Why We Need To Share Millennial Stories Through Independent Platforms

By Zhivko Illeieff

I owe my introduction to American culture to the stand-up comedy of Bill Hicks and George Carlin. This culture hack, fortunate for me and perhaps terrifying for any ruling class, was possible because I was born and raised in Bulgaria where BitTorrent technology in the 2000's gave me access to counter-culture content that wasn't available on traditional media, as opposed to Baywatch, Friends, and every Bulgarian grandparents' favorite, The Bold And The Beautiful.

Once you resonate with higher truth in one medium, it tends to lead you to similar expressions in other places. Hicks and Carlin lead me to the art of Alex Grey and Robert Crumb, the music of Frank Zappa and Tool, the writings of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, the philosophy of Cornel West, and other artists and truth-tellers whose dissenting ideas had found ways to escape the filtration devices of the information industry.

In the meantime, I witnessed how the Bulgarian oligarchy fought for control of the country's drug trade, information channels, industries, and ultimately power over the Bulgarian population.

Much like the U.S., different messiahs and economic "experts" from important places like Wall Street and The World Bank often descend into the Bulgarian political stage with empty promises of progress and equality, only to push the country further into corporate control . The events after 1989, when "communists" became "democrats" overnight, were characterized by mass privatization, increased inequality through the gospel of austerity, high levels of corruption, radicalization of right-wing parties, and widespread demoralization of young people who became apathetic to political issues. Most "well-intentioned" politicians, pundits, and experts who revolved around marketing campaigns to "fix Bulgaria" turned out to be frauds who bamboozled the Bulgarian population through their narratives.

Today, about 2.5 million Bulgarians, or nearly 35% of the country's population, live in severe material deprivation , meaning they can't afford to pay for rent or other basic necessities.

Those responsible for Bulgaria's downward spiral are not unlike their American counterparts. They use the same techniques (mass media control, extreme censorship, cuts in social programs, market monopolization, and other neoliberal tactics), and achieve the same results-increased income inequality, low living standards, mass demoralization, ineffective health care, political polarization, and so on.

Not much is needed to connect the dots. In the end of the day, the mechanism which turns public wealth into private gains boils down to how the ruling elite uses different narratives to manipulate the opinions and behaviors of millions of people . What the work of artists, musicians, comedians, and activists teaches us is how to spot this mechanism. Simply put, truth-tellers point out what oligarchs around the world work hard to conceal-the truth about poverty , war , and capitalism , the power of language , the mechanism of propaganda , and other "cracks in the Matrix."

After I moved to the U.S., I quickly understood why the counter-culture icons I discovered oversees are not embraced by " official culture " in the U.S.-what they say is viewed as a threat to the ruling class. Individuals and platforms that elevate independent thinking are bound to be recuperated, whitewashed, censored, silenced, and ridiculed by the economic and political elite, and replaced by less-threatening ideologies, often by those who hide behind their allegiance to democracy. This is why talking about last night's football game or Hollywood's latest ode to the U.S. military makes you a "productive member of society," while questioning the Democrat-Republican duopoly and other manifestations of the corporate state makes you a "conspiracy theorist" or, more recently, a "Russian spy."

Yet, tricksters tend to find their way around culture engineers. And once their truth resonates with your beliefs, it is hard to go back to corporate-funded, commercially interrupted daily news and propaganda.

The lessons that Hicks and Carlin taught me early on in my life were more useful than any official education I received, as their comedy not only analyzed the fabric of American greed, but also provided a framework for deconstructing the propaganda that enables such greed to take place on a massive scale . Who can watch Hicks's bit on the first Iraq war and not describe his critique of the military industrial complex as prophetic? This is especially true in 2017, when 89% of U.S. Democrats voted in favor of a $700 billion defense policy bill.

It is such signs of "bipartisanship" that reveal the one essential counter-culture lesson-question everything. Question the Democrats. Question the Republicans. Question the news. Question even those who tell you to question and especially those who tell you not to. This is the legacy of those who stood up and "lifted the veil" to expose, in Zappa's famous words, "the brick wall at the back of the theater." There are many who continue this work today. It is a fight worth having.

One vital part of this fight is about the right to shape our stories-not by being passive, obedient consumers, but by talking with each other, working through our differences, and living in a society where people's voices matter. To do so, we have to expose and counter top-down efforts that box us into categories and divide us through elaborate fairy tales.

Perhaps this is why I pursued projects that allowed me to document first-person narratives. In college, I lead a team that documented diverse perspectives about the totalitarian regime in Bulgaria. After that, I worked at Appalshop, short for "Appalachian Workshop," where I produced work that voiced the concerns of Appalachians and rural America. Both places have a lot in common-their people, history, traditions, and natural beauty represent a treasure for humanity. Yet, they are plagued by the results of political and corporate greed, as well as propaganda that vilifies and blames the poor for their problems, while pushing the neoliberal agenda of "corporations first."

Popular culture often neglects the rich history and traditions of those places and focuses on diminishing them and their people. Bulgarians are portrayed as hordes of immigrants and unskilled workers bent on storming the shores of Britain and other "civilized" countries. Similarly, Appalachians have a long history of being a target for journalists, photographers, and pundits who exploit and sensationalize people's addictions and financial struggles.

Even worse-a selected few who come from such places often use their heritage to add credibility to negative stereotypes portrayed in the mainstream media. I see this in Bulgarian politicians who diminish their own country's heritage for private gains. I see it in J.D. Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy," which continues to be heavily criticized for its disingenuous accounts of the causes of Appalachian struggles.

Such commentators are entitled to their opinions. However, their efforts to speak on behalf of millions of people, while ignoring the institutional and corporate causes of inequality and structural violence , need to be examined and countered. This is especially true in cases where "official culture" coronates such individuals as spokespersons for millions of people.

A case in point was the 2016 presidential election in which the U.S. mainstream media provided a tribune to a real estate magnate and a hustler, and thus legitimized him as a viable candidate. Today, those same corporate pundits, owned by the Comcasts and Walt Disney's of the world, cast themselves as leaders of "the Resistance."

Similarly, evoking the "millennial generation" often becomes a way for corporate media to control the narrative of tens of millions of people. By letting corporate forces frame the issues of young Americans, we also let them set the limits of the range of opinions that are allowed to pass through mainstream media. Chomsky advises that we view agenda-setting media as what they truly are-corporations owned by even bigger conglomerates Therefore, corporate media's content on the "millennial generation" can be viewed as a product that utilizes the millennial label for its own profit.

Do you ever wonder why the origin of the millennial label is not well known? As it turns out, the label originated from the books of Neil Howe and William Strauss-two amateur historians with connections to the ruling class . Essentially, they transformed the idea of generations into a capitalist-friendly, reductive narrative that provides a story for anyone willing to ignore its lack of scientific credibility .

While there's certainly a case to be made for using generational labels as a shorthand to investigating complex societal issues (as this blog post hopefully illustrates), there's a difference between genuine inquiries into generational dynamics, and using such labels to sensationalize or obfuscate the issues of tens of millions of people for private benefit.

I regard the millennial label as an instrument for corporate and government propaganda that is so deeply entrenched in our society that many of us don't even know where it came from . I believe this is by design-the myth is sustained by obfuscating its origins. And its origins lead to, you guessed it, attempts to manipulate and profit from us.

If you are skeptical, consider this:

Does it matter that Strauss and Howe, who coined the millennial label in 1987, before many millennials were even born, have connections to "deficit hawk" billionaires like Pete Peterson (known for his attempts to spread the gospel of austerity through " engaging the next generation "?

Does it matter that neoliberals like Newt Gingrich called Strauss and Howe's first book an "intellectual tour de force," and have since been invited by self-appointed "millennial" organizations to preach about generational struggles?

Does it matter that Steve Bannon was inspired by their theories , and has worked with Howe on "several film projects?"

Does it matter that Strauss and Howe created a business out of their generational forecasts?

Does it matter that dozens of "millennial-lead" organizations are using the millennial label to peddle the same economic policies that have annihilated democracy in America and the rest of the world?

Does it matter that books about millennials, and written by millennials, use Koch-sponsored propaganda to argue that young Americans don't approve of welfare programs and would put them " on the chopping block " if given the chance?

To me, it does. In fact, I consider this "chopping and screwing" of the American population to be one of the greatest frauds of our time. Not because there's no value in thinking in terms of generations, or because generations don't exist. It is the perversion of the concept into a product-selling operation that exposes its use as an instrument for propaganda.

While previous works on the subject, such as Karl Mannheim's The Problem of Generations , read as an invitation to deepen our understanding of the concept of generations, Strauss and Howe took a more controversial approach-they combined the concept of generational analysis with historical prophecy; a move that, by their own admission, didn't fare well with traditional historians and scholars.

"What we think that politicians or marketers, in particular product salesmen who are concerned about how to reach generations , should think about as they read our book and try to decide how to get elected or launch a new product line," says Strauss in a 1991 CSPAN interview , "…is look real hard at the section of our book that will certainly be most controversial with historians. That is, we have a 50 page chapter on what the future of the cycle will be…we call it 'Completing the Millennial Cycle.'"

A closer examination of the label's use exposes its role as a "hook" used by a vast network of nonprofits, businesses, and marketing agencies that aim not to understand the people behind the millennial label, but to influence society's opinion of them, and ultimately influence their opinion of themselves.

The justification that is usually used by those who employ the millennial label echoes the words of Edward Bernays, the father of Propaganda :

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind."

The trick worked. Today, most mainstream news platforms and "authoritative" magazines talk about millennials (some 80 million people) like they are a monolithic entity, when in fact they exhibit the same differences that are present in the rest of our society. Yet, most news outlets gloss over the origins of the label, its use, and monetization.

More importantly, it is not your opinions that are being elevated in the media and regarded as "millennial insights." It is the opinions of people who are allowed to pass through the gates of corporate-lead news platforms. A prime example is Jason Dorsey, a rather older millennial, who is often quoted as an "expert on millennial issues," when in fact he is simply promoting his business of selling "insights" about millennials and the upcoming generational brand of people, Generation Z.

Where are the activist millennials? The poor millennials? The millennials who didn't graduate from college? Where are the millennials who would rather talk about substantive issues, instead of selling their own generation in the form of "insights" to the ruling class?

While we intrinsically know that addressing millions of people with a single word is a laughable proposition, cultural engineers have justified, and profited from, these divisions in our society. This is how we have exposed our minds to the brainwashing that usually follows efforts that use biology and marketing to draw conclusions about people's "collective identity."

My research into the topic exposed a new world of possibilities in the same way Hicks and Carlin's comedy opened my eyes to a deeper understanding of reality. What would happen if, instead of selling insights about millennials, there was a way for anyone to add their story to the collective millennial narrative, without being an "expert" on millennial issues? In other words, what would a true bottom-up platform for millennial stories look like?

These questions lead me to create postmillennial.org , a story-sharing platform that makes it easy for millennials and their allies to create and share content about their experiences without the spin that usually follows such accounts.

The platform addresses a major obstacle in publishing content about millennials - it makes it easy for those who fall into the millennial age cohort and their allies to share their perspectives on various issues. The idea is to generate content that is intellectually stimulating, instead of the usual "millennials, those who are x-to-x years old" articles that, willingly or not, mistake birth cohorts with generations.

Most importantly, postmillennial does not owe allegiance or give editorial control to any Party or corporation.

Unlike The Lily, a Washington Post "visually driven product designed for millennial women," postmillennial is not sponsored by JP Morgan .

Unlike Goldman Sachs-sponsored articles in The Atlantic, postmillennial does not compare generations in sensationalist terms .

Unlike "millennial" advocacy organizations , it does not peddle trickle-down economics on behalf of millions of people.

Sure, news platforms need money to survive. However, if we continue to let billionaires decide the faith of our platforms of information, like they do with our political process, we might as well throw in the towel now.

I believe that a millennial-focused platform that is open to diverse perspectives and thoughts has the power to reclaim the millennial narrative, even in the presence of industries that actively work in the opposite direction. We can use the privately engineered label to our advantage, and work to change the millennial label from an expression of the capitalist system and its media culture, to an evolving dialogue where all voices matter.

This originally appeared at postmillennial.org

Zhivko Illeieff is a writer & media producer. He is also the founder of postmillennial, a story-sharing platform that lets millennials and their allies create and share content about their experiences without the corporate spin. He may be contacted at hello@postmillennial.org

The Reds in the Hills: An Anarcho-Syndicalist Interpretation of the Contemporary West Virginia Teachers' Strike

By Michael Mochaidean

Historical Overview

In 1990, the average annual salary for West Virginia public teachers was $21,904, making it the 49th worst state for educator pay; only Mississippi's was worse. The state's Public Employee Insurance Agency (PEIA) was backlogged, with medical expenses taking almost half a year to be addressed. The teacher retirement fund had a $2 billion hole that grew larger each fiscal year, impacting retirees' insurance and state pension.

Today, in 2018, the average annual salary for West Virginia public teachers is $45,000, making it the 48th worst state for educator pay in the nation. By fiscal year 2020, premiums are set to increase for PEIA recipients by 15.2%, 14.3% (2021), and then another 10% (2022). For retirees, it is even worse. PEIA recipients on Medicare are expected to see an increase in their premiums by 38.9% (2020, 29% (2021), and then another (32.8%).

It is no wonder, then, that in both 1990 and 2018, educators across the state utilized direct action tactics to demand greater action be done to fund the state's public programs. Parallels have been drawn between both strikes in the recent past. In a Sunday editorial in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, for example, a poster reflected in "Not Your Mom's Teacher Strike?" that the 1990 strike and the current strike in 2018 suffered from a recurring theme of long-term underfunding of public health care programs, poor teacher pay, and few incentives built in to retain high-quality educators in the state.

The similarities don't stop there. The rhetorical strategy of positioning educators as hotheaded firebrands, whose only concerns are for themselves, have not changed in the almost three decades since the first statewide walkout. In 1990, soon after the strike was announced, Governor Caperton (D) declared that he would not meet with teachers or their union representatives until "calm and reason are restored and the teaching force returns to the classroom." In 2018, Governor Justice (R) recently declared that he would work towards a resolution to this issue when "cooler heads prevail," signaling that Republican legislators were acting calmer and more collected than the educators themselves. Similarly, the state's primary law enforcement agency, the Attorney General's Office, has made quick use of its power of injunction in an attempt to first break public sector unions, and then to establish precedent in future cases. In 1990, Attorney General Roger Tompkins declared the strike illegal in a formal memo that would later be used in Jefferson County Board of Education v. Jefferson County Education Association (1990). The Jefferson County BOE case would go on to state that, "Public employees have no right to strike in the absence of express legislation or, at the very least, appropriate statutory provisions for collective bargaining, mediation and arbitration." As West Virginia has none of the latter, any formal walkout would therefore be deemed illegal in the eyes of the court. In 2018, Attorney General Patrick Morrissey (R) released his own memo on the teacher walkout utilizing the precedent of Tompkins' 1990 memo and the subsequent Jefferson County BOE case to state that "the impending work stoppage is unlawful. State law and court rulings give specific parties avenues to remedy such illegal conduct, including the option to seek an injunction to end an unlawful strike."

Perhaps the only difference between these two events in the color of the state's legislature and governor's mansion. West Virginia, once proudly staunch Democrats, is now a hotbed of conservative Republican lawmakers. Republicans went from having a 18-16 majority in the state senator to a 22-12 majority in 2016. Governor Justice, who ran and won as a Democrat, switched his political party to Republican over the summer in an attempt to court President Trump's influence and, potentially, a cabinet position.

Such changes matter little in a state where both parties have played on the contemporary cultural fears or economic anxieties of their citizens. From the painful ramifications of trickle-down economics in 1990 to the neo-liberal drive to privatize public services in 2018, Democrats and Republicans have used whichever economic theory happens to be in vogue at their time to harm state workers, bringing them to the brink of death only to resuscitate them with a glimmer of social democracy. In the aftermath of the 1990 strike, for example, annual salary for public teachers increased by $5,000, to be distributed over a three-year period from 1991 to 1993, while the $2 billion pension gap was addressed over the course of the decade. More recently, the state's legislature has proposed meager percentage-based raises to be distributed over the next several years. Proposals vary, but range from a 5% increase spread over 4 years to a 4% increase spread over 3 years; each percentage raise would be $404 per educator. Governor Justice announced only a few weeks ago, when pressure began mounting on the legislature, that there would be no change in premiums or deductibles for state employees using PEIA. Such changes reflect a recognition of the power of grassroots democracy when coupled with direct action and statewide solidarity efforts, yet fall short of any substantive change in the fundamental workings of the state's social or economic trajectory. State Senator Richard Ojeda (D), now famous across the state as a "working-class Democrat" and somewhat of a celebrity (who, coincidentally, is also running for West Virginia's 3rd Congressional District this year) has proposed a series of severance taxes aimed against the natural gas industry to help fill gaps in PEIA funding. For every 1% raise in the state's severance tax on natural gas extraction, the state estimates that it will have around $40 million in new revenue. Much like the coal and timber industries before it, such a severance tax would plug metaphorical holes in the state's public services budget, but would do little to provide meaningful change to the operative conditions of workers. Recent statistics put the death toll for West Virginia miners from 1883 to 2018 at 21,000, while statistics for those that have died in the timber industry are inconsistent. In both instances, corporate profits have trended upward over the course of their history.

As the famed robber baron J.P. Morgan once said, "We are not in business for our health."

Theoretical Interpretation

Sol-i-dar-i-ty (noun): 1) unity or agreement of feeling or action, especially among individuals with a common interest; 2) mutual support within a group.

The renowned union song Solidarity Forever is over a century old and has been sung at labor gatherings and trade halls since Ralph Chaplin first penned it in 1915. The chorus extols the listener to remember that through unity in action, with a shared purpose, strength can overcome the greatest odds. "For the union makes us strong."

Chaplin's inspiration for the lyrics came about during his time covering the Kanawha coal miners' strike in Huntington, West Virginia. Over the course of his lifetime, Solidarity Forever would become a mainstay among business and industrial unions. Its lack of sectarianism provided all sympathetic union members the opportunity to sing together, regardless of labor orientation.

Chaplin, however, grew dissatisfied with its popularity and would go on to pen, "Why I wrote Solidarity Forever," wherein he states that, "I didn't write Solidarity Forever for ambitious politicians or for job-hungry labor fakirs seeking a ride on the gravy train." Solidarity, for Chaplin, was a process, a verb. It had to be reshaped in each new movement by a brand of committed industrial unions with a tendency towards dismantling capitalism and abolishing wage slavery. Unlike the more widespread AFL, the IWW, to which Chaplin belonged, took the struggle of workers' rights throughout the first two decades of the 20th century to include direct action politics - ranging from work slowdowns and work stoppages to lock outs and sabotage efforts. Solidarity through unified action, and unified action towards the "birth [of] a new world from the ashes of the old," could be the only end-goal for union efforts.

Peruse the secret Facebook group "West Virginia Public Employees UNITED" and you'll find post after post referencing Chaplin's most famous song. To the passerby, it may seem that the affinity for this song is first and foremost its tune familiarity - sung to the Battle Hymn of the Republic - while secondly, the song provides inspiration for trying times to the everyday worker seeking that reprieve from the capitalist system Chaplin describes. Educators on this page have posted signs detailing their "solidarity forever" with fellow unions, such as the UMWA, UE, and IBEW, and vice versa. The highly-paid staff for these business unions, not to mention their traditional lobbying tactics, would be enough to churn the stomach of any good Wobbly, and it appears at first that the teachers are being led by the same sort of social democracy that they have fallen for in the past.

Leninists, too, have begun critiquing the teachers' strike, yet from an angle that argues, in essence, that the class struggle cannot operate within the single-dimensional framework of public employees. Quoting Lenin in Our Immediate Tasks, they argue, "When the workers of a single factory or of a single branch of industry engage in struggle against their employer or employers, is this class struggle? No, this is only a weak embryo of it. The struggle of the workers becomes a class struggle only when all the foremost representatives of the entire working class of the whole country are conscious of themselves as a single working class and launch a struggle that is directed, not against individual employers, but against the entire class of capitalists and against the government that supports that class." Utilizing the age-old Leninist argument that a revolutionary vanguard party is the sine qua non of all worker struggles, Leninists have challenged the belief that the teachers' strike can have significant impacts on their own, as they are by and large directed, or funded by, business unions, and that the "trade-union consciousness" which Lenin speaks of in What is To Be Done? inherently casts a shadow of doubt over the efficacy of any worker struggle outside of the vanguard.

The theoretical sectarian struggles to this point have been ones that center the discourse on this struggle as one that de-historicizes the larger framework of this narrative, provides a monolithic overview of individual and independent associations into one larger struggle, and relies on standard tropes to paint broadly the teachers-as-union-slaves narrative. In this sense, I hope to set the record straight on the contemporary West Virginia teachers' strike that is currently unfolding while providing my own interpretations of its theoretical foundations.

What Is Our Struggle?

Last year, I was fortunate enough to attend my association's state Delegate Assembly. Every year, the West Virginia Education Association (WVEA) hosts an assembly to elect new officers, provides a framework for future legislative efforts, and meets to discuss relevant issues with educators from across the state. It was at this assembly that I began to grow frustrated with the efforts of President Dale Lee and Executive Director David Haney - both of whom used portions of their assembly speeches to denounce educators who had voted for Republicans and "against their own interests" the previous November. In light of this treatment, I wrote a scathing article about these events in The Socialist Worker in July, hoping to simply vent my frustrations with a wider audience of like-minded thinkers, but assuming little would come of it; I was wrong.

A few weeks after the article was published, a now-comrade of mine - who for the sake of anonymity will be referred to as "Fred" - contacted me with a simple request: "We need to talk about your article." Fred had been at the Delegate Assembly, too, and felt as frustrated as I by the inability of union leadership to effectively mount a serious opposition to reactionary legislation. Over the summer, Fred and I began discussing dates for a grassroots "day at the capitol" lobbying day. We settled on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day because we knew the legislators would be in session and educators would also have the day off, so it would be both convenient and time sensitive. Throughout the next several months, Fred began working on a Facebook group that was then called "West Virginia Public Teachers UNITED." Our goal was to agitate and educate sympathetic teachers across the state into one large group. Each educator was expected to add at least 10 new members that they knew would support our efforts. Over time, we saw the page grow from a few dozen members to several hundred.

By November, we began to worry. Someone had added a member of the executive committee to the group and union leadership was not happy at the efforts we had made. Nonetheless, they realized that if they attempted to halt what progress we had made, they would be halting a real attempt at substantive change, something that hadn't been seen in decades; they took control of the lobby day and began coordinating with local leadership for the next few months. During that time, however, educators continued to post about possible legislation that would arise during the 2018 legislative session. Fears turned into anger as posters began to demand action, and it was at this time that serious talks of a statewide strike were seen. Posters who had been present during the 1990 strike or who had a family member who was on the picket lines then began drawing parallels between the two events organically, recognizing the underlying themes of decades of economic exploitation and the inherent failures of the American democratic experience. The posters were being educated daily, and this education led to their agitation at the state of affairs.

As the Martin Luther King, Jr. Lobby Day rolled around, posters began making concerted efforts to find carpools to the capitol. It looked online as if there would be a mass of teachers waiting in the rotunda to hear what could be done to fix public education for the foreseeable future; in reality, only a little over a hundred educators and supporters showed up. They were greeted by President Dale Lee, who in a surprise move, mentioned the upsurge in revolutionary talk. "I've heard a lot of people talk about 'It's time for a walkout or time for a strike,'" Lee said at the time. "But those are not the first steps in that decision. It's not the first step in what we should do to achieve our goals. If we were to get back to that, there's a lot of groundwork that needs to be laid beforehand." In essence, Lee had given the go-ahead to local leadership to begin efforts at rallying people to join in direct action politics. Mobilization efforts began almost instantaneously. Stories of legislators accosting teachers, refusing to meet with some groups, and outright rejecting basic facts and data from others showed the educators who did arrive that there could be no compromise with the reactionary forces they were fighting - it had to be all or nothing.

The next major rally was scheduled for February 17th. In between the rallies, local counties held a vote of authorization. This would allow state leadership to act on behalf of counties and locals at large. Once the vote had taken place, country presidents would meet at Flatwoods, WV to certify the vote in their county and provide leadership with a firm number of who would support direct action and who would not. The total percentage in support of authorizing statewide action was above 85% - well beyond the expectation of 70% that had been floated as an ideal percentage. The numbers in check and the votes certified, leadership decided to prepare for an eventual statewide walkout that would occur on Thursday, February 22 nd.

On that fateful day, estimates of 5,000 individuals met at the capitol to protest the lack of reforms the state has pushed and demanding long-term funding for PEIA, greater percentage raises for teachers, and a halt to reactionary legislation across the board. At one point, the state's Attorney General became so frightened by the protests outside his office that he barricaded his door with a large, taxidermied black bear. Walkouts continued the following day, even though numbers had dwindled significantly from Thursday to Friday at the capitol.

Meanwhile, online organizing had continued unabated. Several months prior, Fred had decided to change the name of the page from "West Virginia Teachers UNITED" to "West Virginia Public Employees UNITED." Fred realized the stagnant numbers we were drawing would not be able to sustain a mass movement, but even more so, Fred realized that the struggle our group faced was one that transcended our profession, yet was inherently wrapped up in the politics of it. West Virginia teachers could not succeed, he argued, without the widespread outpouring of support from all public employees, who have also been at the forefront of this onslaught against the public sector. Moreover, cross-labor solidarity efforts could show the public that a teachers' strike was not intended simply to alleviate the ills of an under-funded education system; rather, they were an attempt to save all public employees from the state itself. It was at this point that the Facebook page had reached critical mass - over 20,000 active posters. Posters began to talk frequently in person about the lessons they learned from the page, the information being disseminated taught them the limits of electoral politics and the need for greater direct action politics to effect any change. Organization began on the site as well during this time, with some counties splitting off to decide how best to coordinate local efforts for picketing, leafleting, walk-ins, walk-outs, and public relations campaigns.

Posters listened carefully for word on Friday afternoon of an impending rolling walkout to circumvent the Attorney General's upcoming injunction against the unions. Local leadership had told members that week to prepare for this action, listing the benefits of it and how to best organize in defense should educators be required to go to work those days under penalty of suspension or firing. During this week, too, posters complained vociferously that such an action would not have the intended consequences for the legislature. If the legislature knew when we would strike and how long to prepare for, then they would have no need to make a compromise, the argument went. Once again, to everyone's surprise, Lee stated that the walkouts would continue into Monday. It appeared that the grassroots push to have leadership take an active role in listening to its members had its desired effect. Even under threat of injunction, union leadership was keen on the idea of pushing for statewide action, almost indefinitely, until the principal demands had been met.

Theoretical Connections to Anarcho-Syndicalism

At the heart of anarcho-syndicalism is a two-fold attack against the ills of capitalism: 1) a decentralized, horizontal model of leadership that treats all members as first amongst equals, and 2) an abolition of the state through workers' self-management. The quintessential anarcho-syndicalist union of the early 20th century - the Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) - initially organized around these sets of principals as well. Based in Barcelona, the CNT was an anarcho-syndicalist union organized across all sectors of employment. CNT capitalized on the worsening economic and political conditions of Spain in the lead up to global war to form autonomous collectives in the major urban centers throughout the peninsula. Though still mostly a rural nation, Barcelona became a central hub for modern industry in their singular productive industry textile mills. The Spanish losses of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines during the Spanish-American War over a decade prior had damaged Spain's already fractured economy by forcing it to rely less and less on its sugar production and more on national industries based in the peninsula. Catalonia in the north, for example, was the only region in Spain where industrial output was greater than agricultural production.

Beginning with only 26,000 members in 1911, the CNT initiated a general strike which would later be deemed illegal by local authorities for several years. The illegality of this action, however, provided new in-roads upon which the CNT would build. In the interwar period, the CNT had a central role to play in the organizing of the 1919 La Canadiense general strike. This forty-four day general strike forced the Spanish government to agree to the world's first eight-hour work day. 70% of Catalonia's industry was halted during the La Canadiense general strike, and the CNT reached a membership of 755,000 as a result of their successes. According to libcom, "about 10% of the active Spanish adult population was a member of the CNT in 1919."

Declines among the CNT would slowly matriculate as businesses began hiring thugs - similar to the Pinkerton agents of American lore - who would murder union members and leaders with ruthless efficiency, though over the course of the Spanish Civil War, membership would balloon up to 1.58 million by the end of the war. The culminating blow to the CNT would ultimately come with the ascension of Francisco Franco and his Fascist forces, who outlawed the union and forced it to go underground. Much of the history of the CNT is paralleled across reactionary Europe and the United States, to groups such as the IWW and the IWA, which have recently seen an increase in membership.

The theoretical tendencies and historical parallels between the CNT and the contemporary West Virginia teachers' strike can show the deep-seated roots of anarcho-syndicalist tendencies underneath the surface of otherwise conservative states. In theory, anarcho-syndicalists view local autonomy and organizing around shared interests at a directly democratic level will provide the greatest change in society. Noam Chomsky, in his Anarcho-syndicalism: Theory and Practice, relays his views of anarcho-syndicalism to be, "a federated, decentralized system of free associations, incorporating economic as well as other social institutions…" The CNT's model of this association model contrasts with Marxist-Leninist tendencies which seek to form a revolutionary party model upon which a vanguard will appear and act as democratic leaders to herald in the revolution.

Similarly, the contemporary West Virginia teachers' strike has both the material and organizing conditions that make an anarcho-syndicalist system possible. First, West Virginia's economic devastation is a result of what has been called the "resource curse" or the "paradox of plenty" - wherein regions have an abundance of natural resources that can spur larger economic growth in various sectors, yet tend to become stagnant economically - and what Immanuel Wallerstein would deem the "Periphery status" within world-systems theory. According to Wallerstein, periphery states lack economic diversity, are semi-industrialized but only insofar as they provide products to core states, become targets for multinational corporate investment in extracting surplus labor or resources, and have high a pool of labor that is disproportionately poor and lacking in education. Wallerstein tended to view nation-states as at least somewhat monolithic in this regard - treating the United States as a collective core nation and China as a collective core periphery state, for example - without a recognition of the complexities of capital within the communities of those states themselves. If we expand Wallerstein's notion of periperhy status to West Virginia as a whole, a more uniform pattern of shared economic destiny can be understood:

In the case of West Virginia:

1. Ranked fourth highest in the nation for obesity and the highest prevalence of adults reporting fair or poor health in the country.

2. Over 30% of the state does not hold a high school diploma

3. The median household income is $36,864, while the median household income for the country at large is $59,039.

What differentiates the conclusions between a Marxist-Leninist trajectory of these material conditions is that a vanguard party is largely disregarded in the state or is too small and fractured to have any larger sense of statewide support. Furthermore, the support from Marxist-Leninist parties has been largely, though perhaps regrettably, superficial. Workers World and PSL have written articles supporting the teachers, to be sure, and have created a diverse range of graphics to show their solidarity with the collective struggle against capital. Yet, these gestures tend to attract only minor attention on an online space with educators.

On the other hand, collective struggles that decentralize power and return the dynamic to a community-oriented and labor-oriented structure has seen greater advances throughout the course of the strike. Over the past weekend when Dale Lee stated that a statewide walkout would commence on Thursday, February 22nd, local communities began their own decentralized organizing for food distribution centers. In Morgantown, for example, the local Monongalia County Education Association independently took on the task of setting up collection sites for food and other resources that could then be distributed to schools with the highest rates of students on free and reduced lunches. The outpouring of support led to this single organization collecting over 400 bags for lunches, 400 bags for breakfasts, and three-dozen snack bags - all with collections for only four schools total. This is without an even deeper analysis of the various food centers that have begun providing resources to local non-profits and managing distribution centers to students living in rural parts of the state where accessibility to resources is limited. In both senses, it has not been a vanguard party structure nor as movement towards social democracy that has funneled this energy into collective action, but rather, one that has a distributive model of community governance.

It remains to be seen what the result of such actions will be: union leadership could allow electoral strategies to win out and a compromise may be reached before any further action takes place; the Republican-dominated legislature could continue to stall on the issue of funding, providing for a special session to take place, costing the state even more money in the process; or, the state could begin a significant crackdown on educators and other potential dissidents in the process of maintaining "law and order." The last scenario is not unfounded, given the fact that the House of Delegates updated a 1933 law to give capitol police the ability to break up "riots and unlawful assemblages" while providing legal cover "for the death of persons in riots and unlawful assemblages." Thus, the state could effectively begin mass arrests against educators and union leadership, similar to what occurred to the IWW, CNT, and IWA, though driving them underground is unlikely. The difference is that such a direct assault would provide educators the necessary public relations to cover themselves and galvanize greater support in opposition to both capital and the defenders of capital. Thus, a direct assault by the state could essentially be the death knell to a dying institution.

Race Traitors Wanted: Apply Within (A Review of David Gilbert's "Looking at the U.S. White Working Class Historically")

By Colin Jenkins

The term "white working class" captured much of the media analysis which sought to explain Trump's meteoric rise and subsequent victory to the highest office in the United States. The obsession with polling and voting trends based in demographics is certainly nothing new. Mainstream political analysts exist for the purpose of figuring out why Republicans dominate the South, or why Democrats maintain strongholds on the coasts, or why so-called swing states go one way or the other in any given year. But this time around seemed especially interesting, considering that a wealthy businessman (and political outsider) received 63 million votes from a populace that is facing historic economic woes due to the constant greed and manipulation of and by wealthy businessmen.

For the past forty years, some voting trends have remained incredibly consistent. In terms of race, Blacks highly favor Democratic candidates by an overwhelming margin that rests between 74 and 88 points. In contrast, whites consistently favor Republican candidates by margins of up to 25 points. This trend stayed true for Trump, with whites preferring him by a 21-point margin and Blacks favoring Clinton by an 80-point margin.

The intersection of race and class presents a more complex picture, with more fluidity. Both capitalist parties know this. And they also know that, while they ultimately represent the elite/special interests that fund their campaigns and lobby their legislation, they need votes from the "common people." This is the game of bourgeois/liberal democracy in the US: the two parties participate in a political tug of war, we watch and are even allowed to passively participate with a vote, and many of us choose to participate with the faith that our vote actually matters. Regardless of their worth to us, votes do determine which party takes power. And, because of this, the parties deploy ample amounts of resources to capture these votes.

The parties develop strategies to attract not only individual voters, but specific demographics: women, men, "Hispanic," Black, white, "educated," Christian, etc. Each party uses complex marketing and advertising schemes to push agendas and play with psyches, in the hopes of securing large swaths of votes come election time. Patterns and trends develop, and analyses follow in an attempt to explain why certain voters vote the way they do. One conclusion from liberal analysts that has persisted for nearly a half-century is that the "white working class" votes against its own economic interests by siding with Republicans.

A common question, like this one posed in a December-2017 Politico article , asks, "Are working-class white voters shooting themselves in the foot by making common cause with a political movement [Republicans] that is fundamentally inimical to their economic self-interest?" This, of course, is based on the premise that whenever in power, the alternate choice (Democrats) has shown the propensity and capacity to improve or sustain the economic realities of working-class people: a premise that, by any historical measure, appears weak. Nonetheless, the question persists within liberal circles: why do poor and working-class whites vote for the party of Jim Crow, the Southern Strategy, personal responsibility, and ultra-capitalism.

The Radical Dilemma Posed by the White Working Class

While the capitalist parties formulate strategies for votes, revolutionaries continue to operate within the margins of society. In many ways, the same issues and questions that influence mainstream political parties also must be confronted by radicals. Among the Left (anti-capitalist/not Democrats or liberals!) in the US, the issue of the "white working class" takes on an even deeper meaning, presenting an age-old challenge of how to convince poor and working-class whites to let go of their whiteness for the sake of anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, working-class unity.

To many leftists, the challenge is a constant frustration that sparks many internal debates. Some take an optimistic approach in their analysis by claiming that the Trump vote was more middle class than working class; that proto-fascist groups like the Tea Party were predominantly middle class, and not working class; that fascist groups which have surfaced in the age of Trump are more middle class than working class. This optimism also drifts into semantics, where the term "working-class whites" is deemed more suitable than "white working class," which seems totalizing and monolithic to a fault. While, admittedly, the final Trump vote represented a mix of class dynamics, including a strong turnout from middle-class and small-business-owning whites, one statistic can't be ignored: Among all white voters making less than $30,000 a year, 58% chose Trump.

Enter David Gilbert. Or rather, re-enter David Gilbert. During a time of white allies checking their privilege and seeking gold stars through self-flagellation and virtue signaling, Gilbert is a white accomplice who is nearing his fifth decade of a 75-years-to-life prison sentence. A former member of Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground, Gilbert spent the late 70s and early 80s in the Revolutionary Armed Task Force (RATF), an alliance of white revolutionaries that served under the leadership of the Black Liberation Army (BLA). On October 20, 1981, after an attempted robbery of a Brinks armored car which resulted in the deaths of two police officers, members of the BLA and RATF, including Gilbert, were arrested and subsequently found guilty on charges stemming from the incident. Gilbert has been incarcerated in the NY State prison system ever since.

In 1984, Gilbert penned a short book from his prison cell, titled, " Looking at the White Working Class Historically ." The book was an attempt to analyze the white working class in the US in order to gauge historical obstructions to, and potential for, its participation in revolutionary struggle. In 2017, on the heels of Trump's rise, which signifies in part, "racist mass mobilizations" in response to "an imperialism in crisis," and a precursor to "fascism," according to Gilbert, a second edition of "Looking…" was rolled out by Kersplebedeb Publishing. The new edition includes Gilbert's original analysis of three texts - White Supremacy in the US: Slavery and the Origins of Racism (Ted Allen); Black Reconstruction 1860-1880 (W.E.B. Du Bois); and Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat (J. Sakai) - a section on Lessons from the Sixties (1991), and new sections onThe Context of the Trump Phenomenon (2017) and After the Sixties: Reaction and Restructuring (2017).

The original preface remains, both in print and in relevance, as Gilbert opens the book by pinpointing the historical dilemma at hand:

"One of the supreme issues for our movement is summed-up in the contradictions of the term 'white working class.' On one hand there is the class designation that should imply, along with all other workers of the world, a fundamental role in the overthrow of capitalism. On the other hand, there is the identification of being part of a ('white') oppressor nation. Historically, we must admit that the identity with the oppressor nation has been primary." (1)

Leading up to the analysis of the texts by Allen, Du Bois, and Sakai, Gilbert hits "white radicals, to whom this book is primarily addressed," (8) with a hard-hitting historical critique of the white working class as a tool of capitalism, white supremacy, and imperialism - a critique that is ripe for the seemingly rising number of class reductionists occupying the current Left. "White labor has been either a legal opposition within or an active component of the US imperial system," (1) Gilbert tells us, while concluding with a warning: "Blaming the working class is a misdirection; but so too is denialism about the depth and penetration of white supremacy, which has been the basis for the white Left's failures over the past 150 years." (10)

The Trump Phenomenon

In one of two sections exclusive to the 2017 edition, The Context for the Trump Phenomenon, Gilbert is especially penetrating with a systemic analysis regarding the factors leading to our current situation. Identifying the very foundation of the US as "white supremacy," Gilbert correctly views Trump as Americanism Personified ; the inevitable result of a country that is, "at its core, imperialist, patriarchal, and based in a range of ways human beings are delimited and demeaned." (11) As both a historical norm for the country and a predictable systemic response, Gilbert points to "racial scapegoating" as Trump's engine:

"A stable imperialism prefers to rule by keeping the population passive, with large sectors at home placated by relative prosperity. But when the system is in crisis, those running the economy often resort to diverting anger by scapegoating the racial 'other.' The sectors of the population who buy into that get the 'satisfaction' of stomping on their 'inferiors,' which is a lot easier than confronting the mega-powerful ruling class." (11)

Echoing Buenaventura Durruti's assessment at the birth of the Spanish Civil War - "No government fights fascism to destroy it; when the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto its privileges" - Gilbert captures the essence of fascism as capitalism in decay. But Gilbert's most important contribution in "Looking…" comes in his exposing of the modern Democratic Party as not only enablers of the Trump phenomenon, but also as standard-bearers of this very system. In doing so, he indirectly answers the question so often posed within liberal circles. Gilbert sums up the Democrats' role:

"The Democrats, in blaming 'those damn Russkies,' are deflecting attention away from the real reason they lost: they represented the prevailing global capitalism and all the associated frustrations of the decline of US manufacturing and erosion of job security. Trump spoke to those anxieties - in a totally demagogic and dishonest way. For example, during the campaign he railed against Goldman Sachs as the prime example of how Wall Street banks screw the working man; then, as president he selected seven of his top economic appointments from the ranks of Goldman Sachs. The Democrats could not provide a compelling alternative to this racist scam artist because they too are deeply rooted in the long bipartisan history of white supremacy, capitalism, and wars of aggression." (12)

In comparing Trump's "more blatant racism and misogyny" to Obama's "kinder and more inclusive rhetoric," Gilbert concludes that Obama, the face of the Democratic Party and confidant of Hillary Clinton, "provided trillions of dollars to bail out Wall Street at the expense of Main Street… presided over seven wars (drone strikes have killed hundreds of civilians and are acts of war under international law)… deported a record number of immigrants… kept 6,000 people behind bars by opposing retroactive application of legislation that reduced harsh sentences for crack cocaine… and played a key role in sabotaging the 2009 Copenhagen Conference of Parties." (13)

Despite pointing out that "lesser evils" are becoming more and more difficult to identify, Gilbert concludes with a responsible assessment of the Trump phenomenon as "something new and particularly threatening… the way he has enlarged, energized, and emboldened an active and aggressive base for white supremacy" while making "immigrants, Muslims, Native-American water-protectors, Black Lives Matter activists, women who've faced sexual assault, LGBTQ folks, those who can't afford health insurance, and more feel under the gun." (13)

Lessons for White Radicals

While Gilbert's book serves as a concise and insightful baseline analysis of systemic problems, something that is surely needed on the modern Left, its ultimate goal is really to help steer white radicals in the right direction. In this effort, Gilbert passes on his wisdom as a lifelong, revolutionary, white accomplice, seemingly pleading with us to avoid pitfalls of the past.

Gilbert's lesson essentially comes in three parts: Identifying the historical developments that have shaped the white working class in the US; recognizing the uniquely harsh struggles that exist within the non-white working class; and moving forward in a way that seeks to unite the US working class without reducing everything to class. Tricky proposals, indeed; but Gilbert lays the groundwork for tackling them.

In identifying the historical role of the white working class, Du Bois's assessment of the class and racial dynamics that played out in post-Civil War America (Black Reconstruction 1860-1880) is invaluable. For this reason, Gilbert spends an ample amount of time on it. The primary question posed by Du Bois was this: If only 7% of the white Southern population owned three quarters of the slaves, and 70% of Southern whites owned no slaves at all, why did the poor whites agree to police the slaves? Or more to the point, why did poor Southern whites agree to sign on as "shock troops for the mass terror that destroyed the gains of Black Reconstruction?" (31)

Du Bois provides many insights in his classic text, some of which leave Gilbert frustrated as "not being sufficiently materialist." (31) However, in the end, the value of Du Bois' work is that it illustrates the divisions that occurred between the white working class and the newly freed Black slaves - divisions that were rooted in an embrace of whiteness as a means of intra-working-class privileges: "(1) Poor whites were determined to keep Blacks from access to the better land… (2) Poor whites were afraid that the planters would use the Black vote to trample on their class aspirations… (3) Petty bourgeois whites still wanted to have cheap Black labor to exploit… (4) White labor was determined to keep Blacks from work that competed with them…, and (5) White labor, while given low wages, were compensated with social status, such as access to public parks, schools, etc." (29)

In recognizing the uniquely harsh struggles that exist within the non-white working class, Sakai's Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat gives us perspective by "examining the relationship of the white proletariat to Native Americans, Mexicanos, and Asians, as well as the Black nation." (33) To a white radical like Gilbert, Sakai's book is especially striking… "Even for those of us who think we understand the white supremacist core of US history, reading Settlers is still quite an education." (33) By highlighting the US progression as being intimately tied to Native American genocide, the Atlantic Slave Trade, and imperialistic endeavors, Sakai shows that "integral to most advances of 'democratic' reform for white workers was an active consolidation of privileges at the expense of colonized Third World peoples." (33-34)

Sakai's overall thesis may be pessimistic, but it remains crucial for white radicals to consider. This may explain why Gilbert chose it as part of his examination. Ultimately, to Sakai, the US is quite simply "an oppressor nation that does not have a working class, in any politically meaningful sense of the term." (36) Rather, the "oppressor working class" (white working class) has merely secured gains through not only class collaboration, but also through white-supremacist and imperialist collaboration. Sakai hammers this notion home by pointing to specific tactics deployed by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) during the 1930s, which consciously "reinforced white monopolies on preferred jobs and was a loyal component of US imperial policy abroad" (36):

"The CIO's policy, then, became to promote integration under settler leadership where Afrikan labor was numerous and strong (such as the foundries, the meat packing plants, etc.) and to maintain segregation and Jim Crow in situations where Afrikan labor was numerically lesser and weak. Integration and segregation were but two aspects of the same settler hegemony." (35)

By combining historical developments, structural analyses, the works of Allen, Du Bois and Sakai, and specific lessons from the sixties, Gilbert offers somewhat of a blueprint for the anti-capitalist struggle ahead. Allen's contribution on White Supremacy in the US offers hope in the form of early plantation labor, which showed that "when Black and white labor were in the same conditions of servitude, there was a good deal of solidarity," so much so that "a system of white supremacy was consciously constructed" by the owning class:

"It was the bourgeoisie's deliberately contrived policy of differentiation between white and Black labor through the system of white skin privileges for white labor that allowed the bourgeoisie to use the poor whites as an instrument of social control over the Black workers." (21)

In slight contrast to both Du Bois and Sakai, Allen packages white supremacy as a conscious and deliberate construction used by elites to create artificial divisions within the working class. Thus suggesting that if it is in fact a conspiracy from above, it can be dismantled from below; or, as Gilbert puts it: "A system of white supremacy that was historically constructed can be historically deconstructed." (49)

A Window of Revolutionary Potential

Piggy-backing on Allen's optimism, Gilbert suggests that we have entered a window of revolutionary potential in the US, providing examples of cross-racial solidarity among the working class: "organizing efforts of home healthcare workers, campaigns for farm workers, Justice for Janitors, and the fight for a $15/hour minimum wage" (72); the solidarity that was shown in Standing Rock, where white military veterans joined the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline; the recent display of international solidarity between Black Lives Matter and the Palestinian people; (75) and the mass mobilization that has occurred to combat Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) assaults on immigrant communities since Trump took office.

This window of revolutionary potential has been opened by a historical crisis of the capitalist system, which is now starting to fail significant portions of the white working class in the US; therefore rendering past class collaborations null and void. As this window also opens the possibility of a fascist tide, some of which we have begun to see in the wake of the Trump phenomenon, Gilbert desperately calls on white radicals to seize the moment:

"We white radicals have a particular responsibility and crying need to organize as many white people as possible to break from imperialism and to see that their long-term interests, as human beings and for a livable future for their children, lie in allying with the rest of humanity." (70)

This effort, according to Gilbert, must rely less on abstract theories and more on concrete points of intersection that fall outside the narrow scope of the white working class. Focusing on protecting water, increasing wages, acquiring healthcare, improving education, fighting debt schemes, opposing constant wars, opposing police brutality, and battling environmental degradation are a few examples of possible intersections.

Ultimately, the challenge is to "find a way to get across to white working-class people the most fundamental issues: the only way to achieve a humane and sustainable society is by allying with the Global South and people of color." (70) And this must be done by actually interacting with the white working class, thus shedding "the elitist or perhaps defeatist view that dismisses the possibility of organizing significant numbers of white people, particularly working-class whites" (2), something that organizations like RedNeck Revolt and John Brown Gun Club have already begun to do.

Class consciousness is sorely needed in the US, in order to recognize the bipartisan nature of capitalist politics and mount a formidable counter-attack in a class war that up until now has been a one-sided massacre. But, as Gilbert so wisely tells us,

"Class consciousness cannot be defined solely by economic demands. At its heart, it is a movement toward the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. 'Proletarian internationalism' - solidarity with all other peoples oppressed and exploited by imperialism - is a necessary and essential feature of revolutionary class consciousness." For white radicals, "this requires up front support for, and alliance with, the oppressed nations, particularly those within the US (Black, Mexicano, Native). Thus white supremacy and class consciousness cannot peacefully co-exist with each other. One chokes off the other. An honest view of the 350-year history clearly shows that the alignment with white supremacy has predominated over revolutionary class consciousness." (38)

Defaulting to class struggle as a one-size-fits-all strategy will not suffice. A neutral approach to white supremacy and imperialism, even if under the guise of revolutionary class politics, is siding with white supremacy and imperialism. White radicals must do this housework and then proceed to the white working class, which has largely been forsaken. In closing, Gilbert leaves us with a sober assessment: "In my view, there definitely is a white working class. It is closely tied to imperialism; the labor aristocracy is the dominant sector, the class as a whole has been corrupted by white supremacy; but, the class within the oppressor nation that lives by the sale of their labor power has not disappeared." (39)

There is revolutionary potential there. As white radicals, it is our duty to find a way to tap it.

Looking at the US White Working Class Historically (2017) may be purchased at Left-Wing Books .

As of the printing of this book (October 2017), you can write David at:

David Gilbert #83A6158

Wende Correctional Facility

3040 Wende Road

Alden, NY 14004-1187

Building a Socialist Alternative: An Interview with Eljeer Hawkins

By Bryant William Sculos

(A shorter, edited-down version of this interview was first published with Truthout under the title "Inspiring a Socialist Alternative: An Interview with Eljeer Hawkins," published Feb. 24, 2018. The full version of the interview is reprinted here with permission.)

(The following is an interview conducted via email between Nov. 30, 2017 and Dec. 30, 2017, slightly edited for style)

Bryant Sculos: Can you say a bit about how you became an activist and what your early experiences were like?

Eljeer Hawkins: I was born and raised in East Harlem, New York City. It began for me at the age of 18 years old. I discovered the speeches of Malcolm X to the chagrin of my mother who was a child of the 1950s and 60s. My mom was 14 years old when Malcolm X was murdered; she wasn't very enthused to find her oldest listening to old Nation of Islam tapes with brother minister Malcolm X calling the "white man the devil." (laugh)

I never had a black history course until college. I was accepted to Howard University, but didn't have the resources to attend early classes that were in 1992. My dream was to attend Howard; I went to John Jay College for Criminal Justice, I wanted to be a defense attorney. My uncle, Wayne, my mom's brother, became instrumental in my early development as he helped me navigate US history, black history, art, and music particularly the black aesthetic. I will always be indebted to him and what he taught me.

So Brother Malcolm X was a natural starting point. My father wasn't in my life, so Malcolm X and Uncle Wayne were the men and examples I looked to growing up politically and culturally. The first bookstore I visited was Liberation bookstore in Harlem and bought my early black nationalist, cultural nationalist, and socialist books. In college, I joined the Organization of Black Students-became very active on campus-to the determent of my school work. My life changed forever when my mother died at the age of 43 from a massive heart attack. At this time I was engaged in solidarity work with a group in the Congo-formerly called Zaire under the brutal dictatorship of Mobutu. I also was on the periphery of the Workers World organization but never joined.

My mother's death destroyed me; I lost focus and left school after two years. I wanted to dedicate my life to the project of revolutionary ideas and action.

BS: Did you consider yourself a socialist from the beginning or did that develop later?

EH: I was a black revolutionary nationalist until one winter night after a protest in 1995. A sister activist asked me what society after the revolution was I aiming to build. I had ignorantly dismissed revolutionary Marxism as a white man's ideology. February of 1995 I attended a gathering of dissent Congolese organizations with various political and economic leanings. I worked with Serge Mukendi and the Workers and Peasants Movement of the Congo (POP). Brother Serge and the POP declared themselves to be Marxists; he played a foundational role in my political development and hunger to understand the world. Well we attended this meeting of the minds, and we stayed with a member of Labor Militant in Boston, Massachusetts (now Socialist Alternative). I began to look at the brother's bookshelf and was spellbound. I wasn't a member of any socialist organization at the time. So the comrade gave me the contact information of Labor Militant members in New York City. From February to about the early summer of 1995, I attended meetings and discussions. The organization was tiny at the time. After genuinely studying and reading the program, I decided to join and commit my life to the project of building socialism and workers' democracy internationally. I joined at a time following the fall of Stalinism, the triumphalism of capitalism, and decline of the workers' movement. So I participated in a dark moment for socialist ideas, and frankly, it steeled me in every way to march forward armed with a program, analysis, and history. So all the things I've learned and continue to learn have guided me, 23 years later in the international class struggle for socialism. Today, we are witnessing a resurgence of socialist thought and action. I'm humbled to be here for this moment.

BS: What is your take on the current state of the US left-as well as the left globally?

EH: We are at an embryonic stage of socialist ideas. The crisis of capitalism and decline of the institutions of capitalism like their two parties (Democratic and Republican) has led a whole generation to question what the hell is going on and what I can do to change things. Occupy Wall Street was the first shot across the bow, followed by vital social and political explosions and banners like Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, #MeToo, and Arab Spring revolutions, etc. This is also a time for debate and discussion on how the socialist left globally can make gains and what is the best strategy and tactics to take the struggle forward. We need a level of patience, because this is a new and young milieu of activists and organizers who are feeling their way through this period of reform or revolution-battles for self-determination like in Catalonia, an environmental crisis like in California, Puerto Rico, and the Caribbean, and increased racial and sexual oppression. I think as this new left continues to engage in the struggle they will be forced to draw conclusions and rethink what they thought initially. We are truly living in a period of revolution and counter-revolution. We must prepare ourselves through an intense engagement in history, social struggle, and political analysis because of this uncharted territory moment.

BS: Given the unique path you've taken to become a socialist, now with decades of activist experience, I think people would be interested in hearing what your worst experience as a socialist activist has been? Best?

EH: The worst has always been debates to the point of losing sight of the centrality of the working class and their potential revolutionary agency to change the world. Now, please do not get me wrong, a debate organized and focused can provide clarity and a general roadmap on how to proceed in the struggle. The Bolshevik Party is a brilliant example of debate and discussion in the workers' movement-interconnected with political perspectives, action, and the program always centering the international working class and peasantry in the worldwide socialist revolution.

The best experience is winning a debate (laugh), just kidding. I would say witnessing how consciousness is transformed by events and interconnected developments that lead people to draw various conclusions. Consciousness can leap forward or backward based on events, how a situation is given a contextual explanation like an electoral win or defeat, and importantly who and what explains this process like an individual or organization in the struggle. I think of Erica Garner, the daughter of Eric Garner and her political awakening. After the death of her father, she immersed herself in telling the truth and keeping his spirit alive in organizing daily for a full year to decry law enforcement violence. That is powerful to me as an activist and grassroots historian. Mamie Till, the mother of Emmitt Till, said it best when events shape one's consciousness, "Two months ago I had a nice apartment in Chicago. I had a good job. I had a son. When something happened to the Negroes in the South, I said, `That's their business, not mine.' Now I know how wrong. I was. The murder of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of us all."

Socialism is longer a dirty word, the gains like the fifteen dollar minimum wage spearheaded by low-wage workers, electoral victories and organizing of Socialist Alternative and socialist city councilor Kshama Sawant in Seattle, Washington, and a strong showing of Ginger Jentzen in the city council race in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The growth of independent working-class politics is on the agenda. The best moments are witnessing or participating in grassroots struggles that win, raising the morale, confidence, and fighting capacity of working people, the poor, and the most oppressed to change their conditions.

BS: In early November 2017 when you came to speak at a Socialist Alternative event in Worcester, MA, you said that you were a perpetual optimist. Given the state of the world today, the increasingly frequent and devastating crises of capitalism, structural racism, rampant unrepentant sexism and misogyny, and continued ecological degradation, how you can maintain your optimism?

EH: James Baldwin stated, "I cannot be a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist means you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I am forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive."

That optimism comes from a study of history and examples of people fighting back to form a union, stopping an abusive boss, people organizing together for a common goal. Now, we need as Dr. King correctly stated, an urgency of NOW! And we need some action to go along with that urgency. Yes, we have dark days and nights ahead of us, particularly in this era of Trumpism and the economic terrorism of capitalism. That's why we must engage in struggle and critical political study to fortify our resolve. History teaches us when people become fed-up and can't take it anymore, people begin to move. What is crucial for the radical socialist left globally is to be prepared for that moment building organization, program, and leadership in these battles are essential as victory or defeat hangs in the balance.

BS: Building on that question, do you think there is possibly a strategic role for a kind of hopeful pessimism -a kind of expectation, given the forces rallied against the left (as well as the left's self-inflicted failures) that, at least in the short-term, things probably aren't going to turn out well, but that is precisely why we need to struggle and remain hopeful that they can, in the future, turn out well? The strategic idea being that if left activists (especially those who are new to socialism or activism in general) become too optimistic about the possibilities of short-term victories, they will become disillusioned and demobilized when faced with failure. Do you think there is anything to this perspective?

EH: You can't have a blind optimism or a cheerleader's mentality that is not rooted in the reality of class struggle-its ups and downs. The 90s were difficult, but I would not trade it in because I learned during a period of defeat. I was politically developed as a member of the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI) that has a sober approach that follows in the best traditions of genuine Bolshevism. The CWI draws out global political perspectives to explain the events and developments we are living through, even more, critically elaborating on an action program to present to workers and youth in the class struggle rooted in their lived experience under this system.

It is true the left has made mistakes, and there is an uneven history when it comes analysis, strategy, and tactics. With that said, we can't throw out the baby with the bathwater either. The building of the left or revolutionary party, even more so, Socialism, is a project that will demand the full participation and activity of the working class, youth, poor, and oppressed on a daily basis. I firmly believe we need more than smart prose, intellectual verbiage that a tiny minority in the activist world can understand, and commentary that is divorced from the concrete struggle and lives of working people. I wonder what that term "hopeful pessimism" means to someone who has been on the left for years, who carries scares and tears, or a new person discovering these ideas and their voice in the struggle. That "hopeful pessimism" seems abstract and divorces oneself to standing on the sidelines and waiting. I would prefer to engage and test out my ideas in the living breathing struggle and allow the movement to judge me if I am right or wrong.

BS: Given that, and the importance that you (and Marxists in general) place on history, what historical models, regarding movements and organizations, do you think offer the best inspiration (both regarding principles and strategy/tactics) for the contemporary left?

EH: The debate and discussion that is in the air is reform or revolution. This past November marked the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, and many are questioning the Bolshevik Revolution and party itself. I would say the Bolshevik Revolution would be instructive to study, but I would recommend all activists especially the new generation of activists to explore all the significant revolutionary movements of the past. Particularly after the Russian Revolution in 1917, like the German Revolution of 1918, Chinese Revolution (1925-27), Spain between 1931 and1937, etc. And counterpose it to the revolutions after WWII in the aftermath of the strengthening of Stalinism and Social Democracy, like China in 1949, Cuba in 1959, and anti-colonial revolutions in the so-called "third world." In my mind, this is vital because I think this generation needs a sense of historical memory and clarity of what a revolution is and how it comes to life under particular conditions and social forces. As you engage in this study, I think the Bolsheviks will stand out as a unique force that made a successful socialist revolution and fought to keep the flame alive in the face of imperial attack, third world social conditions, civil war, and isolation.

BS: You and I are both members of Socialist Alternative (SA), so obviously we have a shared vision of principles and strategy, but what is your perspective on the uptick in popularity and paper membership of the Democratic Socialist of America (DSA)? How should SA orient itself toward DSA, both locally and nationally? What are your experiences in working with DSA?

EH: This version of DSA is not your momma or daddy's DSA. DSA is a different organization from its original foundations in the 1960s under the leadership of Michael Harrington; I think this past summer's convention proved that to be true. I am interested to see how it will continue to develop with 30,000 members and several DSA members taking office on a city and statewide basis nationally. The Occupy banner, Bernie Sanders phenomenon, and the capitalist crisis have led us to this moment where socialism is being examined seriously for the first time in a generation or two. This generation will be worse off than their parents; they are living through a new gilded age of the super-rich reaping profits beyond imagination, and their lives are precarious in every way from income inequality to the climate crisis.

SA has worked with DSA members and chapters nationwide and would love to do so moving forward around the critical issues facing working people, poor, and the most oppressed around issues such as healthcare, jobs, education, housing, and ending law enforcement violence. We also want to engage in comradely discussion and debate around strategy and tactics for the left and related movements. We are aware of the meaningful conversations taking place inside DSA around the role of Democratic Party, building a sustainable fight back against corporate power, and countless other issues. SA wants to build a multi-racial mass movement of the working class with socialist forces as its backbone. I think the 40,000 strong rally and march against the forces of hate and reaction in Boston, MA (Aug. 2017) was a brilliant example of genuine united front work. And campaigning to show the potential power and organizing capacity of the working class and left that overshadowed and dwarfed the racist and neo-Nazi forces made the national and international news. This will be a period of clarification around ideas, history, and movement building strategy. SA is looking forward to engaging this new generation of activists and organizers because we are on the clock with no time to waste.

BS: Lastly, what do you see as the greatest obstacle to achieving progress towards socialism over the next, say, 5-10 years?

EH: We are up against an empire and global capitalism. There is no final blow against this system of oppression, war, hate, and environmental destruction. It has weapons of mass distraction and destruction at its disposal. We must be clear about what we are up against. As the Russian Revolution of 1917 and many other social movements against tyranny and corporate power have shown us, as the great Fannie Lou Hamer taught us, when people become sick and tired-the winds of change begin to swirl-what seemed impossible becomes possible. We have to prepare, which means we have to rebuild the fighting capacity of the working class, poor, and most oppressed, organizing in our workplaces, schools, and communities in a systematic and daily manner that encompasses defensive struggle to maintain what we have won and offensive battles to fight for what we want and need right now. One of the immediate tasks in front of us is reigniting the early stages of the resistance against Trump and the Republican Party as they advance the corporate agenda just like at this tax bill its naked class warfare. We must forge a mass movement that is not episodic but is sustaining and always pushing forward. Living that famous civil rights anthem to the fullest "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around."

Trump can be defeated, but we must have the will, strategy, analysis, approach, and program that centers the lives of working people and seeks to unite the working class in a common struggle against the ruling 0.1%. That's why I am incredibly excited and interested in the Poor People's Campaign this year and its possibilities in forging that movement. I may not see socialism in my lifetime, but I have been proud to be part of the struggle for socialism. To stand with the millions around the world as we say enough is enough! We will build a new world with our bare hands rooted in love for humanity, a socialist society is possible.

--

Eljeer Hawkins is a community, labor and anti-war activist, born and raised in Harlem, New York, and member of Socialist Alternative/CWI for 23 years. Eljeer is a former shop steward with Teamsters local 851 and former member of SEIU 1199, currently is a non-union healthcare worker in New York City. He contributes regularly to Socialist Alternative Newspaper, socialistworld.net , and The Hampton Institute on race, criminal justice, Black Lives Matter, and the historic black freedom movement. Eljeer is a member of the editorial board of Socialist Alternative newspaper. He has also lectured at countless venues including Harvard University, Hunter College, Oberlin College, and University of Toronto.

Bryant William Sculos, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral fellow at The Amherst Program in Critical Theory, adjunct professor at Florida International University, contributing writer for The Hampton Institute, and Politics of Culture section editor for Class, Race and Corporate Power . His recent work has been published with Constellations , New Political Science , Class, Race and Corporate Power , Public Seminar , New Politics , and in the edited volumes The Political Economy of Robots (Palgrave, 2017) and Marcuse in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, December 2017). He is also a member of Socialist Alternative/CWI.

Anarchism and Catholicism: An Introduction

By Chase Padusniak

Pictured: "Dorothy Day with Homeless Christ" by artist Kelly Latimore

"Anarchy," a scary word to many, doesn't get much use in Catholic circles. It seems downright frightening, either theologically or personally-it seems to threaten longstanding traditions of justice, not to mention the personal comfort and status of the West's largely comfortable and assimilated Catholic population. Witness, for example, the Catholic Encyclopedia :

"The theory of anarchy is against all reason. Apart from the fact that it runs counter to some of the most cherished instincts of humanity, as, for instance,family life and love of country, it is evident thatsociety without authority could not stand for a moment. Men whose only purpose would be to satisfy all their inclinations are by the very fact on the level of the animal creation. The methods they already employ in the prosecution of their designs show how the animal instincts quickly assert themselves."

Harsh words. Although the Encyclopedia is a useful resource in many ways, it was published in 1907, and, in some spots, is rather clearly a product of its time. I can say this, because, in spite of this absolute dismissal, anarchism became popular with more than a few Catholic thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Fr. Thomas Hagerty, Peter Maurin, Dom Léonce Crenier , Dorothy Day, Emmanuel Mounier, Ammon Hennacy, (arguably) Simone Weil, Fr. Ivan Illich, and Fr. Dan Berrigan all come to mind, and that's not even to mention famous examples from Orthodoxy and Protestantism such as Nikolai Berdyaev (along with Leo Tolstoy) and Jacques Ellul. Yet, unsurprisingly, the word continues to frighten us-comfortable as we are. In the interest of clarification, really of de-mystification, I'd like to ask: what is anarchism? And why did it appeal to so many Catholics?

First things first then: "anarchism" refers to a good number of traditions with a variety of commitments. For my purposes here, the central distinction is between individualist forms of anarchism-à la Max Stirner, Benjamin Tucker, and, I would argue, Murray Rothbard (insofar as his ideas can be called by the "a word" at all)-and communitarian forms, often associated with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin.

The former looks something like an extreme form of what most Americans would call "libertarianism" (though often with a Left-wing inflection, that is, with a greater interest in the liberating force of anarchism, as opposed to a preservation or shrinking of existing institutions). Donald Rooum, an advocate of Stirnerian Anarchism, defines his views (and thus anarchism more generally) thus :

"Anarchists believe that the point of society is to widen the choices of individuals. This is the axiom upon which the anarchist case is founded […]
Anarchists strive for a society which is as efficient as possible, that is a society which provides individuals with the widest possible range of individual choices."

Any social relationship in which one party dominates another by the use of threats (explicit or tacit, real or delusory) restricts the choices of the dominated party. Occasional, temporary instances of coercion may be inevitable; but in the opinion of anarchists, established, institutionalised, coercive relationships are by no means inevitable. They are a social blight which everyone should try to eliminate.

Anarchism is opposed to states, armies, slavery, the wages system, the landlord system, prisons, monopoly capitalism, oligopoly capitalism, state capitalism, bureaucracy, meritocracy, theocracy, revolutionary governments, patriarchy, matriarchy, monarchy, oligarchy, protection rackets, intimidation by gangsters, and every other kind of coercive institution. In other words, anarchism opposes governing, in all its forms.

Note that this sounds not unlike a more radical form of American libertarianism, a fully liberated force for human decision-making with limited interest in sociality. Rooum's formulation obviously comes from the Left-wing of the tradition (as do almost all forms of anarchism, again, with the possible exception of Rothbard's Anarcho-Capitalism). The goal, in short, is the freedom of the individual from all forms of coercion: governmental, institutional, and socio-ideological.

The other tradition emphasizes mutual-aid, community-building, and social organization in the absence of the State (here understood in its particularly modern sense, something all-encompassing and subordinating, with, as a result of technological development, near global reach-especially when one factors in supra-state organizations like the EU and the UN). Proudhon, for example, had this to say about his thought :

"All my economic ideas as developed over twenty-five years can be summed up in the words: agricultural-industrial federation. All my political ideas boil down to a similar formula: political federation or decentralization."

In another work, he's a bit longer winded :

"Power, instrument of the collective force, created in society to serve as mediator between capital and labor, has become inescapably enchained to capital and directed against the proletariat. No political reform can resolve this contradiction, since, according to the avowal of politicians themselves, such a reform could only end by giving more energy and expansion to power, and until it had overthrown the hierarchy and dissolved society, power would not be able to attack the prerogatives of monopoly. The problem consists, then, for the working classes, not in capturing, but in defeating both power and monopoly, which would mean to make rise from the bowels of the people, from the depths of labor, a power greater, an action more powerful which would envelop capital and the State and subjugate them."

Wayne Price updates the notion for today:

"There was a vision, called 'communism,' which was held by Kropotkin and other anarchist-communists in the 19th and early 20th century. Marx and Engels shared essentially the same goal. In the stateless, classless, society of communism, the means of production would be held in common (by the community), work would be carried out due to social motives rather than for wages, and consumer goods would be available to all according to their needs."

This division is the major one, though there exist various stripes within these. Some people in the communitarian category do not necessarily think the end goal is the communism in the sense intended by Marx; these people are often called "Mutualists," but the point is clear enough: anarchism can have an individual or a communal inflection. The former seek the abolition of the modern State (and almost all, if not all, institutions) in the name of individual freedom, in the name of personal liberation. The others seek a stateless society, though one that itself would have mutually-beneficial and deeply-communal forms of social organization.

To drive the point home, how different these varieties are, here's Max Stirner (an individualist anarchist) on Proudhon :

"Proudhon, like the Communists, fights against egoism. Therefore they are continuations and consistent carryings-out of the Christian principle, the principle of love, of sacrifice for something general, something alien."

Americans, given our history and libertarian tendencies, are by-and-large more familiar with the first sort. And that is a shame, since it's had much less impact on Catholic thinkers.

But why has social or communitarian anarchism had such an influence on Catholicism? The first step in understanding this phenomenon is a recognition of the development of Christian Personalism in the twentieth century. Often associated with Jacques Maritain and even Pope St. John Paul II, personalism places particular emphasis on the richness of individual human consciousness, really individual human existence. It's a complex term, defined in many ways, but for our purposes here, it might best be defined by the Encyclopædia Britannica :

"Personalism, a school of philosophy, usually idealist, which asserts that the real is the personal, i.e., that the basic features of personality-consciousness, free self-determination, directedness toward ends, self-identity through time, and value retentiveness-make it the pattern of all reality. In the theistic form that it has often assumed, personalism has sometimes become specifically Christian, holding that not merely the person but the highest individual instance of personhood-Jesus Christ-is the pattern."

To be very reductive, personalism came to influence a variety of Catholic figures, including Maurin, Mounier, and Day. They sought to find a philosophy that rejected both the hyper-individualistic and atomistic accounts given by liberalism as well as the collectivizing tendencies of Marxist Communism (I would add here that, like many figures in the early- and mid-twentieth century, these figures often misunderstood all socialisms to be Marxist, that is Soviet. Many failed to recognize the diversity of Marxian thought, let alone socialist thought as a greater whole. I have written about the many branches of such traditions before ).

Related to this personalist impulse was anarchism, another way of bridging the gap between social obligation and pure, unadulterated individualism. Anarchism could command both personal responsibility and communal commitment. Unlike right-libertarianism it did not only pay lip service to communal organization (i.e. it actually levied critiques at capitalism, the ultimate generator of consumerism, commercialism, individualism, etc. in the eyes of these men and women, that is, the ultimate source of institutionalized and cultural injustice) but actually theorized mutual aid, sociality, and commitment to community. On the other hand, it (in their eyes) unlike Soviet Marxism did not degrade the individual. As B. Jay Miller has written:

"Mounier wrote the concluding essay of the issue. He began with the subject of the workers movement which had preoccupied Esprit during the past years. He argued that anarchism was the most important intellectual tradition for the movement in France. He praised Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin for their sensitive analyses of the ills of modern society and argued that they always proceeded from personal experience rather than "scientific" abstractions as did the Marxists. Mounier saw the anarchists as moralists, much in the same spirit as the personalists of Esprit. He praised anarchist federalism as a viable alternative to the tyranny of bourgeois and revolutionary statism. He argued that the anarchists cast a jaundiced eye on further centralization and specialization of industry; work had a personal meaning beyond its economic function. The anarchists preached a reign of abundance and spontaneous liberty, more a celebration of life than a rationalization."

But the link was not merely political. The anarchist belief in personal, but not private, property resonated with the Church Fathers, again signaling a path that respected both human dignity and human sociality. Again, Miller:

"At this point Mounier compared Proudhon to the Fathers of the Catholic Church. They all agreed, so Mounier thought, that one could speak of property as theft in describing the private appropriation of riches from the communally produced superfluity of goods. In short, all goods beyond those satisfying personal needs should be subject to communal distribution; justice and charity demanded it. Proudhon and the Church Fathers knew that the health of the person and the community rested on such distribution."

It was not, however, simply Mounier who came to this connection. Here is Peter Maurin drawing on the same spirit (here mostly of personalism, though it is clear that he also read Proudhon):

Patrick Henry said.
"Give me liberty,
or give me death!"
What makes man
a man
is the right use
of liberty.

The rugged individualists
of the Liberty League,
the strong-arm men
of the Fascist State
and the rugged collectivists
of the Communist Party
have not yet learned
the right use
of liberty.
Read Freedom in the Modern World,
by Jacques Maritain.

And then, of course, there's Dorothy Day:

"Well, we [Catholic Workers] are very much interested in anarchist thought, because a man named Peter Kropotkin wrote a book called Fields, Factories, and Workshops, and he believed that all reform should begin from the bottom up, rather than from the top down […] They, through their organization and through their dedication to bettering conditions begin right where they are. In France, they would call it a personalist position."

And here is Day sounding almost exactly like Mounier above :

"How many thousands, tens of thousands [of prisoners], are in for petty theft, while the 'robber barons' of our day get away with murder. Literally murder, accessories to murder. "Property is Theft." Proudhon wrote-The coat that hangs in your closet belongs to the poor. The early Fathers wrote-[t]he house you don't live in, your empty buildings (novitiates, seminaries) belong to the poor. Property is Theft."

Lastly, an example from Ammon Hennacy. Here we can very clearly see how, for these men and women, anarchism represents both an affirmation of individual responsibility (central to the Christian tradition) alongside the necessary injunction to assist and, above all, love the poor :

"A Christian Anarchist does not depend on bullets or ballots to achieve his ideal; he achieves that ideal daily by the One Man Revolution with which he faces a decadent, confused and dying world."

Anarchism thus appealed to them precisely because, in its communitarian or social instantiation, it represented a via media, a way to minimize complicity in what Dorothy Day once ( may have) called "this rotten, decadent, putrid industrial capitalist system which breeds such suffering in the whited sepulcher of New York," even as it refused to deny the individual human being responsibility and dignity. Anarchism became a way of politicizing the personal conversion required of those who follow Christ, a way of resisting the bourgeois status quo without signing up to serve "the Party." For them "property" was indeed theft, not because it was wrong to own anything per se, but, because, as Aquinas wrote , echoing the Fathers:

"[W]hatever certain people have in superabundance is due, by natural law, to the purpose of succoring the poor. For this reason Ambrose [Loc. cit., Article 2, Objection 3 ] says, and his words are embodied in the Decretals (Dist. xlvii, can. Sicut ii): 'It is the hungry man's bread that you withhold, the naked man's cloak that you store away, the money that you bury in the earth is the price of the poor man's ransom and freedom.'"

Perhaps unexpectedly, it also became a way of practicing pacifism. Although many anarchists committed violent acts, in the hands of these Christians, the anarchist emphasis on mutual aid and responsibility (as opposed to the class war they saw in Soviet thought) led unequivocally to a non-violent way of life. Again, Ammon Hennacy:

"Despite the popular idea of anarchists as violent men, Anarchism is the one non-violent social philosophy.… The function of the Anarchist is two-fold. By daily courage in non-cooperation with the tyrannical forces of the State and the Church, he helps to tear down present society; the Anarchist by daily cooperation with his fellows in overcoming evil with good-will and solidarity builds toward the anarchistic commonwealth which is formed by voluntary action with the right of secession."

In support, again Dorothy Day :

"What do you mean by anarchist-pacifist?" First, I would say that the two words should go together, especially … when more and more people, even priests, are turning to violence, and are finding their heroes in Camillo Torres among the priests, and Che Guevara among laymen. The attraction is strong, because both men literally laid down their lives for their brothers. "Greater love hath no man than this." "Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love." Che Guevara wrote this, and he is quoted by Chicano youth in El Grito Del Norte."

One final point: many may say that the hierarchy of the Church is a clear example of why anarchism cannot be compatible with Catholicism. This, however, confuses several things. First, the modern State does not equal all forms of personal and communal governance (coops, credit unions, voluntary mutual-aid associations, etc.). Second, resistance to the intrinsically unjust capitalist state is an exercise in revolt against a-by definition-unjust authority. The Church, in the eyes of these anarchists, is not an unjust authority (but rather perhaps the most just authority that can exist). Lastly, this makes individualist anarchists out of those who were and are communitarians. Their rebellion again corrupt power structures is a rebellion against something secular; spiritual authority is another matter entirely;. In short, they did not simply hate authority for its own sake. A final Dorothy Day quotation ought to drive this home:

"I had a conversation with John Spivak, the Communist writer, a few years ago, and he said to me, "How can you believe? How can you believe in the Immaculate Conception, in the Virgin birth, in the Resurrection?" I could only say that I believe in the Roman Catholic Church and all she teaches. I have accepted Her authority with my whole heart. At the same time I want to point out to you that we are taught to pray for final perseverance. We are taught that faith is a gift, and sometimes I wonder why some have it and some do not. I feel my own unworthiness and can never be grateful enough to God for His gift of faith. St. Paul tells us that if we do not correspond to the graces we receive, they will be withdrawn. So I believe also that we should walk in fear, 'work out our salvation in fear and trembling.'"

As for those two other tenets to which the Communists subscribe, I still believe that our social order must be changed, that it is not right for property to be concentrated in the hands of the few. But I believe now with St. Thomas Aquinas that a certain amount of property is necessary for a man to lead a good life. I believe that we should work to restore the communal aspects of Christianity as well as some measure of private property for all.

I still believe that revolution is inevitable, leaving out Divine Providence. But with the help of God and by resorting to His sacraments and accepting the leadership of Christ, I believe we can overcome revolution by a Christian revolution of our own, without the use of force.

Put briefly, then, these brave men and women did not cultivate a tradition wholly alien to the Church; rather, they developed a via media, a commitment to the necessary Christian work of personal responsibility, but always and everywhere in service to the neighbor, always and everywhere filled with love for the poor and downtrodden, those forgotten by the system, those too often ignored (and to this day!) by the be-suited who sit in church on Sunday, only to pass the beggar outside right on by.

This was originally published at Patheos.

Is It Nation Time?: The Black Nationalism of Black Panther

By Sean Posey

In the fall of 1992, a unique moment in American cinema captured the attention of the nation. Auteur Spike Lee released his magnum opus, Malcolm X, to wide critical acclaim. But more than that, for the first time, a biopic of one of the central characters in the history of Black Nationalism reached an audience around the country and the world. Hats with the 'X' logo appeared on the heads of black youth everywhere, and the film itself inspired introspection and dialogue among not just black intellectuals but also among African Americans from all walks of life. The film's ending credits merged scenes of Malcolm throughout his life and connected Harlem to Soweto and America to Africa.

A similar moment seems to be upon us with the recent release of Black Panther, a comic book film about an African king/superhero and the fictional nation of Wakanda. Symbols and themes from Black Nationalism and Pan-African history are laced throughout the film, which manages to elevate the comic book genre flick to a visual textbook for not just inspiring black pride, but also for reflecting important elements of the black past and possible future.

Black Nationalism is a complicated concept, one with roots stretching back to the nineteenth century and beyond. The reality of chattel slavery in the West led to the call for the birth of a black nation from men such as Martin Delany, often called the "grandfather of Black Nationalism," and Robert Alexander Young, author of the 1829 Ethiopian Manifesto, which postulated a universal connection between all black peoples.

Young was writing about an old idea - Pan-Africanism. Envisioning a future nation for blacks in North America and beyond (Black Nationalism) - and building connections between African peoples around the world (Pan-Africanism) - are concepts that pulse throughout Black Panther. During the early nineteenth century, Paul Cuffee, a black businessman and abolitionist in America, began bringing African Americans to Sierra Leone. The English had already begun to bring freed slaves to the area after the Revolutionary War to a place called Granville Town, also known as the "Province of Freedom." Cuffee hoped the region could be a future homeland for blacks looking to flee oppression in America.

In the twentieth century, Marcus Garvey, perhaps the most famous of the Black Nationalists and Pan-Africanists, envisioned Liberia as a future homeland for blacks looking to flee violence and discrimination in America. He hoped that such a place would become an advanced country where blacks could prosper and build a power the equal of any in Europe. The Garveyites and other such Black Nationalists saw themselves as indelibly linked to Africa.

In Black Panther, a modern and technologically advanced black nation in Africa has already been realized. The nation of Wakanda masquerades before the world as an underdeveloped state, but hidden behind an elaborate façade is the most advanced country on Earth, powered by a fictional metal known as vibranium. Mined from a sacred mound, the substance powers nearly everything in the country.

In this technologically advanced nation, what Patricia Hill Collins calls the "main ideas" of Black Nationalism - self-determination (political), self-definition (cultural), and self- reliance (economic) - are all fully realized.[1]

Maglev trains, Talon fighters, and vehicles designed to mimic flying animals are among the more wonderful aspects of Wakandan technology that we see in the film. Unlike Western countries, Wakanda incorporates technology that both mimics and exists in harmony with the natural world. Afrofuturistic cities mingle with gorgeous vistas of waterfalls and trees. There are skyscrapers sporting thatched roofs, grass sidewalks, sophisticated public transportation systems, and no visible cars.

There is nary a white face in sight as black vendors sell their wares in the street, and a black king, T'Challa, rules over a country that has never known colonization. According to Carvell Wallace, director Ryan Coogler loosely modeled his idea of Wakanda after the Kingdom of Lesotho, a landlocked country surrounded by South Africa. But Black Panther's kingdom is a futuristic polity beyond the wildest dreams of even Marcus Garvey.

From as far back as the nineteenth century, women such as Maria W. Stewart, a servant turned public figure, espoused the ideas of Black Nationalism on the national stage in America. However, in North America and throughout the African Diaspora, patriarchal structures relegated black women to largely supporting roles in the struggle for black liberation. Such gendered systems of power are absent in Wakanda.

It is easy to see the inspiration of historical figures such as Amy Jacques Garvey and Henrietta Vinton Davis in the characters of Nakia (played by Lupita Nyong'o) and Okoye (played by Danai Gurira).

Okoye is head of the fearsome Dora Milaje, an all-female bodyguard that protects Black Panther and the royal family. They might be thought of as a cross between the "Amazonian Guard" that protected the late Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and the Nation of Islam's Vanguard or "Warrior Class" of the Muslim Girls Training and General Civilization Class. The Dora Milaje bring to mind the term "an army of Amazons to lead the race," used to describe women in the United Negro Improvement Association. [2] Indeed, the Dora Milaje have been compared to the all-female African army of the Dahomey Amazons, who once fought the French in what is now the Republic of Benin.

Unlike Okoye, Nakia is a spy, a member of the secretive "War Dog" squad, which operates in a capacity similar to the C.I.A., minus the overthrowing of foreign governments. During the course of the film, she attempts to convince T'Challa of Wakanda's responsibility to help other embattled Africans across the continent. However, it has long been the tradition in Wakanda to avoid any entanglements with the outside world that might draw attention to the country's true power.

The tension between Wakanda's wealth and the impoverishment and agony among black populations throughout the world is symbolized in the character of Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan). Killmonger is the son of a murdered Wakandan spy and prince, N'Jobu. While working undercover in Oakland, California, during the 1990s, N'Jobu witnesses the poverty and racial oppression facing blacks in America. He comes to believe that Wakanda should use its technology to aid the suffering of fellow blacks, wherever they may be.

N'Jobu comes to work with hated arms dealer Ulysses Klaue to in order to smuggle vibranium of out of Wakanda in order to facilitate an uprising among African Americans. When T'Chaka, who is both N'Jobu's brother and also T'Challa's father, confronts him, N'Jobu refuses to come back to Wakanda to stand trial and is killed by T'Chaka.

N'Jobu's son, the young Killmonger, is left behind in America. He grows to become a member of a black-ops unit, training for the day when he might return to Wakanda and seize the throne. There is more than a bit of Malcolm X in Killmonger, who wishes to arm the black people of the world for a final battle against white supremacy. But unlike X, Killmonger descends into violent acts against his own people (especially women) in his quest for power.

When he ultimately does return to Wakanda to confront T'Challa, it is easy to hear the words of Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, a Black Nationalist and Pan-Africanist, who spoke of the plight of blacks in the United States during the twentieth century: "How long shall we have to wait for something to be done for the black people's of this country?" [3]

T'Challa, the Martin Luther King to Killmonger's Malcolm X, rejects the idea of a global war. But he remains torn over Wakanda's policy of isolation from the rest of the world, particularly the black world outside of his country's borders. By the end of the film, T'Challa decides to open outreach centers throughout the United States, bringing Wakanda's technology to those in the African Diaspora - a true act of Pan-Africanism.

The chant of the Black Power movement during the 1960s and 1970s (Is it nation time?) is symbolically answered in Black Panther. For although Wakanda is a fictional African country, its importance extends throughout the diaspora.

The concept of Black Nationalism in modern times goes beyond the idea of creating a physical polity. According to Kate Dossett, "Black Nationalism in the United States has always been closely linked to Pan-Africanism, and can be better understood through an imagined community notion of nationalism rather than a euro-centric state model." [4]

Wakanda's example is one that reaches out beyond Africa to the masses of people of African descent. It is an imagined nation for an imagined community throughout the world.

Black Panther has the potential to help engage audiences with these concepts and with the history of Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism. The beauty of the costumes, characters and the fictional world of Wakanda can do much more than entertain. They could mark the beginning of a new cultural and political awakening in a century where the key questions of black self-determination, self-definition, and self-reliance continue to be part of a needed dialogue.

Notes

[1] Patricia Hill Collins, From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism and Feminism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 75.

[2] Kate Dossett, Bridging Race Divides: Black Nationalism, Feminism, and Integration in the United States, 1896-1935 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2009), 157.

[3] Keisha N. Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 181.

[4] Doessett, 6.

Are Bourgeois Feminism and the Women’s March Leading Us into the Arms of the Democrats?

By Amir Khafagy

Last month, thousands of protesters marched through the streets of Manhattan to commemorate the first anniversary of last year's Woman's March on Washington. It was an unpresented and incredible march that amounted to the largest single day of protest in American history. Progressive minded people from around the country took part in day of outrage against the misogynistic and racist symbolism of what Trump represents. The protest was not only contained to the streets of Washington but occurred simultaneously in cities across the globe. It was indeed a remarkable achievement in mass political mobilization and organization. Yet, for all its admirable achievements, this year's woman march, like last years, will probably end up at best, selling us a bag full of hollow symbolism and at worst selling us out to the Democratic Party. Last year, as I watched the demonstrators march in New York I wondered out loud to a friend that if Clinton would have won would we be seeing a Woman's March? Some activists left the march feeling disillusioned by the fact that even though hundreds of thousands of people took part in a single day of mass action, there was little in the way in providing concrete demands or even long-term coordinated action.

This year, the organizers were prepared to change that. According to the Woman's March organizers, this year's march was designed to build momentum for its "Power to the Polls" campaign. The campaign will officially launch on January 21st in Las Vegas with the specific goal of initiating a national voter registration drive. As stated on their website, organizers are aiming to "target swing states to register new voters, engage impacted communities, harness our collective energy to advocate for policies and candidates that reflect our values, and collaborate with our partners to elect more women and progressive's candidates to office".

The leaders of the Woman's March are obviously trying to use their brand to influence the upcoming midterm elections. Linda Sarsour, a co-chair the Women's March, was quoted as saying on their website, "This campaign will mobilize a new group of activists to create accessible power to our voting polls." The power that they seem to be describing is vague and symbolic. Actually, it's downright passive and inapt. Voting within itself is one of the passive political acts in itself, especially if you are voting within the context of the two-party system.

Nowhere on their website do they mention any criticism of the role of the two-party system in maintaining a capitalist economic and political system that thrives from oppression and exploitation. You won't find any mention of the devastating effects that neoliberalism has caused for millions of working-class women throughout this country as well as in the global south, despite the fact that both parties have jointly endorsed and enacted these policies happily, arm in arm. Nor is there any mention of protesting militarization or imperialism. Or are those not important issues for women? And the most important piece missing from their entire platform is the central roles that class and race play in the oppression and exploitation of working-class women. In fact, the entire notion of class is invisible to Woman's March organizers, while the centrality of race is at best watered down.

Organizers claim that it is their "moral imperative to dismantle the gender and racial inequities within the criminal justice system" without thinking twice about the fact the entire criminal justice system is racist to its core. Race isn't just another social justice issue that can be lumped in with other issues. Without examining the centrality of racial oppression in supporting American capitalism, specifically against black people, we will never be able to abolish racial inequality. Furthermore, we can't begin to talk about race without talking about class. Class-based politics apparently have no place in a movement they claim is committed to "providing intersectional education" or in their mission to "harness the political power of diverse women and their communities to create transformative social change." How exactly they plan to harness that "power" to create "transformative change" is the most revealing aspect of their ideology.

Essentially, the March's ideology snugly fits into the ideology of neoliberalism. They seemingly have no intention of challenging the neoliberal ideology that dominates our society. Instead, their game plan to fight for a more "inclusive" neoliberalism. You can call it intersectional neoliberalism. Ideologically, they believe that if they "channel their supporters' energy and enthusiasm to the ballot box next November" they will somehow achieve lasting "transformative change." In translation, this means that transformative change will come from all-hands-on-deck support for the Democratic Party, the same that was responsible for rigging the democratic primary against Bernie Sanders. It was the same party that nominated neoliberal war monger Clinton for presidency. It was Democrat Obama who was responsible for cementing the Wall Street bailouts, continuing Bush-era policies of domestic surveillance, the deportation of more people then every previous presidency combined, and the massive increase of military conflicts around the world. Yes, this is the same party that the Woman's March wants us to support.

According to the organizers, our ultimate power is derived from our ability to vote. However, by continuing to vote for Democrats, we are complicit is supporting the same unequal system that we should be trying to fight against. This is not to say that voting within itself is completely powerless. It can be an effective revolutionary tool if radical and progressive-minded people were to unite and form a revolutionary peoples' party or even just back third parties that already exist. Working-class people can't be expected to share the same party with the likes of Wall Street. Our interests are fundamentally in conflict and should be in opposition to Wall Street's interests. Marxist writer and thinker, Joe G Kaye, elaborates on this: "the two-party system is a SYSTEM, that the parties operate in tandem, that the role of the Democratic Party to be the lesser-of-the-two evils, to move to the left when the masses begin to become radicalized so as to prevent the formation of a true people's party. In that sense, the theory of the lesser-of-the-two evils is the greatest evil."

Despite the need for structural change, the Woman's March is mute when it comes to supporting the formation of a third party. They haven't even backed a third-party progressive like Jill Stein, who also happens to be a woman. Instead we are told that the best way to change the system is to continue to support it and lend credibility to it. Maybe if we play identity politics and elect candidates who look like us and share our "values," we are told, then we will be on the road to progress. The problems and limitations with identity politics is that it makes identity, not class, the central defining feature of one's politics. It was not Obama's racial identity that is responsible for leaving the system of mass incarceration intact, it was his class, and the class that he ultimately served, that shaped his political identity. It was tantamount to what writer Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has dubbed, "Black Faces in High Places." Taylor writes that "we have more black elected officials in the United States than at any point in American history. Yet for the vast majority of black people, life has changed very little. Black elected officials have largely governed in the same way as their white counterparts, reflecting all of the racism, corruption, and policies favoring the wealthy seen throughout mainstream politics."

This highlights the various limitations of voting solely based on a shared identity. Just because they might look like us doesn't mean they will be responsive to our working-class interests. In that regard, the Woman's March offers nothing new in terms of fundamentally changing our political or economic system. Historically, social movements have constantly put their fate in the hands of the Democratic Party only to watch as their movements wither away. Have we learned nothing from the aftermath of Jessie Jackson's failed presidential campaign and his Rainbow Push Coalition? This coalition led by Jackson firmly believed they could change the party from the inside. However, over the course of Bill Clinton's administration, poor and working-class people, especially for blacks, were faced with insurmountable, manufactured crises like the end of welfare and the expansion of mass incarceration. Writers Arun Gupta and Steve Horn have called the Democratic Party "the graveyard of social movements." Thus, if the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results, supporting the strategy of the Woman's March is insane. They have become essentially (perhaps they were always) an extension of the Democratic Party. It's the same old lousy gift, this time wrapped in pink.

Thankfully, progressive voices have emerged to critique the structure, leadership, and direction of the Woman's March organization. In Los Angeles, the Palestinian American Women's Association pulled out of Women's March L.A in protest over the inclusion of actress Scarlett Johansson as a featured speaker. The star has made public her support of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, leading Palestinian activist Sana Ibrahim to say that the March's call for human rights "does not extend to Palestinian human rights." In Philadelphia, some black and brown women activists have called for other activists to boycott the march over the concerns that March organizers are collaborating with police. Community leader Megan Malachi from Philly REAL Justice, a coalition of local activist groups, has stated that "The Philadelphia Women's March has once again demonstrated their disconnect from the concerns of working-class black women and their families/communities." She went on to say that by coordinating with police, the Woman's March organizers "are ignoring local struggles against police terrorism and choosing to center the bourgeoisie aspirations of white feminism. Another tone deaf, epic fail."

Writer and activist Jamilah Lemieux echoed many of those same sentiments when last year she wrote "I don't know that I serve my own mental health needs by putting my body on the line to feign solidarity with women who by and large didn't have my back prior to November." It goes to show that even if the Woman's March is on its surface an all-encompassing, inclusive, woman-led movement, there is still serious debate about its direction among its own ranks. Not all women are equal, nor do they all share a common struggle. Let's not forget that 53 percent of white women voters cast their ballot for Trump. Many so-called "progressive" white women might not even be marching in the streets if Clinton were their president.

We can't continue to depend on the Democratic Party to protect us from the evils of the Republicans unless we want to be used as pawns in the two -party game. Poor and working-class people of all sexes and genders will never be liberated if we keep joining coalitions and parties with the very people who have vested interests in maintaining our oppression. It's

time to wake up and see that we are being herded into the trap that has kept us poor and exploited in the first place. It's time to say 'times up' to the Democratic Party and 'times up' for the two-party system.

A Political Philosophy of Self-Defense

By Chad Kautzer

Editor's Note: This essay is an adapted excerpt from Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense (ed. scott crow).

In his 1964 speech "Communication and Reality," Malcolm X said: "I am not against using violence in self-defense. I don't call it violence when it's self-defense, I call it intelligence." Earlier that year, he made a similar point in his Harlem speech introducing the newly founded Organization of Afro-American Unity: "It's hard for anyone intelligent to be nonviolent."

To portray self-defensive violence as natural, in no need of justification, or as so commonsensical that it could barely be called violence has a depoliticizing effect. Since the goal of Malcolm X's speeches was to undermine critiques of armed black resistance, this effect was intentional. For good reasons, he was attempting to normalize black people defending themselves against the violence of white rule. When Malcolm X did speak of self-defense as a form of violence, he emphasized that it was lawful and an individual right. In his most famous speech, "The Ballot or the Bullet" (1964), he explicitly stated: "We don't do anything illegal." This was also, of course, how the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense justified its armed shadowing of police in Oakland in the late 1960s: it was the members' Second Amendment right to bear arms and their right under California law to openly carry them.

To develop a critical theory of community defense, however, we need to move beyond the rhetoric of rights or the idea that all self-defensive violence is quasi-natural or nonpolitical. The self-defense I discuss in this essay is political because the self being defended is political, and as such it requires both normative and strategic considerations. This project seeks to articulate the dynamics of power at work in self-defense and the constitution of the self through its social relations and conflicts.

Because communities of color defend themselves as much against a culture of white supremacy as they do against bodily harm, their self-defense undermines existing social hierarchies, ideologies, and identities. If we were to limit ourselves to the language of individual rights, these interconnections would remain concealed. Violence against women (but not only women), for example, has a gendering function, enforcing norms of feminine subordination and vulnerability. Resistance to such violence not only defends the body but also undermines gender and sexual norms, subverting hetero-masculine dominance and the notions of femininity or queerness it perpetuates. Since the social structures and identities of race, gender, class, and ability intersect in our lives, practices of self-defense can and often must challenge structures of oppression on multiple fronts simultaneously.

In the following, I do not focus on the question of whether self-defensive violence is justifiable, but rather on why it is political; how it can transform self-understandings and community relations; in what contexts it can be insurrectionary; and why it must be understood against a background of structural violence. It is necessary to clarify these dimensions of self-defense for two reasons in particular. First, arguments advocating armed community defense too often discuss the use of violence and the preparations for it as somehow external to political subjectivity, as if taking up arms, training, or exercising self-defensive violence do not transform subjects and their social relations. The influence of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961) on the early Black Panthers, Steve Biko, and others derives precisely from Fanon's understanding of the transformative effects of resistance in the decolonizing of consciousness. "At the individual level," Fanon writes, "violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude."

The second reason for clarification is to distinguish the strategies, ways of theorizing, and forms of social relations of liberatory movements from those of reactionary movements. There is an increasingly influential understanding of self-defense today that reinforces a particular notion of the self-a "sovereign subject"-that is corrosive to horizontal social relations and can only be sustained vis-à-vis state power. This notion of the self runs counter to the goals of non-statist movements and self-reliant communities. To be aware of these possibilities and pitfalls allows us to avoid them, a goal to which the following sketch of a critical theory of community self-defense seeks to contribute.

Resistance and Structural Violence

At the National Negro Convention in 1843, Reverend Henry Highland Garnet issued a rare public call for large-scale resistance to slavery: "Let your motto be resistance! resistance! resistance! No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance. What kind of resistance you had better make, you must decide by the circumstances that surround you, and according to the suggestion of expediency." I describe resistance as opposition to the existing social order from within, and, as Garnet suggested, it can take different forms, such as self-defense, insurrection, or revolution. We can think of an insurrection as a limited armed revolt or rebellion against an authority, such as a state government, occupying power, or even slave owner. It is a form of illegal resistance, often with localized objectives, as in Shays' Rebellion (1786), Nat Turner's Rebellion (1831), the insurrections on the Amistad (1839) and Creole (1841), the coal miner Battle of Blair Mountain (1921), Watts (1965), Stonewall (1969), and Attica (1971).

Distinguishing between defensive and insurrectionary violence can be complicated. In the Amistad case, for example, white officials initially described it as a rebellion and thus a violation of the law, but later reclassified it as self-defense when the original enslavement was found to be unlawful. In a rare reversal, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the captives on the Amistad as having selves worthy of defense. That was never in question among those rebelling, of course, but it does indicate the political nature of the self and our assessments of resistance. "Since the Other was reluctant to recognize me," writes Fanon, "there was only one answer: to make myself known." On the Amistad, rebellion was the only way for the enslaved to make their selves known, meaning that their actions were simultaneously a defense of their lives and a political claim to recognition.

A sustained insurrection can become revolutionary when it threatens to fundamentally transform or destroy the dominant political, social, or economic institutions, as with the rise of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico in 1994 and the recent wave of Arab uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, including most significantly Rojava or Syrian Kurdistan. The armed rebellion led by John Brown in 1859, which seized the United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry, was intended to instigate a revolution against the institution of slavery. Although the insurrection was quickly put down, it inspired abolitionists around the country and contributed to the onset of the U.S. Civil War.

Brown's rebellion was not a slave revolt (and thus not an act of self-defense), but it did highlight the nature of structural violence. Henry David Thoreau, the inspiration for Gandhi's nonviolent civil disobedience and, in turn, that of Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote the most insightful analysis of this violence at the time. In his essay "A Plea for Captain John Brown," Thoreau defends Brown's armed resistance and identifies the daily state violence of white rule against which the insurrection took place:

We preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty violence every day. Look at the policeman's billy and handcuffs! Look at the jail! Look at the gallows! Look at the chaplain of the regiment! We are hoping only to live safely on the outskirts of this provisional army. So we defend ourselves and our hen-roosts, and maintain slavery. . . . I think that for once the Sharps rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous cause [i.e., Brown's insurrection].

In this passage Thoreau highlights how the so-called security of one community was achieved by oppressing another and making it insecure. To properly understand the insurrection, he therefore argues, one must view it as a response to illegitimate structural violence. He enumerates the commonplace mechanisms of this rule, which, for whites, fades into the background of their everyday lives: law and order upheld by a neutral police force, enforced by an objective legal system and carceral institutions, and defended by an army supported by the Constitution and blessed by religious authorities. The violence of white supremacy becomes naturalized and its beneficiaries see no need for its justification; it is nearly invisible to them, though not, of course, to those it oppresses. "The existence of violence is at the very heart of a racist system," writes Robert Williams in Negroes with Guns (1962). "The Afro-American militant is a 'militant' because he defends himself, his family, his home and his dignity. He does not introduce violence into a racist social system-the violence is already there and has always been there. It is precisely this unchallenged violence that allows a racist social system to perpetuate itself."

We all exist within hierarchical social structures and the meaning and function of violence, self-defensive or otherwise, will be determined by our position vis-à-vis others in these structures. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, for example, described the self-defensive practices of the Black Panther Party as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" and thus insurrectionary, if not revolutionary. Surely his assessment had more to do with the threat self-reliant black communities posed to white domination in the country than with the security of government institutions. "When people say that they are opposed to Negroes 'resorting to violence,'" writes Williams, "what they really mean is that they are opposed to Negroes defending themselves and challenging the exclusive monopoly of violence practiced by white racists." These structures of domination and monopolies of violence are forms of rule that operate in the family, the city, and the colony, and resistance to their violence, both dramatic and mundane, "makes known" the selves of the subjugated.

A satisfactory notion of self-defense is not obvious when we view self-defensive acts within the context of structural violence and understand the self as both embodied and social. Writing specifically of armed self-defense, Akinyele Omowale Umoja defines it as "the protection of life, persons, and property from aggressive assault through the application of force necessary to thwart or neutralize attack." While this is appropriate in many contexts, the primary association of self-defense with protection does not capture how it can also reproduce or undermine existing social norms and relations, depending on the social location of the self being defended. Describing the effects of his defense against a slaveholder, Frederick Douglass, for example, wrote that he "was a changed being after that fight," for "repelling the unjust and cruel aggressions of a tyrant" had an emancipatory effect "on my spirit." This act of self-defense, he asserts, "was the end of the brutification to which slavery had subjected me." Our understanding of self-defense must, therefore, account for the transformativepower of self-defense for oppressed groups as well as the stabilizing effect of self-defense for oppressor groups.

Social Hierarchies and Subject Formation

To see how self-defense can have several effects and why a critical theory of self-defense must, therefore, always account for relations of domination, we need to understand in what way the self is both embodied and social. By embodied I mean that it is through the body that we experience and come to know the world and ourselves, rather than through an abstract or disembodied mind. The body orients our perspective, and is socially visible, vulnerable, and limited. Much of our knowledge about the social and physical world is exercised by the body. Our bodies are sexed, raced, and gendered, not only "externally" by how others view us or how institutions order us-as, for example, feminine, masculine, queer, disabled, white, and black-but also "internally" by how we self-identify and perform these social identities in our conscious behavior and bodily habits. By the time we are able to challenge our identities, we have already been habituated within social hierarchies, so resistance involves unlearning our habits in thought and practice as well as transforming social institutions. As David Graeber writes, "forms of social domination come to be experienced in the most intimate possible ways-in physical habits, instincts of desire or revulsion-that often seem essential to our very sense of being in the world."

Since our location within social hierarchies in part determines our social identities, the self that develops is social and political from the start. This does not mean that we are "stuck" or doomed to a certain social identity or location, nor that we can simply decide to identify ourselves elsewhere within social hierarchies or somehow just exit them. To be sure, we have great leeway in terms of self-identification, but self-identification does not itself change institutional relations or degrees of agency, respect, risk, opportunity, or access to resources. These kinds of changes can only be achieved through social and political struggles. Our embodied identities are sites of conflict, formed and reformed through our practical routines and relations as well as through social struggle. Since the actions and perceptions of others are integral to the development of our own, including our self-understanding, we say that the self is mediated, or is formed through our relations with others in systems of production, consumption, education, law, and so forth.

In The Souls of Black Folks (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois theorized black life in a white supremacist society as experiencing one's self as split in two, a kind of internalization of a social division that produced what he called "double-consciousness," or "this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity." Although one may view oneself as capable, beautiful, intelligent, and worthy of respect, the social institutions one inhabits can express the opposite view. Part of the experience of oppression is to live this otheringform of categorization in everyday social life. Even when one consciously strives to resist denigration and to hold fast to a positive self-relation, the social hierarchy insinuates itself into one's self-understanding. In the most intimate moments of introspection, a unified self-consciousness escapes us because our self-understanding can never completely break from the social relations and ideologies that engender it. Social conflict is internalized, and it takes great strength just to hold oneself together; to live as a subjectwhen others view and treat you as little more than an object, and when you are denied the freedoms, security, and resources enjoyed by others. Ultimately, only by undermining the social conditions of oppression through collective resistance can the double-consciousness Du Bois describes become one.

Racism produces race and not the other way around. Racial categories emerge from practical relations of domination, unlike ethnic groups, which are cultural forms of collective life that do not need to define themselves in opposition to others. Racial categories are neither abstract nor biological, but are social constructions initially imposed from without but soon after reconfigured from within through social struggles. As with all relations of domination, the original shared meanings attributed to one group are contrary to the shared meanings attributed to other groups and, thus, often exist as general dichotomies. This oppositional relation in meaning mirrors the hierarchical opposition of the groups in practical life-a fact that is neither natural nor contingent.

Masculinity and femininity, for example, are not natural categories: they are social roles within a social order and thus have a history just as racial groups do. Yet, like those of race, the social and symbolic relations of gender are not contingent. Indeed, masculinity and femininity exhibit a certain kind of logic that we find in every institutionalized form of social domination. Because gender is a way of hierarchically ordering human relations, the characteristics associated with the dominant group function to justify their domination. Group members are said to be, for example, stronger, more intelligent, and more moral and rational. Nearly every aspect of social life will reflect this, from the division of labor to the forms of entertainment.

In reality, the dominant group does not dominate because it is more virtuous or rational-indeed, the depth of its viciousness is limitless-but due to its dominance it can propagate the idea that it is more virtuous, rational, or civilized. "The colonial 'civilizing mission,'" writes María Lugones, "was the euphemistic mask of brutal access to people's bodies through unimaginable exploitation, violent sexual violation, control of reproduction, and systematic terror."

The fundamental dependency of the oppressor on the oppressed is concealed in all ideologies of social domination. Although the very existence of the colonist, capitalist, white supremacist, and patriarch relies on the continuous exploitation of others, they propagate the idea of an inverted world in which they are free from all dependencies. This is the camera obscura of ideology that Karl Marx discusses in The German Ideology (1845-46). The supposedly natural lack of autonomy of the subordinated groups is, we are told, the reason for social hierarchy. Workers depend on capitalists to employ and pay them, women need men to support and protect them, people of color require whites to control and decide for them, and so forth.

Resistance to domination reveals the deception of this inverted world, destabilizing the practical operations of hierarchy and undermining its myths, for example of masculine sovereignty, white superiority, compulsory heterosexuality, and capital's self-creation of value. Violence and various forms of coercion support these myths, but such violence would be ineffective if some groups were not socially, politically, and legally structured to be vulnerable to it.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as "the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death." Indeed, to be vulnerable to violence, exploitation, discrimination, and toxic environments is never the choice of the individual. Any radical liberatory agenda must therefore include among its aims the reduction of such group-differentiated vulnerabilities, which would strike a blow to many forms of social domination, including by not limited to race. This is not to say that vulnerability can be completely overcome. The social nature of our selves guarantees that the conditions that enable or disable us can never be completely under our control, and those very same conditions render us vulnerable to both symbolic and physical harm.

Turning specifically to consider self-defensive practices, while they cannot therefore eliminate vulnerability, they can reduce it for particular groups and undermine it at a structuring principle of oppression. Training in self-defense, writes Martha McCaughey in Real Knockouts (1997), "makes possible the identification of not only some of the mechanisms that create and sustain gender inequality but also a means to subvert them."

The Politics of Self-Defense

If we accept a social, historical, and materialist account of group and subject formation, and understand that groups are reproduced with the help of violence, both mundane and spectacular, then we can see why self-defense functions as more than protection from bodily harm. It will also be clear why self-defense is not external to questions of our political subjectivity. If we acknowledge that we are hierarchically organized in groups-by race, gender, and class, for example-which makes some groups the beneficiaries of structural violence and others disabled, harmed, or killed by it, we see how self-defense can either stabilize or undermine domination and exploitation.

Self-defense as resistance from below is a fundamental violation of the most prevalent social and political norms, as well as our bodily habits. As McCaughey writes: "The feminine demeanor that comes so 'naturally' to women, a collection of specific habits that otherwise may not seem problematic, is precisely what makes us terrible fighters. Suddenly we see how these habits that make us vulnerable and that aestheticize that vulnerability are encouraged in us by a sexist culture." Organized examples of resistance to this structured vulnerability include the Gulabi or Pink Sari Gang in Uttar Pradesh, India; Edith Garrud's Bodyguard suffragettes, who trained in jujitsu; as well as numerous queer and feminist street patrol groups, including the Pink Panthers. McCaughey calls these self-defensive practices "feminism in the flesh," because they are simultaneously resisting the violence of patriarchy, while reconfiguring and empowering one's body and self-understanding. We could similarly think of the self-defensive practices of the Black Panthers, Young Lords, Deacons for Defense and Justice, Brown Berets, and the American Indian Movement as anti-racist, as decolonization in the flesh.

Although self-defense is not sufficient to transform institutionalized relations of domination, unequal distributions of resources and risk, or the experience of double-consciousness, it is a form of decolonization and necessary for other kinds of mobilizations. The praxis of resistance is also an important form of self-education about the nature of power, the operations of oppression, and the practice of autonomy. When conditions are so oppressive that one's self is not recognized at all, self-defense is de facto insurrection, a necessary making oneself known through resistance. While the most common form of self-defense is individual and uncoordinated, this does not make it any less political or any less important to the struggle, and this is true regardless of the mind-set or intentions of those exercising resistance.

We must, however, also be attentive to how resistance, and even preparations for it, can instrumentalize and reinforce problematic gender and race norms, political strategies, or sovereign politics. A critical theory of community self-defense should reveal these potentially problematic effects and identify how to counter them. There is, for example, an influential pamphlet, The Catechism of the Revolutionist (1869), written by Sergey Nechayev and republished by the Black Panthers, which describes the revolutionist as having "no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name." This nameless, yet masculine, figure "has broken all the bonds which tie him to the civil order." But who provides for the revolutionist and who labors to reproduce the material conditions of his revolutionary life? Upon whom, in short, does the supposed independence of the revolutionist depend?

Although the machismo and narcissism here is extreme to the point of being mythical-George Jackson said it was "too cold, very much like the fascist psychology"-it does speak to a twofold danger in practices of resistance. The first danger is that self-defensive practices are part of a division of labor that falls along the traditional fault lines of social hierarchies within groups. Men have, for instance, too often taken up the task of community defense in all contexts of resistance, which has the effect of reproducing traditional gender hierarchies and myths of masculine sovereignty. Considerations of self-defense must therefore be intersectionalist and aware of the transformative power and embodied nature of resistance, as discussed above. The group INCITE!, for example, seeks to defend women, gender nonconforming, and trans people of color from "violence directed against communities (i.e., police brutality, prisons, racism, economic exploitation, etc.)" as well as from "violence within communities (sexual/domestic violence)."

The second danger is a commitment to the notion of a sovereign subject, which is the centerpiece of authoritarian political ideologies and motivates so many reactionary movements. The growing number of white militias, the sovereign citizen movement, as well as major shifts in interpretations of the Second Amendment and natural rights, are contributing to an increasingly influential politics of self-defense with a sovereign subject at its core. For this sovereign subject-whose freedom can only be actualized through domination-the absolute identification with abstract individual rights always reflects an implicit dependency on state violence, much the way Nechayev's revolutionist implicitly relies on a community he refuses to acknowledge. The sovereign subject's disavowal of the social conditions of its own possibility produces an authoritarian concept of the self, whose so-called independence always has the effect of undermining the conditions of freedom for others.

Although one objective of self-defense is protection from bodily harm, the social and political nature of the self being defended makes such resistance political as well. Self-defense can help dismantle oppressive identities, lessen group vulnerability, and destabilize social hierarchies supported by structural violence. The notion of a sovereign subject conceals these empowering dimensions of self-defense and inhibits the creation of self-reliant communities in which the autonomy of each is enabled by nonhierarchical (and non-sovereign) social relations being afforded to all.

This excerpt was originally published at Boston Review .

Revolution and Black Struggle: Marxism as a Weapon Against Racism and Capitalism

By Marcello Pablito

Racism, Capitalism, and Slavery

In his most important work, Marx states that "Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin."1 Despite attempts by political and intellectual groups to deny Marx and Engels' (and, by extension, revolutionary Marxism's) uncompromising stance against racism, the founders of scientific socialism thoroughly understood that racist oppression served as a tool for the capitalist exploitation of all workers. The relationship between capitalism and racism has only grown stronger in subsequent generations. There have been cases in which the falsification of Marx and Engels' positions and the conscious attempts to equate Marxism with Stalinism have led to generalized attacks on Marxism.This brief article will describe how the leadership of the Russian Revolution understood the fight against racism.

Marxism was developed on the foundations of a new worldview based in historical materialism and offering an explanation that was superior to idealism, religious beliefs, or a view of history as a mere succession of random events. Contrary to these views, Marxism explains the development of history and the division of society into classes as emerging from the material development of human society, and it describes class struggle as the driving force of history. It is from a scientific view of the development of capitalism, and from a critique of political economy and the origins of the bourgeois state, that Marxism explains racism as an ideology that emerged to justify and rationalize one of the greatest atrocities in the history of mankind and identifies it as one of the fundamental pillars of primitive capital accumulation: the enslavement and trade of more than 11 million human beings to work on the plantations of the Americas and the Caribbean. This is a counter-perspective to idealistic conceptions that view racism as an ideology that has always existed and is intrinsic to human nature or as an idea that emerged out of nowhere, dissociated from its material foundations.

Without recognition of this fundamental aspect, it is impossible to have a scientific view of either the development of racism or of capitalism itself. As Eric Williams writes in his classic work Capitalism and Slavery:

Slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery ... The reason was economic, not racial ... The features of the man, his hair, color and dentifrice, his "subhuman" characteristics so widely pleaded, were only the later rationalizations to justify a simple economic fact: that the colonies needed labor and resorted to Negro [sic] labor because it was cheapest and best.2

Throughout the book - whose theses continue to generate important debates - Williams describes the role slavery played in the process of primitive accumulation, focusing on the relationship between the slave trade and industrial development in England. In its imperialist phase, the era of "crises, wars and revolutions," the relationship between racism and capitalism was reinforced. It is no coincidence that theories of scientific racism became more fully developed as nation-states played a decisive role in combining racism and capitalism to increase exploitation, precisely when the African continent was occupied and divided up among the European powers.

This is the basis of a scientific explanation of how racism develops as ideology. It is impossible to understand the development of capitalism without considering the relationship between slavery and racism. It is unquestionable that, to this day, racism serves to further capitalist exploitation. Countless statistics indicate that black people have the most precarious, poorly paid jobs and receive far lower wages than white workers even if they do the same work. By increasing the levels of exploitation of the black worker, and especially of black women, capitalists are able to further undercut the wages and living conditions of the working class as a whole. For this reason, the fight against racism must necessarily be a struggle against capitalism.

Revolution and Slavery

The 1917 Russian Revolution showed the working class and the most oppressed sectors of society a glimpse of a future beyond the narrow limits of capitalist oppression. This did not only apply to the Russian workers; the peasants, who came from a history of serfdom in which they were branded like cattle, achieved their dream of agrarian reform; religious minorities obtained religious freedoms; women gained the right to abortion for the first time in history; and gay people were no longer persecuted.

Internationally, the Russian Revolution had a huge impact on class struggle and demonstrated that, even in underdeveloped capitalist countries like Russia or the countries of the African continent, the masses could lead a revolution.

The Third International, led by Lenin and Trotsky, was born out of the struggle against the social-chauvinists who supported the imperialist war in the early 1900s. The international perspective of the socialist revolution was decisive to its founders. After the triumph in 1917, they aimed to transform the newly created Soviet Republic into a barricade for international and global revolution. The interests of the Soviet workers were intertwined with those of the global working class and of the multitudes of oppressed peoples worldwide. One of the most egregious aspects of the early imperialist era was the division and rule of the African continent by 15 European countries at the Berlin Conference of 1885. The expansion of the Russian Revolution, the defeat of the European bourgeoisies, and the victory of the working class in these imperialist countries - which included France, Germany and England - would have been a fatal blow to their colonial project in the African continent. At the same time, the weakening of the European bourgeoisie would have increased the chances of African workers and the oppressed of overthrowing imperialist rule in their regions.

Great revolutionary leaders like Lenin and Trotsky left various testimonies to their enormous enthusiasm for black struggle against racist oppression and the role of all revolutionaries in merging with this struggle internationally. Even before the Russian Revolution, Lenin was already concerned about the situation of black people worldwide, understanding how crucial it was for communists to connect with the most oppressed and exploited sectors of the working class. In 1920, John Reed wrote a report at Lenin's request, describing the situation of black people in the U.S. to the Second Congress of the Third Communist International:

The Communists must not stand aloof from the Negro [sic] movement which demands their social and political equality and at the moment, at a time of the rapid growth of racial consciousness, is spreading rapidly among Negroes. The Communists must use this movement to expose the lie of bourgeois equality and emphasize the necessity of the social revolution which will not only liberate all workers from servitude but is also the only way to free the enslaved Negro people.3

In a society divided into social classes based on relationship to the means of production and the bourgeoisie's private appropriation of the social labor produced by the working class, Marxists argue that the exploiters end up being their own gravediggers. The working class, by virtue of its strategic role in the production of all that exists in society, is the only group capable of defeating capitalism, taking on the task of emancipating not only its own class but humanity as a whole. Black people are not only a fundamental part of the working class; they also comprise its most precarious sectors.

The Fourth Congress held in 1922, before the Stalinization of the Comintern, ratified its theses on black liberation, declaring that the revolutionary order of the day included the fight against racism and support for the struggles of black people on an international scale. After stating that "the enemy of [the black] race and of the white worker is identical: capitalism and imperialism," the theses affirmed that:

The Communist International should struggle for the equality of the white and black races, and for equal wages and equal political and social rights. The Communist International will use every means at its disposal to force the trade unions to admit black workers, or, where this right already exists on paper, to conduct special propaganda for their entry into unions. If this should prove impossible, the Communist International will organize black people into their own unions and then use the united front tactic to compel the general unions to admit them.4

These historical examples show that black struggle is worker struggle, a message that continues to have relevance today. Fighting for the working class means fighting against racism and defending, for example, wage equality between blacks and whites, men and women, and the direct hire of outsourced workers. This fight calls for an end to police brutality, the right to decent housing, and comprehensive agrarian reform, as this is the only way to unite the working class. This is a decisive question since unity is impossible without fighting against racism, and without this unity, victory cannot be achieved in a revolutionary process.

The Black Struggle and the International Revolution

Lenin and Trotsky did not regard the Russian Revolution as an end in itself but rather as the first step in the international and global expansion of the revolution that would first reach other European countries like Germany. This would mean the end of colonial domination in Africa and Asia and a tremendous advance from the point of view of the world revolution.

The reactionary policy of Stalinism in defense of "socialism in one country" promoted after 1924, along with the failures of the Chinese revolution in 1926 and the general strike in England in 1926, sealed the fate of the black struggles and resistance in the African continent. It signalled for the global imperialist bourgeoisie the possibility of regaining its strength and maintaining its international domination, thus delaying for decades the independence of African countries.

In Brazil, the Stalinism represented by the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) played a deplorable role in racial politics. Among several examples until the 1960s, the PCB was opposed to discussing any demand for admitting black people into trade unions because they argued that it divided the working class, blatantly capitulating to the ideology of "racial democracy."

Trotsky devoted all his energy to combating the bureaucratization of the USSR. The Left Opposition, and then the Fourth International, were the continuation of the Bolshevik tradition. The passion and aspirations of these revolutionaries were anchored in the solid theoretical-programmatic foundations of the theory of permanent revolution which strongly encouraged the merging of revolutionary ideas with the most exploited and oppressed sectors of capitalist society such as black people in the U.S., Latin America, and Africa. In Trotsky's words:

We can and we must find a way to the consciousness of the Negro [sic] workers, the Chinese workers, the Indian workers, and all the oppressed in the human ocean of the colored races to whom belongs the decisive word in the development of mankind.5

The revolutionary struggle against exploitation and oppression, particularly among blacks, was decisive for the emergence of a generation of black Trotskyists. The fight against Stalinism and the development of the theory of permanent revolution itself were driving forces for the revolutionary perspective of the fight against racism. Perhaps the individual who most stands out in this respect is CLR James, the author of The Black Jacobins. James is recognized in academic circles as the person who revealed to the world the depth of one of the most glorious black achievements in world history: the Haitian Revolution. Few remember his Trotskyist past or the fact that when he examines Haiti, he does so through the lens of class struggle.

The power of this book is based, among other things, on the way James describes how the revolutionary conditions in France were intertwined with the weakening of Saint-Domingue's elite while highlighting the revolutionary and uncompromising audacity of the black people of the island in search of their freedom. Only someone with a worldview guided by the perspective of the exploited and oppressed in class struggle would be capable of a work that revealed how the revolution transformed the former slaves of Saint-Domingue into heroes.

CLR James was not only a historian but also a Trotskyist militant who sought to link the struggle for black liberation with the direct fight against the imperialist bourgeoisie and its cowardly counterparts in non-imperialist countries. He demonstrated how, in important moments of class struggle, the goals of the whole working class have more chances of being achieved with the unity of the laboring ranks, that is, between blacks and whites.

The Russian Revolution was the highest point in the struggle for an end to exploitation and oppression. It was a demonstration of the audacity, revolutionary courage, and scientific preparation of the Bolsheviks. Notwithstanding the limits of analogy, the same determination in the struggle for freedom flowed through the veins of the black people of Saint-Domingue in this decisive episode in the history of capitalism. The spirit of the Bolsheviks, the Left Opposition, and the Fourth International is reflected in these words:

What we as Marxists have to see is the tremendous role played by Negroes [sic] in the transformation of Western civilization from feudalism to capitalism. It is only from this vantage-ground that we shall be able to appreciate (and prepare for) the still greater role they must of necessity play in the transition from capitalism to socialism.6

From this perspective, the emancipation of both whites and nonwhites, to which Marx refers, acquires full meaning in the struggle for a society free from exploitation and any form of oppression: a communist society. Who, if not those who suffer the most under capitalism, will fight more vigorously for that future?

Translation by Marisela Trevin

This was originally published at Left Voice .

Notes

1 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowles (London: Penguin Classics, 1990), 1:414.

2 Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 20, previously published in 1944.

3 John Reed, "The Negro Question in America: Speech at the 2nd World Congress of the Communist International, Moscow - July 25, 1920," in Second Congress of the Communist International. Minutes of the Proceedings (London: New Park Publications, 1977), previously published by Publishing House of the Communist International, 1921.

4 Jane Degras, ed., The Communist International, 1919 - 1943, vol. 1, 1914 - 1922 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 401.

5 Leon Trotsky, "Closer to the Proletarians of the Colored Races," The Militant 5, no. 27 (2 July 1932), 1, previously published in Fourth International 6, no. 8 (August 1945): 243.

6 CLR James, "The Revolution and the Negro," New International 5 (December 1939): 339-343

Which Red Flag is Flying?: Communist and Anarchist Solidarity in Afrin

By Marcel Cartier

As aspiring Sultan Erdogan's assault on the radical democratic experiment in Afrin is repelled by Kurdish, Arab, Turkmen and other nationalities who comprise a diverse, multi-ethnic region, two red flags are now flying at the front lines. One of these is of course of the occupying, fascist Turkish Republic that is fighting alongside Salafist Free Syrian Army (FSA) units, as NATO's second largest army has made common cause with some of the most regressive figures imaginable. The other flag represents a diametrically opposed tendency, that of the international movement of the working-class. This blood-soaked banner of revolution and the sacrifice of the proletarian struggle is held up with pride by the communist internationalists fighting alongside the People's and Women's Protection Units (YPG and YPJ) to defend the sovereignty of Afrin, of Syria, and the revolutionary ideals of the Rojava Revolution.

The Left and Syria's Proxy War

The complexities of Syria's war - now entering into the eighth year of bloodshed and unrelenting agony for the people of this land so connected with the genesis of civilization - have often been extremely challenging to navigate for an outside observer. For those on the radical left, this has been a conflict that has often exposed key differences between tendencies in terms of how to assess not only the region, but the world situation and character of international actors in what has been far more than simply a civil war.

In the initial days of the so-called Syrian 'uprising' in the Spring of 2011, the western left largely assessed events through the lens of optimism in light of the mass protests that had already swept Tunisia and Egypt. The overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, who had seemed untouchable for three decades, galvanized revolutionary forces in the west who were often far too accustomed to the idea that 'doing the impossible' was precisely that - impossible. History seemed to now be proving differently, showing that sometimes decades can be captured in mere days or weeks.

While some Trotskyist groups in the west had initially thrown their weight behind the mainstream 'Syrian Arab' opposition that was grouped around what became the 'Free Syrian Army', communists from more 'orthodox' parties (those who supported or at least defended the Soviet Union and socialist bloc until its final demise in 1991) tended to support the Syrian government and leadership on the basis of the country being a target of regime change attempts by the western imperialist powers, particularly the United States. (An illuminating example of this enduring fixation by Washington on establishing a client regime in Damascus can be seen in aa 1986 article by conservative commentator Daniel Pipes, who referred to Syria as the 'Cuba of the Middle East' due to its support for national liberation movements such as the Palestinian struggle -- what the U.S. would argue was support for 'terrorism').

Although the often bitter arguments that engulfed the western left in light of Syria's descent into war - occurring almost simultaneously with the NATO bombing of Libya and overthrow of the nationalist government of Muammar Gaddafi - led to an even more pronounced fragmentation of an already divided radical movement, it would be inaccurate to say that the dividing line was simply between 'pro Assad' and 'anti-Assad' forces.

At the time, this is how I assessed the situation myself - I refused to see the possibility of any 'third way' that went beyond the limitations of a very narrow dichotomy. This was itself evidence of the western left often having such an obsession with losing that we refuse to see beyond the bounds of what appears to be possible at the present juncture, no matter how limited and oppressive it may be. Daring to imagine has become something so abstract and remote that we cannot even begin to take it seriously.

The possibility of a 'third way' in Syria only became visible to most forces in the western metropoles after the declaration of autonomy in the northern areas of the country by Kurdish revolutionary forces of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) in the Spring of 2012. Unlike the 'Arab opposition' that declared Assad the primary enemy of their cause and turned their guns toward Damascus, the so-called self-administration that was formed in the areas known by Kurds as 'Rojava' (for 'west' Kurdistan) declared that it wasn't interested in 'regime change', although it did seek the democratization of the country along federal lines that would give recognition to Syria's multi-ethnic and diverse character. This led to a degree of cooperation with the Syrian state in agreeing de-facto lines of demarcation, with Syrian Arab Army forces pulling back from the areas that fell under the control of the People's and Women's Protection Units (YPG and YPJ) in Aleppo, for instance. In other circumstances, Assad repositioned his forces away from Northern Syria to fight rebels preoccupied with overthrowing his Government. Upon this vacuum left by Assad forces, Kurds announced their own administration body, built on the principles of radical democracy, gender equality and multi-ethnic harmony. Even with the declaration of self-administration, however, it wasn't really until the battle of Kobane in late 2014 that the Kurdish question in Syria emerged on the world stage.

Communists and The Rojava Revolution

During this heroic resistance to the fascism of the so-called Islamic State, a considerably higher degree of attention began to be given to the Kurdish question in Syria by not only the mainstream media, but understandably so by the western left. After all, it was the forces of the YPG and YPJ who espoused the most progressive, leftist politics of all of the military formations operating in the theatre of Syria's war.

Due to the ideology of the Rojava Revolution being linked with the theoretical points espoused by Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan in his 'new paradigm' - among them that the Leninist conception of revolution was outdated and that a 'non-state' system showed the path to a free, dignified and socialist society in the 21st century - this movement was deemed by many Marxist critics to be 'anarchist'. A considerable amount of support began to be given to the Rojava project by western 'libertarian socialists', many hostile to 20 th century socialist revolutions, and even the PKK's original orientation as a Leninist national liberation movement. This often put revolutionary Marxists and Leninists in a knee-jerk position of opposing the Rojava experiment, and often refusing to look into it in any considerable degree of detail.

However, a substantial number of Turkish communist organisations didn't take such a simplistic approach to the 'democratic confederalism' being offered by the PYD as an alternative to capitalist modernity in Syria and the region. For many of these Turkey-based formations and parties, Rojava was part national liberation movement, part radical, feminist, democratic experiment. Perhaps they didn't see it as explicitly 'socialist', but it was important to engage with and to participate in.

From 2012, the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (MLKP), until then operating primarily within Turkey's borders, began sending cadres to Rojava to defend the revolution. Among the MLKP fighters who joined the ranks of the YPJ was Ivana Hoffmann, a 19-year old German woman who had joined the party abroad and joined the Kurdish movement's caravan of martyrs when she was killed in March 2015. Ivana's example would serve as the basis for other internationalists to join not only the MLKP, but for the Party to push for the creation of an internationalist organization that would aim to build on the legacy of communists who had flocked to Spain to defend the Republic against Franco's fascism in the late 1930s.

In the summer of 2015, the International Freedom Battalion (IFB) was officially declared at a ceremony in Serekaniye. The show of leftist unity at the announcement of the IFB's formation is an important lesson for revolutionaries across the globe. Groups that had previously been at odds with each other in Turkey now joined hands in struggle. The United Freedom Forces (BOG), itself a coalition of leftist fighters from Turkey that had been declared the previous year, now joined the IFB on the initiative of the MLKP. There wasn't time nor the luxury of ideological squabbles preventing the unity of forces in the face of barbarism. Other groups that joined the IFB included the Turkish Communist Party/Marxist-Leninist (TKP/ML) and its armed wing TiKKO (Workers' and Peasants' Army of Turkey). Beyond the region, communists from Spain played a key role in the IFB's consolidation, with the Reconstruction Comunista (RC) sending cadres to fight in the spirit of solidarity their ancestors in the Spanish Republic knew all too well. This historical link also inspired Marxists from Britain to join the IFB under the banner of the Bob Crow Brigade, paying homage to a major figure in their country's trade union movement.

The Hammer and Sickle on the Frontlines at Afrin

Of course, the level of solidarity expressed with the Rojava Revolution by communists across the world - both in terms of events organized at home, as well as in those actually coming to Syria to be willing to give the ultimate sacrifice - isn't comparable in scope to the tens of thousands who volunteered to fight Francoism. Syria has been a far more complex and divisive war to grasp, on the one hand. On the other, the intervention of major foreign powers into the conflict, especially Russia and the United States, shifted the dynamics of solidarity with the Kurdish-led forces who were spearheading a women's revolution rooted in direct democracy. For many Marxists, military cooperation with the U.S. - 'tactical' or not - meant that at least explicit solidarity with the Rojava experiment was off the table.

However, the Turkish communist groups operating in Rojava seem to have navigated this relationship with great nuance and a spirit of critical solidarity. For sure, the presence of the United States within the borders of Syria is a nuisance at best for the fighters of groups such as the MLKP and TKP/ML. Based on my experiences on the ground in northern Syria, it is fair to say that for many fighters of the YPG and YPJ, that relationship is perceived the same way. However, the communist groups generally take a more critical line toward this cooperation than the Apoists (supporters of Abdullah Ocalan in the PYD and PKK and their umbrella organization, the Union of Kurdish Communities [KCK]).

Almost two weeks into Erdogan's misadventure in Syria, the hollowness of U.S. 'support' for the YPG and YPJ has been made blatantly obvious. This hasn't surprised the Kurdish movement in the least bit, as the writing already appeared on the wall for the U.S. to 'drop' the Kurdish forces after the liberation of Raqqa. Although still cooperating in Deir ez-Zor with the YPG, the tacit approval of Washington for Erdogan's bloody, genocidal incursion into Afrin has spelled out that although the U.S. and YPG may have had mutual, overlapping interests in Syria for the short-term, there was no more of a potential long-term unity that existed as there had been between the Soviet Union and western imperialists who united against Hitler's fascist aggression during the Second World War.

This should reveal to communists around the world that the fight to defend Afrin is a struggle to safeguard the basic principles of the oppressed, and their efforts in establishing an ecological, grassroots, feminist democracy. Marxists should support such a fight and vision of society, even if having some ideological critiques of the model of 'democratic confederalism'.

Fighters from the International Freedom Battalion are now flying the deep crimson flag emblazoned with a hammer and sickle at the frontlines in Afrin. Daring to defy Erdogan's neo-Ottoman aspirations in Rojava as they defied his government's fascistic and assimilationist policies in Turkey and Bakur (northern Kurdistan), Turkey's red militants fight shoulder to shoulder with their YPG, YPG, Syriac Military Council, and other progressive anti-fascist forces.

In an interview with ETHA News Agency, MLKP commander Viyan İsyan described why his Party is taking part in the resistance in Afrin, saying "This revolution is an example to the peoples of the Middle East. Our fundamental duty is to defend the Rojava revolution by any means necessary. The defence of the revolution and its gains will also carry the revolution to the peoples of the Middle East…Defending Afrin is defending honour. Defending Afrin is defending the future. Defending Afrin opens the way for other revolutions…We want them to not surrender to Erdoğan's fascism, we want them to set the streets on fire. We call them to press against the borders of Rojava. Because these borders are unnatural. We call our peoples to action. The resistance of Afrin is a historical resistance. We call on our peoples to uphold this historical resistance…We want it to be known that we will not abandon Afrin. The YPG/YPJ and the people of Afrin will not abandon Afrin. As communists, we will not abandon it. We are here until the end, no matter the cost. Victory will be ours."

Echoing the sentiment expressed by the MLKP, the TKP/ML vowed to crush Turkey's occupation and attempted stifling of the revolution by calling all oppressed people to the ranks of the resistance. In a video message, the Party's military formation TiKKO declared its role in fight against Erdogan, saying "In its attempt to occupy Afrin, the fascist and genocidal Turkish state has shown itself to be the enemy of the oppressed Kurdish, Arab and Turkmen peoples, and the working people as a whole. After being subjected to occupation and massacres by the ISIS fascists, the peoples of Rojava are now undergoing occupation and massacres at hands of the fascist Turkish state with the invading Turkish troops bombing villages and murdering innocent children and civilian workers."

The Critical Need for Internationalist Solidarity

At this moment in which the imperialist powers have made clear that they have no genuine regard for 'democracy', in which their support for NATO's second largest army has trumped any possible semblance of half-hearted support for a Kurdish radical movement that aims to sweep aside capitalism, the left needs to reassess its relationship to the Rojava Revolution.

Communists are taking part in the heroic resistance in Afrin, aiming to protect a society being reshaped along egalitarian lines. The spirit of internationalism which is present in this struggle isn't necessarily one of full ideological unity - there is plenty of struggle taking place within the Rojava Revolution between Apoists, communists, anarchists, and other leftist forces. Where the revolution is headed is being fiercely debated, but in an atmosphere of mutual solidarity and respect, not the hostility and narrow-mindedness that often permeates the leftist environments and movements in Europe and North America. This revolution's vibrancy and richness of diversity is being defended at the frontlines. This result of this struggle will have major ramifications for the future of the international communist movement, and for humanity more generally.

This was originally published at The Region .