The Miseducation of the US Left: Bernie Sanders, Social Democracy, and Left Chauvinism

By Joshua Briond

I first learned about socialism in 2015. To this day I remember exactly how it happened: I was tweeting about the prospects of the presidential election and a mutual asked me, “have you heard about Bernie Sanders?” At the time, I hadn’t. Shocked when she heard this, she told me that “his principles remind me a lot of yours, I think you’d like him.” Then, another mutual of mine cut in on our conversation and said the exact words: “ew, he’s a socialist.” At the time I didn’t know what the word “socialism” meant, so I decided to do some research in order not to respond ignorantly. What I found in my quick Google search was the following definition: “A political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.” Alongside that basic premise is, from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This sort of language resonated with me immediately. I couldn’t understand how anyone could possibly be against an ideological framework that empowers and centers working-class people. 

From a five-minute Google search Bernie Sanders had earned my vote. Everything I read about him just made me like him more. He was everything. Consistent. Progressive. Genuine. He even marched with the late great Martin Luther King Jr. Inspiring! At that time, Bernie seemed to represent an alternative to the bourgeois (wealthy, privileged) establishment politics that I had always resented, even when I lacked the language to sufficiently articulate my distaste for it. After this point, I became fascinated with the tendencies and ideology of socialism, but also angered by the fact I had only just learned of it. Why did we not learn this in school? I continued reading and studying—specifically from Black and brown revolutionaries and theorists—and as a result, became more radicalized. My reading pushed me to the point where I found myself imagining a world and movement beyond the coercive nature of Western electoral politics and the stifling ideology of the ‘lesser of two evils.’ Such an ideology, that is so historically prevalent in the United States, in which we’ve seen in the past century or two have not achieved many, if any, gains for marginalized people. It was during this intensive period of reading and study that I began to connect the dots to what we’re seeing happening in our modern socio-political moment to historical events of the past.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but rather individuals and classes repeat history. Especially when subjects (disguised as “citizens”) of historical violence are ignorant of historical precedents, wilfully or unknowingly, which take the form of tactics cyclically used by our subjectors. I believe we’re in one of those moments where everything we’re seeing has quite literally happened before, and if we’re not careful—if we’re not meticulous and militant in our approach to addressing our material actualities, we will be bamboozled into accepting less than not only what we deserve, but less than what we NEED for survival; and all in the name of short term “progress.”

The socio-political moment we find ourselves in reminds me a lot of what I have studied about the Great Depression of the 1930s and its aftermath in which the rejection of capitalism had become increasingly common, socially acceptable, and a threat to the American social, political, and economic order. Much like the 1930s, capitalism’s contradictions and racialized violence have once again become too blatant to disguise. During that era, membership in socialist and communist parties in the US soared; however, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (commonly known as FDR) appeals to the left barred attempts at achieving a sustainable third party or revolutionary left-wing ideological movement. FDR was incredibly skilled at (mis)appropriating radical language in order to deliberately co-opt the rhetoric and demands of radical left-wing oppositional organizations, parties, and individuals who fought for greater freedom and self-determination of working peoples.

Similar to what occurred with FDR and the New Deal coalition during the 1930s, the likes of Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are attempting to inaugurate a renewed movement of “progressive” Democrats. While this is championed by many as something worthy of celebration—as “progress,” what we are seeing in real time is the liberalization and hollowing out of terms like “abolition,” “resistance,” and “revolution,” amongst others. What this amounts to is a deliberate means of (mis)appropriating and ultimately watering down radical language and movements. Sanders et al, have mastered this sleight of hand in a way not seen in decades. Lamentably, this has successfully fooled many Americans into thinking he, and others, are in fact, radicals and/or socialists.

“Progressive” politicians wield words, slogans, and even ideologies, widely associated with the radical tradition—especially the Black radical tradition, when in actuality all they want is what has already been achieved by most wealthy “developed” countries; a gentleman's reformation of the inherently oppressive institutions that they claim to be against. Given that, exactly how radical can what they are proposing be?

Millions of Americans prefer social democracy, but of course, this really just means welfare state policies to improve material conditions, such as: universal healthcare, cheap and/or free education, etc—without much of an understanding of where the money will come from to fund these domestic advances, beyond simply through “taxes.” Sanders often draws comparisons between the type of political economy he and many of his supporters want with Nordic countries. But rarely is it mentioned that Bernie’s beloved Nordic countries, that he seeks to mimic, not only have a wide ranging Nazi movements on the rise, eerily similar to the US, but their ostensibly nice mix of capitalism and socialism, as its commonly and erroneously described, is becoming increasingly more traditionally capitalist, by the hour; as well as the fact that this welfare state model is sustained through colonial legacies and imperialist endeavours of oppressing, destabilizing, pillaging, and bombing people in oppressed, third-world, and global-south countries. Why are all the nations that Bernie Sanders seeks to imitate in the US majority white and imperialist when there are nations, such as Cuba and China, who’ve statistically achieved equal, and even greater material gains—especially for their most marginalized populations—without the pillaging of non-white countries?

Social democracy and western conception(s) of democratic socialism, like all forms of liberalism, seek to preserve capitalism under the guise of “lessening” or “reforming” its structural violences, are truly just materializations of anti-communism, with a perpetuation of cold-war tactics in which the task is to further prevent radical upheaval from subjects of colonial, imperialist, and capitalist rule. 

Even the new wing of Democratic Party progressives’ advocation of the Green New Deal legislation that aims to “address climate change” was stolen from the Green Party and stripped of its anti-imperialist and anti-militarization elements. It also still seeks to prioritize profit and markets—despite the ecological demand for radical change pending human induced climate extinction—in typical white supremacist, capitalist, and imperialist Democrat Party fashion—which more than anything should tell us all we need to know about the modern green movements in the West, those of which do not prioritized the eradication of capitalism, neo-colonialism, and imperialism. All western economies are sustained through immense financial and technological surplus amassed through serial racialized exploitation, as evidenced by the most recent military coup d’état in socialist Bolivia, ousting the socialist administration, disguised as being “pro-democracy”—which is really just a materialization of modern colonialism and further indigenous genocide. It’s no secret that Bolivia’s lithium reserves, a chemical element that’ll be used to propel the United States’  “green capitalism” pipe dreams and idealizations, and President Evo Morales’ intention to industrialize and nationalize this valuable commodity, led to his unjust militaristic political demise at the hands of the US—which Bernie, amongst other “progressive” democrats only rhetorically and seemingly reluctantly condemned. 

Though he was violently anti-Semitic and ideologically fascistic in multiple ways, FDR is almost universally recognized as the United States’ most left-wing president; which says more of the inherently right-wing nature of the American political stratosphere, historically and presently, than any political ideology FDR aligned himself with. Bernie Sanders, to me, is the modern Franklin D. Roosevelt, or at least they represent the same thing, historically, in the face of capitalist contradictions being on full display. Though far better on race than FDR, Bernie’s continued failures on the issues of race and foreign policy/imperialism cannot be denied or ignored. Whether if it’s in regard to addressing Black people and the question of reparations, being an unapologetic liberal Zionist, or calling democratically-elected indigenous socialist leader(s) and governments, such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro, “dictator(ships)” and “authoritarian,” both of which are heavily racialized terms with imperialist connotations and are only ever used to describe non-white countries and leaders who do not subscribe to Western notions of “democracy” or bow down to the demands of the West. It’s no secret that Bernie Sanders, or any “liberal” or “progressive” politician, wouldn’t dare call the United States of America a “dictator(ship)” and/or “authoritarian,” despite it being one. So how does the US manage to maintain its legitimacy as a “democracy” and “beacon of hope and freedom,” when it terrorizes, imprisons, and kills its political dissidents—both domestically and abroad—incarcerates more people than entire countries combined, and is by far the greatest violator of human rights the world has ever seen?

It’s very easy to be ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ on most domestic social issues, as the modern progressive movement has shown. Where a person starts exposing their self and their true ideologies is when they express how they truly feel about non-western and non-white leaders and countries who’ve been deemed ‘enemy’ states by the US ruling class, as a means of warmongering. This has been demonstrated clearly by Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who’ve directly contributed to the demonization of non-white and non-western countries under imperialist attack, as a means of separating themselves from the Other, as well as these countries’ conceptions and materializations of socialism (authentic economic democracy)—as well as pledging their loyalty to the American hegemony. The level of western chauvinism that has remained unchecked, as a result of Sanders’ rise and role in the miseducation of the left, clearly displays the reality in which democratic socialism—which is largely misunderstood in the west as an extension of social democracy and “welfare statism.” The miseducation of the left has, by no mistake, led to a “left-wing” movement that is motivated and intrigued by the prospects of maintaining the settler-colonial and imperialist project that is the United States and its colonies, while granting its citizens healthcare, education, and greenifying consumption, with its blood dollars that are attained off the backs of colonized and oppressed people in the global South. 

One of the more common materializations of left-wing chauvinism is when it comes to issues of war and imperialism. Bernie Sanders and his supporters, as a result of his mass influence, take the form of their reinforcing imperialist narratives regarding oppressed countries and leaders, under the guise of “nuance.” However, this materializes as inaction and complacency from those in the imperial core in the face of imperialist, settler-colonial, and capitalist violence—which ultimately leads to an acceptance of western intervention in oppressed countries. And then, for the sake of maintaining legitimacy as self-proclaimed “radicals” and/or “leftists,” left-wing chauvinists argue, contradictorily, that in spite of their ideological alignment to these imperialist narratives—used to justify the racialized terrorizing and destabilization of these countries—intervention should somehow still be opposed. We’ve witnessed this in regard to the dominant rhetoric surrounding the DPRK and Kim Jong Un, China and the CPC/Xi Jinping, Syria and Bashar al-Assad, Venezuela and Presidents Chavez and Maduro, or more recently, Bolivia and President Morales, etc. 

It is interesting that Sanders supporters are capable of recognizing mainstream media’s biases and contemptuousness toward Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ilhan Omar, and other new “left-wing” and “progressive” Democrats—which is fueled by Cold War and McCarthyist tactics and hysteria—even though, ideologically, they are not actual socialists. But will look to and reference these same mainstream media outlets for their information on non-white, non-western leaders and countries—countries who actually have socialist leaders, governments, and economies and/or are subject to US imperialist aggression. The connection and contradiction that should easily be recognized is this: if the US media is going this far to delegitimize politicians, who are at best liberal reformists and/or social democrats and basically of the same fundamental political alignment as the US ruling class, imagine how far it will go to demonize and delegitimize actual socialist leaders and countries who represent a legitimate threat to global capitalism, western imperialism and hegemony.

What has become increasingly evident to me over the last few years, specifically, is how much Bernie Sanders’ rise and the modern popularity of social democracy masking itself as [democratic] socialism—though effective in moving millions of people away from centrism and establishment politics and rule—has created a moment of opportunism, careerism, and political punditry masking itself as radical organizing and activism. A moment whose primary role is not just funnelling people back into the arms of the Democratic Party; but also miseducating the masses regarding what socialism actually entails, beyond welfare-state policies and electoralism. There’s been so much talk about the “mainstreaming of socialism” while the whitewashing and watering down of the ideals inherent within a socialist politic remains deliberate as a means of delegitimizing and co-opting the actualities of what building socialism would actually entail. Socialism is not something that can be implemented through policy or mixed in with capitalism. Bernie knows this—especially in countries where every four to eight years another regressive and backward Republican or Democrat will arise and strip away all the “gains” and reforms, as per usual. That route will always fail because the two theoretical frameworks and ideologies of socialism + capitalism/imperialism are in direct and intrinsic contradiction with one another, as we are seeing within Northern Europe. 

I have pondered on the question—especially considering the outcome of the 2016 election, in which Clinton’s emails were leaked and it was proven the DNC and Hillary Clinton collaborated on the rigging of the election against him—“why won’t Sanders just run as an independent?” But I’ve come to the realization that it's because he’s not an independent. He’s a Democrat, and he’s very much interested in maintaining the interests of the imperialist and capitalist Democratic Party—regardless of how violent they continue to be—but also, maintaining the Democratic Party’s (and the two-party system’s) illegitimate and unjust rule. FDR, too, wanted to transfer the Democratic Party into an ideologically progressive party and sought the help of socialist and communist parties—much like Sanders has done with organizations like DSA. They recognized that radical organizations and individuals needed to feel a part of his political entourage in order to preserve the interests of American capitalism through the Democratic Party. 

FDR succeeded in his role of delegitimizing and co-opting the revolutionary left-wing movement of his time, during arguably the most quintessential and crucial socio-political moment since World War I.  The result of this co-optation: Communist Parties saw a drastic decline in support during the 1940 elections. And after getting elected, FDR explicitly ignored the struggles and concerns from the groups and constituencies that were instrumental in getting him [re]elected, and instead collaborated with the conservative wing of the capitalist ruling class. Consequently, the US emerged from the Great Depression as the most anti-socialist and criminally capitalist country in the world.

Undeniably, Bernie Sanders has been targeted with red-scare tactics by elements of the US ruling class and its media. In 2019, we’re still seeing these same tactics being used against him—with the liberal, ruling-class media as the culprit—that were used in the 2016 election. Democrats are going to do everything in their power to prevent even the slightest glimpse of “progressivism” in their party, even if it means sliding further into fascism—which is an indictment of the mediocrity and ineptitude of their party leadership, as the self-proclaimed party of the people. FDR noticed in the 1930s the best route to preserving capitalism is providing citizens in the imperialist core (US) with crumbs of loot gained through colonial and capitalist exploitation and rule throughout the world, as a means of keeping them complicit in their subjugation—making their material conditions comfortable enough to prevent social upheaval, or in other words: revolution.

Regardless of who you’re voting for in the 2020 presidential election, your vote will inevitably be casted for the next global terrorist-in-chief. The next president—whether domestically “progressive” or not—like all presidents, both past and present, is going to cast racialized terror on oppressed and colonized people everywhere. But my goal here isn’t to discourage individuals from voting. I’m simply uninterested in that. My job is to provide the facts and highlight the historical precedence as it relates to the critical socio-political moment we find ourselves in. The progressives, often white, who peddle harmfully held sentiments such as “we just need to elect Bernie, because he’s the best we’ve got and revolution isn’t possible right now” are no different than the white moderates who told us to “wait our turn” in the 1960s – those who Martin Luther King, Jr. and James Baldwin warned us about. 

Much like FDR, whether deliberately or not, Bernie Sanders’ movement, or “political revolution,” as he describes it, is here to preserve capitalism and imperialism, by any means necessary.

The Ballot and the Bullet: Building Socialism in ‘America’s Backyard’

By Matthew Dolezal

When faced with momentous external challenges — be they Spanish colonialism, American imperialism, or devastating hurricanes — the Cuban people have consistently risen to the occasion. In response to ongoing internal challenges, the popular new Cuban constitution (which took effect in April) entrenches the solid Marxist-Leninist foundation of the island’s socialist state while updating the 1976 constitution to better reflect the modern post-Cold War period.

Under the new constitution, each presidential term is five years, with a limit of two consecutive terms in office for those who serve. In addition, the role of Head of State is divided between the president and the newly established office of prime minister.

Other new rights and policies include the presumption of innocence in criminal cases, the right to legal counsel, and the (heavily regulated) use of private property and foreign investment to stimulate the economy (particularly to offset the revenue lost as a result of the continued U.S. blockade).

Despite the many exciting modernizations articulated by this fresh new document, much remains the same. Cuba’s Communist Party is still in only political party legally allowed to operate, and the state continues to control the land and means of production. The news media cannot be privatized, and, according to the new Magna Carta, Cuba will never return to the exploitative, pre-revolutionary capitalist system.

Bourgeois historians and pundits often glibly frame successful socialist governments as “authoritarian.” But from a materialist perspective, the vanguard party serves to protect the achievements of the proletarian revolution — including universal healthcare, education, housing, subsidized food, and land reform — from reactionary and imperialist threats (such as the CIA-backed coup Ernesto “Che” Guevara witnessed in Guatemala prior to the Cuban Revolution). In addition to the Communist Party’s general success, apologists for Western capitalism now have to grapple with the fact that significant democratic processes are occurring within Cuba’s one-party system.

The process to draft a new constitution began in August of 2018 and included the input of millions of Cuban citizens. Assemblies throughout the island were established, and thousands of “standard proposals” were debated for three months. In all, the old constitution faced 760 modifications. The proposed constitution was then featured in a referendum that took place on February 24, 2019. With massive voter turnout, the new constitution was easily passed when more than 85% voted “yes.”

Based on the long-standing solidarity between Cuba and its Latin American ally Venezuela, this recent constitutional process undertaken by the Caribbean nation may have been inspired by Venezuela’s ongoing Bolivarian Revolution. After the 1998 election of the popular Venezuelan revolutionary Hugo Chávez, the formerly discarded masses were not only lifted out of poverty, but politically empowered through a nation-wide upsurge in grassroots democracy.

As historian Greg Grandin wrote in 2013,

“Chávez’s social base was diverse and heterodox, what social scientists in the 1990s began to celebrate as ‘new social movements,’ distinct from established trade unions and peasant organizations vertically linked to — and subordinated to — political parties or populist leaders: neighborhood councils; urban and rural homesteaders, feminists, gay and lesbian rights organizations, economic justice activists, environmental coalitions; breakaway unions and the like. It’s these organizations, in Venezuela and elsewhere throughout the region, that have over the last few decades done heroic work in democratizing society, in giving citizens venues to survive the extremes of neoliberalism and to fight against further depredations, turning Latin America into one of the last global bastion of the Enlightenment left.”

Shortly after Chávez was inaugurated, Venezuelan citizens voted to replace their 1961 constitution with a new document that “expanded the rights of all Venezuelans, formally recognized the rights and privileges of historically marginalized groups, reorganized government institutions and powers, and highlighted the government’s responsibility in working towards participatory democracy and social justice.” This Bolivarian constitution includes mechanisms by which the document can be revised by the people through nation-wide participatory democracy. In 2007, for example, a series of constitutional reforms were debated for 47 days at more than 9,000 public events before a referendum finally took place.

At the height of the American civil rights movement, charismatic black liberation leader Malcolm X issued a powerful ultimatum — “the ballot or the bullet” — in his famous 1964 speech. The metaphor of the proverbial “ballot” and “bullet” can be useful in recognizing both the political and the physical dimensions of socialist struggle. A historical example of these two seemingly disparate themes merging was the short-lived alliance between Chile (“the ballot”) and Cuba (“the bullet”) in the early 1970s, iconically symbolized when revolutionary leader Fidel Castro gifted a personalized AK-47 to democratically-elected socialist president Salvador Allende.

But movements do not have to choose between these two options exclusively. Broadly speaking, Venezuela’s revolution emerged through the ballot box and was later protected through armed defense, whereas Cuba’s revolution was itself an armed struggle that would later evolve through ballot initiatives and grassroots democracy.

The ongoing Cuban and Venezuelan revolutions are impressive enough by themselves, but the material conditions they arose from and the hardships they have endured make them utterly awe-inspiring. Unfortunately, socialism doesn’t develop in a vacuum. It doesn’t grow in a petri dish. Building international socialism brings with it the baggage of constant imperialist assaults aimed at exploiting labor and extracting resources on behalf of global capital.

Now a spectre is haunting Washington — the spectre of the Monroe Doctrine. In its belligerent re-imagining of the 19th century foreign policy staple, the Trump administration has demonized and attacked the sovereignty of both Cuba and Venezuela. In conjunction with a new round of economic sanctions against the so-called “troika of tyranny”, former National Security Advisor and Bush-era war criminal John Bolton claimed last April that the “Monroe Doctrine is alive and well.”

Bolton also announced that the U.S. would reintroduce the Helms-Burton Act — a 1996 law that allows American citizens to file claims related to properties that were nationalized after the Cuban Revolution. However, as Dr. Arturo Lopez-Levy opined, “It is not the United States government’s responsibility or place to force the […] Cuban government to prioritize compensating Cuban right-wing exiles over demands for other reparations, such as for slavery or any of the many other abuses committed in Cuban history before or after 1959.” Furthermore, as author Saul Landau observed, “By 1991, […] the Castro government had settled claims with most of the nations whose properties it had confiscated and offered terms to U.S. companies as well.”

In addition, the Trump administration began restricting U.S. travel to the island in June and revived the half-century-long economic blockade that was briefly loosened under the Obama administration. These Cold War-inspired policies are certainly draconian, but it seems the American regime’s primary target is Cuba’s oil-rich ally across the Caribbean Sea. As John Bolton himself admitted, “It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.”

After winning the Venezuelan presidential election in May of 2018, Nicolás Maduro was sworn in on January 10, 2019 to begin his second term in office. Then, on January 22, Juan Guaidó — a man whom 81% of Venezuelans had never heard of — suddenly declared himself “interim president.” Although Guaidó did not run in any presidential election, American politicians and pundits quickly praised this brazen U.S.-backed coup attempt, some even insisting “this is our backyard!” Washington’s latest regime-change effort in the Bolivarian Republic has thus far failed, but the Trump administration’s brutal economic sanctions have killed an estimated 40,000 Venezuelans in just one year.

Despite this rampant imperialism, there have been notable solidarity efforts — both between Cuba and Venezuela as well as internationally. However, in its overall capacity for both relevant material analysis and tangible solidarity, the American Left has gone astray. Steve Stiffler contends that the U.S. Left’s failure to properly frame Chavismo allowed right-wing propaganda to gain control of the narrative. This defeat in the realm of discourse led not only to the empowerment of far-right forces on the ground in Venezuela, but to a diminishment of the socialist support from within the empire that was once reliable.

An indispensable historical model we should look to for guidance is the Venceremos Brigade. In 1969, a group of young American radicals volunteered their manual labor to assist with Cuba’s sugar harvest in the wake of the crippling U.S. embargo. This primary delegation to the island included 216 brigadistas who helped cut sugar cane for six weeks. Since then, the Venceremos (“we shall overcome”) Brigade spearheaded solidarity efforts between Americans and Cubans, bringing in more than 10,000 people to engage in agricultural work, construction, and other projects. Former brigadista Diana Block recently recounted, “I had traveled to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade in 1977. At that time many radical U.S. political organizations looked to Cuba, and other global anti-colonial struggles, for inspiration and direction. Following Cuba’s lead, international solidarity was recognized as a key organizing principle.”

During my brief trip to Havana last summer I toured Museo de la Revolución, which was still a work in progress. A sizable mural of Fidel speaking to a crowd rested against a banister as workers on scaffolds renovated the neighboring room. After examining the intriguing exhibits, I browsed the items in the gift shop and came across a concise booklet entitled Notes on Che Guevara’s Ideas on Pedagogy by Linda Martí, Ph.D. In it, Martí emphasized the role of a humanistic philosophy in socialist society:

“Is humanism present in every daily decision made by every citizen of our country? Is this concept of a humanist conscience the basis of every analysis made of services, production, or education? Collectivism, as a new personality trait and an expression of humanism in interpersonal relations, was the object of study, inquiry, and experimentation of Che’s theory and praxis.”

Humanism — in an internationalist sense — can motivate the more privileged Western leftists among us to stand in solidarity with independent socialist projects of the Global South and denounce the neo-colonialist tendencies of the ruling classes. Our struggle, after all, is global. Whether utilizing the ballot, the bullet, or both, we should work toward the liberation of all people and consign Eurocentric rubbish like the Monroe Doctrine to the dustbin of history.

How Quebec’s Nationalist Movement Became the Spearhead of Racist Militancy

By Andre-Philippe Dore

Once at the vanguard of social justice struggles in Québec, the nationalist tendency is now one of the strongest components of the racist right-wing in the province. It has almost completely abandoned the fight for political and economic emancipation to concentrate on cultural politics, fighting against immigration, liberty of religion and other topics also cherished by the fascist right. While some would easily condemn nationalism in itself, going back into the history of Québec's fight for independence seems necessary to understand how Québec's liberation movement transformed itself into the reactionary force it is today.

Québec's independence struggle goes back to an old tradition of anti-British revolts like the Patriotes' rebellion of 1837-1838 or pamphleteers' writings from the early 1900s. Its golden age was situated in the 60s and 70s when groups of many horizons - from conservatives to communists - led the struggle up to a referendum in 1980 - which wasn't victorious.

The large array of pro-sovereignty groups was definitely left-leaning : at the far-left was the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ), which had a complicated and utterly action-packed history. With ties to the Black Panthers, Algerian revolutionaries and Palestinian freedom fighters, the FLQ relied on guerrilla tactics - robbing banks, kidnapping government members and blowing up many symbols of British imperialism. Also in the left hemisphere was the Rassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale which sometimes quoted Ho Chi Minh, used the term "socialist" without shame and fought side-by-side with unions against the Anglo-Canadian bourgeoisie. Less well-known were other left-wing groups like the Action socialiste pour l'indépendance du Québec, Québec's Socialist Party or Andrée Ferretti's Front de libération populaire, all influenced by Marxist writers such as Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi.

However, there where other groups that did not want to be associated with the left-wing of the movement, for example the Alliance Laurentienne - a catholic party of intellectuals - or Gilles Grégoire's Ralliement national - a populist party formed by proponents of the social credit theory and dissidents of the Rassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale who did not want to be involved with a party ran by an agnostic, leftist homosexual. TheRalliement national would finally merge with the Mouvement souveraineté-association - a newly formed group with René Lévesque as its leader. Lévesque - a young rising star in left reformist politics - had just left the Liberal Party because its establishment refused to back Québec's plea for independence. He then went on to create the Parti Québécois (PQ) in 1968.

This new party would be the main vehicle for the official and electoral struggle for Québec's sovereignty. Even though Lévesque's point of view on the national question was pretty moderate as he favored the negotiation of a new deal with Canada's government instead of seceding right away - many members of the radical left joined the Parti Québécois. Formerly living in clandestinity because of its involvement with the FLQ, Pierre Vallières publicly joined the side of Lévesque's legal struggle, as Pierre Bourgault - leader of the Rassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale - already did, enjoining the 14 000 members of his party to do the same. For many intellectuals and activists, the Crise d'octobre - which saw the Canadian army invade the streets of Québec and jail almost anyone who actively supported Québec's independence- was a traumatic event, leading them to abandon radical militancy and join social-democrat struggles. Groups who advocated armed struggle for national liberation began to disappear as their members joined either anti-secession Maoist groups like En lutte! - led by the former FLQ member Charles Gagnon - or reformist parties and unions.

The PQ went from a marginal party - as he won only 7 seats during the election of 1970 - to forming the government in 1976. This electoral victory led to a referendum in 1980 which resulted in a win for the federalists since 59% of the voters chose the No option. The referendum question illustrated well the moderate turn of nationalist politics, as it was a nuanced and hesitating text. Against the left-leaning wing of the party, led by Jacques Parizeau - who had been throughout his life both sympathizer of a communist party and banker - opposed it, Lévesque and his party asked the following :

''Le Gouvernement du Québec a fait connaître sa proposition d'en arriver, avec le reste du Canada, à une nouvelle entente fondée sur le principe de l'égalité des peuples ; cette entente permettrait au Québec d'acquérir le pouvoir exclusif de faire ses lois, de percevoir ses impôts et d'établir ses relations extérieures, ce qui est la souveraineté, et, en même temps, de maintenir avec le Canada une association économique comportant l'utilisation de la même monnaie ; aucun changement de statut politique résultant de ces négociations ne sera réalisé sans l'accord de la population lors d'un autre référendum ; en conséquence, accordez-vous au Gouvernement du Québec le mandat de négocier l'entente proposée entre le Québec et le Canada ?"

Although the main voice for the nationalist camp in Québec's media was the PQ's , many initiatives were carried by other supporters of the Yes option. The referendum campaign saw the implication of members of the Communist Party of Québec, of the Combat socialiste's Trotskyists and other far-left activists. Another part of the left opposed that option however, for example the Nouveau Parti démocratique du Québec - a marginal social-democrat party who supported the unity of Canada.

After the defeat of the Yes option, René Lévesque and Claude Morin, an informant for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, proposed what they named « Beau risque ». This would lead the PQ to support the Canadian Progressive Conservative Party - who proposed a mix of free market and conservatism - since its leader Brian Mulroney promised to amend the Canadian constitution to give Québec a special status in it. Québec as a matter of fact never signed the Canadian constitution since it was forced upon the province by an agreement between all the other provinces' premiers, the Canadian premier Pierre-Elliot Trudeau, the British House of Commons and the Queen of England. Many members of the PQ - including progressive MPs like Jacques Parizeau, Camille Laurin and Louise Harel - left the party. The void created by this exodus gave the right wing of the party a more prominent role. Overtly capitalist and anti-union individuals like Lucien Bouchard came to be public figures of the nationalist struggle, leading to the creation of the Bloc Québécois which participated in federal elections as the main representative of the nationalist forces. While advocating left-leaning ideas from time to time to allure their remaining left-leaning base, the Bloc's staff was mostly composed of right-wing activists that were formerly members of the Canadian Liberal Party and the Progressive Conservative Party.

With an even more moderate Lévesque apace with the right-wing Bouchard, the nationalist side never went to propose a deal to the federal government that would satisfy Québec's population and the other provinces'. Instead, the PQ went on to rule as a candid provincial government, even importing capitalist repression tactics usually withheld as the party was said to have a « préjugé favorable envers les travailleurs » (a favorable bias toward workingmen). As 1982 began, Lévesque's government cut in social programs, tried to lower the salaries of the state employees and went at war with unions, as it voted laws to forbid certain strikes that were supported by a large part of the population. Lévesque would retire in 1985 to see Jacques Parizeau make his comeback and take his place 2 years later. The new leadership of the PQ then refocused the party around its raison d'être : to liberate Québec from the colonialist state of Canada.

Parizeau worked with his new ally, Lucien Bouchard, until the 1995 referendum, which resulted in a victory for the No option with 50,58% of the vote. Parizeau - as promised - retired after this defeat and left the gate open for Bouchard to take the leadership of the PQ. Bouchard, as he became the new Premier of Québec, shamelessly favored right-wing policies by imposing austerity measures : he took stances against unions, reduced the growth of the minimum wage and allowed his friend Paul Desmarais to concentrate even more the media outlets of the province. Nowadays, Bouchard is still a zealot of capitalism. He often accused the Quebecers of not working enough while he - since 2011 - had been a lobbyist for an oil consortium, an advisor for the highest paid physicians in the province and a negotiator for a paper company on behalf of the government (he was paid half a million for this last job).

As he went on with his plan to put Québec's independence on the back burner and concentrate on reducing the state spending by 10%, left-wing nationalists, socialists, feminists and alter-globalization militants formed groups that would later merge to create Québec solidaire - a left electoral party who supports Québec's emancipation from Canada. The PQ's change of reign in the 2000s would not rehabilitate the party for these numerous activists who disliked the politics of Lucien Bouchard just as much as those of his successor Bernard Landry - a bourgeois par excellence who became Premier in 2001. Leftists fled the party throughout the decade, while those staying in the organization claimed that other parties were only there to ruin the cause of Québec's liberation since they divided the nationalist vote.

It took up until 2012 for the PQ to be reelected with 31.95% of the popular vote. The student strike which lasted well over 100 days earlier that year permitted Pauline Marois to become Premier, as she supported the student cause and promised to cancel the tuition fees hike that caused the strike in the forst place. However, when she betrayed her electorate by indexing the tuition fees, kneeling before the mining industry and selling the Anticosti Island to a gas company, Marois' support diminished drastically. Bernard Drainville - her minister of « Democratic Institutions and Active Citizenship » - found the inspiration to wave the false flag of an Islamic menace, reminiscing the 2008 rise of the populist right-wing formation, the Action démocratique du Québec, who then almost won its election with this precise tactic. These straw man politics were to allow the PQ a gain of support from a right electorate normally voting for federalist parties while the young citizens turned toward the inclusive Québec solidaire.

Drainville proposed a « Charter of Québec Values » or, in other words, a law that regulates where and when people - especially Muslims - can wear religious symbols or pieces of clothing that cover the head (with the exception of small Christian crosses). Many supporters of this law - that never passed - would later be members of neo-fascist or anti-immigration groups like La Meute,Storm Alliance or the Fédération des Québécois de souche. Among those was also the young Alexandre Bissonnette, a right-wing supporter of Drainville who would kill 7 people at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Québec City in 2017. Despite that draft law which secured them numerous racist allies, the PQ lost 24 seats in the 2014 elections since it had lost the support of non-bureaucratic unions, students, radical nationalists, POCs, Indigenous people, ecologists and feminists. On an obvious decline, the PQ continued to try to appeal to an afraid population by using a xenophobic rhetoric carried by Jean-François Lisée - a then-communist now-chauvinist who would become leader of the PQ in 2016.

During that Charter episode, most of Québec's media (possessed mainly by two companies) went on to unofficially, but conspicuously, endorse an anti-Islam line. The student strike being over, columnists like Richard Martineau, Lise Ravary or Christian Rioux had to find another scapegoat. An already marginalized population like the Muslims was an easy target for racist groups fueled by media propaganda. Pig heads were dropped in front of mosques and hidjab-wearing women were harassed, but many media defended these hate crimes by repeatedly claiming they were only bad taste jokes. Indeed, the hate crimes against the Black and Muslim population in Québec rose from 2014 and onwards according to Statistics Canada.

Having dropped the idea of Québec's independence to prioritize its populist anti-immigration turn, the PQ lost its members to a more openly xenophobic and capitalistic formation: the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) - a party formed by conservatives with the ex-PQ minister François Legault as its head. In 2018, the CAQ formed a majority government and imposed Bill 21 on June 14 2019, which forbids teachers and many other state employees to wear religious symbols.

Still relying on its racist discourse, the PQ is nowadays the only opposition party that supports this law - regardless of the fact that their popularity is radically going down since they began to employ this approach. Now with only 9 seats, making it the fourth party in importance, the PQ is on his deathbed. Instead of defending nationalism by working to build the country of Québec, it has aligned with far-right groups' political narrative. For them, the State must defend the population against ethnic diversity and Islam. However, because of the many disguises the xenophobic movements have put on these discriminatory practices - invoking laicity, Québec values and other ideological euphemisms - it took years for antifascist and antiracist groups to gain some legitimacy in the struggle against discriminatory law projects.

Instead, it was mostly moderate humanist groups that fought against these laws, leaving to the radicals the fight against overtly fascist organizations like Atalante Québec. These days, however, groups from a large spectrum of the left are allying to resist against Bill 21 and the Legault government. They are less and less afraid to point out mainstream right-wingers as racists. As the years go by, it is more and more difficult for ethnic nationalists to legitimate their movement since Quebecers have been fed their « we're not racists, but… » rhetoric to a point it cannot ingest more without taking a stance toward either chauvinism or internationalism.

Québec's situation is not bright with the CAQ in power and neo-fascist groups growing influence in the streets, but now there are counter-movements organizing. On June 19, Montreal activists proclaimed the beginning of a hunger strike to protest Bill 21. In Québec City, an anti-Bill 21 coalition was formed on the initiative of muslim women, students and other feminists. Against the media-fueled xenophobia put forward by the government, a small but significative spectrum of the population is now determined to pinpoint the fact that the nationalist movement in the province is no more a progressive-looking and liberty monger set of forces, but a proper conservative anti-immigration movement.

More Than Words: Formulating Slogans for the Struggle

By Derek R. Ford

This originally appeared at Liberation School .

Slogans play a key role in all political activities, whether they be local demonstrations, pickets, strikes, or mass movements. While the fact that slogans are short might make it seem as though they're of minor importance or a mere matter of semantics, the fact is that slogans can be decisive factors in individual and more protracted political struggles, for movements for reform and revolution.

Slogans aren't just words that we put on banners and placards. They are tools to orient and guide political activity-including mass outreach-to unite different sectors of the movement, to educate people by helping them reach their own conclusions, and to educate the Party by revealing the consciousness of the people.

As crystallizations of complex situations and ideas, slogans distill political theory and strategy into concise formulas; they can't say everything. Because struggles are dynamic, they have to be re-evaluated constantly. A slogan could be correct one day and incorrect the next.

All of this means that slogans can have real, material consequences. They can advance a struggle or move it backwards, alienate people or draw them in, communicate the truth or deceive.

Whether a slogan is correct or not isn't an abstract question, but a concrete one. A slogan can be theoretically correct, in that it communicates a political truth, yet still be practically incorrect because it doesn't relate this truth to the specific conditions of struggle at that time.

Slogans have to be accessible to the broad masses of people, not only in terms of wording but in terms of the content establishing a point of contact with people's consciousness. This doesn't mean that they cater to the "lowest common denominator," but that they speak to the broadest possible segments of the movement. In other words, Marxists don't create slogans for ourselves and other Marxists, but for the masses. They're teaching tools.

Like all propaganda, slogans have different scales. They might be specific to one struggle in one town or city at one moment, or they might have national and international relevance. Some slogans take the form of demands, while others take the form of statements.

The purpose of this article is to flesh out the above elements and functions of slogans, and to illustrate the critical roles they assume during concrete struggles. This is illustrated most clearly in the twists and turns of the revolutionary struggle in Russia as it unfolded in 1917. In the final sections, we give some more contemporary examples and then walk through some guiding questions to aid in the formulation of slogans.

Lenin on slogans: All power to the Soviets!

In the middle of July 1917, Lenin published a short pamphlet "On Slogans" (note: in this section we use the Julian calendar dates). In it, he reflected on the recent drastic shift in dynamics and the corresponding need for new slogans:

"Too often has it happened that, when history has taken a sharp turn, even progressive parties have for some time been unable to adapt themselves to the new situation and have repeated slogans which had formerly been correct but had now lost all meaning-lost it as 'suddenly' as the sharp turn in history was 'sudden.'
Something of the sort seems likely to recur in connection with the slogan calling for the transfer of all state power to the Soviets. That slogan was correct during a period of our revolution-say, from February 27 to July 4-that has now passed irrevocably. It has patently ceased to be correct now. Unless this is understood, it is impossible to understand anything of the urgent questions of the day. Every particular slogan must be deduced from the totality of specific features of a definite political situation."

The slogan, "All power to the Soviets," which Lenin first proposed in his April Theses, was at this moment no longer correct because it no longer corresponded to the balance of forces. It could no longer lead the movement forward. On the contrary, it would actually lead the movement into the hands of counter-revolution. As of mid-July, it was a deceitful slogan.

The last sentence quoted above bears repeating: "Every particular slogan must be deduced from the totality of specific features of a definite political situation."

Only by soberly assessing the current political dynamics can the Party form a correct slogan. As these dynamics unfold, the Party must re-evaluate and, when necessary, withdraw, modify, or create new slogans.

To better appreciate Lenin's writing on slogans, it's helpful to review the evolution of the Bolshevik's slogans during the earlier months.

The February 1917 revolution overthrew Czarist rule and instituted a situation of dual power, a totally unique situation in which power rested both in the new Provisional Government and the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' deputies. The real power rested in the Soviets, a grassroots democracy that derived its authority from the workers, peasants, sailors, and soldiers. They were composed of various political parties, and in the early days of 1917 the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and Mensheviks, both of whom were social democrats of one stripe or another, were the dominating forces. The Provisional Government-charged with organizing democratic elections-was dominated by the Constitutional Democratic Party, or Cadets, which favored a constitutional monarchy with workers' rights. While it's composition changed throughout the year, it also had representatives of other parties, including the SRs (beginning in March) and the Mensheviks (beginning in April).

Lenin described this situation as dual power, as power was divided between these two forces-which he called the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (the Provisional Government) and the nascent dictatorship of the workers (the Soviets)-and there was a more or less stable agreement between them. There was an unprecedented level of political freedom at that time, as communists were able to openly agitate, organize, and protest.

When he returned to Russia from exile in April, Lenin put forward the slogan "All power to the Soviets." He was initially rebuffed within the Party for this slogan (and for the April Theses), but through political explanation won Party members over. The Bolsheviks also withdrew their previous slogan, "Turn the imperialist war into a civil war" at that time.

To understand the significance of this slogan and the work it did, there are a few things to note. Most obviously, the slogan advocated that power should be transferred from the Provisional Government to the Soviets, not that the Soviets should overthrow the government. The Provisional Government was weak and required the consent of the Soviets to rule. The slogan meant that the Bolsheviks should direct all of their energy to building up the power of the Soviets and their influence within them. Further, the slogan was a message to the masses who made up the Soviets: you, the working people and the oppressed, have power and can take it! You don't need the Provisional Government!

"All power to the Soviets" also expressed total opposition to the Provisional Government. This contrasted with the SRs and Mensheviks, who called for confidence in the Provisional Government.

What is particularly interesting is that, at this time, not only were the Bolsheviks the minority of the Soviets, but the Executive Commission of the Soviet of Soldiers' Deputies was actually passing resolutions denouncing Lenin and the Bolsheviks at that time, equating their propaganda with that of the Monarchists. Why would the Bolshevik's call for all power to be transferred to an institution they have no real power in?

The slogan anticipated the inevitability of an open struggle between the government and the Soviets. The Bolsheviks knew that, due to their political orientation, the SRs and Mensheviks wouldn't be able to straddle both forms of power forever. They would have to make choices-through actions and words-and these choices would expose them before the masses. The slogan anticipated certain developments.

Through one crisis after another, the incompatibility of dual power sharpened, and each time the SRs and Mensheviks sided with the imperialist bourgeoisie in the Provisional Government rather than the workers and oppressed in the Soviets. In this way, the slogan was meant to educate the movement, not by lecturing the people with one viewpoint over and over, but by helping them come to their own conclusions based on their own experiences.

During the first crisis in late April-when the streets erupted in protests and meetings, and reactionary elements led by military officers and The Black Hundreds attacked workers-one section of the Bolsheviks marched under the slogan "Down with the provisional government," until the local central committee intervened and ordered them to retract it.

At first, the slogan might appear similar to or compatible with "All power to the Soviets." After all, if there are two powers, calling for all power to one implies zero power to the other, which would result in that power's downfall. But the slogans are different in crucial ways. In a resolution adopted immediately after the protests ended, the Central Committee wrote that the slogan, "Down with the provisional government" was "an incorrect one at the present moment because, in the absence of a solid (i.e., a class-conscious and organised) majority of the people on the side of the revolutionary proletariat, such a slogan is either an empty phrase, or objectively, amounts to attempts of an adventurist character."

It's not that the slogan was wrong in the abstract or for all time, but that it was inappropriate and premature relative to the existing political situation. It didn't do anything to educate or advance the struggle and it unnecessarily left the Party vulnerable to accusations that it wanted to mount a violent insurrection (accusations that appeared in rival newspapers in the following days).

That the Party issued contrasting slogans revealed a weakness in its internal organization and unity, which in turn resulted in a lack of organization and unity in the movement.

The crisis ended when the SRs and Mensheviks cracked under pressure, and got the Soviets to vote confidence in the government. As part of the deal, six SRs and Mensheviks joined the government as ministers. While "All power to the Soviets" remained in effect, they advanced new slogans, including "Down with the 10 capitalist ministers." By framing it this way, the Bolsheviks weren't still weren't calling for an overthrow of the government. They also weren't concentrating their agitation against the six "socialist" ministers collaborating with the imperialists. Instead, the slogan called on the SRs and Mensheviks to break with the imperialists in the government. In so doing, the slogan continued to expose the vacillation of the SRs and Mensheviks and their inability to provide the peace, land, and bread that the masses needed and demanded.

The Bolsheviks advanced these slogans during the next large protest on June 18, which Lenin said at the time marked at "turning point" in the movement because of the political maturity of the demonstrators. It was a short but mass demonstration during which the Bolsheviks' slogans clearly prevailed. Putting the slogans into the streets allowed the Bolsheviks to take the temperature of the movement, to evaluate the level of consciousness amongst the masses.

Slogans are thus a two-way street that not only educate the masses, but also educate the Party.

Just a few weeks later, in what's known as the "July Days," workers staged the most militant demonstrations yet, almost to the point of insurrection. Many workers called on the Bolsheviks to take power at that moment, but they refused because the actions were too concentrated in Petrograd and the Bolsheviks were still in the minority in the Soviets. Pro-government forces opened fire on the workers and burned the Bolshevik's printing press and headquarters.

While there wasn't a large-scale massacre, the events were another turning point in the struggle. The relative peace and freedom ushered in by the February Revolution was broken. There was no more dual power, and no other alternative than to prepare for an armed uprising. This was the moment that Lenin penned his short article "On Slogans" quoted from above.

Later, when the contours of power changed again, the Bolsheviks reintroduced the slogan. In late August, Lavr Kornilov, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army, attempted a coup against the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government. To defeat the coup, the Soviets and the government actually armed the Bolsheviks, who created red guards. They didn't want to, but they knew the Bolsheviks had the most militant workers on their side. In the face of the red guards, Kornilov's troops backed down. No blood was shed, but a new period began. The Bolsheviks now had the majority in the Soviets of Petrograd, Moscow, and elsewhere.

Under these new conditions, "All power to the Soviets" indicated a preparation for the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks.

The role of slogans in the US anti-war movement

Again, slogans are critical for the development of any movement or struggle under any conditions, including non-revolutionary times. They should speak to people, drawing them into the struggle and moving their consciousness forward.

Whenever struggles unfold, so too do contradictions. Different political forces and ideologies fight to win people over and to push the movement in particular directions. In general, whichever ideologies are dominant in society will also be dominant in mass movements, as those forces have the most resources at their disposal. The ruling class in the United States today has the most refined and extensive ideological apparatus of any ruling class in history.

They have a sophisticated ability to absorb and channel discontent. The bourgeoisie, through its liberal wing, proposes their own slogans that funnel outrage and prevent revolutionary consciousness from taking hold.

During the first war against Iraq, the liberal slogan in the anti-war movement was "Economic sanctions, not war." This was a smart slogan because it was accessible for people who were opposed to war, and then moved them into supporting economic sanctions by presenting it as an alternative to war. It worked to prevent the development of principled opposition to war by latching onto a tactical split within the ruling class and trying to draw people into one side of this split.

The opposing slogan was "No war against Iraq." It was honest and straightforward. It was principled yet appealed to the broadest number of people. It encompassed an opposition to economic sanctions, allowing us to show that they were merely another form of warfare. This, in turn, showed the class character of the conflict.

Another key difference concerns the longevity of each slogan. When the actual bombing campaign ended, the slogan "Economic sanctions, not war" was realized. Everyone who was mobilized under that slogan could, as a result, leave the struggle and stop organizing. For those who mobilized under the slogan "No war against Iraq," however, the struggle continued because the war continued by other means. This latter slogan was oriented toward building a sustained anti-war movement, while the former slogan was oriented toward preventing such a movement. Because it flowed from a Leninist analysis of imperialism, it anticipated the continuation of war.

History confirmed that we needed this long-term orientation. The sanctions regime devastated Iraq and its people throughout the 1990s. Contrasted with the pro-sanctions slogan, the "No war against Iraq" slogan allowed people to see exactly how economic sanctions are a war tactic. In the early 2000s the imperialist tactics shifted again.

As the second war against Iraq approached, our slogans were "No war against Iraq" and "Stop the war before it starts. When Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003, our slogans changed to "Bring the troops home now" and "Occupation is not liberation." These slogans were principled in their opposition to war and refused to capitulate to imperialist arguments for "lesser measures" like inspections and sanctions, and to imperialist propaganda that demonized the Iraqi resistance.

Further, the "Occupation is not liberation" slogan in particular allowed people to see links between the occupation of Iraq and the occupation of Palestine. At the time this was a controversial connection to make, even in the progressive movement. The liberal section of the anti-war movement split off largely because this focus alienated them from the Democratic Party.

It's commonplace for liberals and other left forces to advance compromising or confused slogans to prevent anti-imperialist consciousness from growing. For example, during the US/NATO war against Libya in 2011 one segment of the left advocated the slogan, "Yes to the rebels, no to the intervention." This deceived people into thinking that the rebels were opposed to intervention, when they were actually the ones calling for intervention. They also mobilized around, "Down with Gaddafi." This was the exact same slogan as the imperialists. By contrast, our slogan was "Stop the bombing of Libya." Because this bombing was justified under "humanitarian" pretexts that included the demonization of Gaddafi and the Libyan government, the slogan rejected this demonization campaign.

Formulating slogans: Methods of approach and questions to consider

If carefully chosen, straightforward and simple slogans are effective because they can facilitate effective united fronts in different struggles. Slogans should be uncompromising and principled, yet formulated in a popular and accessible way that can advance mass consciousness.

To begin formulating slogans, it makes sense to first assess the different dynamics at play. When a struggle-or the possibility of one-surfaces, think: What's the immediate issue at hand? What are the larger, or systemic causes manifesting in the issue; who and what are responsible? What are different segments of society thinking about it? What is the bourgeoisie rallying around? To learn what the bourgeoisie or its different sectors think, all you have to do is read the newspaper. Are there left-liberal groups anywhere nationally engaged in a similar struggle, and if so, what are their slogans? You can find this on social media. What are people in your area thinking? To find this out, you have to speak with the people. Beyond speaking with coworkers, family, and friends, you could do a poll or survey at a bus station about the issue.

What would it take to resolve the problem, both in the immediate and long term? What, in other words, are your demands? What do they have in common? What do you want people to learn from your slogans? What do you want people to understand, and how best can you help them understand? How can you phrase them so that they can rally the most people together?

Sometimes slogans start off basic and gain greater specificity later. In general, it's better to start out broader. It's common for two or three different slogans to guide a movement, and usually one of them is quite broad ("No war against Syria," or "Justice for Trayvon"). Others that accompany it will flesh out some component of it. For example, "No to the demonization of Syrian government" is necessary for opposing war against Syria, because the demonization campaign is part of the war drive.

There are also different "levels" of slogans. One slogan might address a specific and immediate demand, while another simultaneously addresses the more systemic causes.

Let's say you're organizing a struggle around housing problems in your town or city. One slogan might focus on a particular component of the problem ("Zero tolerance for slumlords," "Tenants' rights now") or a particular target ("No tax breaks for X developer"). At the same time, another slogan might focus on the foundational causes of the problem ("Housing is a human right"). These two different levels work together and can help people make the connections between the specific manifestation and its general cause (the only way to really eliminate slumlords is to make housing a guaranteed right), or the specific remedy and the more foundational and permanent remedy (getting rid of slumlords is part of the struggle for socialism).

Slogans aren't comprehensive political platforms. It might be helpful to think about the slogan as a frame and the political platform as the picture within the frame. The frame encompasses the picture, allows the viewer to see it, and directs the viewer's attention to it (in a museum, you know to look at something if it's framed).

In the same way, the slogan should frame the issue at hand, directing people's attention to it and inviting them in. Within the frame, you'll paint a more intricate and nuanced picture with leaflets, speeches, and other propaganda and agitational materials.

Exploitation and oppression are deepening, and the capitalist ideologies are increasingly unable to provide excuses for the system. As a consequence, people are taking action and looking for real explanations and alternatives. By advancing proper slogans, we can mobilize people and deepen our collective understanding of the problems and their solutions.

Students, Peasants, and Communism in Colombia: An Interview with Oliver Dodd (Part Two)

By Devon Bowers

This is Part Two of our interview with Oliver Dodd, a PhD student at Nottingham University, where we expand upon his April 2019 article in the online edition of the Morning Star.

What is the current political and economic situation in Colombia?

Since the early 1990s Colombia engaged on a process of neo-liberal restructuring, largely to finance the counter-insurgency war against the powerful Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). In return for economic and military aid, the United States and the International Monetary Fund, demanded neoliberal reforms that entailed economic privatisation, liberalisation of foreign trade, financial deregulation, and reduced tariffs. As a result, Colombia's economic model today is largely extractivist and its capitalist accumulation strategy is dependent on those multinational corporations based in the core of the international political economy.

In terms of production of revenue from exports, Colombia's traditional export - coffee - which in the 1980s produced more than half of the country's export revenue, now represents only around 5% of export revenue. Currently, coal, oil and gas, make up more than 60% of export revenue. These economic changes have led to political changes. The multinational corporations invested in extractivism are overwhelmingly based in the capitalist core. The majority of the profits generated in Colombia's economy are put into the pockets of the finance capitalists, based outside Colombia. Furthermore, relative to other sectors - manufacturing (around 10%), services (around 35%), oil, coal and gas generates significantly higher profits. This trend puts multinational corporations in a stronger economic position vis-à-vis Colombia's declining national bourgeoisie. Nationally based companies are increasingly being bought out by multinational corporations, further extending foreign based influence over Colombia's economy and making the country more vulnerable to social forces organised at world order levels.

The peace accord signed with FARC in 2016 is under severe threat. Paramilitary killings of social activists since the signing of the peace agreement have increased, thousands of FARC combatants have either remobilised or refused to demobilise because of what they perceived as betrayal on the part of FARC's leadership, or the danger of paramilitary killings - more than 85 FARC ex-combatants have now been murdered since November 2016. FARC dissident leaders that have taken the hard-line position of refusing to demobilise basically argue that armed struggle is the only path to transform Colombia's political economy. In short, the 2016 peace accord has not brought peace.

However, I would argue that "peoples war" is no longer an applicable strategy in the historically specific conditions of Colombia today. The overwhelming majority of citizens live in urban areas and many of the insurgent social structures formed in the countryside have become corrupted and bureaucratised. The so-called "revolution in military affairs" (RIMA) has allowed the armed forces, notably in the form of air-power, to increasingly put the leftist insurgents on the defensive. Today satellite technology can be employed to detect guerrillas based in the mountains, let alone the countryside - where peasants, especially the youth, are increasingly departing for the towns and cities. This is not to suggest that guerrilla warfare cannot play any useful role as part of an overarching political strategy, but a military-centric strategy is becoming more difficult to implement effectively. Colombia's state, largely due to Plan Colombia and the military technology and intelligence capabilities it provided, has shown a consistent capacity to target even the most protected and important of guerrilla commanders. Until 2008, not a single member of FARC's 7-person secretariat had been killed, but since then, at least four have been successfully targeted and significant numbers of FARC's and ELN's medium level command have been killed. I know of some highly capable and politically educated leaders within the ELN, who were made "High-Valued-Targets" and very swiftly killed. This suggests to me that RIMA is changing the balance of forces in favour of the Colombian military and its main sponsor - the U.S.

There is also a significant shortage of intellectuals within both FARC dissidents' groups and the ELN, largely because they were successfully targeted by the Colombian military. This means that "militias" - those responsible for recruitment and upholding law and order in rural villages and towns, which are usually organised some distance from the more disciplined and politicised structures of the armed guerrilla units - sometimes tend to act without discipline and bring the organisations into disrepute among the civilian population. There is then, the realistic possibility that following another peace accord, these "conflict entrepreneurs" will continue to function as strictly criminal entities, thus leading to no practical end in the conflict.

ELN's strategy however, as already mentioned, does not entail a "military solution" to the conflict. Armed structures are understood by ELN as permanent, unless the conditions of class struggle within Colombia's periphery change to undermine guerrilla struggle completely - this conception of armed struggle is distinct from the more military-centred strategy of people's war, based on surrounding the cities from the countryside. The ELN's strategy implies that armed force has a utility in class struggle, not that political power will necessarily come through the barrel of a gun. This has been one of the fundamental differences in strategy between ELN and FARC for decades.

Regarding Colombia's trade-union structures, neoliberalism is making it more difficult for the labour movement to organise. On top of having a significant and dispersed informal sector in Colombia, repeated right-wing governments (I include the Santos administration here) have favoured economic growth along neoliberal lines rather than extending the political and economic rights of workers; this has amounted to government policies and a political economy that makes it harder for the trade-unions to organise, in the midst of paramilitary violence. At the same time, recent changes to agricultural economic policies have made it more difficult for peasants to earn a living, thereby increasing displacement and opening up land for capitalist investment. It is important to note that such rural-to-urban migration, of the constant supply of formerly rural labours desperately looking for work in the cities, enables urban based capitalists to benefit from the increased competition for work and therefore to keep wages low.

Even the peace agreement seems to have been conceived, to a large extent, as part of a neoliberal economic growth strategy. By signing the peace accord with FARC, multinational corporations have been able to access territories, wealthy in natural resources, which were previously governed by the FARC. Indeed, a key motivation for the accord, unveiled by the former President, Juan Manuel Santos, was that "A Colombia in peace will attract more investments that will create more and better jobs" - in other words, the neoliberal capitalist accumulation model will be strengthened because there will be no leftist insurgent forces to put pressure on international investors.

Still, the fact that Gustavo Petro placed second in the 2018 presidential elections is significant. The last time a leftist candidate in Colombia's political system challenged for president, he was assassinated - Jorge Gaitán in 1948. As such, we have seen the rise of a left-wing surge in Colombia, like in other countries - Bernie Sanders in the U.S., Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Podemos and Syriza in Spain and Greece respectfully. The current right-wing president, Iván Duque, who employed populist discourse to get elected, is being unmasked as no different from the establishment. This may create some opening for the left in the next elections, enabling it to open up some political space for the labour movement to organise a fight-back.

In what ways does the US supporting anti-guerilla efforts in Colombia linked to a larger, regional strategy push back against leftist movements in Latin America?

U.S. support for the Colombian state goes back many decades. Colombia borders five countries and, with ten U.S. military bases, permits the U.S. to effectively project its military power into Central and South American countries. Also, Colombia's economy is potentially very balanced, and benefits from several natural resources and has very fertile land for agriculture. There exist the resources to develop powerful industrial and manufacturing sectors, moving away from what is currently an economic strategy of extractivism.

A socialist state in Colombia, supported by a powerful labour movement, could have a transformative impact on Latin America and change the correlation of social class forces in favour of the socialist movement. It would be possible for a socialist government in Colombia to pursue a relatively independent political economic strategy, while focusing on economic and political independence for the region as a whole. The experience of the small and economically impoverished island of socialist Cuba on Latin America's left and labour movement - situated only ninety miles from the U.S - is an example of what a revolutionary state in the much wealthier Colombia could achieve, in terms of potentially shaping the future of the region. In other words, a left-wing or socialist-led Colombia could represent a major defeat for U.S. imperialism.

Additionally, Colombia's capitalist system is difficult to transform constitutionally, and the country boasts of having one of the longest surviving liberal-democratic systems in Latin America, although state terrorism employed against workers and peasants has remained constant throughout the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Historically, the two dominant political parties, the Liberal and Conservative party, solidly represented capitalist interests, and rarely disagreed over fundamental questions relating to economic change. These trends make Colombia a reliable ally for the U.S. in its "backyard".

For these reasons, the Colombian state has been a consistently reliable ally of the U.S. Having only ever had pro-capitalist governments, a free-trade agreement is in place, Colombia's economy is dominated by U.S. multinationals, and the state has loyally followed the U.S. government's policy of open hostility to the so-called "Pink-tide" - the surge of South American based, left-wing, anti-imperialist influence over the last two decades. In its fight against the leftist rebels, Colombia opened up its economy to U.S. corporations in return for economic and military aid. And currently, Colombia is being used as the main proxy to further aggravate the political and economic crisis in Venezuela. The dominant capitalist classes in Colombia will benefit enormously from regime change in Venezuela.

Initially, the U.S. drew on the pretext of combating drugs to justify intervention into Colombia. The U.S. State Department insisted that Plan Colombia, the U.S. military and economic initiative implemented at the start of the 1999-2002 peace negotiations with FARC, was about tackling the drug-trade. In reality, Plan Colombia was employed as a counter-insurgency measure that upgraded and restructured Colombia's armed forces and was used largely to target the leftist rebels, as opposed to the drug-cartels and right-wing paramilitaries. It also led to the major expansion of U.S. military influence in Colombian society, including the building of several U.S. military bases. In other words, the pretext of anti-drug activity, and then anti-guerrilla activity, was exploited by the U.S. to establish a base of political, military and economic influence in a strategically located country of South America.

Where can people learn more about ELN and your own work?

There is a momentous amount of work on the armed conflict and the insurgent groups published in Colombia. Unfortunately, very little of this work has been translated from Spanish into English. This needs to be rectified, and I am surprised that so little effort has been put into this process of translation, as it would allow international audiences to learn about Colombia's complicated history - Colombia is understood as an "outlier" in politics and international relations scholarship. Indeed, the depth of Colombian scholarship on the armed conflict is strong.

Regarding the ELN in the Spanish language, "La Guerrilla Por Dentro" by Jaime Arenas, a former ELN guerrilla gives an insider perspective on the first stages of the movements' formation. Darío Villamizar has also published, in Spanish, one of the key histories of the several insurgent movements in Colombia. Carlos Medina, in addition to other important works on the ELN, has just written a history of ELN's ideas from 1958 to 2018, in Spanish, where he talks about the worker-peasant-student alliance. Carlos Medina's works are very detailed and significant; relatively little has been written on the ELN in any language. I haven't come across a book dedicated to understanding the ELN's trajectory in English, but the journal article by Gruber and Pospisil, entitled "'Ser Eleno': Insurgent identity formation in the ELN", vigorously contests some of the significant misconceptions about the movement.

I am in the first year of my PhD at Nottingham University working on Colombia's 2016 peace agreement with FARC, which analyses the underlying dynamics from a historical materialist perspective. My MA dissertation, slightly modified, was published in the Midlands Historical Review and can be found online. I have also written two journalistic pieces on the ELN in the Morning Star newspaper. I am currently working on a journal article relating to the "political" inside the ELN - challenging the narrative that the ELN has "lost its way" and merely become a criminal entity - based on my five months of ethnographic research in 2015. My blog about armed conflict in Colombia can be found online at http://www.colombianconflict.com

Decolonial Resistance in Hip Hop: Re-Colonial Resistances, Love, and Wayward Self-Determination

By Joe Hinton

Although many forms of black expressive culture contain elements of political resistance, hip hop is a form that has been recognized by numerous scholars for its unique, complex, and nuanced forms of offering political discourse. As Damon Sajnani notes, the origins of hip hop are inherently political, specifically rooted in the politics of the "decolonization of local urban space". Hip Hop today, the most popular genre in the United States (if not the world), is quite disconnected from these political roots in a radical anti-colonial politic built through creating livelihood out of structure-based psychological pain.

What is the nature of resistance in hip hop, and what do scholars have to say about its current status? Many note that hip hop has been co-opted by a white-controlled market and has been manipulated so as to promote limited narratives of Blackness, many of which are derived from minstrel tropes. Sometimes, these tropes can be manifested as partial resistances to white-supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal settler-colonialism. Sometimes, when they rely on European notions of political resistance that are either inherently capitalistic or statist/nationalist, they reify colonial structures and are thus re-colonial. Sometimes they flip the narrative of oppression or expose it for what it is, as Tricia Rose notes, but do so in a way that constitutes a solid first step to resistance but does not completely answer the question of how one wants to exist and live in a world beyond the reality of this oppression.

In my eyes, the only types of resistant expressive culture that can actually spur Black liberation must create alternative visions that denounce resistances that rely on other closely related forms of oppression and toxic psychologies. Building off the ideas of Cornel West, Zoe Samudzi, and William C. Anderson, these visions must be centered in both collective love and individualist, wayward, and deviant lifestyle choices. By wayward and deviant, I mean prone to reject the boxes imposed by American culture and its depictions of Blackness. I draw on the idea that Black and indigenous people in the United States exist liminally, not as citizens. This means that as the state is functioned to precipitate our extinction and/or suffering and to prevent our full integration into the benefits of society, and that our existence as colonial subjects, regardless of socioeconomic advancement, renders our status perpetually ambiguous and subject to a constantly uncertain chaos and threat of violence that reinforces a spiritual feeling of collective subordination. This chaos can be overcome by a moment of creation and establishment of what the state deprives us of and excludes us from: self-love. Hip Hop originally sought to achieve this, but it has been co-opted by the market and the limited narratives it promotes, with some notable exceptions. Once based in love, and dedicated to the creation of love-based communities, these forms of culture can help spur mobilization against white-supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal settler-colonialism (WSCPSC) to defend ourselves against it and eventually overthrow it; or, more immediately, find a way to create communities that employ social rules and customs that promote Black and indigenous love, rather than relying on the false promises of liberal reformism and partial resistances.

Although it remains true that hip hop has been co-opted by a powerful white media establishment, it also remains true that hip hop is an inherently resistant genre in that it constantly engages with the "politics of having fun," a framework that can be perceived as seemingly apolitical, but is actually quite focused on the psychological effects of socio-political hierarchies. Where songs can be differentiated in their political efficacy is the degree to which they promote a liberational Black politic. As Cornel West notes, a truly liberational Black politic is committed to fighting racism at its root: capitalism. And is also determined to end all associated forms of oppression that result from capitalism and colonialism: homophobia, sexism, ableism, and transphobia. Within hip hop, although the 80s and 90s featured a number of artists for whom the legacy of Black Power reigned eminent, the modern mainstream genre is primarily full of either market-driven resistances, partial resistances, or their associated re-colonial resistances.

Partial resistances vary as to the terms to which they reify colonial resistances, but most do to one extent or another. N.W.A's "Fuck tha Police" emphatically decries the historically biased and anti-Black prosecuting tendencies of the City of Los Angeles quite creatively while also reifying the colonial oppression of gay people by using homophobic slurs. The sexual domination narratives promoted by Cardi B and Nicki Minaj take a step towards a less subordinate position for Black women and do promote positive narratives that Black women can be proud of their sexuality, but also reify the objectification and exploitation of the Black female body by offering limited options for how a famous Black women is to present herself and her body. This is not to say that other options are not presented by other Black females; to do so would be myopic. I am rather emphasizing that the female rappers with the most prominence do not fit these narrow images, coincidentally; they are approved by a white-controlled media elite that has never shied away from aligning Black female exploitation and lucrative profits. In the wake of the death of Nipsey Hussle, an LA rapper known for his generosity and devotion to community uplift, Jay Z exclaimed that Black people should look to gentrify their own neighborhoods before white people can. Given that gentrification is fundamentally aligned with the same ideologies of settler-colonialism and economic exploitation that hip hop was founded on alleviating and eliminating, suggesting such a notion is especially re-colonial. All of these are examples of when artists in hip hop use their platforms to promote the advancement of an oppressed group, but somehow reify a hierarchy that exists to make Black people and Black women suffer.

Then how can hip hop be completely resistant and neither partial nor re-colonial? As Sajnani notes, the diasporic nature of Black nationalism is an effective liberational alternative to the pain of WSPCSC, a nationalism distinct from its European analog. This nationalism has been referred to vaguely by scholars such as Bakari Kitwana, specifically to his conception of a Hip-Hop Generation, and was cited positively by West in his analysis of Morrison's Beloved. Many arguments regarding Black self-determination usually rely on this statist conception. Sajnani's analysis of the Black national bourgeoisie, of which Jay Z is a prominent member, is particularly revealing. He claims that partial resistances are often performed by prominent Blacks as a means to receive compensation from the white cultural gatekeepers while Black exploitation is upheld by the national order. To Sajnani, to support the American Dream is to ignore economic stratification, which in the US is always a racial topic. Black capitalists, especially in hip hop, engage in the rhetoric of the American Dream quite regularly, relying on a misguided bootstraps ideology. But even if Black capitalism can't be a true form of resistance to WSPCSC, can diasporic nationalism constitute a more complete resistance? As Zoé Samudzi and William C. Anderson propose in their powerful novel on the anarchism of Blackness as Black as Resistance,

"attempting to reclaim and repurpose the settler state will not lead to liberation, and it will not provide the kind of urgent material relief so many people desperately need, though electing empathetic officials sometimes can arguably mitigate against harm. Only through a material disruption of these geographies, through the cultivation of Black autonomy, can Black liberation begin to be actualized."

As such, a legitimate response to WSPCSC must not consider the future of Blackness as reliant on a statist solution. Although Sajnani's support of a somewhat re-colonial nationalism, no matter if distinct from European nationalism, is misguided, his emphasis on "resisting the appropriation of Hip Hop and elaborating its original mission" (I would replace appropriation with misappropriation) is quite relevant to establishing a liberatory Black politic through hip hop. What is the next step?

While resistance in Black politics today often calls for criminal justice reform instead of radical restructuring of the industrial-prison complex, 2018 saw some powerful forms of resistance enter the mainstream, most notably Childish Gambino's "This is America." Gambino's Grammy-award-winning song and video effectively criticizes the current state of hip hop and minstrel tropes. As Frank Guan notes, "It's a tribute to the cultural dominance of trap music and a reflection on the ludicrous social logic that made the environment from which trap emerges, the logic where money makes the man, and every black man is a criminal." Gambino's work helped bring a critical element of reflection into the mainstream of pop and hip hop: that the limited, minstrel-reproducing narratives of Blackness in popular culture contribute to past and present forms of social subordination. It is a crucial step towards finding a liberatory politic and is quite close to a complete form of resistance. Where it falls short however is along two fronts: an explicit embrace of a collective love ethic, and a moment of creation that accepts the reality of Black liminality and becomes devoted to a deviant determination of one's self that allows for the complexity of Blackness to live freely and waywardly, away from the psychological boxes imposed on us by WSCPSC.

I have come to learn that hip hop has an extremely high potential for being politically resistant to WSCPSC, but it is going to take a lot of work to return it to what it once accomplished. Very few forms of hip hop are directly engaged with a love ethic nor with an explicitly deviant rejection of WSCPSC based in self-determination. Two legacies of Black expressive culture will serve as my examples for such a cultural politic in this section: Toni Morrison's Beloved, as cited and analyzed by West, and the work of Prince, a genre-less Black artist whose influence on and connections to hip hop are understated. These forms of culture are committed to examining how Black people can create their own worlds under oppression, and even as they strive for radical changes, they are pragmatic and understand that a complete rejection of WSCPSC would constitute a violent revolution. As such, they utilize Black art as a means of peaceful resistance and alleviation of colonial pain, as hip hop once did. West noted that Morrison's Beloved was an active buffer against the pain of Black nihilism derived from WSCPSC, stressing that "Self-love and love of others are both modes toward increasing self-valuation and encouraging political resistance in one's community."

Black literature's emphasis on self-love and reflection must be replicated in hip hop. Prince understood that "Transcending categories however is not synonymous with abandoning ones' roots." After his death, Alicia Garza, a BLM founder noted that he "was from a world where Black was not only beautiful, but it was nuanced and complex and shifting and unapologetic and wise." Prince does not allow the chaos of Blackness (as constructed by WSCPSC) to render him a slave to reifying some form of colonial oppression, rather he recognizes that "it's about being comfortable in an unfixed state while improvising the topography of your life and music as you go along." Such a mindset and perspective are directly derivative of African religious culture. Thus, a liberational politic must be Afrofuturist. It must avoid the categorical labels offered by WSCPSC because of how much they limit us and function to constrict us. Perhaps a contemporary example of such a wayward, liberational politic comes in Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives: Beautiful Experiments, in which she reimagines the deviant and radical lifestyles and love-ethics of early 20th century upper-middle-class Black women. When Black people have the socioeconomic privilege to be able to transcend the limits of WSCPSC's social construction of race using a collective Black love ethic and staying true to the root cause of Black uplift, a promotion of a more plentiful array of types of Black existence can proliferate. And the commodification of Black art can start to dissipate, pushing more and more colonial subjects to reimagine their humanity away from internal colonialism.

This is the future I see for hip hop, one that returns it to its political roots. I understand that the pull of the market is strong, and that hip hop's decolonial future will require some serious changes in cultural discourse. Hip hop must return to its basis as a means of cultural self-defense, of engaging with the politics of having fun in a way that is more cognizant of decolonial motives. Taking down WSCPSC will require both explicit and implicit resistance, most of which will be anti-capitalist. Black expressive culture and its dynamism, specifically with regard to hip hop, have extreme potential for creating radical Black communities in the United States that are neither re-colonial nor based in the European need to monopolize violence, and embrace the duality of Black liminality, the complex nuances of double consciousness, and consider Blackness on one's own determined set of terms.

Notes

Berman, Judy. "'This Is America' 8 Things to Read about Chidish Gambino's New Music Video." New York Times, May 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/arts/music/childish-gambino-this-is-america-roundup.html.

Gordon Williams, James. "Black Muse 4 U: Liminality, Self-Determination, and Racial Uplift in the Music of Prince." Journal of African American Studies, vol. 21, no. 3, Sept. 2017.

Rose, Tricia. Black Noise Rap Music and Black Culture In Contemporary America. Wesleyan University Press, 1994.

Sajnani, Damon. "Hip Hop's Origins as Organic Decolonization." Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society, 2015, https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2015/04/02/hiphops-origins-as-organic-decolonization/ .

Samudzi, Zoe, and William C. Anderson. As Black as Resistance. AK Press, 2018.

Sehgal, Parul. "An Exhilarating Work of History About Daring Adventures in Love." New York Times, Feb. 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/books/wayward-lives-beautiful-experiments-saidiya-hartman.html.

West, Cornel. "Nihilism in Black America." Race Matters, Beacon, 1994.

The Nature of the Left: On the Question of Human Nature

By Corinne Hummel

There seems to be a shared cynicism among some members of the Left and the ideologues of liberal democracy: that sexism and racism belong to human nature. While the liberal may use this assertion to justify and necessitate the state, the anarchist may hold this assertion alongside a rejection of the state. In either case, the possible organization of society is restricted by the assumption of innate characteristics. It is unscientific to attribute these products of consciousness to biological determinism, and the implication in this attempt to apply positivism to the human lifeworld is cynical; where potential is limited by subjective observations of the anathema. Recognizing that such cynicism is incompatible with scientific socialism, I aim to explore the ideological genealogy of the Left, along with the topic of human nature. Because there have been many contributors to these theories, I will only name those necessary for the purpose of this discussion.

Beginning with Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations was such an apt observation of the activity of economic life that it catalyzed dozens of 19th -century successors in the realm of political and economic philosophy. Smith presented capitalism as moral and natural, and asserted that the state should not interfere in the liberty of the individual in the market. Hegel thereafter presented an ontological wedge between Smith's work and its influence, theorizing that liberty is achieved when the rational and universal principles of the self-determination of the individual become objectified in the laws of the state. Influenced by both Smith and Hegel, Proudhon became the "father of anarchism" as he argued for collective ownership of the means of production and insisted that individuals should have a right to the full product of their individual labor. He imagined a market society constituted of free-associating collectives, with the state reformed into a "regulating society" with the sole purpose of supporting this activity. As an associate of Proudhon, Bakunin rejected the idea of a reformed state, and instead advocated for a syndicalism which would end the state, as he declared the state to be inherently oppressive.

Bakunin's communist contemporary, Karl Marx, developed his theories of social phenomena and political economy through critique of Smith and Hegel. Marx noticed that Smith's depiction of capitalism as "natural" was scientifically unwarranted. Smith's methodology was teleological: he neglected to critically explain how capitalism emerged, as his "invisible hand" was expressly providential. And where Hegel concluded the human experience is decided by our consciousness, Marx added that our consciousness is informed by our material relations, an idea known as "dialectical materialism." Bakunin promoted collective ownership of the means of production, but disagreed with Marx over collective control of the means of production, as he believed that would result in oppressive hierarchies. Bakunin betrays himself in his declaration that Marxist communism would lead to a "parasitic Jewish nation." Marx was deeply critical of Bakunin, and the two were positioned as adversaries. An interesting turn occurred in Italy where Cafiero, a young advocate of Marxism, joined the more popular Bakuninist side, bringing with him significant influence from Marx. In 1880, Cafiero and his associates made a formal declaration that the individual appropriation of the products of individual labor leads to wealth accumulation based on merit, and that the state becomes necessitated and reinforced by this condition of inequality. So, the Italian Bakuninists, influenced by Marx, shifted the ideas of collectivist anarchists toward what became known as anarcho-communism.

Kropotkin, a naturalist, made significant theoretical contributions to anarcho-communism when he published a series of essays in 1890, which were later combined under the title "mutual aid: a factor in evolution." In these works, Kropotkin used examples from the animal kingdom to argue against survival of the fittest. Inspired by Darwin, he used the methodology of evolutionary biology to claim that cooperation is naturally selected for, as a consciousness. This means that anything not considered cooperation, such as violence, is an expression of consciousness belonging to an unfavorable evolution. Kropotkin faults the earliest formations of centralized states for enchanting humanity toward authority. The crux of this theory is that in the presence of hierarchies, biological tendencies for cooperation are suppressed in an alteration of consciousness. Kropotkin stated that it is only when all individuals' needs are met that the individual can be free, creatively, and for all individuals' needs to be met, there must be cooperation. According to his hypothesis, such cooperation prerequisites a higher consciousness. Kropotkin's empiricist methodology, when applied to sociology, was not immune to subjective idealism. He claimed to be logically outside the realm of metaphysics, yet he demonstrated Hegel's one-way dialectic in which consciousness decides existence. His conception of the naturally evolved consciousness presents a very agreeable outlook on the nonviolent potential of humanity, but it becomes overshadowed by a cynicism that collective consciousness cannot transcend its subjective perceptions of hierarchies.

Looking at non-human species to interpret human sociobiology will produce a variety of contradictory examples, until it becomes a pseudoscientific double-edged sword. Our view of ourselves as we see it in the world around us is subject to the most determined of biases. The reactionary cites the behavior of lobsters to justify class society, while the leftist claims that white supremacy is congenital. In a study of apes, all were given a banana except for one, and that one reacted violently. When looking at human history, we see those with accumulated wealth enacting violence, as conditions of perceived resource scarcity threatened the reproduction of wealth. Homo Sapiens have existed for roughly 200,000 years while capitalism has existed for no more than 700 years (including its precursors). Capitalism is distinct from the trading activities of ancient civilizations, just as you would not call primitive nomadic peoples "colonizers." The birth of capitalism is marked by the expropriation of the means of production, which was preceded by wealth accumulation. Natural disasters, presenting resource scarcity, were likely causes of the transferring of the commons into private ownership. In the work of Carl Nicolai Starcke, we learn that the emergence of patriarchy, first instituted within the family, was preceded by the establishment of private property. Patriarchy first emerged in those primitive societies which uniquely had a gendered division of labor in which private property became solely undertaken by men. Property, at this point in history, was the means of production: animals or land necessary for reproducing existence. This particular development depended on geography. In the harsh climate of Northern Europe, primitive societies were more dependent on herding animals than growing crops, and in these cases there was a gendered division of labor for biological reasons. Men came to inherit the herds because pregnant women could not care for the herds. The subordination of women occurred after their separation from the means of production, as it became the private property of men, but the original separation was not itself subordinating. Similarly, slavery in the Roman Empire was not based on race: the accumulation of wealth, requiring reproduction and protection, caused the state apparatus to develop a market for human labor as property. As capitalist production expanded, sexism and racism became ideological constructions, institutionalized in the service of entrenching support for continued expropriation of the means of production. The witch hunts and colonialism appearing in the late 15th century occurred 100 years after feudal crises had developed pre-modern capitalism.

Compelled by the lack of technical rigor in Wealth of Nations, Marx investigated what is unique to capitalism in its influence on human behavior. In addition to wealth accumulation and perceived resource scarcity, he theorizes that there is alienation occurring in the mode of production. The mode of production is the way in which society reproduces its existence: it is the material and social relations of labor. In capitalism, the instruments of labor, and the products of labor, do not belong to the laborer. To understand Marx's theory of alienation requires his concept of "base and superstructure" wherein the base is the mode of production; the relations of which are reproduced into the superstructure as societal norms and institutions. In the capitalist mode of production, the worker is estranged from the value of their labor while the capitalist is estranged from the labor of the value they extract. Performing these mechanistic roles alienates the individual from the self: from rationally knowing the fulfillment of need, as the only need becomes wages or profits. Marx was inspired by Darwin as well, in conceiving of history as a complex, yet quotidian, process of change and the response to change. Alienation is what the individual experiences when reality contradicts the rational motivation of the species-being: when the individual's labor is not for the self-determination of the individual, which is simultaneously unique and universal, as a being of a social species. This alienation is reproduced outwardly because material (social) relations inform consciousness, from which behavior cannot be isolated. In capitalism, the behavioral response precipitates evidence of humanity's spirit, though as a broken one, and the empiricist unjustly casts these behaviors as both irrational and belonging to human nature. It is from this cynical perspective that the ideologues of liberal democracy necessitate the utilitarian state to ensure civilization progresses. But for Marx, the ills of society are products of contractual agreements in which can be no real consent. The norms and institutions of the superstructure reinforce, through violence and ideological mystification, that which produces them.

For Kropotkin, capitalism is a byproduct of the state. For Marx, the state is a reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. Marx understood the historical emergence of the capitalist mode of production as preconditioned by rational responses to perceived resource scarcity in stateless primitive societies. The theories of Marxism and anarcho-communism were developed through distinctly different methodologies. When the mode of reproducing existence is not accounted for as an objective material reality of consciousness, observations will be subject to an idealism in which it is possible to misknow reality. For this reason, agreements found among leftists may only superficially bridge an epistemic divide. Marx said, "Proudhon does not know that all of history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature." He meant that one simply cannot say what is innate: behavior is the response to a changing material reality transmuted by the subjective consciousness. Marx contended that we should consider humanity apart from our conceptions of nature because history cannot be explained in the non-human natural world. Marxism is scientific socialism because of dialectical materialism: a process philosophy which overcomes the limitations of empiricism, rationalism, and subjective idealism. It is a more complete theory of social phenomena. By this method, the institution of science can be understood to be oppressive due to it being ideologically reinforced as a reproduction of the oppression in the base of society. When it is recognized, by the historical application of dialectical materialism, that capitalism is responsible for the environmental plunder of colonialism, it is possible to conclude that our societal conception of "nature" has been white supremacist. I conclude with the suggestion that the cynical perception of "human nature" is the result of ideological mystification producing an epistemic impasse.

"Ideology does not exist in the 'world of ideas' conceived as a 'spiritual world.' Ideology exists in institutions and the practices specific to them. Ideology represents individuals' imaginary relation to their real conditions of existence. Ideology has a material existence. There is no practice whatsoever except by and under an ideology. There is no ideology except by the subject and for the subjects. Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects."

- Louis Althusser

American Exceptionalism, American Innocence, and What Comes Next: An Interview with Danny Haiphong

By Colin Jenkins

The following is an email interview with author and activist, Danny Haiphong, regarding the current state of capitalism, US politics, and his new book, American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People's History of Fake News-From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror, which is co-authored with Roberto Sirvent. Danny is a regular contributor to Black Agenda Report. His book may be purchased directly from Skyhorse Publishing .

"The failure of the Western left in general and the U.S. left in particular to understand the inextricable, structural connection between empire, colonization, capitalism, and white supremacy-and that all elements of that oppressive structure must be confronted, dismantled, and defeated-continues to give lifeblood to a system that is ready to sweep into the dustbins of history. This is why American Exceptionalism and American Innocence is nothing more than an abject subversion. It destabilizes the hegemonic assumptions and imposed conceptual frameworks of bourgeois liberalism and points the reader toward the inevitable conclusion that U.S. society in its present form poses an existential threat to global humanity."

- Ajamu Baraka

I've been a personal fan of your writing on Black Agenda Report for many years, so I was excited to hear of this book when it was in the works. Can you let everyone know how it came to fruition? And how it materialized into a co-authoring project with Roberto Sirvent?

Thank you. I certainly have so much gratitude for The Hampton Institute, which I believe is one of the few truly socialist resources available for both new and veteran activists interested in the science of Marxism. As for the book, the project began when Roberto Sirvent reached out to me in the summer of 2017 with the idea of a book of essays on American exceptionalism. Roberto believed that Black Agenda Report's voice needed to be included in any analysis of the subject. We engaged in a series of discussions over the course of the next several months. The conversations centered on issues such as the U.S.' legacy in World War II, the significance of Colin Kaepernick's demonstration against the national anthem, and the framework of humanitarian imperialism.

We realized that American exceptionalism was a thread that linked these issues to a common struggle, the struggle against imperialism. American exceptionalism protects the system of imperialism by linking the interests of the oppressed with those of the ruling class under the banner of the (white) nation-state. Our purpose in writing the book was to ensure that activists and scholars possessed a tool for challenging American exceptionalism from the left. The left really has no use for American exceptionalism because it is based on myth and white supremacy. American exceptionalism presumes that the U.S. is the principle force for good in the world and that U.S. superiority gives the oligarchy the right to determine the destinies of those deemed inferior, whether in Syria, Venezuela, or for Black Americans right here in the United States. We agreed to make internationalism and anti-war politics a central focus of the book from the introduction to the final chapter.

Can you tell us a little about your personal journey through politicizing? Do you identify with any particular ideology?

Sure. I grew up in a working-class community in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My father was a white union worker for the federal government and my mother was a Vietnamese woman who has consistently struggled with mental health issues and has thus struggled with employment. After the elimination of Glass Steagall, banks and creditors sold my mother the dream of owning land and great wealth. Her pursuit of these endeavors nearly left our family bankrupt and her massive credit card debt (upwards of a quarter million dollars by the 2000 economic crisis) forced my father to work sixty to seventy hours per week for several years to make up the difference. Even then he was forced to refinance the house that we lived in twice in order to pay a small portion of the tuition that my sister and I incurred from undergraduate school.

It was in college that I was exposed to the one percent. Unlike many of my Black, brown, and white peers, I was able to attend an elite college and graduate. During this time, I frolicked in the same institution as our class enemy in the one percent. It drove me into depression. I thought about dropping out more than once. Then an Afro-Dominican friend of mine was racially profiled by the police and community in the town outside of my school and my depression turned to anger. I had lost several Black peers to premature death and was already privy to racism from my experiences with being called a "gook" and a "model minority" throughout my childhood. My organizing efforts around his case led to broader efforts to fight against racism on campus. These efforts were severely limited due to the class orientation of many of the students I was organizing with. It became clear that careerism trumped their principles.

I was lucky enough to have a professor who facilitated my transfer to New York City for the fall semester of 2011. While there, I interned for a labor union and participated in Occupy Wall Street. Both the labor movement and Occupy Wall Street, for different reasons, seemed unable to confront the fundamental contradictions of U.S. society. Labor leadership appeared indifferent to militant action out of opportunism and fear of capitalist reprisal. Occupy Wall Street appeared too disorganized to solidify an ideological and strategic direction and thus was vulnerable to state repression. As I participated in these struggles, I began reading corporate mainstream news on the U.S.-NATO invasion of Libya. I questioned why the so-called Black president who I voted for in 2008 would lead an invasion of an African country on what seemed like an Iraq-like pretext. No one in Occupy or the labor movement mentioned Libya.

The invasion of Libya and my frustrations with the struggle on the ground led me to read Black Agenda Report and Huey P. Newton's To Die for the People simultaneously. Each source of information introduced me to the concepts of socialism, anti-imperialism, and internationalism. It was clear from reading Newton and studying Black Agenda Report that I needed a stronger understanding of Marxism and socialist theory. Political education became my new objective. In the years since 2011, I have focused mainly on political education through participation in various mass-based and socialist organizations. I have been writing weekly for Black Agenda Report for the last five years. My ideology is socialist. Not to be confused with democratic socialism or social democracy, I ascribe to Marxism-Leninism as described by Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and Fred Hampton.

In the Introduction, you explain one of the goals in writing this book: (xix) "we want to equip our readers with the tools to locate, critique, and dismantle the twin ideologies of American exceptionalism and American innocence." Can you expand on this statement a little?

This book is not just meant to tell activists what to think, but how to think. By revealing the central contradictions of American exceptionalism, we believe that this book contributes to the broader struggle for social justice and transformation at the point of ideology. In 7th Congress of the Youth Communist League, Fidel Castro said that

"We must use solid arguments to talk to members and non-members, to speak to those who may be confused or even to discuss and debate with those holding positions contrary to those of the Revolution or who are influenced by imperialist ideology in this great battle of ideas we have been waging for years now, precisely in order to carry out the heroic deed of resisting against the most politically, militarily, economically, technologically and culturally powerful empire that has ever existed. Young cadres must be well prepared for this task."

We feel similarly to Comandante Fidel. American exceptionalism and innocence have shaped the political orientation of every single working class and oppressed person in the United States. While this doesn't mean everyone aligns with the tenets of innocence and exceptionalism, it does mean that their influence surely has an impact on the development of resistance movements against capitalism, white supremacy, and empire. The left in the United States rarely raises the question of war and when the struggle against white supremacy is raised, we find that it is not linked to the questions of power and oppression but rather of representation. This allows U.S. imperialism to render itself innocent of wrongdoing through the division of our struggles into easily containable parts. We believe that if we can identify and demystify American exceptionalism (the belief that the U.S. is a force for good), and American innocence (the belief that the U.S. is "above" the crimes it commits), then we can advance the battle of ideas that is currently being waged in the here and now. For example, instead of arguing that socialism is a project of reform, the rejection of American exceptionalism and innocence helps us realize that socialism requires nothing short of a complete transformation of society. We hope that our book will help others come to this realization through a study of history, ideology, and the reality behind imperialist rhetoric.

A paragraph that struck me as especially important reads, (xxiii) "Many avoid being labeled "un-American" by remaining silent about war, poverty, racism and the many ills that U.S. imperialism inflicts upon the world. Some activists have even suggested that approaching people from "where they are" by appealing to American exceptionalism will help recruit more Americans to the cause of social justice and transformation. If Americans believe "democracy" and "freedom" are worthwhile goals, we are told, then these sentiments should be utilized in service of the development of a more just social order. We believe that this is a monumental error in political thought and action. It not only assumes that the American population, especially the oppressed, primarily identify as "American" and will identify as such for the foreseeable future, but it also assumes that the American nation-state is in fact capable of ever bringing about true freedom, justice, or peace."

Can you talk about why this approach is a "monumental error" and why the underlying assumptions to it are wrongheaded?

The U.S. was never a democracy in the first place. This is difficult to swallow for many, including Bernie Sanders, who still believes that the West is the beacon and standard bearer of "democracy." In this era of neoliberalism, we find that pandering to the so-called values of the U.S. is very common, even among those who claim to be progressive or on the left. Take the example of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. In speech after speech on climate change, Ocasio Cortez continues to insist that the best way to mobilize a fight against tide of environmental catastrophe is to rise to occasion like the U.S. did in World War II. This reinforces the myth that the U.S. saved the world in World War II and that the U.S. is going to save the world again.

Our struggles for liberation and revolution will fail if they intend to make U.S. imperialism a more perfect system. We can't improve upon what doesn't exist. We can't rise to the occasion like in World War II. Real socialists should not whitewash a legacy rife with criminality including the use of two nuclear bombs on Japan, the firebombing a defenseless Dresden at the expense of over thirty thousand civilians, and the corporate financing of Hitler and fascism prior to the U.S. entrance in the war. We discuss the U.S.' participation in WWII in Chapter 4.

We should also remember that American exceptionalism is a white exceptionalism. If we are attempting to reform or perfect the architectures of the U.S. imperial state, then we are perfecting a racist regime whose primary interest is in the mass incarceration, elimination, and erasure of native people and Black people in the United States. Our conceptions of liberty, freedom, and democracy will have to be based on a different model all together, if they are to be useful at all.

Chapter 1 sets the tone for the entire book, dissecting the underlying psychology that stems from dominant culture (culture from above). In it, you hit on the events of 9/11/01 and its aftermath, illustrating how the capitalist ruling class took advantage of this to perpetuate a backs-against-the-wall mythology that continues to prop up the empire. You write, (p 3) "The idea of the United States as a perpetual "victim" of enemy aggression that is compelled to "play defense" on the international stage is a quintessential example of American exceptionalism and American innocence working together."

Can you talk about what you mean here, especially in terms of how exceptionalism and innocence interplay in this scenario?

The Bush administration declared after 9/11 that terrorists hated the United States for its "freedoms." By invoking American exceptionalism and the myth that people all over the world fawn over the achievements of the U.S., the U.S. imperial state was able to simultaneously present itself as a victim of foreign aggression. This aggression was stateless and thus anyone could be blamed for its occurrence. The lies kept coming and coming. First came the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 based on the false allegation that the Taliban were behind the attacks. Then there was the Weapons of Mass Destruction debacle that led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Throughout it all, the U.S. justified the destruction of far weaker nations by playing the innocent victim.

Innocence and exceptionalism often go hand in hand. Innocence requires an aggressor, a rapist, a subject devoid of humanity. The cruelty of the beast allows the U.S. ruling class to do whatever it wants in the name of profit. Enslaved Africans and displaced natives were depicted as savage creatures who were blessed by the civilized settler colonialist. In the War on Terror, the terrorist became synonymous with Muslim or Arab. Ironically, plenty of actual terrorists, or who are more appropriately named mercenaries, are created by U.S. foreign policy and its staunch ally, Saudi Arabia. But the War on Terror has always been less a crusade against these forces than it was a war to justify endless war abroad and state repression at home.

In Chapter 3 you address the interconnectedness of American imperialism, Black oppression (from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration), and the genocide of Native Americans at the hand of European colonizers. Can you tell readers why this is such an important connection to understand?

In this era of Trump, there appears to be an ever-growing awareness of the race-based foundations of the United States. Missing from this awareness is how the U.S. never grew out of its white supremacist roots. We hear a lot that Trump "isn't what the U.S. is all about." We are often told, especially by white liberals, that the U.S. is proud of diversity and inclusion. Yet the plight of indigenous people and Black people in the United States tell a different story. Not many people know that indigenous people face higher rates of police homicide than Black Americans. Or that Black wealth in the U.S. is set to be zero by year 2053 if current trends persist. Inclusion and diversity ignore these realities. Even more disturbing is how anti-Russian racism fuels much of the white liberal resistance to Trump.

Without the enslavement of Africans and colonization of indigenous peoples, the U.S. would not have been able to develop the capitalist infrastructure necessary to become a global imperial terror in the world. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who we cite extensively in Chapter 2, explains that the U.S. military's very formation lies in the hiring of mercenaries by the War Department to rob and loot indigenous communities. There is a deep misconception that the struggle for Black liberation or against settler colonialism is a domestic dispute. Nothing could be further from the truth. If we don't internationalize the struggle against racism at home, then we can't follow in the footsteps of Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party, both of whom sought redress and recognition from the United Nations. American exceptionalism helps us forget these struggles and keeps us interested only in making the U.S. a more "diverse" society at the expense of any real struggle for power.

As someone who has gone from once being restrained by the thought parameters of dominant culture to now being deeply involved in revolutionary thought, I've noticed that one of the most difficult tasks when dealing with folks who are stuck in that former stage is reorienting their thought from individualistic to systemic. Angela Davis talked about this type of individualistic worldview being solidified in the neoliberal era, to the point where it even negatively affects activism and organizing. One of the reasons I've always loved your writing, as well as most content on Black Agenda Report, is because it is firmly embedded in a structural/systemic understanding. Not surprisingly, this book carries that analysis forward. For example, in talking about the systemic effects of white supremacy in the United States, you write, (p 54) "If American society itself is a monument to white supremacy, then the economic, cultural, and legal manifestations of white supremacy must take precedence over individual attitudes." Can you explain to our readers why it is so crucial that systemic effects must take precedence over individual attitudes?

Individualism is a bedrock ideology of American capitalism and imperialism. It is a powerful force that has a wide array of effects on the consciousness of the masses. Our book centers individualism not only in the neoliberal stage of capitalism but also in the formation of the United States as an empire that privileges the god-like image of the white citizen. The U.S. ruling class has been comprised of these whte citizens from the very beginning. White citizens of the ruling elite have attempted to instill the same values, principles, and behaviors in the entire white American population with great success. Citizenship here is key. Citizenship gives white America something to mobilize around. That was the basis of the entire Jim Crow period. The end of slavery was depicted as the end of white citizenship and organizations such as the KKK emerged to ensure that freedom for Black Americans would be nominal rather than universal in character.

Individualism not only mobilizes the political right but also infects the so-called left as well. We saw this inn the recent struggles against Confederate monuments in the United States. We also saw this in the confrontations of figures such as Richard Spencer. The focus tends to be on individual symbols and leaders rather than on the material conditions that allow people like Spencer or monuments of the Confederacy to exist at all. Such a focus allows real monuments to white supremacy such as the prison-state and finance capital to remain undisturbed and unchallenged. Individualism thus inevitably leads us toward projects to improve the image of the U.S. rather than the conditions of the masses. While some may see this as a defense of the political right, it is really a call for us to move our energies toward the structures of power that give the political right a foundation to stand on. If we cut that foundation, we cut out their existence as well.

An ongoing topic of importance is how white folks fit into modern revolutionary politics. This is especially important in the United States because of our long history of racial divide, both within the working class itself and as used as an effective tool by the capitalist class. It continues to be a crucial question. One product of liberalism and "white guilt" has been this manifestation of white saviorism.

You touch on this phenomenon in the book, writing on page 161, "The White Savior Industrial Complex is a modernized expression of American individualism and thus a direct product of the United States' racist and capitalist roots. In an article in the Atlantic, Teju Cole describes the White Savior Industrial Complex as "a valve for releasing the unbearable pressures that build in a system built on pillage." White saviorism recruits Americans-and white Americans in particular-to resolve the guilt inevitably produced by the unbearable conditions that U.S. imperialism has wrought on the world with individual acts of charity funded and sponsored by the very agents responsible for the destruction. Acts of "charity" not only focus on individualized action over collective response but also tend to reinforce the United States' obsessive fear of racialized "others." The White Savior Industrial Complex uses charity to absolve the U.S. of responsibility for the conditions produced by this obsession. White guilt is the escape valve. "We can participate in the economic destruction of Haiti over long years," Cole writes, 'but when the earthquake strikes it feels good to send $10 each to the rescue fund.'"

White saviorism is usually reserved for liberal circles; however, like most products of whiteness, it can certainly infect radical and revolutionary circles as well. That being said, what are your thoughts on more recent notions like "allies" and "accomplices?" How do such roles square up within a proletarian movement in the vein of Fred Hampton's Rainbow Coalition? How do you see the divides working out between so-called "class reductionists" (who are often white, and thus more likely to underestimate other forms of oppression) and hyper-marginalized members of the working class (Black, Brown, Women, etc) who experience these compounded forms of oppression every day?

Those are great questions. The United States is an imperialist nightmare with no shortage of internal contradictions that pose serious problems in developing a class-conscious revolutionary movement. White leftists in the United States are divided into two general categories (although they are far from exhaustive). These categories are the New Left, which emerged from anti-war and other political movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and a new generation of younger leftists who were inspired by Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and now the Sanders phenomenon. What is interesting is that while the New Left is often thought of as class reductionist, the politics of white saviorism often instills feelings of guilt about their white privileges and render them attracted to liberal discourses on race and identity largely emanating from the bourgeois academy and university system. I find that class analysis is what is reduced when class analysis is ignored, while class reductionists in the white left are reacting to this development in a negative way. Both often lead to irreconcilable issues and weak movements.

The younger white leftists are more amenable to radical interpretations of society. What is lacking is political organization, a real vehicle that can drive younger activists toward revolutionary politics and strategies. Occupy Wall Street was unable to become an organized, discipline force capable of developing long-term alliances and fending off state repression. Right now, everything is confined within the Democratic Party and Bernie Sanders. On the surface, it appears that Sanders supporters tend to take a class reductionist point of view. Many of the demands of Sanders supporters revolve around economic necessity. Corporate Democrats have taken such a surface level analysis very seriously and have attempted to make what is a pretty diverse group of people who are aligned to Sanders look like a bunch of angry white men.

It is important to realize, however, is that the only effective way that class reductionism or white saviorism have ever been countered is through the self-determined political organization of Black Americans and the racially oppressed. Your example of the Rainbow Coalition is a good one. Fred Hampton and the Black Panther Party were able to forge alliances with white radical organizations such as the Young Patriots because there was a significant Black left-leaning presence in the struggle of that time. Even if the Black Panther Party was numerically small, Black Americans in large numbers opposed wars, favored economic transformation, and (especially young Black Americans of the period) were attracted to political demands that sought to rectify the failures of integration and Civil Rights. Furthermore, there was a large global socialist movement led by a bloc of nations such as China and the USSR which helped challenge U.S. imperial domination worldwide. In the absence of these conditions, we have seen white saviorism and class reductionism battle for the hearts and minds of the white left.

In summary, Black workers and working people of oppressed nationalities must be the ones to lead the conversation and organization around their self-determination. This is the best antidote to the contradictions white left, which has always needed direction. But the answer for white leftists is not to sit on their hands or give up demands for economic and political change. It also isn't to become "white allies" with the oppressed in the way that it has been defined by the academy. White American leftists need to be challenging the ideologies of exceptionalism and saviorism, as well as the far-right political trend occurring throughout the Western world. They must ask: when has being an "ally" transformed the material conditions of anyone? No movement has ever been based on elitist grand-standing, which is what I believe the politics of diversity and inclusion promotes in the final analysis. White leftists must bring an anti-imperialist, anti-war orientation into their communities and find ways to promote solidarity with their comrades in Black communities and other oppressed communities. That is the only way forward.

In Chapter 21, you tackle the question, "who exactly does the military serve?" As a military veteran who has written about such questions, this spoke to me. In answering, you write (page 239), "Consciousness of who and what is behind the dominant narratives of American exceptionalism and American innocence is a prerequisite for the development of an alternative narrative that can be popularized widely." Can you elaborate on what you mean here?

We must know the enemy. American exceptionalism and innocence make us believe that the enemy is ourselves. Or, that the enemy is the "other"-a racialized threat created to justify the original sin of slavery through the dehumanization of the African or Black person. Alternative political narratives emerge only when the veil has been lifted off those who cause the suffering. The Black Lives Matter movement initially pointed to the police and prison-state as the enemy that was not only killing Black Americans but also reinforcing narratives of criminality so important to the conditions of premature death that plague Black communities across the country. We believe that lifting the veil from the peddlers of American exceptionalism and innocence gives us an even broader understanding of who and what is behind the oppression and exploitation of Black America and the working class more broadly. Corporate media outlets, education systems, corporate executives, military officials, and politicians; these are the stakeholders of the ideologies of American exceptionalism and innocence. Being able to identify them and begin an investigation into their interconnectedness helps us realize how power in the form of the profit-motive is at the heart of U.S. imperialism. Perhaps even more critical is that we can then see that this system is not an amorphous or abstract project. It is a product of class rule in a specific historical epoch and thus a temporary condition which can be destroyed and replaced by a new system with the help of a peoples' revolution. This is no easy feat, and I don't pretend have the answers as to how this will happen but getting more struggling people in the U.S. to realize this is an important step.

That is what our book is all about. And we feel that ending on the note of the U.S. military is appropriate since there is perhaps no institution more destructive and obviously controlled by the capitalist class. The U.S. military is also one of the most venerated institution in U.S. society for this exact reason. Few people, except the ruling class themselves, would support wars if they believed the only reason for them was to expand the profits of a small number of capitalist oligarchs. Thus, the military has been depicted as an engine of democracy, freedom, and an opportunity to get an education and a job in a society that provides neither as a human right. Prior to that, the U.S. military was heralded as an engine of white prosperity and employment. Its targets on the other hand have been turned into sub-human creatures worthy of annihilation. Who can forget when, in 2011, the U.S. military-state and its media accomplices claimed that the Gaddafi government was using Viagra in the U.S.-NATO invasion of Libya to rape women and children? Or when the U.S. military trained its soldiers to view Koreans as wild savages and "gooks" during the Korean War? Unfortunately, many Americans have, and that's because American exceptionalism has infected the political discourse from top to bottom.

As a society, we seem to be on a precipice of sorts. Or at least find ourselves in a significant moment in history, with neoliberalism intensifying inequality, environmental disaster looming, extreme wealth taking ownership of our public agenda, never-ending militarism, creeping fascism, etc. Where do you see things heading in the next five years? And how should we as radicals respond from within the belly of the beast?

In the next five years, I see three developments of significance that will have a profound impact on the trajectory of the U.S. left.

First, the ruling class will continue its assault on the social democratic tendencies of the Democratic Party base. This will exacerbate the political crisis of legitimacy occurring in the United States generally, strengthen the figures such as Trump, and lead hopefully to new opportunities to develop a viable independent left political party.

Second, the U.S. is due for a capitalist economic crisis. This crisis is likely to be even more devastating than the 2007-08 crisis. The proletarianization of U.S. society will reach a breaking point. Where workers and oppressed people in the U.S. go from here is anyone's guess, but we can expect that they won't take the suffering quietly.

Third, Russia and China are eclipsing the United States on the world stage. U.S. imperialism wants nothing more than to weaken its rivals to the East. This means that in the next five years, the threat of war with Syria, Iran, Russia, and China will escalate. The threat will increase amid political and economic crisis.

We must respond through political organization and education. There is a progressive tide occurring in the United States. But the tide is not organized outside of the Democratic Party and there is no Black liberation movement to lead it. Thus, we must be vigilant in creating the conditions for the organization of the working class and popularizing the politics of solidarity and anti-imperialism.

The conditions for organizing on a socialist and communist basis are becoming more favorable. Large portions of the United States want universal healthcare and are more amenable to the term socialism. Of course, many still think socialism is the New Deal and a reform project. But the sentiment against unfettered capitalism and imperialism is there and it will be up to us to harness it and push the contradictions forward to their logical conclusion: social revolution.

Black Metamodernism: The Metapolitics of Economic Justice and Racial Equality

By Brent Cooper

I'd been thinking about this idea for a while before a redditor asked the very pointed question: Are there any black metamodernists? I didn't really have a complete answer yet, which is 'yes and no.' It's a complicated question, and it doesn't seem like many are rushing to answer it. Mostly no in the explicit sense like Hanzi , of developing the "metamodern" concept and advancing a program beyond the discourse of the Dutch school . But yes in many other ways, both explicit and implict.

Black to the Future

For starters, there is one obscure but direct source for 'black metamodernism,' in Transatlantic dialogue: contemporary art in and out of Africa , 1999 (limited to a snippet view). Art history professor Moyo Okediji described contemporary African-American art in terms of metamodernism as an "extension of and challenge to modernism and postmodernism." Without access I cannot offer a thorough review, but the point is clear; black metamodernism exists and was another one mostly missed.

The book jacket lists a number of black artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat. He is considered a type of black metamodernist described as 'returnee artists'; "African-American artists who return from Africa with a new awareness of their identiy that affects their work." (from Monni Adams book review ). This concept could certainly apply to Malcolm X or Dave Chappelle as well, who were forever changed and radicalized by their pilgrimages to Africa. I think metanoia, a fundamental change of mind, plays such a role in metamodern sensibility. All of this seems to align with metamodern critique, art, praxis, and values, and yet we do not hear much about a black metamodernism today.

Martin Luther King has already been accurately characterized as metamodern by Alexandra Dumitrescu, who thinks "he might have been a metamodernist avant la lettre ," and I couldn't agree more. King had a vision so progressive that it is only just being fully realized (actualized) today. The dream was cut short by his assassination, for which the white establishment is necessarily implicated. Even though he's gone and from a different era, his actions and ideas resonate now in a crucial way because they are still not achieved, so it's a battleground issue (conservatives try to co-opt and re-write MLK). And if we are going to mention MLK, perhaps we should also include Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Fred Hampton and countless other black activists ahead of their time, as implicitly metamodern.

Cornel West could be a metamodern thinker, pictured above, but he has never used the term, and this distinction matters, given its history at this point and his ability to wax on postmodernism. As I addressed in Gonzálezean Metamodernism, West is a good candidate to embrace the discourse, not only because he is invoked by González in that context, but because more broadly black theology is at the root of Hispanic liberation theology, and West is a cutting edge philosopher of sorts. Now is as good a time as any to (re-)introduce black metamodernism, as it builds on the turn González proposed for Hispanic Americans. Black people too are metamodern aliens in the postmodern promise land.

In Whose (Meta)modernism?: Metamodernism, Race, and the Politics of Failure (2018), James Brunton asks the right question, but also misses the source material I've mentioned. He draws his theory from Vermeulen and van den Akker, and David James and Urmila Seshagiri (2014), as well as many black poets, but he is yet another scholar 'missing metamodernism' in the broader sense I describe, and Okediji 's black metamodernism specifically.

This is a call to action to implicit black metamodernists, many of whom I discuss here, to cross over, to represent, and join the paradigm shift explicitly; my inspiration for metamodernism has in part already come from many of them. Wolfgenghis_Khan wants you; and so do we. I have written just two other articles about race/ black issues; one about black abstract art (where Basquiat is mentioned), and one about how racism is "abstracted " (made obscure), particularly by white racism against black people in the US. These are facets of my approach to metamodernism, and how abstraction can reveal or obscure the nature of racial politics and discourse. And in those I also have missed much of what I describe in this article, so it is all (re)combining into a broader black metamodernism.

Green Metamodernism

In terms of metamodern theory itself we can consider Nordic or Dutch as varieties of green metamodernism. The are green by being or having moved from the left beyond the liberal status-quo, but also green in the sense of being inexperienced or naive. To be sure, they are brilliant, but green (new, fresh) compared to their metamodern forebearers who have been missed. In the dominant Dutch School (art/ history/ culture) mode, the artist Reggie Watts is considered metamodern for his mind-boggling and heart-warming sincere absurdism. Donald Glover is metamodern too, as described here (2014), and here (2017), not least for his meta-humour in the metamodern show Community. Also, here is very comprehensive site, Metamodernity and Because the Internet , dedicated to the study of Donald Glover/ Childish Gambino and metamodernism. And this is all before his song/video " This is America " (2018) made a profound statement about race. After, we can understand him better through a lens of black metamodernism.

Green metamodernists generally do not theorize race directly or explicitly, although Hanzi has deconstructed the alt-right at some length . The general aversion is probably in part because the importance of the subject is generally implied as metamodernism is ostensibly about synthesizing and transcending both the postmodern critique (which includes the intersectionality of race, gender, class, etc) and its target, modernism. Race just becomes a smaller but still important detail in a broader context of meta-theory, planetary crisis, and metamorphosis (systems-change). But race theory is also peripheral in part because these metamodern epistemic communities are mostly white people who are tacit allies.

On the other hand, 'black metamodern' discourse has not been maintained or linked up with contemporary metamodern discourse. So the problem is two-way. This crossover should happen for two reasons: 1) by metamodernism not addressing it, it appears racialized, ignorant, or biased, and 2) by black discourses not combining with the broader paradigm shift, it remains disempowered and marginalized by the anti-postmodern and white nationalist political climate.

Metamodernism, from its Dutch and Nordic schools of origin, appears to have a eurocentric and white bias, though they have a global orientation and sensibility, as well as tacit understanding and concern about systemic racism. As we've seen in all versions, metamodernism doesn't ignorantly deny the merits of postmodern critique, or abandon social justice that conservatives and centrists have written off, nor does it embrace the full excesses of SJW culture and what has been termed 'grievance studies' literature by some determined IDW-adjacent academic hoaxers - The whole problem there is that they don't realize that all academia/ scholarship has similar problems (even their own fields, which aren't social science), but they are singling out and mocking social justice while social justice isn't being achieved in reality.

But metamodernism hasn't yet provided a clear or viral enough answer for the postmodern impasse. Or at least we've tried, and few have paid attention. Meanwhile, the new centrism of the Intellectual Dark Web has filled the void (or rather spoke over the Other) with anti-postmodern and anti-social justice diatribes that actually inflame systemic racism (which they deny exists). Those on the left who have already united against the IDW would do better to understand their moves as metamodern, and generate greater collective coherence as such.

The IDW would have you believe progressivism is a lost cause, yet they stand in the way, provide no alternative, and tune out the people actually working on those problems. The IDW remain do not engage with actual leftist politics, let alone black sociology. I offered a broad critique of the IDW over a year ago , trying to pre-emptively assuage the culture war, much of which still holds up. The IDW have gotten worse in some respects, have been critiqued harder, and now is quickly crumbing and becoming obsolscent, giving rise to a new emergent discourse.

There is also the odd (right-wing) person who is fond of metamodernism, but interprets it for their own ends without really understanding it. They support Trump. They like Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Haidt. They are against immigration for personal (identity) reasons. They have no interest in the thorough critiques of any of these things. They, of course, have also been missing the metamodernisms as I have described in this series, but also in the contemporary sense that comes from Dutch and Nordic versions, because there's nothing in those sources to inspire right-wing ideology. On the contrary, they demand a much closer read of history, theory, and social consciousness.

In general, metamodernism is post-political, beyond the left-right spectrum, and refers to the era we are in (and so does hypermodernity). But along a particular axis of issues, metamodernism as a movement and sociological theory is uniformly aligned with the leftist movement today, as it is expressed throughout this series (vis-a-vis technology, liberation theology, black socialism), and some of my other writings. This doesn't mean conservatives aren't welcome to participate and contribute - they are - but it means zero tolerance for ignorance about what postmodernism actually means, and regressive dogmas about climate change or social justice. In the Dutch and Nordic versions, metamodernism assumes the viability of a socialist steady state, not surprisingly because they are from successful ones, and are relatively successful in such societies. The idea is to provide that to everyone, and it's not a pipedream.

Metamodernism, by all available standards, reflects a progressive culture towards a cosmopolitan post-capitalist demilitarized vision of society that will mitigate climate risk, not an ethnonationalist hyper-capitalist militarist denialist prophecy of social control that will accelerate and exacerbate collapse. The choice is starkly contrasted, and the latter is called hypermodernism, not metamodernism. With this in mind, I see no right-wing person actually theorizing metamodernity, coherently at least, but there is still a need for a course correction in green metamodernism by black metamodernism.

Back in Black Metamodernism

My role here is not to be an expert on black metamodernism per se, but to defer to the real experts in their fields and to help widen the space of the new discourse. Outstanding black scholars are not in short supply, but are still fighting an uphill battle against a white-privileged status-quo. Many are immensely wise, strong willed, and influential, and yet lack the clout they truly deserve. Their critiques have not reached far enough to affect the needed change. And the lack of convergence through metamodernism has not helped either.

Notable black thinkers/ activists/ leaders include Cornel West, Charles W. Mills , Tressie Mcmillan Cottom, Michelle Alexander, Ta-nehisi Coates, Michael Eric Dyson, Benjamin Dixon, Mansa Keita, Bill Fletcher Jr., Wosny Lambre, Briahna Joy Grey, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Presley, Kwame Anthony Appiah , Patricia Hill Collins , Kimberlé W. Crenshaw , Angela Y. Davis , Henry Louis Gates, Jr. , and many more . Could this be a cross section of black metamodern thought? Many of them have theorized or criticized postmodernism as well, so it would not be a stretch to entertain metamodernism, especially with these added perspectives (Borgmann, González, black, in addition to Dutch and Nordic strands).

This negligence of black metamodernism is part of the wider pattern of Missing Metamodernism  - even amongst black scholars. They could perhaps be forgiven for not dropping everything and devoting themselves to Dutch or Nordic metamodern developments, but they also have a precedent with 'black metamodernism,' so we hope they will learn and develop it with us and speak up. Take up this meta- mantle and converge with metamodernism more broadly, to develop a new paradigm.

Much of the public discourse is not lacking in racial awareness, evidenced by the following TED talks, but it's a broader question of some (white) people's interests and attention spans. And the mainstream media is still deeply filtered and divisive over race issues. My purpose here is just to share some of what's out there, so that it can't be ignored or missed by those interested in metamodernism. And so it can't be denied by the centrists and right-wingers that want to preserve some mythical abstraction of white Western civilization. The point is that black culture was metamodern before some industrious white people rediscovered metamodernism.

In The Dangers of Whitewashing Black History, David Ikard recounts the story of his son in Grade 4, who was taught that Rosa Parks was frail old black women, diminishing her life-long struggle and the story of social justice behind her. David wanted to confront the teacher, but because of his experience with the "white fragility" of some people, he knew that might be a bad idea. So he instructed his son to learn the true history, which he did, and his son gave a speech debunking the myth. The teacher apologized to student, and subsequently retaught the Rosa Parks lecture. This is why Rosa Parks wrote her autobiography, so she could tell her own story, David said, but it still so easily becomes whitewashed. In 1950s, lynching was normal. MLK's house was bombed twice. Rosa parks was not an 'accidental activist.' These facts are often submerged by a more sanitized narrative.

Then there was a book draft David reviewed for his brilliant white professor "Fred" (not his real name) while he was a graduate student. Fred was writing a history of the civil rights movement, David explains, "specifically about a moment that happened to him in North Carolina when this white man shot this black man in cold blood in a wide-open space and was never convicted." David saw a problem in a particular personal story of how Fred talked with his black maid (which already has racial undertones in itself).

1968, MLK had just been assassinated, Fred is 8 years old, and his maid is crying and he asks why. "It'll be okay" he says… "Didn't Jesus die on the cross for our sins?" and 'maybe things will work out.' The maid, despondent as she was, tempered herself and gave little Fred a hug and a cold Pepsi. For Fred, it was proof people could cross racial lines to overcome adversity; that love could conquer all; he did a good thing. David called bullshit. The story wasn't about the maid, it was a selfish story about Fred naively thinking he was helping. The whole episode was clouded by the fact Fred was technically her employer, so she couldn't get mad at him. After being called out, Fred then realized that he misread the moment.

And there is many more TEDx that challenge basic misconceptions and expose systemic racism: Black Self / White World - lessons on internalized racism | Jabari Lyles | TEDxTysonsSalon (2017); White Men: Time to Discover Your Cultural Blind Spots | Michael Welp | TEDxBend (2017); Let's get to the root of racial injustice | Megan Ming Francis (2016). Not to mention the ample books and documentaries out there.

From the Intellectual White Web to Black Lives Matter

The more you know, the less ignorant you are, but some people can't be bothered. From the current smorgasbord of trashy thought leaders, Jordan Peterson is probably the most obtuse white person one can picture. He is tacitly against identity politics and racism, white supremacy, and white nationalism, while not having a clue how they actually operate in the world and through his own discourse. The Peterson paradox is being able to unironically praise MLK in one sentence and condemn his core values (like democratic socialism ) in another without an inkling of cognitive dissonance.

Imagine being so functionally ignorant of systemic racism that you lecture about how 'white privilege is a marxist lie' at Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC (2018), behind a picture of Abe Lincoln, as if that means something in this context. It is scholarly dereliction to be so ignorant about those concepts, to say the very least. And then to cry crocodile tears when Michael Eric Dyson calls you out as a "mean mad white man." And then for your demagogic bile and self-help slop to fuel the xenophobic incel rage of white nationalist shooters. And then to get even angrier that you have incessant critics, as if don't they have something important to explain to you. And then you give a high school book report of The Communist Manifesto to Zizek. But at least you've made over $1M in the past year and are now doing a business scam thing with Kobe Bryant and George W. Bush , and chumming with far right politicians who want to purge humanities teachers. So much for classical liberalism. Fear not mean white man, have a cold Pepsi, we know you're doing your best, just like "Fred" was with his maid.

At the end of the day black metamodernism is not just about the 'black' modifier; it's not self-interested minorities with narrow identitarian priorities, like their white majority racist counterparts. Many black scholars do not dwell on race, they are well rounded, but rather race is forced upon them because of their skin color and place in society. Some become experts by choice, others by circumstance. The dream is for racial equality and economic solidarity, not black supremacy, but white anxiety keeps murdering this dream, keeping the nightmare (whitemare?) alive and well in America.

"Black Lives Matter" (BLM) is actually a proportional response to the criminalization of drugs, profiling of minorities, and being incarcerated or killed by racist or paranoid cops. Whether the cops are overtly racist or subconsciously is beside the point, because they are still racist in effect and consequence. Opponents of BLM generally miss the point, only seeing a black power grab, but that itself is a racist interpretation based on ignorance, fear, and (social) media distortion and polarization. The reality is, as Brunton described it;

"The Black Lives Matter movement argues that we need to recognize precisely the opposite of what the movement's hashtag declares that is, historically, white patriarchy has failed to treat black lives as though they matter. American liberal democracy has failed to provide the rights and privileges of citizenship to a large portion of the citizenry, and the election of a black president has failed to usher in a post-racial society." - Brunton, Whose (Meta)modernism?: Metamodernism, Race, and the Politics of Failure (2018)

Like with MLK, this progressive (black) metamodernism includes the racial struggle, but is about the larger quest for socio-economic and even environmental justice. As such, black metamodernism is not reducible to a shallow form of identity politics. To avoid this caricature, the first task is to consolidate the new subfield as metamodern, as could be done for each path in (ie. Borgmann, González, etc…). The second task is to re-integrate back into a broader more inclusive notion of metamodernism to address the meta-crisis of hyper-capitalism. This series tries to advance both tasks in a small way.

Furthermore, it's all about climate change now, the anthropocene, and (quite certain) global existential risks that humanity are creating. There is this overriding sentiment that if 'we're all going to die' then might as well do the right thing now. And as you can see (below), black metamodernists are already ahead of this curve, which is why we should already be united under one paradigmatic umbrella.

The Black Socialists of America were on the podcast New Models - Episode 12: BLACK SOCIALISTS (Z, Busta, Keller, @LILINTERNET ). They describe how they founded it response to how Cornel West was attacked by "black liberals" for critiquing Ta-nehisi Coates, and realized there wasn't a real platform for Black American socialists, anti-capitalists, leftists, etc. At 7:30, they start to get into it;"I don't want to slam postmodernism too hard here but…" Needless to say, they are beyond postmodernism, and have a thoughtful critique that could be described as metamodern.

The Michael Brooks Show (TMBS) invokes black sociology often (consider the work of the Association of Black Sociologists on twitter too), especially with the frequent guest Bill Fletcher Jr . Brooks is so committed his twitter bio says "Member of the Yacubian Left," a nod to the theory that an ancient 'black scientist' created white people through eugenics. On TMBS 91 " Wonkery Won't Save Us & Green Imperialism ," Brandon Sutton (The Discourse podcast) was recently on to brilliantly break down systemic racism and the neoliberal agenda (May 21, 2019). Sutton is also cautious about cancel culture and performative wokeness that run the risk of undermining their goals. TMBS has been critical of Kanye's politics and black activism (vis-a-vis Trump), from black perspectives. Briahna Joy Gray (former Intercept editor and now Bernie's press secretary) is a regular guest too.

Michael Brooks and guests have been the most incisive critics of the IDW, because they already have this implicit metamodern awareness, as noted in Gonzálezean metamodernism. To be sure, black metamodernists would go after the mostly white Intellectual Dark Web, not join it like Candace Owens, Coleman Hughes, or Thomas Sowell to be instruments for a racist status-quo. See ' Coleman Hughes is bad for the discourse ', and this vid , and James B. Stewart, Thomas Sowell's Quixotic Quest to Denigrate African American Culture (2006). Hughes and Sowell, despite whatever intellectual merits, are truly not grounded in racial reality, and are certainly not metamodernists, but reactionary modernists.

Last Light on Black

There is still so much more to explore in this potential subfield than I have not covered here. I have just scratched the surface of black metamodernism, as with the other articles in Missing Metamodernism. Afrofuturism seems pretty metamodern. The movie Black Panther was a critical and commercial success; perhaps a black metamodern film in a metamodern franchise. A black writer named Germane Marvel has authored a couple Medium posts on metamodernism which seem to offer fresh philosophical musings about it; Meta Something? , followed by Meta Nothing? Research in Black Feminist Science explores how "the intellectual endeavors of marginalized black women have historically represented radical challenges to structures of knowledge and systems of oppression."

Some more artefacts of black metamodernism to consider include Get Out , The Legacy of Black Reconstruction, by Robert Greene II , Bernie's Plan for Racial Justice, by Meagan Day , The Boondocks (TV series) , and Into the Spiderverse . And through the internet over the past couple years I have connected with a few black people in Africa and elsewhere interested in metamodernism, but without having a proper African version of it. I think now it is safe to say there is one, and it can be developed more.

Conclusion

I hope I have established a solid precedent for what I suggest by a broad 'black metamodernism'; a shrewd awakening and reality check for what Charles W. Mills calls 'white ignorance,' among many other things, that metamodernism has not hitherto immunized against. Social justice still demands resolution, despite what the (pseudo-)intellectual posturing against it would tell you. The ample literature on structural racism may seem to shout through the matrix of postmodernism, incomprehensible to the new center, but we are listening. In a time when racial tensions are still high and systemic racism persists around the world, particularly against people of color in the United States, not to mention the scourge of white nationalism and dastardly race/IQ pseudoscience, we cannot make excuses for the absence or negation of a black metamodernism that was always present.

Furthermore, postmodernism and social justice are under constant attack for the wrong reasons, while questionable postmodern (gibberish) scholarship is still being produced, normatively for the right reasons, but at the limits of critique. For many of us in the culture war, this is the whole point of a metamodern intervention; to cut through the bullshit and end the culture war itself (along with actual war), while also reforming the research and education paradigm towards these ends. Who but (black) metamodernists could most aptly advocate for this?

→ Read Part 1: Missing Metamodernism
→ Read Part 2: Borgmannian Metamodernism
→ Read Part 3: Gonzálezean Metamodernism

Brent Cooper is founder and Executive Director at The Abs-Tract Organization , a Canadian think tank.

On the Latest Developments Within the U.S. Working Class

By Ekim Kilic

The 2016 Presidential Elections were a turning point for U.S. labor and popular movements. Since then, provocative statements and decisions by the Trump government have been threatening millions of working peoples' lives. However, the actions of the current U.S. government are not independent of its predecessors and their economic applications that also carried out the needs of U.S. capital and its forces. Today, precarious employment and life conditions, a declining social safety net, and not being able to resonate their voice politically are headlines of the U.S. workers' current problems as a result of long-standing neoliberal policies and the 2008 financial crisis.

In the midst of these issues, the U.S. working class experienced a revival the likes of which that has not been seen in a long time. According to an opinion article that was written for CNN by Richard Trumka [1] , the president of AFL-CIO, " In the year since, working people have been doing just that. From airports and hospitals to newsrooms and college campuses, workers are organizing on a scale that I haven't seen in decades. More than a quarter-million Americans joined unions [2] last year - three-quarters of them under 35. Half of the nonunion workers say they would vote to do the same [3] if given the chance, and Gallup has even pegged unions' popularity at a 15-year high. " [4]

As a side note, the unions organized Labor Day 2018 at a time when the workers' struggle was accelerating: the successful state-wide strikes of elementary school and high school teachers, the struggle of the Chicago hotel workers, which then inspired several others in the sector across the country, the strike authorization of the United Metal Workers' Union (USW) on the collective bargaining agreement with the metal bosses, 27% wage increase of window cleaners as a result of their struggle, 260,000 UPS postal workers authorizing a strike and struggling against the union bureaucracy, struggle for unionization from New York construction workers, and the university assistants' struggles for unionization. The US labor forces celebrated Labor Day in an unusual and special atmosphere. On the other side, one should note that the U.S. labor movement saw several struggles for unionizing and wage increases against weak work conditions in prisons and main sectors, such as cable, automotive, packaging, arms, and agriculture in last 2 years.

Despite the recent upsurge in labor struggles, current demands and problems of U.S. labor are rooted in the past. A short account of the history of U.S. labor may be helpful to make sense of the significance and characters of today's labor actions. Because the dominant narrative on labor comes from liberal or social-democratic accounts, which have avoided representing the U.S. labor as a working-class force for a long time. Instead, their accounts consistently blur the line between working class and middle class through using income and level of education as almost the only metrics. Besides that, the story of U.S. labor remained either one-sided and descriptive academic sources on the U.S. labor or narrating the labor history as if it was only a cultural motif.

AN OVERVIEW OF THE U.S. WORKING CLASS

Based on 2016 data from "employment by major industry sector" chart of the U.S. Department of Labor, distributions of the labor force are in mining, construction, manufacturing, 12.6%; in service industry, 80.3%; agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting, 1.5%; and nonagricultural self-employed 5.6%. [5] Another important finding from the statistics is that although union membership is more likely to experience a revival, the general situation remains stagnant. According to data on union affiliations was obtained from the Department of Labor website, employees from all backgrounds, industries, and occupations who are 16 years old and over;

Change in union membership and Representation in the US, 2007-2017, by the data from the Department of Labor [6]

As is illustrated in the chart, although the popularity of the unions has an upward trend, according to a Gallup poll referred to before, union membership and representation capability still remain steady. [7] However, this recent situation is not independent of national and international condition for the U.S. labor movement. The Taft-Hartley act of 1947, which strengthened the right to work law, the witch-hunt operations of McChartyist era against American communists after WW2 throughout the 1950s, the removal of communists from union leadership as a result of the Communist Control Act of 1954 [8] , then Nixon's dirty war against Black and Anti-War activists through the "war on drugs" after Lyndon Johnson's acceptance of "civil rights act of 1964" as an adjustment of the American social contract, then trickle-down economics of Reagan era, which sought to decrease taxes on the companies that they may encourage growth in the short run and benefit society in the long run, all weakened the labor unions politically, economically and socially. Even though some of the honest unionists maintain their struggle to some extent, most unions are stuck with an extremely legalist approach, which directly or indirectly broke the workers' initiative.

As a matter of fact, the historical processes considered above also grew U.S. capital's capacity for outsourcing and movement overseas. NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) increased the mobilization of the U.S. capital, and reduced tariffs, which caused loss of many manufacturing jobs, and increased the competition to the detriment of small producers. Seeking markets that have lower labor prices left American workers jobless eventually. On the other hand, weak healthcare services, precarious employment conditions, weak access to education, affordable daycare, safe housing, healthy and reasonably priced food, gender wage inequality in non-unionized workplaces, open-shop practices, and politicians who ignore workers' concerns are main challenges that the U.S. working class currently has.

All in all, this overview may draw attention to the background of the current situation of the U.S. working class. The escalating problems of the working class generated a discussion around the 2016 presidential elections among the media, pollsters, and academics. Despite the imposition of the caricatured idea that " president Trump was supported by the white working class" it is becoming clear that the radicalizing right-wing anxiety of petty-bourgeois classes as a result of losing their class positions, unemployment, and years of years of nationalist and religious propaganda were other main reasons. This caricatured idea is utilized as a scapegoating attempt by the Democrats to avoid their responsibility in the current political, economic and social atmosphere in the U.S.. While Charles Post explains why white workers supported Trump, he underlines that casting no vote as white workers could be more effective than casting a vote for Republicans, which Christine J. Walley and Claudine M. Pied make similar points. [9] In other words, the loss of trust in the electoral democracy that may fundamentally shift the tides of U.S. politics can be read as another reaction to neoliberalism. As a result of analyzing three workers' cases, their resentment and voting behaviors/rationalities, Pied concludes that " there is… not one white working-class reaction to neoliberalism ." [10] That is, one may say that the US working class has been seeking different solutions instead of just supporting right wing nationalist candidates. Yet, we have to acknowledge the considerable impact of right-wing nationalism on white workers.

CHARACTERS OF CURRENT WORKING CLASS ACTIONS 2017-2018

Since the 2016 presidential elections, new Trump anti-labor appointees to NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) [11] , recent restrictions by the NLRB to unions' right to picket, and demoralizing decisions in the cases "Epic Systems Corp. vs. Lewis" [12] and "AFSCME vs. Janus [13] have been unrelenting, successive defeats for the labor movement.

In April 2018, the U.S. Senate confirmed pro-business lawyer John Ring to the National Labor Relations Board. The senate handed control of the board over Republicans. Ring is a partner at Morgan Lewis & Bockius, and was appointed to a five-year term. The board now has three Republicans appointed by President Donald Trump and two Democrats.

An October ruling of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) declared that janitors who were picketing for better working conditions were not protected from unfair labor practices committed by their employer. The Board ruled that the janitors, who were being contracted by a building management company, were engaged in secondary picketing. [14]

In May 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the bosses could hinder workers' rights to collective and legal action for better wages and working conditions in the "Epic Systems Corp. vs. Lewis" case. Another case, which was concluded in June and known as "AFSCME vs. Janus," was again decided against the unions. Even if the U.S. unions manage a majority in the workplace, not all workers in that workplace are required to become members of that union. However, workers who are not members of that union paid a certain amount of contribution to the union, because they still benefited from the collective bargaining in the same workplace. In June 2018, such a necessity has now been eliminated in unionized workplaces of the public sector by the Janus ruling.

However, tides are still turning for the U.S. working class. Even if the labor movement received significant counter-attacks, these are not likely to end this new and energetic tide. Because patterns of today's strikes for wage increases and betterment of working conditions and unionizing struggles in non-unionized workplaces appear as radical, contagious, and encouraging worker and laborer actions.

Radicalization of workers for their economic demands are important as future opportunities for the political transformation of the unions and boldness of the labor movement. For a long time, U.S. unions have relied on collective bargaining processes with bosses, in which the most union leaderships would seek were ways of compromising with bosses. On the other hand, except a few labor occasions, one may find union presences mostly through their political action committees, which run election campaigns for a candidate that union endorsed. And those candidates are mostly from the Democratic Party. Additionally, union representatives run their campaign through the motto "more middle class jobs" as if they already acknowledged that being a part of the working class is unsustainable. Hence, these unions are more likely to avoid even from the strike authorizations since they can negotiate with bosses through union lawyers and court cases.

Worker and laborer struggles in the aftermath of the 2016 elections reveal radical characteristics in many aspects. Pending strike authorization of UPS workers, whose union has tended to compromise with bosses, state-wide wildcat strikes of teachers, early morning protests of New York construction workers once every week, hunger strikes, and occupations of grad students are several examples of this radical turn. In addition to that, laborers in the same sector, but from different states, follow each other's example. Hence, this pro-active pattern may spark a fire easily in the same sector, such as in teachers, grad students, prison complex, and hotel workers.

Therefore, it shows that emergent radical union members will not necessarily tolerate waiting for legalist solutions as it has always been; because these are generally long-lasting court cases, which may break workers' initiative. On the other hand, workers' reactions to the Democratic Party became apparent in the 2016 presidential elections. Rising support for the Trump's Republican Party, not casting a vote at all, or voting third parties instead of for both grand parties were different reactions against the neoliberal policies that are being supported by former labor Democrats, especially in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Wildcat teachers' strikes had an encouraging effect on the labor struggle. On February 22, starting with West Virginia, wildcat strikes spread out among 8 states, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Virginia, and West Virginia with reactions to low wages for teachers and support staff, inadequate school budgets, overcrowded classrooms, and other problems. Following this wave, workers at 26 hotels of Chicago went on strike as members of UNITE HERE Local 1 on September 7, which was then followed by Marriott hotels workers' strike in 8 cities, in Detroit, Boston, San Diego, San Jose, Oakland, San Francisco, Maui, and Oahu. Wages, workloads, and health insurance are among the issues at play. [15]

Although grad students are the most vulnerable one because of their recent recognition of employee status, their strikes and unionizing struggles are still ongoing. Cafeteria strikes, occupations, hunger strikes and ongoing strikes take place at the country's most privileged schools, such as the New School, Columbia University, and Yale University. They are also faced with weak working conditions, precarious insurance-pay, and lack of resources for their livelihoods. Additionally, the CUNY adjunct's struggle arose from precarious work conditions. Full time lecturer positions are difficult to come by. As academic laborers say, more than half of CUNY classes are taught by CUNY adjuncts, their salaries make 5% of the budget.

As another type of precarious work, seasonal farm workers, who are mostly Central American immigrants, from Sakuma Brothers and Driscoll's (the world's largest distributor of berries) were successful in their struggle for unionizing and obtaining their rights for minimum wage. In a statement from their website, the union claims that Sakuma Brothers is guilty of " systematic wage theft, poverty wages, hostile working conditions, and unattainable production standards. " [16]

On the other hand, since December 2017, New York construction workers, who work in the Hudson Yards redevelopment project, have been fighting against the union-busting tactics of the bosses, who impose the open shop model. The Hudson Yards redevelopment project is the largest construction project in North America and the largest private real estate project in U.S. history. The open shop agenda pushed by Related Co. may create a precedent for the expansion of the already growing open shop work model. The struggle of workers against the open shop model is crucial for future labor struggles that will take place in the city. Since December 2017, workers have been regularly doing protests in front of the construction site every Thursday morning at 6 a.m near their workplace. That can also be count another radical characteristic of the recent labor struggle.

Last spring, negotiations between the Teamsters, UPS, and UPS Freight started over the union's proposals, which would address a range of critical issues facing UPSers - ending forced overtime for package car drivers, raising part-timers' wages, imposing monetary penalties for management harassment, and protecting jobs from automation, among others. This negotiation included about 260.000 workers. Even though an overwhelming majority of workers voted yes for strike authorization last summer, and no for UPS contract in this fall, union leadership ignored the decisions of workers, creating a wave of reactions to union leadership from rank-and-file union members and workers.

In another important development, the U.S prisons saw the largest strike in their history. Beginning at the end of last summer, prisoner workers were on strike for voting rights of millions of American prisoners and better prison conditions against slavery-like work conditions. In the U.S., the anti-slavery law includes all citizens except prisoners. According to 13th Amendment, it abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime.

Moreover, in heavy industry, USW's (United Steel Workers) pending strike authorization, IBEW's (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers) struggle against Spectrum Cable Company last year, and UAW's (United Automobile Workers) unsuccessful attempt to organize union in a Nissan factory of Mississippi in summer 2016 have been other headlines of the U.S. workers' struggle. Unfortunately, the struggle is relatively weak while comparing with other sectors. Considering that terrific and racist anti-union campaign in Nissan plant, especially against African-American workers, the union's inability to build a strong organizing committee, and the fear of losing their jobs at Nissan, underlines how the U.S. represses their workers while hiding it from public eye. However, as one of Nissan workers mentioned, those are educative processes that may prepare workers for future struggles.

As a last note on the current struggles, Amazon workers' voices are still up for a union in the U.S. A month ago, McDonalds' workers led by Fight For $15 went on strike for better wages, against weak working conditions, and harassment. For Chicago teachers, strikes are on their agenda.

TEACHERS AND UPS WORKERS SHOW HOW TO USE "THE STRENGTH THAT COMES FROM PRODUCTION" [17]

Among all fruitful labor struggles, wildcat teachers' strikes and UPS's collective bargaining process show many other lessons specifically and clearly. Wildcat teachers' strikes were named by the U.S. media as "the red wave" which refers to dominant Republican politics in those states. Another reference to "the red wave" is that almost all statewide strikes happened in right-to-work states. Beyond being widespread, teachers' strikes have a daring character as we mentioned before. These strikes had that daring character because they were mostly led by grassroots organizing among teachers with the progressive rank-and-file teacher union caucuses in AFT (American Federation of Teachers) and NEA (The National Education Association) since the union leadership had shown a trend of abandoning the working class. [18] Similarly, the progress among Teamsters (International Brotherhood of Teamsters) affiliated UPS workers is being directed mostly by rank-in-file members. A pending strike of UPS workers has been unexpectedly persistent. One may expect that workers would quickly lose their hopes in the struggle, but it consistently developed while challenging the union bureaucracy and bosses in a well-organized manner. Considering that this labor issue involves 260,000 workers, it is not easy to maintain such a struggle.

Teachers' strikes took the stage in West Virginia on February 22, 2018 with the demands of lowering health insurance costs, made worse by stagnant wages. [19] Undercover groups in social media were utilized as a way of organizing, and debating. West Virginia has a famous history within the U.S. working class struggles. Including the famous struggle of the Battle of Blair Mountain, heroic miners struggles of the 1920s, wildcat strikes of the 1970s, and the victories of the Miners for Democracy movement are several key historical moments, which make American worker today "proud to be union." [20] It truly shows that the memory of class struggle is alive, which appears through discussions on social media, or the general trend of daring to follow rank-in-file instead "the leadership."

Teachers went on strike against budget cuts, decreased employee benefits, low per pupil spending, low salaries, right-to-work laws, school choice, and school vouchers. A 20% pay raise in Arizona, 2% pay raise and increased school spending in Colorado, increased school funding, teachers raises by $6000, support staff raises by $1250 in Oklahoma, and 5% pay raise in West Virginia are the gains of these struggles. [21] Arizona teachers, for instance, won their struggle with their gradual action from low-intensity to high-intensity actions, such as wearing red T-Shirts on Wednesdays and posting photos on social media, then handing out flyers, then rallying at the capitol with signs and stickers: " I Don't Want to Strike, But I Will" and finally, walking out and massive marches. [22] The West Virginia teachers' strike, the most advanced struggle of the many that erupted in 2018, started with rallies and walkouts from the beginning of February 2018, the strike month. [23] Therefore, one may say that although the social media reach-out played an important role, more or less all strikes and labor struggles escalated from low-density actions to high-density actions.

However, strikes remained valuable considerable remarks. Almost 80% of U.S. public school teachers are women, and women made up almost all of the leadership of strikes in Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Particularly because of this, some of West Virginia teachers carried out the matter of preserving abortion rights into the strike efforts. Another positive development is exposure of the betrayal of the union leadership, or their compromising tendencies with state governments. Teachers do have a feeling of being undervalued by the business and state governments. But the political perspective of many teachers, for example in Kentucky and West Virginia, doesn't exceed the slogan "vote all the enemies out of office," which means for them supporting teacher-friendly candidates in the Democratic Party. [24]

As a note for our readers, one may expect that the U.S. democracy values on the surface liberal values and human rights, besides the racist history and present that could not be solved totally. Ironically, similar to slanders and racial slurs of the bosses and their associates against black workers of the Nissan factory, teachers were mostly blamed by the state incumbents and political authorities to hurt educational process. Kentucky governor went further, and said " You know how many hundreds of thousands of children were left home alone today? I guarantee you somewhere in Kentucky today a child was sexually assaulted that was left at home because there was nobody there to watch them. " Oklahoma governor found her cure to the strikes by classifying striking workers as: "a teenage kid that wants a better car." [25]

CONCLUSION

Some of the struggles considered here are still ongoing among the workers. The most important characteristics that may be extracted from these examples are the radical, contagious and encouraging actions. In addition, a majority of these actions ended with relative victory. This new accumulative process as for workers' experiences may provide future opportunities to transform unions politically towards unions which are strongly tied with workers and their class interests. On the other hand, the awakening sections of the youth, and an increase in sympathy to socialism are turning towards to the working class and the organizational problems they face. Although it might be early to make a guess about what may happen, one may definitely say that the U.S. working class is seeking ways to escape from this recent, oppressive and extremely exploitative situation, while organizing politically and economically.

Notes

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/03/opinions/labor-day-working-people-deserve-our-fair-share/index.html

[2] https://www.epi.org/publication/biggest-gains-in-union-membership-in-2017-were-for-younger-workers/

[3] https://aflcio.org/2018/6/22/study-popularity-joining-unions-surges

[4] https://news.gallup.com/poll/241679/labor-union-approval-steady-year-high.aspx

[5] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-sector.htm

[6] https://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpslutab3.htm#union3.xlsx.f.1

[7] https://news.gallup.com/poll/241679/labor-union-approval-steady-year-high.aspx

[8] "The Communist Control Act of 1954", The Yale Law Journal 64, no. 5 (1955): 712-65. doi:10.2307/793898.

[9] Post, C. (2017). The roots of Trumpism. Cultural Dynamics, 29(1-2), 100-108.

[10] Pied, C. (2018). Conservative populist politics and the remaking of the "white working class" in the USA. Dialectical Anthropology, 42(2), 193-206, sf. 204.

[11] https://www.reuters.com/article/labor-nlrb/senate-confirms-trump-nlrb-nominee-handing-control-to-republicans-idUSL1N1RO28L

[12] https://theredphoenixapl.org/2018/05/22/a-blow-to-the-working-class-reveals-capitalist-ruthlessness-and-fear/

[13] https://www.afscme.org/now/janus-for-leaders

[14] http://www.fightbacknews.org/department/labor

[15] http://www.fightbacknews.org/department/labor

[16] https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-07-18/workers-who-pick-your-summer-berries-are-asking-you-not-buy-them?fbclid=IwAR03gjveysa610ss2nzGxqiaGe_H56hpBjtqtUh8Y_LLerArll_20On14nk

[17] The Strength Comes From Production: A widely used worker slogan from Turkey. One may encounter with this idiom in workers' and unions' informative materials in Turkey.

[18] http://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2018/05/whats-behind-teachers-strikes

[19] http://www.labornotes.org/2018/02/west-virginia-teachers-launch-statewide-strike

[20] http://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2018/03/west-virginia-teachers-learned-1970s-miners

[21] https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-arizona-teacher-protests-20180503-story.html , https://www.denverpost.com/2018/05/12/pueblo-teacher-strike-is-over/ , https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/04/teachers-strikes-oklahoma-socialism-sanders-unions , https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/05/politics/west-virginia-teachers-strike-future-unions/index.html

[22] http://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2018/04/heres-how-arizona-teachers-organized-their-first-ever-statewide-strike

[23] http://www.labornotes.org/2018/02/west-virginia-teachers-launch-statewide-strike

[24] https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3732-striking-teachers-and-wildcat-politics

[25] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2018/04/04/oklahoma-governor-compares-striking-teachers-to-a-a-teenage-kid-that-wants-a-better-car/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.c9f793c87e21 , https://www.vox.com/2018/4/16/17242812/kentucky-governor-bevin-teachers-strike-child-assault , http://time.com/5176094/west-virginia-teacher-strike/ , https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/04/23/arizona-teachers-walkout-governor/544535002/