilege voluntary action and individual initiative.   

As a popular commentator and public intellectual, McWhorter has repeatedly demonstrated his liberal-to-conservative values, while occasionally acknowledging the views of his left-wing colleagues. As someone who speaks as a black American man about black issues, like housing, education, poverty, and crime, it is easy to mistake McWhorter’s politics as socially responsible, along the oxymoronic lines of George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.” By targeting mainstream black antiracists like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and Nikole Hannah-Jones, McWhorter would seem to share some common ground with left-wing critics like Adolph Reed Jr., Cedric Johnson, Vivek Chibber, and David Walsh. But that is hardly the case and that is why it is necessary to elucidate the difference between a leftist and a conservative critique of woke antiracism. 

The Left and Right critiques of antiracism are not, as Robin D.G. Kelley has suggested, strange bedfellows. The left-wing view defines woke antiracism as a petty-bourgeois politics of the professional-managerial class. While there is an existing and growing literature on the Left that defends emancipatory universality and advances a class critique of contemporary identity politics, these views are not widespread and the political Left tends to follow the radical democratic tendency of new social movements. This makes it that much easier for McWhorter to correctly associate woke antiracism with postmodern theories.

The right-wing critique of woke antiracism makes the task of the Left more complicated than it was previously. Unfortunately, the activist and academic milieu has been reluctant to criticize woke culture wars, fearful that any such effort would serve the Right. Moreover, the “cancel culture” that has gripped postmodern progressives is at times as harrowing as the conditions of labour precarity and so creates an atmosphere of conformity. 

Compromise formations have been the modus operandi for leftists since the postwar period and it would be foolhardy to think that we can advance the cause of socialism without taking up what appears to some to be matters that are secondary to problems of political economy. However, the weakness and reluctance of a Left that has been in retreat for decades has reduced the socialist challenge to capitalism to an inoperative infrapolitics of resistance and democratic agonism. Today’s petty-bourgeois leftism considers genuine socialism to be an outmoded totalitarian ideology. The only remaining task for conservatives is to attack the countercultural attitudes of postmodern scholars and activists. 

Against the latter, McWhorter adopts conservative takes on public issues. At the risk of taking some of his views out of context, this would include the following: racism is hardwired; the elimination of racism is a utopian pipe dream; black America’s problems are not all about racism; black antiracists want whites to give them more attention and kowtow to them; the politics of respectability and responsibility are not incompatible with black pride; black agonism is self-defeating and insults blacks; black people should stop thinking of themselves as victims and should instead prepare for the job market; family dysfunction is not a distinctly black issue and poverty is a multiracial problem; the Congressional Black Caucus contributed to flawed War on Drugs policies; the emphasis on white-on-black crime ignores black-on-black crime; the election of Barack Obama and the success of people like Condoleezza Rice and Tiger Woods are rebukes to the insistence that America is defined by its racism; Obama did not disappoint black people; the Trump election was not a whitelash but was mostly due to social media having made politics more aggressive; antiracists turn black people against their country; oppositionality is a question of psychology, not politics, and exaggerates the problem of racism; because segregation is illegal, antiracists must inflate minor problems; the obsession with the concept of institutional racism is more damaging to black people than the n-word; oppositional antiracism prevents reasonable analysis of the problems of racism; antiracists betray the cause of black progress; antiracist academics are expanding the classification of racism to new areas, repeating the failed indoctrination methods and psycho-social experiments of the radical sixties and seventies; antiracism is self-congratulatory delusion; progressives should focus on helping those who need help rather than attacking the power structure; antiracists prefer a conversation about race than they do advancing practical priorities like ending the war on drugs, promoting vocational education, and ending the AIDS and obesity epidemics.

Each of these points are not necessarily countered by simple contradiction. Some of them may be correct, but for the wrong reasons. Some of them may be wrong, but for the right reasons. Others require a different set of historical, social, cultural, political, and economic considerations. Woke Racism offers more than enough, in that regard, to make the assertion that McWhorter’s conservative politics have nothing in common with the class politics of leftist universalism. 

The book begins with five assertions, each of which has its left counterpoint: 1) McWhorter’s argument that the ideology of woke antiracism is best understood as a destructive, incoherent, and seductive religion mitigates a critical explanation; 2) his goal of explaining why it is that black people are attracted to a religion that treats them as simpletons ignores the class function of antiracism (and racism) within a multiracial social space; 3) his suggestion that the woke religion harms black people avoids the analysis of which social groups it benefits — namely, the black middle class, the multiracial professional-managerial class, and, ultimately, the capitalist upper class; 4) the argument that a woke-free Democratic Party-friendly agenda can advance the cause of black Americans ignores the organic link between capitalism and the Democratic Party, a tendency that harms radical left politics more generally; 5) his suggestion of ways to lessen the grip of woke religion on public culture entails the problem that a flawed analysis cannot lead to effective solutions. 

While McWhorter wishes to reassure his readers that he is not against religion, even in its BLM incarnation, he also wishes to reassure liberals and leftists that he is not a supporter of the conservative Right. He seeks to address New York Times and NPR-type audiences that, he says, have wrongly accepted the argument that virtue signaling about racism will in some way help black people. McWhorter thus marshals Martin Luther King’s idea that character is more important than skin color against the kind of victim politics that emphasizes weakness and injury as rewards in their own right. 

While the rejection of a culture of complaint is perhaps necessary to political integrity, it has also been an alibi for those who seek to restrict benefits to those who can already afford them. That is why McWhorter’s defeatist stance abandons the task of convincing antiracists that their approach to social praxis is mistaken. On this point, McWhorter’s post-racialism complements rather than challenges the ideology of race managers like Coates and Kendi. His call to “live graciously” among antiracist power brokers should not be countered with activist outrage and indignation, or even smarmy academic irony, but with those left critiques and strategies that have sustained the communist hypothesis across and beyond the valley of postmodernism.

While leftists are no more enamored of DiAngelo-style diversity training than the black guys at Bloggingheads or the reasonable folks at The New Culture Forum, the Left does not advocate self-reliance so much as autonomy in and through solidarity. That the concept of solidarity is now also under attack from the academic Left is only one reason why radical leftists, unlike McWhorter, do not see themselves as serving their race or, as the case may be, attacking their own (white) race. For a socialist, politics is not a matter of identity.   

Building an in-group, rather than a universalist politics, so as to buttress society against the woke mob, is McWhorter’s first line of attack. The first chapter of Woke Racism is dedicated to establishing who these “woke” people are who, for example, cancel nurses for saying things like “everyone’s life matters.” What kind of people are they? Why do they get away with their righteous attacks? Should others allow them to continue? 

In some ways, these questions answer themselves. The devil is in the details insofar as the mounting of any challenge to woke antiracism must appreciate the distinct aspects of the postmodern variant of antiracism. Although nothing about political purges or encounter groups is new, McWhorter is correct to say that some of what we are witnessing did not exist only five years ago. One of the shifts, as Angela Nagle has argued, is that countercultural transgression is now also common on the Right, while the liberal Left has arguably become more censorious than it was during the politically correct eighties.

To take one example described by McWhorter, the data analyst David Shor was fired in 2020 for tweeting a study by a black Ivy League scholar which shows how violent sixties protests were more likely to deliver voters to the Republicans than nonviolent protests. The fact that Shor was not endorsing this study did not prevent his critics from arguing that it was inappropriate for a white man to make this information available. What Shor did, regardless of his intention, is nothing that someone like Chris Hedges would not also say. However, not everyone has the platform that Hedges has to defend his views from those who would demand absolute conformity to inexistent and absurd rules.

What defines the new phase of antiracism is the shift away from abolition and civil rights struggles toward the kind of “third wave antiracism” (TWA) that considers whites to be inherently complicit with structural racism. The obverse to this is the assumption that the fact of embodiment makes blacks inherently radical. McWhorter rightfully decries the zealous sort of inquisitorial micro-politics that brands even leftists as backward. Wokesters do more damage than they advance the cause of antiracism when they define mathematics and punctuality as “white” or reduce Shakespeare and Lincoln to racism. That this heightening of performative politics, of giving and taking offense, has led to denunciatory rituals is an indication of the illiberal shadow of conventional liberalism. It’s a capitalist world, after all, and that is something that most cynics can agree about. 

McWhorter is correct to say that the woke serve a purpose other than the one they say they do. However, his critique of contradictions does not point to those of labor and capital, but rather to an anthropological realism that is populated by bigots, killjoys, power-mongers, and social justice slayers. The “catechism of contradictions” that McWhorter attributes to latter-day inquisitors is as dualistic as it is metaphysical and no doubt the lodestar of a Protestant work ethic that continues to associate material wealth with salvation. 

McWhorter contends that only religion explains why the actually existing antiracist public policies are not enough for the woke. Since these missionaries are inherently self-interested, he adopts Joseph Bottum’s concept of “the Elect” to define those who consider themselves the chosen ones who can lead their people to the promised land. A moral critique is thereby devised to strategically detract from the political and class critique. This moral critique is something that liberals share with conservatives about as much as their concern for tax breaks. 

McWhorter ignores the reality that causing “beautiful trouble” is today not only a matter of social justice but also a career in the creative and knowledge industries. The main character in the TV series The Chair tells the continuing education student David Duchovny that a great deal has happened in the last 30 years, like affect theory, ecocriticism, digital humanities, new materialism, book history, and critical race theory. Indeed.

McWhorter predicts that the woke will soon have to tamper their Elect nonsense if they are not to lose more people to the Trump Right. In the meanwhile, the best defense against the Elect is knowing how to identify them and understanding the ways in which they operate like a religious sect. The woke do not know they are religious, yet they unquestioningly accept doctrine as a matter of etiquette, demanding the submission of their followers. Their clergy includes gifted orators who denounce the sin of white privilege, going the extra mile to denounce the presence of this within themselves. Testifying to privilege on Sunday is more important than what one does the rest of the week. 

Woke evangelism teaches that the discussion of racism is in and of itself a matter of revelation. Donations to the church of woke by corporate America, even in the form of expiation, like the removal of Confederate statues or The New York Times 1619 Project, or just taking a knee, are accepted as signs of the infallibility of the Elect’s view of the world. As the list of heretics who are burned at the stake increases along with the number of words that constitute blasphemy, their power increases. In practical terms, this means that unless one is actively committed to issues of race, gender and sexuality, one can be suspected of heresy.

While the Elect can be found anywhere, their presence among university faculty adds intellectual cachet to their prosecutorial might. All of this is true enough, but the reality of academic life is that it is a competitive environment in even the best of circumstances. Cornel West has been decrying the gangsterization of academic life since at least the 1980s. The difference now is that, with the disappearance of tenure and the overreliance on adjunct teachers, the pressures placed on instructors by neoliberal administrations and disrespectful students has made “the last job that makes sense anymore” into an increasingly privatized zone of conflict. 

Because it risks undermining solidarity, TWA accompanies and facilitates the managerial deskilling, commodification and marketization of education. Even those programs that specialize in TWA are affected by what they do. As McWhorter claims, or as Thomas Kuhn might have put it in more scientific terms, TWA supplants older religions. While one might think that ceci tuera cela is par for the course in an innovative knowledge sector, new knowledge is not necessarily better knowledge. The march through the institutions by radical intellectuals is undermined in this regard by the broader defeats of the Left in the postwar era, leading, as Richard Barbrook has put it, to a replacement of the struggle between socialism and capitalism with the struggle between old (left) forces and the new (left) social movements. Since TWA is by and large a postmodern phenomenon, even this matters less than the term social justice suggests. 

If religion has no place in the classroom, which is not a claim that can be fully sustained, what about race metaphysics and applied social justice postmodernism, as Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay refer to it? McWhorter claims that the woke do not play according to the rules of Enlightenment reason. However, if the classroom is to remain a place of critical inquiry, it does not serve anyone to limit what can and cannot be studied. As Slavoj Žižek says, it takes religion to make good people do bad things. McWhorter says the same about woke antiracism. For this reason, he insists that trends like critical race theory can not only be taught, but that they can also be criticized. The question for us is whether the extended metaphor of religion is fair in that regard. 

As with fascist irrationality, the definition of woke antiracism as a religion allows McWhorter to generously add that its advocates are not simply insane. Like Pluckrose and Lindsay, his rejection of TWA allows him to make a second, arguably more ideologically important move, which is to relate the “performative ideology” of the woke Elect to literary deconstruction and then extend this critique of postmodernism to the academic Left. If woke activists can claim that seeing a white man hold a black baby hurts them, or claim that cisheteropatriarchy justifies looting, then the shift from a socially reformist Left to a culturally conformist Left transforms the politics of equality into a guerrilla war against reason, objectivity, truth and accountability. This is not a politics of speaking truth to power but a will to empowerment through the relativization of truth claims through concepts like standpoint epistemology. Postmodernism’s suspicion of meta-narratives becomes the meta-narrative of suspicion.

McWhorter argues that Electism is today more powerful than the Marxist pretense to offer a comprehensive worldview. The woke are thus identified and identify themselves as the left in contemporary American politics. So long as there is no socialist around to provide some needed contrast, the woke can present themselves as the redeemers of humanity, filling the left-wing hole that was created with the political shift to neoliberalism. 

Deconstructing privilege, the woke have come to view their struggle as the activist dismantling of hegemonic structures. Unlike Jane Addams and MLK, McWhorter says, the woke do not accomplish anything much since they have given themselves the easy task of denouncing everything as racist, sexist and homophobic. He argues that buzzwords like structural and institutional racism anthropomorphize the term racism and require that people suspend their disbelief that not everything is driven by prejudice. This interesting suggestion does nothing to alter the reality that these concepts are products of the same Cold War liberalism that McWhorter ascribes to but does not analyze, better to leave his readers none the wiser about that fact. And why should he when so many of the more critical voices among academic and activist leftists do not do so themselves? 

Woke antiracism is an ideological support of neoliberal institutions that have undergone a thorough legitimation crisis. Since McWhorter defends this system, his sleight of hand on the issue of antiracism substitutes class politics for disingenuous concern about the fate of black people. While nothing about his own politics has much in common with the labor politics and anti-imperialism of the Civil Rights generation, the fact that BLM has little to do with them either allows him to pose as the defender of black interests. 

The transformation of black radicalism in the form of TWA difference politics now finds “allies” among whites who gladly engage in sycophantic rituals of humility and demand that others do the same. Although not all black people want or expect this from whites, the focus on the condition of being psychologically broken, according to McWhorter, is advanced as proof that one has not sold out to the white power structure. The loyal opposition of the woke antiracist is therefore not the Marxist Left or white liberals but right-wing whites. The Elect ultimately associate all heretics with this group, regardless of the reasons for them having fallen out of favor. 

The only group remaining that can advance the cause of blacks, McWhorter claims, are black conservatives. Along postmodern lines, today’s blackness is more a deconstructed category than it is a matter of black essentialist authenticity since blackness is not defined by the woke in terms of what it is, but rather in terms of what it is not, namely: not white and not racist. “Elect ideology,” McWhorter writes, “requires non-white people to found their sense of self on not being white, and on not liking how white people may or may not feel about them.”Like the hysteric in Freudian analysis, antiracists do not call for people to stress their individuality but their condition of secondariness. On this topic, McWhorter avoids the more heady concepts of people like Orlando Patterson, Sylvia Wynter, Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton, and Fred Moten. 

Although someone can genuinely be said to be victimized – like George Floyd, for example, or Julian Assange – victim politics counter-defines McWhorter’s definition of individualism. One is an individual (like John McWhorter) because one is not a victim or because one refuses the status of victim on the singular basis of ascriptive racial category. However, one can be both an individual and a victim. The experience of victimization need not lead to the balkanization of the self but a social world in which the latter would be a desirable outcome, in the form of negative theology, is one in which Marxism has lost all purchase on reality and praxis. That this can be reverse engineered by the kind of zealotry that McWhorter otherwise accurately describes merely underscores the reactionary if not fascist frames of reference in which these social phenomena and discussions take place. 

This perhaps more than anything else explains why woke antiracists make “being oppressed” the essence of black identity — because victim status is a seemingly winning hand in a game that blacks cannot lose given the postulate that majority subjects cannot make similar claims. If they do, they identify with reactionary racist whites and lose the game twice over. While McWhorter’s rejection of antiracism as a performative and expressive anti-politics is shared by some leftists, the limitation of (black) politics by anyone to notions of masquerade and transgression is not something that can pose a serious challenge to capitalism.   

McWhorter is correct to say that there is nothing progressive about a performative game of victim politics that is gloomy, illogical, and pointless. However, a different game cannot be played when people insist on its unwritten rules. Changing the game means changing the rules of the game. On this point, McWhorter is no help at all. While he does not wish to insist on “the race thing” in the same way that people like Kendi do, he is self-admittedly short on solutions.

Rather than the long list of policy demands that defined the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns, for example, McWhorter is satisfied to identity three policy proposals: 1) end the War on Drugs, 2) teach phonics to improve literacy, and 3) get past the idea that everyone needs to go to college and instead value working-class jobs. Why so few planks? Because, McWhorter says, platforming too many good ideas is more performative than actionably pragmatic in a polarized parliamentary system. Although Great Society efforts are facts of history and Democratic Party liberals like Mark Lilla advocate a return to them, McWhorter dismisses this as unsophisticated utopianism. Better to keep your sights on the realistic future rather than bygone times, he advises, adding that those gains achieved by the labor struggles he cannot bring himself to mention have not, in his estimation, had any lasting effect. Only a limited number of policy proposals that have a chance of making it through Congress and come with in-built gains should be pursued. 

One can see from this why it is that working-class jobs need to be valorized. If nothing can realistically advance the interests of the working class in corporate America at the level of wages, paid time off and holidays, affordable housing, free college tuition, universal health care, criminal justice reform, ecology, day care and elder care, etc., then conservatives do well to minimize demands for equality since any one major gain for the working class, like those civil rights laws that were not simply utopian, threaten to lead from one victory to another.

Woke Racism offers no real solutions to our problems. It is not even a good analysis of them. It just says no to woke antiracism in the same way that conservatives say no to the countercultural “mobocracy” that they consider to be little more than a nuisance.

McWhorter is right to say that opposition to racism is not by itself a politics. What would do the most to alleviate the problems that are exacerbated by racism or that lead to racism is not something that he addresses head on. Rather than the broad set of phenomena that cannot be limited to minorities or to racism, he prefers, as a black man, to think of woke antiracism as an exaggerated form of virtue signaling. If the performance of black authenticity is inoperative as the substance of left politics, it is not, as McWhorter suggests, because it lacks logic, but because it does not, by itself, provide a radical perspective on class relations. 

While there are different approaches to the identity and class debate, Žižek’s recent publication, Heaven in Disorder, offers a useful summary of the fundamental dilemma. In the entry “Class Struggle Against Classism,” Žižek mentions the political divide between progressive neoliberals like Biden — who give lip service to identity and demographics but are otherwise no different than the Republicans — and progressive populists, who mobilize constituencies on the basis of progressive policy as well as cultural competence, meaning the kind of postmodern equity that replaces universalist equality with attention to disparities based on ascriptive differences. 

An ostensibly “inside-outside” populist like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can criticize the Biden administration while simultaneously rejecting the “class essentialism” of socialists. This criticism, Žižek argues, is the old liberal-left trick of accusing the Left of serving the Right. It is reflected in Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara’s downplaying of the January 6 coup attempt and warning to the Left that too much criticism of the Democratic Party only serves the far Right. 

The “brocialist” Left is said to privilege class over anti-racism and feminism. The question is: Does the progressive neoliberalism of Clinton, Obama, and Biden actually do anything better to advance the cause of women, blacks, and minority groups? Assuming it is accepted that global capitalism is the target of left politics, class essentialism cannot be considered to be the problem, that is to say, except as Stalinist deviation. 

Contrary to his equivocation on the Biden administration on the Bad Faith Podcast, Žižek does not accept the Democratic Party agenda as part of a strategy that, by making things worse, would eventually lead to change. He does not advocate staying “inside” the system so as to pursue a more radical “outside” politics. This does not imply that the Left must reject any and every progressive policy put forward by the Biden administration — not that there have been very many, beyond the withdrawal from Afghanistan. 

The accusation of class essentialism, Žižek says, misses its mark. Without dismissing ecological, feminist, antiracist, decolonial, and national struggles, class should be understood as the dynamic that overdetermines these interacting and multiple struggles. Against radical democratic and intersectional approaches, Žižek rejects the bell hooks idea that class is only one in a series of antagonisms. When class is reduced to one among other identities, he argues, class becomes another version of identity politics. The resulting “classism” advocates (self-)respect for workers, which Žižek says is a characteristic of both populism and fascism.

The problem with John McWhorter’s Woke Racism is that it tacitly accepts racial oppression because it defends class exploitation. Since capitalism makes use of antiracism in ways that are similar to its use of racism — by and large to divide the working class and defend the interests of the ruling plutocracy — internationalist class solidarity is the missing element of his study. Class overdetermines the relation between race and class in McWhorter’s analysis. Because he accepts capitalist class exploitation, his description of race politics has no explanatory value. 

Not only is McWhorter’s theory regressive with respect to the possibility of improving people’s lives, but it must rely on anthropological guilt structures, couched in the terms of religion, in order to make capitalism seem eternal and unchanging. In the end, it is McWhorter who is a strange bedfellow of woke antiracists since both rely on a static view of the social order. The woke libertarian’s emphasis on the original sin and eternal damnation of racism is echoed by the economic libertarian’s conservative theory of human nature and ratification of capitalist social relations as the norm and telos of social progress.   

Marc James Léger is a Marxist cultural theorist based in Montreal. He is author of Bernie Bros Gone Woke: Class, Identity, Neoliberalism (2022) and Too Black to Fail: The Obama Portraits and the Politics of Post-Representation (2022).

The Unwakeable American Dream

By Jack Ely

For many, to varying degrees, picking the next president (or nearly any elected official) feels analogous to deciding which doctor is best fit to care for a terminal patient. Their job is merely to mediate the impending decline, to maintain all the basic life processes so long as that patient can go on existing without ever hoping for more health than what they precariously still cling to. The terminal nature of this condition, however, can never be openly acknowledged without fracturing the ideological fantasy that maintains our collective reality as Americans. But over the last few decades the Settler-Capitalist mythology that imbued the cultural consciousness of the 20th century has developed into something else entirely, a form of hyper-reality. The lofty, idealistic language of past American leaders remains as popular as ever, yet detached from anything real. Nowhere is this more prevalent than with the American Dream, an ideal rooted in a past that never was and speaks to a future that will never be. The promise of economic security and upward mobility that so many White, “Middle-Class” Americans enjoyed in the decades following World War II remains as ubiquitous as ever within the political ethos of both major parties, yet strays further and further from the actual experience of workers today. My goal is not to dive into the specific causes of this phenomena, as there is already plenty of existing research that can explain them far better. What I am interested in are the philosophical implications of this shifting material landscape and how they’ve reverberated across our social reality in the 21st century to deliver us to our current political moment.

At the forefront of both of the last two presidential elections has been the question of “How did we end up here?” Many in the media and general public alike opt for a top-down chain of causality, attributing the dismal selection of candidates on both sides to an institutional decline in our political system. There are several problems with this kind of moralizing, the first of which being that the bygone, golden era of party politics that both Republicans and Democrats wish us to believe we’ve strayed away from never really existed to begin with. We saw this with the media’s incessance on exceptionalizing Trump as some sort of uniquely depraved and corrupt deviation from past GOP presidents of the likes of the Bushes and Reagan. In reality, Trump only differed from them on the surface. Behind all of his outsider rhetoric and populist eccentricity, Trump largely governed like any standard Neoliberal of the past 40 years. In fact, the material damage sanctioned by his administration was rather mild compared to his Republican predecessors, yet George W. Bush receives cushy media coverage with the blood of a million Iraqi citizens on his hands, while Ronald Raegan still remains nationally beloved despite his numerous domestic and international crimes. Perhaps Trump was ostracized to the extent he was because he ripped the mask off and showed us who the ruling class is and always has been. Rather than a deviation from the norm, Trump is American Capitalism personified in its most crude form, stripped of all its niceties and decorum. If that is true, then what does that make Biden? 

In Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Leatherface is not the mastermind behind the violent acts he carries out; his family takes advantage of his mental impairment to force him into killing for them. It’s also heavily implied that the Sawyer family are displaced slaughterhouse workers who kill in order to continue their way of life and means of subsistence. In many ways, Leatherface can be seen as a sympathetic character who is as much a victim of his family and circumstances as the people he slaughters. For Joe Biden, the mask he wears may be symbolic, but it is just as crude and disfigured as the one Leatherface wears of human skin. Like the Sawyers, the American ruling class grows increasingly desperate as they cling to an unstable status quo, the only difference being they are the architects of this instability rather than its maddened victims.

What Trump offered was a bombastic alternative to the glib, sanitized politics that came to represent the Neoliberal order, even if this alternative was itself a different form of masquerade. Nonetheless, his defeat by Joe Biden, narratively, was a ‘return to normal’. Yet, as I alluded to earlier, there is a sense that this normal can no longer exist. They can piece the mask back together, but the cracks can no longer be ignored. Joe Biden exemplifies this desperation to maintain this reality so acutely because for so many years he was the ideal personification of it; the traditional White moderate with an All-American charm who made a career of bolstering the Imperial and Carceral industries while tempering the public's expectation that any real or meaningful change is possible. Additionally, his proximity to Obama (whom Democrats truly long for) made him the obvious Neoliberal torch bearer to take on Trump. However, the Biden of today far better reflects the Late-Capitalist decay that we find ourselves in, contrary to the Pre-Neoliberal idealism that cloaks his administration. He appears as an anachronism, a relic of a past only accessed through fading memories much like the abandoned remnants of industrial America that litter our roadsides. And in his lassitude, the exhausted breath of a dying political order can almost be felt.

Still, Trump and Biden seem to have only warped America’s ideological mythos. Ruling class ideology still remains potent as ever in shaping our reality in this country, and no amount of cracks seem likely to change that anytime soon - regardless of how unpopular the last two presidents have been. In fact, that may only be reinforcing it, as the 2020 election had one of the highest voter turnouts in history. But why, in a time when faith in our government is so low, does its grip on power remain so strong? Here I turn to Slavoj Žižek’s insight on how ideology functions under Postmodern Capitalism - “Even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them” (Žižek 33). Many supporters of Biden (especially young people) had a sort of weary, begrugended attitude in doing so - a choice between the ‘lesser of two evils’. What matters is not whether that wager was true, rather why so many people unequivocally accepted voting for any form of ‘evil’ in the first place. The politics of cynicism that we find ourselves living in today seem to be even more subordinating than any form of propaganda that authoritarians could hope to devise. As Žižek pointed out, Nonbelief  is the prevailing ideology of Neoliberalism, and it does all the work of propaganda without us ever realizing it. No matter how much we disavow the ruling class in our beliefs, we still support them in our actions - which ultimately produces an even more totalizing form of control. 

Despite this, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that those of us who’ve grown up in 21st century America still hold a very different image of it than our parents do. If Nixon and Vietnam fractured the ideological consensus of post-war America, today’s younger generations have grown up in the chasm left in its wake. Endless imperial war and presidential scandals seem to us almost banal - as Marx once said, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” The waning patriotism and political pessimism among young people in response may be justified, but it also presents a new problem in the form of cynicism. We’ve seen one crisis after another, all directly caused or exacerbated by the Imperial rot unfolding all around us. Yet we remain as disengaged and detached as ever, transfixed in a near catatonic gaze on the endless stream of attention grabbing media bites informing us of the latest horrible event that deserves our outrage. 

Accordingly, two horrific massacres just recently unfolded in Buffalo, NY and Uvalde, TX. The discourse surrounding these uniquely American forms of pathological violence has been trite to say the least. Lost in the clamor over guns, video games, and mental illness is the reality that those factors by themselves are not enough to explain what’s happening to the degree it has here. Only in a country as deeply alienated, hyper-individualistic, and foundationally violent as America could these seemingly unthinkable acts be so commonplace. Mass shootings, especially ones as gut-wrenching as the one at Robb Elementary School, clearly provoke a more visceral and outspoken reaction. It often feels like the solutions are right in front of us and all that stands in the way is legislative action from our political leaders. But once again, this brings us to the Sisyphean predicament at the forefront of all aforementioned issues; the American ruling class is not interested, nor capable of reconciling the inherent contradictions within our country. To do so would mean to unravel the Settler-Capitalist fabric of the nation itself, which is antithetical to their class interests and roles in maintaining those very power structures. 

In light of this, it's no wonder why so many (young) people feel hopeless that things can change. The America we’ve grown up in has made it nearly impossible to go on believing in the fantasies told to us about it, yet we remain ideologically imprisoned to the very structures we know are broken. Neoliberalism’s greatest triumph is how thoroughly it’s managed to obscure and weaken our collective capacity to envision a different, better world. Even the Anti-Capitalist Left falls victim to this lack of political imagination far too often, and our task moving forward shouldn’t simply be to try and recreate past forms of struggle. We’ve reached an inflection point in American politics with Donald Trump and Joe Biden. However, we can’t, and shouldn’t wish for a return to Obama-era politics that do nothing more than mask the underlying reality playing out in this country. As Fascists try to drive us off a cliff, the Democratic party has done nothing but pave the road for them. Now, in the face of ecological collapse and every other imminent crisis at bay, our hopes will have to lay outside of the ballot box and in new forms of collective political struggle. 

Citations

Desilver, Drew. “Turnout soared in 2020 as nearly two-thirds of eligible U.S. voters cast ballots for president”. Pewresearch.org, January 28 2021, https://pewrsr.ch/3oAN3MB

Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso Books, 1989. 

On Hierarchies and Humanity: A Review of ‘The Dawn Of Everything’ by David Graeber and David Wengrow

[Pictured: Waving across time, the Cave of Hands in Argentina, painted as far back as 11,000 B.C., reminds us that prehistory was filled with real people. Credit: R. M. Nunes / IStock / Getty Images Plus]

By Nathan Albright

Before his sudden death in September of 2020, two weeks after the completion of his final book, The Dawn of Everything, the beloved anthropologist David Graeber had demonstrated a knack for writing about the right thing at the right time. In 2011, his masterwork Debt: The First 5,000 Years, an inquiry into the relationship between debt, morality, and political power, was published just a few months before Occupy Wall St. began an international conversation on much the same. In addition to authoring the book and other writings that circulated in the movement, Graeber was actively involved from the beginning of the encampment, participating in direct actions and assembly meetings, and famously coining the Occupy mantra “We Are the 99%.” In 2013, Graeber, again, struck a chord with a short article titled On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, in which he batted around a few ideas about how a surprising number of jobs seem to be “utterly meaningless,” even to those working them, and speculated that this kind of work had become more widespread than is openly talked about. Within a week of its publication, the article was read by millions and translated into over a dozen languages, prompting countless responses, mostly from those  effusively agreeing with Graeber’s premise and wanting to share their own anecdotes of meaningless work. In 2018, Graeber expanded the article, and combined it with the testimonies that readers had sent him, along with some of his past writing on gendered labor, authority, bureaucracy, and imagination, into what became his most accessible and widely read book, Bullshit Jobs. Its main themes, especially his willingness to question what work is actually necessary, foreshadowed many of the discussions that took shape during the the early days of the Covid 19 pandemic as the public found itself split into essential and non-essential workers. In the years since, as droves of workers have quit their jobs in what is being called the Great Resignation, Graeber’s writing has been widely circulated in online communities like the Anti-work sub-reddit, an online forum where millions of users share stories of workplace abuses and encourage one another to quit their jobs and seek more meaningful and less exploited ways of living.

Years before, in 2005, long before Graeber amassed much of a readership, he wrote a pamphlet titled Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, which, maybe more than any other work, serves as a prequel to his final publication. In the pamphlet, he asks, if Anthropology is the academic field most familiar with the variety of social arrangements that have existed without structures of domination – those which have valued cooperation over competition, creativity over conformity, and autonomy over obedience – why does it, as a discipline, so rarely engage with social movements that are, sometimes rather aimlessly, trying to recreate just such conditions. Graeber concluded the pamphlet with a call for his fellow anthropologists to make common cause with social movements because, in short, “we have tools at our fingertips that could be of enormous importance for human freedom.” That same year, Yale University controversially declined to renew his teaching contract, a move that many saw as retaliation for his political affiliations. Sixteen years later, the posthumous release of The Dawn of Everything, coauthored with the archeologist David Wengrow, shows that the incident only sharpened Graeber’s resolve to actualize the kind of ‘anarchist anthropology’ his pamphlet had envisioned, and to do so in a way that could not be ignored. According to Wengrow, Graeber insisted on publishing each section of the book individually in peer reviewed journals before releasing the full compilation in order to head off any efforts to dismiss their findings. What the two present in the volume is a radically different vision of human history, an attempt to broaden our understanding of what we, as a species, have been, that is as doggedly hopeful as it is rigorously researched. 

Graeber and Wengrow set out from one of the oldest questions in the social sciences: “what is the origin of inequality?” They begin by turning the question on its head, instead asking, how is it that social theorists of 18th Century Europe came to be interested in the idea of inequality in the first place? The answer, they suggest, is simple: although Enlightenment thinking is often framed as the unique brainchild of individual European male genius, it was actually the result of an explosion of cultural exchange following first contact with the indigenous people of the Americas who had exposed Europeans to entirely different ways of thinking and living. Moreover, Indigenous intellectuals like the Huron-Wendat chief Kandiaronk (who the authors profile at length in the second chapter), were so horrified by the hierarchy, competitiveness, and poverty permeating European culture that they leveled scathing critiques of the inequalities they witnessed.

That this indigenous critique is to thank for enlightenment debates over inequality is plain to see in the historical record. In fact there is simply “no evidence that the Latin terms aequalitas or inaequalitas or their English, French, Spanish, German and Italian cognates were used to describe social relations at all before the time of Columbus,” not to mention that while most Western historians seem to overlook it, the fact is that most enlightenment figures openly “insisted that their ideas of individual liberty and political equality were inspired by Native American sources and examples.” It only makes sense that enlightenment thinkers would have come across indigenous critiques because, at the time, some of the most popular books circulating in Europe were summaries and accounts of cultural exchanges with Native Americans, usually in the form of dialogues and debates. In some of these debates, the European, often a Jesuit priest, argued at length against the idea of freedom as a virtue, a line of argument so utterly untenable by today’s standards that it is clear just how drastically indigenous thinking went on to shape the course of history.

The popularity of this indigenous critique left European pride bruised, and the authors suggest that reactionary thinkers scrambling for counter-arguments to protect their sense of superiority developed lines of thinking that have endured to the present day. The Economist A.J.R. Turgot, friend and colleague of Adam Smith, pioneered a line of argument that societies move through stages of development marked by forms of technology and subsistence that are progressively more sophisticated. Thus, the mere fact that some indigenous peoples were hunter gatherers meant that they were inferior.  Graeber and Wengrow point out that Turgot latched on to technology and forms of subsistence as central to superiority because, when it came to quality of life, wisdom, or happiness, equality, or freedom, eighteenth century Europe was in abysmal shape. But the emphasis on forms of subsistence and technological progress stuck, and eventually developed into its two most enduring forms in the writings of Hobbes and Rousseau. Hobbes essentially argued that indigenous people were equal only in so far as they were equally poor and stupid, that life for the so-called uncivilized was a vicious \war of all against all and modern powers vested in governments were the only thing keeping people from tearing each other apart – reasoning that remains the bedrock of conservative thought. Rousseau on the other hand, painted indigenous people as coming from a utopian state of innocence, totally unaware of inequality and un-corrupted by the kinds of inevitable technological advances, like agriculture, which had forced Europeans to lose touch with their own Eden. 

While both formulations are patently false and racist in their own unique ways, the authors note that Rousseau was not wrong in observing that something had been lost in European culture that clearly did exist among indigenous groups. Settlers, when exposed to indigenous ways of life, overwhelmingly chose to remain, or even to return after failing to re-integrate to European society. Indigenous Americans brought to European society, on the other hand, would invariably seek every opportunity to escape and return home. Even European children separated from their parents and brought to Indigenous communities would often choose to stay. But why? What was so different, so much more appealing about indigenous life? “The fact that we find it hard to imagine how such an alternative life could be endlessly engaging and interesting,” the authors suggest, “is perhaps more a reflection on the limits of our imagination than on the life itself.” Our understanding of life in other times and places, and therefore our idea of what is possible for our lives here and now, is shaped by our own narrow experiences. The authors provide an example: travel routes uncovered by archaeologists. These pathways have frequently been assumed to be trade routes, an assumption that reflects a modern obsession with markets, but, in actuality, these routes served as everything from elaborate circuits traversed by healers and entertainers, to inter-village networks for women’s gambling, to long distance vision quests for individuals guided by dreams. “When we simply guess as to what humans in other times and places might be up to,” the authors write, “we almost invariably make guesses that are far less interesting, far less quirky – in a word, far less human than what was likely going on.” The rest of the book, with this in mind, sets out to retell some of the most widely misunderstood stories that we have come to believe about our past and, with the help of some of the most recent archaeological discoveries, to uncover this more colorful, more imaginative, more human history. 

Some of the details the authors cover won’t be new to a student of Anthropology: medieval serfs worked significantly less hours than the modern office or factory worker, and “the hazelnut gatherers and cattle herders who dragged great slabs to build Stonehenge almost certainly worked less than that.” Such details were made widely known in the 1960’s in an essay titled The Original Affluent society by the anthropologist Marshal Sahlins, who would later serve as Graeber’s thesis advisor. The authors confirm that the basic tenets of the essay have held up over time, but it too provided a limited picture of what pre-agricultural life was like. For one thing, the break between pre-agricultural and agricultural was not so clean, not the “revolution” we have been taught, but a long process of experimentation. There were sometimes thousands of years between the first examples of agriculture in a region and any kind of consistent use for subsistence purposes. The first instances of farming looked a lot more like gardening, and were carried out with little effort, often in delta regions where seasonal floods would do most of the work of tilling, fertilizing, and irrigating – such liminal farming spaces also had a sort of built in resistance to measurement, allotment, or enclosure. The first farmers in these spaces, it seems, were women, and they often grew herbs or ornamental crops rather than food staples as had once been assumed. There’s even evidence that early farmers actually worked against traditional hallmarks of plant domestication in order to avoid becoming solely dependent on their own labor to produce crops. The authors use the term “play farming” to describe this millennia long process of leisurely experimentation and learning. 

More to the point, Graeber and Wengrow want to get one thing straight – the advent of agriculture was not the revolutionary social, political, cultural catalyst it has been heralded as. There is no evolution of social forms based on subsistence mode. How a group of people obtains its food doesn’t determine how it’s politically or hierarchically structured. In fact, pre-agricultural life was not made up of roving bands of hunter gatherers, but “marked, in many places, by sedentary villages and towns, some by then already ancient, as well as monumental sanctuaries and stockpiled wealth, much of it the work of ritual specialists, highly skilled artisans and architects.” Similarly the authors dispel the idea that greater scale, of a city for example, necessarily results in greater hierarchy. A revelation that upends an assumption so widespread that is long been considered common sense. 

Cities populated by tens of thousands began appearing around the world roughly six thousand years ago and there is surprisingly little evidence of any kind of hierarchy among them. Neither, it seems, were they dependent on a rural population to supply their needs, but instead relied on forms of subsistence gardening, animal husbandry, fishing, and continued hunting and gathering in surrounding areas. “The first city dwellers,” the authors write, “did not always leave a harsh footprint on the environment, or on each other.” Graeber and Wengrow provide examples of self governing cities from regions around the world including Ukraine, Turkey, China, central Mexico, Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent, the Indus Valley and others. The evidence that most of these early cities were non-hierarchically organized is so compelling the authors argue that the burden of proof is now on those trying to find evidence for hierarchy. 

Life in these early cities, the authors write, was one grand social experiment: large public works projects, public housing, elaborate city planning, monuments, temples and more, all before the widespread adoption of farming. In many of the largest early cities, the grandest projects, centrally located, elaborately adorned and monumentally constructed, appear to have been public meeting spaces, likely for citizen’s assemblies, neighborhood councils, and any number of other forms of direct democracy. In fact, popular councils and citizen’s assemblies were simply part of the fabric of life in early cities, even those civilizations that readers will be most familiar with like Sumeria, Akkadia, and other Mesopotamian cities as well as among the Hittites, Phoenicians, Philistines, and Israelites. “In fact,” the authors write, “it is almost impossible to find a city anywhere in the Near East that did not have some equivalent to a popular assembly – or often several assemblies … even … where traditions of monarchy ran deep.” 

In the Americas, this applies not only to pre-history, but also to relatively recent history, including the time of first contact with Europeans. Even the conquistador Hernando Cortez wrote at length about the assemblies he encountered in central Mexico, comparing it favorably to the forms of Italian democracy he was familiar with. While we tend to learn the history of the few, large-scale hierarchical empires in the Americas, like those Cortez most directly sought out, Graeber and Wengrow convincingly argue that the majority of indigenous Americans actually lived in social arrangements specifically formed in contrast to these cities, self-consciously arranged in such a way as to prevent forms of domination from emerging. The authors describe a world of constant experimentation and fluidity in the structures that did exist. Some groups, for instance, transitioned from short term rigid hierarchy during a hunting season, to total egalitarian relations during the next. The result of such fluid experimentation seems to have been a much more accepting, creative populous, where eccentricities were celebrated, and individuals could change identities, kin, even names from season to season as a a spirit of perpetual reinvention and regeneration flourished. Far from Rousseau’s naive state of innocence, the indigenous people of the Americas were keenly aware of the dangers of hierarchy and had become adept at the art of heading off any signs of individuals amassing coercive power. 

The evidence suggests that this fluidity of social forms and an avoidance of hierarchy, alien as it may now seem, was characteristic of most social life for most of human history. The authors suggest that perhaps the most guarded values common to all people were autonomy (as in, the complete freedom of the individual from domination by others) and communism (as in, ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’) – one serving as the necessary precondition for the other. Far from the realm of idealistic fantasy, these were the social relations in cities of hundreds of thousands of people who self-governed for periods of thousands of years. In fact, there are periods in the archeological record of up to 500 years in which entire regions as large as “eastern North America” show remarkably little evidence of traumatic injuries or other forms of interpersonal violence. For the majority of human history, throughout the majority of the world, except for islands of hierarchy, people tended to resist domination and instead live in voluntary associations of mutual support.

A book with such an inspiring reinterpretation of human possibility, written by an author who has on more than one occasion presaged social movements, is a glimmer of hope in a very dark time. As the largest protest movement in US history swept across the country, raising questions of police and prison abolition, demonstrators could have used a vote of confidence from anthropologists who are keenly aware that the kind of possibilities activists are pursuing have not only existed, but thrived for millennia at a time. Abolitionists may be heartened to read the Huron-Wendat chief Kandiaronk’s views on the European penal system: “For my own part, I find it hard to see how you could be much more miserable than you already are. What kind of human, what species of creature, must Europeans be, that they have to be forced to do good, and only refrain from evil because of fear of punishment?”

As Wildcat Workers Unions, Tenant’s Unions, Citizens’ Assemblies, and Mutual Aid Networks are blossoming around the country, participants must wonder on what scale this kind of grassroots self-organization is possible. The answer, according to Graeber and Wengrow, is entire regional federations of metropolises –  as big as any hierarchical structure has ever managed and arguably with much greater success.  

What kind of a social movement could take form armed with the knowledge of the full spectrum of social forms throughout human history? Could humanity’s oldest values, autonomy and mutual-aid, flourish again? Can the violence and rot of capitalist empire really be undone? If a reader takes one thing from The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow want it to be this: nothing in history was ever predetermined. Neither Hobbes’ mindless automatons nor Rosseau’s innocent children of Eden ever existed. History is alive with self-conscious actors, constantly negotiating the conditions of their lives and with far more possible outcomes than we were ever led to believe. But more importantly, so is the present.

Nathan Albright is a building super in Brownsville, Brooklyn. His writing can also be found in The Catholic Worker newspaper and at TheFloodmag.com.

Proletarian Poetry Returns: A Review of Matt Sedillo's 'City On The Second Floor'

By Jon Jeter

Reading Matt Sedillo’s second book of poetry, City on the Second Floor, reminded me of the late, hip hop icon, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, who chose that colorful pseudonym, according to his bandmates in the Wu Tang Clan, “because there was no father to his style.”

That is not entirely true of Sedillo. As I myself wrote in my review of his first book, Mowing Leaves of Grass –a postcolonial takedown of Walt Whitman’s fabled 1855 book of poetry, Leaves of Grass – Sedillo’s verses shares much in common with the late, African American griot, Amiri Baraka. I wrote at the time:

"Present in the work of both poets –the late icon and the relative ingenue respectively –is the rhythmic mixture, una mezcla, of the street, and minds sharpened, like swords, by struggle, and self-enlightenment.

This is not to suggest that Sedillo’s poetry is all fire and brimstone. Like Baraka before him, Sedillo infuses his poetry with a certain knowing, or playfulness, befitting an outsider who is in on the joke, and has seen through the illogic of a handful of Europeans “discovering” 90 million indigenous people. The white settler’s arrogance produces both amusement and blinding, righteous, anger.”

Hints of Baraka are also present in City on the Second Floor, but reflecting a relatively-young poet who continues to find his voice, Sedillo’s verses are evolving, making it difficult to pinpoint one single, or dominant, influence. Or, to return to the example of Ol’ Dirty Bastard, it is not that his style is fatherless, but rather it seems the product of many fathers.

Aside from Baraka’s work, City on the Second Floor’s most glaring resemblance is perhaps to the work of another son of Los Angeles, Charles Bukowski, although the similarities between the two poets are superficial, and I suspect, purely coincidental. Like Sedillo, Bukowski’s poetry was often a paean to his hometown, the City of Angels, and its seedy underbelly but Bukowski ‘s gritty portraiture veers towards cynicism, and even solipsism, mindful, perhaps,`` of film noir. Sedillo uses Los Angeles’ grit much differently, casting the city’s Chicano community and dispossessed populations in sharp relief, and his poetry is reminiscent not of any sterile Hollywood oeuvre, but of Mexico’s iconic Marxist muralist, Diego Rivera, and his classic fresco depicting the Ford River Rouge plant in interwar Detroit.

In a poem entitled The Pope of Broadway, Sedillo writes:

Heard a story that

When Anthony Quinn married in to the DeMille family

It was on the condition that his very Mexican family would not be attending the wedding

And that's the ticket, the price of admission, what they are buying and you had best be selling

And let me tell you one thing

When Dallas, Minneapolis, Ann Arbor, Orlando, Toledo, Scranton Ohio sends their people

They don’t send their best

They're vain

They're shallow

They're narcissists

And some of them I imagine are good waiters

Flight of the sociopaths

Transplants turned cynics chasing down plans, hopes and ambitions

On roads paved in ways I would never even begin to dream to imagine

Talking only to themselves, defining a place by all they claim it is not but it’s them

Fake, fakes, fake as fuck, fuck them

They don’t know this town, this region the history

Hell they don’t even know the valley

A certain class consciousness imbues the work of both Bukowski and Sedillo, but while Bukowski maintains a comfortable distance from the unwashed, bearing witness to the struggle but not really getting his hands dirty, Sedillo picks a side, and dives in head first, grounding — to borrow a term introduced by the late Marxist, Jamaican economist Walter Rodney — with the masses. His poetry is equal parts art, advocacy, and anthropology. Consider his poem from which the book draws its title:

There is a city on the second floor

An international destination

Whose entrance is prohibited

To all those appearing

Too poor for travel

Where commerce crosses

Bridges of wire and concrete

Just above the street light

Rises an economy of scale

Where buildings and offices

Connect to disconnect from the world below

Here

In the space between

Worker and destination

Conversation spins profit

And no one moves without reason

And no one speaks without purpose

Here

The word is stillborn

A commodity

And the world dies anew

While working stiff spend wages

In cheap imitation

Of their exploitation

Arrogant

Delusional

Walking dead

Laughingly dreaming

Of a penthouse suite

They will never reach

While staring down from terraces

Towards the street below

In this and other poems, I detect echoes of two, towering Midwestern poets whose work is often associated with proletarian themes: Detroit’s Philip Levine, and Chicago’s socialist scribe, Carl Sandburg, whose poem, Chicago, remains one of my all-time favorites. City on the Second Floor is indescribably good, as rich and textured as the best bottle of wine you’ve ever consumed, , in part because of this almost sociological lens that Sedillo applies to his verses. But reading it for me was a bit of a chore, akin to a high-stakes wine-tasting contest, as I struggled mightily to identify the differing bouquets: was that vanilla or almond, nutmeg or currants?

After identifying hints of Baraka and Bukowski, Sandburg and Levine and even a subtle aroma of Rivera, I still felt I was missing someone. Finally, after my second reading of Sedillo’s poem entitled simply, The Rich, it hit me: the Spanish poet, , Federico Garcia Lorca, who was assassinated by Spanish fascists in 1936. It reads:

You see the rich

And the poor

Well, they're just like you and me

Two hands

Two feet

The sky

The sea

And everything between

One heart that beats

And the time

To make the most of it

So, you'll find no sympathy

Reaching into these deep pockets

All we ever asked was our fair share

And God damn it, that's all of it

So, while you're out in the streets screaming for peace and justice

We’re sleeping in satin sheets dreaming free and guiltless over oceans and tariffs liquidating pensions then off to bid on porcelain and portraits at billion dollar auctions

You know you need us

You know we're selling your secrets

It is not that Sedillo is a surrealist as Garcia Lorca was but his poetry represents Chicanos in the same unapologetic way that Garcia Lorca represented his tribe of Andalusian Roma people, who suffered under the thumb of Franco’s regime just as Sedillo’s tribe suffers under the white settler regime in LA. Reading Sedillo’s use of the words “us” and “we” is subversive, particularly in such dire times, and emotionally triggering, but in a good way, harkening back to a day when the best artists were not feted with awards and university chairs, but were instead held in contempt by the pharaohs, for helping the people fight their oppressors.

Jon Jeter is a former Washington Post correspondent and the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People and the co-author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Bright Nights and Dark Days in Obama’s Postracial America.

The U.S. Gives Us Hell But It’s A Liberated Africa That Can Douse the Flames

By Mark P. Fancher

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

African Liberation Day is a reminder that African descended people make progress when joined together in international unity. Internationalism is essential.

When U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) was established in 2007, the only thing more offensive than its use of proxy African soldiers to carry out imperialist missions was the appointment of a Black man, William E. (“Kip”) Ward, to lead AFRICOM operations.

After Ward stepped down, white men assumed leadership of AFRICOM. But now, yet again, AFRICOM will be headed by a man of African descent. Lt. Gen. Michael Langley will assume the role of training and directing the armed forces of African countries to militarize Africa and plunder the continent’s resources for the benefit of foreign governments and corporations. The publication Stars and Stripes reported that for Langley “a top priority will be countering militants in the East African country of Somalia.”

The cynical use of Africans to control and exploit Africa is surpassed in its odiousness only by a willingness of Africans like Ward and Langley to engage in the enterprise. Those committed to Africa’s liberation have long been aware of the importance of ensuring that members of African communities decline such collaboration with oppressors. To that end, in 1963, the Organization of African Unity proclaimed May 25th as African Liberation Day - a day when the African World might orient itself to a serious commitment to achieving Africa’s genuine independence.

Although the commemoration of African Liberation Day throughout Africa and the African diaspora has become an ever-growing tradition, this year, in the wake of the racist massacre in Buffalo, New York, there are no doubt many Africans born and living in the U.S. who can’t bring themselves to think of Africa’s plight when their personal circumstances seem so precarious. If the only problems were violent white supremacists, prospects for survival might not seem so bleak. But the anti-Black hostility has manifested in so many ways that signal that help is not on the way from any of the quarters from whence Africans in America might expect it.

Specifically, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a police bullet was fired into the head of Patrick Lyoya at point-blank range making him one of the latest of a very long series of Africans killed by cops and affirming yet again that not only are Africans unable to look to the police for protection, but that the police themselves are an enemy force.

Less blatant, but no less concerning, is the U.S. government’s seeming indifference to the international dilemma of WNBA star Brittney Griner, a captive in Russia, purportedly for drug-related offenses, even as the U.S. State Department fought more efficiently and vigorously for the release of others. In fact, it took weeks for the U.S. to even acknowledge its belief that Griner had been wrongfully detained. Concern is not limited to the plight of Griner as an individual, but it is also for the unmistakable message that a U.S. government that should presumably protect its nationals can’t be counted on if the person in question is Black.

It is not surprising then that persons of African descent in the U.S. might perceive themselves to be adrift, alone, vulnerable and unprotected even by the government entities charged with keeping them safe. The perceived intensity of the danger means that calls to work for Africa’s liberation may not resonate. While this is understandable, historically, the challenges of Africa’s diaspora have not deterred engagement in internationalist service.

The list of revolutionaries who have emerged from communities under stress but who have nevertheless thrown themselves into Africa’s struggles is long. Frantz Fanon left colonized Martinique to struggle alongside those fighting for Algeria’s independence. Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) physically relocated himself from the U.S. where Civil Rights and Black Power struggles raged to become a vital member of the Democratic Party of Guinea. Che Guevara was not content with his sterling service to the Cuban revolution, and he fought in Congo and ultimately Bolivia where he was captured and killed.

In fact, some of the most important internationalist service to Africa has been rendered by Cuba, even in the face of extreme pressure from not only western imperialism but also from the Soviet Union. Of Cuba’s assistance to the efforts to liberate Angola, Piero Gleijeses, a Johns Hopkins University professor explained:

“In early November 1975, as South Africans were advancing along the coast, Angola sent a desperate appeal request to Cubans for help. The military mission also told Fidel [Castro] that the Cubans had to do something, because Luanda was going to fall. On November 4, Fidel decided to send troops to Angola. The Soviet Union was miffed, because it didn’t want the Cubans to intervene. It showed its annoyance by not assisting in the dispatch of Cuban troops to Angola. Until 1975 or 1976, the Cubans arrived by ship and old transport planes.”

Cuba went on to play a vital role in the liberation of Angola and the fall of apartheid in Namibia and South Africa. Cuba’s sacrifices for Africa neither began nor ended in Southern Africa. Even after its military forces withdrew from the region, they were replaced by brigades of Cuban physicians and other medical personnel deployed throughout the continent.

For Black people in America, internationalist service can be not only as noble as that rendered by forebears, but it can also be pragmatic. This is because Africans are not only a numerical minority in the U.S., but also a powerless minority. Meanwhile, Africa’s population is exploding. Foreign Policy columnist Adam Tooze explained that by 2050, Africa’s population will account for nearly 25 percent of the population of the planet. He said:

“In the 2040s alone, it is likely that in the order of 566 million children will be born in Africa. Around midcentury, African births will outnumber those in Asia, and Africans will constitute the largest population of people of prime working age anywhere in the world.”

It just makes good sense for Africans in the U.S. to see themselves as part of that mass of humanity. This does not even consider the potential of Africa to seize control of the continent’s natural resources and to use them for the benefit of Africans worldwide. Such global sharing and collaboration will happen more organically if the African diaspora participates not only in reaping the benefits of the power that flows from control of Africa’s natural wealth, but also in the struggle on the front end to make such control a reality.

While a united and socialist Africa, with all its resources could be a powerful social, economic and political engine for communities throughout the African diaspora, as a practical matter it would need to do nothing to impact them. The mere existence of a powerful, unified Africa would be a deterrent to every police officer inclined to kill brothers like Patrick Lyoya. When the Brittney Griners of our communities might find themselves in international predicaments, the State Department would likely turn somersaults if necessary to assist them because of the need to curry favor with a powerful Africa. In the end, Africans in America need to make Africa a primary focus of their struggles despite the many hardships and challenges presented by the U.S. It just makes good sense.

Mark P. Fancher is an attorney and writer. He is a member of the Black Alliance for Peace Africa Team and the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party. The views expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of organizations with which he is affiliated. He can be contacted at mfancher[at]comcast.net.

What is the Fetishism of Commodities?

By Carlos Garrido

I was asked by a few comrades to explain Marx’s concept of the fetishism of commodities, and with that, the main ways it has been misunderstood by both mainstream bourgeois academia and by well-meaning Marxists. The following short reflection attempts to do just that.

Marx begins section four of the first chapter of Capital by saying that “a commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing;” however, “its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” (Marx, 71). I can imagine ‘bourgeois’ political economists reading this in 1867 wondering what the hell is ‘queer’ about a commodity? I can envision them asking “what in the world does a commodity, a category of political economy, have to do with metaphysics and theology?” Before I analyze what Marx means, let us look at some of the things he doesn’t mean, but which, as usual, people think he does.

There are a few ways the commodity fetish is misunderstood, but the most prominent misunderstanding describes the fetishism of commodities as a sort of ‘false consciousness’ which takes us over when we engage in the market; a sort of ‘illusion’ that occurs when we idealize the products we consume, or the products we are faced with the opportunity to consume. The commodity fetish is understood here as a sort of libidinal connection to products. It is as if one could watch Confessions of a Shopaholic and retrieve the same message Marx is proposing in this section.

This is not, in my view, what Marx means by the fetishism of commodities. It is not an illusion which functions as a filter to distort our view of the world. If that were the case, as Michael Heinrich notes, “false consciousness must disappear once the real conditions have been explained” (Heinrich, 71).  This is not, however, the case. We don’t become immune to the ‘false consciousness’ of the commodity fetish after reading Marx’s Capital. Instead of thinking of the commodity fetish as a subjective experience of ‘false consciousness,’ Marx holds the fetish is in the world itself. It has an objective presence in the social relations of capitalist commodity production.

Marx uses the example of the construction of a table. When wood is formed into a table, there is no mystery present. We have a “common, every-day thing” (Marx, 71). However, “so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent” (Ibid – my italic). Notice here how he is very explicit that it is the object itself that is changed into something transcendent when it becomes a commodity. It isn’t, again, simply a matter of a mental illusion or false consciousness.

“The mystical character of a commodity,” Marx will go on to say, “does not originate, therefore, in their use-value” (Ibid). If it was simply a result of the use value of the good, all things – regardless of whether they were commodities or not – would have ‘metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.’ Instead, what makes a commodity such a queer thing is the relation which makes a good into a commodity in the first place –  its exchangeability. It is here where a good becomes a sinnlich übersinnliches ding (sensuous extrasensory thing). As Marx says: “whence, then, arises the enigmatic character of the product of labour, so soon as it assumes the form of commodities? Clearly from this form itself” (Ibid, 71-2).

For a good to carry an ‘exchange value’ means that the specific type of concrete labor and materials which were necessary to create that good have fallen to the background. What matters in exchange value is not the type of work, but the socially necessary time it takes for that work to produce its product. In essence, qualitatively different forms of work, producing objects with qualitatively different utilities, are all homogenized and differentiated only quantitatively, that is, by the amount of socially necessary labor time materialized in the work. The homogenization of the human element of the commodity creates the conditions where “the social relations of the producers… and the social character of their labour” takes “the form of a social relation between products” (Ibid, 72). The human source of the commodity disappears, it becomes absorbed and metamorphized into the thing itself, appearing “as an objective character stamped upon the product” (Ibid). In the commodity a “definite social relation between men” assumes “the fantastic form of a relation between things” (Ibid).

A good analogy to such a queer relation can be found in the religious fetish, wherein human creations (the Gods) are disconnected (in their being and in their qualities) from their human creators. The relationships are seen not as relations between human constructions, but relations between “independent beings endowed with life” (Ibid). A prominent example of this phenomenon can be seen in the religious alienation Ludwig Feuerbach depicts in The Essence of Christianity. Nonetheless, the point is that because this fetishism “attaches itself” to the “products of labor, so soon as they are produced as commodities,” in a system of commodity production, this fetish has an objective character (Ibid).

For instance, in the movie ‘They Live,’ the protagonist John Nada finds a box of glasses which when worn show the real message behind social symbols (e.g., advertisement for vacation reads ‘reproduce and consume,’ the dollar reads ‘this is your God,’ etc.). In his reaction to the film, Slavoj Žižek’s The Perverts Guide to Ideology provides a helpful analysis of these “ideology critique glasses,” which aids our understanding of how the commodity fetish has been misunderstood. Ideology, Žižek states, is usually thought of as a set of glasses distorting our view of the real world. Therefore, ideology critique is usually framed as the removal of these glasses, an act which allows a spontaneous and direct engagement with the real world. Similarly, the central misunderstanding of the commodity fetish is that it is merely an illusion we hold, once we remove the illusion from our understanding the fetish disappears. This way of thinking about ideology critique is, as Žižek notes, ideological as well.

Instead, as the movie rightly depicts, ideology is objectively in the world. The task of critique is beyond the commonsensical and spontaneous. Critique is an often-painful addition which mediates between us and the world in such a manner that provides us with insights into the objective limitations of the objective world. The commodity fetish is not a distorted view of the world. It is not ‘fixed’ through easy liberal consumptive practices; through knowing where your cow died and where your eggs came from. The commodity fetish is an objective reality in a world dominated by commodity production. It takes critique to see this, but a revolution to change it.

Bibliography

Karl Marx (1867), Capital Vol. I, International Publishers (1974).

Michael Heinrich (2004), An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital, Monthly Review (2012).

Russia and the Ukraine Crisis: The Eurasian Project in Conflict with the Triad Imperialist Policies (2014)

By Samir Amin

Republished from Monthly Review.

This was originally written by Samir Amin in 2014, at the time of the Maidan Coup in 2014. It provides insight into today’s conflict in the region.

The current global stage is dominated by the attempt of historical centers of imperialism (the U.S., Western and Central Europe, Japan—hereafter called “the Triad”) to maintain their exclusive control over the planet through a combination of:

1. so-called neo-liberal economic globalization policies allowing financial transnational capital of the Triad to decide alone on all issues in their exclusive interests;

2. the military control of the planet by the U.S. and its subordinate allies (NATO and Japan) in order to annihilate any attempt by any country not of the Triad to move out from under their yoke.

In that respect all countries of the world not of the Triad are enemies or potential enemies, except those who accept complete submission to the economic and political strategy of the Triad—such as the two new “democratic republics” of Saudi Arabia and Qatar!  The so-called “international community” to which the Western medias refer continuously is indeed reduced to the G7 plus Saudi Arabia and Qatar.  Any other country, even when its government is currently aligned with the Triad, is a potential enemy since the peoples of those countries may reject that submission.

2. In that frame Russia is “an enemy.”

Whatever might be our assessment of what the Soviet Union was (“socialist” or something else), the Triad fought it simply because it was an attempt to develop independently of dominant capitalism/imperialism.

After the breakdown of the Soviet system, some people (in Russia in particular) thought that the “West” would not antagonize a “capitalist Russia”—just as Germany and Japan had “lost the war but won the peace.”  They forgot that the Western powers supported the reconstruction of the former fascist countries precisely to face the challenge of the independent policies of the Soviet Union.  Now, this challenge having disappeared, the target of the Triad is complete submission, to destroy the capacity of Russia to resist.

3. The current development of the Ukraine tragedy illustrates the reality of the strategic target of the Triad.

The Triad organized in Kiev what ought to be called a “Euro/Nazi putsch.”  To achieve their target (separating the historical twin sister nations—the Russian and the Ukrainian), they needed the support of local Nazis.

The rhetoric of the Western medias, claiming that the policies of the Triad aim at promoting democracy, is simply a lie.  Nowhere has the Triad promoted democracy.  On the contrary these policies have systematically been supporting the most anti-democratic (in some cases “fascist”) local forces.  Quasi-fascist in the former Yugoslavia—in Croatia and Kosovo—as well as in the Baltic states and Eastern Europe, Hungary for instance.  Eastern Europe has been “integrated” in the European Union not as equal partners, but as “semi-colonies” of major Western and Central European capitalist/imperialist powers.  The relation between West and East in the European system is in some degree similar to that which rules the relations between the U.S. and Latin America!  In the countries of the South the Triad supported the extreme anti-democratic forces such as, for instance, ultra-reactionary political Islam and, with their complicity, has destroyed societies; the cases of Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya illustrate these targets of the Triad imperialist project.

4. Therefore the policy of Russia (as developed by the administration of Putin) to resist the project of colonization of Ukraine (and of other countries of the former Soviet Union, in Transcaucasia and Central Asia) must be supported.  The Baltic states’ experience should not be repeated.  The target of constructing a “Eurasian” community, independent from the Triad and its subordinate European partners, is also to be supported.

But this positive Russian “international policy” is bound to fail if it is not supported by the Russian people.  And this support cannot be won on the exclusive basis of “nationalism,” even a positive progressive—not chauvinistic—brand of “nationalism,” a fortiori not by a “chauvinistic” Russian rhetoric.  Fascism in Ukraine cannot be challenged by Russian fascism.  The support can be won only if the internal economic and social policy pursued promotes the interests of the majority of the working people.

What do I mean by a “people-oriented” policy favoring the working classes?

Do I mean “socialism,” or even a nostalgia of the Soviet system?  This is not the place to re-assess the Soviet experience, in a few lines!  I shall only summarize my views in a few sentences.  The authentic Russian socialist revolution produced a state socialism which was the only possible first step toward socialism; after Stalin that state socialism moved towards becoming state capitalism (explaining the difference between the two concepts is important but not the subject of this short paper).  As of 1991 state capitalism was dismantled and replaced by “normal” capitalism based on private property, which, as in all countries of contemporary capitalism, is basically the property of financial monopolies, owned by the oligarchy (similar to, not different from, the oligarchies running capitalism in the Triad), many coming out of the former nomenklatura, and some newcomers.

The explosion of creative authentic democratic practices initiated by the Russian (October) revolution was subsequently tamed and replaced by an autocratic pattern of management of society, albeit granting social rights to the working classes.  This system led to massive depoliticization and was not protected from despotic and even criminal deviations.  The new pattern of savage capitalism is based on the continuation of depoliticization and the non-respect of democratic rights.

Such a system rules not only Russia, but all the other former Soviet republics.  Differences relate to the practice of the so-called “Western” electoral democracy, more effective in Ukraine, for instance, than in Russia.  Nonetheless this pattern of rule is not “democracy” but a farce compared to bourgeois democracy as it functioned at previous stages of capitalist development, including in the “traditional democracies” of the West, since real power is now restricted to the rule of monopolies and operates to their exclusive benefit.

A people-oriented policy implies therefore moving away, as much as possible, from the “liberal” recipe and the electoral masquerade associated with it, which claims to give legitimacy to regressive social policies.  I would suggest setting up in its place a brand of new state capitalism with a social dimension (I say social, not socialist).  That system would open the road to eventual advances toward a socialization of the management of the economy and therefore authentic new advances toward an invention of democracy responding to the challenges of a modern economy.

It is only if Russia moves along such lines that the current conflict between, on the one hand, the intended independent international policy of Moscow and, on the other hand, the pursuit of a reactionary social internal policy can be given a positive outcome.  Such a move is needed and possible: fragments of the political ruling class could align on such a program if popular mobilization and action promote it.  To the extent that similar advances are also carried out in Ukraine, Transcaucasia, and Central Asia, an authentic community of Eurasian nations can be established and become a powerful actor in the reconstruction of the world system.

5. Russian state power remaining within the strict limits of the neo-liberal recipe annihilates the chances of success of an independent foreign policy and the chances of Russia becoming a really emerging country acting as an important international actor.

Neo-liberalism can produce for Russia only a tragic economic and social regression, a pattern of “lumpen development” and a growing subordinate status in the global imperialist order.  Russia would provide to the Triad oil, gas, and some other natural resources; its industries would be reduced to the status of sub-contracting for the benefit of Western financial monopolies.

In such a position, which is not very far from that of Russia today in the global system, attempts to act independently in the international area will remain extremely fragile, threatened by “sanctions” which will strengthen the disastrous alignment of the ruling economic oligarchy to the demands of dominant monopolies of the Triad.  The current outflow of “Russian capital” associated with the Ukraine crisis illustrates the danger.  Re-establishing state control over the movements of capital is the only effective response to that danger.

Further Readings

• Amin, Samir. The Implosion of Contemporary Capitalism. London and NY: Pluto and Monthly Review Press, 2013.

• Amin, Samir. “What ‘Radical’ Means in the 21st Century.” Review of Radical Political Economics 45.3 (September 2013).

• Amin, Samir. “The Democratic Fraud and the Universalist Alternative.” Monthly Review 63.5 (October 2011).

• Amin, Samir. “Unity and Diversity in the Movement to Socialism.” Monthly Review (forthcoming in the June 2014 issue).

• Amin, Samir. “Russia in the Global System.” Translated from Arabic into Russian by Said Gafourov.

The Mecca of African Liberation: Walter Rodney in Tanzania

By Chinedu Chukwudinma

Republished from Review of African Political Economy.

Karim Hirji, a Tanzanian student, was in a good mood when he went to bed on the 10 July 1969. That evening he had heard the most impressive lecture of his life at the University of Dar es Salaam. The lecture was on the Cuban Revolution and its relevance to Africa. Back in his dorm, he praised the speaker in his diary: “one could almost feel the strong conviction and deep emotions from which he spoke”. The man he admired and later befriended was Dr Walter Rodney. [1]

After being banned from Jamaica, Rodney settled with his family in Tanzania to teach history and political science at the University of Dar es Salaam from 1969 to 1974. He reconnected with the socialist students he had met during his first stay in 1966. In those days, Rodney helped them establish the University Students African Revolutionary Front (USARF). He ran their Marxist workshops and attended their anti-imperialist protests and talks. His connections brought the likes of CLR James, Stokely Carmichael and Guyanese politician Cheddi Jagan to speak on USARF platforms. Upon his return in 1969, Rodney was pleased to see that the USARF had gained new members. Karim Hirji was one of them. He got Rodney to write the first article for the group’s magazine Cheche on African labour (Cheche took its name from Lenin’s newspaper Iskra. Both words mean ‘spark’–in Swahili and Russian respectively). Rodney thus continued agitating for socialism on campus as he had done in Jamaica. But the political climate was now more favourable for him, as Tanzania was the mecca of African liberation. [2]

Tanzania offered hope to Rodney and many radical black intellectuals. They believed the African diaspora’s fight for freedom and equality relied on the success of anti-imperialist movements in Africa. Tanzania’s first president Julius Nyerere and his party, the Tanganyika African Nation Union (TANU) opposed imperialism as few independent African states did. Nyerere gave diplomatic and material support to every national liberation movement in southern Africa. He opened offices for the Liberation Front of Mozambique (FRELIMO) and built military bases for them. He established training camps for the paramilitary wing of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, uMkhonto we Sizwe, to help it fight the apartheid regime in South Africa. Living in Tanzania enabled Rodney to deepen his understanding of guerrilla warfare and international solidarity. FRELIMO fighters taught him how to shoot a rifle when he visited their camps. He also met with delegations from Vietnam, then involved in the war against the United States and organised solidarity protests with the Vietnamese on campus.

When Rodney first visited Tanzania in 1966, he witnessed Nyerere publish his program for socialism and self-reliance, the Arusha Declaration. The president had turned his African socialist philosophy known as Ujamaa—familyhood—into a policy of nationalisation of foreign companies and land reform. He aspired to increase food production through the creation of Ujamaa villages based on collective farming. Africans no longer had to rely on volatile cash crops and aid from advanced capitalist nations to make a living. Nyerere was confident that his plan suited the interest of the peasant majority. But he had yet to convince the minuscule educated elite, made up of students and state officials, to help the peasants. Back in 1964, some elitist students had shown Nyerere their disdain for work in the countryside when they protested against compulsory national service. Afterwards, Nyerere vowed to turn the university into a battleground for his progressive ideas. [3]

By 1970, Rodney stood at the heart of the debates concerning African underdevelopment that occurred almost every night at the University. In the packed auditorium, Rodney debated a TANU Cabinet Minister on Tanzania’s economic direction. He also debated the renowned Kenyan political science professor, Ali Mazuri, on why Africa should be socialist, not capitalist. His ideas, however, did not always please Nyerere. The president replied with anger to an article Rodney published in TANU’s newspaper, which argued that African leaders who served western capitalism deserved to be overthrown by the people. Nyerere disagreed and accused him of preaching violence to young people. The regime set limits on how left-wing students and academics could be. A few months later, it banned the USARF for promoting “foreign ideology”. [4]

The ban did not change Rodney’s respect for Nyerere, nor did it discourage him from sharing his radical Marxist ideas with students. He taught a graduate course on the Russian Revolution to show his African students that they could draw lessons for their own struggle from October 1917. He made parallels between present-day Tanzania and Tsarist Russia, which both had a large peasantry and a small working class. Rodney praised the Russian Revolution as the first break with capitalism, transforming the once mainly agrarian country into an industrial power in its aftermath. Bourgeois historians, he argued, sought to discredit October 1917 because it represented the victory of organised workers allied with peasants over their class. [5]

Rodney had begun a monograph on the Russian Revolution in 1971, but he never finished it because he had more urgent matters at hand. He wanted to use Marxist theory to address the issue of African underdevelopment.

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

Rodney’s involvement in debates concerning African underdevelopment in Tanzania inspired him to write his most influential book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. He was concerned that most African nations had not broken ties with the old colonial powers in the decade after colonialism. They had achieved political independence, but their economies remained in the hands of European and American companies. They remained poor and reliant on foreign aid because the Western ruling class stole their natural wealth (land, oil etc.) for its benefit, with help from African leaders who served them. Yet, many African intellectuals still believed that trade deals, loans and investment from advanced capitalist countries would benefit African development. Rodney sought to convince them to the contrary.

His book, published in 1972, revealed that European intervention in Africa, through the slave trade and colonialism, stifled African development. It told how the European ruling class robbed Africa of its wealth, which contributed to Europe’s prosperity and industrial growth. Rodney examined Africa’s relationship with Europe from 1500 to 1960 to elucidate the present. He opened the preface with his message for the future: “African development is only possible on the basis of a radical break with the international capitalist system” which had underdeveloped Africa for centuries. [6]

Rodney’s skilful use of Marx’s historical method in his book uprooted Africa from the colonial myths surrounding its past. In Chapter One, Rodney dismantled the racist idea that Africa stood outside progress by defining development as a universal and multifaceted process. As Marx and Engels did before him, he understood development as being rooted in how human beings cooperate to provide the necessities of life out of nature. He explained that when people found better ways to produce wealth by working together, they developed new forms of cooperation, new ideas and changed the form of their society. Rodney showed a sophisticated understanding of development, arguing that it did not unfold as a linear process but rather was uneven across continents and regions, as sometimes the people who defended old forms of cooperation and ideas stopped those attempting to modernise production, delaying societal change for years to come. [7]

Rodney dedicated the second chapter to portraying Africa’s development before Europeans arrived in the 1500s. Far from being outside of progress, Africa displayed formidable advances in agriculture, science, and art. Most societies at the time were small classless ones with low levels of production, where people had equal access to land and evenly shared resources. Africa, however, developed more hierarchical societies that resembled Europe’s feudal states in places like Ethiopia, Egypt, and Zimbabwe. In these unequal societies, a ruling class owned the land and appropriated the surplus created by the exploited peasants. Rodney argued that underdevelopment was never the absence of development. It was not inherent to Africa and its people, but the historical consequence of capitalist expansion and imperialism. [8]

By the 16th century, Europe developed at a faster pace than Africa and the rest of the world, transitioning from feudalism to capitalism. Rodney argued that European powers demonstrated their superiority in maritime and armaments technology. They opened West Africa for trade with their ships and canons and transformed it into a supplier of slaves for their plantations in America and the Caribbean. In the third and fourth chapter, Rodney explored the consequences of the transatlantic slave trade on African development by engaging in the debate concerning the number of African captives. He opposed Philip Curtin’s tally that counted only 10 million enslaved from 1500 to 1870. “Because it is a low figure it is already being used by European scholars who are apologists for the capitalist system and its long record of brutality”. [9] Rodney explained that Curtin’s toll failed to measure the whole tragedy because it only relied on records of slaves’ arrivals in America. The number of victims went far beyond 10 million, as some captives were smuggled, and millions more never left Africa. They died in the wars fought over slaves and more captives perished during the long journeys from the interior of Africa to the coast as well as the so-called ‘Middle Passage’ the journey across the Atlantic.

After he established the horrific magnitude of the slave trade, Rodney explained how it underdeveloped Africa. He showed that the trade stunted Africa’s demographic growth. As European powers kidnapped able young men and women, Africa lost those of childbearing age who performed the most arduous tasks on the land. With fewer people at hand, many African societies struggled to harness nature and develop. Moreover, Rodney argued that Europe’s demand for slaves made slave raiding and wars commonplace in West Africa. Societies that had hitherto coexisted in peace now turned on each other to acquire more slaves. Violence instilled fear and insecurity among Africans. It disrupted the organisation of agriculture, mining, and commerce that they had established over centuries. It destroyed crops and artisanal trade turning farmers into soldiers, and soldiers into slaves. This disruption of farming and trade even impeded the development of African regions that were not involved in the slave trade.

While the slave trade stalled and reversed African development, it contributed to Europe’s capitalist development. Rodney demonstrated that the slave trade generated enormous profits for the Portuguese, British and French empires, making fortunes for countless bourgeois merchants and plantation owners. Its wealth and magnitude gave rise to the infamous ports of Bristol, Liverpool, Nantes and Bordeaux. He explained how the profits and goods accrued from the exploitation of African slaves in the New World fuelled Britain’s Industrial Revolution. A century ago, Karl Marx had made the same point when he wrote, “without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry”. [10] At the end of chapter four, Rodney explained how colonialism emerged out of the imperialist stage of capitalism in the late 19th century. Rivalries between European capitalist firms assumed the form of a competition between nation-states for control over the world’s markets, natural resources and trade routes. Africa, which had been weakened from centuries of slave trading, fell victim to Europe’s violent colonial conquest. European ruling classes justified this conquest with racist ideology, as they claimed to be civilising savage people by converting them to Christianity. Thus, by 1900, they had divided the entire African continent into colonies. [11]

In the fifth chapter, Rodney analysed colonialism (1885-1960) as a cruel and exploitative system, whereby the European bourgeoisie extracted wealth from African workers and peasants. He assessed the oppression and suffering of African workers at the hands of the colonial state. The state ensured that Africans often worked under forced labour, while their European counterparts could freely sell their labour. Even those Africans who were able to choose their employer received miserable wages for endless hours of work. Colonial rule was even worse for the African peasant. Rodney showed how the colonial state confiscated their land through severe taxation, evictions, and warfare. It forced some peasants to abandon food production for export crops that were sold cheap. Moreover, peasants suffered at the hands of trading companies and their middlemen who offered miserable prices. Rodney, however, did not simply illustrate the horrors of colonialism. He provided case studies of multinational companies, like Unilever, and the enormous profits they acquired from robbing Africans. Moreover, he described how Africa’s contribution to capitalism went beyond monetary returns. Its raw materials supported Europe’s advancement in electronics, metallurgy and chemistry and other industries, which stood at the centre of Europe’s capitalist development in the 20th century. [12]

In the final chapter, Rodney attacked the racist idea that colonialism had benefits for Africans because the colonisers built railroads, schools and hospitals. All the roads and railways, he said, went from the plantations and mines to the coast to ship raw materials to Europe, never to encourage trade between different regions of Africa. The infrastructure that colonialists built served to entrench Africa’s unfavourable position in the world economy, as a precarious supplier of raw materials and a free market for European finished products. The colonialists had no interest in providing health care and education to Africans. Rodney established the grim tally of five centuries of Portuguese colonisation:

The Portuguese had not managed to train a single African doctor in Mozambique, and the life expectancy in Eastern Angola was less than thirty years. [13]

Rodney’s historical account received support from Tanzania’s radical socialist minister A M Babu who clarified Africa’s present predicament in the postscript. “Foreign investment”, the minister wrote, “is the cause, and not a solution, to our economic backwardness.” [14] Investment went into projects designed to exploit African labour and raw materials for the benefit of the Western ruling class, never into health care and education. At best, foreign investment made fortunes for the few African leaders and businessmen, who partnered with western states and multinationals. But it failed to uplift the masses from poverty. Babu and Rodney advocated a revolutionary path to development, aimed at breaking Africa’s dependence on imperialist powers and empowering the workers and peasants. What would that path look like? Initially, Rodney thought that Nyerere’s socialism offered an answer to that question.

Chinedu Chukwudinma is a socialist activist and writer based in London. He writes on African politics, popular struggles, and the history of working-class resistance on the continent and is a member of ROAPE’s editorial board.

Notes

1. Karim Hirji, The Enduring Relevance of Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Mkuki Na Nyota, 2017).

2. Karim Hirji, Karim, Cheche: Reminiscences of a Radical Magazine. (African Books Collective, 2010), p.29.

3. See Mattavous, Viola, 1985, “Walter Rodney and Africa”, Journal of Black Studies, pp. 115-130. and Amzat Boukari-Yabara, Walter Rodney (1942-1980): Itinéraire et Mémoire d’un Intellectuel Africain, PhD thesis, (Centre d’Études Africaines CEAf, EHESS, 2010) pp.351-362.

4. Karim Hirji, 2010, p.95.

5. Rodney, 2018, p.76.

6. Walter Rodney, 2012, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Pambazuka Press, Cape Town, 2012), p.xi.

7. Rodney did not see development as a linear process. Although it was a general trend, it was uneven across continents and regions. As sometimes, the people who defended old forms of cooperation and ideas stopped those attempting to modernise production, delaying societal change for years to come. See Rodney, 2012, pp.7-10. For Marx’s historical materialist method, see Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Lawrence & Wishart, 1970) pp.42-60.

8. Rodney, 2012, pp.3-70.

9. Rodney, 2012, pp.96.

10. Karl Marx, Karl, Letter from Marx to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov (1846).

11. Rodney, 2012, pp.75-145.

12. Rodney, 2012, pp.149-201.

13. Rodney, 2012, p.206.

14. Rodney, 2012, p.284.