Expropriation or Bust: On the Illegitimacy of Wealth and Why It Must Be Recuperated

By Colin Jenkins

This is dedicated to Kwame Somburu, scientific socialist, William F. Buckley-slayer, thorn in the side of "mental midgets," lifelong advocate of "herstory," mentor, and friend.

"Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated."

- Karl Marx (Capital: Volume One)

Election seasons bring with them a renewed interest in politics. For most that couldn't care less about such concerns, election season becomes, for at least a moment, a time to reflect on deeper issues. For those of us who spend a large portion of our lives thinking, writing, acting, and engaging in these larger-than-life matters, election seasons bring other questions: can we affect change through the electoral system, how effective is voting, and how can we overcome the corporate stranglehold over politics, to name a few.

However, beneath all of the political discussions lies an uncomfortable and overwhelming truth: Nearly all of our problems are rooted in the massively unequal ownership of land, wealth, and power that exists among the over-7 billion human beings on earth. More specifically, these problems are rooted in the majority of the planet's population being stripped of its ability to satisfy the most basic of human needs. This predicament did not happen overnight, and it is far from natural. Rather, it is the product of centuries of immoral, illegitimate, and unwarranted human activity carried out by a miniscule section of the world's people.

This realization leads to an even more unsettling and uncomfortable truth: If we are to ever establish a free and just society, mass expropriation of personal wealth and property will be a necessity. In other words, the few dozens of families who have amassed personal riches equal to half the world must be forced to surrender this wealth. And furthermore, those next 5% of the global population who have acquired equally obscene amounts of wealth, relatively speaking, must also be liquidated. And, in heeding Lucy Parson's warning that "we can never be deceived that the rich will allow us to vote their wealth away," we can presume that this inevitable process of mass expropriation will not be pretty. This is a harsh and discomforting truth, indeed. But it is an undeniable truth. It is a truth that we must recognize. It is a truth that, despite being conditioned to resist, we must embrace if we are to have a shot at constructing a just world for all.

We have reached a breaking point in the human experiment. After centuries upon centuries of being subjected to extreme hierarchical systems - from monarchies to feudalism to capitalism - we are on the precipice of making a final choice: economic justice through the mass expropriation of personal wealth or infinite slavery covered by illusionary spectacles of consumer joy and bourgeois political systems. Make no mistake, expropriation is not theft. It is not the confiscation of "hard-earned" money. It is not the stealing of private property. It is, rather, the recuperation of massive amounts of land and wealth that have been built on the back of stolen natural resources, human enslavement, and coerced labor, and amassed over a number of centuries by a small minority. This wealth, that has been falsely justified by "a vast array of courts, judges, executioners, policemen, and gaolers," all of whom have been created "to uphold these privileges" and "give rise to a whole system of espionage, of false witness, of spies, of threats and corruption" [1], is illegitimate, both in moral principle and in the exploitative mechanisms in which it has used to create itself.

It is in this fundamental illegitimacy where we must take the reins and move forward in a truly liberatory and revolutionary fashion. However, before we can take collective action, we must free our mental bondage (believing wealth and private property have been earned by those who monopolize it; and, thus, should be respected, revered, and even sought after), open our minds, study and understand history, and recognize this illegitimacy together. This understanding must be reached through a careful study of the various socioeconomic systems that have ruled the human race, how the accumulation of wealth, land, and power has been extended and maintained through these systems, and how such accumulation has been illegitimate in both the ways in which it is (and has been) acquired and the ways in which it has displaced, disenfranchised, and impoverished the large majority of human beings on earth in its process. With this understanding, we can move beyond the futile process of trying to reform systems that are rotted from the core, and move forward on deconstructing these formidable social hierarchies that have been built through illegitimate, immoral, and illegal means.

"Other People's Money": On Recycled, Cold-War Propaganda

"The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all ... The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands - the ownership and control of their livelihoods - are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease."

- Helen Keller

For those who remain ignorant to history - and, more specifically, to understanding how capitalism has shaped the present - ideals rooted in socialism represent a fairy-tale bogeyman. As historical understanding gives way to corporate media and standardized education schemes, fewer and fewer seem to grasp not only the basic theories of each system (capitalism and socialism) but also the ways in which they relate to us. Reactionary talking points are built on this hollow foundation. Arguments against socialist ideas and principles, whether taught in American classrooms or disseminated on cable news, remain nothing more than conditioned and packaged responses that have been recycled from Cold War propaganda. This is evident in the mythological construction of, and obsession with, equating socialism to government authority. There simply is no substance because there has been literally no scholarship on these topics in compulsory U.S. educational settings. Instead, we continue to falsely associate capitalism with freedom, private property with liberty, and socialism with theft. This is done without any learning, any thought, any investigation, or any historical analysis. It is, by nature, the epitome of propaganda, designed for one purpose and one purpose only: to justify and maintain systems of hierarchy, oppression, and mass inequality. For as long as the victims of these systems are made to believe our victimization is not only justifiable but necessary, the longer such systems can operate with little scrutiny and minimal opposition.

One of the most common parroting routines regarding the demonization of socialism is taken from neoliberal champion Margaret Thatcher, who famously remarked, "The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." This one line has been used ad nauseam by proponents of capitalism. It is, after all, a perfect sound bite for those who do not want to take the time to read and learn, critically think, or chip away at their hardened cognitive dissonance. It also perfectly sums up the thoughtlessness of anti-socialist propaganda, which can be characterized by four basic presuppositions: (1) that capitalism equals freedom; or, at the very least, is the only alternative, (2) that capitalism naturally produces "winners" and "losers," (3) that capitalism is as meritocratic as possible, and thus everyone has an equal opportunity to become a "winner" or "loser," and your individual outcome is based solely on your "hard work" or lack thereof, and (4) that "winners" have earned their wealth through their own exceptionalism, and thus deserve it; while, in contrast, "losers" have earned their impoverishment through their own shortcomings, and thus deserve it.

These four ideas expose a problematic contradiction within anti-socialist propaganda: on one hand, they are ahistorical - in other words, they do not consider historical developments regarding the accumulation of wealth, property, and power, and therefore are unable to understand how these developments have shaped our modern existence. On the other hand, because they are ahistorical, they rely on a peculiar blank-slate theory - that human beings, as we exist today, have just appeared in our current state, and that this state (which is rife with inequality, impoverishment, hunger, homelessness, joblessness, etc.) is justified merely by its being, because it was not shaped by history, as history does not exist. With this blank-slate approach, investigation is not necessary. Inquiry is not necessary. Because finding the roots of these ills is a painstaking and overwhelming process that would rather be deemed unnecessary. For the world is as it is, the systems we live in are the best we can do, and emotion and instinct are all we need when reacting to the problems placed before us.

In reality, there are historical causes and effects that have created modern conditions. When we realize this, and take the time and effort to learn these layered epochs of wealth accumulation, we ultimately learn that "other people's money" is really not justifiably theirs to begin with. [2] Instead, things like personal wealth, land, and power are accumulated in only one fundamental way: through the murdering, maiming, coercing, stealing, robbing, or exploiting of others. This is not only a historically-backed truism (of which I will illustrate below), but it is also a fundamental truth rooted in human relations. There simply is no other way to amass the obscene amounts of personal wealth as have been amassed on earth.

Primitive Accumulation, Slavery, and "Old Wealth"

"In actual history, it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, and force, play the great part."

- Karl Marx

Deconstructing Thatcher's statement is not especially difficult. Even on face value, most of us can recognize that wealth is hardly earned on one's perceived exceptionalism. The contrasting (and correct) retort to Thatcher's is that "the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer." This has been the case throughout history, and is a constant trend within all socioeconomic systems that have been implemented. In Monarchial Europe, wealth was determined and sustained by bloodlines and nobility. In feudal times, this transformed into divisions between lords and peasants. With capitalism, this transitioned into owners and workers. In each case, the respective governmental systems that have complemented these economic bases have always used their power to keep these divisions intact, literally for the sake of keeping wealth with wealth, and thus, power with the powerful. The founding fathers of the United States, as wealthy landowners and aristocrats, had no intentions of swaying from this model. When constructing a unique federal system in the colonies, John Jay captured the consensus thought at the Constitutional convention in Philadelphia, proclaiming that "those who own the country ought to govern it." And, in the influential Federalist Papers, James Madison echoed this sentiment, urging that a priority for any governmental system should be to "protect the minority of the opulent (the wealthy, land-owning slave-owners) against the majority (the workers, servants, and slaves)."

For instance, take the case of Donald J. Trump. Like most wealthy individuals, Trump experienced an uber-privileged upbringing, worry-free and filled with private schools and immense economic and physical security. As a young man - during a time when most people are indebting themselves for life through college, juggling multiple, minimum-wage jobs with hopes of affording basic needs, or relegated to military duty - Trump was handed his father's real-estate empire and eventually inherited between $40 and $200 million in addition. [3] Trump wealth can be traced back to a family-owned vineyard in Bavaria. [4] Trump's grandfather (Frederich Trumpf) utilized the family's wealth to move to the United States, where he opened a bar in Seattle's Red Light District and relied on prostitution as a source of revenue. This continuous line of wealth allowed Donald's father, Fred, to start a real estate business with his mother, Elizabeth Christ Trump. [5] On the verge of collapse during the Great Depression, the government (Federal Housing Administration) stepped in and saved Trump's business by funding him to build a multitude of homes in Brooklyn. Continuing his relationship with the FHA, Trump was awarded contracts to build homes for US Navy personnel throughout the east coast. [6]

Through centuries of privilege, and crucial assistance from the federal government in times of near-collapse, Trump family wealth has been allowed to flourish. Donald himself, after being handed this empire, declared bankruptcy four times, was allowed to write off over a billion dollars of debt, and was rescued by the banking industry on at least two occasions. There's nothing remotely exceptional or innovative in any of this Trump wealth. It was built on the exploitation of land, labor, and (literally) prostitution; and was boosted, and even saved, on numerous occasions by the government. While the case of Trump is admittedly anecdotal, it does represent a very common trend in regards to how personal wealth is accumulated, maintained, and extended throughout history. Contrary to those favorite anti-socialist talking points, it is almost never meritocratic. It almost always relies on external protectors and facilitators. And it always feeds on the exploitation or displacement of the majority.

But in order to truly understand how things like wealth and land, and consequently power, have been accumulated by so few, there must be basic systemic understandings of historical processes, how old epochs have transitioned into new epochs, and most importantly, how capitalism operates. In most cases, personal wealth and power is nothing more than an extension from previous generations; inheritance after inheritance stemming from primitive forms of accumulation dating back many centuries. Old wealth is intimately tied to systems that may sound like ancient history - monarchies, feudalism, indentured servitude, chattel slavery - but are, in reality, only a handful of generations removed. By merely tracing wealth back a few generations, one can see how major companies that exist today used something like the Atlantic Slave Trade to emerge as viable businesses 150 years ago. It is well-documented that companies and financial institutions like Lehman Brothers, Aetna, JP Morgan Chase, New York Life, Wachovia Corporation, Brooks Brothers, Barclays, and AIG, among many others, directly profited from the enslavement of African people in the Americas and built their financial empires from this illegitimate process. Regardless of public apologies and recognition of these past transgressions (if these things ever materialize), these powerful institutions remain intact, hoping to gain and maintain a general appearance of legitimacy as their illegal foundations become further removed from time.

Whether speaking of caste systems, nobility, aristocracy, feudalism, indentured servitude, chattel slavery, or capitalism, all modern socioeconomic systems have carried one common trait: they all amount to a minority using the majority (through exploitation or displacement) as a source of wealth, and thus have enforced and maintained this causal relationship by the threat and use of physical force and coercion in order to protect their minority interests. In the European empires, the concentration of wealth gained by this privileged minority was done so through vicious colonial expeditions where millions were murdered or enslaved and multitudes of land and natural resources were claimed by force. In North America, a wealthy minority established their own colonial experiment that was "a carbon copy of the old English aristocracies," eventually leading to the birth of the United States, "a country that was not born free, but born slave and free, servant and master, tenant and landlord, poor and rich." [7] The foundation of the US was constructed in two distinct regions, both shaped significantly by transplanted 'old wealth' and towering hierarchies: the North, where a "commercial and religious oligarchy" sought to preserve in America "the social arrangements of the mother country" by exploiting the wage-dependent and landless masses through "control of trade and commerce, establishing political domination of the inhabitants through church and town meetings, and by careful marriage alliances among themselves" [8]; and the South, where a landed aristocracy used their inherited wealth to purchase large parcels of land and thousands of slaves from the Atlantic Slave Trade. Through the early colonial years, this exclusive landed-aristocracy "held control of government, including the elected assemblies, by wielding power over tenants and slaves, by disenfranchising most citizens, and by under-representing the back-country areas." [9]

The problem of slavery in the American colonies is well documented; but what is not often understood is that chattel slavery was the foundation of the country's modern economic system. This cannot be overstated enough - the practice of chattel slavery in the South was quite literally the lifeblood of the modern United States, in terms of finance, capital, infrastructure, and even global power. Or, as Public Seminar's Julia Ott succinctly put it, "racialized chattel slaves were the capital that made capitalism." [10] According to Sven Beckert, it was the "cotton empire" that transformed the United States into a global power:

"As this cotton boom violently transformed huge swaths of the North American countryside, it catapulted the US to a pivotal role in the empire of cotton. In 1791, capital invested in cotton production in Brazil, as estimated by the US Treasury, was still more than ten times greater than in the US. In 1801, only ten years later, 60 percent more capital was invested in the cotton industry of the US than that of Brazil. Cotton, even more so than in the Caribbean and Brazil, infused land and slaves alike with unprecedented value, and promised slaveholders spectacular opportunities for profits and power. Already by 1820, cotton constituted 32 percent of all US exports, compared to a miniscule 2.2 percent in 1796. Indeed, more than half of all American exports between 1815 and 1860 consisted of cotton. Cotton so dominated the US economy that cotton production statistics 'became an increasingly vital unit in assessing the American economy.' It was on the back of cotton, and thus on the back of slaves, that the US economy ascended in the world." [11]

A 2013 paper released by economists Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman illustrated not only the profound wealth generated by American slavery, but how it was significant in setting the United States apart from other industrialized nations. In contrast to its European counterparts, whose elites relied on land-wealth as their primary source of power, American elites were initially faced with a peculiar situation in regards to colonial land. Ironically, since land in the "new world" came so cheap (because it could simply be stolen from Native tribes), the true value of land became the mass agricultural production generated through slave labor. So, for American elites, wealth was not merely created by their violent land grabs, but more so by their access to free labor. Picketty and Zucman conclude,

"The lower land values prevailing in America during the 1770-1860 period were to some extent compensated by the slavery system. Land was so abundant that it was almost worthless, implying that it was difficult to be really rich by owning land. However, the landed elite could be rich and control a large share of national income by owning the labor force… In the case of antebellum U.S., the value of the slave stock was still highly significant. By putting together the best available estimates of slave prices and the number of slaves, we have come to the conclusion that the market value of slaves was between 1 and 2 years of national income for the entire U.S., and up to 3 years of income in Southern states. When we add up the value of slaves and the value of land, we obtain wealth-income ratios in the U.S. South which are relatively close to those of the Old World. Slaves approximately compensate the lower land values." [12]

The significance of slavery to the Southern economy is as obvious now as it was then. In an 1883 address to the Louisville Convention, Frederick Douglass observed this fact,

"The colored people of the South are the laboring people of the South. The labor of a country is the source of its wealth; without the colored laborer today the South would be a howling wilderness, given up to bats, owls, wolves, and bears. He was the source of its wealth before the war, and has been the source of its prosperity since the war. He almost alone is visible in her fields, with implements of toil in his hands, and laboriously using them today." [13]

But it was not just the South that thrived off the institution of slavery. It was the entire country. And it was the newly found institution of capitalism. This primitive form of accumulation amounted to an immense pool of capital which has since been utilized in layered schemes of exploitation, throughout generations, as the primary source of cyclical wealth development. Those who created it were never given access to even an ounce. Those who essentially stole it (through violent land grabs and human enslavement) have since built financial, retail, industrial, and real estate empires from it. Empires that have one common trait: they are completely illegitimate. And their connections run deep, transcending region. The tracing of this history has already been done. Take the case of 19th-century New York City banker James Brown and his family's investment bank, Browns Brothers & Co., which served as a substantial source of finance capital for over two centuries (and still exists today as Brown Brothers Harriman & Co). Upon tallying his wealth in 1842, Brown found that "his investments in the South exceeded $1.5 million, a quarter of which was directly bound up in the ownership of slave plantations." [14]

Northern bankers made fortunes from slavery. And Northern industries relied heavily on the cotton production to jump-start their own fortunes. Beckert and Seth Rockman describe these historical connections,

"Brown was hardly unusual among the capitalists of the North. Nicholas Biddle's United States Bank of Philadelphia funded banks in Mississippi to promote the expansion of plantation lands. Biddle recognized that slave-grown cotton was the only thing made in the U.S. that had the capacity to bring gold and silver into the vaults of the nation's banks. Likewise, the architects of New England's industrial revolution watched the price of cotton with rapt attention, for their textile mills would have been silent without the labor of slaves on distant plantations…

…to understand slavery's centrality to the rise of American capitalism, just consider the history of an antebellum Alabama dry-goods outfit called Lehman Brothers or a Rhode Island textile manufacturer that would become the antecedent firm of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

Reparations lawsuits (since dismissed) generated evidence of slave insurance policies by Aetna and put Brown University and other elite educational institutions on notice that the slave-trade enterprises of their early benefactors were potential legal liabilities. Recent state and municipal disclosure ordinances have forced firms such as JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Wachovia Corp. to confront unsettling ancestors on their corporate family trees.

Such revelations are hardly surprising in light of slavery's role in spurring the nation's economic development. America's "take-off" in the 19th century wasn't in spite of slavery; it was largely thanks to it. And recent research in economic history goes further: It highlights the role that commodified human beings played in the emergence of modern capitalism itself." [15]

The United States, while advertised as the "new world" or the "free world," was nothing more than a breeding ground for age-old social hierarchies. "No new social class came to power through the door of the American Revolution. The men who engineered the revolt were largely members of the colonial ruling class." [16] There was nothing egalitarian about this experiment. "Roughly 10 percent of the American settlers, consisting of large landholders (the landed aristocracy) and merchants (the commercial aristocracy), owned nearly half the wealth of the entire country, and held as slaves one-seventh of the country's people." [17] The founding fathers and settlers sought to create a political and governmental system that avoided handing any meaningful sense of power or influence to the people, while also establishing a rule of law capable of protecting the extremely unequal distribution of land and wealth. As Cornel West explains, "American democracy emerged as a republic (representative government) rather than an Athenian-like direct democracy primarily owing to the same elite fear of the passions and ignorance of the demos (the masses). For the founding fathers - just as for Plato - too much Socratic questioning from the demos and too much power sharing of elites with the demos were expected to lead to anarchy, instability, or perpetual rebellion." [18] A general insecurity and fear of the masses, or "the mob," was a primary motivation in this birth. And this motivation was rooted solely in the material interests of a transplanted colonial ruling and owning class. Charles Beard's invaluable contribution, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (1935), hammered this thesis home. In reflecting on this work, Howard Zinn tell us that,

"Beard found that most of the makers of the constitution had direct economic interests in establishing a strong federal government: The manufacturers needed protective tariffs; the money lenders wanted to stop the use of paper money to pay off debts; the land speculators wanted protection as they invaded Indian lands; slave owners needed federal security against slave revolts and runaways; bondholders wanted a government able to raise money by nationwide taxation, to pay off those bonds." [19]

These motivations have dominated the political, social, and economic landscape of the United States throughout its existence. As we can see, 150 years removed from the nation's founding, not much had changed. In 1937, investigative journalist Ferdinand Lundberg obtained tax records and other historical documents in order to expose this perpetual chain of concentrated wealth. His findings, duly titled "America's 60 Families," concluded that,

"The United States is owned and dominated today by a hierarchy of its sixty richest families, buttressed by no more than ninety families of lesser wealth. These families are the living center of the modern industrial oligarchy which dominates the United States, functioning discreetly under a de jure democratic form of government behind which a de facto government, absolutist and plutocratic in its lineaments, has gradually taken form. This de facto government is actually the government of the United States - informal, invisible, shadowy. It is the government of money in a dollar democracy." [20]

And today, two-and-a-half centuries later, still nothing has changed. As of 2010, " the top 1% of US households (the upper class) owned 35.4% of all privately held wealth, and the next 19% (the managerial, professional, and small business stratum) had 53.5%, which means that just 20% of the people owned a remarkable 89%, leaving only 11% of the wealth for the bottom 80% (wage and salary workers). In terms of financial wealth (total net worth minus the value of one's home), the top 1% of households had an even greater share: 42.1%." [21]

These unequal beginnings have remained consistent through history, and have been maintained through a governmental system designed to protect them. From slavery and the industrial robber-baron era to the modern forms of monopoly and neoliberal capitalism, each epoch has continued seamlessly by constantly replacing and rebranding forms of human exploitation - peasant, servant, slave, tenant, laborer - as sources of concentrated wealth.

Human Resources: Capitalism, Enclosure, and the Exploitation of Labor

"In virtue of this monstrous system, the children of the worker, on entering life, find no fields which they may till, no machine which they may tend, no mine in which they may dig, without accepting to leave a great part of what they will produce to a master. They must sell their labour for a scant and uncertain wage."

- Peter Kropotkin (The Conquest of Bread)

One of the basic mechanisms of capitalism is the relationship between capital and labor. No matter what argument one may make in support of capitalism, this fundamental relationship can never be denied. Everything from entrepreneurships to small, family-owned businesses to corporate conglomerates must rely on this foundational interaction inherent to this economic system. Whether branded as "crony-capitalism," "corporate-capitalism," "unfettered-capitalism" or any one of the many monikers used to distract from its inherent flaws and contradictions, proponents can't deny its lifeblood - its need to exploit labor. And they can't deny the fundamental way in which it exploits labor - by utilizing property as a social relationship. It is in this relationship where masses of human beings are commodified, essentially transformed into machines, and forced to work so they may create wealth for those who employ them. This fundamental aspect of capitalism is not debatable.

The epoch of capitalism and its reliance on mass exploitation of labor was described by Marx throughout his work. A most fitting summary is found in its transition from feudalism, which is explained by Marx in Capital, Volume One,

"As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the labourers are turned into proletarians, their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialisation of labour and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the labourer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many labourers. This expropriation is accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself, by the centralisation of capital." [22]

In the US, the exploitation of labor - whether free (chattel slavery) or surplus (wage slavery) - has been the primary source of wealth-building for centuries. When chattel slavery was officially brought to an end after the Civil War and Emancipation Proclamation, a transition to establish and protect new forms of exploitation began. During Reconstruction in the South, the newly freed slaves were immediately betrayed by the post-war government. This betrayal came in three basic components: "(1) the freedmen did not get 'the 40 acres and a mule' they were promised; (2) the old slave owners got back their plantations and thus the power to institute a mode of production to suit cotton culture; and (3) the crop lien system was introduced with 'new' form of labor: sharecropping." [23] This transition, hence, created a new form of slavery in the South; one where,

"…the cropper (former slave) had neither control of the nature of his crop nor the marketing of it. The cropper owned nothing but his labor power, and was thus forced to part with half of the crop for 'furnishings.' The rest of the crop was to go to the merchant upon whom he depends for his every purchase of clothing, food, implements and fertilizer. The cropper was charged exorbitant prices but could not question the word of the boss who keeps the books and makes the 'settlement,' at which time the cropper found himself in perpetual debt and thus unable to leave the land." [24]

As this rebranding of human exploitation was sweeping the South, federal soldiers directed their attention north, where wage laborers were engulfed in a battle to break their own form of slavery. This concerted effort on the part of the owning class (in both north and south) to suppress their exploited laborers showed how blurred the lines between chattel slavery and wage slavery really were. In her crucial essay, American Civilization on Trial, Raya Dunayevskaya explains,

"In 1877, the year the Federal troops were removed from the South, was the year they were used to crush the railroad strikes stretching from Pennsylvania to Texas. The Pennsylvania Governor not only threatened labor with "a sharp use of bayonet and musket," but the Federal Government did exactly that at the behest of the captains of industry. The peace pact with the Southern bourbons meant unrestrained violence on the part of the rulers, both North and South, against labor." [25]

The attack on Northern laborers intensified and was supported by a continuation of white supremacist tactics that divided the white and black labor force, mostly by keeping newly freedmen indebted and stuck in their new sharecropping roles on southern plantations:

"The ruthlessness with which capital asserted its rule over labor that worked long hours for little pay, which was further cut at the will of the factory owners every time a financial crisis hit the country, drove labor underground. The first National Labor Union had a very short span of life. The Knights of Labor that replaced it organized white and black alike, with the result that, at its height (1886) out of a total membership of one million no less than 90,000 were Negroes. Nevertheless, no Northern organization could possibly get to the mass base of Negroes who remained overwhelmingly, preponderantly in the South. For, along with being freed from slavery, the Negroes were freed also from a way to make a living. Landless were the new freedmen, and penniless." [26]

The transition from feudalism to capitalism, or from peasant to wage laborer, was facilitated through similar means. As European nations - and the American colonies - had built up primitive forms of capital through stolen resources and the enslavement of Africans, industrialization was coming into its own. The feudal systems of old were no longer sufficient for the owning classes, not because they weren't advantageous, but because the peasantry, despite its subordinate and often times subhuman existence, was relatively self-sustaining. Peasants had access to land and resources - access that allowed them sustenance and the means to produce basic necessities for themselves and their families during their free time. To them, industrial wage labor was nothing more than slavery - being stripped of access to land and resources, becoming completely reliant on labor power and the meager wages it brought (of lucky) as a source of income, and being doubly reliant on those wages to not only purchase goods, but to merely sustain. In other words, to the feudal peasant living under a lordship, the prospect of becoming a wage laborer in a "more free" capitalist society was viewed as a downgrade.

This transition was a futile sell for lords-turned-capitalists; the peasantry knew better than to accept these conditions. So, the "industrious men" of the time duplicated history and proceeded in the only way they could - by stripping the peasantry of their "common" land rights and corralling them into the factories and mills. This was accomplished through the construction of bankrupt philosophies, false justifications, new laws, and armed police forces to enforce these laws. In his book, Stop Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance, historian Peter Linebaugh identifies the brain trust behind this transition:

"Arthur Young was the advocate of land privatization; the earth became a capitalist asset. Thomas Malthus sought to show that famine, war, and pestilence balanced a fecund population. Patrick Colquhoun was the magistrate and government intelligence agent who organized the criminalization of London custom. Jeremy Bentham contrived the architectural enclosure of the urban populations with his 'panopticon.'" [27]

Their experiment was human engineering at its finest - a literal example of a capitalist conspiracy, if there ever was one, designed for the purpose of transforming masses of people into commodities without their consent. With a contrived philosophical approach in hand, the creation of artificial laws provided the mechanism to accomplish this,

"They present their policies as 'law.' The law of property with Bentham, the law of police with Colquhoun, the laws of political economy with Young, the laws of nature in Malthus. Bentham will have institutions for orphans and 'wayward' women. Malthus will recommend the postponement of marriage. Colquhoun inveighed against brothel and ale-house. Arthur Young takes the ground from under the feet of the women whose pig-keeping, chicken minding, and vegetable patch depended on common right. They are concerned with the reproduction of the working class." [28]

The 'legal' destruction of the common land and its subsequent privatization was a fundamental prerequisite for capitalist production. It amounted to land theft on a grand scale, falsely justified by laws passed by the very men who stood to gain from it. However, this legal transformation was not complete without the forced enclosure of the peasantry. It was in this development where masses of people, formerly allowed access to common lands, were stripped of whatever meager degrees of self-determination they once had under feudalism:

"By enclosure, we include the complete separation of the worker from the means of production - this was most obvious in the case of land (the commons) - it also obtained in the many trades and crafts of London, indeed it was prerequisite to mechanization. The shoemaker kept some of the leather he worked with ("clicking"). The tailor kept cloth remnants he called 'cabbage.' The weavers kept their 'fents' and 'thrums' after the cloth was cut from the loom. Servants expected 'vails' and would strike if they were not forthcoming. Sailors treasured their 'adventures.' Wet coopers felt entitled to 'waxers.' The ship-builders and sawyers took their 'chips.' The dockers (or longshoremen) were called 'lumpers,' and worked with sailors, watermen, lightermen, coopers, warehousemen, porters, and when the containers of the cargo spilled they took as custom their 'spillings,' ' sweepings,' or 'scrapings.' The cook licked his own fingers." [29]

The invention of capitalism and wage labor changed all of this. And, in this day and time, wage labor was widely recognized by former slaves and peasants as being not very different from that of chattel slavery. "Experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery," warned former slave, Frederick Douglass, "and this slavery of wages must go down with the other." [30] To ruling and owning elites, the invention of wage labor was intimately tied to that of chattel slavery, systemically. "While most theories of capitalism set slavery apart, as something utterly distinct, because under slavery, workers do not labor for a wage," Ott tells us, "new historical research reveals that for centuries, a single economic system encompassed both the plantation and the factory." [31]

Even in the field of "business organization" and "management," the southern slave plantation was viewed as an influential and beneficial model to be transplanted and deployed in northern factories and mills:

"The plantation didn't just produce the commodities that fueled the broader economy; it also generated innovative business practices that would come to typify modern management. As some of the most heavily capitalized enterprises in antebellum America, plantations offered early examples of time-motion studies and regimentation through clocks and bells. Seeking ever-greater efficiencies in cotton picking, slaveholders reorganized their fields, regimented the workday, and implemented a system of vertical reporting that made overseers into managers answerable to those above for the labor of those below." [32]

And because of this inherently exploitative and dehumanizing labor process found under capitalism, the state has been needed to act on behalf of those who accumulate the illegitimate wealth from this process. Without the state, this unequal social arrangement - where the majority is essentially born into bondage - would not survive. An especially useful anarchist analysis regarding the relationship between wage slavery and state force tells us,

"In every system of class exploitation, a ruling class controls access to the means of production in order to extract tribute from labor. Capitalism is no exception. In this system the state maintains various kinds of 'class monopolies' (to use Benjamin Tucker's phrase) to ensure that workers do not receive their 'natural wage,' the full product of their labor. While some of these monopolies are obvious (such as tariffs, state granted market monopolies and so on), most are 'behind the scenes' and work to ensure that capitalist domination does not need extensive force to maintain." [33]

Hence, the illegitimacy of primitive accumulation provided the foundation for the illegitimacy of the wage-labor system central to capitalism, whose exploitative arrangement is protected by the illegitimacy of the capitalist state.

"Property is Theft": On Private Property and Landlordism

"If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery? and I should answer in one word, It is murder!, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to remove a man's mind, will, and personality, is the power of life and death, and that it makes a man a slave. It is murder. Why, then, to this other question: What is property? may I not likewise answer, It is robbery!, without the certainty of being misunderstood; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first?"

- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (What is Property?)

The prevailing mindset within capitalist society has been to place property above all else. Those of us who have grown up in the US have had this idea drilled into our heads at every turn. The materialistic nature of consumerism, which equates self-worth with the accumulation of wealth, land, and other material goods, has conditioned us to view our lives and the lives as others as being secondary, or at best equal, to the value of property. Our property becomes our identity, and for this reason, it becomes as sacred and revered as human life itself.

When American "pioneers," accompanied by federal soldiers, stole Native American land, forced Native American people out of those lands, corralled them into open-air prisons, and used that newly-claimed land to enrich themselves, this established a path of illegitimacy. It doesn't matter that - after multiple generations have partaken in the buying and selling of this same land - those who profit from said land today did not take part in the actual killing, maiming, and robbing of Native American peoples. Time and separation are irrelevant factors. Being distanced from the illegitimate roots of multi-generational theft for the sake of profit-making doesn't make one innocent in the process. The entire cycle has been built on a foundation of illegitimacy. This stolen land was never intended to be a source of wealth for European colonizers and their future bloodlines, or for anyone else for that matter. In using this modern scenario, this process of wealth accumulation can be applied to all such accumulation since the beginning of time.

That being said, condemning and exposing the forcible extraction of land, in itself, does not begin to address the philosophical illegitimacy of private property. In order to correctly point out this illegitimacy, we must dig deeper. We must understand the meaning of private property, how it came about, and what its sole purpose is. To being this inquiry, let's consider what Emma Goldman had to say about private property in her 1908 pamphlet, "What I Believe":

"'Property' means dominion over things and the denial to others of the use of those things. So long as production was not equal to the normal demand, institutional property may have had some raison d'être. One has only to consult economics, however, to know that the productivity of labor within the last few decades has increased so tremendously as to exceed normal demand a hundred-fold, and to make property not only a hindrance to human well-being, but an obstacle, a deadly barrier, to all progress. It is the private dominion over things that condemns millions of people to be mere nonentities, living corpses without originality or power of initiative, human machines of flesh and blood, who pile up mountains of wealth for others and pay for it with a gray, dull and wretched existence for themselves. I believe that there can be no real wealth, social wealth, so long as it rests on human lives - young lives, old lives and lives in the making." [34]

When one person, any person, acts on their individual power to acquire property that is to be used beyond their own means, they are doing so for the purpose of direct exploitation or residual dispossession. If it is not to be used as a means to live and sustain, it can either be (1) abandoned and restricted from those who have none, (2) used to extract natural resources for individual use beyond necessity, or (3) utilized as a social relationship to employ other human beings as a source of wealth-building (through the exploitation of labor). When one exercises this undue power (whether through force or unseen privilege), "It is conceded that the fundamental cause of this terrible state of affairs is: that man must sell his labor; and that his inclination and judgment are subordinated to the will of a master (the one who owns the land)." [35]

When considering this analysis, one that surely sounds alien to most living in the 21st century, it is important to understand basic notions of property, and most importantly, the difference between "personal property" and "private property."

The use of private property as a way to exploit others is unique to capitalism. For example, in contrast to feudalism, capitalists only allow workers access to their property during times when said workers are laboring to create wealth for said owners. In feudal times, as mentioned before, peasants were allowed to live on this land, and even use it as a means to sustain for themselves and their families, as long as this personal activity was done after the lord's work had been completed. Now, with capitalism, workers "punch in," proceed to labor for a specified amount of time in exchange for a fraction of the wealth they create, "punch out," and then are left to find their own means of housing, food, clothing, and basic sustenance with only the wage they receive. This latter task has proven to be difficult for a majority of the world's population for the past number of centuries, even in so-called industrialized nations, which is why welfare states have become prominent as a means to facilitate the mass exploitation of the working class. Capitalists, and their governments, learned long ago that workers must be able to survive, if only barely, so that they may continue to labor and consume.

In 1918, on the heels of Russian Revolution and subsequent birth of the Soviet Union, German socialist Rosa Luxemburg illustrated the glaring contrast between a society that allows for the concentration of property as a means to exploit a displaced and landless majority (capitalism) versus one that utilizes property as a communal, life-sustaining resource (socialism) for all of its members. In analyzing capitalist property relations and its consequences on society, she tells us,

"To-day all wealth, the largest and most fruitful tracts of land, the mines, the mills and the factories belong to a small group of Junkers and private capitalists. From them the great masses of the laboring class receive a scanty wage in return for long hours of arduous toil, hardly enough for a decent livelihood. The enrichment of a small class of idlers is the purpose and end of present-day society…

… To-day production in every manufacturing unit is conducted by the individual capitalist independently of all others. What and where commodities are to be produced, where, when and how the finished product is to be sold, is decided by the individual capitalist owner. Nowhere does labor have the slightest influence upon these questions. It is simply the living machine that has its work to do." [36]

In contrasting this with a socialist solution, she illustrates the alternative:

"To give to modern society and to modern production a new impulse and a new purpose - that is the foremost duty of the revolutionary working class…. To this end all social wealth the land and all that it produces, the factories and the mills must be taken from their exploiting owners to become the common property of the entire people. It thus becomes the foremost duty of a revolutionary government of the working class to issue a series of decrees making all important instruments of production national property and placing them under social control.

…Private ownership of the means of production and subsistence must disappear. Production will be carried on not for the enrichment of the individual but solely for the creation of a supply of commodities sufficient to supply the wants and needs of the working class. Accordingly factories, mills and farms must be operated upon an entirely new basis, from a wholly different point of view.

…production is to be carried on for the sole purpose of securing to all a more humane existence, of providing for all plentiful food, clothing and other cultural means of subsistence." [37]

While the ways in which such economic justice can and should be obtained, and how new systems should be arranged as an alternative, are debatable topics, Luxemburg's description of and contrast to capitalist property relations still remain the same. And it serves as an instructive analysis to why such property relations are fundamentally illegitimate. In Marx's explanation of potential transitions from the capitalist mode of property to the socialist, we see the same contrast. In Capital, he tells us,

"The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.

The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialised production, into socialised property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people." [38]

To complement the materialist analysis presented by an array of Marxist thinkers, anarchists have added equally-useful, philosophically-based arguments against the ownership of private property. Simply stated, to anarchists, private property must be opposed because it is "a source of coercive, hierarchical authority as well as exploitation and, consequently, elite privilege and inequality. It is based on and produces inequality, in terms of both wealth and power." [39] The unnatural and unequal distribution of power among human populations due to private property is a common-sense analysis that can be understood by simply imagining the start of any such society, where all would have equal footing, equal rights, equitable futures, and the basic will to satisfy needs (without taking that will away from others). However, if and when a member of that community decides to take more than they need, they immediately create a scenario where others will inevitably go without, be subjected to an exploitative social relationship, and/or rely on the illegitimate landowner for basic needs (in the form of some sort of exchange). As anarchist philosophy tells us, "those who own property exploit those who do not. This is because those who do not own have to pay or sell their labor to those who do own in order to get access to the resources they need to live and work (such as workplaces, machinery, land, credit, housing, and products under patents). [40]

Proudhon's assertion that "property is theft" was not hyperbolic. He elaborates,

"The proprietor, the robber, the hero, the sovereign -- for all these titles are synonymous -- imposes his will as law, and suffers neither contradiction nor control; that is, he pretends to be the legislative and the executive power at once . . . [and so] property engenders despotism . . . That is so clearly the essence of property that, to be convinced of it, one need but remember what it is, and observe what happens around him. Property is the right to use and abuse . . . if goods are property, why should not the proprietors be kings, and despotic kings -- kings in proportion to their facultes bonitaires? And if each proprietor is sovereign lord within the sphere of his property, absolute king throughout his own domain, how could a government of proprietors be anything but chaos and confusion?" [41]

Even bourgeois philosophers like Jean-Jacque Rousseau, someone whose ideas would now be relegated to the radical fringe, warned against the notion of private property, albeit from a moral viewpoint. In his 1755 "Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men," he touched on its consequences for humanity, writing,

"The first man who, having fenced off a plot of land, thought of saying, 'This is mine' and found people simple enough to believe him was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors might the human race had been spared by the one who, upon pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had shouted to his fellow men: 'Beware of listening to this impostor; you are lost if you forget the fruits of the earth belong to all and that the earth belongs to no one.'" [42]

Ironically, the notion of private property is lauded by right-wing theories of "libertarianism" as the basis of liberty and freedom. In reality, private property accomplishes the opposite, and makes any semblance of human liberty obsolete and impossible. Legalistically, under capitalism and the state's enforcement of property law, the illegitimate ownership of land creates a scenario where land is monopolized by an extremely small and privileged group of people for the sole purpose of extracting wealth (essentially through force and coercion) from both natural and human resources. The anarchist analysis tells us,

"The land monopoly consists of enforcement by government of land titles which do not rest upon personal occupancy and use. It also includes making the squatting of abandoned housing and other forms of property illegal. This leads to ground-rent, by which landlords get payment for letting others use the land they own but do not actually cultivate or use. It also allows the ownership and control of natural resources like oil, gas, coal and timber. This monopoly is particularly exploitative as the owner cannot claim to have created the land or its resources. It was available to all until the landlord claimed it by fencing it off and barring others from using it." [43]

The natural consequence of this process is landlordism, "an economic system under which a few private individuals (landlords) own property, and rent it to tenants." This system, despite being a major affront to liberty, has become the norm. And, like the system of wage labor, it coerces the majority into an extremely subservient and dependent role by forcing them to rely on, and submit themselves to, a privileged minority which has gained control of the land. Returning to our anarchist analysis, we can see that,

"At a minimum, every home and workplace needs land on which to be built. Thus while cultivation of land has become less important, the use of land remains crucial. The land monopoly, therefore, ensures that working people find no land to cultivate, no space to set up shop and no place to sleep without first having to pay a landlord a sum for the privilege of setting foot on the land they own but neither created nor use. At best, the worker has mortgaged their life for decades to get their wee bit of soil or, at worse, paid their rent and remained as property-less as before. Either way, the landlords are richer for the exchange." [44]

The illegitimacy of this form of land ownership is found not only in its reliance on mass exploitation and dispossession, but also in the means in which it has been allowed to develop. This process of landlordism has complemented the development of the capitalist system, mimicking the social relationship between labor and capital, and consequently doubling down on exploitation through the creation of yet another relationship between tenant and landlord. Along with primitive forms of accumulation, like chattel slavery, which allowed for the influx of the raw capital needed to launch the capitalist system, the forceful acquisition and expansion of privately-owned land has been facilitated by the state. This facilitation has been delivered through both military force and legislative (legal) support:

"… The land monopoly did play an important role in creating capitalism. This took two main forms. Firstly, the state enforced the ownership of large estates in the hands of a single family. Taking the best land by force, these landlords turned vast tracks of land into parks and hunting grounds so forcing the peasants little option but to huddle together on what remained. Access to superior land was therefore only possible by paying a rent for the privilege, if at all. Thus an elite claimed ownership of vacant lands, and by controlling access to it (without themselves ever directly occupying or working it) they controlled the laboring classes of the time. Secondly, the ruling elite also simply stole land which had traditionally been owned by the community. This was called enclosure, the process by which common land was turned into private property." [45]

Much like the advent of wage labor, the notion of private property has undergone a complete transformation in the psychological imagination over the past few centuries. Both serve one purpose - to act as social relationships which allow for the accumulation and concentration of wealth via the exploitation of the majority. This understanding was once common sense, even among bourgeois philosophies that dominated the Enlightenment. Now, after generations of conditioning, this basic realization is alien to most. Not only are notions of wage labor and private property viewed as the natural order of things, but private property itself has become infused with the much different idea of personal property. This has led to the development of an exploited working-class majority which reveres such property, respects its existence without question, and even fights to protect it at all costs despite its sole purpose to exploit said majority. Thus, in the psychological imagination, the illegitimate has become legitimate. While, in reality, it remains as illegitimate as ever.

Natural Resources: On Colonialism and Global Looting

"The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force."

- Michael Parenti

In order for capitalists to utilize private property as a social relationship in their mass exploitation of the working class, they must have access to the natural resources - timber, gold, minerals, diamonds, shale, oil, etc… - that are necessary to fuel production and create commodities and goods to be bought and sold in a market. Since nations are, in theory, constricted to geographic boundaries, they often do not have access to all of the natural resources they need or desire. Throughout history, the remedy for this was the notion of trading - whereas one nation would trade their surplus resources to another nation in return for needed resources, and vice versa. However, as industrial capitalism began to grow exponentially, so did the need to transform agrarian land to industrial zones, as well as farmers to industrial laborers. As Karl Kautsky explained in his 1914 essay on "ultra-imperialism," the arrival of colonialism and, more specifically, imperialism, was an inevitable stage of global capitalist production. As capitalist governments, in representing their profit sectors, were forced to seek out new industrial zones, "the sweet dream of international harmony (free trade) quickly came to an end." Because, "as a rule, industrial zones overmaster and dominate agrarian zones." [46]

Modern European imperialism can be traced as far back as the 15th century, at the height of its trade with Asian territories. During this time, because of a lack of marketable goods, European nations turned to naval dominance as a means to an end. The Portuguese provided an example of this militaristic transition:

"…since Roman times, Europe had been exporting gold and silver to the East: the problem was that Europe had never produced much of anything that Asians wanted to buy, so it was forced to pay in specie for silks, spices, steel, and other imports. The early years of European expansion were largely attempts to gain access either to Eastern luxuries or to new sources of gold and silver with which to pay for them. In those early days, Atlantic Europe really had only one substantial advantage over its Muslim rivals: an active and advanced tradition of naval warfare, honed by centuries of conflict in the Mediterranean. The moment when Vasco da Gama entered the Indian Ocean in 1498, the principle that the seas should be a zone of peaceful trade came to an immediate end. Portuguese flotillas began bombarding and sacking every port city they came across, then seizing control of strategic points and extorting protection money from unarmed Indian Ocean merchants for the right to carry on their business unmolested." [47]

Around the same time, in perhaps the most influential development in the shaping of the modern world, European powers discovered the western hemisphere. The mass looting of the Americas, as they would come to be called, more than satisfied the Asian demand for precious metals via trade:

"At almost exactly the same time (as the Portuguese assault), Christopher Columbus - a Genoese mapmaker seeking a short-cut to China-touched land in the New World, and the Spanish and Portuguese empires stumbled into the greatest economic windfall in human history: entire continents full of unfathomable wealth, whose inhabitants, armed only with Stone Age weapons, began conveniently dying almost as soon as they arrived. The conquest of Mexico and Peru led to the discovery of enormous new sources of precious metal, and these were exploited ruthlessly and systematically, even to the point of largely exterminating the surrounding populations to extract as much precious metal as quickly as possible." [48]

For European powers during the 19th century, militarism also became the primary means of resource extraction from the continent of Africa. While Africa had faced problems with colonial settlers as far back as 550 BC (Greeks), the late-19th century pillaging of the continent was especially important to the modern system of global capitalism. As consistent with capital accumulation, Africa's natural resources proved to be a major source of wealth production for a tiny sector of Europe's capitalist class, while simultaneously leaving African peoples in dire circumstances. Britain's role in this process is especially notable. Claude Kabemba, of the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, tells us,

"British capital played a key role in extraction of resources during the colonial period, especially in southern and central Africa. The competition to find and control sources of raw materials, including minerals, was one of the main drivers of European penetration and eventual colonial partition of Africa in the last quarter of the 19th century. Africa's vast resources were plundered to support the development of Britain - and other European powers - while contributing minimally to the development of the continent. Indeed, Africans have little to show for centuries of exploitation of their mineral resources. Poverty on the continent is as bad as ever. Inequality is also just as severe, if not worse, and there are increasing conflicts between extractive companies and communities." [49]

Colonialism is inseparable from Capitalism. As the capitalist system became globalized over the course of a few centuries, in its constant search for new markets, the need to dominate unoccupied lands and "uncooperative" peoples became a necessity. Thus, "new markets" were established through occupation directed by capitalist militaries, the forcible removal of millions of human beings from their native lands, and the forcible extraction of natural resources. US Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler's account of his experiences in South and Central America at the turn of the 20th century gives invaluable insight on this process. Said Butler,

"I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents." [50]

Butler's honesty, while representing a rare act of integrity for a high-ranking US military officer, did little to help the millions of people who had been ransacked, looted, and displaced by the US military and subsequent corporate takeovers of land. Such occupations would reverberate for decades, if not centuries. For example, in Haiti, although the official military occupation ended in 1934, "the corporations that were given lands failed miserably, with the lone exception of the Haitian-American Sugar Company, which endured for over five decades until it closed its doors in 1989." With unfathomable amounts of resources and wealth being stolen and regenerated by the US capitalist class, "the people of Haiti were left landless and jobless," making mass migration through the western hemisphere a necessity. And these complicit actors (like Butler) who had long passed, and these dead entities, "live on as one collective in this ghost that continues to mold Haiti's policy" and modern reality. [51]

In expanding on, or correcting (in his view), Kautsky's analysis, Vladimir Lenin illustrated how it was not only the parasitic nature of industrial capitalism that led to imperialism, but more so the constant need of finance capital to regenerate itself through exposure to new markets. In this sense, explains Lenin, the illegitimacy of capitalist accumulation on a national level became at odds with itself, with various "core" nations attempting to outdo one another in their pillaging of "periphery" nations. Lenin tells us,

"Imperialism is a striving for annexations-this is what the political part of Kautsky's definition amounts to. It is correct, but very incomplete, for politically, imperialism is, in general, a striving towards violence and reaction. For the moment, however, we are interested in the economic aspect of the question, which Kautsky himself introduced into his definition. The inaccuracies in Kautsky's definition are glaring. The characteristic feature of imperialism is not industrial but finance capital. It is not an accident that in France it was precisely the extraordinarily rapid development of finance capital, and the weakening of industrial capital, that from the eighties onwards gave rise to the extreme intensification of annexationist (colonial) policy. The characteristic feature of imperialism is precisely that it strives to annex not only agrarian territories, but even most highly industrialised regions (German appetite for Belgium; French appetite for Lorraine), because (1) the fact that the world is already partitioned obliges those contemplating a redivision to reach out for every kind of territory, and (2) an essential feature of imperialism is the rivalry between several great powers in the striving for hegemony, i.e., for the conquest of territory, not so much directly for themselves as to weaken the adversary and undermine his hegemony. (Belgium is particularly important for Germany as a base for operations against Britain; Britain needs Baghdad as a base for operations against Germany, etc.)" [52]

The profit-making potential of war has become even more obvious in recent decades, exposing the intimate ties between capitalism, imperialism, finance, and the military industrial complex. False and contrived "calls to action," like the United States' so-called "War on Terror," provide the perfect justification for the endless production, use, and reproduction of immensely destructive weapons and munitions. A simple search on stock trends for the top weapons' manufacturers illustrates this. Lockheed Martin stock, which was worth $38.49 per share on 9/7/01 (4 days prior to the 9/11 attack), is now worth $238.01 (6/17/16). Raytheon went from $24.85 per share to $134.49. Northrup Grumman has increased from $40.95 per share pre-9/11 to $213.87. Halliburton ($16.08 per share in 2001 to $73.41 in 2014), Boeing ($68.35 to $129.60), General Dynamics (from $41.50 $138.94), Honeywell (from $35.75 to $115.93), and BAE Systems ($330.00 to $477.30) have all experienced similar profit gains during this period of massive bombing campaigns across the world. A 2016 report by the Netherlands-based peace organization, PAX, also found that 150 financial institutions, including JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America, have invested roughly $28 billion dollars in companies manufacturing internationally-banned cluster bombs. And, when considering that major US politicians, including John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, have owned stock in these companies, this quite literally represents a form of human sacrifice for monetary gain. Every dead body in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Pakistan, etc… equals more money in their personal bank accounts.

Immanuel Wallerstein's World-Systems Theory (WST) is especially helpful in terms of macro-analyzing global relations based in the expansion of the capitalist system over the past few centuries. This approach "traces the rise of the capitalist world-economy from the 'long' 16th century (c. 1450-1640), which, according to Wallertsein, "was an accidental outcome of the protracted crisis of feudalism (c. 1290-1450)." In formulating this capitalist world order, "Europe (the West) used its advantages and gained control over most of the world economy and presided over the development and spread of industrialization andcapitalist economy, indirectly resulting in unequal development." [53]

Because of its Eurocentric organization, the global capitalist onslaught that has dominated the modern world has blatantly racial underpinnings. The "core nations" that make up WST's dominant group (US, England, France, Germany) tends to be "lighter" on the color scale, while the "periphery nations" that make up its dominated group (nations primarily in the global south) tend to be "darker." If anything, this oppression based in colorism makes it easier for core-nation ruling classes to justify their actions to their own subjects (the core-nation working classes). Despite a white supremacist agenda (see "Manifest Destiny," the "White Man's Burden," and the Roosevelt Corollary of the Monroe Doctrine) that has undoubtedly influenced this global looting on a mass scale, the primary development of modern capitalist imperialism remains economic. As world-systems theorist Samir Amin tells us, for the peoples who live within periphery nations, "colonization was (and is) atrocious. Like slavery, it was (and is) an attack on fundamental rights." However, its perpetuation is motivated by material gain. "If you want to understand why these rights were trampled on and why they still are being trodden on in the world today," explains Amin, "you have to get rid of the idea that colonialism was the result of some sort of conspiracy. What was at stake was the economic and social logic that must be called by its real name: capitalism." [54]

In echoing earlier assessments of colonialism and imperialism (from the likes of Kautsky and Lenin) as inherent capitalist mechanisms, Amin insists that,

"They are inseparable. Capitalism has been colonial, more precisely imperialist, during all the most notable periods of its development. The conquest of the Americas by the Spaniards and Portuguese in the 16th century, then by the French and the British, was the first modern form of imperialism and colonization: an extremely brutal form which resulted in the genocide of the Indians of North America, Indian societies in Latin America thrown into slavery and black slavery through the whole continent, north and south. Beyond this example, by following a logic of precise deployment through the different stages of its history, we can see that capitalism has constructed a consistent dichotomy of relations between a centre (the heart of the system of capitalist exploitation) and the periphery (made up of dominated countries and peoples)." [55]

In describing the real-life effects on populations of people, Amin tells us that this global order,

"…has been based on unequal exchange, that is, the exchange of manufactured products, sold very expensively in the colonies by commercial monopolies supported by the State, for the purchase of products or primary products at very low prices, since they were based on labour that was almost without cost - provided by the peasants and workers located at the periphery. During all the stages of capitalism, the plunder of the resources of the peripheries, the oppression of colonized peoples, their direct or indirect exploitation by capital, remain the common characteristics of the phenomenon of colonialism."[56]

In other words, "the plunder and hyper-exploitation of the global South," a region spanning dozens of countries and billions of people, has directly led to the enrichment of the west (European powers). And this enrichment, which expands well into the tens of trillions of dollars, has been claimed by a very small sector of the western capitalist and ruling classes. Much like how labor and private property are used as the primary means for the few to extract wealth from the many, colonialism and imperialism have represented more blatant and violent forms of robbing global wealth. Through the forced occupation of "unused" land (property not being utilized as a means to exploit), displacement of millions of communities, killing of masses of indigenous peoples, and utter destruction of more than half of the earth's infrastructure, "62 individuals have been allowed to amass the same amount of wealth as 3.6 billion people combined." [57]

Beyond the mass displacement and impoverished of billions of people, this process has also equaled a social cost that simply cannot be explained in numbers. It is the cost associated with the ravaging and utilization of earth's finite resources. In a modern inquiry into the concept and history of land ownership, Jeriah Bowser sums up the environmental consequences of the European colonization of North America:

"The cost of the North American land enclosure has been heavy. In less than 500 years, over four million square miles of land have been colonized, privatized, and commodified. Over 95% of the standing forests in the US are gone, the soils of the once-fertile breadbasket of the Midwest are extremely depleted, over 37% of the rivers in the US are declared 'unusable' due to pollution and contamination, over 1,000 species of plants and animals have become extinct, and the largest genocide in history took the lives of over 50 million indigenous people. The rich and promising 'land of opportunity' was apparently only an opportunity for a few, at the expense of many." [58]

These numbers apply to North America alone, which amounts to 9.5 million square miles. Multiply this by 54 to get a sense of the global consequences (over 510 million square miles).

The Trickery Behind "New Wealth"

"I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence."

- Eugene V. Debs

Most "new wealth" has been accumulated through financialization, a massive scheme of manipulating, speculating, and gambling on money and commodities. The modern form of speculation that has dominated financial markets is a brand of trickery on a scale like none before. While it represents a complete separation from traditional capitalist production schemes, it remains tied to capitalist wealth production in that it owns and controls the bloodline of this system: currency. And it uses this concentration of money to manage all aspects of the economic system that control us. In a damning summary of modern financialization, Chris Hedges explains,

"Once speculators are able to concentrate wealth into their hands they have, throughout history, emasculated government, turned the press into lap dogs and courtiers, corrupted the courts and hollowed out public institutions, including universities, to justify their looting and greed. Today's speculators have created grotesque financial mechanisms, from usurious interest rates on loans to legalized accounting fraud, to plunge the masses into crippling forms of debt peonage...

...They steal staggering sums of public funds, such as the $85 billion of mortgage-backed securities and bonds, many of them toxic, that they unload each month on the Federal Reserve in return for cash. And when the public attempts to finance public-works projects they extract billions of dollars through wildly inflated interest rates.

Speculators at megabanks or investment firms such as Goldman Sachs are not, in a strict sense, capitalists. They do not make money from the means of production. Rather, they ignore or rewrite the law -ostensibly put in place to protect the vulnerable from the powerful-to steal from everyone, including their shareholders. They are parasites. They feed off the carcass of industrial capitalism. They produce nothing. They make nothing. They just manipulate money. Speculation in the 17th century was a crime. Speculators were hanged." [59]

The 2008 global financial crisis was caused by these very practices which became commonplace on Wall Street - practices that were purposely deceitful, vague, and built for a short-term and surefire way to funnel massive amounts of wealth into the hands of very few. As has become clear in the aftermath, those who were in on this "scam of epic proportions" understood exactly what they were doing. Essentially, the massive amount of private wealth that was created during this first decade of the 21st century was completely reliant on one, gigantic, legalized Ponzi scheme. And this scheme had millions of victims - people who lost pensions, lost homes, were driven out of the workforce, driven off public protections through austerity, starved, and impoverished on mass scale. As David Graeber explains,

"…when the rubble had stopped bouncing, it turned out that many if not most of them had been nothing more than very elaborate scams. They consisted of operations like selling poor families mortgages crafted in such a way as to make eventual default inevitable; taking bets on how long it would take the holders to default; packaging mortgage and bet together and selling them to institutional investors (representing, perhaps, the mortgage-holders' retirement accounts) claiming that it would make money no matter what happened, and allow said investors to pass such packages around as if they were money; turning over responsibility for paying off the bet to a giant insurance conglomerate that, were it to sink beneath the weight of its resultant debt (which certainly would happen), would then have to be bailed out by taxpayers (as such conglomerates were indeed bailed out). In other words, it looks very much like an unusually elaborate version of what banks were doing when they lent money to dictators in Bolivia and Gabon in the late '70s: make utterly irresponsible loans with the full knowledge that, once it became known they had done so, politicians and bureaucrats would scramble to ensure that they'd still be reimbursed anyway, no matter how many human lives had to be devastated and destroyed in order to do it." [60]

The mortgage-backed securities scheme was not an outlier on Wall Street; it was its backbone for nearly a decade. It was as elaborate as it was enormous. And, as I wrote in a 2013 piece for the Hampton Institute, it was made possible through decades of deregulation during the first half of the neoliberal era:

"… [This trend] began during the 1980s and beyond, when widespread deregulation of the financial sector led to a new trend regarding home loans. Notable legislation was the 1982 Alternative Mortgage Transactions Parity Act (AMTPA), the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999, and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which essentially opened the door to free-game derivatives and the questionable use of credit default swaps. Ultimately, deregulation led to a virtual disappearance of accountability, and this disappearing act was made possible by a newly developed loan process that was characterized by a seemingly perpetual delegation of responsibility. Rather than hold a loan through its lifespan (common practice until this point), commercial banks began selling mortgages to investment banks, which in turn began pooling together hundreds and thousands of mortgages as mortgaged-backed securities. The investment banks then sold these mortgage-backed securities to hedge funds, pension funds, foreign investors, etc.., essentially 'passing the buck' of what were known by many to be toxic. Therefore, the 'originators' of mortgages (commercial banks and mortgage companies) no longer had a financial incentive to make sure the homebuyers were 'credit-worthy.' Instead, they issued the mortgages and sold them off through securitization." [61]

The scheme also involved bond rating agencies like Moody's and Standard and Poor's, which were complicit in awarding AAA ratings to these toxic securities in order to get in on the action themselves. The exact amount of wealth generated by this decade-long scheme is difficult to determine, but certain figures provide a glimpse of its magnitude. The most telling figure is the cumulative debt that derived from it, which "was larger than the combined Gross Domestic Products of every country in the world." [62] The initial bailout, approved by the W. Bush administration, provided over $204 billion in immediate relief to dozens of banks and financial institutions between October of 2008 and November of 2009 ( See the full list here). Through several rounds of quantitative easing - a process where central banks create money by buying securities from banks using "electronic cash" that did not exist before - the "US Federal Reserve's balance sheet (the value of the assets it holds) increased from less than $1 trillion in 2007 to more than $4 trillion in 2015." [63]

In layman's terms, this means that over $3 trillion was created and given to the private banking industry by the US government (via the Fed) between 2008 and 2015. Quasi-government agencies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were also given nearly $200 billion, and General Motors was awarded $50 billion. [64]

In an admission of guilt, at least five "big banks" - Goldman Sachs, Bank of American, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley - have agreed to settlements with the US Justice Department. The five settlements are for a combined $41.7 billion; however, after considering various factors, the actual payouts for all five institutions combined will be reduced to $11.5 billion. [65]

When considering that trillions of dollars were essentially ciphered from the American public (first through the banking schemes, then through government bailouts), this penalty amounts to virtually nothing. And, additionally, none of the people involved in this massive scheme have been sent to prison. Rather, they rode off into the sunset with unfathomable amounts of personal wealth, all of which remains completely illegitimate.

The elaborate and sometimes illegal schemes constructed by Wall Street, while detestable, are really only part of the story of financialization and investment banking. The most glaring illegitimacies regarding finance-generated wealth are speculation and common activities among shareholders and investors who buy and sell stocks. A prime example of exclusive shareholder schemes that allow wealthy investors guaranteed returns on their wealth is Apple's "Capital Return" program, which operates under the guise of attracting investors to provide "capital" in the form of stocks, and then issuing returns that are commiserate with profit growth. However, as in the case of billionaire investor Carl Icahn, we see that such schemes are hardly investments at all, but rather sure-fire ways for the wealthy few to regenerate their wealth without providing any form of capital or risk. In a June 2016 report for the Institute for New Economic Thinking, we're told that Icahn "purchased 27,125,441 shares of the publicly traded stock of Apple Inc. in August of 2013." And, "by the end of January 2014, Icahn had increased his stake in Apple to 52,760,848 shares, equal to 0.9% of the company's outstanding shares, at a total cost to Icahn of $3.6 billion." [66] When all was said and done, Icahn, "with ostensibly little mental effort," reaped a gain of some $2 billion in 32 months. He did this without providing any "capital" to Apple's supposed "capital return" program. Instead, he accomplished this simply because he was extremely wealthy and had the money to do so; or, as the report concludes, because he was "wealthy, visible, hyped, and influential." [67]

As these examples illustrate, the mortgage -backed securities scheme, along with other methods of financial trickery, have allowed the wealthy class to create massive gains on their already-illegitimate wealth. Even so-called "legitimate" investment activity, like Apple's "capital returns program," isn't much different in that they're essentially artificial systems of wealth enhancement that provide nothing of value, include no risk, and utilize phantom capital to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Not to mention, as with the case of Apple, these return on profits are also directly tied to the massive exploitation of modern slave labor abroad.

Currency and Debt as Means to Maintain Hierarchy

"In Heaven, there are no debts - all have been paid, one way or another - but in Hell there's nothing but debts, and a great deal of payment is exacted, though you can't ever get all paid up. You have to pay, and pay, and keep on paying. So, Hell is like an infernal maxed-out credit card that multiplies the charges endlessly."

- Margaret Atwood

In addition to the artificial social relationships formed through wage labor and private property, currency and debt have long been utilized as means of control, mostly to maintain systems of hierarchy, keeping wealth with the wealthy, and keeping the masses trapped in the proverbial rat race, on that never-ending chase for coin and paper. The metaphorical "hell" that Margaret Atwood describes above is, in all actuality, our collective reality. The history of currency and control-through-debt is a long and protracted one. David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5,000 Years" (2011) details this history in a way that questions and exposes fundamental relationships between ruling classes and their nationalized and colonial subjects throughout history. This history exposes our "living hells" as nothing more than artificial creations, designed by the few to fleece and control the many.

Like other forms of exploitation, currency and debt have an inherent connection with the state, in that the state facilitates and determines the value of currency and enforces debt collections through laws and the use of force and coercion. The Hegelian dialectic that Marx relied on in his analysis of capitalist relations (i.e. capital vs. labor) is also relevant to this broader struggle between rich and poor, which has historically been represented by a fundamental struggle between creditors and debtors. Graeber explains,

"For thousands of years, the struggle between rich and poor has largely taken the form of conflicts between creditors and debtors - of arguments about the rights and wrongs of interest payments, debt peonage, amnesty, repossession, restitution, the sequestering of sheep, the seizing of vineyards, and the selling of debtors' children into slavery. By the same token, for the last five thousand years, with remarkable regularity, popular insurrections have begun the same way: with the ritual destruction of the debt records - tablets, papyri, ledgers, whatever form they might have taken in any particular time and place. (After that, rebels usually go after the records of landholding and tax assessments). As the great classicist Moses Finley often liked to say, in the ancient world, all revolutionary movements had a single program: 'Cancel the debts and redistribute the land.'" [68]

States have been intimately involved in the coining, distribution, and facilitation of currency and debt as far back as the early Roman Empire. As time has transpired, this has become an undeniable fact, even more so during the past century where "metallism" - currency value based on precious metals - has been replaced by "chartalism" - currency whose value is created purely by law (or the state). For the United States, this system based solely in fiat currency became concretized when President Richard Nixon officially abandoned the gold standard in 1971. However, as economist John Maynard Keynes had suggested four decades prior in his "Treatise on Money," chartalism was already the international norm:

"The State, therefore, comes in first of all as the authority of law which enforces the payment of the thing which corresponds to the name or description in the contract. But it comes doubly when, in addition, it claims the right to determine and declare what thing corresponds to the name, and to vary its declaration from time to time-when, that is to say it claims the right to re-edit the dictionary. This right is claimed by all modern States and has been so claimed for some four thousand years at least. It is when this stage in the evolution of Money has been reached that Knapp's Chartalism - the doctrine that money is peculiarly a creation of the State - is fully realized . . . Today, all civilized money is, beyond the possibility of dispute, chartalist." [69]

While representing crucial subjects in regards to economic theory, these ideas go beyond their intended field of study to illustrate how power relations have been established and maintained in our world. The key concept in this understanding is not currency, but debt. Among many things, currency is nothing more than a convenient way to calculate and enforce debt onto people. And this enforcement, always directed by the owning and ruling classes throughout history, is primarily used to maintain hierarchies and wealth inequities. In fact, debt, as a societal ledger and form of control, has existed long before formal markets and states. Graeber tells us,

"The core argument [of primordial-debt theory] is that any attempt to separate monetary policy from social policy is ultimately wrong. Primordial-debt theorists insist that these have always been the same thing. Governments use taxes to create money, and they are able to do so because they have become the guardians of the debt that all citizens have to one another. This debt is the essence of society itself. It exists long before money and markets, and money and markets themselves are simply ways of chopping pieces of it up." [70]

Furthermore, as anthropologists like Graeber have discovered, primitive forms of currency were primarily used as a means to facilitate social relations, and not merely to buy and sell goods:

"Anthropologists do have a great deal of knowledge of how economies within stateless societies actually worked-how they still work in places where states and markets have been unable to completely break up existing ways of doing things. There are innumerable studies of, say, the use of cattle as money in eastern or southern Africa, of shell money in the Americas (wampum being the most famous example) or Papua New Guinea, bead money, feather money, the use of iron rings, cowries, spondylus shells, brass rods, or woodpecker scalps. The reason that this literature tends to be ignored by economists is simple: "primitive currencies" of this sort is only rarely used to buy and sell things, and even when they are, never primarily everyday items such as chickens or eggs or shoes or potatoes. Rather than being employed to acquire things, they are mainly used to rearrange relations between people. Above all, to arrange marriages and to settle disputes, particularly those arising from murders or personal injury." [71]

As with other forms of illegitimate accumulation and wealth-building, debt is exposed as not just a tangible facilitator of buying, selling, and owing, but rather as an intimately humanized system designed solely to act as a social relationship. It is in this relationship where personal wealth continues its illegitimate path through human history, and where the wealthy gain an even tighter grip on their subject masses, virtually guaranteeing the continuation of massive inequities. Under capitalism, the capitalist state has supplemented its chartalism by creating a "credit monopoly" that serves multiple purposes, both facilitating the inherent contradictions of capitalism and restricting alternative systems from forming in response to these contradictions. A modern anarchist analysis on capitalist credit explains its purpose in preventing alternatives to the capital-labor business model,

"The credit monopoly, by which the state controls who can and cannot issue or loan money, reduces the ability of working-class people to create their own alternatives to capitalism. By charging high amounts of interest on loans (which is only possible because competition is restricted naturally through accumulation and the inevitable facilitation of the state) few people can afford to create co-operatives or one-person firms. In addition, having to repay loans at high interest to capitalist banks ensures that co-operatives often have to undermine their own principles by having to employ wage laborr to make ends meet." [72]

Anarchists like Proudhon emphasized the importance of addressing the credit problem alongside the labor problem,

"Just as increasing wages is an important struggle within capitalism, so is the question of credit. Proudhon and his followers supported the idea of a People's Bank. If the working class could take over and control increasing amounts of money it could undercut capitalist power while building its own alternative social order (for money is ultimately the means of buying labour power, and so authority over the labourer - which is the key to surplus value production). Proudhon hoped that by credit being reduced to cost (namely administration charges) workers would be able to buy the means of production they needed." [73]

In modern times, with the arrival of globalized, neoliberal, and monopoly capitalism, the advent of consumer credit has become a crucial component in keeping this system afloat amidst extreme and widespread inequality and dispossession. Using Doug Henwood's analysis in his 1998 book, "Wall Street: How it Works and for Whom," we can see how consumer credit is being used (in very real ways) to maintain control of the exploited majority, thus solidifying systems of illegitimate wealth and power while also providing stabilizers to avoid total collapse:

"The 1980s were marked by a rising debt burden on households as well as the increased concentration of wealth in the US. The two are linked. Due to 'the decline in real hourly wages, and the stagnation in household incomes, the middle and lower classes have borrowed more to stay in place' and they have 'borrowed from the very rich who have [become] richer.' By 1997, US households spent $1 trillion (or 17% of the after-tax incomes) on debt service. 'This represents a massive upward redistribution of income.' And why did they borrow? The bottom 40% of the income distribution 'borrowed to compensate for stagnant or falling incomes' while the upper 20% borrowed 'mainly to invest.' Thus 'consumer credit can be thought of as a way to sustain mass consumption in the face of stagnant or falling wages. But there's an additional social and political bonus, from the point of view of the creditor class: it reduces pressure for higher wages by allowing people to buy goods they couldn't otherwise afford. It helps to nourish both the appearance and reality of a middle-class standard of living in a time of polarization. And debt can be a great conservatizing force; with a large monthly mortgage and/or MasterCard bill, strikes and other forms of troublemaking look less appealing than they would otherwise." [74]

Long before capitalist notions of private property and wage labor materialized, debt provided a fundamental way to maintain and facilitate power over large numbers of people. Since the advent of the capitalist system, debt, and its intimate relationship with the capitalist state, has proven to be the thread that holds this layered exploitation together. It safeguards illegitimate wealth accumulation by constructing a tangible mechanism to enforce the inherent indebtedness that comes with being born in systems of extreme hierarchy. In this way, it serves capitalism, and its illegitimate foundation, well.

Expropriation is not Theft; It's Justice

"The rich are only defeated when running for their lives."

- C.L.R. James

It's no secret that capitalism has run amok over the past three decades. This is not to say that it has been derailed or mutated in some way. In reality, it is acting as it should; creating massive amounts of wealth for a minority through the systematic dispossession and exploitation of the majority. The era of neoliberalism - where capitalist governments have been formerly acquired by private wealth - was inevitable in the natural progression of things. An economic arrangement that relies on structural unemployment (a "reserve army of labor"), mass labor exploitation, the concentration of private property via the displacement of the majority, the forced extraction of natural resources, and constant production for the sake of conspicuous consumption needs a coercive, powerful, and forceful apparatus to protect and maintain it. The capitalist state serves this need, simply because the blatant theft of over 7 billion human beings by mere hundreds cannot continue without a massive militarization of that global minority.

Global wealth inequality has reached unfathomable heights. And wealth inequality in the United States has surpassed that of the Gilded Age. This is not due to mythological or abused forms of capitalism, so-called "cronyism" or "corporatism," "unbridled" and "unfettered" forms, or any of the adjectives that mainstream analysts insist on using to describe this system. Yes, capitalism has invariably reached certain stages in its development - neoliberalism brought the inevitable fusion of public and private power, while monopoly capitalism has reached its pinnacle - but all of these modern epochs are rooted in the most fundamental mechanisms of the system, most notably its reliance on using private property as a social relationship to exploit labor. These mechanisms have always tended toward capital accumulation and concentrated wealth for a privileged minority; and, consequently, mass displacement, alienation, and disenfranchisement for the unfortunate majority. The world's problems are the result of capitalism, in its orthodox state. It is working exactly as it is supposed to work, intensifying as time goes on.

Despite the extremes we've experienced, wealth and greed continue to rule the day; and the wealthy are not only unapologetic, they're also incredibly bold. There is an entire financial "asset protection" industry built with the sole purpose of instructing wealthy individuals on how to hide their money and avoid paying taxes. And this is done in plain sight, for all to see. A simple online search brings up dozens of companies offering these services, and "experts" offering their advice. From tutorials on how to repatriate your Offshore Funds without paying taxes to "everything you need to know about bringing your money back to the United States," the wealthy are not shy about their illegal activities. Business executives have become so bold that they've publicly admitted to stashing "hundreds of billions of dollars" in foreign banks to avoid paying taxes in the United States. And rather than prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law for tax evasion, the US government continues to "negotiate" with them to bring their money back to the US. For example, on December 15, 2010, a group of business executives met with President Obama at the White House to ask for "a tax holiday" that would allow them to "tap into over $1 trillion of offshore earnings, much of which was sitting in island tax havens." [75]

Hiding money to avoid taxation has become an elaborate and extremely lucrative business. And everyone, including the President, the IRS, Senators and members of Congress, are fully aware. According to Edward D. Kleinbard, a law professor at USC, "U.S. companies overall use various repatriation strategies to avoid about $25 billion a year in federal income taxes." [76] Despite these negotiations with the government, corporations have already figured out "legal" ways to bring the hidden money back. For example, in 2009, Merck & Co Inc., the second largest drug-maker in the U.S., "brought more than $9 billion from abroad without paying any U.S. tax to help finance its acquisition of Schering-Plough Corp., securities filings show." [77] That same year, "Pfizer Inc. imported more than $30 billion from offshore in connection with its acquisition of Wyeth, while taking steps to minimize the tax hit on its publicly reported profit." [78] Between 2009-2010, "Cisco reported $31.6 billion of undistributed foreign earnings, on which it had paid no U.S. taxes" and Merck "tapped its offshore cash, tax-free, to pay for just over half the cash portion of its $51 billion merger with Schering-Plough" and then "lent $9.4 billion to a pair of Schering-Plough Dutch units" without paying any US taxes. [79] These examples are endless. And they are, essentially, unethical, if not illegal. Negotiating with the government to bring back money (over a trillion dollars by conservative estimates) that was intentionally hidden to avoid paying taxes is the equivalent of someone stealing $200 from you, admitting they did it, and then offering to give you $20 back to let bygones be bygones.

Of course, even if these businesses paid their taxes under a stringent tax system, capitalism would still exist, and with it all of its illegitimacies. During the so-called "golden age" of the United States, where effective tax rates for the higher-income brackets were consistently in the 90th percentile (they were cut in half in the '80s and are now in the 30th percentile), mass exploitation and dispossession still remained. Globally - through traditional colonialism, military force, and the construction of modern international finance systems - the United States and other industrialized nations supplemented their higher standards of living by ravaging foreign lands, peoples, and resources. Domestically, despite the emergence of an exclusively white middle-class, masses of citizens consisting of ethnic minorities, the rural and urban poor, and women remained disenfranchised both socially and economically. In other words, the golden age was nothing more than a mass sacrifice of hundreds of millions of people abroad and at home, carried out in order to supplement a burgeoning (and relatively small) sector of the white working class in U.S.. Taxation was the compromise the owning class once agreed upon in an attempt to legitimize their illegitimate wealth. In a capitalist system built on immoral foundations, taxation isn't theft - it's a plea bargain. And, even when this deal is adhered to and effectively processed, it is not enough to undo the massive injustice that it seeks to appease. Just as reforms are not enough; and government regulations are not enough.

The leak of the Panama Papers in early 2016 showed what many of us have known all along - that wealthy individuals have not only built massive personal fortunes through illegitimate means, but that they have also constructed elaborate "asset management" schemes which allow them to hide their money, avoid paying taxes, and hoard what amounts to be trillions of dollars from the public. [80] Thoughtless, ahistoric, and emotional responses to this (like those coming from USAmerican "libertarians") may include a disdain for taxation - something that, to them, represents a form of theft, whereas the government embezzles money from individuals through the threat of force or coercion (tax laws, the IRS, law enforcement). This would be a plausible argument if the wealth and land being taxed wasn't already created through widespread embezzlement of the majority. The fact of the matter is that all personal wealth in the world has been built on a foundation of murder, extortion, exploitation, theft, illegal banking and debt schemes, colonialism, racism, slavery, and various artificial systems of hierarchy.

Just as taxation, reforms, and regulations are not enough, reparations would also fall short. For example, reparations for the descendants of American slavery, while warranted and certainly needed, would not adequately address the power dynamics created by centuries of accumulation. Giving 40 acres and a mule to one of George Washington's slaves would do nothing to address the illegitimate and residual wealth and power owned by George Washington and his family, especially when society (via the government) is the payer of such monetary justice. Rather, true justice would amount to cutting Washington's land and wealth into parcels, divvying it up amongst his slaves, and removing Washington from society (as with all criminals). These three steps are the only way to effectively expropriate illegitimate wealth: (1) liquidate the benefactor(s) of such wealth, (2) place it in a societal pool to be used for a common good, (3) and remove those who took part in the stealing of such wealth from society. This same logic and approach applies today. This is the only way to recuperate our stolen collective-wealth, while also addressing the inequities of power rooted in this theft.

The wealthy few have stolen from the world; and have enslaved, impoverished, and indebted the rest of us (over 7 billion people) in the process. They have no right to their wealth. It belongs to us - it belongs to global society. Not so we can all live extravagant lifestyles, but rather so we can satisfy the most basic of human rights and needs - food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, education - and thus carry on our lives as productive and creative human beings. Taxation is a pathetic compromise to thousands of years of mass extortion. Reforms and regulations have tried and failed. Reparations even fall short of justice. And voting for representatives from the ruling class (who are directly employed and controlled by the owning class) with hopes of them voting away their own wealth has been proven to be a perpetual act in futility. The only just solution is to recuperate this stolen wealth; to destroy these extreme systems of hierarchy and control; to allow human beings the dignity and self-determination they deserve; and to expropriate the expropriators once and for all. Righting centuries of wrongs is not "theft," it's justice.

Colin Jenkins is founder and Social Economics chairperson at the Hampton Institute.

Notes

[1] Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, Chapter 1 (1892)

[2] "Justifiable" defined as "being able to be shown to be right or reasonable; defensible."

[3] Gwenda Blair (2000). The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire. Simon and Schuster.

[4] Brian Miller and Mike Lapham (2012) The Self-Made Myth: The Truth About How Government Helps Individuals and Businesses Succeed. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

[5] Blair (2000)

[6] Miller and Lapham (2012)

[7] Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, p. 50.

[8] Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in the Wilderness: The First Century of Urban Life in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971)

[9] Daniel Vickers, A Companion to Colonial America (Blackwell Publishing, 2003, p. 289)

[10] Julia Ott, Slaves: the capital that made capitalism, 4/9/14 http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/04/slavery-the-capital-that-made-capitalism/

[11] Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History, p. 119

[12] Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman, Capital is Back: Wealth-Income Ratios in Rich Countries 1700-2010, Paris School of Economics: July 26, 2013 http://www.parisschoolofeconomics.com/zucman-gabriel/capitalisback/PikettyZucman2013WP.pdf

[13] Fredrick Douglass address to the Louisville Convention, 1883, http://people.ucls.uchicago.edu/~cjuriss/US/Documents/US-Jurisson-Unit-2-Douglass-Address-to-Louisville-Convention-1883.pdf

[14] Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, How Slavery Led to Modern Capitalism, 1/24/12 https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2012-01-24/how-slavery-led-to-modern-capitalism-echoes

[15] Ibid

[16] Zinn, p. 65.

[17] Jackson Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America.

[18] Cornel West, Democracy Matters, pp. 210-211

[19] Zinn, p. 90.

[20] Ferdinand Lundberg, America's 60 Families. http://www.pdfarchive.info/pdf/L/Lu/Lundberg_Ferdinand_-_America_s_60_Families.pdf

[21] G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? On Wealth, Income, and Power. University of California at Santa Cruz. http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

[22] Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One. Chapter 32, Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm

[23] Raya Dunayevskaya, American Civilization on Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard.

[24] Ibid

[25] Ibid

[26] Ibid

[27] Peter Linebaugh, Stop, Thief!

[28] Ibid

[29] Ibid

[30] August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, Along the Color Lines: Explorations in the Black Experience, p. 18

[31] Julia Ott, Slaves: the capital that made capitalism, 4/9/14 http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/04/slavery-the-capital-that-made-capitalism/

[32] Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, How Slavery Led to Modern Capitalism, 1/24/12 https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2012-01-24/how-slavery-led-to-modern-capitalism-echoes

[33] An Anarchist FAQ: Why are anarchists against private property? Infoshop.org. Accessed at http://www.infoshop.org/AnarchistFAQSectionB3

[34] Emma Goldman, What I Believe (1908) Accessed at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-what-i-believe

[35] Ibid

[36] Rosa Luxemburg, What is Bolshevism? (1918) Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/20-alt.htm

[37] Ibid

[38] Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One (1867) Chapter Thirty-Two: Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation. Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm

[39] An Anarchist FAQ: Why are anarchists against private property? Infoshop.org. Accessed at http://www.infoshop.org/AnarchistFAQSectionB3

[40] Ibid

[41] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property? (1840) Accessed at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/pierre-joseph-proudhon-what-is-property-an-inquiry-into-the-principle-of-right-and-of-governmen

[42] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Discourse on Inequality," The Social Contract and Discourses. Everyman Paperback (1993), p. 84.

[43] An Anarchist FAQ: Why are anarchists against private property? Infoshop.org. Accessed at http://www.infoshop.org/AnarchistFAQSectionB3

[44] Ibid

[45] Ibid

[46] Karl Kautsky, Ultra-imperialism (1914) Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1914/09/ultra-imp.htm

[47] David Graeber (2011) Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Melville House: NY, p. 311.

[48] Ibid, p. 311

[49] Claude Kabemba, Undermining Africa's Wealth, the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, 3/2/14, http://www.osisa.org/economic-justice/blog/undermining-africas-wealth

[50] Smedley Butler, War is a Racket (1935) Accessed at http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html

[51] Alain Martin, Haiti and the Ghost of a hundred years, 7/30/15, http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/haiti-and-the-ghost.html

[52] VI Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), Chapter 7, Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch07.htm#fwV22P268F01 )

[53] Frank Lechner, Globalization theories: World-System Theory, 2001

[54] Lucien Degoy, Samir Amin: Colonialism is Inseparable from Capitalism, IHumanite, 1/28/06, http://www.humaniteinenglish.com/spip.php?article70)

[55] Ibid

[56] Ibid

[57] Andrew Soergel, 5 Takeaways from the world's widening wealth gap, US News, 1/19/16, http://www.usnews.com/news/slideshows/top-1-percent-get-richer-as-world-wealth-gap-widens-says-oxfam

[58] Jeriah Bowser, An Inquiry into the Origins and Implications of Land Ownership, 12/27/13. Accessed at http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/implications-of-land-ownership.html

[59] Chris Hedges, Overthrow the Speculators. Common Dreams, December 30, 2013. Accessed at http://www.commondreams.org/views/2013/12/30/overthrow-speculators

[60] Graeber, Debt, pp. 15-16

[61] Colin Jenkins, A Predictable Disaster: Exposing the Roots of the 2008 Financial Crisis, 6/7/13. Accessed at http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/preddisaster.html

[62] Graeber, Debt, p. 16

[63] What is Quantitative Easing, The Economist, 3/9/15 http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/03/economist-explains-5

[64] Bailout List, Propublica.org https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/list

[65] David Dayen, Why the Goldman Sachs Settlement is a $5 Billion Sham, New Republic, 4/13/16, https://newrepublic.com/article/132628/goldman-sachs-settlement-5-billion-sham

[66] Lazonick, Hopkins, Jacobson, Institute for New Economic Thinking, 6/6/16 http://ineteconomics.org/ideas-papers/blog/what-we-learn-about-inequality-from-carl-icahns-2-billion-apple-no-brainer

[67] Ibid

[68] Graeber, Debt, p. 8

[69] John Maynard Keynes (1930) A Treatise on Money. Republished by AMS PR, Inc, 1976.

[70] Graeber, Debt, p. 56

[71] Graeber, Debt, p. 60

[72] An Anarchist FAQ: Why are anarchists against private property? Infoshop.org. Accessed at http://www.infoshop.org/AnarchistFAQSectionB3

[73] Ibid

[74] Ibid, referencing Doug Henwood, Wall Street: How it Works and for Whom (1998), Verso, p.64-66

[75] Jesse Drucker, Dodging Repatriation Tax Lets U.S. Companies Bring Home Cash, Bloomberg Technology, 12/29/10 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-12-29/dodging-repatriation-tax-lets-u-s-companies-bring-home-cash

[76] Ibid

[77] Ibid

[78] Ibid

[79] Ibid

[79] Eric Lipton and Julie Creswell, Panama Papers Show How Wealthy Americans Made Millions. NY Times, 6/5/16, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/06/us/panama-papers.html?_r=0

Activism or Revolution?: Deciphering Modern Forms of Resistance

By Kevin Bailey

Here in the United States, and the global North in general, there is a lack of clarity regarding activism and revolutionary activity, in fact one is often confused for the other. This is part and parcel of our post-modern condition in which every action, no matter how small, has the intrinsic property of being in and of itself a revolutionary act simply by rejecting dominant cultural narratives or withdrawing from participation in politics, for example. Lifestyle choices like veganism, ethical consumerism, buying fair-trade, or a simple rejection of politics in general, have become substitutes for a political line in many circles on the Left. A negation is thus inverted into a positive affirmation in which the mere act of verbal rejection, or non-participation, or withdrawal/retreat is treated as a substantive revolutionary act. Furthermore, what matters is one's membership to a micro-community, one's inward beliefs and values, and one's outward appearance and individual actions. There is no emphasis on a political and individual transformation in connection to a larger collectivity struggling for general emancipation. That is not to neglect the importance of smaller communities that often do serve the important function of providing personal assistance, empowerment, and support networks to marginalized communities, but rather, that these variants of lifestylism or micro-communities, if self-isoloated and not linked up to a broad emancipatory struggle, are not revolutionary but separatist. And not only that, but as de-politicized and isolated phenomena they can never be revolutionary, only expressions of petty-bourgeois individualism thoroughly tinged with accommodationist leanings towards bourgeois society, or a general apathy or cynicism towards mass struggle and politics.

Of course this notion of a withdrawal, or separation, from political life and struggle, to a retreat into the confines of a self-isolated community mirrors the transformation of bourgeois democracy in the global North from traditional social democratic models of supposedly inclusivist participation to the "low intensity" democracy of neoliberalism. With the prevalence of micro-struggles and a general receding of participatory channels for democratic expression as the State is literally, and quite physically, deconstructed, the notion of activism itself has been transformed. Previously what it meant to be an activist was someone who had been transformed politically, either through a long struggle or through a "revelatory" event (think of the young people who were radicalized by seeing the mass killings in Vietnam on television), and then submerged themselves in the stream of the mass movements and participated in the class struggle for definite political ends. Now activism has become a rejection of political transformation, because it is a rejection of the politicization of things themselves, it is the anti-politics.

Anyone who has witnessed a picket, protest, or rally in recent decades has probably witnessed the following: people standing around holding signs with vague slogans devoid of political content, a few chants lazily cast skyward, and a few raised fists as people march, or even worse, attendees standing silently while listening to some half-dead academic speak on the issue of the day. Of course after all of this is said and done we can wash our hands of guilt, since we did something, we acted, (after all, doing something is better than nothing, right?), and that makes us better than those who did nothing or are ignorant of our cause. But that's the problem, activists have become so satisfied with doing something that they have forgotten to stop and ask the "whys" and the "whats" of that something. Asking that question, which was asked by the activists that came before us, leads straight towards a universalization of struggle, away from separatism and towards political transformation. It leads to class struggle. And why does it lead there? Because a collective conceptualization of your struggle necessitates you grappling with your struggle's relation to all other struggles. Its recognition is anathema to separatism, apathy, cynicism, and identity politics, it leads to a general theorization of a linking up of seemingly disparate micro-struggles, to the recognition of their role in the mass struggle, which in our capitalist world is the class struggle.

Counter to activism, revolutionary activity requires politicization, it requires the revolutionizing of an individual. To most students, thoroughly ingrained with petty-bourgeois ideology, the notion of the necessity of transformation and of incorporating one's own personal or community struggles into a larger struggle screams of an oppressive totalization and marginalization. However, disregarding the rejection in toto of all totalities as being a totalization itself, the notion that one's own struggles have to take a subordinate role, or backseat, to some other issue is missing the point, as well as implicitly privileging one's own struggle over other's. A revolutionary struggle, unlike an activist struggle, is totalizing in that it is the sum total of all oppressed people's struggles for liberation linked and forged through direct experience. This is not a negative as the post-modernist dread of totalization would have us believe, it is a positive. And it is a positive because mass revolutionary, not activist, struggles have led to the liberation of hundreds of millions of people historically (the revolutions in Russia and China freed over 600 million people, across both countries, from the yoke of capitalism, semi-feudalism, and imperialism). Yet, what has the activist line produced? Micro-struggles that lead to gradual reform measures to better the lot of a particular oppressed group while another oppressed group is ignored, until of course their own micro-struggle emerges to lessen their oppression (because it would be "oppressive" or "totalizing" if these two struggles were linked since one is not a direct member of the other's oppressed community or group).

In my own organization, as well as countless others, there is a contradiction between an activist line and a revolutionary line. Or, more specifically, between the line expressing a desire for a depoliticized and loose grouping that wishes to do nothing more than protest this or that, and the line of those who wish to politicize themselves and the masses and march forward towards organizing and building for collective liberation. This activist line must be struggled against, and those who uphold it must be won over to the revolutionary line and be convinced of the necessity of its application. While activism bills itself as the most revolutionary trend, in that it rejects politicization and mass struggle in favor of micro-struggles, inward looking personal development, and depoliticized spaces, it is thoroughly anti-revolutionary. Not only because it opposes the revolutionary line elaborated on here, but because it cannot lead towards a liberation from the oppression that it seeks to end by the methods it employs. While the activist Left in Western Europe and North America continues to naval gaze and search for anti-political solutions to political problems, revolutionaries in India, Turkey, Afghanistan, and the Philippines are seeking to storm heaven, to capture State power and free millions from the chains of capitalism, imperialism, patriarchal oppression, and semi-feudal conditions. They are revolutionaries, not activists.

We must grapple with the fact that our own approach has produced nothing more than a few isolated apparent victories that have done nothing more than ameliorate our existing conditions. We have rejected politics in favor of being cynical or apathetic, we have discarded parties and organization in favor of disunity and a deified decentralization, we have unspokenly privileged our own struggle over those of others, and we have done all of this as the State and capitalism continue their assault on us. We have voluntarily dismantled our own power, our own defense, in the face of the neoliberal offensive and called it liberation. We were wrong, activism was wrong, and it has proven to be a dead end. It may not be easy for many of today's activists to admit this, but it is a political necessity to self-criticize and transform oneself politically in the service of the masses. It's time to come out of the ivory towers, come out of the hermetically sealed safe spaces, come out of our own self-imposed ideological and political exile and step into the class struggle and serve the people. It's time to integrate ourselves with the masses and cast aside petty-bourgeois illusions of separatism, apathy, and cynicism and say that we won't settle for anything less than total emancipation and a destruction of the old society through our collective power. Most importantly, it's time to become a revolutionary in the service of the oppressed peoples, to become more than just the chanter or sign holder that is the activist, to transform oneself politically to fight for liberation. To this I say down with activism, and up with revolution.

This piece was originally published at Necessity and Freedom.

The 50th Anniversary of the Meredith March Against Fear

By L. Eljeer Hawkins

"If a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he is not fit to live."

- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

As the sun sets upon the presidency of the first black President, Barack Hussein Obama, and the emergence of a powerful life-affirming banner, Black Lives Matter (BLM). It was June 5, 1966 that the last great march of the civil rights era took place, the Meredith March Against Fear, which highlighted the deep fissures in the movement politically, generationally, and organizationally. Let's examine the anatomy of the march and its lasting and troubled legacy.

Blood on Highway 51

On October 1, 1962, James Howard Meredith became the first black student to attend the previously segregated University of Mississippi (Ole Miss), marking another great victory for the civil rights movement. James Meredith a former enlisted man in the air force, a defiant race man who walked to his beat politically and morally. Meredith had a contentious and combative relationship with the traditional civil rights leadership and organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( NAACP) and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). For years, Meredith hinted at a march from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi to provide a new type of leadership and counter balance the doctrine of non-violence and subservience to white supremacy.

Following the legalistic victories and encouraging developments under President Lyndon B. Johnson - the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the march from Selma to Montgomery - the Civil Rights movement was facing a defining moment as the United States was escalating its military operations in Vietnam while, at the same time, Johnson introduced the Civil Rights Bill to Congress in 1966. The great society and anti-poverty programs couldn't quell the civil unrest in some urban centers like Harlem and Watts, and a growing militant segment of black youth. This political and cultural radicalization was epitomized by the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) under the leadership of newly elected chairperson and Howard University student, Stokely Carmichael, and Floyd McKissick of Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

On June 5, 1966, Meredith set out to begin his lone sojourn; a no-no within the highly organized and choreographed civil rights movement. Meredith would be accompanied by 4 or 5 others in the scorching sun and into the deep south to restore black manhood and respect. The state of Mississippi has a bloody, violent history rooted in slavery and its 1861 Southern secession from the Union. After the end of the radical Reconstruction Era, it was the site of some of the most horrific events faced by the black working class and poor under Jim and Jane Crow: the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955; the assassination of NAACP organizer Medgar Evers in 1963; and the murder of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney in 1964.

On June 6, Meredith faced impending danger from the white racists standing alongside the highway jeering and cursing as black people stood proudly in Meredith's March against Fear. Like a thunderbolt, several shots pierced the air and hit Meredith directly. Once again blood was spilled in the Magnolia state of notorious hate.

The Big Six in Mississippi

As news of Meredith's shooting and possible death spread like wildfire across the country, the new national director of CORE, Floyd McKissick, asserted the importance of continuing the march as Meredith lay in a hospital bed. Leading civil rights leaders like Dr. King and organizations like SNCC agreed to resume the journey despite differences from NAACP and the National Urban League. Historically, the Civil Rights movement's campaigns of desegregation and voting rights had a clear and direct mission that would force the national government to intervene and pass groundbreaking legislation to end Jim and Jane Crow. The March against Fear didn't have a stated goal or mission, and this made the march a defining moment for the movement and its organizations.

The only civil rights organization that had any organizing roots in Mississippi was SNCC. SNCC played a very crucial role in the battles to desegregate the Mississippi Democratic Party, and they helped to co-found the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) that challenged the the selected Mississippi Democratic Party delegates at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. At this convention, President Johnson and Democratic Party leadership refused to recognize Fannie Lou Hamer and the other MFDP delegates. As Cleveland Seller, program director for SNCC, would explain, "We left Atlantic City with the knowledge that the movement had turned into something else. After Atlantic City, our struggle was not for civil rights, but for liberation." (Hassan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama's Black Belt, p.56)

The work of SNCC and local activists in Lowndes County combined black power politics, grassroots organizing, political education, and the construction of an independent black working-class organization, the LCFO - the original "Black Panther Party." The LCFO and the Lowndes County Freedom Party (LCFP) put forward an alternative - organizationally, programmatically, and ideologically - to the traditional civil rights organizations' reformist approach, while challenging the Democratic Party in the county.

The March Against Fear had the ingredients of a great debate about the direction of the movement, with the rise of black nationalist ideas, rejection of white liberal involvement, the relevance of non-violent civil disobedience tactics, and reformist politics in the face of an enormous crisis facing the Johnson administration. The debate would be recorded and filmed as Dr. King and Stokely Carmichael marching along the highway engaged in a friendly, but tense, back and forth about the tactic of non-violence and the beloved community in the face of white racist terrorism.

What awaited the marchers in Mississippi was a concrete wall of hate, callous indifference, and terror punctuated by the white political and economic establishment in the Democratic party, the Citizens' Council, which was founded after the 1954 Brown vs. Education decision and boasted over 100,000 members throughout Mississippi and the South. Terror organizations like the Americans for the Preservation of the White Race (APWR) and the dastardly Ku Klux Klan rounded out the reality facing marchers. The hatred and social control of black workers and poor under Jim and Jane Crow weren't confined to race, but ideas and organizing as well. The system of Jim and Jane Crow violently opposed labor union organizing, communists, and black and white solidarity campaigns.

The reality of black life in Mississippi stamped the urgency and symbolic nature of the March Against Fear as many were living through deep levels of poverty, displacement, and structural racism. In many ways, it fit in perfectly with Dr. King's Chicago project, which highlighted poverty and housing discrimination in the urban north. Dr. King was tying the threads of racism, poverty, and capitalism.

A new political paradigm emerged for SNCC as Stokely Carmichael and young people were inspired by figures like Malcolm X, Robert F. Williams, Deacons for Defense, anticolonialism struggles in the so-called third world, and a diasporic racial consciousness. The dashed dreams and hopes of post-world War II economic prosperity and democracy for black youth and workers were too much to bear. The long hot summers of law enforcement terrorism, endemic poverty, and betrayal of reformism and liberalism went up in flames as multiple cities burned to decry the consistent criminal governmental neglect at both the federal and city levels. The time bomb that shined a light on the dubious political motives of the liberal establishment was Assistant Secretary of Labor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan's "The Negro Family: A Case for National Action," a report that placed the blame for poverty and ineptitude on the disintegration of the black family and absence of the black father in the household.

The banner and rallying cry of Black Power was articulated in every urban center before it was detonated in Mississippi during the March Against Fear. Black Power caused a significate debate and split within the movement as well as the presence of the Deacons for Defense, a black clandestine armed self- defense organization comprising of black veterans of the military and union activists founded in Louisiana.

The March on its Final Leg

The March against Fear would conclude on June 26, 1966, with a healed James Meredith. A march that set in motion the next stage of the black freedom movement as the coalition politics which defined the civil rights movement would collapse under the weight of political, ideological, and organizational differences, and historical events like the War in Vietnam. The marchers would face the brutal reality of state violence unleashed by the Mississippi Highway Patrol and indifference by President Johnson to the March as the 1966 Civil Rights bill failed in Congress.

The march did achieve significant gains particularly in the context of Mississippi politics. As author Aram Goudsouzian states, "Black people defied Jim Crow's culture of intimidation by marching. Moreover, 4,077 African Americans registered to vote in the counties along the route. Federal examiners registered 1,422, and county clerks performed the rest. Approximately 1,200 registered in Grenada County, where a large crowd had already attended the first meeting of the Grenada County Movement." (Aram Goudsouzian, Down To The Crossroads Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear, p.246)

The rise and prominence of the black power era would usher in a significant phase in the movement and a violent response by American capitalism under the Counter Intelligence Progam (Cointelpro), which sought to prevent the development of a unified radical movement and leadership. Cointelpro developed under the guidance of FBI chief, J.Edgar Hoover, and was a continuation of the Palmer raids of the early 1900s and the McCarthy witch-hunts of the late 40s and early 50s to neutralize the movements of resistance against U.S. capital at home and abroad.

The Lessons For Today

The March Against Fear reminds us of the stark reality of the ever present need to challenge racism, white supremacy, and capitalism. In the 50 years since the March, we have witnessed the evisceration of the traditional organizations of the black freedom movement; our leaders co-opted, publicly assassinated or imprisoned as the system of profit and destruction continues. The Black Lives Matter banner is going through a critical phase of development and debate as the forces of corporate America and the liberal establishment attempt to co-opt and corral this nascent movement by criminalizing grassroots BLM activists daily. The BLM banner is soaked in identity politics, which I firmly believe is the first phase of one's political awakening under a system of degradation and alienation. But, as black power became a response to the failings of American capitalism and democracy by rejecting reformism and white liberalism, a political and organizational mistake was made refusing and alienating good and dedicated activists who were 'white casted' out to organize in their "communities." In the face of a disjointed working class struggle and consciousness today against capitalism and racism, those within the BLM banner would be politically inclined to follow suit as black power activists did many years ago with a view engaging in this struggle by organizing black folks exclusively. We must challenge all forms of co-optation, sexism, racism, classism, and homophobia in our movement. Only through honest and forthright political discussion and debate on those points can our movement move forward and develop coherent ideas, program, demands, and strategy to challenge capitalism and racism.

The final years of Dr.King's political work - the Chicago project, Why I am Opposed to the War in Vietnam, Poor People's Campaign, and Memphis sanitation workers strike - provide a historical framework on how to take our struggle forward within 21st century political, economic, and social conditions. Dr. King at the end of his life influenced by events began to challenge the contours of the empire at home and abroad.

The Meredith March Against Fear stands as a powerful lesson for activists today as we aim to dismantle the edifice of capitalism and racism.

Eljeer Hawkins is a community and anti-war activist who was born and raised in Harlem, New York. He has been a member of Socialist Alternative/CWI for 21 years. Eljeer is a former shop steward with Teamsters local 851 and former member of SEIU 1199, and is currently a non-union healthcare worker in New York City. He regularly contributes to Socialist Alternative Newspaper and socialistworld.net on race, criminal justice, and the historic black freedom movement. Eljeer has lectured at Harvard University, Hunter College, Oberlin College, and the University of Toronto. Eljeer can be reached at eljeer123@gmail.com or at http://www.greatblackspeakers.com/author/eljeerhawkins/.

Revolutionary Shop Stewards and Workers Councils in the German Revolution

By Kevin Van Meter

The following is a review essay of Ralf Hoffrogge's Historical Materialism Series book Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard Müller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement .

If Ralf Hoffrogge were writing within an American context rather than a German one, he would be situated between two important developments in the United States. A new cohort of social movement historians is addressing the gaps in anarchist, anti-authoritarian, and left-communist historiography. Neighboring this is a resurgence of interest in workers' councils historically and in the contemporary period. With the recent translation and subsequent publication of Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard M üller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement in two editions, Hoffrogge enters this discourse with a extremely detailed political biography of a nearly unknown militant whose finest years coincided with the German Revolution and workers' council movement of 1918. Communists of various stripes have laid claim to Rosa Luxemburg and anarchists to Gustav Landauer, both murdered as the revolution was suppressed with the latter yelling "to think you are human" as he was stomped to death. Council communists and autonomists have been gifted Richard Müller, who was forgotten in part because he survived.

Revolutions often begin in desertion: sailors, not shop stewards, led the German uprisings of 1918. The end of the Great War steered into the Russian Revolution with soldiers, worn through their boots, joining upheavals rather than returning to their old lives; resulting in the Bolshevik government of October 1917. A year later on October 29th, in a port city 250 miles northwest from Berlin, seamen rebelled, forming sailors councils that later joined with those of workers. Rebellions led by sailors quickly spread across the coast. By November 9th, workers in Berlin left the factories, though daily meetings and shop floor deliberations had begun amongst various revolutionary factions as early as the 2nd. German sailors and workers joined Russians, Greeks, Irish, Mexicans, Egyptians, and Poles as revolutions, often incorporating councils modeled on Russian soviets, emerged across the planet. The Red Scare in the United States prevented circulation of struggles to the American context. Elsewhere in Germany, the Bavarian Council Republic arose November 7th, though it would be defeated electorally in January 1919 with the left parties and radicals pushed out of the government.

There was a constellation of left parties and organizations in Germany leading up to the revolution. The Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) had sought a parliamentary avenue to repair the country following economic crises and war; winning the war was viewed as a step toward parliamentary democracy. Karl Liebknecht, like Luxemburg (whom he was eventually killed alongside), was expelled from the SPD due to his antiwar agenda, resulting in the formation of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD). The Spartacus League, led by Liebknecht and Luxemburg, initially functioned as the left wing of of the SPD before merging with the USPD as they increasingly sought revolution through parliamentary means using the vehicle of the workers' councils. Then the Spartacists founded the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in December 1918. After the revolution of November they attempted to consolidate the left wing of the workers movement and bring the workers' councils and shop stewards under their auspices. Launching their own ill-fated insurrection on January 4th, in what is now referred to as the Spartacist uprising, the KPD was suppressed on the 19th; the arrest and execution of its leadership quickly followed. Meanwhile, outside of these shifting allegiances and political wrangling, the sailors and workers' councils persisted as the democratic, organizational expression of working-class abilities and needs.

As with Antonio Gramsci, Liebknecht and Luxemburg enter into the historical record. What is less recognized is how these party formations sought to capture the democratic and revolutionary impulses of the councils in order to form a workers' state. Müller and the shop stewards stood in opposition to these attempts, even as they participated in governing bodies. There is a fundamental political disagreement here. With regard to the shop stewards, Hoffrogge writes, "Their forum was the factory and their form of political action was the general strike" (p. 62). As a young unionist Müller struck out against the imposition of Taylorism. He was to go from a lathe operator to become the temporary head of state for the revolutionary republic. Meanwhile, as a delegate he was the workers' representative in the daily operations of the revolution. Reflecting on Müller's views, Hoffogge offers,

The councils were the original representation of the working class. In the eyes of his opponents, the mass mobilization, which turned every street and factory into a parliament, was 'pure anarchy,' the opposite of politics. The councils' potential for a different structure of representation was opposed and suppressed by the coalition of traditional elites purporting to represent the 'people' (p. 91).

Müller served as workers' council delegate to the Executive Council of the Council of People's Deputies, the governing body of the councils and hence post-revolutionary Berlin. His position as chair meant he was in charge of the Council and in turn the government. The experiment of the Executive Council was to be short-lived since on December 16th the machinery of state was subsumed under the Central Council; the Executive Council, with its direct relationships to sailors and workers' councils, was jettisoned. These maneuvers from above would mark the decline of the November Revolution. Before a year had past, in August 1919, the constitution that would become the guiding document of the Weimer Republic was instituted. Nevertheless workers in central Germany launched rebellions during March 1921 and again in Hamburg throughout October 1923. With the end of the Hamburg uprising the romance of the Germany Revolution was extinguished.

Hoffrogge details the process of revolutionary upheaval, followed by the innumerable ways it disintegrated. Hoffrogge observes that workers' councils, drawing on Müller's own writing of 1913, "had to work out collective practices, like refusal of overtime or slow-downs, gradually and painstakingly" (p. 18). These machinations do not translate into parliamentary politics. Two key political lessons result. First, as delegates and members of councils, ordinary workers are ill-equipped to jostle with party bureaucrats and professional politicians in government bodies. In fact, it is not only the structural incorporation of workers' councils into the government that lead to their defeat. The very day-to-day mechanisms of government dominated by the party and politicians erode the democratic impulses of delegates while replacing their spontaneous enthusiasm with proceduralism. As a result, and secondly, preparing for governing post-revolutionary conditions is an important area for future theorization and organizing. However, Hoffrogge has produced an intellectual history not a genealogy or strategic manual for potential workers' councils. The book suffers for lack of a proper introduction and overview for those unfamiliar with the German Revolution. The first such summary appears in chapter five. Many readers will have trouble acclimating to the context Müller was operating within.

There are two ways to read Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: as a social movement history or as a biography. Readers looking for the former will stop at chapter nine and forgo the final three chapters, which address Müller's developments after leaving politics. But for those looking for the arc that is a political life will discover Hoffrogge's excruciatingly detailed account of the lathe operator who was to become temporary head of the German Republic before "returning to obscurity" (p. 230).

Read as a social movement history, Hoffrogge joins the resurgence of interest in workers' councils following the 2008 planetary economic crisis. Edited collections, including, Ours to Master and to Own: Workers' Control from the Commune to the Present (where Hoffrogge's writing on Müller first appeared in English), New Forms of Worker Organizing: The Syndicalist and Autonomist Restoration of Class-Struggle Unionism, and An Alternative Labor History: Worker Control and Workplace Democracy have reintroduced the concept of the workers' council to contemporary labor organizers, although, a new edition of labor historian Peter Rachleff's out-of-print Marxism and Council Communism would provide a historical overview of these ideas and practices. As social movement scholars, Hoffroge and others will have to contend with the short twentieth century where workers' councils appeared as part of revolutionary upheavals. When considered chronologically, these include: Russia, Poland, Germany, Italy, Ireland, China, Spain, Hungary, France, Chile, and Iran. Did what began in 1905 conclude in 1978?

While Hoffrogge addresses missing historiography, I am afraid that the specificity of the subject matter - Müller, shop stewards, Berlin in 1918 - will draw readers away from the considerable details of day-to-day organizing and operations of workers' councils. Admittedly this is a criticism of the reader rather than the author. The Brill edition is a pricy hardback suitable for academic libraries. Historical Materialism has corrected this initial error by providing a softcover version at just over the cost of buying a round of bier for Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Landauer, and Müller.

Hoffrogge, Ralf. Working-Class Politics in the German Revolution: Richard M üller, the Revolutionary Shop Stewards and the Origins of the Council Movement. Joseph Keady, trans. Chicago: Haymarket Books. 2015. 253 pp. $28.00 softcover. ISBN 978-16-08-46550-7; and, Leiden & Boston: Brill. 2015. 253 pp. $141.00 hardback. ISBN 978-90-04-21921-2.

The Party's Over: Beyond Politics, Beyond Democracy

By Crimethinc

Nowadays, democracy rules the world. Communism is long dead, elections are taking place even in Afghanistan and Iraq, and world leaders are meeting to plan the "global community" we hear so much about. So why isn't everybody happy, finally? For that matter-why do so few of the eligible voters in the United States, the world's flagship democracy, even bother to vote?

Could it be that democracy, long the catchword of every revolution and rebellion, is simply not democratic enough? What could be the problem?

Every little child can grow up to be President

No, they can't. Being President means occupying a position of hierarchical power, just like being a billionaire: for every person who is President, there have to be millions who are not. It's no coincidence that billionaires and Presidents tend to rub shoulders; both exist in a privileged world off limits to the rest of us. Speaking of billionaires, our economy isn't exactly democratic-capitalism distributes resources in absurdly unequal proportions, and you have to start with resources if you're ever going to get elected.

Even if it was true that anyone could grow up to be President, that wouldn't help the millions who inevitably don't, who must still live in the shadow of that power. This imbalance is intrinsic to the structure of representative democracy, at the local level as much as at the top. The professional politicians of a town council discuss municipal affairs and pass ordinances all day without consulting the citizens of the town, who have to be at work; when one of those ordinances displeases citizens, they have to use what little leisure time they have to contest it, and then they're back at work again the next time the town council meets. In theory, the citizens could elect a different town council from the available pool of politicians and would-be politicians, but the interests of politicians as a class always remain essentially at odds with their own-besides, voting fraud, gerrymandering, and inane party loyalty usually prevent them from going that far. Even in the unlikely scenario that a whole new government was elected consisting of firebrands intent on undoing the imbalance of power between politicians and citizens, they would inevitably perpetuate it simply by accepting roles in the system-for the political apparatus itself is the foundation of that imbalance. To succeed in their objective, they would have to dissolve the government and join the rest of the populace in restructuring society from the roots up.

But even if there were no Presidents or town councils, democracy as we know it would still be an impediment to freedom. Corruption, privilege, and hierarchy aside, majority rule is not only inherently oppressive but also paradoxically divisive and homogenizing at the same time.

The Tyranny of the Majority

If you ever found yourself in a vastly outnumbered minority, and the majority voted that you had to give up something as necessary to your life as water and air, would you comply? When it comes down to it, does anyone really believe it makes sense to accept the authority of a group simply on the grounds that they outnumber everyone else? We accept majority rule because we do not believe it will threaten us-and those it does threaten are already silenced before anyone can hear their misgivings.

The average self-professed law-abiding citizen does not consider himself threatened by majority rule because, consciously or not, he conceives of himself as having the power and moral authority of the majority: if not in fact, by virtue of his being politically and socially "moderate," then in theory, because he believes everyone would be convinced by his arguments if only he had the opportunity to present them. Majority-rule democracy has always rested on the conviction that if all the facts were known, everyone could be made to see that there is only one right course of action-without this belief, it amounts to nothing more than the dictatorship of the herd. But even if "the" facts could be made equally clear to everyone, assuming such a thing were possible, people still would have their individual perspectives and motivations and needs. We need social and political structures that take this into account, in which we are free from the mob rule of the majority as well as the ascendancy of the privileged class.

Living under democratic rule teaches people to think in terms of quantity, to focus more on public opinion than on what their consciences tell them, to see themselves as powerless unless they are immersed in a mass. The root of majority-rule democracy is competition: competition to persuade everyone else to your position whether or not it is in their best interest, competition to constitute a majority to wield power before others outmaneuver you to do the same-and the losers (that is to say, the minorities) be damned. At the same time, majority rule forces those who wish for power to appeal to the lowest common denominator, precipitating a race to the bottom that rewards the most bland, superficial, and demagogic; under democracy, power itself comes to be associated with conformity rather than individuality. And the more power is concentrated in the hands of the majority, the less any individual can do on her own, whether she is inside or outside that majority.

In purporting to give everyone an opportunity to participate, majority-rule democracy offers a perfect justification for repressing those who don't abide by its dictates: if they don't like the government, why don't they go into politics themselves? And if they don't win at the game of building up a majority to wield power, didn't they get their chance? This is the same blame-the-victim reasoning used to justify capitalism: if the dishwasher isn't happy with his salary, he should work harder so he too can own a restaurant chain. Sure, everyone gets a chance to compete, however unequal-but what about those of us who don't want to compete, who never wanted power to be centralized in the hands of a government in the first place? What if we don't care to rule or be ruled?

That's what police are for-and courts and judges and prisons.

The Rule of Law

Even if you don't believe their purpose is to grind out nonconformity wherever it appears, you have to acknowledge that legal institutions are no substitute for fairness, mutual respect, and good will. The rule of "just and equal law," as fetishized by the stockholders and landlords whose interests it protects, offers no guarantees against injustice; it simply creates another arena of specialization, in which power and responsibility are ceded to expensive lawyers and pompous judges. Rather than serving to protect our communities and work out conflicts, this arrangement ensures that our communities' skills for conflict resolution and self-defense atrophy-and that those whose profession it supposedly is to discourage crime have a stake in it proliferating, since their careers depend upon it.

Ironically, we are told that we need these institutions to protect the rights of minorities-even though the implicit function of the courts is, at best, to impose the legislation of the majority on the minority. In actuality, a person is only able to use the courts to defend his rights when he can bring sufficient force to bear upon them in a currency they recognize; thanks to capitalism, only a minority can do this, so in a roundabout way it turns out that, indeed, the courts exist to protect the rights of at least a certain minority.

Justice cannot be established through the mere drawing up and enforcement of laws; such laws can only institutionalize what is already the rule in a society. Common sense and compassion are always preferable to the enforcement of strict, impersonal regulations. Where the law is the private province of an elite invested in its own perpetuation, the sensible and compassionate are bound to end up as defendants; we need a social system that fosters and rewards those qualities rather than blind obedience and impassivity.

Who Loses?

In contrast to forms of decision-making in which everyone's needs matter, the disempowerment of losers and out-groups is central to democracy. It is well known that in ancient Athens, the "cradle of democracy," scarcely an eighth of the population was permitted to vote, as women, foreigners, slaves, and others were excluded from citizenship. This is generally regarded as an early kink that time has ironed out, but one could also conclude that exclusion itself is the most essential and abiding characteristic of democracy: millions who live in the United States today are not permitted to vote either, and the distinctions between citizen and non-citizen have not eroded significantly in 2500 years. Every bourgeois property owner can come up with a thousand reasons why it isn't practical to allow everyone who is affected to share in decision making, just as no boss or bureaucrat would dream of giving his employees an equal say in their workplace, but that doesn't make it any less exclusive. What if democracy arose in Greece not as a step in Man's Progress Towards Freedom, but as a way of keeping power out of certain hands?

Democracy is the most sustainable way to maintain the division between powerful and powerless because it gives the greatest possible number of people incentive to defend that division.

That's why the high-water mark of democracy-its current ascendancy around the globe-corresponds with unprecedented inequalities in the distribution of resources and power. Dictatorships are inherently unstable: you can slaughter, imprison, and brainwash entire generations and their children will invent the struggle for freedom anew. But promise every man the opportunity to be a dictator, to be able to force the "will of the majority" upon his fellows rather than work through disagreements like a mature adult, and you can build a common front of destructive self-interest against the cooperation and collectivity that make individual freedom possible. All the better if there are even more repressive dictatorships around to point to as "the" alternative, so you can glorify all this in the rhetoric of liberty.

Capitalism and Democracy

Now let's suspend our misgivings about democracy long enough to consider whether, if it were an effective means for people to share power over their lives, it could be compatible with capitalism. In a democracy, informed citizens are supposed to vote according to their enlightened self-interest-but who controls the flow of information, if not wealthy executives? They can't help but skew their coverage according to their class interests, and you can hardly blame them-the newspapers and networks that didn't flinch at alienating corporate advertisers were run out of business long ago by competitors with fewer scruples.

Likewise, voting means choosing between options, according to which possibilities seem most desirable-but who sets the options, who establishes what is considered possible, who constructs desire itself but the wealthy patriarchs of the political establishment, and their nephews in advertising and public relations firms? In the United States, the two-party system has reduced politics to choosing the lesser of two identical evils, both of which answer to their funders before anyone else. Sure, the parties differ over exactly how much to repress personal freedoms or spend on bombs-but do we ever get to vote on who controls "public" spaces such as shopping malls, or whether workers are entitled to the full product of their labor, or any other question that could seriously change the way we live? In such a state of affairs, the essential function of the democratic process is to limit the appearance of what is possible to the narrow spectrum debated by candidates for office. This demoralizes dissidents and contributes to the general impression that they are impotent utopians-when nothing is more utopian than trusting representatives from the owning class to solve the problems caused by their own dominance, and nothing more impotent than accepting their political system as the only possible system.

Ultimately, the most transparent democratic political process will always be trumped by economic matters such as property ownership. Even if we could convene everyone, capitalists and convicts alike, in one vast general assembly, what would prevent the same dynamics that rule the marketplace from spilling over into that space? So long as resources are unevenly distributed, the rich can always buy others' votes: either literally, or by promising them a piece of the pie, or else by means of propaganda and intimidation. Intimidation may be oblique-"Those radicals want to take away your hard-earned property"-or as overt as the bloody gang wars that accompanied electoral campaigns in nineteenth century America.

Thus, even at best, democracy can only serve its purported purpose if it occurs among those who explicitly oppose capitalism and foreswear its prizes-and in those circles, there are alternatives that make a lot more sense than majority rule.

It's no coincidence freedom is not on the ballot

Freedom is a quality of activity, not a condition that exists in a vacuum: it is a prize to be won daily, not a possession that can be kept in the basement and taken out and polished up for parades. Freedom cannot be given-the most you can hope is to free others from the forces that prevent them from finding it themselves. Real freedom has nothing to do with voting; being free doesn't mean simply being able to choose between options, but actively participating in establishing the options in the first place.

If the freedom for which so many generations have fought and died is best exemplified by a man in a voting booth checking a box on a ballot before returning to work in an environment no more under his control than it was before, then the heritage our emancipating forefathers and suffragette grandmothers have left us is nothing but a sham substitute for the liberty they sought.

For a better illustration of real freedom in action, look at the musician in the act of improvising with her companions: in joyous, seemingly effortless cooperation, they create a sonic and emotional environment, transforming the world that in turn transforms them. Take this model and extend it to every one of our interactions with each other and you would have something qualitatively different from our present system-a harmony in human relationships and activity. To get there from here, we have to dispense with voting as the archetypal expression of freedom and participation.

Representative democracy is a contradiction.

No one can represent your power and interests for you-you can only have power by wielding it, you can only learn what your interests are by getting involved. Politicians make careers out of claiming to represent others, as if freedom and political power could be held by proxy; in fact, they are a priest class that answers only to itself, and their very existence is proof of our disenfranchisement.

Voting in elections is an expression of our powerlessness: it is an admission that we can only approach the resources and capabilities of our own society through the mediation of that priest caste. When we let them prefabricate our options for us, we relinquish control of our communities to these politicians in the same way that we have ceded technology to engineers, health care to doctors, and control of our living environments to city planners and private real estate developers. We end up living in a world that is alien to us, even though our labor has built it, for we have acted like sleepwalkers hypnotized by the monopoly our leaders and specialists hold on setting the possibilities.

But we don't have to simply choose between presidential candidates, soft drink brands, television shows, and political ideologies. We can make our own decisions as individuals and communities, we can make our own delicious beverages and social structures and power, we can establish a new society on the basis of freedom and cooperation.

Sometimes a candidate appears who says everything people have been saying to each other for a long time-he seems to have appeared from outside the world of politics, to really be one of us. By persuasively critiquing the system within its own logic, he subtly persuades people that the system can be reformed-that it could work, if only the right people were in power. Thus a lot of energy that would have gone into challenging the system itself is redirected into backing yet another candidate for office, who inevitably fails to deliver.

But where do these candidates-and more importantly, their ideas and momentum-come from? How do they rise into the spotlight? They only receive so much attention because they are drawing on popular sentiments; often, they are explicitly trying to divert energy from existing grass-roots movements. So should we put our energy into supporting them, or into building on the momentum that forced them to take radical stances in the first place?

More frequently, we are terrorized into focusing on the electoral spectacle by the prospect of being ruled by the worst possible candidates. "What if he gets into power?" To think that things could get even worse!

But the problem is that the government has so much power in the first place-otherwise, it wouldn't matter as much who held the reigns. So long as this is the case, there will always be tyrants. This is why it is all the more important that we put our energy into the lasting solution of opposing the power of the state.

But what are the alternatives to democracy?

Consensus

Consensus-based decision-making is already practiced around the globe, from indigenous communities in Latin America and direct action groups in Europe to organic farming cooperatives in Australia. In contrast to representative democracy, the participants take part in the decision-making process on an ongoing basis and exercise real control over their daily lives. Unlike majority-rule democracy, consensus process values the needs and concerns of each individual equally; if one person is unhappy with a resolution, it is everyone's responsibility to find a new solution that is acceptable to all. Consensus-based decision-making does not demand that any person accept others' power over her, though it does require that everybody consider everyone else's needs; what it loses in efficiency it makes up tenfold in freedom and accountability. Instead of asking that people accept leaders or find common cause by homogenizing themselves, proper consensus process integrates everyone into a working whole while allowing each to retain his or her own autonomy.

Autonomy

To be free, you must have control over your immediate surroundings and the basic matters of your life. No one is more qualified than you are to decide how you live; no one should be able to vote on what you do with your time and your potential unless you invite them to. To claim these privileges for yourself and respect them in others is to cultivate autonomy.

Autonomy is not to be confused with so-called independence: in actuality, no one is independent, since our lives all depend on each other. The glamorization of self-sufficiency in competitive society is an underhanded way to accuse those who will not exploit others of being responsible for their own poverty; as such, it is one of the most significant obstacles to building community.

In contrast to this Western mirage, autonomy offers a free interdependence between people who share consensus.

Autonomy is the antithesis of bureaucracy. There is nothing more efficient than people acting on their own initiative as they see fit, and nothing more inefficient than attempting to dictate everyone's actions from above-that is, unless your fundamental goal is to control other people. Top-down coordination is only necessary when people must be made to do something they would never do of their own accord; likewise, obligatory uniformity, however horizontally it is imposed, can only empower a group by disempowering the individuals who comprise it. Consensus can be as repressive as democracy unless the participants retain their autonomy.

Autonomous individuals can cooperate without agreeing on a shared agenda, so long as everyone benefits from everyone else's participation. Groups that cooperate thus can contain conflicts and contradictions, just as each of us does individually, and still empower the participants. Let's leave marching under a single flag to the military.

Finally, autonomy entails self-defense. Autonomous groups have a stake in defending themselves against the encroachments of those who do not recognize their right to self-determination, and in expanding the territory of autonomy and consensus by doing everything in their power to destroy coercive structures.

Topless Federations

Independent autonomous groups can work together in federations without any of them wielding authority. Such a structure sounds utopian, but it can actually be quite practical and efficient. International mail delivery and railway travel both work on this system, to name two examples: while individual postal and transportation systems are internally hierarchical, they all cooperate together to get mail or rail passengers from one nation to another without an ultimate authority being necessary at any point in the process. Similarly, individuals who cannot agree enough to work together within one collective can still coexist in separate groups. For this to work in the long run, of course, we need to instill values of cooperation, consideration, and tolerance in the coming generations-but that's exactly what we are proposing, and we can hardly do worse at this task than the partisans of capitalism and hierarchy have.

Direct Action

Autonomy necessitates that you act for yourself: that rather than waiting for requests to pass through the established channels only to bog down in paperwork and endless negotiations, establish your own channels instead. This is called direct action. If you want hungry people to have food to eat, don't just give money to a bureaucratic charity organization-find out where food is going to waste, collect it, and share. If you want affordable housing, don't try to get the town council to pass a bill-that will take years, while people sleep outside every night; take over abandoned buildings, open them up to the public, and organize groups to defend them when the thugs of the absentee landlords show up. If you want corporations to have less power, don't petition the politicians they bought to put limits on their own masters-take that power from them yourself. Don't buy their products, don't work for them, sabotage their billboards and offices, prevent their meetings from taking place and their merchandise from being delivered. They use similar tactics to exert their power over you, too-it only looks valid because they bought up the laws and values of your society long before you were born.

Don't wait for permission or leadership from some outside authority, don't beg some higher power to organize your life for you. Take the initiative!

How to Solve Disagreements without Calling the Authorities

In a social arrangement that is truly in the best interest of each participating individual, the threat of exclusion should be enough to discourage most destructive or disrespectful behavior. Even when it is impossible to avoid, exclusion is certainly a more humanitarian approach than prisons and executions, which corrupt police and judges as much as they embitter criminals. Those who refuse to respect others' needs, who will not integrate themselves into any community, may find themselves banished from social life-but that is still better than exile in the mental ward or on death row, two of the possibilities awaiting such people today. Violence should only be used by communities in self-defense, not with the smug sense of entitlement with which it is applied by our present injustice system. Unfortunately, in a world governed by force, autonomous consensus-based groups are likely to find themselves at odds with those who do not abide by cooperative or tolerant values; they must be careful not to lose those values themselves in the process of defending them.

Serious disagreements within communities can be solved in many cases by reorganizing or subdividing groups. Often individuals who can't get along in one social configuration have more success cooperating in another setting or as members of parallel communities. If consensus cannot be reached within a group, that group can split into smaller groups that can achieve it internally-such a thing may be inconvenient and frustrating, but it is better than group decisions ultimately being made by force by those who have the most power. As with individuals and society, so with different collectives: if the benefits of working together outweigh the frustrations, that should be incentive enough for people to sort out their differences. Even drastically dissimilar communities still have it in their best interest to coexist peacefully, and must somehow negotiate ways to achieve this…

Living Without Permission

…that's the most difficult part, of course. But we're not talking about just another social system here, we're talking about a total transformation of human relations-for it will take nothing less to solve the problems our species faces today. Let's not kid ourselves-until we can achieve this, the violence and strife inherent in conflict-based relations will continue to intensify, and no law or system will be able to protect us. In consensus-based structures, there are no fake solutions, no ways to suppress conflict without resolving it; those who participate in them must learn to coexist without coercion and submission.

The first precious grains of this new world can be found in your friendships and love affairs whenever they are free from power dynamics, whenever cooperation occurs naturally. Imagine those moments expanded to the scale of our entire society-that's the life that waits beyond democracy.

It may feel like we are separated from that world by an uncrossable chasm, but the wonderful thing about consensus and autonomy is that you don't have to wait for the government to vote for them-you can practice them right now with the people around you. Put into practice, the virtues of this way of living are clear. Form your own autonomous group, answering to no power but your own, and chase down freedom for yourselves, if your representatives will not do it for you-since they cannot do it for you.

Appendix: A Fable

Three wolves and six goats are discussing what to have for dinner. One courageous goat makes an impassioned case: "We should put it to a vote!" The other goats fear for his life, but surprisingly, the wolves acquiesce. But when everyone is preparing to vote, the wolves take three of the goats aside.

"Vote with us to make the other three goats dinner," they threaten. "Otherwise, vote or no vote, we'll eat you."

The other three goats are shocked by the outcome of the election: a majority, including their comrades, has voted for them to be killed and eaten. They protest in outrage and terror, but the goat who first suggested the vote rebukes them: "Be thankful you live in a democracy! At least we got to have a say in this!"

This was originally published by Crimethinc.

Safe States, Inside-Outside, and Other Liberal Illusions

By Howie Hawkins

Bernie Sanders is on his way to an endorsement of Hillary Clinton, the candidate of War, Wall Street, and Wal-Mart. Sanders ran as a New Deal Democrat, but he will soon be campaigning for a plain old corporate New Democrat.

To keep his troops engaged through this transition, Sanders will stage a few rules and platform fights at the convention. But rule changes are irrelevant to the real party power structure of candidate organizations and their corporate investors. Any platform planks won will be irrelevant as well. No corporate Democrat will feel bound by them.

Faced with that demoralizing prospect, some Sanders supporters are recycling failed old strategies in an attempt to salvage Sanders' "political revolution" without opposing the Democratic Party.

Safe States

Seattle city councilor Kshama Sawant and her Socialist Alternativecomrades have called on Sanders to continue running as an independent, but only in non-competitive "safe states."

The Green Party tried this in 2004. After a controversial decision to nominate the safe states candidate, David Cobb, it quickly became clear that the approach was impractical. I compiled and contributed to a book about this experience where you can see the debate between safe states and independent politics evolve as the case for safe states collapses in the face of political realities. Cobb had to convert from "safe states" to "smart states," which meant running wherever local Greens wanted him to. That turned out to be every state, safe or battleground, with a Green Party. Cobb did not want alienate Greens in battleground states like Ohio and Pennsylvania who were knocking themselves out to overcome difficult ballot petitioning requirements and hoping for sufficient Green presidential votes to secure ballot access for local candidates in future elections.

It also became clear that few voters or reporters would take a candidate seriously in a non-competitive safe state who didn't believe his or her own third-party candidacy was important enough to carry into the competitive battleground states as well.

A hypothetical Sanders safe states run would face the same problems Cobb did on a larger scale. His supporters in battleground states would feel abandoned. That would split his base. And he would not be taken seriously by voters or the press because he would not be taking himself seriously enough to run in the battleground states and try to beat both Trump and Clinton.

Inside-Outside

Another liberal illusion is the inside-outside strategy toward the Democratic Party. The logic of an inside-outside approach leads increasingly inside in the party. To be accepted inside one must disavow outside options. Bernie Sanders conceded to this logic from the start of his campaign when he said would support the Democratic nominee and not run as an independent.

If Sanders had not made that pledge, he would not have been allowed on to Democratic ballots or debate stages. Soon after he pledged his Democratic loyalty, Sanders was signing fundraising letters on behalf of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Before long Sanders will be campaigning for Clinton.

When I wrote a critique of this idea in the Summer 1989 issue of New Politics, I was addressing the left wing of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, which proposed an inside-outside strategy of supporting progressives inside the Democratic Party and running progressive independents against corporate Democrats. By the time the next iteration of the inside-outside strategy was promulgated by the Progressive Democrats of America, which grew out of the Kucinich campaign in 2004, outside was now reduced to lobbying the Democrats for progressive reforms. Running independent progressives against corporate Democrats was not part of the outside strategy anymore.

The inside-outside proponents from the Rainbow Coalition believed their strategy would heighten the contradictions between progressive and corporate Democrats, leading to a split where either the progressives took over the Democrats or the progressives broke away to form a viable left third party with a mass base among labor, minorities, environmentalists, and the peace movement. But the logic of working inside meant forswearing any outside options in order to be allowed to inside Democratic committees, campaigns, primary ballots, and debates. Many of the Rainbow veterans became Democratic Party operatives and politicians whose careers depend on Democratic loyalty. Meanwhile, the corporate New Democrats consolidated their control of the policy agenda. And today the "outside" of the inside-outside strategy has been scaled down to pathetic attempts at political ventriloquism - clicking, lobbying, and demonstrating to try to get corporate Democrats to utter messages and enact polices that are progressive.

Party within the Party

The most longstanding liberal illusion is the party-within-the-party approach, an organized movement to take the Democratic brand away from its corporate sponsors. Some leaders of Labor for Bernie have beenexplicit about this. It is what Sanders has indicated he has in mind.

This approach is has been tried repeatedly by the liberal left since the 1930s and always failed. The inside path of "taking over" the Democratic Party has been tried by labor's PACs, waves of reform Democratic clubs, McGovern's new politics, Harrington's Democratic Socialists of America, Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, Dean's Democracy for America, Kucinich's Progressive Democrats of America, and many, many others, including the fusion parties in New York State over the decades that functioned as a second ballot lines for Democrats: American Labor, Liberal, and Working Families.

In every case, they failed. Worse, many of the reform Democrats went over to the other side and became career Democratic regulars. McGovern lieutenants like Gary Hart and Bill Clinton became leaders of the neoliberal New Democrats. The Jackson legacy is a Congressional Black Caucus stuffed with corporate money and almost universally in the Clinton camp.

The operatives and the pols backed by the fusion parties in New York State have not only become embedded in corporate-financed Democratic politicians' organizations, many have been corrupted. By the time it lost its ballot line in 2002, the Liberal Party had become the crassest of patronage machines, brazenly selling endorsements to the Democrats and Republicans alike in return for jobs and contracts. Its successor, the Working Families Party, kept backing Sheldon Silver, the fallen Speaker of the state Assembly (and Clinton Superdelegate), even after he was indicted for corruption. Silver was just sentenced to 12 years for selling his office for financial kickbacks and sexual favors. A top political aide to New York Mayor Bill De Blasio and former Working Families Party campaign manager, Emma Wolfe, has just been subpoenaed in a federal investigation of a scheme to skirt around New York State's campaign contribution limits. No doubt we'll be reading in the future about Sanders activists who became careerists and corrupt in corporate Democratic organizations.

Many are going to believe that this time it's different because the Sandernistas are stronger than earlier reform Democratic movements. Sanders is winning over 40% of the Democratic primary votes. These folks are going to pursue the party-within-the-party. Since it is inevitable that some large fraction of the Sandernistas are going to choose this path, the independent left should work with them in fighting for reforms like Improved Medicare for All even if we oppose their Democrats in elections. If they are smart, they will recognize that the independent left is their strategic ally. Without independent candidates giving progressive voters somewhere else to go, the reform Democrats will be taken for granted and lose their political leverage against the corporate Democrats.

Also if the reform Democrats are smart, they will fight for a membership-controlled party-within-the-party. The top-down mailing list left is the debilitating scourge of progressive politics today. Non-profits staffed by salaried professionals paid for by philanthropic capitalists decide what to mobilize people for, but don't help people organize to educate and make decisions themselves. If the mass base of small donors that the Sanders campaign has amassed is going to fund this reform effort, those same small donors should be organized into local clubs with membership rights to make decisions and elect and hold leaders accountable. For this to happen, Sanders will have to release his 2 million plus small donor list for local organizing. A party-within-the-party will have to demand that Sanders "Free the Lists!"

Vote for the Lesser Evil

The illusion of last resort for liberals is lesser evilism. They call on us to vote for the lesser evil Democrat to defeat the greater evil Republican.

Here is where Ralph Nader is invoked for "spoiling" the 2000 presidential election. In fact, as a major media consortium found in a thorough $1 million recount, Gore won Florida despite computerized racial profiling by the GOP that disenfranchised tens of thousands of black Democratic voters. The GOP stole the election and consolidated the coup by stopping the recount in a party line Supreme Court vote. But, like GOP climate change deniers, Democratic lesser evil proponents don't let facts get in their way. Instead of fighting the Republicans, they blame Nader.

Of course, a left third-party candidate could well be the margin of difference. The argument against lesser evilism is that voting for the lesser evil paves the way for greater evils. The classic example is the Social Democrats of Germany supporting the conservative Paul von Hindenberg in order to the defeat the Nazi Adoph Hitler in the 1932 German presidential elections. Von Hindenberg won and then appointed Hitler as Chancellor.

Hillary Clinton is the von Hindenberg of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Clintonite prevarication and triangulation will accommodate the right and bring us the greater evils we were afraid of. Hillary the Hawk trumps Trump for the neocons swarming to her campaign. She doesn't need the left to beat Trump. She's got the militarists and the corporate elites - and the lesser evil liberals - in a grand coalition for the status quo.

The lesser evilists call it strategic voting. It's really strategic suicide. The corporate center-right personified by Clinton will not defeat the hard right. She will use it to scare the liberal left into accepting her corporate and militarist agenda as the lesser evil. The most effective way to defeat the right is with a left that builds support and power by organizing and campaigning for its own distinct alternative.

Write In Bernie

The Bernie or Bust movement has raised another illusion. If Sanders doesn't win the nomination, then give him a write-in vote in the general election.

At least in this approach they do not lower their flag and disappear into the Democratic Party. But it has its own problems. A write-in vote for Bernie is a vote for Hillary Trump. It's a vote for Hillary because Bernie supports Hillary. It's a vote for Trump because it could be the margin of difference in a battleground state.

Fortunately, Bernie or Bust recently changed its pledge to "write-in Bernie Sanders or vote Green" and the number of pledgers quickly doubled to nearly 100,000.

A Left Third Party Without Illusions

Jill Stein's Green Party campaign for president ought to be the first stop for Sandernistas who refuse to vote for corporate Clinton. Stein will give voice to popular demands and movements and help shape political debate during the election. But more than anything, the Stein campaign is a party-building campaign. It's about securing ballot lines that can be used in future local elections for municipal, state legislative, and congressional seats. It's about creating campaign committees that continue after the election as local Green parties.

Local independent left candidates can win. Kshama Sawant has shown that in her Seattle city council races. Over 150 Greens have shown that in cities and towns across the country. These wins can be replicated all over the country.

Many states have non-partisan local elections where independents are not so hampered by partisan loyalties in the two-party system. Due to the gerrymandering of safe seats, most partisan election districts are in practice one-party districts where the other major party does not seriously compete. A left third party can very quickly become the second party in these districts on the road to becoming the first party. Running serious local election campaigns ought to be the second stop for independent Sandernistas.

Ballot access barriers, winner-take-all elections, private campaign financing, and inherited two-party loyalties are real obstacles to building a left third party. But the idea that they are insurmountable is just wrong because viable third parties have been built and independent candidates have won. The abolitionist, populist, and socialist parties from the 1840s to the 1930s garnered enough support to really affect American politics. Greens, socialists, and independent progressives, including Bernie Sanders himself, have won office in recent decades. What's been missing since the 1930s is a left that understands that independent politics is the road to power and change. Most of the self-described left today practices dependent politics. It depends on the corporate-sponsored Democrats to enact changes.

Sanders' campaign has revealed there is a mass base for left party that is ready to be organized. His campaign shows that millions are ready to vote for what public opinion polling has shown for decades - that there is majority support for progressive economic reforms like single-payer, progressive taxation, tuition-free public higher education, and climate action. Sanders' campaign also shows that millions will fund a campaign for these reforms with small donations at a level that can compete with the candidates of the corporate rich.

If the Greens are going to be the vehicle for an independent left political insurgency, they will need to reorganize as a mass-membership party with membership dues and local branches for sustainable self-financing, democratic accountability, and grassroots dynamism. The Greens will remain underfunded, weakly organized, and politically marginal if they continue to be organized like the Democrats and Republicans with an atomized base of voters who only have the right to vote in primaries, with no locally organized base to elect and hold leaders accountable, and with minimal funding from intermittent fund appeals.

It is no surprise that so many liberal illusions are being proposed in the wake of Sanders' campaign. The campaign itself was a liberal illusion that conflated liberal New Deal type reforms of capitalism with democratic socialism. It implied that the social, economic, and environmental crises we face are not systemic, but simply the result of bad leaders and policies that we can replace. Socialism means a radical restructuring of society that socializes and democratizes economic and political institutions. Without an independent left to articulate this socialist vision, "progressive" has come to mean a coalition of liberals and socialists behind a liberal program. The socialist left disappeared as an alternative voice and vision.

Working class independence has been the first principle of socialist politics since the pro-democracy uprisings of 1848 erupted across Europe and Latin America. Workers found they could not count on the professional and business classes to support their right to the franchise. They would have to fight for their rights themselves. Exiled "Red 48ers" were among the core of the American abolitionist and populist parties in the latter half of the 19th century.

The mass-membership working-class party was an invention of the labor left in the second half of the 19th century. It was how working people organized democratically to compete politically with the older top-down parties of the propertied elites, which had grown out of their competing legislative caucuses. In the U.S., the Greenback Labor and People's parties of the farmer-labor populist movement won hundreds of offices at all levels up to governors and U.S. senators. They forced their program - from greenback monetary reform and progressive income taxation to labor rights, cooperatives, and public ownership of railroad, telegraph, and telephone utilities - into the center of political debate. The Debsian Socialists, many of them former populists like Debs himself, continued this effective third-party tradition in the 20thcentury until 1936, when most of labor and the left collapsed into the New Deal Democrats' coalition. The left has yet to re-emerge as a distinct and visible voice that matters in American politics.

There is no shortcut through the Democratic Party to building a mass party on the left. That shortcut is a dead end. Hopefully, many new activists energized by the Sanders campaign will come to the realization that road to "political revolution" for "democratic socialism" lies not inside the Democratic Party but in an independent left party that is opposed to and starts beating the Democrats.

This piece was originally published at Counterpunch.

Art, Race, and Gender: An Interview with Son of Baldwin

By Devon Bowers

Below is a transcript interview I had with the founder and operator of the Facebook page, Son of Baldwin, where we discuss comic books as a political medium and also as it relates to and in many ways reflects the current racial and gender structures we see in society.

What made you interested in comics? For me, personally, comics were an extension of my interest and enjoyment of animation.

My father bought me my very first comic books when I was four years old and I was hooked instantaneously. At that point, I had already been introduced to super heroes via the 1973 Super Friends cartoon and then the 1975 Wonder Woman television series. I was fascinated with the idea of these larger-than-life characters with incredible powers who used those powers to protect defenseless people from the evil and corrupt. That resonated with me on a primal level. Forty years later, it still does.

Comic books are the reason I'm a writer today. My earliest writings were me attempting to create my own superhero stories. Additionally, two superheroes in particular played a major role in the shaping of the very unsophisticated political consciousness of my childhood:Wonder Woman and her black sister, Nubia. Wonder Woman comics were filled with stories that touched on very basic, elementary feminist principles. And with the introduction of Nubia, a very clumsy race awareness was brought to the fore. Both impacted me in ways that I can't fully articulate, but suffice to say, they were my first child-like understandings of identity.

The fact that these were female characters was quite important. I wasn't drawn to Superman orBatman, or even Black Lightning and Black Panther in the same way. I believe that I was rejecting, on some subconscious level, the narrowness and rigidness of a particular brand of masculinity and the increasing and needless violence that came along with it. Wonder Woman and Nubia-with their bold strength, unabashed femininity, and desire to teach first and punch only if they had no other choice-seemed more balanced and free. The escapist fantasies I had with them allowed me the room to safely explore other, queerer aspects of myself, aspects that I was only beginning to become aware of and understand. At four years old, I couldn't know that this is what was happening, but looking back, it makes a great deal of sense.

Given the fact that so many movies and shows are flourishing due to diversity, why don't you think that companies don't have more diverse characters, if for no other reason than to cash in?

There are a great number of experts, theorists, and thinkers who believe racism, sexism, and other forms of institutional bigotry are tied to economics. The prevailing wisdom goes something like: to rid ourselves of these evils, we must disconnect them from their economic incentive; we must make bigotry unprofitable. But what that class analysis fails to contend with are the psychological benefits of bigotry. Bigoted ideology helps oppressive groups feel good about their actions, beliefs, practices, and thoughts. It warps their perception of reality so that any evidence contrary to their false ideas of supremacy are discarded and discounted. They'll invent flimsy excuses to uphold the status quo in the face of utter ruin. This benefit is separate from economics. It lives in that mental and emotional realm that allows poor white people, for example, to say: "I may be poor, but at least I'm not black!" or straight black people to say, "I may be black, but at least I'm not queer."

So when the research shows that inclusive media is actually more profitable than exclusive media , they regard that data as suspect and reject it. Simultaneously, when the exclusive media they promote fails financially, they behave as though they're baffled in regard to why that might be and continue to make more of the same stuff in the face of utter failures. As a last resort, they might test the research by releasing inclusive media, but that's always a game of gotcha. If the media does well, they say it's a fluke. If it does poorly, then it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It doesn't matter if what they thought was inclusive was actually tokenism dressed in offensive stereotypes. It doesn't matter how many inclusive forms of media do well or how many exclusive forms of media fail. The bigot isn't operating from a logical, rational, common-sense perspective. Even the capitalist bigot will choose losing money over allowing marginalized peoples and perspectives centralized locations in the production of media-especially marginalized peoples and perspectives they can't control.

Would you say that comics can be used effectively as a means of political engagement on some level?

Absolutely. I'd be loath to give my nieces and nephews a comic book without first reading it and then reading it with them, though. Many comic books contain really toxic messages about race, gender, gender identity, sexuality, disability, etc. I think comic books politically engage children in ways that I find abhorrent. Most comics teach kids that physical violence is the way to solve most problems; that women should always be subject to the gaze and whims of men; that queer people don't exist, or if they do, it's as the strange punchline or comic relief; that being disabled is the worst thing in the world to be and must be "corrected"; that all races should be subordinate to the white race, and so on. It's very, very rare that I come across comics that I would give to the children in my family (Princeless is a pretty good one). But I do find that my adult friends and family are politically engaged with the comic books they read. Mostly though, they, like me, find themselves in opposition to the overt and covert sociopolitical messages in them. Most mainstream comic books, I'm convinced, are created for white, heterosexual, cisgender, non-disabled men-which makes sense since that demographic, by and large, is the one creating them.

What are your thoughts on the fact that Scarlett Johansson is playing Major Motoko in an upcoming Ghost in the Shell movie ? Do you think that this is being used as a ploy of sorts to get people from criticizing Marvel for not creating a standalone Black Widow movie?

Scarlett Johansson to be playing an Asian character is blatant racism; it's yellowface. There's just no other way for me to view it. It's bold and proud racism masquerading as a necessary casting choice. Racists will always try to justify their racism and, in the justification, attempt to remove the racism label: "It was an economic decision! And Johansson is popular, so…!" They say that as though either of those plea cops shield them from the racist label. They don't. Racism is racism irrespective of the "justification."

There's just no way in the world I will see Ghost in the Shell without an Asian actor in the lead role. Period. The end. That goes for Doctor Strange, too. Ain't no way I'm supporting that film either. My response to Hollywood racism is to do everything in my power to ensure that their racist products fail. Not that they'd ever learn their lesson: How many Exodus' or Gods of Egypts have to flop before they get it? I learned that they don't want to get it. They dismiss my views by calling me a SJW (social justice warrior)-a term that they seem to think is a slur, which reveals much more about them than it does about me-and whining about how hard it is not to be a bigot.

So instead of trying to persuade bigots why it's wrong to be bigots, I give my money to those who already know why. That's why I make it my business to support ARRAY.

As far as a Black Widow stand-alone film , I don't think there's any way Marvel can protect itself from that criticism. There is no sleight-of-hand they can pull that could distract anyone from something so obviously and egregiously sexist.

Regarding the role of women in the comic book industry, would you say that there is some room for women in the industry in terms of women taking the lead in creating and producing comics?

I wish I could say yes. The industry is so incredibly hostile to women, though. Like openly hostile; so openly that it seems almost built into the industry's design.

For example, there's this situation at DC Entertainment where one of the senior editors has been repeatedly accused of sexual harassment-for years and years, by many women-and only now, after one woman spoke publicly and other survivors of this man's behavior spoke up and social media got a hold of their testimonies-is DC "investigating." And they made sure to use DC Entertainment Diane Nelson to make the public statement about the investigation in an oh-so-cynical Public Relations 101 stunt move. Like that wasn't absolutely transparent. It's almost like if the public never found out about the allegations, DC would have been content with allowing it to continue, like sexual harassment is a normal part of their professional culture.

And it's not just the publishers; it's the audience, too. Women have complained of harassment and worse at comic conventions and other comic-related spaces including comic book retail stores. And don't venture into the comment sections at every comic book news site or message board. Misogyny is a staple. If you were a woman, would you feel welcome in such a vicious environment?

And it's a shame that this is the state of the industry because there are so many talented female creators and eager female readers who could help boost the industry's lagging sales-especially DC's, whose market share continues to shrink.

I find it strange in some ways (though in some ways not), that in many cartoons such as Justice League Unlimited that have strong, well-liked female characters such as Vixen and Hawkgirl and yet people seem to think that movies or shows based on those characters wouldn't succeed. Why would you say that is?

The answer is bigotry. Bigots cannot understanding centering anything outside of their identity sphere. It doesn't matter how many times Batman, Spider-Man, or Superman fail, they will be given multiple chances to succeed. Because they are perceived as having inherent value due to merchandising, etc. But if Vixen was given as many chances to find her stride as Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman have over these many decades, maybe she would eventually find her popularity as well. Though I must say, Vixen comes out of a kind of stereotype about black women's sexuality and womanhood; a white, patriarchal gaze which regards it as animalistic, base, degenerate, evil, and wayward. Vixen needs a black woman writer to redeem and revitalize her, and remove her from the clutches of the white supremacist sensibility that imagined her. There's a dope character in there somewhere, but a black woman's vision is needed to realize it.

How are cartoons used to enforce gender roles? I say this as the show Young Justice was canceled by DC as they thought that women wouldn't purchase toys of the largely male cast. ( http://io9.gizmodo.com/paul-dini-superhero-cartoon-execs-dont-want-largely-f-1483758317 )

It's funny you should ask this. I just wrote an essay about a superhero cartoon called DC Super Hero Girls for The Middle Spaces that explores, in some ways, the function of cartoons.

What I've come to understand is that most American media aimed at children is propaganda designed to enforce very conservative and harmful ideas about class, disability, gender, gender identity, nationality, race, sexuality, and Otherness in general. There are some exceptions ( Steven Universe may be one, though I have some minor issues with that show as well that I hope someone can correct; but that's the topic of another conversation). But for the most part, this media is attempting to indoctrinate children into becoming a very specific kind of citizen, a very specific kind of laborer, a very specific kind of taxpayer, a very specific kind of soldier, to practice a very specific kind of religion, to form a very specific kind of family-and all of those things lean noticeably to the right.

That's why we have toy commercials where only boys play with racing cars and only girls play with dolls. Shit, we even call boys' dolls "action figures" to ensure that the line between genders is solidly drawn. Cartoons, which are little more than 15- and 30-minute commercials for toys and games, are design to reinforce these outdated and limiting notions. And, unfortunately, adults have been indoctrinated far longer than children. So most adults act as the police force ensuring their children absorb these restrictive, reductive ideas.

Why do you think that so many people who are into comics want to keep the entire medium to a small few, denigrating people who are just learning about the comics or who became interests in them via the movies as not being 'true fans?' Doesn't that hurt them in a sense as a major reason comic book movies were/are being made is because of those people who haven't yet/don't read the comics?

People, I've come to understand, are afraid of change. We become anxious when we perceive that something might change because we allowed some other group to be included. The comic book fanatic that denigrates new readers because they think the new readers might cause the industry to alter its priorities and storytelling to accommodate the new reader has much in common with the xenophobe who wants to build a wall at the southern border to keep Mexicans out of the United States because they think the Mexicans will "steal their jobs." Those fears are family. They live together. And they will, thankfully, die together. It's inevitable. They're scared of that, too.

What comics/graphic novels would you say had an impact on you on a personal level and why did they have such a major impact? [For me, I would say Solanin, Blankets, and Not Simple.]

I love this question. There are a few. I tend to like comic books/graphic novels that make me think, that make me question things, that encourage me to envision a better world and a better way of life, and invite me to be a better human being:

Erika Alexander and Tony Puryear's Concrete Park is the very first comic book/graphic novel that I've ever read about people of color that wasn't plagued by the white gaze. It's the very first comic book I've encountered in which people of color are centralized, are the default, belong in the landscape, are the norm. It's the very first comic book that I felt didn't ask permission to exist in this state. It avoids stereotypes. It allows its characters the full realm of humanity and is unapologetic in allowing its Blackness to begin with a capital B. And it's a Blackness that wasn't imagined by white folks who listen to rap music and had a black roommate in college so now they think they're experts on black people even though all they can manage to conjure is black pathology. With beautiful writing and beautiful art, this comic, more than any other, provides a way for me to envision fully realized black characters in my own stories.

Phil Jimenez 's Otherworld was such a smart examination of sociopolitical hierarchy. The backdrop was Celtic myth and science fiction, but the heart of the story was about the lovelessness that defines contemporary conservative ideology and how it can only lead to human extinction. Art wise, every page is a masterpiece. Every detail is rendered meticulously. And the colors were outrageous. The series only lasted seven issues when it was scheduled to go for 12. So I never got to read the conclusion, but what I did read impacted my personal politics in a very profound way.

Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie's Young Avengers broke all of the rules in terms of narrative and visual storytelling, and did so with elegance, grace, and aplomb. They literally broke the boundaries of the panels in their stories-the art often allowed the characters to actually use the white space between panels as weapons! And then they broke one of the biggest boundaries of all: In their final issue, they revealed that every member of the team was queer. Basically, all the things the industry would have said couldn't be done because it would affect sales, they did. Their fearlessness bolstered my own.

Robert Jones, Jr. is a writer from Brooklyn, N.Y. He earned both his B.F.A. in creative writing and M.F.A. in fiction from Brooklyn College. His work has been featured in The New York Times , Gawker , The Grio , and the Feminist Wire . He is the creator of the social justice social media community, Son of Baldwin, which can be found on Facebook , Google Plus , Instagram , Medium , Tumblr , and Twitter . His first novel is in the revision stage and he's currently working on the second.

Marxism, Intersectionality, and Therapy

By David I. Backer

Intersectionality and marxism are not on great terms, supposedly.[1] While some thinkers and activists recognize the need for intersectional insights in research and organizing, others maintain more negative attitudes and analyses towards such insights. The negative attitudes and analyses combine a new resent with the old tension between feminist and poststructuralist critiques of Marxist theory and the latter, sometimes named "identity politics" or "identarian politics." While intersectionalists claim that race, class, and gender (and other categories and discourses) compound, mingle, and mix in unique ways during particular events and experiences, Marxists allege that class trumps all with respect to oppression. The intersectionalists call for specific and particularized redress of compounded oppressions which sometimes do not include class or, in other cases, are lost when class is the sole focus (or any single category of oppression by itself). The Marxists, on the other hand, call for changing the relations of production, focusing on class. Racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and other oppressions will be ameliorated, or at least the conditions for their amelioration can only begin, after that shift in exploitative, alienating, and degrading relations of capitalist production. The debate leaves two conflicting camps on the Left. One with a particularized sensitivity to the complex layers of oppression, and the other with a fervent clarity regarding the link in the chain of domination which, if broken, will release the people from their bonds.

The choice is ultimately a false one, though the divisiveness it inspires is real. The matter deserves special attention, and some have begun to seriously consider it.[2] I want to focus on the term "relations of production," since, for the Marxists, everything comes down to a shift in these relations. Thinkers as diverse as G.A. Cohen and Louis Althusser confirm, in their readings of Marx, that relations of production are what defines a social formation as any given moment: you can have any set of productive forces, but the kind of society you have--the modes of production--is largely defined by the relations of production. Looking at the term "relations of production" again shows that the tension between intersectionality and Marxism is, frankly, dumb.

Marx defines production, at least in the Grundrisse, as tackling nature and making our lives together. [3] A "relation" of production is a kind of dynamic which forms between people when making their lives together, as well as a dynamic which forms between people and nonhuman things (like the means of production).[4] Marx's German word for "relation" in "relation of production" is Verhältnis. In the Grundrisse and the crucial opening chapters of Capital Vol. 1, the term has two meanings which fit with the definition I just gave.[5] The first meaning is in the sense of a mathematical ratio: a relation of production can mean an absolute or relative value of commodities in terms of other commodities, like prices or wages, for example. The second meaning is in the sense of person-to-person interactions like speech, action, and working together.

This division is useful for distinguishing different kinds of Marxist critique that have evolved over the years, one example being the critical theorists' distinction between recognition and redistribution (Nancy Fraser's is the best articulation of this [6]). Take exploitation of labor, for example. Exploitation, in its distributive sense, occurs as a mathematical allotment based on the value of work completed and value received in exchange for that work. It is a mathematical relation between employer and employee. The value of work completed is always greater than the value in wages received, leaving employees bereft of the full value of their work. You can never be paid fully for what you do when you work for a wage, since the wage relation is an exploitative relation of production. Exploitation in its recognitive sense, in contrast (sometimes called alienation), refers to what it's like when people are exploited, both subjectively and intersubjectively (think Hegel's master-slave dialectic). The distributive sense of "relation of production" is mathematical and the recognitive sense of "relation of production" is more subjective, identarian.

Here's my claim. We should read Marx as saying that relations of production are both recognitive and distributive: that a single relation of production has a recognitive and redistributive aspect. There are two meanings of "relation of production," so why shouldn't the term mean both? Making our lives together in production requires both recognition between persons and mathematical ratios in the distribution of resources among persons. Recognition and distribution are two senses of the same notion, two moments of one dynamic, two sides of the same coin: they are simultaneously occasioned in any given relation of production.

If a relation of production is both redistributive and recognitive, then changing the relations of production requires changing both recognition and redistribution. To reverse oppression, in other words, both are necessary and sufficient. Neither on its own is enough for revolution. Making life together justly--an emancipatory production--means having just distributions and just recognitions. The Verhaltnissen in a just society has to have each of these, conjoined, not a disjunction or causal implication. Thinking one is more important than one or the other, or that somehow one must be antecedent to the other, is dumb. Changing relations of production means changing ratios of distribution and changing interative practices so that they are recognitive and not misrecognitive.

Radicals in the past have understood this point clearly. Fred Hampton understood it very clearly, as did many members of the Black Panther Party and others in the Black Power movement of the 1960s. Even Lenin and Marx showed evidence of understanding this point, specifically regarding the United States. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor talks about this inclusive tradition in her excellent new book, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. [7] Though they may not have put it in these terms, some of the most effective activists and deepest radical thinkers in the leftist tradition understood that relations of production are dynamics composed of recognition and distribution, especially in the United States context.

There are at least two important kinds of oppression which flow from the two senses of "relation of production," whose conceptual relationship has been poorly formulated: distributive oppression and misrecognitive oppression. The dumb question to ask is: What causal role does an exploitative mathematical ratio of distribution play in oppression, generally speaking? How important is the first sense of verhaltnisse to the second?

One position, taken by some Marxists, is that there is a direct causal link between the two, going one way. If the mathematical ratio is evened out, if there are widespread non-exploitative distributions, then oppression's chokehold is broken. All the recognitive problems will collapse, like a body without bones, as soon as the correct ratios are put in place. Another position, taken by critics of the Marxists, is that the two are not causally linked. Other oppressions will survive and thrive (in fact, have survived and thrived) changes in the distributive ratios: women, people of color, marginalized sexualities and genders, and others will face the same recognitive oppressions whether or not they own the means of production together with others.

That these are two opposing positions is dumb. Rather than constituting some kind of crisis for the soul of the Left, they merely delimit two important aspects of liberation that both need to occur in tandem if the goal is changing the relations of production. Recognitive (misrecognitive) oppression must be redressed, and the way in which it is redressed must focus on the complexly layered, compounded experiences and events of those who face it by finding ways to unlearn old recognitive patterns and learn new ones. Distributive oppression must be redressed, and the way it is redressed must focus on securing the right kinds of mathematical ratios in distribution through changes in ownership of the means of production.

Perhaps "dumb" is too dumb a label for this false dichotomy. Given that distribution and recognition are both necessary and sufficient for relations of production, and the point of our work on the Left is changing relations of production, I propose the following. Whenever you start to think that a relation of production is not both recognitive and distributive (or you hear someone else talking like it is more one than the other), this a therapeutic issue, not a political one. By "therapeutic" I mean a kind of problem which is adjacent, but not identical, to the kinds of oppression activist work seeks to change. Therapeutic issues are made of traumas, desires, frustrations, projections, conflicts, and ambivalences. They are social and individual, and they are important for politics, but they are not political. These issues are not rational, but rather unconscious and implicit, and can compel you and others to think that relations of production are either recognitive or distributive, rather than both.

My proposal is that conflict over the hierarchy of distribution over recognition (or vice versa) in relations of production results from therapeutic problems in the relations of activism and not political problems in the relations of production which the activism is trying to change.

I think more people should go to therapy in general, but perhaps Leftists in particular would benefit from examining unconscious ambivalences and conflicts, specifically around this issue. Why would you come to think that redistribution is more important than recognition, or vice versa, rather than part of a singular relation of production? Therapeutic issues create disagreements about the relations of production when left unaddressed, like thinking there is some hierarchy between recognition and redistribution. Most likely, these "hierarchies" are just reified feelings of loss, frustration, or disappointment which neurotic persons have insinuated into the theoretical record.

I have been in therapy for years and I consider it part of my liberation, but not identical to my activism. The therapy helps me distinguish the conjuncture from my own baggage; or, better yet, therapy mobilizes my baggage so it compels me to take a more inquisitive approach to thinking about the conjuncture. These things--baggage and conjuncture--get confused, and the confusion trickles into how we work together to make another society. Too long has activism not been accompanied by liberatory therapy; too long have therapeutic issues been mistaken for political issues; too many political spaces have been hijacked for therapeutic purposes; too many meetings and debates have been spent going in exhausting circles. The confusion can lead to unhelpful splinters, petty fractions, and mismatching views of the conjuncture. Unfortunately, unaddressed therapeutic problems in the relations of activism can ultimately leave oppressive relations of production in place. A unified and inclusive view of relations of production as both recognitive and distributive, while creating access and then going to therapy, might help. It may show that Marxism and intersectionality are on the same side and more powerful when they work together.

David I. Backer is an author, teacher, and activist. For more about him, here is his blog.

Notes

[1] Eve Mitchell, "I am a Woman and Human: A Marxist-Feminist Critique of Intersectionality Theory, Unity and Struggle, http://unityandstruggle.org/2013/09/12/i-am-a-woman-and-a-human-a-marxist-feminist-critique-of-intersectionality-theory/ ; "Is Intersectionality Just Another Form of Identity Politics?" Feminist Fight Back, http://www.feministfightback.org.uk/is-intersectionality-just-another-form-of-identity-politics/ '
Mark Fisher, "Exiting the Vampire Castle," The North Star, http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=11299, Julie Birchill, "Don't You Dare Tell Me To Check My Privilege," The Spectator, http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/02/dont-you-dare-tell-me-to-check-my-privilege/ My own thinking about this question was spurred by a tweet passed along by Benjamin Kunkel, which said "let them eat intersectionality."

[2] Kevin B. Anderson, "Karl Marx and Intersectionality," Logos, http://logosjournal.com/2015/anderson-marx/

[3] Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Penguin: New York, 1993, p. 85-90. We might reasonably stipulate that most mentions of "relation" (85, 99, 108, 109, 159, 165) are occasions of communicative recognition, though more study of the German could reveal otherwise. Marx appears to write the word Verhältnis for "relation," which can mean "ratio" as well as "relationship." The former sense is a correlation between ideas while the latter implies a correspondence between speakers.

[4] G.A. Cohen distinguishes the term like this in Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defense.

[5] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Penguin International, 1996, pp. 45-50.

[6] Fraser, N., & Honneth, A. (2003). Redistribution or recognition?: a political-philosophical exchange. Verso.

[7] Taylor, K. (2015). From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. New York: Haymarket, 2015, see chapter 7 pp. 205-209.

Capitalism's Depleted Reserves: Recognizing and Preparing for Systemic Breakdown

By Ben Peck

The capitalist crisis of 2008 was rescued by an enormous transfusion of public money into the banks. The system has been on life-support ever since.

Despite this, the bourgeois see little prospects of a recovery for their system. Rather, they wring their hands and impotently grimace in anticipation of another slump. Many consider this now a question of "when", not "if".

An organism in crisis will begin to burn off its reserves of fat in order to survive. Austerity has been capitalism's economic equivalent of this process. The system has eaten deeply into its reserves, particularly in the advanced capitalist countries. All the accumulated reforms conquered by the working class in the preceding historical period; relatively decent wages, the welfare state, pensions, etc; in order to pay for a system in crisis have been, or are in the process of being, burned away.

One particularly rich reserve has been Chinese capitalism, which has been heavily depleted. In the wake of the crisis the Chinese pumped half a trillion dollars into their economy. It was one of the greatest Keynesian interventions the world has ever seen. Rather than merely propping up the banks, the intervention contributed markedly to the real economy. According to the former US treasury secretary Larry Summers, between 2010 and 2013 China poured more cement than America did in the whole of the twentieth century! Up until last summer a city the size of Rome was being built in China every two weeks. This intervention gave a clear impulse to the Chinese and world economy.

However, the Chinese reserve is now near exhaustion and the effects of the stimulus are turning into their opposite. Debt has ballooned from $7trn to $28trn - 282% of GDP. Imports and exports are falling. The massive economic stimulus has ended up in a massive crisis of overproduction, provoking a world-wide crisis of steel. In Redcar and Port Talbot in Britain steel works are closing, destroying communities. On the other side of the world, the same course is being taken in China itself.

Political reserves

The depletion of these "economic reserves" has had a corresponding effect on capitalism's "political reserves", which are also being burned away. The old political arrangements are falling apart, including many of the traditional workers' parties. According to a report in The Economist recently, the social democracies in Europe stand at their lowest level of support for seventy years.

The classic example is PASOK, which commanded forty-five percent of the electorate in Greece prior to the crisis. On the basis of its complete capitulation to the Troika and the collapse of the Greek economy it has been reduced to a mere four percent. PASOK is now hanging on to a place in parliament by its fingernails.

In Europe in 2015 the social democrats lost power in Denmark and recorded their worst ever results in Poland, Spain, Finland and also came very close in Britain.

In France the so-called Socialist President, Francois Hollande, is the most unpopular leader in seventy years. By attacking the labour laws his government has provoked a mass movement, which on March 31st carried out a general strike involving 1.2m French workers united against the socialist government.

The strike involved a significant participation of French youth, who now compose a very class conscious vanguard of the struggle. These youth did not go home, but stayed out in an occupation of the squares, the "Nuit Debout" movement, which is reminiscent of the Syntagma and Indignados movement in Greece and Spain. These movements were the basis for the rise of parties which have since supplanted the social democracies. It is not difficult to imagine the same process developing in France.

People are turning away from the social democrats in their droves everywhere, laments The Economist. The explanation is not complicated. Where the social democrats offer no alternative to austerity, but instead work hand-in-glove with the bosses to implement it, they completely undermine their reason for existence in the eyes of the working class.

Even in Britain, the two-hundred thousand-strong movement behind Corbyn is not necessarily enamoured with the Labour Party. In Greece, support for Syriza has collapsed to sixteen percent following its betrayal of the OXI movement and its resumption of the austerity programme of its predecessors.

This crisis of Social Democracy is part of the general crisis of bourgeois democracy, which is fast expending its political capital. This is a dangerous development for the ruling class, as noted by the Financial Times' Martin Wolf on February 2nd in an article entitled "Bring our elites closer to the people":

"...we already face the danger that the gulf between economic and technocratic elites on the one hand, and the mass of the people on the other, becomes too vast to be bridged. At the limit, trust might break down altogether. Thereupon, the electorate will turn to outsiders to clean up the system. We are seeing such a shift towards trust in outsiders not only in the US but also in many European countries."

The reference is to the Trump-Sanders phenomenon in the US, which was anticipated in Europe by the rise of Syriza, Podemos, the SNP and Corbyn on the left, and also the French NF and, more recently, the AfD in Germany, on the right. Class polarisation is tearing at the seams of capitalism's political veneer.

Consciously or unconsciously, when the bourgeois start to worrying about "outsiders" interfering in their system, what they actually express is the fear of the working class taking an interest in the way society is run, and interfering in their affairs.

When the next global downturn arrives, the period between that crisis and 2008 will mark a watershed period in the history of the capitalist system. It will be characterised as one in which the system, far from developing, burned away many of the reserve layers at its disposal, economically, socially and politically, which had acted as "cushioning" in 2008.

This will give the class struggles of the not-too distant future a far sharper character. The struggle on the part of the bourgeois will be far more desperate. The struggle on the part of the working class will take place after a period in which sick and enfeebled capitalism has been able to do nothing to solve its fundamental problems. Illusions that previously existed have been burned away, many defenders of the old system discredited. This is something we must prepare for, and intervene in, to build the forces of Marxism.

Originally published at In Defence of Marxism.

Who's Afraid of Mazdak? Prophetic Egalitarianism, Islamism, and Socialism

By Derek Ide

The year was 1974. Algeria's National Liberation Front (FLN) had liberated their country from the French occupying forces and the pieds noirs (French settlers) only twelve years prior. Under the leadership of Ahmed Ben Bella (1962-5) and then Houari Boumédiène (1965-78), Algeria underwent a series of state-building initiatives immediately following independence. The Algerian leadership operated within the parameters of a loosely defined "socialism" that became the organizing ethos under which they constructed the newly independent state.

Algeria was still in the midst of its "socialist" transformation when, a year earlier in 1973, the president of Egypt, Anwar al-Sadat (1970-81), embarked upon his neoliberal Infitah ("Opening") program. This nascent economic program significantly augmented Western capitalist institutions control over Egypt and would eventually overhaul the "Arab Socialism" that had been arduously built from the top-down by his predecessor, the pan-Arab nationalist hero Gamal abd Al-Nasser (1954-70). To deal with the remnants of the Nasserist and Communist left in Egypt, Sadat slowly released many members of the Ikhwaan (Muslim Brothers) from prison. While they had been locked up under Nasser, Sadat viewed the Islamists, including al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya (Islamic Group), as a counterweight to the still active Egyptian left, especially on university campuses. Violence against the left was often encouraged, and the Islamists eventually came to dominate many university settings.[1]

While the Islamists engaged in violence against the left in Egypt on behalf of the state, the Islamists of the Maghrib launched a new ideological war against the "socialist" states in North Africa. In 1974 Abdellatif al-Soltani published what historian Benjamin Stora called the "first manifesto of the Islamist movement in Algeria." This "virulent critique" of the "Socialism of the Algerian leaders" invoked the name of none other than the 6th century Zoroastrian prophet and Iranian reformer Mazdak. Al-Soltani's polemic was titled "Mazdakism is the Origin of Socialism" [2] and it denounced the moral decay of the "destructive principles imported from abroad." All political action must emanate from "within the framework of the party of God, as opposed to the party of Satan," it proclaimed, implicating that the "socialist" policies of the Algerian state as deriving from the latter. Al-Soltani continued that there must be a "single state with a single leader, founded on Muslim principles."[3] For the Islamists like al-Soltani, socialism was something foreign, a contaminant that could not be reconciled with the all-encompassing totality that was Islam.

Yet, the Algerian state during its "socialist" stage was far from secular in any sense of the word. Even at the peak of these state-building and industrialization exercises, the Islamic lexicon was dominant and the state was heavily adorned in religious garb: Islam was the official state religion, no future law could ever "target the state religion," jumaa became the official day of rest, gambling and alcohol sales to Muslims were illegal, Muslims couldn't raise pigs, the president had to be a Muslim, the amount of masajid more than doubled (2,200 to 5,829) from 1966 to 1980, and government sponsored seminars on Islamic thought took place annually.[4] Thus, critiques of the Algerian state on the basis of any perceived secularism were relatively desiccated. Instead, the primary enemy for the Islamists was the socialist model of development; their issue was with "socialism" in any form or degree, not with the professed religiosity of the state. Not only was Marxism an "imported" ideology foreign to Islam, socialism was also an ideological descendent of Mazdakism, a dangerous heresy against God that any good Islamist ought to struggle against.

But who was Mazdak, and why was this pre-Islamic Iranian prophet's name being pejoratively drug into Islamist political discourse in 20th century Algeria? Mazdak was a Zoroastrian prophet who lived and preached during early 6th century. Although details of his life are tenuous at best, a few tenants of his ideology and religious teachings have been established. Mazdak claimed to be a prophet of Ahura Mazda, the monotheistic god of Zoroastrianism. However, Mazdak's Zoroastrianism was an egalitarian rejection of the mainstream clerical establishment and most of his teachings were considered heresy by the Zoroastrian clergy. A significant element of Mazdak's religious thought focused on economic egalitarianism, including an emphasis on developing communal property and community work where all people benefited. Although Mazdak himself was a Zoroastrian Mobad (priest), his teachings were radically anti-clerical in the fact that they accused the mainstream Zoroastrian clergy of oppressing the Persian population and causing poverty through excessive accumulation.

Mazdak's socially conservative critics accused him of extending "communal property" to the point of "sharing wives" and "free love." Despite these allegations, Mazdak's real crime was his economic message. It was his radical egalitarianism that caused him to become a target of the state. Zoroastrian scholar M.N. Dhalla articulated the core teachings of Mazdakism:

"The account of Mazdak's system is very meagre; but it is known that he accounted Jealousy, Wrath, and Greed as the three main causes of all evil in the world. Everyone, according to Mazdak's teachings, should be given equal opportunity and equal share of the enjoyment of the earthly possessions of God. So it was originally ordained by God, but that natural order has been upset by the aggressive strong for their own self-aggran­dizement. Society should therefore return to that original ideal state. These revolutionary teachings thrilled for a time Iran, and exercised a powerful fascination on the masses. The crisis was brought to a head when, far from taking any initiative to stamp out the heresy, the king encouraged it, and finally embraced it. His son, Prince Noshirvan, summoned the Dasturs and Mobads to consider the situation. It was certain that the cult would spread and the young prince adopted severe measures to suppress it, lest it should menace the public peace. The clergy who viewed the new heresy with great alarm, advised rigorous measures to extirpate the threatening creed. Mazdak did not live long to preach his doctrine, for the prince arranged a banquet for him and his followers and put them all to the sword in A.D. 528."[5]

Thus Mazdak and his followers were executed by the state and the religious establishment for the "excitement" they encouraged amongst the Iranian masses. A variety of accounts of Mazdak's death show the gruesome hatred ruling elites harbored for Mazdak. One narration suggests that Mazdak was presented with the spectacle of a "human garden" by his executors when three thousand of his followers were buried alive with their feet sticking from the ground. According to this account Mazdak himself was then hanged upside down and shot with arrows. Other stories of his execution employ equally morbid methods of torture.

Overtime Mazdak and "Mazdakism" became a common pejorative utilized by religious scholars, both Zoroastrian and Islamic, to denigrate any radically egalitarian religious philosophies within their respective traditions. While medieval Muslim historiography often condemned the "socialist" aspects of Mazdakism, this critique was carried over effectively into the 20th century, and not just by way of al-Soltani and the Algerian Islamists. As early as 1919 the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Mohammed Bakheet, was vehemently condemning Mazdakism as a predecessor of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Bakheet wrote that the communists in Russia represented an "ancient 'way' and it is the creed of a Persian hypocrite named Zoroaster." [6] But this "ancient way" was only spread to the masses by a "man from Mazria called Mazdaq" who "taught communism of property and of persons, and put it in their mind that this, although it might not be from religion, was at least honorable in the doing." Mazdak's "heresy" furthermore articulated the idea that "God furnished the means of living to be divided equally among the people… [so] they decided to take from the rich and give to the poor… [and] the masses seized this opportunity wholeheartedly with Mazdaq and their followers aiding them in all their views." After condoning the slaughter of Mazdak and his followers, the Grand Mufti goes on to explain that "Islam was introduced and swept this false way aside." Furthermore, Bakheet proclaimed, God himself had "undertook the distribution of the means of living among His creatures by saying 'We divided up their livelihood among them' and 'God gives the livelihood to whom He wishes from among His servants,' and so on." Thus God had ordained prodigious inequality, and it was no place for mere humans to challenge God's will in this regard. Bakheet furthers his critique of the Bolsheviks, proclaiming that their "way" is:

"…one which destroys all Divine laws… it legalizes blood-shedding, allows trespass upon the property of others, treachery, lies, and rape… demolishes human society, destroyed the order of the world, leads to apostasy from religion, threatens the whole world with horrible distress and bitter troubles, and instigates the lower classes against all systems founded upon reason, morals, and virtue.

Accordingly, every true Moslem ought to avoid such people and their misguided views and false doctrines and deeds, because they are undoubtedly apostates." [7]

Indeed, it is this historical memory that al-Soltani and other Islamists drew upon in 1974 to validate their "Socialism as Mazdakism" critique of the Algerian state.

It is no wonder then that the United States and other imperialist powers often viewed the Islamists as appropriate vehicles through which they could combat pan-Arab nationalism and left-wing movements in the Middle East. At nearly every turn the Islamists presented themselves as enemies of left-wing and progressive movements and as such could be readily absorbed into the larger imperialist framework. When the Islamic Salvation Front (ISF) finally took power in Algeria in the 1990s, they hastened the privatization of the state sector and the dismantling of any remnants of the socialist project. But examples of the Islamist movement serving the interests of imperialism go far beyond Algeria. Islamists of the Maghrib undermined the legitimacy of anti-imperialist states like Libya and Syria. Egyptian leaders used the Ikhwaan to undermine the pan-Arab and nationalist left. While the Palestine Liberation Organization, including its second largest party the communist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), engaged in militant guerrilla war against Israel, Palestinian segments attached to the Egyptian Muslim brothers (those that would eventually become Hamas) refused to fight for decades. Instead they opted to try to "Islamicize" Palestinian society before engaging in the struggle and focused on developing enough cadre to position themselves at the forefront of the Palestinian national liberation movement. During the events of "Black September," the Jordanian Muslim Brothers sided with the Hashemite monarchy, originally installed by the British, in its brutal repression against and expulsion of the secular Palestine Liberation Organization. Most explicitly, the "brave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan" (as they were infamously eulogized in the Rambo film) worked in tandem with the United States to overthrow the revolutionary communist government of Afghanistan established in 1978. Thus, wherever the modern incarnation of "Mazdakism" needed to be undermined, the Islamists were there to do it.

Not all Islamic theology has been predicated upon disdain for radically egalitarian messages, however. For some Mazdak was even a religious figure that could be rehabilitated within the framework of a sort of "Islamic liberation theology," one shares some characteristics with its Catholic counterpart in Latin America. For instance, as Shireen Hunter notes the Iranian scholar Ali Shariati "believed the Iranian mind has always been attracted to ideas of social activism for the sake of justice." Shariati, who spiritualized Marxist notions of class conflict and social struggle within the lexicon of Shia Islam, appeared to have held an interest in Mazdak himself.[8] Shariati brilliantly satirized the arguments put forward by the class of religious elites, such as the Grand Mufti quoted above, who perpetually told the poor to be content with their lot in life.

"Have patience, my religious brother. Leave the world to those who are of it. Let hunger be the capital for the pardon of your sins. Forebear the hell of life for the rewards of paradise in the Hereafter. If you only knew the reward of people who tolerate oppression and poverty in this world! Keep your stomach empty of food, O brother, in order to see the light of wisdom in it. What is the remedy? Whatever befalls us. The pen of destiny has written on our foreheads from before: The prosperous are prosperous from their mother's womb and the wretched are wretched from their mother's womb. Every protest is a protest against the Will of God. Give thanks for His giving or non-giving. Let the deeds of everyone be accounted for on the Day of Reckoning. Be patient with oppression and give thanks for poverty. Do not breathe a word so that you do not lose the reward of the patient in the Hereafter. Release your body so as not to require clothes! Do not forget that the protest of a creature is protest against the Creator. The accounting of Truth and justice is the work of God, not the masses. In death, not in life. Do not pass judgment for the Judge of the judgment is God. Do not be shamed on the Day of Resurrection when you see that God, the Merciful, the Compassionate forgives the oppressor who you had not forgiven in this world. Everyone is responsible for his own deeds." [9]

Thus, for Shariati these views that condemn the poor to a life of misery were mere religious facades intended to placate the population and perpetuate economic inequality. The religious leaders who tell the masses to wait for their pie in the sky and dare not shake the foundations of social inequality while on Earth were the real scoundrels.

In stark contradistinction to the Sunni Islamists who condemned "Socialism as Mazdakism," Shariati laid forth his revolutionary and radically egalitarian theology in the quintessential work The Philosophy of History: Cain and Abel. There Shariati posited that "History represents an unbroken flow of events that, like man himself, is dominated by a dialectical contradiction, a constant warfare between two hostile and contradictory elements that began with the creation of humanity and has been waged at all places and at all times, and the sum total of which constitutes history." This "contradiction" began with the origin of human history, the struggle between Cain and Abel. Abel, as the manifestation of pastoralism, represents a sort of "primitive communism" where accumulation is impossible. Alternatively, Cain is a reflection of agricultural modes of production and represents the first schism between social classes in human society. Thus:

"In my opinion, the murder of Abel at the hands of Cain represents a great development, a sudden swerve in the course of history, the most important event to have occurred in all human life. It interprets and explains that event in a most profound fashion scientifically, sociologically, and with reference to class. The story concerns the end of primitive communism, the disappearance of man's original system of equality and brotherhood, expressed in the hunting and fishing system of productivity (equated with Abel), and its replacement by agricultural production, the creation of private ownership, the formation of the first class society, the system of discrimination and exploitation, the worship of wealth and lack of true faith, the beginning of enmity, rivalry, greed, plunder, slavery and fratricide (equated with Cain). The death of Abel and the survival of Cain are objective, historical realities, and the fact that henceforth religion, life, economy, government and the fate of men were all in the hands of Cain represents a realistic, critical and progressive analysis of what happened…

The wing represented by Abel is that of the subject and the oppressed; i.e., the people, those who throughout history have been slaughtered and enslaved by the system of Cain, the system of private ownership which has gained ascendancy over human society. The war between Cain and Abel is the permanent war of history which has been waged by every generation. The banner of Cain has always been held high by the ruling classes, and the desire to avenge the blood of Abel has been inherited by succeed­ing generations of his descendants‑the subjected people who have fought for justice, freedom and true faith in a struggle that has continued, one way or another, in every age. The weapon of Cain has been religion, and the weapon of Abel has also been religion…

This inevitable revolution of the future will be the culmina­tion of the dialectical contradiction that began with the battle of Cain and Abel and has continued to exist in all human societies, between the ruler and the ruled. The inevitable outcome of history will be the triumph of justice, equity and truth.

It is the responsibility of every individual in every age to determine his stance in the constant struggle between the two wings we have described, and not to remain a spectator. While believing in a certain form of historical determinism, we believe also in the freedom of the individual and his human responsi­bility, which lie at the very heart of the process of historical determinism. We do not see any contradiction between the two, because history advances on the basis of a universal and scientif­ically demonstrable process of determinism, but "I" as an individual human being must choose whether to move forward with history and accelerate its determined course with the force of knowledge and science, or to stand with ignorance, egoism, opportunism in the face of history, and be crushed."[10]

Whereas Bakheet condemned Mazdak for inciting revolution amongst the masses and Al-Soltani issued his invective of "Socialism as Mazdakism," Shariati invites the revolutionary and egalitarian struggle. Far too many Islamists have lent their services to the "system of Cain" contra the socialist and left-wing "system of Abel." Naturally, Mazdak was a manifestation of the latter. It is imperative for the future of humanity that we follow in the footsteps of Mazdak and Shariati's Abel, not the oppressive forces of Cain and their religious interlocutors.

Notes

[1] See Hossam El-Hamalawy, MERIP, http://www.merip.org/mer/mer242/comrades-brothers

[2] Alternatively translated as "Socialism is the Descendent of Mazdakism."

[3] See Benjamin Stora, Algeria 1830-2000: A Short History, 171-2.

[4] Stora, 171.

[5] M.N. Dhalla, History of Zoroastrianism, http://www.avesta.org/dhalla/history5.htm

[6] See Tareq Ismael and Rifa'at El-Sa'id, The Communist Movement in Egypt, 1920-1988, 164.

[7] See Ismael and El-Sa'id, 166-7.

[8] Shireen Hunter, Reformist Voices of Islam: Mediating Islam and Modernity, 54.

[9] See Ali Shariati, Religion vs. Religion.

[10] Ali Shariati, The Philosophy of History: Cain and Abel.