Against Ignoring Race: The Zanj Revolution as Black Slave Revolt

By Derek Ide

Numerous controversies exist surrounding one of the most historic uprisings in the pre-modern world. The Thawrat al-Zanj was a mass uprising in the area surrounding Basra against the Abbasid Caliphate from 869 to 883.[1] The Zanj revolt has been variously described as a "typical class war" and "proletarian movement based on a coherent politico-religious doctrine,"[2] a "state run by bandits," [3] a "semi-barbarian movement,"[4] and a "terrible revolt" which "sowed the seeds of Lower Mesopotamia's ruin." [5] Eventually, the Abbasids brutally crushed the rebellion, particularly after the leader of the Saffarid uprising in Persia declined a formal alliance with theSahib al-Zanj, Ali ibn Muhammad. [6] Despite prodigious bloodshed, the revolutionaries who revolted against their former masters, landlords, and the general class of Arab ruling elites were driven by a deeply-rooted egalitarianism, officially articulated by Ali ibn Muhammad, who at times borrowed from Kharijite slogans. There were certainly material and ideological limits to the revolution, limits that adherents of modernity's universal humanistic claims may find unsavory. One in particular was the unwillingness or inability to abolish slavery as an institution but instead to reverse the position of slave and slave-master. Yet, in spite of limited primary source material, enough evidence exists to understand the Zanj revolution as primarily a slave revolt first, and a racialized one at that. This neo-traditionalist analysis positions the former slave class in a vanguard role, even if other classes eventually joined the revolt.

There are a few distinct criteria that can be established in order to confirm that the Zanj revolution was a slave rebellion led by black slaves. First, we must trace the etymological lineage of the word "Zanj," a word of considerable disputation. Second, we must establish that the rulers of Abbasid Iraq did indeed utilize black slave labor, particularly in the marshy areas around Basra. Finally, we must establish that Ali ibn Muhammad specifically organized the black Zanj as the primary motor to lead the revolt against the Abbasid caliphate. After addressing these three variables, the second task of this essay will be to review existing literature on the topic, primarily split between those who assert the black slave character of the revolt and those who obscure or deny it. For the sake of simplicity, the labels "traditionalist" (or neo-traditionalist) will be used for the former while the term "revisionist" will be used for the latter. Despite the claims of revisionist historians who attempt to obscure the racialized nature of the revolt, [7] the Zanj revolution was certainly about slavery, even if its goals were not to abolish slavery as an institution but simply reverse the role of slave and slave master.

The Etymology and Use of the Word "Zanj"

There are several theses on the origin of the word Zanj. The one common denominator is that it is not an Arabic word in origin, but that its tri-consonant structure (z-n-j) allowed it to be easily adapted. At least one scholar asserts it is of Ethiopian origin, connected with " zenega" (to prattle, stammer, to barbarize). Another group of scholars claim it is of Persian origin, claiming zang/zangi is used to denote "Negro." [8] Others still claim it is Greek, coming from "zingis," although this is less likely. The more heated area of contestation focuses on the interpretation of the word and how contemporaries of the Zanj revolt employed it. In general, however, Popovic asserts that to talk about a "land of the Zanj," as it has sometimes been employed, to denote a general territory south of Abyssinia and along the Eastern coast of Africa, is misleading. This is due to the fact that the term "Zanj" include "blacks from numerous peoples bought or seized in all ports of call all along the coast." [9]

It is evident from both contemporaneous Arab commentators, as well as those who lived in the wake of the Zanj revolt, that racial tropes were regular elements of Arab thought. For instance, Arab cosmographer and geographer Kazouini attributes "fetid odor, limited intelligence, extreme exuberance, [and] cannibalistic customs" to the Zanj. [10] Masudi likewise notes the Zanj are of "smelly skin, excessive petulance, sparse eyebrows, [and] highly developed sexual organs." [11] Fourteenth century Arab writer Al-Bakoui notes the Zanj are characterized by their "odor, their quicknes ot anger, their lack of intellect, their habit of eating one another and their enemies." Finally, Arab geographer al-Kindi argues that the hot climate in the land of the Zanj causes the brain to lose "its balance, and the soul can no longer exert its complete action on it; the swell of perceptions and the absence of any act of intelligence are the result."[12] French translator L. M. Devic that amongst Arab authors of the Middle Ages, such commentaries were ordinary. The Zanj are variously: evil, "surpass brute animals in their unfitness and perverse natures," are "so hideous and so ugly," idolaters, etc.[13] It should be noted, however, that exceptions to such characterizations exist. For instance, centuries later Ibn Khaldun chastises Masudi, Galen, and al-Kindi for asserting that the Zanj character is dominated by a "weakness of the brain," which for Ibn Khaldun was a "worthless" explanation that "proves nothing." [14]

In 1976, M.A. Shaban argued that a distinction between the term sudan and zanj was integral to understanding the revolt around Basra. As he explains, this terminology was "not used at random; they were meant to define certain groups of mankind." The Zanj were from East Africa and extending into Central Africa, while the sudan indicated the Western Sudan of today to the shores of the Atlantic. [15] According to Shaban, the governor of Egypt Ibn Tulun enlisted tens of thousands of "negroid" Sudanese to fight against the Zanj, in order to capture certain port cities and restore lucrative trade routes that had been severed because of the uprising.[16] However, this binary etymological distinction is complicated when Shaban discusses the Qaramita revolt after the crushing of the Zanj. For instance, he suggests that the Qaramat first appeared to describe a "group who had supported the Zanj revolt, the reference being to the Qarmatiyyun and to Nubians who could hardly speak Arabic." [17] He notes that the geographer Maqdisi associates these two people with the Sudan. Shaban argues that the Qaramita were "remnants of the Zanj revolts who… were ready to take part in any revolt." [18]

In her 1986 work "Toward a Definition of the Term Zanj," Marina Tolmacheva makes a compelling and cohesive argument undermining the thesis that "Zanj" is etymologically associated only with a specific portion of the East African coast.[19] In many ways, she borrows from Talhami, who argues that there is an "overemphasis" on Arab commercial interactions with East Africa in the early Abbasid era, and that "the assumption that 'Abbasid writers used Zanj to mean specifically the East African coast, and that therefore the people they called Zanj originated in a specific part of that region, is completely unjustified."[20] Tolmacheva posits a new argument:

I would like to suggest that the history of the term Zanj, and the growth of its geographic and racial scope, may be more closely connected with the history of commercial ties between Africa, Arabia and the Persian Gulf than with political-military expansions, whether of Rome, Persia or the Islamic caliphate. Continually under certain constraints of navigation and temporarily focused under the Sassanids on the Red Sea area, these ties were eventually restored to include the East African coast. In this process the word formerly used to describe negroid slaves exported from north-east Africa may have developed a new connotation for peoples of the coast well past Cape Guardafui .[21]

Thus, while possibly weakening the idea that the slaves working in the marshy areas of Baghdad were specifically Southeast African in origin only, this reinforces the notion that these were likely black slaves from other areas of Africa.

The Class Economy of Basra in the Latter Half of the Ninth Century

The Zanj Revolt primarily occurred in what is modern day Iraq and a section of Iran (Khuzistan). Two regions in particular, Batiha and Maysan in lower Iraq's canal region, are of particular importance. [22] As Alexandre Popovic notes, this importance can be attributed to the "nature of their soil," which were largely marshy flatland areas that are regularly flooded with mud.[23] Swamp reeds and growths permeated the wide but shallow canals crossed the area. Only small, flat boats could navigate these canals, making navigation in al-Batiha extraordinarily difficult (and often a perfect hideaway for brigands and rebels of all sorts).[24] Lower Iraq's "Canal Region," especially the Nahr Abd al-Khasib where the Zanj capital of al-Mukhtara ("The Chosen") was established, facilitated guerrilla activity and acted as the base from which the rebels could launch raids.[25] While the reeds and rushes that naturally adorned the area were put to many uses by local inhabitants, the agrarian population also grew melons, onions, rice, barley, corn, and other grains. Yet, as al-Tabari noted, swarms of mosquitoes were a scourge on the population and malaria was an omnipresent threat.[26]

Prior to Umayyad governor al-Hajjaj and his successors, the Arabs of Iraq (either Bedouins or merchants) showed little care for land reclamation projects. The Abbasid Caliphs augmented the land revival projects, which were carried out by overseers (wakil) and freemen (mawla) who had been granted the land as rewards. As Popovic notes, four points are of significant interest: 1) the existence of "dead lands" around Basra, 2) the possibility of "acquiring these lands," 3) the presence in Basra of people with substantial capital, and 4) the presence of slave laborers to transform the land.[27]

The date of arrival for black slaves to Iraq from the East Coast of Africa is contested. One scholar, F. Al-Samir, suggests 720 as the date for Muslim trade outposts in East Africa. If, as it is believed, black slaves were captured, bought, or obtained from subject states on the coast as tribute, it can be surmised that slaves proliferated in Iraqi society after this date. Some scholars, such as Charles Pellat claim an earlier but indeterminate date of origin, noting that Arab historians reported general "Zanj revolts" (not the Zanj revolt of Basra) as early as 689-90 and 694-5. [28] As Jere L. Bacharach explains:

It was not unusual to find references to African slaves in Iraq without any warning of when and how they got there or what happened to them after the specific event was recorded; for example, a revolt of African Zanj slaves in Basra in 76/695 or the appearance of 4,000 Zanj military slaves in Mosul in I33/75I. Therefore, the silence in the Arabic chronicles on the numbers and activities of African military slaves in Iraq from 210/825 to the Zanj rebellion (255/869-271/883) may reflect their absence or, more likely, their relative unimportance in the eyes of the chroniclers. [29]

By the Abbasid era, as Bacharach argues, the "Muslim military reflected an organizational pattern more familiar to the pre-Islamic Fertile Crescent than to the Arabia of Muhammad." [30] Imported military slaves, notable Turkish cavalrymen and African infantry, were used by Arab rulers to control large swaths of territory. Africans were generally considered inferior to Turks due to a circular logic (infantry inferior to cavalry, Africans associated with the former and Turks with the latter) that was self-reinforcing. The kind of racialized and occupational inferiority assigned by Arab rulers and writers to Africans in a military context was grafted onto slaves utilized for extractive labor as well.

According to Tabari, the future rebels were employed as laborers ( kassahin) to prepare the land in lower Iraqi so that the area around Shatt al-Arab could be cultivated. The arduous objective was removing the top crust from the surface, transfer it by mule, and pile it in large heaps. These laborers were recruited from among black slaves, camped in groups of 500 to 5,000, [31] and forced to survive off handfuls of flour, semolina, and dates. In general, only the wealthy had access to such lands and could afford to purchase and exploit such large quantities of slaves. Al-Tabari suggests around 15,000 slaves were employed in such a manner. [32] Louis Massignon's description of Basra's "intense crisis" during this period is apt:

Basra was destined to furnish the first example of the destructive social crisis of the city in Islam, when social restraints were broken, when usury, indirect taxes, government borrowing were rampant, and the opposition was exasperated by the luxury of the wealthy… expensive clothes and jewelry, African ivory, pearls from the Gulf, precious wood from India made a mockery of the working proletariat's misery on the plantations. Canonically, the lands of Basra were "amwat" ("dead lands"), under their original crust of unproductive natron or sebakh, "revived" by the coolie labor of the Zanj… who were refused their claim to freedom following their conversion… in Basra it ended in a fight to the death between the privileged elite of the City that wanted everything for itself, and the starved proletariat of the plantations and sand-filled oases who pounced on the City to destroy it. Babel, which was alive as long as it was a place where the exogamous exchange of values and language was carried on, became Sodom, and burned. [33]

Yet for all the hyperbole regarding the "burning" and "destruction" caused by the Zanj, there is remarkably little information regarding the actual internal organization of the revolutionary state. It is also likely that the "destructive" nature of the event has been overemphasized by Arab commentators who were driven by a severe disdain for the black rebels.

Black Slaves as Revolutionaries under Ali ibn Muhammad

Information on Ali ibn Muhammad is quite scarce. The book of Ali ibn Muhammad's foremost biographer, Muhammad ibn al-Hasan ibn Sahl's Kitab Akhbar Sahib al-Zanj, which Tabari relies on for biographical information, has been lost to us. [34] It is likely that the Sahib al-Zanj was born in a village outside of Tehran, although he was probably of Arab descent. [35] His maternal grandfather had been a Kharijite involved in the struggle against the 10 th Umayyad caliph Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik, and had fled to al-Rayy outside of Tehran as an exile. [36] Ali ibn Muhammad spent some time as a court poet in Samarra, where he also taught writing, grammar, and astronomy.[37] In 863-4 he left Samarra for Bahrain, where he claimed to be a descendent of Ali.[38] In the Bahraini village of Al-Hajar, Ali ibn Muhammad attempts to galvanize a following, which he partially succeeds in doing. After acrimonious clashes between his supporters and detractors, he leaves al-Hajar and ended up in al-Ahsa (modern day Saudi Arabia), where he convinced certain tribes of his prophethood and collected taxes in his own name. Already he was mobilizing against the Abbasid caliphate. After some wayward clashes in the desert, where he loses many of his supporter, he decides to make his way to Basra. His attempts to organize there are quickly smashed by the ruling tribes, his supporters are jailed, and he is sent fleeing to Baghdad.

After a year, Ali ibn Muhammad snuck back into Basra, pretending to be a wealthy merchant who was selling land in the area. One of his first recruits was a man named Rayhan ibn Salih, who was a worker that transported flour from Basra for distribution to the Zanj slaves. Through Rayhan, Ali ibn Muhammad was able to begin organizing amongst the Zanj. [39] In the month of Ramadan, 869, Ali ibn Muhammad proclaimed the revolt. He began intercepting groups of slaves on their way to the worksites, bound the slave drivers, and compelled the slaves to join his uprising. Within days he had organized hundreds of slaves. Ali ibn Muhammad promised improved conditions, wealth, and to never deceive or fail the newly emancipated slaves. He condemned the former slaveholders, ordered the slaves to beat their former masters, and after a period of physical vengeance the former masters were allowed to leave after an oath of secrecy regarding the rebels' location. One of the former owners escaped and warned the overseer of a "large camp" where reportedly 15,000 slaves were employed. [40] Still, as others have noted, success brought more success: "there is no doubt that the blacks were quickly aided by poor peasants, Bedouins always eager to pillage… and finally, even black deserters from the Caliph's army." [41] Most scholars, including Popovic, Lewis, Cahen, and Noldeke assert that it is likely poor peasants joined the Zanj revolutionaries.

Popovic's reading of Tabari's narrative, in line with the traditionalist scholars, is one of a battle between slave and slavemaster. As he explains, "one after the other, successive detachments sent out by the 'people of Basra' were defeated and freed slaves swelled the ranks of the insurgents." [42] At one juncture, according to Tabari, the Abbasid general Rumays offered Ali ibn Muhammad five dinars for each slave returned and promised him free passage out of the territory. In response, Ali ibn Muhammad assembled the Zanj, and through an interpreter (as many of the slaves did not speak Arabic), swore that none would ever be returned to their former master. In one particularly moving line, Ali ibn Muhammad proclaims: "May some of you remain with me and kill me if you feel that I am betraying you." [43] As late as February, 881, two years from total defeat, Ali ibn Muhammad refused an absolute pardon and great rewards in exchange for capitulation. [44] It was clear that Ali ibn Muhammad's sincerity to the cause of Zanj liberation was genuine. We find another measure of his class and racial egalitarianism in the fact that of his two daughters, one was married to Sulayman ibn Jami'a, a black slave and measurer of grain from Hajar. [45] At one juncture, Hamdan Qarmat approaches Ali ibn Muhammad in order to negotiate an alliance. From Tabari's account, Qarmat purportedly met the "prince of the blacks" but decided they could "never agree" and refused to concretize any alliance.[46]

The task of outlining the internal organization of the Zanj state under Ali ibn Muhammad is a difficult task for two reasons. First, Arab chroniclers were significantly more interested in the minutiae of the battles between Abbasid generals and Zanj rebels. Second, the writers generally considered the Zanj enemies of religion and law, and as such any descriptions handed down are generally pejorative in nature. Either way, it is hardly accurate to describe Zanj social relations, as some earlier writers have, as "communistic" in nature. [47] It is far more likely that the social order was reversed, not abolished. One anecdotal passage from Al-Masudi is of importance in this regard. Masudi, who despises the Zanj, explains that their "insolence" was so great that at one point they "auctioned off the women of the Hasan, the Husayn, and the Abbas families, descendants of Hashem, of Quraysh and of the most noble Arab families… Each black owned ten, twenty, and even thirty of these women, who served them as concubines and performed humble tasks for their wives."[48] Thus, Masudi's consternation is in large part derived from his racial sensibilities. For him, it is inconceivable that blacks could hold noble Arab women as concubines, even though black women were regularly forced into concubinage by Arab masters.

The Divide Between Traditional and Revisionist Historians

For a long time the Zanj revolt was understood as a classic slave revolt. Both al-Tabari, an influential Persian contemporary of the Zanj episode, and al Mas'udi, an Arab historian and geographer born not long after the crushing of the Zanj, speak at length about the role of black slaves in the revolution.[49] Both scholars regularly asserted their disdain for what are variously described as Zanj, Sudan, 'abid, ghulam, or khawal.[50] As early as 1892, Theodore Nöldeke described the uprising as a "negro insurrection."[51] Much of the contemporary mid-20th century scholarship in Arabic confirms this thesis.[52] Marshall Hodgson, writing in the 1950s in his monumental magnum opus The Venture of Islam, describes the Zanj revolt as such: "the Negro slaves, called 'Zanj,' many of whom were used for labour in the marshy areas at the mouth of the Tigris, had risen in 869 under a Khariji leader and set up their own state, which tried to turn the tables on the former masters, enslaving the former slave-owners." [53] Zakariyau Oseni, in his more recent work "The Revolt of Black Slaves in Iraq Under the 'Abbasid Administration 869-883 CE," explicitly situates himself as a modern writer sympathetic to the Zanj. He writes that the primary agents were "Black slaves whose race, more than any other, had suffered the atrocities and humiliation inherent in that ancient institution throughout the course of known history."[54] More recently, Alexandre Popovic has asserted a "neo-traditionalist" analysis in his The Revolt of African Slaves in Iraq in the 3rd/9 th Century , an English translation of the work he carried out mostly in the 1970s. This approach stands in stark juxtaposition to a more recent wave of scholarship that has attempted to obfuscate the role of race in the Zanj revolution.

One of the earliest revisionist accounts of the Zanj revolt appeared in 1977. Ghada Talhami's "The Zanj Rebellion Reconsidered" does not strictly discount the role of race or black slaves in the revolt, but attempts to complicate the narrative by including the role of other social classes. Her account is fairly nuanced, moreso than other revisionist scholars like M. A. Shaban for instance, when she asserts that: "The slaves were merely one among several oppressed classes who participated in the rebellion, which was not an attack on the institution of slavery but on social inequality… If one group contributed more than others to the success of this drawn-out revolt, it was not the black slaves but the Bedouins from the surrounding region, who provisioned the fighters throughout the insurrection."[55] Her sub-thesis is that no major slave trade existed with the East African coast of Zanzibar during the ninth century (or else scholars would have noted it) and thus, it is unlikely that this was primarily a black slave revolt. [56] Although there are legitimate critiques of Talhami's approach, a rather absurd revisionist narrative is constructed by M. A. Shaban, who denies that the Zanj revolt was a slave revolt at all, and instead proclaims that it was a revolt primarily of Arabs and some East Africans. Slaves, he asserts, would have lacked the resources to challenge the Abbasid government for such an extended period of time. [57] Although they do so in distinct ways, in general these arguments tend to conceal the role that racially-based slavery played in fomenting the Zanj revolt.

One of the most prominent revisionist historians is M.A. Shaban, who counterpoises his analysis with Noldeke by asserting that the Zanj rebellion is "one of the most misunderstood episodes in Islamic history." [58] The notion that the Zanj episode represented a "slave revolt" has been "slavishly regurgitated by modern scholars" who were tempted by the "romantic idea of a slave revolt in a slave-ridden society" and could not be bothered with the "cumbersome task" of "wading through the considerable amount of valuable material" which would suggest a different narrative. [59] Shaban begins by noting correctly that the Zanj revolt occurred in conjunction with other serious forms of dissension in the Abbasid Empire. It was one of many revolts against the central government, including the prominent Saffarid rebellion as well as the Shia of Tabaristan, amongst others.

For him, however, the Zanj was not a slave revolt. It was a "Zanj, i.e. a Negro, revolt."[60] Shaban argues that equating Negro with Zanj is a nineteenth-century racial trope not applicable to ninth century Arabia. Salves rising against the wretched conditions of work in the salt marshes of Basra is a "figment of the imagination." For Shaban, a "few runaway slaves who joined the rebels" does not make a slave revolt. [61] Instead, the Zanj was an "Arab-Negro alliance" that represented Free East Africans who had made their home in the region alongside Arabs of the Persian Gulf. For Shaban, the fact that even "Jews were among the supports of the revolt" is proof that it was not slave revolt. [62] In a passage that perhaps most betrays his highly elitist conception of the incapacity of slaves to act as historical agents of change, Shaban argues:

If more proof is needed that it was not a slave revolt, it is to be found in the fact that it had a highly organized army and navy which vigorously resisted the whole weight of the central government for almost fifteen years. Moreover, it must have had huge resources that allowed it to build no less than six impregnable towns in which there were arsenals for the manufacture of weapons and battleships… Significantly the revolt had the backing of a certain group of merchants who persevered with their support on the very end. [63]

For Shaban the "bone of contention" was African trade with the Persian Gulf, not slavery.[64] The expansion of trade and the demand for African goods "stimulated the setting-up and growth of East African colonies in all the trade centers of the Gulf."[65] A high rate of taxation, as high as 20%, on imported goods imposed by the central government under Muwaffiq encouraged revolt by these East African merchants.[66] It was this combination of wealth and manpower that allowed the Zanj revolt to occur.

Whereas Shaban argues that in "the Islamic world slaves were mostly employed in domestic housework and of course as concubines," Alexandre Popovic acknowledges this fact but explains this is precisely the importance of the Zanj episode. [67] Popovic's thesis is that the Zanj revolt is significant because it "suppressed the unique attempt to transform domestic slavery into colonial slavery." [68] For him, it is clear that "the conditions of the Zanj slaves in Iraq were wretched, and there were two uprisings before the great revolt." [69] Yet, Popovic also sees in Ali ibn Muhammad nothing more than an "ambitious, totally unprincipled man."[70] As for his ideology, Popovic asserts that he had a "tendency to embrace difference doctrines" as a "powerful political tool." This allowed him to borrow variously from Shiite, Kharijite, and Azrakite tendencies. [71] Thus, in Popovic's final analysis, the Zanj revolt was "in part a social revolt, but it was not, as some have said, a true (modern) social revolution with a definite plan."[72] The revolt's most important consequence, other than its geopolitical assistance to other movements,[73] is that it forced the abandonment of Lower Iraq's barren lands, leading to a disappearance of the large slave work sites and their concomitant misery.

Conclusion

To conclude, the Zanj revolution was a slave rebellion led Ali ibn Muhammad, who rallied black slaves for the purpose of revolution. The etymological lineage of the word "Zanj," even if it does not denote black slaves of specifically East African origin, was used as a catchall for blacks more generally. Furthermore, the rulers of Abbasid Iraq did indeed utilize black slave labor. In particular, the ruling classes of Basra utilized them for transforming the "dead" lands of the marshes into agricultural land. Traditionalist and revisionist scholars differ over whether or not they view the revolt as racialized, and in particular whether the Zanj revolution was actually driven by black slaves. However, upon review of the evidence, the Zanj rebellion was certainly a racialized slave revolt, in which the Arab slave masters were subjugated by former slaves. In this sense it was not a modern social revolution, where the social structure was abolished and replaced with something totally new. Instead, the social order was inversed. The Zanj revolt, despite failing, was successful in warning Arab rulers against transitioning slavery from primarily domestic servitude to chattel slavery (in the way that Philip Cutin's "plantation complex" did first in the Mediterranean, then in the Canary Islands and finally the Caribbean and South America). [74] Slavery was not abolished, but the Zanj were no longer the ones who would be enslaved at the hands of Arab overlords.

Bibliography

Bacharach, Jere. "African Military Slaves in the Medieval Middle East: The Cases of Iraq (869-955) and Egypt (868- 1171)." International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 13 (1981).

Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex. Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Furlonge, Nigel D. "Revisiting the Zanj and Re-Visioning Revolt: Complexities of the Zanj Conflict (868-883 AD)," Negro History Bulletin (Vol 62, No. 4, 1999), 9-10.

Hodgson, Marshall G. S. The Venture of Islam, Conscience and History in a World Civilization, Vol. 1: The Classical Age of Islam. University of Chicago Press, 1974.

Nöldeke, Theodor. "A Servile War in the East," in Sketches from Eastern History, (Beirut: Khayats, 1963, originally printed in 1892).

Oseni, Zakariyau I. "The Revolt of Black Slaves in Iraq under the Abbasid Administration in 869-883 C.E.," Hamdard Islamicus (1989).

Popovic, Alexandre. T he Revolt of African Slaves in Iraq in the 3rd / 9th Century. Markus Weiner Publishers, 2011.

Shaban, M.A. Islamic History: A New Interpretation, Vol 2: A.D. 750-1055 (A.H. 132-448) . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Silkaitis, Emily Martha. "Modern Takes on Motivations Behind the Zanj Rebellion," Lights: The Messa Journal (Spring 2012, Issue 3, Vol. 1).

Talhami, Ghada Hashem. "The Zanj Rebellion Reconsidered," The International Journal of African Historical Studies (Vol. 10, No. 3, 1977).

Trimingham, Spencer. "The Arab Geographers and the East African Coast," H.N. Chittick and Robert I. Rotberg, eds., East Africa and the Orient (New York, 1975), 116-117, n. 4.

Tolmacheva, Marina. "Toward a Definition of the Term Zanj," Journal of the British Institute in Eastern Africa, 21:1 (1986).

Notes

[1] The first period, from 869-79, was characterized by the Abbasid Caliphate's inability to crush the revolt, partially because its attention was diverted to other pressing challenges. The second period, from 879-83, when the empire could address the revolt with its full coercive powers, was one of slow decline but terminal defeat for the Zanj. As Popovic argues, "In spite of Ya'qub b. Layth's rejection of Ali b. Muhammad's proposal for an alliance, there is no question about the Saffarid contribution to the Zanj cause… it was only when the Saffarid question was settled that al-Muwaffiq was able to undertake the large-scale operations that would eventually crush the revolt," See Alexandre Popovic, The Revolt of African Slaves in Iraq in the 3rd / 9th Century (Markus Wiener Publishers, 2011), 1. Furthermore, the Tulunid issue forced the Abbasid's to remove one of their best generals, Musa b. Buga, from the Zanj front and place him in Syria.

[2] Charles Pellat, quoted in Popovic, 2.

[3] C. Brockelmann, quoted in Ibid., 3.

[4] Bernard Lewis, quoted in Ibid., 3.

[5] G. Marcais, quoted in Ibid., 3.

[6] There is considering divergence on this question. M.A. Shaban laments that it "is a sad comment on research in Islamic history that, in spite of the proximity of the territories where these two movements took place, no attempt has been made to examine their relationship… It is a curious fact that the two movements never made any attempts to ally themselves against their common enemy, the central government, and instead actually fought each other." M.A Shaban, Islamic History: A New Interpretation, Vol 2: A.D. 750-1055 (A.H. 132-448) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 99.

[7] There is an entire intellectual lineage that attempts to surreptitiously avoid racialization in the Islamic world, particularly in the pre-colonial era. When racialization, and anti-black racism in particular, is addressed, it is usually done so as a colonial legacy, one that the British or French or some imperial power imposed upon the Muslim world. Although it is certainly true that colonial administrators and imperial powers augmented and exacerbated racial hierarchies, especially given the rigid racial categories in European society, it is hardly honest to dismiss claims of racialization in the Islamic world with a host of rhetorical tropes ("one of the sahaba, Bilal, was black," "Islam does not recognize race," etc.).

[8] Popovic, 15.

[9] Ibid., 16.

[10] Ibid., 16.

[11] Ibid., 17.

[12] Ibid., 17.

[13] Ibid., 18.

[14] Ibid., 18.

[15] Other terms, like Nubian, Habasha (Abyssinians), and Beja were also in use. Shaban, 110.

[16] It is important to note that Ibn Tulun sent this contingent of black soldiers to suppress the Zanj not on the orders of Muwaffiq, with whom Tulun was in competition over resources, but in order to augment Egypt's treasury. The leader of the expedition, who Shaban identifies as one Lu'lu, eventually switched sides and began working for Muwaffiq against the interests of Ibn Tulun. See Shaban, 133.

[17] Shaban, 130.

[18] Ibid., 130.

[19] See Tolmacheva, 105. "This paper addresses itself to the use of the word Zanj in relation to black people of East Africa in their domicile. The Zanj slaves of the Caliphate and the so-called Zanj of the Western Sudan! remain therefore outside its scope. This approach implies a basic distinction in cognitive perspective, to be repeatedly referred to later: specifically, that in the Caliphate the wordZanjusually refers to slaves and consequently sets the people called Zanj in a separate socioeconomic category, entailing connotations of dependence and inferiority." Marina Tolmacheva, "Toward a Definition of the Term Zanj," Journal of the British Institute in Eastern Africa, (Vol. 21, No. 1, 1986), 105.

[20] Ghada Hashem Talhami, "The Zanj Rebellion Reconsidered," The International Journal of African Historical Studies (Vol. 10, No. 3, 1977), 461.

[21] Tolmacheva, 112. Emphasis added.

[22] The Batiha Marshlands extend roughly from Kufa to Basra. Al-Mukhtarah, Ali ibn Muhammad's established fortress-city for the Zanj, was located east of Basra. At one point, the Zanj reached as far north as Jarjaraya, just southeast of Baghdad.

[23] Popovic, 10.

[24] Ibn Battuta mentions this region as a "forest of reeds surrounded by water" where "bandits of the sect of Ali" often "fortify themselves in these swamps and defend themselves against pursuers." Quoted in Popovic, 11.

[25] Popovic, 12.

[26] Ibid., 11.

[27] Ibid., 12-3. The first three contentions are generally accepted. On the fourth, the idea that a large slave market existed in East Africa where Arabs could purchase black slaves, is contested. This will be addressed later.

[28] Ibid., 20.1

[29] Jere L. Bacharach, "African Military Slaves in the Medieval Middle East: The Cases of Iraq (869-955) and Egypt (868-1171)," International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 13 (1981), 473. One of the reasons African slavers were "deemed unimportant" was due to the fact that they were not "directly involved in the power struggles consuming the Baghdad court," 474.

[30] Bacharach, 489.

[31] Likely an exaggerated figure.

[32] Popovic, 24.

[33] Louis Massignon, quoted in Popovic, 24-5.

[34] Muhammad ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Sahl (known as Shaylama), was one of Ali ibn Muhammad's supporters that had been pardoned after the crushing of the revolt. As such, in an effort to exonerate himself, his work is full of invective against his former leader and accuses him of the worst transgressions, which Tabari regularly exploits. Shaylama himself is eventually arrested for conspiring against the Caliph while in Baghdad. The stories of his execution differ. One explains he was "skewered on a long iron rod which penetrated him from his anus to his mouth; he was kept like this over a huge fire until he died." Another claims he was tied between three spears, placed above a fire and "turned and roasted like a chicken" before being tied to the gallows between the "two bridges in the eastern quarter of Baghdad." Popovic, 124. Tabari, Masudi, Ibn al-Nadim, and Ibn al-Jawzi all rely upon his work.

[35] Popovic argues that his birth place is what leads many authors to mistake him for Persian, 33, 41.

[36] Popovic, 34. Based on Tabari's telling.

[37] Ali ibn Muhammad was, according to Tabari, "eloquent, a superior mind, and a natural poet." One of his pieces that received significant attention read as follows:

It is a humiliating situation (to be forced) to live in frugality, accepting it all the while…

If the fire becomes lessened because of too many logs,

its progress will depend on their separation

If a saber remains in its sheath, another

Saber will be victorious on the day of combat

[38] Ali ibn Muhammad ibn al-Fadl ibn al-Hasan ibn Ubayd Allah ibn al-Abbas ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib.

[39] Popovic, 39-40.

[40] Ibid., 41. Tabari's figures are certainly inflated, but the general idea remains the same.

[41] Ibid., 137.

[42] Ibid., 45.

[43] Ibid., 48.

[44] Nigel D. Furlonge explains that on at least three separate occasions Ali ibn Muhammad refused to betray the Zanj. Nigel D. Furlonge, "Revisiting the Zanj and Re-Visioning Revolt: Complexities of the Zanj Conflict (868-883 AD)," Negro History Bulletin (Vol 62, No. 4, 1999), 7-14. Also see Popovic, 103.

[45] Popovic, 123.

[46] Ibid., 81-2.

[47] M. Gaudegroy-Demombyne writes, for instance, that the "principles that could best assure its authority over the black masses are those that we have seen repeated by all the Iranian agitators since Mazdak: wives and property in common." See Popovic, 129-30.

[48] Popovic, 132-3.

[49] For an explication of how various modern authors employ both al-Tabari and Mas'udi, see Emily Martha Silkaitis, "Modern Takes on Motivations Behind the Zanj Rebellion," Lights: The Messa Journal (Spring 2012, Issue 3, Vol. 1). Popovic notes that Ibn Al-Athir and Ibn Abd al-Hadid also provide some minor details about the Zanj revolt, but mostly drawn from al-Tabari and al-Masudi.

[50] For a delineation of these terms see Nigel D. Furlonge, "Revisiting the Zanj and Re-Visioning Revolt: Complexities of the Zanj Conflict (868-883 AD)," Negro History Bulletin (Vol 62, No. 4, 1999), 9-10. Furlonge describes each term as such: Zanj (denoting a slave from East Africa), Sudan (free African), 'abid (generic slave), ghulam (attendant or guard), khawal (generic slave).

[51] Theodor Nöldeke, "A Servile War in the East," in Sketches from Eastern History, (Beirut: Khayats, 1963, originally printed in 1892), 149-153.

[52] For a brief overview of the historiography in Arabic, see Popovic, 4. Abdul Karim Khalifa's unpublished thesis on the Zanj is dedicated to "all the oppressed in their struggles against their exploiters." Also see Faysal al-Samir's doctoral thesis, Thawrat al-Zanj (University of Cairo and published in Baghdad). Of interest here is also Ahmed S. Olabi's work, available in French, La revolte des Zanj et son chef Ali b. Muhammad (Beirut, 1961).

[53] Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Conscience and History in a World Civilization, Vol. 1: The Classical Age of Islam (University of Chicago Press, 1974), 487-8.

[54] Zakariyau I. Oseni, "The Revolt of Black Slaves in Iraq under the Abbasid Administration in 869-883

C.E.," Hamdard Islamicus (1989), 65.

[55] Ghada Hashem Talhami, "The Zanj Rebellion Reconsidered," The International Journal of African Historical Studies (Vol. 10, No. 3, 1977), 455.

[56] This is a rather duplicitous and shortsighted claim that will be addressed later.

[57] Shaban, M.A. Islamic History: A New Interpretation, Vol 2: A.D. 750-1055 (A.H. 132-448) . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. This certainly must be news to the Haitian revolutionaries, or Spartacus.

[58] Shaban, 100.

[59] Shaban, 101.

[60] Shaban, 101.

[61] Ibid., 101.

[62] Ibid., 102.

[63] Ibid., 102.

[64] Ibid., 102.

[65] Ibid., 107.

[66] Shaban notes that this rate of taxation is not confirmed, but can be extrapolated from studying the taxation regimen imposed upon Egypt. It is questionable whether or not the same taxation rates were applied to the Arabian peninsula as to Egypt, where more a more formal and established administrative-extractive apparatus already existed. Shaban, 108.

[67] Shaban, 101.

[68] Popovic, 3.

[69] Ibid., 22.

[70] Ibid., 151.

[71] To claim to be an Alid was important for securing religious sympathy, while the egalitarian preaching of the Kharijites was a useful rally cry to organize black slaves.

[72] Popovic, 153.

[73] As Popovic notes, the Zanj certainly facilitated the rise of the Tulunids in Egypt, the Saffarid movement, and even some of Byzantium's military undertakings. Furthermore, some of the followers of the Qaramita appear to have made their debut amongst the Zanj. See 153.

[74] For more on this phenomenon see Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex (Cambridge University Press, 1988).

Overcoming Liberalism from Within: On Solidarity and American Socialism

By Daniel Tutt

"We are dealing with two factors in American life: the absence of feudalism and the presence of the liberal idea."

- Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America [1]

A helpful framework for thinking modern political struggles revolves around how political communities achieve the unmet demands of the French revolution: liberty, egalitarianism (equality) and fraternity. As the Japanese Marxist thinker Kojin Karatani argues, these demands form a dialectical knot of contemporary politics, where liberty stands for upholding the sphere of the market economy; fraternity represents the ideals of reciprocity (the nation); and equality stands for the redistribution of wealth and resources carried out by the state. [2] Political philosophers have conceived of these names as receptacles of demands for social freedom, as a thinking of different organisms in search of homeostasis. For example, Hegel applied theories of living organisms to social spheres and Marx discussed the 'crisis free society' as a social organism.

But liberalism, the reigning political philosophy of the post-French Revolution, has failed in achieving these demands. Why did liberalism fail? The primary opponent of liberalism in the post French Revolutionary period was civic republicanism that posed a two-way dialectic of social freedom between liberty on the market as the best means to producing the social conditions of fraternity. But civic republicanism radically excluded the sphere of equality in its conceptions of social freedom for fear of an ossification of state bureaucracy would impinge on personal individual liberties on the market. But what gave liberalism a particular hegemony is that it was able to achieve what civic republicanism could never dream of achieving by tempering demands for individual freedom by opening them to the fraternal dimension of political life. In many ways, this is a story we know all too well. It is also a story that, post-2016, seems to be coming to an end. The liberal approach to promoting social freedoms has resulted in the rise of immense inequalities of wealth and to racist and xenophobic populations. Somehow, the future feels socialistic.

In a series of lectures entitled The Idea of Socialism: Towards a Renewal, the third generation Frankfurt School theorist Axel Honneth argues that today's socialists must overcome the failures of liberalism from within liberalism to achieve the unmet demands of the French Revolution. Honneth's argument is that social freedom must be put forward as a "normative guideline [3]" in the economic sphere. Honneth argues that to achieve the sort of equality within the economic sphere that liberalism has failed to develop, we must return to the praxis of solidarity Marx and other socialists discussed in the late nineteenth century.

To correct the dynamic of liberalism, Honneth argues for solidarity that is immanent to capitalism but no longer tethered to class exclusively. Unlike the Marxist address of solidarity to "workers" Honneth's expansion of social freedom is one that he claims should be addressed more broadly, to "citizens." So 'citizen' replaces the revolutionary category of Marx's proletariat. Expanding the address of social freedom has the potential to disrupt the republican and liberal trap of opposing freedom to fraternity to the neglect of equality. Thus, in the uneven relation of the three spheres of political life solidarity replaces equality - we must achieve solidarity to restore the missing homeostasis. Social freedom is best secured by relations that emphasize mutual solidarity in the economic realm of life as a precondition to secure individual freedom in civic and national life.

Criticizing socialists after Marx, Honneth argues that the early socialists limited their promotion of freedom because they insisted on demands from "societal labor" and not in terms of what Honneth advocates, "political democracy." The task of today's socialists must be to build on what liberalism achieved in terms of individual liberties by appealing to expansions of social freedom in the realm of fraternal relations of civil society, but unlike liberals, socialists must insist that those same freedoms be expanded to the economic realm. In reading Honneth, one gets the sense that he is, in many ways, the philosophical voice of American democratic socialism à la Bernie Sanders.

Honneth is correct to observe that socialist movements from their nineteenth century origins and throughout the 20th century ascribed interests to workers based on a pre-existing set of desires that were thought to already reside within workers by virtue of the exploitation they face as wage laborers. The proletariat was treated as a messianic, albeit secularized, agent of the abolition of existing class society. The effect of the economic determinism of socialist thought was that socialist theory became self-referential and unevenly concerned with the achievement of freedom in the domain of liberty through egalitarianism afforded by state intervention either through redistribution or communist state seizure. Where socialists emphasized the knots of liberty and equality will only come about through achieving proletarian solidarity, liberals sought to govern the state by privileging the sphere of the market as the means for producing fraternal modes of social life.

Do liberals, or at least a certain philosophical version of liberalism; have something to teach socialists today? Honneth insists they do. Today's socialists have refused to learn something vital from liberals: addresses and demands to freedom must appeal to social freedoms broadly understood, and not isolated to economic emancipation. The idea of social freedom Honneth is proposing is thus a praxis of solidarity that is capable of meeting the unrealized ideals of the French Revolution, a praxis that might "offer[s] a mechanism or scheme of action according to which the freedom of each would directly presuppose the freedom of the other." [4] The philosophical source for the generation of greater social freedom is found in the American pragmatist John Dewey. For Dewey, social freedom is enhanced when communication barriers are lifted, wherein the idea of human history becomes an ever-expanding process of human communication through social interaction.[5]

The biggest failure of socialist movements, in Honneth's view, was their "inability to adapt the groundbreaking concept of social freedom to the reality of a functionally differentiated society, making it impossible to apply this concept to a gradually separated social sphere." [6] Communication across the three spheres of political live "functional differentiation", if done through the liberating mode of enhanced communication, is capable of achieving new modes of value beyond capital. Unlike the new reading of Marx's value form in the work of the German Marxist Michael Heinrich, Honneth does not place the task of socialist movements as one directed towards the revolutionary task of abolishing the value form. Such a task reeks of an economistic focus and fails to produce the sort of societal homeostasis he is after. Honneth remains a staunch democratic socialist committed to the existence of market mechanisms in social and political life.

Honneth's idea of social freedom is underpinned by the concept of will-formation and how the collective will of the community ought to ideally form. To overcome liberalism from within, democratic will-formation must function as a communicative act, that is, it must extend the same tendencies of enhanced liberties that liberalism extended to the sphere of the nation and individual liberties, to that of economic liberty. This begs the question of how will-formation occurs in producing inclusive forms of solidarity. What Republicanism has blinded liberals to is the necessity to see the economic sphere as a space of will-formation that must consist of forms of solidarity. Liberals have accepted as a fait accompli that the market is a quasi-sacred sphere. To rival this blind spot within liberalism and its relation to the sacred market, socialists must present an appeal to freedom through solidarity on a global scale and back that up locally lifting of barriers to communication. How socialists go about lifting barriers to communication in the age of big data, social media and algorithmic marketing mechanisms, is not clearly answered. The task ahead for socialists is to once again pick up the banner of the Enlightenment to expand the realm of social freedom to the market.

In homage to Marx's ethical maxim "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs", Honneth's praxis for achieving this political community emphasizes communication so that institutions (including economic institutions) can develop to promote the well-being of others for non-instrumental ends. Socialists should thus seek out a political conception of achieving ends that are for the political community, broadly construed. A political community that is inclusive of ethnic, racial and religious difference. This communicative political community would then be capable of posing a new conception of freedom from that of the liberal conception that places emphasis on the solitary individual based in the sphere of the market, but communicatively free in the sphere of civil life. The individual in the new socialist framework must be understood as a communally grounded subject rooted in forms of solidarity and mutual dependence. [7]

The Case of American Liberalism

With the rise of the democratic socialist ideas in American life following the 2008 economic crash and later the 2010 Occupy Wall Street movement and hitting a crescendo moment with the 2016 campaign of Bernie Sanders, Honneth's critique seems to offer insight to the American context. But is American socialism capable of overcoming liberalism from within? Recent discussions of the collapse of liberalism following the defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016 has led many commentators to think of American liberalism as a temporary ruling class that comes and goes. In Ross Douthat's widely read New York Times op-ed[8] on the decline of WASP's as a governing coterie in American life, we are presented with an idea of political power that transfers from distinct ideological communities-most recently the transfer has been from the WASPs (neoconservatives) to the meritocratic Third Way centrists (neoliberals). What Douthat misses is the ideological consistency of liberalism across these two projects.

I want to argue that, on the contrary, American political history and American political thought has been seized by an unmovable liberalism all the way down. The very question of contesting the hegemony of America's deep commitment to liberalism requires that we develop new thinking on what a political community is and how one is formed. In what follows, I want to offer a historical overview of utter dominance of the liberal idea in American political life and from that analysis offer a critique of Honneth. The question of overcoming liberalism from within depends on understanding the magnitude and the inertia the liberal creed actually possesses in America. Before unearthing whether Honneth's model of functional differentiation that emphasizes solidarity can truly rival the liberal idea, we have to understand the unique form liberalism in America has taken historically.

American political life has been formed around a commitment to fraternity and liberty with a hostile relation to equality. It's well known that America has rejected socialism, but even more significant is that America's version of liberalism has also rejected utilitarianism, the nineteenth century social philosophy that supported redistributionist ideals in European societies. The high priest of American liberalism is John Locke whose natural rights philosophy granted liberalism a sense of equality that had no capacity to speak to extreme forms of inequality and class hierarchies. While Locke's foundational insights into private property as a domain of natural rights are significant, what remains even more important is the philosophical notion of original equality Locke offers.

The most important, and overlooked, fact of the American Revolution resides in the absence of feudalism in the social relations from which it sprang. Unlike the French Revolution and other European bourgeois revolutions of the early nineteenth century that had feudal structures looming in the social life of the societies, the American Revolution was a solidly bourgeois revolution. The American Revolution was a form of inverted Freudianism with no primal father ever killed. Hartz, the historian of the groundbreaking history of American liberalism, The Liberal Tradition in America (1955) is our guide in this regard. Hartz notes that it was not until very late into the American Revolution that effigies of King George were burned. America never killed a primal father, not having a primal father to kill.

Despite the settler colonial and chattel slavery systems embedded in its origins, these oppressive systems were not sources that reformed the guiding idea of liberalism. American political thought rather relied on a metaphysical Lockianism that conceived of every moral, economic and social problem from the same baseline of equality that founded the American project. The belief that America's equality arose ex nihilo was of course only true for the elite and bourgeois classes within the American society. But the result of this myth of the equality of origins lies the profound inability of liberalism to truly revolutionize social relations when those social relations ossify into rigid racial and class hierarchies. Whereas Europe had developed a sense of community built around multiple moral codes, America had developed one moral code alone: a religious zeal built around the idea of liberalism. Hartz understood that the result of the immunizing effects of the liberal idea in American political life was such that it produced an uneven commitment to the knot we have been tracking between fraternity, liberty and solidarity.

Cathedral Liberalism

Can American liberalism be overcome by socialism? The first place to begin to unravel this problem resides in understanding the role of what I will name the American Cathedral. If liberalism has replaced the moralizing function of conscience politics that came out of the early Christian socialist movements and later the progressive movement, the idea of a Cathedral liberalism is fitting as it evokes the quasi religious homogeneity of the public sphere or civil society liberalism manages over. Unlike the neoreactionary invocation of the concept of the Cathedral by the likes of Nick Land and Mencius Moldbug, the Cathedral I am referring to is one that persists through its function of supporting conscience above commitments to the political community. Put differently, the Cathedral succeeds by valorizing the individual on the condition that collective solidarity or collective-based notions of the individual embedded in a political community are swept to the side. The Cathedral succeeds by placing conscience above solidarity and then weaponizing the sphere of representation and morality to vent the alienated antagonisms of the political community.

We are not facing an either-or proposition in unraveling the American Cathedral of liberalism. Rather, we are facing an ideological matrix that has achieved such profound inertia that it's nearly impossible to think of politics without it. At every crisis and historical juncture of profound political transformation from the Civil War to the New Deal, liberalism has exerted its hegemonic force by preserving the sphere of moral conscience to reinforce an individualized ethic of public rights without aiming to reverse or adjust the fundamental inequities of the market. While the Cathedral is felt perhaps most acutely in today's politically correct politics: 'virtue signaling', 'wokeness' and the figure of the 'SJW', these figures are also frustrated responses to the inadequacies of the Cathedral's limited mode of political address. We are not dealing with a spatial logic of inside/outside with the Cathedral. Like capital, there is no outside to the Cathedral. The task, as Marx imagined it, is one of burrowing inward, not of inhabiting an imagined outplace. It is not that socialist political community must abandon appeals to conscience and moralizing, it is rather that socialists must do so without reinforcing the core creed of America's Lockianism. The Cathedral cannot think a multitude of struggles from within because each time it props itself up what we are faced with is the empty origin of the mythical sameness of each citizen.

But just what is the ideological underpinning of the Cathedral? Again, Hartz is our guide. For Hartz, what keeps the engine of individual liberty humming is the guiding ideology of what he names Algerism, the Gilded Age precursor to post-90s meritocracy. The popular novels and stories of Horatio Alger tell tales of scrappy young white men born into extreme poverty who through perseverance and providential luck enter the Middle Class. In true Gilded Age form, the tales of Horatio Alger rely on the assistance of a paternal wealthy patron that elects the young boy based on his merit and passionate hard work. Algerism is the next logical mutation in the ideological framework opened by the Puritan work ethic Max Weber argues founded the ethical support system of industrial capitalism. Algerism formed the backbone of resilience to the sphere of the market as a sphere of unquestioned liberty. As the guiding myth of the American Cathedral, Algerism ensured that:

No comfortable aristocracy awaited the millionaire success and no apocalyptic dream of revolution functioned as solace for the failed proletariat. But even more significant than these denied satisfactions was the simple fact of denial itself: the compulsive impact of a single creed. [9]

The effects of Algerism have been to reinforce liberalism as an irreversible ethic. All social problems or resistances from working classes or racial justice movements to the injustices of the market have been transformed into technical problems that necessitate a pragmatic solution. This technical turn to every problem was a result of America's abiding liberal faith and origin. Most notably, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal was never painted in anticapitalist terms. On the contrary, Roosevelt adopted many of the quasi-collectivist measures of the European liberal reformers, but he refrained from framing the crisis of capitalism in the language of class as his socialist critics had.[10] Roosevelt instead fell back on the Cathedral logic of "solving problems," which meant that no larger number of New Dealers drifted into socialism than did progressives. The New Deal was a demand for property on the largest scale ever conceived, a dream to extend the promise of Algerism to ever-greater numbers of people. In its origin myth of a society born equal we are faced with the very limits to America's imagination of a possible socialism.

Similar to the New Deal compromise, Gilded Age liberal reformers corrected the excesses of monopoly capitalism by reinforcing the rights of small propertied bourgeoisie by isolating the socialist critique of the system. The liberal reformers of the late nineteenth century swallowed up peasant and petit bourgeois in the same breath, and they consequently swallowed up the vibrant socialist movement and chained it to democratic capitalism. In the background of this movement was the Alger mythos, which grew to become the ideal flag for liberals to wave against the excesses of invisible hand capitalism. As Hartz notes in his treatment of the Gilded Age liberal reforms, if the trusts were at the heart of all evil during the Gilded Age, than the Alger mythos could be resurrected by smashing it. With Alger on their side, American liberals could effectively silence their progressive and nativist critics by reinforcing the sphere of the market as sacrosanct. The task of a socialist politics is to seek out an alternative to this guiding myth. [11]

The dominance of the liberal idea is on display even in the writing of the great literary bard of America, Walt Whitman. Whitman, like Emerson and Thoreau never embraced the Christian socialist movements of their time, which were fairly prominent. For Whitman, the Christian socialism of the late 1800's possessed the right impulse in that the ideals of socialism sought to preserve the dignity and the humanity of the citizen outside of oppressive social and economic arrangements. Socialism, as Whitman remarks, sought to "put the crown on man and take it off things." [12] Whitman, like many American socialists after him, was not prepared to place any work or trust in the idea of the socialist party, nor was he prepared to deal with what comes after the revolution, what Marx called the dictatorship of the proletariat. Whitman exhibited a distinctively American view of socialism when he said, "I am with them in the rebel, but I don't know about what comes after." The American political imaginary can think the idea of revolution, but it is revolution qua moral individualism that remains its limit point. From the time of the American Revolution, America was born in liberalism, never knowing a break with truly oppressive social conditions.

Cracks in the Cathedral: Achieving Solidarity

Socialist movements today are not facing the same problems socialist revolutions faced in Russia and China during the 20th century. Firstly, once these revolutionary movements achieved the seizure of the state, the nation and the economy (the sphere of liberty and fraternity) were thought to wither with the enhancement of enlightenment. The nation and the state were conceived as extensions of the superstructure of society and not rooted in the base material relations of exchange or production. As superstructure effects, socialist and communist movements of the 20 th century saw the task of overcoming the nation and the state as limits of representation requiring the expansion o enlightenment. But the hegemony of capital over social relations proved this thesis wrong. As Karatani has indicated, this assumption has neglected the modes of exchange inherent in the state form, which makes the state and the nation extensions of the base.[13] Secondly, the premise of revolutionary socialism during the 20th century was built around the unification of heterogeneous, albeit identifiable, elements of the proletariat: workers and peasants, students and factory workers, for example. Contra Honneth's argument, the figure of the masses did in fact possess coherence due to the fact that exploitation at the hand of wage labor provided the grounds of the potential organization of disparate parts of the proletariat.

I would like to argue that what matters in achieving solidarity today does not come through enhancing communicative apparatuses and communicative capacities solely. What matters is waging experiments in formations of communities of solidarity that have no formal existence within civil society. The task is to construct the identity of the proletariat of our time. Freedom is not found in preexisting identities, it is found in structural failures, in points of dissolution, in cracks in the Cathedral. In the exchange we have been discussing, the three spheres are receptacles of unmet demands that must interact fluidly. This tripartite knot is underpinned by a commitment to the subjective solidarity of a proletarian subjects. Capital necessitates that liberty remain immune from the demands of solidarity. It has been proven time and again that liberty and fraternity can produce a stable equilibrium at the enormous cost of human suffering and exploitation in the market. We have understood furthermore that liberalism maintains this partial stability through its refusal of forms of solidarity in its core idea of the political community.

The task of constructing the proletariat must begin with facing and dismantling the historical hegemony of the liberal idea in American political life. The ascension and popularity of socialist ideas and principles from Medicare for all to universally free college must not fall into the same moral protest rhetoric that prior movements have done from the Gilded Age through to the New Deal. Socialists must invent an alternative ideological framework that is capable of overcoming the Alger mythos that permeates ideals of individual liberty. The Cathedral reproduces a sphere of social life that Marx and other nineteenth political philosophers called civil society.

In the political community, he regards himself as a communal being; but in civil society he is active as a private individual, treats other men as means, reduces himself to a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers.[14]

This quote from the early Marx is a good reminder that any address to the political community is in fact an address to the subject in the dimension of the most communally connected aspect of their social being. Since 2016, the Cathedral logic, reliant as it is on an address to a homogenous civil society, is no longer capable of sustaining communicative modes that are capable of instituting reforms or justice. Liberal forms of community formation, as Niall Ferguson has rightly observed, rely on "a prescriptive commonality, one leading inexorably toward normative unity. [15]" In the Marxist vision, on the other hand, what threads thinking on community into a common concern is "the practices of judgment, a descriptive commonality, that leads towards multiplicity and contestation. [16]"

Hartz points out that while Locke has guided the American ideals of equality, missing is the Rousseau of the Social Contract, where he theorizes the formation of community beyond identification with the preexisting ideals of civil society. Rousseau's political community allows for a dissensus at the level of the common sense, a community is united in the division of their different and singular senses. Rousseau's innovation in thinking community is that he thinks togetherness outside of an organic essence, or substance. In his famous Social Contract, political community is no longer identified with transcendent figures such as the nation, God, or the leader, and he gives the subjects of the community an interior freedom by opening a new space by which the will of the subjects, what Rousseau refers to as the general will, might gain autonomy from the sphere of the immunizing social totality. To get around immunizing logics that essentialize the will of the people, Rousseau develops a theory of political community that is grounded in sense and existence.

This type of model of political community formation is also found in the work of contemporary French political philosopher Jacques Rancière and his idea of the 'dissensual community.' For Rancière, the political community of dissensus is a political version of Rousseau's generic community, grounded on the notion of what he calls, 'being together apart'. Rancière develops a theory of an aesthetic community that avoids identification with any transcendent entity to ground the community. Rancière develops an ethics of what he terms "dis-identification" with the common wherein subjects are formed in the ruptures and interruptions of normative political existence. These ruptures might often occur at moment of crisis in the capitalist system, or moments of uprising or insurrection. It is these de-stabilizing moments that bring about an otherwise invisible 'un-counted' community, what Rancière calls the "part of no part" into social visibility. He theorizes these communities throughout history, from nineteenth century worker movements up to more contemporary art-collectives. What holds the dissensual community 'together-apart' requires a mode of dissensus from the Cathedral.

In the Russian revolution, the demand of the people was "Bread, Peace and Land" -these were not conceptual demands, but large receptacles where in grievances that did not have to do with these particular demands were expressed through them.[17] Cathedral liberalism cannot think of the same sort of receptacles by which demands can be unloaded. The Cathedral grounds a homogenous political community bounded by the liberal idea. The task of socialism today is to invent the grounds for new ideas of solidarity accompanied by mythic and ideological alternatives to the immunizing pull and sway of the liberal idea.

Daniel Tutt researches and writes about contemporary philosophy. His writing and work has been published in Philosophy Now, the Washington Post, and Crisis and Critique, among other publications. He teaches philosophy as an adjunct professor at George Washington University, Marymount University and he has taught courses in prison through the Georgetown University Prisons and Justice Initiative. He holds a Master of Arts from American University in philosophy and ethics and a Ph.D. in contemporary philosophy from the European Graduate School based in Switzerland.

Notes

[1] Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution , Harcourt Inc. New York, NY. 1955, 20.

[2] Karatani, Kojin, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange , Duke University Press, 2014, 234.

[3] Honneth, Axel The Idea of Socialism: Towards a Renewal, Polity Press, Mladen, MA. 2016, 98.

[4] Ibid, 77.

[5] Ibid, 64.

[6] Ibid, 77.

[7] Ibid, 25.

[8] Douthat, Ross Why We Miss the WASPs, New York Times, December 5, 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/opinion/george-bush-wasps.html

[9] Hartz, Louis The Liberal Tradition in America, 211

[10] Post, Charlie, The New Deal and the Popular Front Models for contemporary socialists? International Socialist Review, Issue #108 https://isreview.org/issue/108/new-deal-and-popular-front

[11] A good idea for a research project would be to track the genealogical through-line from the Alger myth of the Gilded Age all the way up to the meritocracy of neoliberal Third Way politics up to today's Green New Deal.

[12] Marsh, John In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America from Itself , 3Monthly Review Press, New York, 2015

[13] Karatani, Kojin, Structure of World History: Modes of Exchange, 2. Karatani notes that a major flaw in historical materialism and its interpretation in the 20th century is that it led to conceptions of the state and the nation as intrinsic parts of the superstructure on par with art or philosophy. Overcoming these imaginary structures could thus be conceived as an act of enlightenment. He argues that in fact the state and the nation should be understood as extensions of the base and namely, as extensions of the dominant modes of exchange.

[14] Marx, Karl, On the Jewish Question, 4.

[15] Ferguson, Kennan (2012) All in the Family: On Community and Incommensurability Duke University Press, 2012, 51.

[16] Ibid, 51.

[17] Laclau, On Populist Reason, Verso Books, New York, NY 2012, 97 - 98.

Evaluating Venezuela as a Socialist in the US

By Colin Jenkins

In all of the talk about Venezuela, many are missing the real conversation that should be had. Naturally, after being subjected to sensationalist and heavily-biased media reports, most Americans frame the situation in terms of “dictatorship,” “humanitarian crisis,” and “U.S. intervention.” This is expected. Modern U.S. media always has been, and always will be, a mouthpiece of the Pentagon. It has helped to falsely justify every illegal war and intervention the U.S. has embarked on over the past half century. And part of its duty is to delegitimize socialism wherever it appears. Again, expected.

The U.S. left (not liberals & Democrats, the real left) has higher standards. However, despite this, the conversation in leftist circles often gets reduced to the typical “authoritarian vs. libertarian” duality when talking about Venezuelan socialism, to the point where the same superficial media biases are reproduced. Context and nuance are desperately needed. Thus, the primary question we should be asking is this: If you’re a country trying to implement socialism within a global capitalist system, how do you accomplish this?

A vast majority of Venezuelans have supported the Bolivarian Revolution (Venezuela’s socialist movement) for the good part of two decades because they know of the ravages that come with capitalism/imperialism. Socialism has a confirmed pattern of legitimacy within the country. The people want it. So, how does the Venezuelan government proceed with implementing it? How does it deal with imperialism? How should it handle internal dissent? Old wealth? The lingering capitalist class? How does it deal with embargos? Blockades? Restrictions and obstructions from global banking? Foreign influence (U.S. and global capital) and funding of opposing political parties?

What the Bolivarian Revolution has undertaken for the past two decades (with significant support from the masses) has been a delicate and, often times, near impossible task. Any socialist project that is subjected to the powerful forces of global capital is. Heavy hands are needed at times. But who should carry out this heavy-handedness? Who are its targets? How extreme does it need to be? And how can it be balanced enough to provide defensive measures without alienating supporters?

Too much heavy-handedness and you risk losing support and giving ammo to global capital and its propaganda organs worldwide. Not enough heavy-handedness and you risk internal and external sabotage from powerful interests. There are real-life factors that don’t allow us to reduce this to a false dichotomy of authoritarian or liberatory.

This is the discussion we should be having. Not only for Venezuela, but for all socialist movements that currently exist and will inevitably be born in the coming years.

West Virginia's Ongoing, Anti-Capitalist Struggle

By Michael Mochaidean

One year ago, teachers and school service personnel in West Virginia rocked the nation with their historic nine-day statewide walkout. The movement was sparked in part due to declining state revenue for state employees' insurance plan - PEIA - and a persistent lack of wage growth compared to contiguous states. In the wake of the Mountain State's first statewide walkout in twenty-eight years, a rupture began to emerge between education workers and their states. Soon thereafter, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Arizona witnessed their own statewide actions, ranging from a few days of actions to weeklong walkouts.

State legislatures were forced to compromise by these strike actions. In Oklahoma, teachers won an additional $6,000 raise and an increase in school funding by over one hundred million dollars. In Arizona, teachers won a twenty percent raise and increase in support staff salaries to entice teacher retention. West Virginia's victory was smaller by comparison, but no less impactful. There, state workers won a five percent pay raise (equivalent to $2,000 for teachers), a one-year hiatus on PEIA premium increases, and the promise of a PEIA Taskforce whose sole purpose was to find a long-term revenue source for the state's ballooning health care costs. The year had ended with an empowered, engaged, and militant rank-and-file, who were at the forefront of these battles.

The present legislative session in West Virginia is reminiscent, in many ways, of last year's militant struggle. Before the session had even begun, Senate Majority Leader Mitch Carmichael had touted Senator Patricia Rucker's appointment to the Republican-controlled Senate Education Committee. Senator Rucker, a bourgeois reactionary Venezuelan who has spoken damningly about the Bolivarian Revolution, ended 2018 with an attack on socialism in her op-ed, "Socialist-style policies won't grow WV." Senator Rucker, who moved to West Virginia only a decade prior, founded a local Tea Party chapter in 2009 whose sole purpose it was to recruit "liberty-minded" candidates to run for office. Rucker even claimed that she and her family had moved to West Virginia "as refugees from socialist Montgomery County [Maryland]," and thus her desire to implement right-wing libertarian fringe elements into the state's political discourse could be better accomplished in more conservative-leaning West Virginia.

Yet despite her consistent redbaiting, which became an all too common feature during last year's legislative session, Senator Rucker's most troubling pieces of her background are her ties to the far-right in both the religious and education realms. Rucker is a self-described member of the Traditionalist Roman Catholic strand of Catholicism, a right-wing segment of the Roman Catholic Church that believes Vatican II was an illegitimate liberal reform effort. Rucker is also a homeschool advocate who has no experience teaching in public schools. Though Rucker had initially claimed to be a public-school teacher, a freedom of information request with the Maryland State Department of Education found that Rucker never held a teaching certificate with the state board of education, but was only a substitute teacher between 1993 and 2002, before she began homeschooling her children full-time.

In conjunction with her role in the reactionary right's religious and education fields, Rucker is also one of a handful of West Virginia legislators affiliated with ALEC - the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC is a front group for corporate lobbyists and state legislators who help funnel resources from large corporate donors into crafting legislation beneficial to the ruling elite. Corporate backers of ALEC help to draft "model" bills that are then used by ALEC-sponsored legislators in a hastily-fashioned copy-and-paste procedure, whereby tax breaks and deregulation maneuvers are inserted into legislation on a state by state basis. Ninety-eight percent of ALEC's revenue, according to ALEC Exposed, comes from "sources other than legislative dues, such as corporations, corporate trade groups, and corporate foundations." Some of the largest donors to ALEC include the Koch Foundation, the Castle Rock Foundation, the Allegheny Foundation, and the Claude R. Lambe Foundation, all backed by some of the wealthiest Americans - the Koch, Coors, and Scaife families.

Rucker was highlighted as ALEC's "State Legislator of the Week" last year as a model for right-wing libertarian deregulation and privatization efforts in state legislatures. Her down-home charm as a candidate, running for "limited government, lower taxes, and personal freedom" obscures her larger role as an austerity-minded politician whose proudest achievement at the time was the repeal of Common Core. The ability to receive taxpayer funds to provide religious indoctrination - either at home or in private school settings - appears to be one of Rucker's larger goals now as Chair of the Senate Education Committee. Intersecting her relationship to ALEC with the reactionary religious right makes it evident that Rucker's initial goal to help modernize West Virginia's education system is a ruse, obfuscated by her larger desire to implement neo-liberal "reforms" within the state's public education system.

Once this legislative session began, Rucker's Senate Education Committee wasted no time in pushing their privatization, austerity-ridden omnibus bill - SB 451.

The omnibus bill would impact education in the following ways:

- Unlimited charter school development throughout the state.

- The creation of educational savings accounts (ESA's) that provide families with a percent of district funds should they choose not to send their children to public schools.

- Payroll protection clauses, which force unions to individually sign up members rather than having members sign up and have their paychecks automatically deduct their dues.

- Eliminate seniority as a factor in transfers and layoffs when consolidations occur, potentially eliminating higher scale workers in favor of lower scale state employees.

- Increase student cap sizes in elementary schools.

The bill itself passed quickly through the Education Committee - spending less than a week in committee - before it was debated for only two hours, passing in the State Senate on an 18-16 vote. Senator Mitch Carmichael stated at the time that, "It's a historic, great day for the state of West Virginia," at a press conference soon after. "We are so thrilled about the vote today and the aspect of finally, comprehensively, reforming the education system in West Virginia." Senator Rucker likewise claimed that she and her committee were "determined to do the right thing no matter the political pressure."

Education workers, however, were prepared for the worst retaliation from the Senate in advance. On the first day of the legislative session, roughly one month prior to SB 451's passage, hours before Governor Jim Justice held his State of the State address, teachers in twenty counties held walk-ins to remind their fellow workers, parents, and community members what it was they were fighting for. The theme of the walk-ins was a need for mental health and community support for children most impacted by the twin factors of neo-liberal capitalism and the opioid crisis.

To give some perspective on the relative crisis schools are facing, West Virginia:

- Ranks forty-sixth for child poverty, and last for child poverty for children under the age of six.

- Has over one-third of children being raised by their grandparents, which ranks it second in the nation for this. Grandfamilies, as they are called, make on average $20,000 less than the average household in the state.

- Is operating at sixty-six percent efficiency for school counselor to student ratio, and at twenty-three percent efficiency for school psychologist to student ratio.

- Has more than one-in-four children experiencing an adverse childhood experience (trauma leading to depression, violence, substance abuse).

The educator and activist Bob Peterson describes this brand of unionism social justice unionism in that the union represents the interests of the community in conjunction with the material interests of the workers themselves. It is little wonder that this was the theme, given that the walk-ins were organized by the newly-formed West Virginia United caucus, whose five core principles include social justice unionism. An affiliate of UCORE (United Caucuses of Rank and File Educators), West Virginia United began in the wake of last year's statewide walkouts. The caucus is a combination of members from the state's three primary education unions - West Virginia Education Association (WVEA), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the West Virginia School Service Personnel Association (WVSSPA). In a video released back in September that announced the caucus' formation, steering committee member Jay O'Neal stated that, "We need a caucus, because we saw what happened when teachers and service personnel came together, stood together, and said, 'Enough is enough.' We know that our power lies in us; it's not in the politicians down at the capital."

Worker self-management of unions with respect to bargaining and actions is a component of what the famous Wobbly historian and organizer Staughton Lynd calls solidarity unionism. Solidarity unionism, in its broadest form, is a concept in union organizing that recognizes that the individual union member knows best their conditions and their contractual obligations. In lieu of relying on business unionism - lobbying and mediation to gain power - solidarity unionism utilizes direct action to mediate disputes between members and management. Union representatives become less impactful in organizing efforts or disputes, as workers themselves take on the task of building their union at the local level. In addition to social justice unionism described above, solidarity unionism is also one of United's five key principles.

Already, West Virginia United has begun the work of constructing a left-libertarian dual power institution that can challenge both their own business unions and the reactionary right. Members engage in online-on-the-ground campaigns that work to build power across the state within online spaces that are then transformed into on-the-ground efforts. On the Public Employees United page, which was used last year during the nine-day walkout for organizing efforts, over 20,000 public employees engage with one another across the state to educate themselves on this legislation, agitate their co-workers against it, share stories of triumph and anger, and organize as a larger collective. West Virginia United is uniquely poised to capture and redirect this anger towards the larger struggle against austerity, given that their model of organizing relies on worker self-management in both a right-to-work state and in a state where public employees do not have the ability to collectively bargain. The primary education unions in West Virginia act more so as business representatives for teachers, assisting them with insurance, certification, and classification issues. Both WVEA and AFT lobby the legislature to push for laws that benefit members while holding electoral campaigns through their PAC's to provide resources that help elect likeminded candidates. The disconnect between business unionism and the militancy West Virginia has sparked nationwide last year, however, means that the tactics of solidarity unionism and social justice unionism must be central in the fight against neo-liberal capitalism.

The battle between the austerity-minded education reformers and the militant education workers will continue regardless of what happens to SB 451. As of the writing of this article, SB 451 is being debated in the House of Delegates, and its longevity is uncertain. Whatever may come of this lone bill, it is clear that the fight West Virginians are taking on once again is one in opposition to the rampant capitalism we have witnessed since privatization of public education began a little over two decades ago. The victories of the recent UTLA strike provide hope to many in the Mountain State that unions, driven by a desire to protect public services and in direct confrontation with neo-liberal capitalism, can win the day, but we cannot concede an inch to privatizers in the meantime. To open the floodgates would be disastrous to far too many engaged in this struggle. Should West Virginia strike again, it will be because the working-class educators of this state have developed a burgeoning class-consciousness that was lit last year, and is now carried on in the ranks of its militant citizens.

Michael Mochaidean is an organizer and member the West Virginia IWW and WVEA. He is currently co-authoring a book detailing the 2018 education walkouts, their triumphs and limitations one year later.

Returning Libertarianism to its Proper Place: The Current Fight for Socialism within the U.S. Libertarian Party

By Colin Jenkins

The following is an email interview with Matt Kuehnel and Dane Posner, two members of the Libertarian-Socialist Caucus (LSC) of the Libertarian Party. The interview took place over the course of a few months, between December 2018 and February 2019. The LSC may be contacted and followed on Facebook and Twitter. If interested in learning more or interacting, the LSC welcomes prospective members to participate in their discussion group on Facebook.

Colin Jenkins: Please tell us a little about yourselves, your personal political paths/evolution, and about the Libertarian Socialist Caucus of the Libertarian Party?

Matt Kuehnel: Born and raised in Macomb County, Michigan, home of the Reagan Democrats, I'm 35, he/him, skilled trade worker, former candidate for Michigan's State House of Representatives and currently organizing a committee to run for mayor of my home town of Warren, MI.

Bordering Detroit, Macomb County is a mix of rural and suburban communities that has shaped it to be a thermometer on the electoral pulse of America. I was raised in the upper middle-class city of Sterling Heights, but found myself attracted to the realness of the more poverty-stricken southern communities and people. The suburbs, to me, was fake people living fake lives trying to put on their best show for each other, to appear well-adjusted and successful.

My first awareness and resentment of authority was school. I got into drugs and vandalism, bounced around schools, and by senior year I dropped out. I then attended an alternative school and got my diploma. Started my professional career in food service, then CNC machining, residential construction for almost a decade, got my associate degree at age 32 for HVAC (heating and cooling), and I've been doing commercial maintenance for 4 years now.

My political beginnings were largely shaped by my middle-class parents who are Reagan Democrats, now Trump supporters. My first presidential vote was for Bush's second term, then I voted for Obama his first term, and it was then I became disenfranchised with the two parties following Obama's betrayal re-signing the Patriot Act his first week in office. I found the Tea Party, expected revolt. I showed up to the first rally in camo, masked up, with a sign that said, "eat the rich, burn the banks." This was a preclude to me finding the Libertarian Party, where I have an upbringing that should connect me with these conservative middle-class white people, but I reject the identity and advocate for those forgotten, or often vilified, by the suburbanites. I'm able to communicate and be heard, but my priorities and ideals are radically different. I realized that what I was doing was confronting toxic ideas in their safe space. In a way, I see it as de-platforming, challenging them on their own turf. I now consider myself a libertarian, a socialist, and a communist, and I'll use those terms interchangeably. I see ideology weaponized often, treated as religion, and for that reason I refuse to proclaim myself as a specific sect of socialist. I believe all revolutionary ideas hold value, some more than others, but ideology without praxis is nothing more than debate.

Dane Posner : My name is Dane Posner, currently 26 years of age. I've considered myself an anarchist since I first discovered punk rock towards the end of elementary school. Of course, I didn't understand most of the subject matter at the time, but as I transitioned into adolescence, I felt I could certainly relate to the alienating feeling of distrust of authority espoused in those lyrics - especially faced with the assertion from my so-called "superiors" that as a youth, I was discouraged from questioning this hierarchical relationship, as if my elders were somehow infallible. All the while, I was spoon-fed heaps of imperialist propaganda from American textbooks, telling me that everything our government did was for "the greater good", regardless of the human rights violations we committed in the name of "freedom", "liberty" and "justice for all".

I abstained from involvement in the electoral process until around 2015-2016, though I had paid attention to political matters for quite some time before that. I supported Ron Paul in 2012 from hearing his anti-war rhetoric, along with his rhetoric about the importance of personal civil liberties, but I didn't want to get involved with the Republican Party, and I saw how the corporate media controlled the narrative in the first place. During the 2015-2016 primary season, I discovered the same sort of corporate propaganda unleashed upon the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. Of course, it all made sense, as the rhetoric he espoused was fundamentally at-odds with the corporate agenda. I finally learned firsthand that the two-party system was not at all concerned with democracy, liberty, or the people's best interests. I had registered as a Democrat to vote for Bernie Sanders during the 2016 primaries, then traveled from Houston to Philadelphia to protest the dog-and-pony show that was the 2016 "Democratic" National Convention. I immediately "Dem-exited" following that farcical event in which the more unpopular candidate somehow "won" the party's nomination, then proudly voted for Dr. Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka in the 2016 General Election.

I had long identified as an anarchist, and throughout my teen years, as a libertarian, though I was definitely turned off by some of the poor-shaming rhetoric I had heard from that crowd, coming from a background of poverty myself. In early 2018, I learned about a "socialist infiltration" of the Libertarian Party. That certainly piqued my interest, as I had long-identified as "left-leaning." but didn't quite adopt the "socialist" label until late 2015. I had read Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's famous work What is Property sometime during intermediate school, and as I learned more about the Libertarian Socialist Caucus of the Libertarian Party, I was able to draw parallels between that text (in which Proudhon famously declared "Property is theft!") and the phrase "libertarian-socialism". "Finally!" I thought to myself, "a label that I can truly identify with!" I started reading more works by the likes of anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin and communalist Murray Bookchin and got more and more involved with the so-called "commies" in the Libertarian Party. Finally, I decided to travel to New Orleans to attend the 2018 Libertarian National Convention, to support self-proclaimed "an-com" (anarcho-communist) Matt Kuehnel, who was running for Libertarian National Committee Chair, along with other members of the LSC-LP who were running for various offices within the Libertarian Party (infamous stripper James Weeks for LNC Vice-Chair and Povertarian Caucus founder/LGBT-rights activist Mike Shipley for LP "At-Large"). Unfortunately, no members of the LSC-LP were elected to any offices within the LP, however our very presence there sent shockwaves throughout the Libertarian Party. I personally caught quite a bit of attention by flying and donning the famous red & black anarcho-syndicalist flag of the Spanish Revolution as a cape on the Convention floor. To many of the capitalists' ire, we made it known that the socialists were there to stay.

CJ: Historically and logically speaking, "libertarian socialism" is essentially anarchism - with its primary focus on eliminating coercive, hierarchical structures from both capitalism and the state. Thus, to many anarchists, it is a redundant term. But the redundancy has become necessary in the U.S. due to the capitalist cooptation of the term "libertarian." So, being in the U.S., I suspect you've received a lot of confused responses from folks (the "socialism is anything the government does" lot) thinking "libertarian socialism" is an oxymoron. As well as from those who incorrectly label anarchism as a right-wing ideology. How do you respond to this?

MK: It depends on who I'm addressing. When I hear "libertarian socialism is an oxymoron" from someone who genuinely doesn't understand, I do my best to educate patiently. I understand that the right wing has hijacked the term libertarianism in the US. They did this purposefully and they considered it a victory. When I encounter a right-wing libertarian who proclaims the ideas an oxymoron, I attack, I ridicule, I make an example of them. It exposes the ignorance and hypocrisy of US libertarianism. They are proud of being anti-authority, often posturing against each other as the "most-libertarian" libertarian. This competition to be anti-authoritarian makes them easily manipulated by those of us that oppose authority not just by the state, but in all human interaction. I did learn their ideologies, I learned their language and ideas, and it makes me a formidable opponent in debate.

DP: We encourage those individuals to read up on the origins of libertarian thought, by citing the writings of early anarchist thinkers such as Joseph Dejacque, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Errico Malatesta, etc., as they all predate the works of American libertarian thinkers such as Murray Rothbard and Milton Friedman.

CJ: Touching on the term "libertarian" some more, leftists are often more aware of the rich history of left-libertarianism than others, especially in the U.S., where the term has become bastardized. This history includes the "first socialist schism" that occurred within the First International, where the Bakunin and Marx camps had their differences, leading to the expulsion of Bakunin and his brand of anarchist socialism. It's found in Dejacque, an anarchist communist who is known for the original use of the term "libertarian" in 1857; and in Kropotkin's subsequent work that cemented the philosophical basis for anarcho-communism as a formidable socialist current.

Do you have an educational component that focuses on this history? Or do you take the approach of avoiding too much "dead white-guy theory" (something that's becoming more popular alongside attempts to "decolonize" anarchism and political education in general)?

DP: We try to frame the history of libertarianism not only in the context of its linguistic origins in 19th-century Europe, but also within the context of natural society, as espoused in Peter Kropotkin's work Mutual Aid or Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Libertarianism is the natural state of being. Non-hierarchical collectives have existed throughout human history, far predating any capitalist or proto-capitalist system such as feudalism. Of course, "libertarian-socialism" is a large umbrella term representing various philosophies ranging from anarcho-communism to mutualism or individualist anarchism. Ownership of the individual product of labor is the basis for this socio-economic philosophy, which can then be applied in various ways, either through voluntary distribution, or self-sustainability. Sometimes we frame it in terms of the Marxist doctrine, "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs," however our disagreements with Marx, in conjunction with Bakunin, stem from the methods used to achieve such a goal. We as Libertarians reject the initiation of force to achieve social or political goals, however we do view economic exploitation as an act of aggression, often backed up by theft-funded state force. This is why we argue that private ownership of the means of production, or the protection of absentee private property, cannot exist without a state or state-like entity.

MK: I honestly try to avoid being overly philosophical these days. Ideals are, by definition, unrealistic. I appreciate philosophy and theory, I think it does have a place in educating. Especially when defending the caucus's presence in the party, it's essential to combat their ideals because it's a party that prides itself on theory and purity. It can be persuasive when dealing with other nerds who read theory, but it's kinda useless with the general population. In my public interactions, I try to keep things simple, focus on policy where the most common ground can be found. It's hard enough to get people over apathetic tendencies of feeling helpless, let alone sell them on the idea that we can have some perfect, specific theory. Anything man makes will be imperfect, and expecting to get a whole community or whole nation to adapt and organize a perfect government is naive. I focus on immediate needs, immediate solutions, and that's where I find the most success.

CJ: Tell us about your experiences thus far within the Libertarian Party. How are you being received overall? Tell us about some of the debates and relationships that have formed with USAmerican libertarians within the party.

MK: I joined the party in 2016 to support Gary Johnson. Being a former Reagan Democrat, he was the perfect centrist to me at the time. He was the compromise candidate, he won my trust on a personal level, and I was raised to judge the person's character more than their politics. Immediately, I realized how small and disorganized the party was. Macomb County is one of the largest counties in Michigan, and the local affiliate was comprised of two elderly couples and a young guy who was their secretary. They were supporting Trump. Me and others had to create a new affiliate and ended up absolving the other affiliate and being recognized as the official Libertarians of Macomb County. It was exciting, because it was a bunch of us younger, new activists just finding our way through the political process. The bonds I formed locally have been what had kept me in the party despite the pushback I've received.

I had no idea of theory prior to the LP. It was there that I was exposed to anarchist philosophy and it started my journey. Originally, I was fighting with the anarchists for supporting Gary Johnson, then I was fighting the "pragmatists" when I took to anarcho-capitalism. Then, I found mutualism and started questioning and challenging capitalist rhetoric. I just kept reading, learning, and drifting further and further left, slowly losing most of my friends and allies in the party. I ran for their national chair position in 2018, the first ever open communist to run for that position to my knowledge. I had enough support at that time to get enough tokens at the national convention for my chair race to make the debates. I don't think I have that 5% support anymore. The Audacious Caucus was where most of my support was, and they are a radical anarchist caucus. Many of the original LSC members were from that caucus. When I received the dual nomination from the Socialist Party of Michigan, an affiliate of SPUSA, for my state representative race in 2018, I lost a lot of that support. I took on more pragmatic positions, and that caused backlash. It also exposed the anti-communist beliefs many of the LSC members hold, referring to things as "authoritarian socialism" and "state communism." which I find to be oxymoronic. It's now been a fight for me within the caucus, to defend against anti-communism and capitalist sympathies. I'm still in the party, still in the caucus, but it's a fight for solidarity and understanding of fellow socialists.

DP: While it has certainly been an uphill battle educating the right-wing Libertarians on libertarianism's leftist roots long predating the Libertarian Party, we have found many left-libertarians who have been waiting for an organization such as ours to spring up for quite some time. The Libertarian Socialist Caucus has only existed since August of 2017, but we've been making waves ever since! At the 2018 Libertarian National Convention in New Orleans, I even got thrice-elected Libertarian National Committee Chair Nicholas Sarwark to admit to me in a room full of capitalists that American capitalists stole the word "libertarian" from the likes of individuals like Proudhon and Bakunin - though to not completely ruin his reputation, he did add "but it's ours now," (as is the capitalist way). "True" libertarians don't believe in intellectual property rights, but it's the principle behind the right's attempted erasure of history that irks me.

CJ: What do you view as the main problems with the U.S. version of libertarianism?

DP: The emphasis on private property rights is fundamentally at odds with opposition to a theft-funded state. The way I see it, a "private security company" is not much different from a gang of police officers, perhaps besides how they receive their funding. I support the right to defend one's own personal property by any means necessary, or the right to collectively organize to defend common property, but the ultimate goal, of course, is to ensure that the basic needs of all individuals are met. "If liberty does not exist for all, then liberty does not exist at all." - Benjamin Dryke, LSC-LP member, former State House candidate for Michigan's 36th District and presidential candidate seeking the Libertarian Party's nomination in 2020. We share many common goals with right-Libertarians, such as dismantling the surveillance state, police state, ending the drug war, decriminalizing all non-violent offenses such as sex work, etc., however we feel that many of them are a bit misguided when it comes to our ideas of what a post-state world might look like. Personally, I would rather live in a unified community in which all necessities are readily available to all than a land of unnecessary competition and constant struggle for land rights and access to other natural resources.

MK: Shaming the poor and idolizing the rich is by far the biggest issue. Racism and sexism is also rampant and largely accepted in the party. Social Darwinism is a common theme. The right has done an excellent job forming an ideology based on ideals of morality that justify the most immoral ideas. The party attracted me for their anti-war and anti-police-state stances. Finding opposition to civil rights was the first eye opener for me. Then discovering how stances such as abolishing public education and welfare would have the greatest impact on marginalized people helped snap me out of the dogma I had originally bought into. I think most just don't recognize this, but some are fully aware and proud that they would be operating and depriving marginalized people. There is a very real libertarian-to-alt-right pipeline. The LSC has put a fork in the pipeline, diverting at least some newcomers to the left.

CJ: The left in the U.S. is known for sectarianism. One of the main wedges is that between anarchists and so-called "tankies" (Communists, Marxist-Leninists, Maoists, etc). This wedge is often described as "libertarian" vs. "authoritarian," something that represents a vulgar interpretation, but nonetheless prevails. What are your views on this particular split? What are your experiences working with "tankies"? How do you view sectarianism in general?

MK: I mentioned before, ideology gets weaponized and treated as religion. I find it so toxic. I have comrades throughout organizations like SPUSA, IWW, and the DSA. Prioritizing ideology over things like racism, misogyny, transphobia, ableist, etc., causes unnecessary division. So much stems from confusion, propaganda, and just the general combativeness of politics. That's why I prefer to focus on realistic reform and direct action, where the most common ground is found across ideologies. Even among the LP, that's where I can connect with many people. I like to say that I'm for working class solidarity, not left unity. In practice, we could all be socialists, creating a new and unique application of the ideals without following a specific ideology just through solidarity with our neighbors. I think ensuring organizing spaces are safe and inclusive is the most important factor in exclusion, not purity and conformity of philosophy.

DP: The roots of our disagreements tend to stem from what we interpret to be the most viable methods of achieving our idea of a classless, stateless, non-hierarchical society. The libertarian-left feels that the abolition of involuntary hierarchy cannot be achieved by replacing one hierarchy with another, especially through violent means. That said, we are willing to work with anyone who shares our common goals of dismantling the classist and racist institutions such as the police state that prevent us from living the way we choose.

CJ: A section of your Statement of Principles reads: "We concur that imposed communism would be the most detestable tyranny that the human mind could conceive, and free and voluntary communism is ironical if one has not the right and the possibility to live in a different regime, collectivist, mutualist, individualist - as one wishes, always on condition that there is no oppression or exploitation of others."

I anticipate that many leftists would view this as problematic for a number of reasons, the most obvious to me being the insinuation that a classless society where the means of production are owned and operated in common could be imposed on anyone? As if people would not want more control over our lives. In other words, contrary to capitalist propaganda, a true communist society seems perfectly in line with that of liberty ("the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behavior, or political views.") Can you explain the thought process behind including this section and what it means to you? Have you received any negative feedback from it?

MK: There is a struggle of tactics and goals within the LSC. My tactics are that of agitation, my goal would be to fill and usurp the party with actual leftists. Others believe it better to blend in and persuade current membership to accept our presence with the goal of creating an anti-state coalition. The platform was created democratically, and there's very few obstacles to becoming a voting member, although roadblocks are being created to combat a supposed "tankie takeover." The most active members are those that were already party members, so they not only hold less than socialist views, they also have bonds and alliances with party members that they are afraid to lose. I honestly loathe this language, and the idea of pandering to anti-communism to appease capitalists is one I am constantly fighting against. I prefer to appeal to actual socialists, and I would encourage leftists to join and help me combat the right, but I can't in good faith without being honest about what you're getting into - a horribly toxic party and a caucus where we have to combat toxicity in our own space. That's politics, though. A large part of my activism is just showing how easy it is to participate. There's elitism for sure, but, for the most part, all you need to do is show up and speak up. It takes away the feeling of powerlessness we've been accustomed to with politics. I'm able to be an open communist in the Libertarian Party; and the Party, as well as the caucus, cannot figure out a way to get rid of me. That's all we need to improve - good people showing up and speaking up, and we should do this in every party, organization, union, etc.

DP : The working class has never fully owned the means of production under any so-called "socialist" or "communist" regime. Socialism, as we define it, means "worker ownership of the means of production and products of labor", whereas communism is a "classless, stateless society in which the means of production and products of labor are commonly-owned". State ownership of the means of production and products of labor is not by any means the same thing as worker ownership.

As long as involuntary hierarchies exist, neither socialism nor communism has been achieved, in my view.

CJ: A section of your Platform that stood out to me reads, "We reject attempts to do away with the violent state's 'crutches' for the most marginalized and at-risk among us, while still maintaining its 'teeth,' and we seek abolition now of its most violent and oppressive elements." Can you elaborate on this a little?

MK: This is a plank I fought for, and it's meant to allow for incrementalism and pragmatism. If you took the philosophies encompassed in what we call libertarian-socialism and applied them strictly, in that the state should not exist, it could lead you to support anything from repealing the Civil Rights Act to public schools. It is my belief that we cannot operate with this mindset, because it feeds into the already oppressive conditions for the biggest victims of state and capitalist oppression. The proletariat must have their needs met in order to be able to fight. The caucus and philosophical ideal are equal distribution through mutual aid networks, but those should come first and eliminate the need for govt assistance programs. Otherwise, it's a social Darwinist 'sink or swim' mentality until inequality is addressed and eliminated. So, the biggest intersects that we share, not only with current party members but also the general population, is the major structures that uphold oppression by the state. By those, I'm referring to the imperialist military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, the pharmaceutical industrial complex, corruption, and pollution. These big problems are staring us straight in the face and a good 50% of the population can immediately find themselves in agreement against them. Those are where the greatest number of victims are created, where the largest amount of protection and tools for oppression by the capitalist class are found. I think there should be MORE assistance given, like Medicare for All, until these large systems are eliminated, making equality possible. And that's kinda the point of this plank, allowing members to reject idealism for pragmatism.

DP: Militarized police forces serve as a theft-funded tool of oppression and nothing more. The police serve to protect the property of the "haves", oftimes at the expense of the "have-nots" - that is to say, they exist to protect the possessions of the rich at the expense of the working class, who pay more taxes in proportion to their income than their wealthy fellow citizens (through sales taxes, rent, etc.).

CJ: Staying on this topic regarding the Welfare State and mutual aid, your platform reads, "We reject the offensive and paternalistic premise that ordinary people of modest means are unable to run their own lives and need government to 'help' them. Thus, we reject the coercive redistribution of wealth and call for the voluntarily mutualization of the welfare state through a compassionate transition to voluntary, community-based mutual aid networks."

Can you tell us what you mean by "the coercive redistribution of wealth" and how this transition from welfare state to "voluntary, community-based mutual aid networks" would take place and what it would look like?

MK: The "coercive redistribution of wealth" is opposing systems imposed by states to direct resource allocations. It's basically saying 'taxation is theft' in leftist terms. This plank may accurately describe ideals, and a big part of why it's included is to be cannon fodder against right libertarians when they call us "statists". How we transition from a state tax system to voluntary cooperation can be answered in so many ways by so many people. Many in the caucus would envision a stateless free market of competition allowing socialist market practices to outcompete capitalist modes of production rendering capitalist businesses few or obsolete. Others might say that capitalist modes of production are inherently aggressive and worthy of defensive action, essentially outlawing them through a collective rejection, boycott, strike, or insurrection making wealth redistribution unnecessary following the transfer of the means of production into the hands of the working class. An example of what a voluntary system would look like might be like GoFundMe or UNICEF. Organizations of people collectively and voluntarily working towards shared commonwealth, justice, and relief. Ultimately, this plank and others are shared ideals but not necessarily with uniform solutions, tactics, and ideas of how to achieve them or what they might look like.

DP: We believe that without a state, the legal claims to absentee private property will become null and void. It is a shared view amongst most libertarian-socialists that natural resources, as they exist without the additions of human labor, cannot be legitimately claimed or protected without the use or threat of force, however we feel that instead of fighting over these resources, it would be far more beneficial to the community as a whole to voluntarily share these resources amongst ourselves to ease the suffering of all of our fellow humans. Most of us advocate a push towards a post-scarcity world, in which all goods are available to all people free of charge. The innovations of technology in the modern age have pushed us closer than ever to achieving such a world, however, we feel that the state, on behalf of those who claim the most capital, has hindered the human race from achieving that goal. Modern technology has significantly diminished the demand and necessity for human labor, and has made mass food production a possibility, which could ultimately end world hunger, even without leaving a huge carbon footprint (by incorporating green technology and diverting away from the use of fossil fuels). Even healthcare could ultimately be provided to all people with little to no human labor required, however our ideal for the current day and age is a transition to worker-owned healthcare cooperatives through the systematic dismantlement of corporation and state, which currently exists to accumulate profit at the expense of the sick, disabled, and those in pain.

CJ: You mention the 'free market' a few times in your platform and even refer to the free market as "a cornerstone of a free and prosperous society." You also call for an end to "the government enforcement of capitalist property laws and exploitative financial systems" in this vision. Can you elaborate on this? What would your version of a free market look like, as opposed to the capitalist version?

MK: In the libsoc (libertarian-socialist) understanding, the term 'market' is economically agnostic. In a market, you might have some elements of capitalism, some of socialism, and maybe ones we haven't thought of yet. A free market is one absent of restrictions, especially imposed by a state, self-regulated by its natural forces and conscious actors. Some believe that by simply eliminating the state, and thusly the structures that defend and uphold capitalist norms, capitalism would not be possible, especially at the current level. Not all libsoc's are communist, and therefore we are not in full agreement that markets should exist. I'm in favor of abolishing markets altogether, as markets are inherently competitive. I prefer communist ideals of cooperation. Putting ideals into practice, my state rep position included abolishing private property. The way I would describe that in practice as a state rep, is that I would support any measure to give a worker more control over their labor, an individual more control over their possessions, and a community more control over their resources. I'm running for mayor of Warren this year on the platform of banning evictions. This means having our city courts refuse to process, approve of, and aid in evictions as another way to address the destructive nature of private property and offer a solution to strip the owning class of power over our means of shelter.

DP: What we view as a "free market" is a system of trade free of involuntary hierarchy, i.e. government and corporate intervention. "Free market socialism" is not an oxymoron, by the definitions I used earlier. We believe that the individual owns that which they individually produce, and if a collective of individuals decides to collaborate to increase production and productivity, then they should most certainly have the right to do so. This, we feel, is the essence of a truly free market. The complications come when we start figuring out how to trade with entities that exist on a hierarchical, for-profit system, however many basic needs can be met through localization. How is it that humanity was able to thrive in the Americas for millennia, prior to European colonization?

CJ: Under the Labor section of your platform you state, "the exploitation and control of labor, slavery, both direct and indirect, has been the single greatest violation of the liberty of individuals throughout history. We oppose this violation." Can you talk a little bit about this point and tell us what role you believe capitalism has played here?

DP : Income inequality has long been a problem throughout American history, even prior to our declaration of national sovereignty at the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783. It should not be ignored that this nation was built on the backs of slaves and other involuntary laborers such as indentured servants, who had no real choice but to labor for so-called "lords of the land" for the "opportunity" to survive in colonial America. But by what right does man claim dominion over another, either through direct coercion or deprivation of vital resources?

Private property rights in America were claimed through the initiation of force in the form of genocide against the mostly peaceful indigenous peoples of this land. This harsh reality cannot be ignored, regardless of the fact that it is was the past. The enslavement and forced assimilation of indigenous peoples, both in the Americas and Africa, built this country from the ground up. Private property rights were claimed through systemic violence, and passed down from generation to generation. That is how we got to where we are today. The so-called "Founders" of this country, according to our history textbooks, were a union of wealthy, white male landowners, who for the most part inherited their own wealth from generations past. At the founding of our country, many fortunes were made through the systemic exploitation of involuntary labor, maintained through the use of force and the threat of death. Even following the executive order of President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which allegedly freed the slaves, and the bloody battles fought between the Union and Confederacy during the US Civil War, black and brown men and women struggled for well over a century to be recognized as equal beings who deserved the same rights to land and resources as their Caucasian counterparts. To this very day, there is a blatantly stark contrast between the economic conditions of whites and non-whites. While it is true that white people exist in poverty, per capita, black and brown individuals make up a far larger proportion of the lower economic classes. This does not denote a difference in productivity between races - rather, this is the manufactured design of the American capitalist system. When private ownership of the means of production can be claimed by European colonizers through the use of force and passed down for generations, while depriving non-whites of their rights and subjecting them to forced labor for the accumulation of individual personal wealth, it cannot come as a surprise that the current socioeconomic racial divides exist as they do.

MK: This is an attempt to articulate wage theft, along with any other forms of exploitation of labor. The LP is very much into the idea of things being voluntary, so almost everything gets analyzed in the lens of consent. I don't always like when things that aren't slavery get called slavery, because it minimizes the atrocities committed through chattel slavery, but it's common on the left to consider capitalist exploitation as wage slavery. You're forced to participate, it's coerced consent to surrender portions of your labor to your boss. This becomes a big talking point against what right Libertarians will call voluntary.

CJ: I appreciate what you all are doing and for taking part in this interview. I think your efforts are an important part of the socialist revival we are witnessing in the U.S. That being said, what are your short-term and long-term goals for this Caucus? Where do you see this movement in another few years?

MK: Short term is just to have a presence in the party. Just being there, despite being largely outnumbered, has had a huge effect. What I would love to see long term is a full takeover of the LP, and it would be so easy if people would just show up locally. Most counties don't have affiliates, most affiliate can't even break double digit attendance to their monthly meetings. The national convention had less than 1000 delegates. It is completely possible for the left to swallow up the LP by 2020, but I just don't see the interest in it yet. Even myself, I'm losing interest and prioritizing my non-partisan mayor run and considering running as a Democrat in 2020, assuming I lose the 2019 mayoral race. I'm glad the caucus exists, flaws and all. I'm proud of my involvement and the work we've collectively done. I think taking over the party would be a symbolic and significant victory, but just having the caucus exist is a victory in itself for leftist ideals. The LP is a great place to start your activism, to learn political processes, to practice public speaking, but I find all third parties ultimately ineffective to getting elected. My goal originally wasn't to get elected, but just use the platform to advance my ideals. I've since evolved, I enjoy being a public speaker and giving a voice to those who previously had none. There's often fights between reform and revolution. I support both, but, until a revolution is actualized, people need relief and reform can provide that. I would say my future in the caucus and the LP is undecided, but regardless I hope that the caucus continues to grow, takes on more true socialist tendencies, and continues to challenge and disrupt the LP.

DP: We hope to provide the anti-authoritarian left an outlet for sharing their ideas for achieving our common goal of a world set free. Though we exist as a relatively small organization within a minor political party, our focus is not solely on electoral politics. We encourage direct action, as a more "pragmatic" means of achieving this goal. We hope to build our organization up to include like-minded individuals from various walks of life; a multiracial, multicultural amalgamation of free spirits - like a modern-day "Rainbow Coalition" - working towards the liberation of all people, through peaceful and voluntary means. We want to unify as one resounding, echoing voice that cannot be ignored by the masses currently distracted by the farce and fraud of the bipartisan false dichotomy known as our so-called "two-party system," which ultimately exists to serve the same capitalist masters. We hope to establish voluntary cooperatives all across the nation that can end our communities' dependence on the oppressive institutions that govern our daily lives, forcing us to depend on them or face incarceration for the crimes of free movement and challenging the status quo. We hope to become a force to be reckoned with that expands far beyond the electoral system, that could ultimately change the world for the better by achieving liberty for all in a world truly set free. Our goal will certainly not be easy to achieve, but what have we got to lose besides our chains? Give me liberty or give me death!

Between Developing and Defending the Cuban Revolution

By Joshua Lew McDermott

Recently, I picked up Leon Trotsky's forgotten classic "Their Morals and Ours: Marxist vs. Liberal Views on Morality." The pamphlet offers a scathing critique of what today is known as the "horseshoe theory," wherein the far left and far right are considered morally identical from the standpoint of liberalism, because both employ radical (and sometimes) violent tactics. This viewpoint will be familiar to anyone who has watched the corporate media decry anti-fascist activists as indecipherable from the neo-Nazis they combat.

The crux of Trotsky's argument, which is astoundingly relevant today, is not only that liberals are embarrassingly inconsistent and hypocritical when it comes to passing moral judgments (the lack of outrage from moral crusaders on Yemen's genocide, Hillary Clinton's destruction of Libya, and many other instances of imperial aggression has long been deafening), but the fact that liberals derive their morality from an ahistorical universalist ideal means that liberal morality inherently serves the rich and powerful. Adherence to abstract and eternal moral laws such as "thou shalt not steal" or "always obey the laws of the land" leads to a remarkably reactionary system of ethics. For example, is it immoral for a starving man to steal a loaf of a bread from a bakery owned by a wealthy business owner? In liberal societies, in which property is the ultimate sacred cow and morality is not contingent upon material/historical context, the answer is "yes." Never mind the relevant economic and legal structures which enabled the business owner to become wealthy and led the other man to starvation.

What's more, Trotsky also grapples with the notion of "the ends justify the means" morality, a sentiment which was doubtlessly tested by Communist regimes throughout the 20th century, sometimes to indefensible ends. Yet, the cynical exploitation of sincere revolutionary upheavals by authoritarian figures does mean that there is a divine law which proves that means can never be justified by ends, as pragmatist John Dewey pointed out in his relatively agreeable response to Trotsky's piece. Again, the true determent of morality for any activist who sincerely cares for other humans being must be based upon a sober calculation of real-world facts and contexts and driven by a sincere desire to create a fair world for all people. As Che Guevara famously said, "At the risk of sounding ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love."

I do not bring up this moral debate to comment on morality as such or to arbitrate in the often absurd, abstract, and counterproductive clashes within the leftist social media sphere between what's become known as "tankies" and "ultraleftists," but because I found the deficiencies of liberal moral outrage especially cogent and consequential while on a recent educational trip to Havana in July 2018 which I took with a small organization known as La Luchita (run by a lovely and well-meaning husband and wife couple) tailored towards building networks between grassroots American and Cuban organizers and activists.

In an interesting dynamic, the American group, of which there was maybe fifteen of us, largely consisted of vaguely progressive activists, mostly in their late-twenties, who were nonetheless highly critical, or even outright dismissive, of Cuba's socialist project. For one week, we met with a cross-section of Cuban activists, from civil-society activists to students to university professors, all with legitimate critiques and praises of the Cuban revolutionary experiment. As one would expect, almost none of our hosts viewed "the Revolution" (as it is referred to on the island) in simple black-and-white terms, though some were more apologetic than others. The same cannot be said for many of the Americans, who were quick to confirm any anti-revolution bias by latching onto any critiques offered by the Cubans, but slow to acknowledge any triumphs of the revolution. The Americans were, as far as I could tell, not conscious that their knee-jerk responses to the most laudable aspects of the revolution (when finding out that wealthy persons were forced to give up any extra homes they owned in order to provide housing to the poor, some of the Americans audibly gawked) were highly reactionary, a condition indicative of so many American progressives. This blindness is symptomatic of gaining a "progressive" education sans any sort of class-analysis, a condition which defines so many well-meaning activists here. This is a symptom of hailing from an imperial heartland wherein questions of class are largely considered irrelevant, where billionaires such as Elon Musk and Oprah Winfrey are even considered radical by some. This selective blindness is the result of not of an absence of ideology, but the product of living deep beneath an invisible ideological shroud: for my colleagues, it seemed, anything good in Cuba was the result of some nebulous category vaguely defined as "Cuban culture" and anything bad in Cuba was due to socialism. For example, on nights out socializing in the city, the beauty of the fact that people from all professions (one night we went out to a jazz club with a group of Cubans comprised of a dentist, a professor, students, a cigar-factory worker, and a janitor) and races intermingled to an extent unimaginable in the U.S. seemed largely to be lost on my American counterparts. "That's just how Cuba is," I imagine they assumed, not realizing the huge strides made for the poor and Afro-Cubans since the fall of the Batista regime.

As a Chinese colleague of mine who travels to Cuba regularly once pointed out to me, Cuban society does not rest on a cult of personality, as in China, nor is it defined by social engineering and violent state control: police presence was almost non-existent within the city. At risk of romanticizing a country with many serious problems, I felt a deep authenticity and cohesiveness in Cuban society I have not experienced in any other country. The difference between Havana or Mexico City or Freetown, Sierra Leone, or any major American city could not have been starker.

I experienced the absolute strangeness of walking across a major city at 1am while seeing children and families enjoying the public parks free from fear, of knowing that every person I saw had full access to one of the world's best healthcare systems and the right to basic human necessities such as housing and employment, still makes my head spin. Where was the oppressive state presence I had heard so much about? The crime-filled streets? I felt I had caught just a small glimpse, for the first time in my life, of the potential harmony that we, as human beings, could achieve in society. What stood out to me most, perhaps, was the prevalence of dignity. Yes, Cuba has tremendous poverty. But the poverty is different than that in the U.S., where social isolation and a lack of access to even the most basic goods abounds despite our unfathomable wealth.

When I raised these insights with my fellow American travelers, the response was not surprising, nor altogether wrong: "you can't tell someone else to be grateful for what they have if you have more than them," one American told me when I expressed concern that the thawing of Cuban-American relations would hasten the-already-quickening erosion of Cuban social welfare. Many of the Cubans we met were under the impression that this would mean more, not less, prosperity for all islanders: to build upon Steinbeck's famous "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" sentiment: it seemed that many of even the poorest pro-American Cubans assumed (in large part due to American cultural influence that the government has long tried to keep out of Cuba) that they themselves would be the casino and resort owners once capitalism comes back to the island (this was often spoken of as an inevitably). Imagine the surprise of some of my Cuban friends, then, when I told them of growing up in America without health insurance, of experiencing homelessness and abject poverty. As any international traveler can attest, American cultural products, such as Hollywood films, have been remarkably successful at one thing: convincing many of the world's poor that poverty does not exist in the U.S.

Regardless, my American traveling companion was right: as an American who benefits greatly from being a citizen of the world's imperial center (take for example, the ease with which I can attain a visa for travel) with just a few relatives from Cuba and little experience on the island myself, I am in no position to tell Cubans they ought to be grateful for living under a government which has, undoubtedly, at times weaponized the threat of imperialism to silence legitimate dissent. Like many other members of my generation and as a young adult recovering from a childhood in Mormonism, there is little I dislike more than living subject to a governance structure which cannot allow for deviation. But, context and material facts do matter if we, as socialists and activists wanting to change the world, are to give any sort of fair appraisal of the Cuban Revolution. The liberal, postmodern project which reduces all legitimate political activism to thoughts and actions based solely upon one's own life experiences and identity categories is antithetical to social solidarity and all forms of class-politics and anti-imperialism. Case-in-point: after informing another American colleague that I was, in fact, a communist, she replied: "I believe subscribing to any sort of label or ideology destroys the political imagination." I don't doubt her sincerity, but neither do I doubt that her aversion to an actively radical ideology was inherently ideological. It is precisely this sort of nebulous belief in the moral superiority of the (nonexistent) apolitical which explains why so many well-meaning liberals can call a revolution which eliminated illiteracy and homelessness in a generation "monstrous," just because some wealthy people lost their second homes.

Regardless, it's important that all freedom-loving people acknowledge the right of Cubans to self-determination, whatever that means for Cubans. Yet, it's also important that anyone who puts stock on truth and morality acknowledges the great successes the revolution has entailed for inhabitants not only of the island, but for the poor all throughout the world, including especially Africa, where Cuban soldiers helped fend off apartheid and Cuban doctors continue to save countless lives. Socialists, in particular, have a political and moral obligation to denounce the U.S. embargo and calls for regime change.

As for appraising what the revolution can teach non-Cuban socialists about how to fight for a better world going forward, the crux of the matter was illustrated for me in a debate over a single word. One of the Cuban activists, an anarchist, asked me: should Cubans be "defending" or "developing" the Cuban Revolution? To defend the Revolution, he told me, assumes that the revolution was a specific historic event that occurred in 1959 and is now complete. According to him, this imagining of the Revolution entails stagnation, nostalgia, authoritarianism. Instead, he argued, Cubans must develop the revolution; this means emphasizing the need for evolution, growth, self-reflection. For him, an end to Cuba's socialist economy (in its present form) would be a step in the right direction as it would mean an easing of state control and an allowance for the sort of dissent necessary for evolution.

For a communist activist I met, however, if one is not defending the revolution, one is working with the project of American imperialism to defeat it. "The revolution has this much room to maneuver," he told me, squinting through an imperceptible slit between his thumb and index finger. This does not mean that this individual was uncritical of the Communist Party; on the contrary, he offered some of the most insightful critiques of the Cuban system. Nor does this mean that the anarchist comrade was not aware of the threat of U.S. economic imperialism. But to act like it will be good for Cuba to simply throw open its borders and government to unchecked American influence, as many American liberals attest, is not only naive but ideological par-excellence: an end of the Cuban socialist project will no doubt mean suffering for the average Cuban.

In other words, the Cuban revolution is not black-or-white. The Cuban government has long been stuck between a rock and hard place. We have an intellectual and moral responsibility to note that if the Cuban socialist government does, in fact, fall, it is more than likely that the millions of Cubans that the revolution lifted out of poverty, taught to read, offered education and healthcare, will face dire consequences in that brave new world of authoritarian neoliberalism that has always defined counterrevolutionary regimes in Latin America, from Pinochet to the newly elected president of Brazil.

Socialists in the 21st century have an obligation to acknowledge the successes of the revolution and to reject the off-hand moral denunciation that liberals are so quick to heap upon any political organization which dares to buck the conventions of the capitalist ruling system. Is Cuban Socialism perfect? No. No system made by humans will ever be and workers should always be free to critique and develop existing socialist projects. But resistance to capitalist exploitation, to poverty, to imperialism, cannot exist if we hold ourselves to an absurd, abstract, and inconsistent moral standard designed to protect the status quo. Revolution is not easy nor morally straightforward. But Cuba has lifted millions from abject poverty and offered its people and people throughout the world dignity and true sovereignty. For this, it deserves our praise, solidarity, and defense, as do all Cuban people, whether they believe in developing or defending revolution. Ultimately, what the Cubans decide to do about their revolution is up to them, but all socialists have an obligation to defend the island and its revolutionary government from outside aggression.

The Actuality of Revolution

By Jodi Dean

This essay originally appeared at Liberation School .

Revolution today names more a problem than it does a solution. We know that revolutions happen, but we have a hard time believing in revolution. We have a hard time believing in revolution because we are no longer confident that the revolutionary process leads in an emancipatory egalitarian direction. There are revolutions, but they are not for us, not the revolutions we were hoping for, not proletarian revolutions.

We no longer believe in revolution because we no longer adopt the perspective from which we see ourselves as revolutionaries, the perspective of the communist party. Absent this political perspective, only capitalism with its permanent crises, innovations and transformations appears as capable of effecting revolutionary change. Fortunately, the crowds and demonstrations of the last decade suggest that a new party perspective may be emerging. The collective practices and intensities exhibited in current struggles, as well as the limits against which these struggles falter, are renewing the salience of the party question on the Left. As people experience their collective power, the desire for something like a party is reemerging, a party as the organized site of our belief in revolution.

In this essay I focus on two, seemingly opposed, approaches to organization and revolution. I begin with Georg Lukacs's account of the Leninist innovation: the realization that the core of historical materialism is the actuality of the proletarian revolution. The force of this innovation comes from anticipation, the capacity of the future revolution to coordinate the actions that will bring it about. I then turn to the present and the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. The problem with their account is that it precludes the temporality - or conception or logic of time - that would produce revolutionary practice. Revolution is present as potential, a possibility that flows out of what we are already doing. There is no revolutionary break, no negation of some practices, trajectories, and potentials in the forwarding of emancipatory egalitarian aims. Theirs is thus a "revolution without revolution." In contrast, the future projected in Lenin's assumption of the actuality of revolution coordinates political action to bring revolution into being. The party anticipates the revolution, materializing the belief that makes revolution possible not just as an outflow or overflow of present possibilities, but as an effect of the negation of some practices, trajectories, and potentials and the forcing of others.

My argument relies on Jean-Pierre Dupuy's notion of "projected time." Dupuy introduces "projected time" as a name for "coordination by means of the future," that is, as a term for a temporal metaphysics wherein "the future counterfactually determines the past, which in turn causally determines it. The future is fixed, but its necessity exists only in retrospect"(1). From the perspective of the future, what led to it was necessary. It could not have been otherwise because everything that happened led to it. Before an event occurs, there are possibilities, options. After something happens, it appears inevitable, destined. Projected time assumes a future inevitability, establishing this inevitability as the fixed point from which to decide upon present actions.

Projected time might seem strange. Dupuy explains that it is actually "the temporality peculiar to someone who carries out a plan that he has given to himself to carry out"(2). Planning makes clear how projected time is not a prediction of what will happen, a fantasy about what one wants to happen, or a set of proposals regarding what should happen (3). Instead, a certain outcome generates the processes that lead to it. Again, in this temporal metaphysics, the future is not the inevitable effect of a chain of causes. The future is itself the cause. The future produces the past that will give rise to it.

Dupuy developed the metaphysics of projected time in the context of an investigation of catastrophe. People have a hard time believing in imminent disaster, even in the face of abundant information that the worst is about to happen. Dupuy concluded that the obstacle preventing people from acting is not one of knowledge but one of belief. They know what will happen, nevertheless they do not believe that it will happen. Projected time addresses this level of belief. Dupuy wagers that since it is "more difficult to reject a fate than to avoid a calamity, the threat of catastrophe becomes far more credible if it appears to be something that is inevitable"(4). That very inevitability can mobilize the determination and imagination necessary for avoiding the inevitable.

A view from the future

Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought is Lukacs' account of the enormity of Lenin's theoretical contribution: Lenin realized Marxist theory in practice. Because he grasps "the actuality of the revolution," Lenin can explain the events around him in its terms. He posits a certain future - the revolution - and lets this future guide action in the present. Lenin thus identifies the mechanism through which organization mediates between theory and practice. The projected future of revolution generates the practices that materialize the belief necessary for its realization.

Projected time tells us how to read Lukacs's claim that "the proletarian revolution constitutes the living core of Marxism" (5). The revolutionary future determines the actions that bring it about. Historical materialism is not primarily an account of the past. It is a relation to a specific future, one where "revolution is already on its agenda" (6). A distant future lacks coordinating capacity. Lenin, however, made the actuality of revolution into the point from which actions are considered. This certain future enables choices and decisions. It cuts through the manifold conflicts of groups and individuals within the masses, as well as the economic fatalism that contributes to capitalism's own response to crises.

The actuality of revolution is the presupposition on which Lenin's concept of the party rests. The projected future of proletarian revolution causes the Bolsheviks to select "single-minded revolutionaries, prepared to make any sacrifice, from the more or less chaotic mass of the class as a whole." The party does not make the revolution. Nor does it try to pull along inactive masses and present them with a fait accompli. Instead, it anticipates the revolution. Given that the period is revolutionary, that the proletarian revolution is on the agenda, what form of organization follows? Lenin's answer is the "strictest selection of party members on the basis of their proletarian class-consciousness, and total solidarity with and support for all the oppressed and exploited within capitalist society" (7). Why? Because of the way the proletariat develops its own class-consciousness and becomes able to put it to use in the context of revolutionary upheaval.

In the course of its revolutionary movement, the proletariat encounters differences within and without it. The internal differences involve economic differentiation within the proletariat (e.g., the infamous "labor aristocracy"). The external differences refer to the other classes that are part of the revolutionary alliance. Differences within the proletariat hinder class unity. Some workers, perhaps those with more education or experience in union leadership, tend to see their interests as allied with the bourgeoisie. Differences between the proletariat and other social strata create confusion, particularly as crises intensify and the revolutionary period gets nearer. The multiplicity of interests within the revolutionary alliance of the oppressed pulls them in different directions. Not every potential present in the masses forwards the revolution. Figuring out the correct path, and keeping together the alliance through which all can win, becomes increasingly difficult.

Lenin's model of the party responds to the pull of these differences by providing an independent organizational space for the "fully conscious elements of the proletariat." Lukacs writes, "It is this that demonstrates that the Leninist form of organization is inseparably connected with the ability to foresee the approaching revolution " (8). In the party, even the most seemingly trivial decision becomes significant, that is, made in light of the projected future of proletarian revolution. A party decision cuts through myriad possibilities, directing action in one way rather than another.

Lukacs's account makes clear that even as this view of the future provides the party with its organizational form, it is the party that sustains the view. He addresses the debate between Kautsky and Luxemburg. Kautsky argues that the party is the precondition of revolutionary action. Luxemburg argues that it is the product of revolutionary mass movement. Lukacs finds each view one-sided: "Because it is the party's function to prepare the revolution, it is - simultaneously and equally - both producer and product, both precondition and result of the revolutionary mass movement" (9). The party's role as producer is itself a product of the projected future of proletarian revolution. The party is a product not only of events as they unfold and to which it responds but also of the future that calls it into being, the future that enables it to guides its responses toward it.

Crucial to Lukacs's argument is the party's combination of flexibility and consistency. The party has to learn from the struggles of the masses, adjusting its interpretations and practices as necessary. Responses to the present in light of the projected future are inscribed into party structure and theory. Learning from the struggles of the people is possible because of the party's anticipation of the revolution. The party thereby unites the discoveries that arise from the mass struggle with the actuality of the revolution. Belief in revolution arises out of the combination of theory and action: actions appear as revolutionary because the future revolution is calling them into being.

In sum, Lukacs presents the actuality of revolution as a projected future. Every decision, every tactic, every compromise anticipates the revolution. To the extent that party practices are coordinated by the future, they both manifest belief in it - as opposed to the more abstract knowledge of revolution posited by social democrats - and help bring it about. Lukacs insists that the actuality of revolution distinguishes Lenin's position from both social democrats and left-wing purists. From the perspective of the former, the revolution is always too far off, the proletariat never mature enough, the unions still too weak. From the perspective of the latter, the ripeness of the moment dictates a pure politics, a radical insistence on principles without compromise. Unlike either, the actuality of revolution involves the political time of anticipation and struggle, a time when the future guides the party prepared to usher it in.

Revolution today

In the final volume of their influential trilogy, Hardt and Negri announce: "Revolution is now, finally, becoming the order of the day" (10). Their theory of revolution arises out of an account of the biopolitical character of capitalism in the late twentieth century. Networked communications have transformed the process of production, contributing to its homogenization, decentralization/deterritorialization, and informatization. Knowledge, affect, and communication play a greater role; labor has become "increasingly immaterial" (11). The result is a fundamental change in the relation between production and the reproduction of life: rather than separate from and subordinated to the demands of productive work, "life infuses and dominates all production" (12). With its biopolitical turn, capitalism subsumes the entirety of the social.

On the basis of their analysis of changes in production, Hardt and Negri claim that today "the perspective of revolutionary action has to be conceived on the biopolitical horizon" (13). Such a revolution is a "revolution in life," that is, a revolution that exceeds the range of demands and expectations associated with the labor movement.

Biopolitical revolution has a distinct temporality. In contrast to the projected future provided by the actuality of revolution, revolution today "is no longer imaginable as an event separated from us in the future but has to live in the present, an "exceeding" present that in some sense already contains the future within it" (14). Instead of a future with the capacity to coordinate action in the present, revolution coexists with and within non-revolution. Unable to imagine a future revolution, we cannot use its actuality to decide our tactics. As a distinct component of political action, tactics falls by the wayside, displaced by potentials within biopolitical production.

Hardt and Negri imagine revolution as an analogous "kind of simultaneity," the excess and limit to capitalist command over the biopolitical production it can never fully capture or control. Biopolitical labor is generally autonomous from capitalist command, emerging out of networked cooperative practices. Capital seeks to capture, expropriate, and discipline these practices, even as it itself depends on the creativity that their autonomy unleashes. Bypassing commodification, capital extracts value directly from social relations themselves.

Hardt and Negri highlight the democratic dimension of biopolitical labor: the same networked, cooperative structures that produce the common generate new democratic capacities, and even "make possible in the political sphere the development of democratic organizations" (15). For this reason, Hardt and Negri reject "vanguard organizations." The vanguard party corresponds to a different, earlier, structure of labor (a different technical composition of the proletariat). According to their periodization, the vanguard party fits with the early twentieth century's professional factory workers. The deskilled workers of the mid-twentieth century fit with that period's mass party. The political form appropriate to biopolitical labor, the one appropriate to us now, they argue, must be democratic, cooperative, autonomous and horizontally networked. The vanguard party is inadequate, "anachronistic," because it doesn't look like the networks of contemporary biopolitical production.

This argument is not convincing. Complex networks are not the horizontal, cooperative and autonomous forms that Hardt and Negri imagine. As Albert-Laszlo Barabasi's work on complex networks demonstrates, free choice, growth and preferential attachment produce hierarchies, dramatic differences between the one that is most chosen and preferred and the many that are not (16). The most popular node or item in a complex network generally has twice as many links as the second most popular, which has more than the third most popular and so, such that there is very little difference among the crowd of those at the bottom but massive differences between top and bottom. This hierarchical structure is pervasive in communicative capitalism. Blockbuster movies, best-selling books, and giant internet hubs like Google, Facebook, YouTube and Baidu all reflect the power law distribution of links in complex networks. The few get a lot; the rest get very little, almost nothing. The idea appears in popular media as the "80/20 rule," the "winner-take-all or winner-take-most character of the economy," and the "long tail" of the many. The ostensibly creative, cooperative and democratic character of networked communication does not eliminate hierarchy. It entrenches hierarchy by using our own choices against us. And, as Barabasi's work on complex networks makes clear, this hierarchy is not imposed from above. It is an immanent effect of free choice, growth and preferential attachment.

A political form mirroring biopolitical production would not be horizontal and democratic. Its democracy would produce power-law distributions, unequal nodes or outcomes, winners and losers, few and many. We see this phenomenon on Twitter as people fight through trending hashtags: hashtags provide common names that serve as loci of struggle. When they trend, they rise above the long tail of the millions of unread, unloved Tweets coursing through the nets. The democratic element - people's choice to use and forward - produces the inequality that lets some hashtags appear as and even be, for a moment, significant. The fact of emergent hierarchies suggests that an emergent vanguard may well be the political form necessary for struggles under biopolitical conditions.

The structure of the complex networks of biopolitical production indicates that, contra Hardt and Negri, a vanguard party is not anachronistic at all. It is instead a form that corresponds to the dynamics of networked communication. This structure indicates an additional problem with Hardt and Negri's rejection of the vanguard party. They characterize Lenin's party as involving an organizational process that comes from "above" the movements of the multitude. Historically, this insinuation is clearly false. The Bolsheviks were but one group among multiple parties, tendencies and factions acting in the tumultuous context of the Russian Revolution. They were active within the movements of the oppressed workers and peasants. The movements themselves, through victories and defeats, short- and long-term alliances, new forms of cooperation, and advances in political organization gave rise to the party even as the party furthered the movements.

Finally, Hardt and Negri criticize Lenin's party on the grounds of identity. For them, the party is a "new identity," and they think that revolution today must aim at the abolition of identity (17). Lenin's party is not an identity; it is a process whereby the distinctions of what Hardt and Negri associate with identity are smoothed out and a collective revolutionary will is generated (18). The party functions through the installation and maintenance of a gap within the field in which identity is given, not as a new identity.

For Hardt and Negri, the goal of revolution is "the generation of new forms of social life" (19). They describe revolutionary struggles as a process of liberation that establishes a common. Such a process, they argue, consolidates insurrection as it institutionalizes new collective habits and practices. Institutions, then, are sites for the management of encounters, extension of social rupture, and transformation of those who compose them.

The resemblance between these institutions and the vanguard party is striking. The party involves a common name, language, and set of tactics. It has practices that establish ways of being together. Its purpose is occupying and extending the gap within society that class struggle denotes. As Lukacs insists, Lenin's concept of party organization prioritizes flexibility and consistency; the party has and must have a capacity for self-transformation. What Hardt and Negri describe as the extension of insurrection in an institutional process is another way of theorizing the party.

Because they disavow the party, their version of democratic organization lacks a position that can anticipate the revolution and thereby materialize belief in its actuality. The future does not exercise coordinating capacity. Hardt and Negri emphasize that revolution is "squeezed in the vise between past and future, leaving it very little room for maneuver." They write, "even when revolutionaries think their actions are sufficient to launch us into the future, the past bursts through to reimpose itself." And they conclude, "Revolution's creation of a new form of government holds off the past and opens toward the future" (20). Rather than products of the revolution they produce, revolutionaries in Hardt and Negri's version remain at a distance from the future. Their actions seem disconnected from it, uninformed by it, and hence all the more under the sway of the past. Revolution opens to the future, but a projected future does not call into being the forces that will have produced it.

Lacking a vision of the future capable of orienting action, Hardt and Negri outline instead a platform of demands without a carrier, without a body to fight for them. Their model of institutions suggests that a party or parties could be such a carrier, but rather than presenting their platform as a party platform, Hardt and Negri present them as demands to be made to existing governments and institutions of global governance. The demands are for the provision of basic means of life, global citizenship and access to the commons. They acknowledge that "today's ruling powers unfortunately have no intention of granting even these basic demands" (21). Their response is laughter, "a laugh of creation and joy, anchored solidly in the present" (22). No wonder they do not present their demands as the platform of a party. The demands are not to be fought for. They mark potentials present already in the biopolitical production of the common, limits to capitalist control.

The identification of egalitarian potential in what generally seems a bleak and miserable present is laudable. Absent a party oriented toward its realization, though, it is hard to believe that this potential is stronger than, say, a neo-feudalism of globally connected fortress-cities surrounded by impoverished scavengers competing for access to a better life via networked gaming platforms and desperately defending their last bits of fresh water and arable land from refugees fleeing ever intensifying resource wars while the tiny class of global billionaires eat caviar in gold-plated jets. No practices coordinated by means of the future materialize this belief. Precisely because our setting is one of exploitation, ownership, competition and struggle, our sense of the present has to be tied to the future that results from the realization of some potentials rather than others. The party is the form for this realization insofar as through it the future can produce the actions that will have brought it about.

Conclusion

Across the globe, crowds are rupturing the status quo, the actuality of their movement displacing the politics of identity. These mobilized crowds are forcing the Left to return again to questions of organization, endurance, and scale. Having come up against the limits of immediacy and horizontality, activists and organizers alike are thinking again about institutional forms like the party.

Hardt and Negri imply that the party form is outmoded. I have argued that not only do contemporary networks produce pow- er-law distributions of few and many but that emergent hierarchies - particularly when understood in terms of the vanguards and practices that already emerge out of political movement - point to the ways that party organizations emerge. Current examples of this tendency include the adoption of common tactics, names and symbols that bring together previously separate, disparate and even competing struggles. When local and issue politics are connected via a common name, successes in one area advance the struggle as a whole. Separate actions become themselves plus all the others. They instill enthusiasm and inspire imitation.

A global alliance of the radical Left, or, better, a new party of communists, can be knit together from the concentrated forces of already existing groups: militants skilled at direct action, artists adept with symbols and slogans, parties experienced at organizing, issue groups knowledgeable about specific areas of concern, mutual aid networks addressing basic needs. If this new party is to be an agent of revolutionary time, it will have to continue to foster and even amplify the common practices and tactics capable of materializing revolutionary belief. This fostering and amplification requires discipline, choices, conscious planning, and decisions regarding what to prioritize and how to allocate resources and energies. Precisely because of the multiplicity of the experiences of the oppressed, we need the party as the form through which we discipline ourselves, through which we produce the collective political will that will push revolutionary tendencies in an emancipatory egalitarian direction.

Many of us are convinced that capitalist crises have reached a decisive point. We know that the system is fragile, that it produces its own grave-diggers, and that it is held in place by a repressive international state structure. Yet we act as if we did not know this. The party provides a form that can let us believe what we know.

References

1 Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Economy and the Future, trans. M.B. DeBevoise, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2014, 110.
2 Dupuy, 116.
3 Projected future thus functions differently from the program put forth by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in Inventing the Future,
London, Verso, 2015.
4 Dupuy, 129.
5 Luka�cs, 12.
6 Ibid. (italics in original)
7 Luka�cs, 30.
8 Luka�cs, 29.
9 Luka�cs, 32.
10 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009, 344.
11 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2000, Empire 365.
12 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 365.
13 Commonwealth, 239.
14 Commonwealth, 242-243.
15 Commonwealth, 354.
16 See my discussion in Crowds and Party, London, Verso, 2016, 12-13.
17 Commonwealth, 334.
18 As Luka�cs writes in �Towards a Methodology of the Problem of Organization,� �the Communist Party as the revolutionary form of consciousness of the proletariat is a process by nature,� 316, italics in original; and, �the party exists in order to hasten the process by which these distinctions are smoothed out,� 326�the distinctions Luka�cs is referring to are stratifications within the class.
19 Commonwealth, 354.
20 Commonwealth, 360.
21 Commonwealth, 382.
22 Commonwealth, 383.

This essay was originally published in our book, Storming the Gates: How the Russian Revolution Changed the World , published on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The New European Left: Reasons for Resurgence and Rejection

By Kacper Grass

The events of 1989 which culminated in the success of the Polish Solidarity Movement, the fall of the Berlin Wall in East Germany, and the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union effectively sterilized the revolutionary left in Western Europe. Insurgent militant organizations such the Greek Revolutionary Organization 17 November, the First of October Anti-Fascist Resistance Groups in Spain, Action Directe in France as well as the Italian Red Brigades and West Germany's Red Army Faction, lost their patron in Moscow. Moreover, Marxism's failure to contend with global capitalism/imperialism widely discredited the remaining communist parties which sought to seize power through electoral means. Thus, it seemed as though Francis Fukuyama's end of history prophecy was becoming a reality, and neoliberalism was indeed to be the final form of humanity's sociopolitical evolution. In a desperate struggle for survival and relevance, that which remained of the European left was forced to accept the status quo and abandon revolution for reform.

This status quo went largely unquestioned for two decades, and as a result the left had no choice but to move its ideological orientations towards the center, campaigning on social-democratic platforms and often compromising its positions in order to form governments with parties from the opposite side of the political spectrum. Faith in this status quo, however, was immensely shaken by the shock of the European debt crisis in 2009, which was most strongly felt by the Eurozone's southern member states like Greece and Spain. The gravity of the recession made many people, especially those most affected by the crisis, look more critically at fundamental EU institutions such as the European Central Bank, which they saw as the root of the crisis. The right's reaction to the issue was a long line of austerity policies in many countries, which sought to resolve the national crises at the cost of the working-class citizens most dependent on the welfare state. The center-left parties' inability to find an alternative solution to the recession made them practically indistinguishable from their right-wing counterparts in the eyes of many, thus creating a political establishment whose member factions differed merely in name alone. As a result, a large class of unemployed students, workers, and struggling small business owners felt marginalized by the existing system and betrayed by a nominal left which no longer represented their interests. The time had come for an international movement that would change the political landscape of the European Union and put new life into the largely defeated or disappearing European left. This movement, however, would have its limits.

The wave of rebirth for the left did not reach the eastern reaches of the Union, where the 2009 recession was not experienced with the same intensity as it was in Southern Europe. There, the liberal center's rule went largely unchallenged since the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, as the newly added members of the 2004 EU expansion slowly made progress down the path of social and economic integration into the European Union. Although rarely questioned and generally applauded, this decade of progress was first threatened by the Union's second major emergency in the 21st century, that of the 2015 migrant crisis. As Germany and the European Commission mandated quotas of Middle Eastern and African asylum seekers to be accepted by each of the Union's member states, many Eastern Europeans felt threatened by what they saw as an attack on their sense of national identity and state sovereignty. What resulted was a firm rejection of the "refugees welcome" slogan, which was largely viewed not only as the product of Angela Merkel's Christian democracy, but also of Western Europe's rising new left. Thus, the fears of many citizens in nations like Hungary and Poland, still mindful of the memories of four decades of communist repression, needed a voice on the European stage. That voice came in the form of a reactionary wave of right-wing nationalist movements unseen since the fall of Western European fascism in the 1970s.

Resurgence of the Left in Greece and Spain

In the words of Watkins (2016), "the common context for all the new lefts is anger at the political management of the Great Recession. The outcomes vary: after several years of zero interest rates, and trillions of dollars in bailouts and quantitative easing, the US and UK are officially in recovery, while Greece and Spain are still far below pre-crisis levels; less severely affected by the crash, France and Italy were suffering from stagnant growth and high structural unemployment well before 2008" (Watkins 2016, 6). She adds that "a second shared feature is the collapse of the centre-left parties, whose win-win 'Formula Two' of Third Way neoliberalism was the governing ideology of the boom-and-bubble years on both sides of the Atlantic. Having abandoned their former social-democratic moorings and working-class constituencies, Europe's Third Way parties were now punished in turn, whether for deregulating finance and pumping credit bubbles, or for implementing the subsequent bailouts and cuts… This rightward shift by the ex-social democrats-often into 'grand coalitions' with the conservatives-opened up a representational vacuum on the left of the political spectrum" (Watkins 2016, 7).

At the forefront of this movement was Greece, where a strong left-oriented political culture dominated the Third Hellenic Republic in reaction to seven years of dictatorship by far-right military juntas that ended in 1974. The first free elections saw the reemergence of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) as well as the formation of the significantly less radical Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), which maintained a strong presence in parliament for nearly 40 years, usually competing for electoral majority with the New Democracy (ND) party on the center-right. Nonetheless, a poll conducted in 2011 by the Athenian newspaper Kathimerini and the television network Skai TV revealed that 92% of people surveyed felt disappointed by the current PASOK government, while only 5% believed that a PASOK government would be best for the nation in the upcoming general elections (Kathimerini and Skai TV 2011). That same year, massive anti-austerity protests in the country's capital revealed the root of people's disenchantment with the ruling establishment, and a political vacuum was created by the absence of an electoral force capable of adequately representing the frustrations of a bankrupt nation in Brussels. That vacuum was filled, however, when "Syriza was founded as a unified party in [2012], through the fusion of the half-dozen groups that had formed an electoral 'coalition of the radical left' in 2004; at that stage its dominant component was Synaspismos, itself a coalition around one of the Greek communist parties, then with some 12,000 members. The new Syriza established a traditional structure: an elected central committee, on which the different factions were represented, a secretariat and a parliamentary group, centred round [Alexander] Tsipras's office and only nominally accountable to its base" (Watkins 2016, 13). Under Tsipras's charismatic leadership, the unified Syriza won a majority of 35% in the 2015 general elections and managed to form a government, putting Tsipras in the position of prime minister of Greece as well as making him the standard bearer of Europe's new left (Ministry of Interior of Greece 2015). Neither job, however, would prove to be an easy task.

Watkins (2016) explains that "by the time it entered office, the Syriza leadership was pledged to keep the euro and negotiate with the Eurogroup. Tsipras refused point-blank to explore Schäuble's offer of support for a structured exit in May 2015, as some of his Cabinet were urging. Syriza was reduced to begging for a debt write-down, abandoning one 'red line' after another, scrabbling for funds from hospitals and town halls to pay the ECB and IMF, until Tsipras was finally confronted with the choice of radicalizing his position, with the overwhelming mandate of the July 5 referendum, or submitting to the will of 'the institutions' and signing the harshest Memorandum yet" (Watkins 2016, 19-20). The party has also struggled in forming a coherent stance on immigration, as "Syriza switched from an avowed policy of anti-racism-closing down the previous government's notorious detention centres-to rounding up refugees for forcible deportation, in line with the EU's new policy" (Watkins 2016, 23).

In many respects, Spain's modern political history runs parallel to that of Greece's. The death of Francisco Franco in 1975 marked the end of his fascist regime, and free elections saw the restoration of the center-left Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) and the formation of the right-wing People's Party (PP) by former Francoist minister Manuel Fraga. Both parties took turns ruling in what became a de facto two-party system, as the 1986 foundation of the radical coalition United Left (IU) failed to ever become an electoral threat to the PSOE. By the peak of the debt crisis, however, it was becoming quite clear that the PSOE was out of touch with much of its left-leaning voter base. This sentiment of growing popular indignation against the political establishment was ultimately manifested in a nation-wide anti-austerity movement that began with protests in Madrid on May 15th, 2011. Like in Greece the same year, a political vacuum had been created. As Watkins (2016) explains, "Podemos sprang into existence in January 2014, the initiative of the nucleus around [Pablo] Iglesias, who put out a call for a new, anti-austerity platform for the Europarliament elections. Nearly a thousand local 'circles' began forming almost spontaneously, built by 15-M and far-left activists. Podemos was formally constituted as a Citizens' Assembly in October 2014, with over 112,000 members signing up online to vote on its founding documents… Coalitions with regional left forces, sealed by support for a Catalan independence referendum, helped lift Podemos to 21 per cent of the vote in the December 2015 elections, with 69 deputies in the Cortes, nearly a quarter from Catalonia." (Watkins 2016, 14).

Unlike Tsipras, though, Iglesias remained in the opposition following prolonged government formation negotiations that resulted in a second election the following year. This time Podemos ran on the same ticket as the IU under the label Unidos Podemos and finally secured third place in parliamentary seats, behind the PP and the PSOE respectively. In terms of platforms and ideologies Podemos and Syriza share much in common, Iglesias even having referred to Tsipras as "'a lion who has defended his people' in September 2015" (Watkins 2016, 20). Regarding immigration, however, Podemos takes an even more radical stance than Syriza, as the party's "2014 programme called for full citizens' rights for all immigrants" (Watkins 2016, 23).

As Watkins (2016) summarizes, "the founding purpose of the new left oppositions is to defend the interests of those hit by the reigning response to the crisis-bailouts for private finance matched by public-sector austerity and promotion of private-sector profit-gouging, at the expense of wage-workers. In the broadest sense, this is, again, a defence of labour against capital, within the existing system" (Watkins 2016, 28). She adds that "Podemos has… established itself as a fighter for those afflicted by foreclosures in the housing-bubble meltdown, a demand that exceeds-or post-dates-classical liberal democracy. The fruite en avant of Syriza Mark Two towards the social liberalism, or neoliberal austerity, of the other, formerly social-democratic, now tawdry centre-left parties, serves to confirm rather than contradict the general rule" (Watkins 2016, 29).

Rejection of the Left in Hungary and Poland

As Euroscepticism in the south was being fueled by a still unresolved debt crisis, the anti-Brussels sentiment spread eastward following the unprecedented influx of Middle Eastern and African migrants that began in 2014. The following year, the European Commission with Germany's backing set quotas on the number of asylum seekers to be accepted by each member state in an attempt to lessen the burden on Greece, Italy, and the other Mediterranean countries that served as the initial points of arrival for many migrants. The mandate, which was viewed as a violation of state sovereignty by many Eastern Europeans, sparked a wave of nationalism in the largely ethnically and religiously homogenous countries of the Visegrád Group. The political landscape of the group, which serves as an alliance between Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic within the European Union, has experienced a significant shift towards the right, with all members effectively rejecting the European Commission's quotas following the wave of illiberalism that began in Hungary and later spread to Poland, the group's largest member state, before also finding fertile ground in Slovakia and the Czech Republic.

Following the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989, Hungary held its first free elections the following year. After the transition to democracy, the ruling Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (MSzMP) was renamed the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) and adopted a considerably more moderate social-democratic stance, competing for dominance in parliament with the originally libertarian Fidesz party since the 1998 elections. Nonetheless, in 2010 the MSZP was defeated by an increasingly nationalist Fidesz, and the 2014 elections marked the start of another term in office for prime minister Victor Orbán following the landslide victory of a coalition between his Fidesz party and the socially conservative Christian Democratic People's Party (KDNP), which together won 133 out of 199 parliamentary seats. In order to compete for second place with the far-right Jobbik party, the Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) had to enter into a coalition with four other center-left parties, finally winning 38 seats compared to Jobbik's 23. The remaining five seats were won by the centrist green party Politics Can Be Different (LMP) (National Election Office of Hungary 2014). With an absolute majority in government and the additional support of Jobbik, Orbán had a free hand in determining Hungary's stance on the migrant crisis. The result was two years of nationalist rhetoric leading up to a referendum on the issue set for October 2nd, 2016. The referendum posed the question: "Do you want the European Union to be able to mandate the obligatory resettlement of non-Hungarian citizens into Hungary even without the approval of the National Assembly?" While the poll was finally considered invalid for its low voter turnout of 44.04%, an overwhelming majority of 98.36% voted 'no' while only 1.64% voted 'yes' in response to the question (National Election Office of Hungary 2016).

Much like Hungary, Poland held its first free parliamentary elections in 1991 following the end of communist rule two years before. More than 100 registered parties participated in the first elections, with the political landscape changing frequently until the elections of 2005, in which the liberal Civic Platform (PO) and the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party emerged as the main contestants. The moderate Democratic Left Alliance (SLD), founded largely by ex-members of the dissolved communist Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR), was pushed into opposition after holding president Aleksander Kwaśniewski in office since 1995. By the elections of 2015, the composition of the Polish Sejm was very reminiscent to that of Hungary's parliament. In reaction to the migrant crisis, PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński adopted a significantly more nationalist and conservative rhetoric, which proved effective in winning his party an absolute majority of 235 of 460 seats, effectively forming a government while also enjoying support from the smaller right-wing Kukiz '15 (K'15) party, which won 42. The opposition was dominated by the PO, as it earned 138 seats, and was supported by the smaller liberal Modern (N) party, which won only 28. The agrarian Polish People's Party (PSL) won 16 seats while the regional German Minority (MN) won a single seat (National Electoral Commission of Poland 2015). The election was notable for two principal reasons. Primarily, it was the first time in Poland's democratic history that a party managed to win an absolute majority in the Sejm. Secondly, it was the first time that a left-wing party did not manage to secure any representation. Following the election, the newly inaugurated president Andrzej Duda reversed the previous government's promise to accept 2,000 refugees, adding that he "won't agree to a dictate of the strong. [He] won't back a Europe where the economic advantage of the size of a population will be a reason to force solutions on other countries regardless of their national interests" (Moskwa & Skolimowski 2015). Following Orbán, Duda has since raised the prospect of holding a referendum on the issue.

Germany Caught in the Crossfire

The reunification of East and West Germany in 1990 resulted in the merger of two extremely different political cultures into a single democratic state. Despite this initial obstacle, the country soon recuperated and advanced to become the economic and political hegemony of the European Union in the 21st century. Assuming office in 2005, Angela Merkel of the liberal Christian Democratic Union has been a central figure in European politics from the start of the recession throughout the ongoing migrant crisis. Much as in the cases of Greece and Spain, the onset of the recession proved that the existing left-wing establishment, represented in Germany by the Social Democratic Party (SPD), had compromised too much of its leftist ideology to remain competitive with its opponents in the Bundestag.

As Bergfeld (2016) explains, "the mass movement that emerged in the mid-2000s to oppose Schröder's Hartz welfare- and labor-market reforms led to a significant breakaway from the SPD. Labor and Social Justice - The Electoral Alternative (WASG) was founded in 2005 by activists frustrated with the ruling Red-Green Coalition. The WASG would go on to form one main component, alongside the East German-based Party of Democratic Socialism, of the new Die Linke. After nearly ten years of collaboration, differences between the East and West wings of the party remain stark. Sections of the party based in the former East Germany are eyeing state governments or already hold office in federal states (like Thuringia), while the West German section is not represented in any federal state parliaments, with the exception of Hessia" (Bergfeld 2016, 3). He continues by noting that "Die Linke's founding represented a historical opportunity for the German parliamentary left to move beyond the SPD. Today, it is the main opposition party in German parliament. For all the problems it entails, the party's institutionalization has facilitated the construction of a sturdy platform for antiwar and anti-neoliberal voices in mainstream politics. It was Die Linke that first popularized the demand for a national minimum wage, which was taken up by the trade unions, the SPD, and later on Merkel herself before becoming law in early 2015" (Bergfeld 2016, 3). Despite this, "The party has never acted as a catalyst for social, economic, or political struggles and is unlikely to ever do so. It has been able to involve itself, to varying degrees, in labor mobilizations and social movements initiated by others, most notably the demonstrations against Europe's largest fascist rallies in Dresden in 2011 and 2012. Even Bodo Ramelow - now prime minister of Thuringia - participated in mass civil disobedience to block the fascists from marching" (Bergfeld 2016, 4).

Since the beginning of the migrant crisis, the fascist rallies against which Die Linke demonstrated in 2011 and 2012 have since become an organized political force, opposing Merkel's neoliberalism from the right of the political spectrum. "To Merkel's dismay, her modernization of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has enabled a nationalist-conservative party to develop to her right. The Islamophobic and Eurosceptic Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has emerged on the main stage of German politics as Merkel's positions have become indistinguishable from mainstream social-democratic ones" (Bergfeld 2016, 3). Indeed, the chancellor's inability to secure an absolute majority in the 2017 Bundestag elections illustrates the challenge that the neoliberal status quo faces from both the new left as well as the reactionary right in the very heart of the Union.

Conclusion

Thus far, the events of the 21st century in Europe-from the beginning of the debt crisis in 2009 to the continuing migrant crisis-have done little to reflect the positivity felt by many at the close of the previous century. The neoliberal status quo is not only being openly put to question, but it is under attack by the rise of a new left movement, whose resurgence can be traced back to its Greek and Spanish instigators. There are two principal reasons why Syriza and Podemos were able to win the massive support that put them at the forefront of Europe's new left movement. First of all, they emerged in countries whose left-leaning political cultures were shaped by the lingering trauma of fascist dictatorship. Secondly, by framing the recession as the fault of neoliberal institutions such as the European Central Bank and blaming the political establishment for implementing austerity policies at the cost of the working class, their proposed leftist platforms had a particular appeal to citizenries desperate for economic relief.

Nonetheless, this is not to say that the development of the new left has gone unchallenged. The Eastern European countries of the Visegrád Group, starting with Hungary and Poland, managed to avoid the worst of the debt crisis but under cultural and historical pretexts reacted in stark opposition to the European Commission's assignment of migrant quotas on the grounds that the policy jeopardizes their respective national identities and effectively makes an assault on their rights as sovereign states. Moreover, the still-healing wounds of four decades of repressive "communist" regimes have made it easy for right-wing nationalist movements to blame the migrant crisis on the new left parties that take much more radical pro-immigration stances than do the neoliberal establishments in Brussels and Berlin.

Finally, as the new left continues its trend of resurgence and reactionary right-wing movements continue to form in order to reject it, Germany will be only one case of many where oppositions from both sides of the political spectrum arise to challenge the existing neoliberal status quo. In fact, as is the case in Germany of Die Linke and the AfD, in France Jean-Luc Mélenchon's La France Insoumise is fighting a similar battle against Marine Le Pen's National Rally with Emmanuel Macron caught in the middle. The same can be said of the opposition to Italy's ex-prime minister Paolo Gentiloni, which ultimately resulted in the victorious coalition of Luigi Di Laio's Five Star Movement and Matteo Salvini's Lega Nord in the general elections of March 2018. Even in Great Britain, as Jeremy Corbyn fights to return the Labour Party to its leftist roots, Gerard Batten has taken up the work of Henry Bolton in leading the UK Independence Party towards an exit from the European Union. If this trend continues, the parliaments of Europe will continue to be turned into political battlegrounds where the Union's ideology, policies, and future are at stake. If this polarizing trend continues, the Europe of the 21st century may not resemble the perpetual liberal democratic union envisioned by Fukuyama. It could instead devolve into something more reminiscent of the previous century, the age of extremes.

Bibliography

Bergfeld, M. (2016). Germany: In the Eye of the Storm. In Príncipe, C. and Sunkara, B. (Eds.), Europe in Revolt (pp. 115-128). Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Kathimerini, Skai TV (2011). Political Barometer '95 - October 2011. Kathimerini Daily.

Ministry of the Interior of Greece (2015). Parliamentary Elections September 2015. Ministry of the Interior and Administrative Reconstruction.

Moskwa, W., Skolimowski, P. (2015). Poland's Duda Blasts EU 'Dictate of the Strong' on Migrants. Bloomberg News.

National Election Office of Hungary (2014). Parliamentary Election 6th April 2014 - The Composition of the Parliament. National Election Office.

National Election Office of Hungary (2016). Referendum 2016 - October 2 nd. National Election Office.

National Electoral Commission of Poland (2015). Statement by the National Electoral Committee 26th October 2015. National Electoral Commission.

Watkins, S. (2016). Oppositions. The New Left Review, 98, 5-30.

The Social Economy of Rojava: A Primer on the Co-op Model

By Thomas Sullivan

Since the 2011 liberation of the northern Syrian region commonly known as Rojava, the de facto leadership of the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria has begun a program of ground-up direct democracy, women's liberation, and socially-owned means of production (Knapp 2016, 52). This article will examine the economic conditions of Rojava, by way co-operative ownership, so that an evaluation with historical context may be available.

Background on Rojava

After the liberation, the people of Rojava were faced with a post-colonial, monoculture economy with little industry available for refined goods. The Ba'athist regime had limited agriculture in the three cantons to only a single crop and allowed for no means of processing these crops. Around 80% of farm land was held by the government, the rest held by private businesses (Knapp 2016, 192).

With the intent of establishing a social economy, the land was handed over to local, municipal units called communes for distribution for co-operative ownership by workers. 2,500 hectares have been distributed to the co-ops as of 2015, with 1-4 being reserved for individual use. No large land-owners have been allowed access to the seized land (Knapp 2016, 199).

Beyond land and agriculture, co-operatives focused on simple industries have been organized in cities to increase the self-sufficiency of Rojava. These include bread-baking, textiles, clothes production, dairy production, and selling cleaning supplies (Knapp 2016, 200).

Historical Context

To best examine how the co-operatives of Rojava may thrive, we would need to look at past examples as a basis for future predictions. One of the most cited examples of a successful cooperative is the Spanish Mondragon Co-operative Corporation. The organization, which dates to 1956, was founded from several co-operative organizations that joined together in 1991 to form the international corporation it is today. The co-ops showed remarkable staying power, with most of the 100 original co-ops surviving to form the united corporation. Employing upwards of 3% of the Basque region's workforce over multiple industries, the co-operatives showed that alternative corporate models could be successful when they were previously untested on a large scale (Harding 1998, 61).

However, the Mondragon example also points to a critical failing of co-ops. Mondragon has shed many of its original ideals to remain competitive with other international businesses as the globalized, capitalist economy has developed. This includes creating non-co-op subsidiaries abroad and decreasing the number of co-operative employees to 29.5% as of 2007 (Bretos 2017, 155). This example of the most well-known and well-studied co-operative falling back into a more capitalistic model would suggest that the co-op model is not sustainable in the long term.

Mondragon's change did not occur in a vacuum of some static economy. The co-operative began to require modification after the fall of the fascist Franco government, the liberalization of Spain's economy, and the opening of European free trade by way of the European Common Market and later the European Union (Harding 1998, 62). We can see from this mix of pro-capitalist institutional changes that external stress on co-operatives would result in failures or the need for structural changes.

The Rojava Difference

The situation in Rojava currently precludes such stressors. Only 20% of arable land is held by private owners, with a moratorium on any new private landowners (Knapp 2016, 199). There was little to no pre-existing industry, with most small business owners having fled when the revolution began. As such, most of all business is co-operative and directly supported by the local governments. The pressure is on private businesses to offer co-operative grade work or lose the ability to function to co-ops. Moreover, the embargo in place on Rojava by neighboring Turkey and South Kurdistan limits the possibility of inclusion with free-trade economics (Knapp 2016, 196).

Co-operatives within the Rojava system are inextricably tied to the commune system of self-governance. They are specifically forbidden by law from becoming independent private businesses. As such, local communes elect the co-ops' leadership; the economic commissions throughout the administration supports the co-ops' production. In exchange, the needs of the greater society and local commune are served by the co-ops (Knapp 2016, 205).

Local co-ops alone are obviously insufficient to meet every commune's need. They therefore pass their needs on to economic committees at the federal level. Surplus production from other regions is allocated to communes lacking in some areas, while surplus production is likewise given for distribution outside of the native commune (Knapp 2016, 206).

The Movement for a Democratic Society is one of the overlapping organizations that guides the development of co-operatives and other aspects of the emerging social economy. Their Economic Committee issues a pamphlet concerning how these co-ops are to be run (The Movement for a Democratic Society 2016). Of interest is the division of profits. Twenty percent is given over to the commune to handle any needs of the commune, 30% reserved by the co-op to purchase more goods, machines, and other capital, and 50% to shareholders. Workers received a monthly salary as well as their share of the profits yearly or when a major goal is completed.

Those who work in the co-op are considered shareholders and receive the highest allocations from net profits. Members can also contribute capital of some sort to the co-op to receive a payout, but to a lesser extent than workers.

People over Profits

Understanding the difference between this social economy and the ubiquitous capitalist economy will require a recap of labor theory and surplus-value. Karl Marx explains that the value of commodities sold on the market can be separated between the use-value of the item and the surplus-value of it. The surplus is the source of worker exploitation, where the worker is not receiving the whole possible value of their work. Allowing workers to keep the full value of their work eliminates this exploitation. Methods by which the workers can retain surplus value are varied, with no single answer for the best possible way.

For Rojava's co-operative economy, an initial glance would suggest that worker exploitation remains. The co-op pays the workers a wage and sells their production for a value higher than their combined salaries and the cost of production. As Thomas Sekine enumerates in his work, value theory can be formulated in with a simple c + v + s = end value (Sekine 1997, 129). The value c would represent any constant capital, as in the actual means of production, v would represent variable capital, as in labor-power purchased, and s would be surplus value. Sekine explains that only in the application of labor-power, by way of production, does this end value result. Surplus value alone does not contribute to the end value but is a separate part of the value added by labor-power retained by a capitalist or in this case the co-op (Sekine 1997, 130). As such, there is a part of the workers' labor-power being removed that would otherwise represent a degree of exploitation under a capitalist system.

But the Rojava system distributes the profits in a way that favors the worker over non-working members. The workers are paid the highest portion relative to the non-working capital contributors (The Movement for a Democratic Society 2016). As such, surplus value is redistributed back to the workers through yearly payouts and amounts given over to the commune used to improve the workers conditions through improving the commune collectively.

The Future of Rojava and the Co-ops

Understanding the function of the co-ops within Rojava is one step in understanding the complex interaction of municipal direct democracy, the social economy, and libertarian-socialist ideals. Historical context suggests that given a stable and supportive political economy within Northern Syria, the co-ops will prove as beneficial and successful as any capitalist model would be able.

Unfortunately, the situation surrounding this experiment may not allow for this. The Ba'athist regime still holds most of Syria, the rebels are hostile to Rojava's continuation, other Kurdish groups are unsupportive of their efforts, and Turkey has recently begun a campaign of conquest in the most western canton with threats of future invasion. Should Rojava weather this storm, they may face more external pressure from American and European economic imperialism or from neighboring powers such as Iran or Saudi Arabia.

References

Bretos, I., & Errasti, A. (2017). Challenges and opportunities for the regerneation of multinational worker cooperatives: Lessons from the Mondragon Corporation - a case study of the Fagor Ederlan Group. Organization, Vol. 24(2) 154-173.

Harding, S. (1998). The Decline of the Mondragon Cooperatives. Australian Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 33 No. 1 59-76.

Knapp, M., Flach, A., & Ayboga, E. (2016). Revolution in Rojava : Democratic Autonomy and Women's Liberation in Syrian Kurdistan. London: Pluto Press.

Marx, K. (1995, 1999). Capital, Volume One. Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org).

Sekine, T. (1997). An Outline of the Dialect of Capital, Volume One. London: Palgrave Macmillan

The Movement for a Democratic Society. (2016, February 15). The Experience of Co-operative Societies in Rojava. Retrieved from The Hampton Institute: http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/cooperatives-in-rojava.html

Prisoner Prophet: Revisiting George Jackson's Analysis of Systemic Fascism

By Colin Jenkins

The rise of Donald Trump has brought talk of fascism to the forefront. While comparing US Presidents to Hitler is certainly nothing new - both Obama and W. Bush were regularly characterized as such by their haters - Trump's emergence on the national political scene comes at a very peculiar moment in US history. In response to this seemingly hyperbolic trend, Godwin's Law has become a well-known rule of thumb, proclaiming that "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1."

Anyone that has participated in an online political discussion knows Godwin's Law to be reliable. It is almost inevitable that folks will compare modern-day politicians to a perceived authoritarian figure (most popularly, that of Hitler). Claiming this law is a way to shame those who make the comparison, as if it has reached the level of the boy who cried wolf, growing increasingly nonsensical as time goes on.

Enter Trump, a man who reached the highest office of the land by appealing to fascistic tendencies, both through his projections and by the misdirected pool of angst that has accumulated during capitalism's late stage - neoliberalism. Under a neoliberal agenda that has dominated the political landscape since Reagan, capitalism has been unleashed like never in history, leading to massive inequality, obscene amounts of wealth being transferred from public coffers to private hands, and an overall erosion in American life that effects everything from medical care and debt to education and public utilities.

The unleashing of the capitalist system has left many financially desperate and hopeless. And it has left most wondering why things are so bad. Capitalism has shaped every aspect of American culture, including the ways in which we view and think about the world. One of the most penetrating notions is that of individualism. American life has long been tied to ideas of "rugged individualism," "exceptionalism," and "pioneering" and "exploration." Over centuries, the country's collective psyche has owned this - to the point where systemic problems are routinely framed as individual ills, and broad areas of study are reduced to "generalizations" by snarky social media comments. Thus, the most important tool we have as historians, social theoreticians, and activists - systemic analysis - has been essentially shut down by dominant culture.

The term "systemic fascism" may seem redundant to some, but the redundancy has become necessary to combat the individualistic modes of thinking that have trapped much of the American public. This framing tendency has never been more evident than in the liberal obsession with Trump, the individual. Even among sectors of the Left, who have joined in the liberal chorus, everything has become about Trump - Trump the racist, Trump the fascist, Trump is destroying America, Trump is an embarrassment to the highest office in the land, our problems are due to Trump. These sentiments are the result of a collective myopia that is produced by capitalist culture and its hyper-focus on the individual - a key propaganda tool that is used to not only obscure the reasons that most of us struggle, but also to avoid any sort of collective solution to our problems.

George Jackson, Prisoner Prophet

On August 21st, 1971, George Jackson was shot and killed by a prison guard in San Quentin during an alleged escape attempt. He was 29 years old. Jackson, who was imprisoned a decade earlier on an armed-robbery charge, died three days before he was to begin a murder trial stemming from the death of a guard. A year earlier, Jackson made national headlines when his 17-year-old brother, Jonathan Peter Jackson, had attempted an armed insurrection at the Marin County Courthouse in San Rafael, California in order to free the "Soledad Brothers" (George, Fleeta Drumgo, and John Clutchette), the trio of inmates who were accused of killing the guard in retaliation for the murder of three Black prisoners a month prior.

Jackson was a scary figure in the American conscience. On the heels of a tumultuous decade that included a fierce Civil Rights movement, a corollary black power movement, and a series of liberation movements rooted in radical democracy, the country was still reeling. Major figures like Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, and Malcolm X were known by all, but many of the radicals working in the trenches of these revolutionary movements were discarded, both through a deliberate erasing from above and a general fear of facing hard truths about American history and society.

During his time in prison, Jackson developed and refined thoughtful analysis through voracious reading that informed his experience as a Black man growing up in a white-supremacist society. While he became known more for the violent incidents that were destined along his revolutionary path, Jackson was a prolific writer and theorist, particularly on the topics of capitalism and fascism. Along with fellow prisoner W. L. Nolen, Jackson founded the Black Guerilla Family, a black liberation organization based in Marxist-Leninist and Maoist theory. Jacksons' ideological formation had taken place with the help of Nolen during the late 60s while in San Quentin. As he later explained in his collection of prison letters, "I met Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels, and Mao when I entered prison, and they redeemed me."

While other valuable works on systemic fascism - most notably Robert Paxton's 2004 The Anatomy of Fascism - have made their rounds during Trump's political emergence, Jackson's analysis has remained largely uncovered. To continue to ignore it would be a mistake for two reasons. First, it comes from a genuine working-class view, unadulterated and immune from the confines of academia. In other words, Jackson's insight was formed purely from a place of organic class-consciousness and subsequently refined and confirmed through self-study. Second, it comes from the view of a hyper-marginalized member of the working class from within the epicenter of imperialism. As a Black man in America, and thus a subject of America's internal colonization, Jackson could not ignore the powerful, underlying effects of white supremacy on the class nature of systemic fascism. The unique history of American slaves and descendants of slaves makes this inclusion an absolute necessity for any analysis of American fascism.

Capitalism and State Repression

Understanding fascism as the inevitable systemic conclusion to Americanism is crucial. Only then can one realize that Trump is not "bringing fascism to America," but rather that fascism was built into the American project from day one. The most reductive way to view fascism as a process is to gain an understanding of the social and economic systems that breed not only extreme hierarchies, but also extreme forms of domination and subjugation within these hierarchies. In the United States, the most influential system is capitalism. It exceeds all else, including politics and government, because it is rooted in the one thing that dominates all else - money. Capitalism concerns itself with two goals: growth and profit. In its narrow-minded pursuit, things like humanity, democracy, freedom, liberty, Earth, and the environment cannot be considered. They are nuisances to be co-opted or destroyed. And, the late stage of capitalism that we are living through is the culmination of this co-optation and destruction.

In order to understand the systemic fascism that is rising before our eyes, we must understand the historical seeds of Americanism that have provided it with a fertile breeding ground. Jackson understood this better than most, as laid out in his two prominent works, Blood in My Eye and Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. The authoritative nature of capitalism, which relies on inherently dominant mechanisms of private property and labor exploitation, is key in this development, as has been seen in four major phases: (1) capital accumulation that has produced a completely unchecked capitalist class, (2) a formation of the corporate state through the literal purchasing of governmental institutions by the capitalist class, (3) increasing economic hardship for a majority of Americans, and (4) a complete reliance on state violence both home (militarized policing) and abroad (imperialism/war) to control working-class angst and develop new markets outside of the United States to replace living-wage labor.

As early as 1970, Jackson recognized this coming era because he understood America's roots and the historical trajectory of capitalism. More specifically, he recognized the emergence of monopoly capitalism as a formative stage in the transition from bourgeois democracy to the early stages of fascism. "The trends toward monopoly capital began effectively just after the close of the Civil War in Amerika. Prior to its emergence, bourgeois democratic rule could be said to have been the predominant political force inside Amerikan society," explains Jackson. "As monopoly capital matured, the role of the old bourgeois democracy faded in process. As monopoly capital forced out the small dispersed factory setup, the new corporativism assumed political supremacy. Monopoly capital can in no way be interpreted as an extension of old bourgeois democracy. The forces of monopoly capital swept across the Western world in the first half of this century."

This transition opened the door for the neoliberal era, which began shortly after Jackson's death and was designed to cement the capitalist system in a newly formed corporate state. The most obvious elements of this pattern are that of political cooptation and direct state repression.

"Corporative ideals have reached their logical conclusion in the U.S. The new corporate state has fought its way through crisis after crisis, established its ruling elites in every important institution, formed its partnership with labor through its elites, erected the most massive network of protective agencies replete with spies, technical and animal, to be found in any police state in the world. The violence of the ruling class of this country in the long process of its trend toward authoritarianism and its last and highest state, fascism, cannot be rivaled in its excesses by any other nation on earth today or in history."

The ultimate expression of this state repression is, and always has been, found in the nation's criminal justice system. With the advent of laws, so-called rights, criminal procedures, police, courts, and prisons, the illegitimate systems of dominance (such as capitalism and white supremacy) have long been given a façade of legitimacy, and thus have become naturally classist and racist. In the end, these systems of so-called justice only target those at the bottom of socioeconomic hierarchy, serving the same purpose that a head on a spike served in Medieval times - a warning against all those who dare challenge the embedded power structure. Jackson elaborates,

"The hypocrisy of Amerikan fascism forces it to conceal its attack on political offenders by the legal fiction of conspiracy laws and highly sophisticated frame-ups. The masses must be taught to understand the true function of prisons. Why do they exist in such numbers? What is the real underlying economic motive of crime and the official definition of types of offenders or victims? The people must learn that when one "offends" the totalitarian state it is patently not an offense against the people of that state, but an assault upon the privilege of the privileged few. Could anything be more ridiculous than the language of blatantly political indictments; "The People of the State vs. Angela Davis and Ruchell Magee" or "The People of the State ... vs. Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins." What, people? Clearly the hierarchy, the armed minority."

This national system of domination and incarceration mimics its international cousin of imperialism, which exists to serve capitalism by carving out new markets, gaining control of resources, and forcing populations into wage servitude. This process comes full circle from its international face (imperialism and foreign occupation) into a national face (domestic occupation and mass incarceration). Jackson continues,

"In order for capitalism to continue to rule, any action that threatens the right of a few individuals to own and control public property must be prohibited and curtailed whatever the cost in resources (the international wing of the repressive institutions has spent one and one-half trillion dollars since World War II), whatever the cost in blood (My Lai, Augusta, Georgia, Kent State, the Panther trials, the frame-up of Angela Davis)! The national repressive institutions (police, National Guard, army, etc.) are no less determined. The mayors that curse the rioters and' the looters (Mayor Daley of Chicago has ordered them summarily executed in the streets) and ignore the fact that their bosses have looted the world!"

In terms of domestic authoritarianism, the ultimate tool is the prison system. In the United States, especially following a series of 1960s radical grassroots movements once referred to by the ruling class as an "excess of democracy," much of the state's repressive apparatus has transformed from covert (i.e. COINTELPRO) to overt (prison industrial complex, "The New Jim Crow"). Jackson had pinpointed this repressive institution prior to its massive expansion that began in the 1980s, providing insight to both the capitalist underpinnings of the prison system and the cultural baggage that comes with it.

"The purpose of the chief repressive institutions within the totalitarian capitalist state is clearly to discourage and prohibit certain activity, and the prohibitions are aimed at very distinctly defined sectors of the class - and race - sensitized society. The ultimate expression of law is not order - it's prison. There are hundreds upon hundreds of prisons, and thousands upon thousands of laws, yet there is no social order, no social peace. Anglo-Saxon bourgeois law is tied firmly into economics. One can even pick that out of those Vital Statistics. Bourgeois law protects property relations and not social relationships. The cultural traits of capitalist society that also tend to check activity - (individualism, artificial politeness juxtaposed to an aloof rudeness, the rush to learn "how to" instead of "what is") - are secondary really, and intended for those mild cases (and groups) that require preventive measures only. The law and everything that interlocks with it was constructed for poor, desperate people like me."

Jackson recognized the inherent connection between authoritarianism and capitalist modes of production, and most specifically the working class's subordinate relationship to capital. This systemic class analysis is something sorely missing today, further obscured by the focus on Trump as an individual phenomenon capable of shaping society. Uncovering these important roots comes in the deduction of capitalism as an inherently fascistic system, reliant on the forced separation of the masses from the land, and thus feeding on coerced labor since day one. "The nature of fascism, its characteristics and properties have been in dispute ever since it was first identified as a distinct phenomenon growing out of Italy's state-supported and developed industries in 1922," Jackson writes. "Whole libraries have been written around the subject. There have been a hundred 'party lines' on just exactly what fascism is. But both Marxists and non-Marxists agree on at least two of its general factors: its capitalist orientation and its anti-labor, anti-class nature. These two factors almost by themselves identify the U.S. as a fascist-corporative state."

Redirecting Revolutionary Rage Into Empty Outlets

An important part of Jackson's analysis is the role that is played by moderates and liberals within a political system that is arranged for the specific purpose of placing everyone in a war for inches - a war that is fought on a predetermined battleground which benefits the ruling class, whether the capitalists themselves, the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, or the politicians that exist to protect these embedded systems. In other words, electoral and legislative reforms are designed to appear as "progress" atop a landscape where meaningful/revolutionary progress has been rendered structurally impossible. This lesson is perhaps the most valuable for today's Left which, despite decades upon decades of evidence to the contrary, continues to give in to delusions of electoral and legislative potential.

As Jackson tells us, "elections and political parties have no significance when all the serious contenders for public office are fascist and the electorate is thoroughly misled about the true nature of the candidates." This applies to candidates from both capitalist/imperialist parties whom are (knowingly or unknowingly) the products of carefully-constructed systems of dominance. The point of the Constitution, Bill of Rights, three branches of government, and all their "checks and balances" was not to promote and encourage real democracy, a government of and for the people, but rather to obstruct such a thing, therefore "protecting the opulent minority from the majority." Within this arrangement, protest is allowed, voting is allowed, relative free speech is allowed, and even some forms of civil disobedience are allowed because such actions can be contained and rendered harmless from a structural point of view. Thus, fascistic tendencies have been allowed to flourish under the cover of liberal democracy, evidenced by the fact that any activity which develops as a true threat to its growth is brutally shut down.

"Fascism has established itself in a most disguised and efficient manner in this country. It feels so secure that the leaders allow us the luxury of a faint protest. Take protest too far, however, and they will show their other face. Doors will be kicked down in the night and machine-gun fire and buckshot will become the medium of exchange. The establishment does everything in its power to ensure that revolutionary rage is redirected into empty outlets which provide pressure releases for desires that could become dangerous if allowed to progress…

One has to understand that the fascist arrangement tolerates the existence of no valid revolutionary activity. It has programmed into its very nature a massive, complex and automatic defense mechanism for all our old methods for raising the consciousness of a potentially revolutionary class of people. The essence of a U.S.A. totalitarian socio-political capitalism is concealed behind the illusion of a mass participatory society. We must rip away its mask. Then the debate can end, and we can enter a new phase of struggle based on the development of an armed revolutionary culture that will triumph."

Under bourgeois democracy, elections largely represent an illusion of choice but still allow for some short-term concessions from the ruling class, if only as a way to quell inevitable clashes. Since the emergence of monopoly capital and neoliberalism, elections have become even less effective, rarely leading to even minor reforms or concessions. In fact, "with each development in the fascist arrangement," with each vote for representatives within this arrangement, "the marriage between the political elite and economic elite becomes more apparent. The integration of the various sectors of the total economic elite becomes more pronounced." This natural fusion was never more realized than in the early 20th century, a time of historic capitalist crisis and political upheaval. Jackson illustrates the liberal response to the mass desperation that struck the land, ultimately choosing to solidify the capitalist hierarchy at the expense of the revolutionary moment and the prospects of radical democracy:

"There was positive mobilization of workers and the lower class, and a highly developed class consciousness. There was indeed a very deep economic crisis with attendant strikes, unionizing, lockouts, break-ins, call-outs of the National Guard. The lower class was threatening to unite under the pressure of economic disintegration. Revolution was in the air. Socialist vanguard parties were leading it. There was terrorism from the right from groups such as Guardians of the Republic, the Black Legion, Peg-leg White-type storm troopers and hired assassins who carried out the beginnings of a contra-positive suppressive mobilization. Under the threat of revolution, the ruling class, true to Marxian theory, became all the more co-optive and dangerous. F.D.R. was born and bred in this ruling class of families. His role was to form the first fascist regime, to merge the economic, political and labor elites. Governing elites/corporative state/fascism - his role was to limit competition, replace it with the dream of cooperation; to put laissez faire to rest, and initiate the acceptance of government intervention into economic affairs."

The Only Real Resistance to Fascism is Socialism

In discussing the emergence of monopoly capitalism, Jackson echoed the later theoretical developments of Malcolm X by recognizing an inevitable war between the oppressed of the world and their oppressors. "To fight effectively, we must be aware of the fact that the enemy has consolidated through reformist machination the greatest community of self-interest that has ever existed," Jackson tells us. While the forces of monopoly capital, white supremacy, and imperialism gained strength, an "opposite force was also at work, i.e., 'international socialism' - Lenin's and Fanon's - national wars of liberation guided not by the national bourgeois but by the people, the ordinary working-class people."

As capitalism in mature form, fascism can only be effectively countered by socialism - the development of radical democratic economies where the people own the means of production and operate them in a way that benefits all of society, eliminating the brutal competition for basic human needs for which capitalism has thrived on for so long. And socialism must develop in a way that represents a formidable attack against the absurd levels of capitalist brutality we are witnessing, which include an arsenal of weaponry and resources, and the will to cause mass environmental and human destruction like never before. In other words, as the default conclusion to capitalism, fascism can only be countered with deliberate, conscious, and forceful organizing. Jackson elaborates:

"At its core, fascism is an economic rearrangement. It is international capitalism's response to the challenge of international scientific socialism. It developed from nation to nation out of differing levels of traditionalist capitalism's dilapidation. The common feature of all instances of fascism is the opposition of a weak socialist revolution. When the fascist arrangement begins to emerge in any of the independent nation-states, it does so by default! It is simply an arrangement of an established capitalist economy, an attempt to renew, perpetuate and legitimize that economy's rulers by circumflexing and weighing down, diffusing a revolutionary consciousness pushing from below. Fascism must be seen as an episodically logical stage in the socio-economic development of capitalism in a state of crisis. It is the result of a revolutionary thrust that was weak and miscarried - a consciousness that was compromised."

Socialism, as a radically democratic system, must develop from below. It must do so in a way that overcomes the dark forces created throughout dominant culture by capitalist degradation and alienation. As a country defined by a racial caste system which has obstructed class consciousness, we must recognize that any class struggle formed absent a crucial understanding of white supremacy is doomed to fail. Because, without recognizing and eliminating these internal divisions rooted in conditioned fear, the working class will remain a splintered and impotent force against fascist advancement. Ultimately, ours is a material struggle, but it is one that has been fortified on a "psycho-social level." Jackson provides crucial insight,

"We are faced with the task of raising a positive mobilization of revolutionary consciousness in a mass that has "gone through" a contra-positive, authoritarian process. Racism enters, on the psycho-social level, in the form of a morbid, traditional fear of both blacks and revolutions. The resentment of blacks, and conscious or unconscious tendencies to mete out pain to blacks, throughout the history of Amerika's slave systems, all came into focus when blacks began the move from South to North and from countryside to city to compete with whites in industrial sectors, and, in general, engage in status competition. Resentment, fear, insecurity, and the usual isolation that is patterned into every modern, capitalist industrial society (the more complex the products, the greater the division of labor; the higher the pyramid, the broader its base and the smaller the individual brick tends to feel) are multiplied by ten when racism, race antagonism, is also a factor. There is certainly no lack of evidence to prove the existence of an old and built-in character assassination of programmed racism (what class controls the nation's educational facilities, prints the newspapers and magazines that carry the little cartoons, and omits or misrepresents us to death?) has always served to distract and defuse feelings of status deprivation suffered by the huge sectors just above the black one. Then also to account for the seemingly dual nature recognizable in the authoritarian personality (conformity, but also a strange latent destructiveness), racism has always been employed as a pressure release for the psychopathic destructiveness evinced by a people historically processed to fear, to feel the need for a decision-maker, to hate freedom."

In conclusion, Jackson provided us with an optimistic call to action just prior to his death, urging the working-class masses to squash fascistic tendencies and conflicts within our milieus, while keeping our collective eye on the prize - a new society for all people, built on cooperation and a mutual respect for all life.

"There must be a collective redirection of the old guard - the factory and union agitator - with the campus activist who can counter the ill-effects of fascism at its training site, and with the lumpenproletariat intellectuals who possess revolutionary scientific-socialist attitudes to deal with the masses of street people already living outside the system. They must work toward developing the unity of the pamphlet and the silenced pistol. Black, brown and white are all victims together. At the end of this massive collective struggle, we will uncover our new identity, the unpredictable culmination of the revolutionary process. We will be better equipped to wage the real struggle, the permanent struggle after the revolution - the one for new relationships between people."

Understanding the systemic nature of fascism, while certainly daunting, should not be disheartening. It provides us with the truth behind the dark days we are witnessing. It allows us to uncover the roots to our current place in history. And, most importantly, it gives us a material perspective on where we've been, where we are, and where we're heading as a nation - replacing the hopelessness of confusion with the purposefulness of understanding. George Jackson is one of many revolutionary prophets who dedicated his life to passing on the insight needed to take control of our collective future - a future that will be determined by our conscious, deliberate actions from this point forward, and ours alone. A future that must be won through a hardened attack against powerful people guarding centuries-old systems of oppression. Cowardice, inaction, apathy, and infighting may ultimately be our downfall, but George Jackson and others like him made sure that ignorance is not.