The Mecca of African Liberation: Walter Rodney in Tanzania

By Chinedu Chukwudinma

Republished from Review of African Political Economy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

4. Karim Hirji, 2010, p.95.

5. Rodney, 2018, p.76.

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

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

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

9. Rodney, 2012, pp.96.

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

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

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

13. Rodney, 2012, p.206.

14. Rodney, 2012, p.284.

Derek R. Ford’s “Encountering Education:” Bridging Marxist Educational Theory and Practice

By Peter McLaren

It was almost seven years ago that I participated in Derek R. Ford’s dissertation defense at Syracuse University. In that work—later published as Education and the Production of Space—Ford built on my own revolutionary critical pedagogy by further experimenting with the exact educational logics at work in revolutionary struggles and their spatial relations and implications.[1] After many twists and turns, for the last several decades I’ve worked to enlarge the scope of critical pedagogy into social movements because Marxist pedagogy is nothing unless it’s contributing to a social universe outside of capitalist value production.[2] Ford is one of several who continue to take that project in new directions, and since his dissertation he’s continued his work as a communist organizer at the local, national, and global levels and, just as importantly, has continued to write and theorize at the intersections of Marxism, pedagogy, and revolutionary struggles today. His seventh book, Encountering Education: Elements for a Marxist Pedagogy continues this trend in important and provocative ways.[3] The book is an incisive intervention in the fields of educational and political theory, yet it’s also one that’s relevant to organizers and activists today.

Ford begins by observing the frequency with which Marx’s eleventh Theses on Feuerbach—that “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it”—is cited. From here he launches into his own intervention by noting that what is rarely mentioned is “the direction toward which he wanted to change it,” something that is inseparable from what he studied and the theory he articulated.[4] In other words, Marxist theory isn’t merely about changing the world but about advancing the class struggle toward the eventual abolition of class society. This is the transformation from the capitalist mode of production to the communist mode of production via socialism, which “as a social formation” is a combination “of elements of both modes of production in which communist relations and means of production are ascending through the class struggle.”[5] The novelty of Ford’s work is the way he sees pedagogical processes as absolutely central to not only the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production but, more importantly, as key yet neglected aspects of the struggle for a new mode of production. Ford contends that we have to both explain the political context of our moment and the pedagogical philosophies of marxist education appropriate to that conjuncture, while insisting that neither are reducible to the other.

An Overview of Ford’s Latest Riffs

The first chapter begins where his last book, Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy, left off: with Ford’s unique and bold excavation of two latent pedagogical logics in Marx’s own works.[6] This is a theme he’s developed elsewhere in various ways, and in this sense Encountering Education is another extended riff on this theory. This is not mere repetition, but rather the result of Ford’s sprawling research that refuses to follow a linear trajectory. In this book, it serves as the foundation for the “elements of a marxist pedagogy” that Ford organizes around the “disinterpellative encounter,” a concept first proposed by another former student of mine, Tyson E. Lewis. Whereas Althusser articulated interpellation as the material process through which subjects are inaugurated into the mode of production, Lewis and Ford theorize disinterpellation as the disruption of that process. “The pedagogical encounter,” Ford writes here, “is ‘an exposure to an outside,” and an excess or surplus gap within the lesson.’”[7]

For Ford, Marx’s distinction between the method of presentation and inquiry serves as the starting points for a marxist pedagogical philosophy of learning and studying, the former of which is linear and guided by predetermined ends and the latter of which is open-ended and guided by a ceaseless wondering and wandering to and fro. Ford innovatively reads work by Marx and his commentators as gesturing toward but never reaching this pedagogical dialectic Marx articulates.

The next chapter develops a theory of “errant learning” in which both pedagogies are blocked together, and the political context here are anti-colonial and decolonial struggles. He begins with John Willinsky’s Learning to Divide the World, which looks at how education was and is fundamental to colonialism.[8] Ford attends to Willinsky’s neglect of learning and colonialism while at the same time contributing to revolutionary work on studying that has focused primarily on neoliberalism. He does this through a highly unique—and for some, probably, controversial—turn to Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Space and Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres project. Here, Ford identifies “the grasping drive as the educational foundation of the colonizing apparatus. I argue that the grasping drive positions opacity as a potential that must be realized—as a thought that must be known—an orientation that ends up sacrificing opacity as such.”[9] Ford turns to the question of form through Sloterdijk, linking the grasping drive to “lordly imagining,” before drawing out the revolutionary potential of Sloterdijk’s work on foams. He develops his theory of “errant learning” as “another form of dialectically blocking together the methods of inquiry and presentation, but one that shows the necessity of presentation and the existing historical material conditions in which we engage in inquiry.”[10]

After exploring the colonial and imperial context of our times, Ford turns next to the urban coordinates of our struggle and our present. He shows how the grasping drive is the pedagogical logic of today’s urbanism, which he justifies and then develops a pedagogical response to by turning to Jean-François Lyotard’s later work. Indeed, here we will note Ford’s highly unorthodox marxism that, while it’s unapologetically committed to the proletarian class camp and the struggle for communism, looks for philosophical allies everywhere he can, even in the most unsuspecting of places. Today’s urbanism—the megalopolis—is one in which everything is put into circuits of communication and exchange and “is ‘an economy in which everything is taken, nothing received,’” and is thus illiterate. Ford takes illiteracy as a positive element for marxist pedagogy insofar as such illiteracy “is not the negation or suppression of literacy, but instead a development of literacy as grasping, through which forms and concepts constitute objects under the mind’s direction and the subject’s will.”[11] Instead of presenting what this looks like, he inquiries into examples, one of which is the use of “scare quotes.” When we write or read square quotes, we “create a margin around the words and prevent any firm links between the words inside and outside to be drawn. While we can produce uncertain connections (“what is it about ‘this’ word?”), these always slip out of our grasp.”[12]

Urbanism isn’t only about steel and pavement, bounded densities of population and production, but is also virtual and material at the same time. In the fourth chapter, he builds on Curry Malott’s work on the postdigital, which Malott sees as a struggle “over what form the postdigital will take, which will be determined,” Ford urges, “by what mode of production prevails.”[13] While there is much of interest in this chapter, what is perhaps most politically and theoretically important is Ford’s argument against marxist theorists who have abandoned Marx’s theory of value today on the basis that “immaterial” and “knowledge” or “cognitive” work and products are immeasurable. “Marx’s law of value,” he reminds us, “is precisely immeasurable” insofar as both aspects of socially-necessary labor time are “dynamic,” “unpredictable,” and at times even outside of even our individual and collective consciousness.[14] The main problem he identifies with capitalist postdigital pedagogy is “that it limits individuation to the capitalist form of individuality and reinforces our conception and experience of individuality as a finalized starting point rather than an endpoint.”[15] Capital needs the individual subject-form to produce commodities (like knowledge). Yet rather than argue for the collective alone, Ford proposes—in postdigital fashion—for the pedagogical and political process of individuation through incalculable thought.

Ford begins the conclusion by noting that “there’s an immense power that comes from hearing an explanation for one’s oppression and our collective poverty and misery,” but that “explanation is only one part of the marxist pedagogical dialectic. The other part—inquiry—is a different kind of power: the power of wonder.”[16]  Here he summarizes the political and pedagogical distinctions between inquiry and presentation beautifully:

“If one side of the marxist pedagogical dialectic is about knowing and presentation, then we have to attend to the other side, which is about thought and inquiry. Such a distinction turns on the dialectic between exchange-value and use-value, between abstraction and differentialization, between capitalism and communism. The dialectic itself is here, in the present, in the global capitalist world, but in the world in transition. Understanding or knowing involves a determinate judgment that takes place when given data comes under the mind’s order and comprehension is a faculty of determination in which data comes under the mind’s comprehension. Thinking, by contrast, is an exposure to stupor, an experience with immeasurable concepts that the mind can never grasp.”[17]

After an important presentation and study of interpellation, counterinterpellation, and disinterpellation, Ford turns to the role of noise and music in anti-colonial struggles to tie together the various riffs produced in the book, ending with the example of technologies that mediate the voice such as autotune, which show us that vocalization is a ‘process without a subject’ insofar as they prevent us from linking the sound of a voice to an essence of an individual subject or a piece of fixed capital.” These technologies produce a “sonic surplus” that we have to listen to both synchronically and diachronically as well in order to “receive an immersive education in the wonder as well as the theory of class struggle, a struggle that is advanced ideologically and materially through the forces of opposition and swerve.”[18] The swerve is the unpredictable but nonetheless intended action of the marxist pedagogue.

Conclusion

There’s no doubt in my mind that Ford’s book—and this review—will be challenging to some. Yet for those who are confused, I can only urge you to spend time with Encountering Education, which makes these dense and difficult theories accessible and makes them come to life with real-world examples. That the book is available as an affordable paperback and a free online PDF will hopefully contribute to the essential ideas in this book proliferating throughout our movements. The pedagogical elements of the book aren’t recipes or dictates, but rather resources for us to use in all of our revolutionary educational endeavors.

Peter McLaren is Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, College of Educational Studies, Chapman University, where he is Co-Director of the Paulo Freire Democratic Project and International Ambassador for Global Ethics and Social Justice. In 2005, a group of scholars and activists in Northern Mexico established La Fundacion McLaren de Pedagogía Critica to develop a knowledge of McLaren's work throughout Mexico and to promote projects in critical pedagogy and popular education. On September 15, 2006 the Catedra Peter McLaren was inaugurated at the Bolivarian University of Venezuela.

Notes

[1] Derek R. Ford, Education and the Production of Space: Political Pedagogy, Geography, and Urban Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2017).

[2] Peter McLaren, Pedagogy of Insurrection: From Resurrection to Revolution (New York: Peter Lang, 2016), 373.

[3] Derek R. Ford, Encountering Education: Elements for a Marxist Pedagogy (Madison: Iskra Books, 2022).

[4] Ibid., 1.

[5] Ibid., 94.

[6] Derek R. Ford, Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect: Beyond the Knowledge Economy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

[7] Ford, Encountering Education, 14.

[8] John Willinsky, Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire’s End (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

[9] Ford, Encountering Education, 43.

[10] Ibid., 44.

[11] Ibid., 76.

[12] Ibid., 85.

[13] Ibid., 86. See also Curry S. Malott, “Capitalism, Crisis, and Educational Struggle in the Postdigital,” Postdigital Science and Education 1, no. 2 (2019): 371-390.

[14] Ibid., 93.

[15] Ibid., 99-100.

[16] Ibid., 102.

[17] Ibid., 103.

[18] Ibid., 122.

'No Royal Road' to Revolutionary Education

By Patricia Gorky

Liberation School's new book Revolutionary Education is edited by Nino Brown.

Capital was a formidable book from the moment it was published in 1867. In an attempt to make the content more accessible, Capital's first French publisher published the book in multiple pieces.

Karl Marx wrote to the publisher and commended him for the new teaching method used to present Capital. "I applaud your idea of publishing the translation of Das Kapital as a serial," he wrote. "In this form the book will be more accessible to the working class, a consideration which to me outweighs everything else."

The first three chapters, however, had a unique structure that were harder to understand split apart. Despite this tradeoff, Marx approved of the approach since the most important metric for him was whether people would understand his analysis of capitalism.

So as in 1872, so today: Socialism must be understood to be accepted. Socialism is a system where the working class wields control over the productive forces of society, and the economy is planned in a scientific manner according to the needs of the people and planet. Socialism unleashes the potential of the highest creativity and flowering of the working class.

Although the demonization in recent years has faded, socialism remains a badly-misunderstood topic. Teaching, therefore, is a critical skill that socialist organizers can and must hone and master.  Different situations calls for different teaching methods, or pedagogies. How do we know which method to use? How do we improve our own efficacy in presenting information? 

Liberation School's fresh book, Revolutionary Education: Teaching and practice for socialist organizers, explores these questions from the viewpoints of history, theory, and practice. Edited by Nino Brown, the book compiles essays from educators, organizers, and journalists on revolutionary education and socialist educational methods.

Brown explains in his essay on building organizations and developing cadre that organizers have much to learn from the suffering, sacrifices and victories of our comrades in struggle all over the world. "We are all linked by our common oppression under imperialism," he writes. The job of a revolutionary is to help make the revolution. To do that, socialists need to make more revolutionaries.

How do socialists win people over? Socialists are actually in the most favorable moment for socialists in the U.S. in decades. Organizer Walter Smolarek explains that organizers have the opportunity to make connections with working people and build a base of support through different tactics, including provisioning direct services.

Provisioning direct services, commonly referred to as "mutual aid", can be a way to make inroads with communities. Even an inherently nonrevolutionary activity can be used as an opening to bring people into the political struggle for socialism, but the tactic itself cannot be confused with the strategy. When a current approach does not work, organizers must recalculate and find new tactics to reach people.

The goal of Revolutionary Education, after all, is the emancipation of humankind.

Guinea-Bissau's struggle for independence led by the liberator, theorist, and educator Amilcar Cabral is one such example.

Curry Mallot traces the history of how the small west African country became a world leader in decolonial education, in large part due to the leadership of revolutionary Amílcar Cabral. For more than 400 years Guinea-Bissau was a colony of the vicious Portuguese empire, Mallot writes, whose colonial mode of education was "designed to foster a sense of inferiority in the youth." Colonial educators set predetermined outcomes sought to dominate learners by treating them as if they were passive objects.

Militant historian Sónia Vaz Borges, the child of Cape Verdean immigrants, grew up in Portugal. Vaz Borges experienced firsthand the colonial education taught to the African diaspora in the colonial center. In an interview with Breaking the Chains, she recounts how the African community "does not see themselves reflected in official versions of Portuguese history." Political education is not abstract.

Socialists must be able to explain the class character of all events. Organizers know socialist revolution is the only path to survival, yet how do we convince others of its necessity? Revolutionary teaching has to give the person all of the keys needed to be able to interpret events. "Every event has an origin and a process of development," explains Frank González, director of Cuba's Prensa Latina news agency in a 2006 interview with Gloria La Riva.

Television overwhelms us with images, González notes, but the same media denies space to interpret events. The development of social media has only exacerbated these effects. In the end, bourgeois media leaves people with nothing but confusion.

In a separate essay, Mallott explores Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky's ground-breaking work that shows how people's development corresponds to their past and present experiences. Thought emerges from engagement with the concrete world. "While all of us have been shaped by this racist, sexist, capitalist society," Mallott writes, "we never lose the ability to grow, change and think differently."

Intelligence is an attribute but also a social construct. How do you tell children facing hunger, homelessness, and police brutality to be more "gritty", when in fact they already put in tremendous effort to survive? Organizer Jane Cutter in her essay on comradeship emphasizes that all progressive people must be willing to learn from experience and work in collaboration. 

Revolutionary Education closes with two practical appendices for day-to-day organizing. "Formulating study and discussion questions" explains how to break out of a linear mode of education. The sample questions are in and of themselves instructive for the tactics they represent in addition to the thought that they provoke. Learning facts and timelines goes hand-in-hand with discussion with others, reflection on ideas and combining those with our own experiences.

Comprehension questions, for example, help distill dense texts down to their key points. Questions that focus on the identification of significance help people understand why the author themselves highlighted portions as key. For revolutionaries, perhaps the most important types of questions are those that apply and extend our knowledge of the world. How can revolutionary pedagogy sharpen our ability to educate and reach people?

The second appendix covers teaching tactics that can be applied in study groups or classrooms. Some material is best presented in a lecture form, while other situations call for more interactive engagement through having participants draw out concept maps.

How do we best reach people? How do we make sure that our message is getting across? Each situation calls for its own tactics. Revolutionaries must be flexible and adaptable according to the needs of the moment. Learning is an endeavor that requires effort on the part of both participant and teacher.

Marx closes his 1872 letter with an encouragement to work through such difficulties. "There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits."

Those in the struggle for socialism will find in Revolutionary Education a worthy climbing tool indeed.

Patricia Gorky co-hosted the podcast Reading Capital with Comrades.

Clarifying and Inspiring Revolution for 130 Years: Marx's "Critique of the Gotha Programme"

By Mazda Majidi and Derek Ford

Republished from Liberation School.

Karl Marx never intended to spell out what the communist future would look like or how we would get there. His writing that comes closest to doing this is a short letter he wrote in 1875, given the title Critique of the Gotha Programme. Published 130 years ago—in 1891—by Friedrich Engels, Marx’s lifelong collaborator and comrade, the short and incisive text served to clarify and inspire the working-class struggle for power through a critique of the draft version of the Gotha Programme, a program eventually adopted with a few revisions at the First Congress of the Social Democratic Party of Germany in the city of Gotha in 1875. The program brought together the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany and the General Association of German Workers. The latter was founded by Ferdinand Lassalle, whose ideas strongly influenced the new party’s platform.

Lassalle and Marx became friends and comrades through their participation in the 1848 democratic revolutions throughout Europe. Marx first organized for the revolution in Brussels but was banished to Germany, where Lassalle lived, and where Marx continued to agitate and organize. Lassalle was imprisoned for inciting violence and served six months in prison. Years later, in 1864, when he was only 39, having been deprived of the chance to marry a woman he loved, Lassalle challenged the man to whom the woman’s father married her, a Romanian prince, to a duel. Lassalle was killed.

In his preface to the 1888 English edition of The Communist Manifesto, Engels wrote in a footnote that “Lassalle personally, to us, always acknowledged himself to be a disciple of Marx” who “stood on the ground of the Manifesto,” although in the last two years of his life his “public agitation… did not go beyond demanding cooperative workshops supported by state credit” [1].

The Gotha Programme was a compromise between the followers of Lassalle and Marx. Marx wrote his critique in preparation for the Congress, and it circulated widely amongst Party members, especially those coming from the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany. Marx addressed it to his allies in an effort to convince them not to compromise with the reformist ideas of Lassalle. In 1875, Engels wrote a letter to August Bebel, who for most of his life was a Marxist. Engels wrote that he and Marx were only aware of the unification efforts through public papers and that the “programme has certainly astonished us not a little” [2].

Engels published The Critique of the Gotha Programme in 1891, after Marx’s death and the same year the Erfurt Programme replaced the Gotha Programme. Although the Erfurt Programme was more revolutionary in content than the earlier one, the Party apparatus was still dominated by what we’d now refer to as social democrats and adherents to other non-revolutionary variants of socialism.

It is important to read the text for what it was: a critique, a commentary written in conversation with the socialist movement at a certain juncture in history. At the same time, the short Critique (of an even shorter program itself) has a long legacy with lasting impacts on the world socialist and then communist movements. Given the attention Lenin gave to the text and to Marx and Engels’ letters about it in his State and Revolution, we can see that the Critique provided some theoretical groundwork for the revolutionary Marxism of the Third International to split with the reformism and national chauvinism of the Second International [3].

Background of the Critique: Marx’s analysis of capitalism, the state, and revolution

After the 1848 revolutions some—or actually most—people in the movement and in the Communist League believed there would be an immediate resurgence of struggle after the counterrevolution prevailed. Marx and Engels disagreed. They forecast—correctly—that a reactionary period was settling in for some time. As a result, they believed that the immediate tasks of the communist movement should emphasize revolutionary education and theory. Marx and Engels were able to convince the Communist League’s branch in London of their conviction, although the League would dissolve in 1852.

In accordance with the new tasks for the new period, Marx turned his attention to the study of political economy, a study in which he had not systematically engaged yet. This work was ironically facilitated after the German authorities put Marx on trial several times, in each of which he was acquitted. They kicked him out of Germany in 1849. Marx first tried going back to Paris, but the authorities said he was too dangerous. So Marx ended up in London, where he spent the rest of his life.

Marx’s studies of political economy culminated in the 1867 publication of the first volume of Capital–Marx’s most developed analysis of capitalist production–where he articulated the theory of value and surplus value. Marx was working on other volumes at the time, although the workers’ movement forced him to turn his attention elsewhere. Particularly relevant to the Critique was the experience of the Paris Commune. His study of the Commune was published in 1871 as The Civil War in France, and was one of Marx’s most developed analyses of the state and the revolutionary process.

The essence of Marx’s critique

The real dynamics of capitalism and the role of the state in the revolutionary struggle for communism are at the heart of Marx and Engels’ criticisms. At the same time, it’s important to remember that Marx was writing to comrades in the German Party (not for the public) and it was a highly contextual intervention. The essence of the Critique revolves around the program’s interrelated misconceptions of 1) labor, classes, and wages; 2) the state’s role in the emancipation of the working class; and 3) the revolutionary transition from capitalism to communism. In this section, we highlight some of the most relevant insights that emerge from the text.

The program did not comply with Marx’s theory of value [4]. The draft and final version of the Gotha Programme demanded the “equitable distribution” of the “total labour” of society. There’s no acknowledgement of the fact that what is produced has to be divided between replacing “the means of production used up,” investments in expanding productive capacities, and the creation of a reserve of surpluses for an “insurance fund.” Moreover, society’s products have to fund administration, common “needs, such as schools, health services,” as well as “those unable to work” [5]. The demand is thus utopian in that it supposes a communist society based “on its own foundations” rather than on the actual foundations on which it emerges: capitalism [6].

Rather than “equal distribution” there will, under socialism–the first stage of communism–be unequal distribution because socialism inherits inequalities from capitalism that can’t be wished away. In the first stage of communism–socialism, material goods are not distributed evenly. There is still the distinction between the wages of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled labor. Only “in a higher phase of communist society” can “society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” [7]!

The Program proclaimed that all classes besides the working class “are only one reactionary mass” and ignored the existence of other classes, such as landlords, the self-employed, peasants, and the middle classes [8]. With the continued concentration of capital, these classes are largely proletarianized, giving them a revolutionary potential dismissed in the Gotha Programme. At the same time, the program declared that its utopian demands would be achieved by the “democratic control” of “state aid,” which would establish “the free basis of the state” [9]. This free basis includes a number of democratic demands like universal suffrage, free and compulsory schooling, and a progressive income tax.

Marx asks: “Free state – What is this” [10]? The state isn’t free-floating or neutral, but is rooted in the capitalist mode of production. The experience of the Paris Commune, in particular, showed that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes” [11]. Instead, the struggle for communism entails a “period of revolutionary transformation,” to which “there corresponds… also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat” [12]. Marx insists on the necessary struggle for the working and oppressed to conquer state power to repress the former ruling classes.

Although “the free basis of the state” in the draft was replaced with “the state,” the essence remained unchanged because the state was seen as a neutral vehicle to be used to replace capitalism with socialism.

Later developments and political consequences of Marx’s critique

Because this was a founding program based on principles rather than strategies, Marx and Engels worried about its impact on the Party and the workers’ movement as a whole. In their correspondence on the unification congress, both insisted that “every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes” [13]. What matters more than what the Party says is what the Party does. For example, even though the final program addressed Marx’s criticism of the implicit nationalism in the draft–which didn’t include “a word… about the international functions of the German working class!”–the Party’s later support for World War I would make their chauvinism clear [14].

The critique was a key resource for Lenin’s study and publication of The State and Revolution. Lenin expanded on the transition between the first and second stages of communism and justified the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Lenin writes that “the first phase of communism cannot yet produce justice and equality; differences, and unjust differences, in wealth will still exist, but the exploitation of man will have become impossible” [15]. This, Lenin writes, guards against idealism insofar as “we must not think that having overthrown capitalism people will at once learn to work for society without any rules of law. Besides, the abolition of capitalism does not immediately create the economic prerequisites for such a change” [16]. The dictatorship of the proletariat is essential in consolidating this phase and guiding society towards the next phase, in which there’s “no need for society, in distributing the products, to regulate the quantity to be received by each; each will take freely ‘according to his needs’” [17].

Importantly, the construction of communist society is a possibility without guarantees. “By what stages, by means of what practical measures humanity will proceed to this supreme aim,” Lenin insists, “we do not and cannot know” [18].

Marx’s emphasis on the importance of the proletarian dictatorship in the transition between capitalism and communism in the Critique is echoed in W.E.B. Du Bois’ classic, Black Reconstruction in America. Du Bois initially titled one chapter, “the dictatorship of the Black proletariat in South Carolina.” In a 1934 letter to his publisher (in which he admits he only has a few of Lenin’s works), Du Bois defends the title in response to objections from others, noting that “in 1867, there were distinct evidences of a determination on the part of the [B]lack laborers to tax property and administer the state primarily for the benefit of labor.” The title was important, he insisted, because it “revolutionizes our attitude toward Reconstruction” [19].

While the title was eventually changed to “the Black proletariat in South Carolina,” the book still speaks of the struggle between the dictatorship of capital and labor. In the aftermath of the Civil War, Du Bois laments how the reunited U.S. “delivered the lands into the hands of an organized monarchy of finance while it overthrew the attempt at a dictatorship of labor in the South” [20]. In chapter 14 of the book, Du Bois argues that “in the South universal suffrage could not function without personal freedom, land and education, and until these institutions were real and effective, only a benevolent dictatorship in the ultimate interests of labor, Black and white, could establish democracy” [21]. For Du Bois, as for Marx, reconstruction was a struggle over state power, over how and in whose interests the state would be used. In the vision of united labor’s dictatorship, “unjust differences” would still exist, and the dictatorship was necessary for creating the conditions for real equality.

Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme was an internal response to debates and figures that belong to a different era, and Marx didn’t write it as a blueprint or roadmap for communism. Yet it remains a rich resource for our own struggles and agitation, for winning workers over to Marxism rather than liberalism, and for clarifying the socialist program in the U.S. Over the last 130 years, the struggle has persisted between reformists, who falsely claim that the capitalist state can be adjusted to serve the interests of the working class, and revolutionary communists, who insist that fundamental change is only possible when the working class smashes the state apparatus of the bourgeoisie and constructs its own workers’ state through the dictatorship of the proletariat.

References

[1] Engels, Friedrich. (1888/1967). “Preface to the German edition of 1883,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,The communist manifesto(New York: Penguin), 200.
[2] Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. (1891/1966). “Appendix I: From the correspondence of Marx and Engels concerning the Gotha Programme,” in Karl Marx,Critique of the Gotha Programme, ed. C.P. Dutt (New York: International Publishers), 27.
[3] For the historical impact of The state and revolution, see Becker, Brian. (2018). “How “The state and revolution” changed history.”Liberation School, September 30. Availablehere.
[4] See Ford, Derek and Mazda Majidi. (2021). “Surplus value is the class struggle: An introduction,” Liberation School, March 30. Availablehere; and Majidi, Mazda. (2021). “Relative surplus value: The class struggle intensifies.”Liberation School, 18 August. Availablehere.
[5] Marx, Karl. (1891/1966).Critique of The Gotha Programme, ed. C.P. Pruitt (New York: International Publishers), 7.
[6] Ibid., 8.
[7] Ibid., 10
[8] “Programme of the German Workers’ Party: Draft,” inCritique of the Gotha Programme, 89.
[9] Ibid., 90.
[10] Marx,Critique of the Gotha Programme, 17.
[11] Marx, Karl. (1871/1966).The civil war in France(Peking: Foreign Languages Press), 64.
[12] Marx,Critique of the Gotha Programme, 18.
[13] Marx and Engels, “Appendix I,” 34.
[14] Marx,Critique of the Gotha Programme, 13.
[15] Lenin, V.I. (1918/1964). “The state and revolution,” inLenin: Collected works (vol. 25): June-September 1917, ed. S. Apresyan and J. Riordan (Moscow: Progress Publishers), 471.
[16] Ibid., 472.
[17] Ibid., 474.
[18] Ibid., 477.
[19] Du Bois, W.E.B. (1934). “Letter from W.E.B. Du Bois to Ben Stolberg, October 1.” W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries,1, 2.
[20] Du Bois, W.E.B. (1935). Black reconstruction in America: An essay toward a history of the part which Black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America, 1860-1880(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company), 580.
[21] Ibid., 585.

Blows Against Empire—2021 In Memoriam

By Steve Lalla

2021 was marked, from start to finish, as a year dominated by the pandemic and its attendant dramas, including vaccination, variants, and lockdowns. When the prior year had come to a close, journalists and writers had described 2020 as the “plague year” or the “lost year.” Although 2020 was defined by the onset of the pandemic and over two million deaths attributed to COVID-19, this was nothing compared to the all-encompassing, inescapable pall that COVID cast over the year 2021.

The pandemic has dealt a particularly heavy blow to residents of the world’s greatest imperialist power, where over 880,000 US citizens have perished. The country’s failure to care for the well being of its people — particularly when juxtaposed with the success of China, where about 875,000 fewer deaths have been attributed to the novel coronavirus — laid bare the futility of capitalism and individualism when faced with crisis. The parallels with global climate catastrophe are impossible to ignore.

From January 1, 2021, until the final day of the year, powerful blows reigned down on the global imperial superstructure captained by the US, leading in tow its Western European vassal states and junior partners including Canada, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Colombia, India and the UK.

January 6: If any one event marks the end of the unipolar world led by the US since the fall of the Soviet Union, it is the cringeworthy storming of the US Capitol, incited by Donald Trump and carried out by farcical supporters united by their belief that the US presidential election was a fraud.

“Trump did more for the liberation of humanity from Western imperialism, because of his crudeness, than any other US leader in history,” commented political analyst Laith Marouf — and that was before the embarrassment of the failed uprising exposed the fragility of the US capitalist regime.

Contrary to the mainstream media narrative, over half of those arrested for involvement in the January 6 insurrection were “business owners, CEOs from white-collar occupations, doctors, lawyers, and architects.”

January 19: On his very last day in office, disgraced President Trump labels China’s treatment of Xinjiang’s Uighur community as a “genocide.” The laughable claim is promptly echoed by mainstream/imperialist media. A month later, Canada’s parliament voted to second the motion, cementing its status as fawning minion to the US war machine. These claims were particularly ironic as Canada, like the US, is a nation founded on actual genocide.

January 28: The GameStop scandal went viral and many learned firsthand that capitalism was a giant Ponzi scheme designed to plunder their savings.

March 7: A death blow was dealt to Brazil’s Bolsonaro regime, one of the US’ largest and most compliant vassals, as former President Lula was acquitted of all charges related to the Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash) lawfare scheme which had imprisoned him for 580 days. The failure of the maneuver exposed the similar proceedings against his successor, Dilma Rousseff, as a fraud, and later in the year the White House admitted the nefarious role it played in using paralegal means — also known as lawfare — to overthrow Brazil’s progressive governments and replace them with the neo-fascist Bolsonaro, whose popularity continued to bottom out through the course of the year.

March 13: The 99% rejoiced as fugitive former Bolivian dictatress Jeanine Áñez was discovered hiding under a bed and arrested by the democratically elected government of Luis Arce, committed to restoring order in Bolivia and serving justice to Áñez’s US-backed coup regime.

April 28: The gigantic paro nacional [national strike] broke out across US client state Colombia. A neoliberal austerity package passed by the Duque regime set off the mobilizations. The package would have seen Colombia bowing to IMF pressure with a swath of proposed “reforms” that increased taxes on the most vulnerable, accelerated privatization of healthcare, increased student tuition fees, and allowed for a 10-year wage freeze. The national strike was met with brutal force, dozens were killed and thousands arrested.

The immensity of the revolt led to working-class victories including “the withdrawal of the tax package, the sinking of the privatizing health project, the extension of the zero tuition to students of stratum 3, the unanimous international condemnation against the insane wave of police-paramilitary repression of the regime, the forced resignation of the ministers of finance and foreign affairs — representatives of the imperialist bourgeoisie — and a parliamentary trial of the minister of war,” as detailed by the World Federation of Trade Unions.

May 14: Amid the genocidal war on Palestine waged by the apartheid state, Hamas missiles pierced the so-called Iron Dome defense system. The vaunted missile defense system, funded by billions of dollars from the US and the apartheid state, proved to be an overpriced lemon, like so many other US weapons of war, as Gaza rose to the defense of Palestinians in the West Bank, on the other side of their divided nation. The militant solidarity shown by Gaza, and its ensuing sacrifice when civilian dwellings were subsequently levelled by the apartheid state, will be remembered as a turning point in the long journey towards a free Palestine.

May 26: President Bashar al-Assad was re-elected by the Syrian people, receiving 78% of the vote. “Supporters of the president took to the streets in the hundreds of thousands as the results were publicized, celebrating what they saw as a repudiation of violence and a step forward for the beleaguered nation,” wrote Mnar Adley for MintPress News. Celebrations in Damascus put the lie to claims by the empire ruled from DC regarding Assad’s supposed lack of popular support.

May 29: A chilling reminder that Canada was founded on the genocide of the Indigenous inhabitants of the land was unearthed in Kamloops, BC. A mass grave of 215 children, whose deaths were undocumented, was found at an Indigenous children’s concentration camp — euphemistically called “residential school” — after years of denial that such sites existed.

“We hear from residential school survivors who tell you of these things happening, of mass graves existing, and everybody always denies that those stories are true,” said Arlen Dumas, grand chief of Manitoba’s Assembly of Chiefs. “Well, here’s one example… there will be more.”

Sure enough, mass graves continued to be unearthed throughout 2021. The last Canadian “residential school” closed in 1996, and between 6,000 to 50,000 children are estimated to have been murdered in the concentration camps for Indigenous children.

June 6: Pedro Castillo, presidential candidate of Peru’s Marxist Peru Libre party, rose from virtual obscurity to defeat the right-wing candidate Keiko Fujimori, daughter of disgraced former President Alberto Fujimori, convicted in 2008 of crimes against humanity. Castillo named staunch left-wing revolutionary Héctor Béjar as his foreign minister, who re-established diplomatic relations with Venezuela (made official on October 16), bringing an end to the Canada-led “regime”-change operation The Lima Group. Béjar referred to The Lima Group as “the most disastrous thing” Peru had ever done in the field of foreign relations.

June 24: The Bicentennial Congress of the Peoples of the World convened in Caracas, Venezuela, to celebrate the 200-year anniversary of the Battle of Carabobo, the decisive victory by Venezuelan troops, led by Simón Bolívar, over Spanish imperialism. Delegates from 123 countries attended the Congress, lauded as an “anti-imperialist and internationalist space for dialogue with social movements.”

June 24: Yet another powerful symbol of the crumbling foundations of the empire ruled from DC, a building collapse in Miami, Florida, left 98 people dead. Only four survived the sudden disintegration of the 12-story beachfront condominium, one of the deadliest residential building collapses in modern history. Rescue operations went on for two weeks. With each passing day, monotonous news items covered the rescue operations, effectively delaying the announcement of the death toll until few were paying attention anymore.

June 28: Russia and China announced the renewal of their 20-year long mutual cooperation pact. “The two sides agreed to continue maintaining close high-level exchanges, strengthening vaccine cooperation, expanding bilateral trade, and expanding cooperation in low-carbon energy, digital economy, agriculture and other fields and promote the alignment of the Belt and Road Initiative with the Eurasian Economic Union,” reported Xinhua. The midsummer event was another milestone in the death march of the unipolar world.

July 1: The Communist Party of China celebrated 100 years since its founding. During that span, the CPC has lifted 850,000 people out of extreme poverty, according to the DC-based World Bank.

July 6: Honduras’ highest court found Roberto David Castillo guilty of the 2016 murder of celebrated land defender and activist Berta Cáceres. Castillo was a graduate of the West Point US Military Academy in New York state. COPINH, the organization founded by Cáceres, hailed the verdict as a “people’s victory for justice for Berta; a step towards breaking the pact of impunity.” In addition, COPINH hoped that the conviction would open the door to “bringing the masterminds behind the crime to justice,” members of Honduras’ family of billionaires, the Atalas.

July 6: The dictator Jovenel Moïse, who dissolved parliament and ruled Ayiti (Haiti) by decree beyond the term of his mandate, was assassinated by a team of Colombian paramilitaries contracted by a Florida-based firm. Ayiti had been racked by waves of mass protests and general strikes almost continually since 2018, when Venezuela was forced to suspend the Petrocaribe program due to US economic sanctions on Venezuela’s national petroleum company PDVSA. Petrocaribe had provided cheap fuel to Ayiti in exchange for deferred payment. These deferred funds, earmarked for social programs, were instead pocketed by Moïse’s administration. Demonstrators demanded his resignation and a proper election in which Fanmi Lavalas could fully participate. The Moïse regime was propped up by the de facto ruling cartel, the Core Group including the US, Brazil, and Canada.

August 13: The Mexico Talks, a dialogue between Venezuela’s government and the opposition, began in Mexico City. To its great ire, the US was excluded from the process. Both parties signed a memorandum demanding an end to the economic blockade imposed on Venezuela by the empire ruled from DC.

August 15: With the US hastening its withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban took the capital Kabul and overthrew the US puppet government. Videos filmed at Kabul airport the next day went viral, capturing the hysteria of the fleeing US forces and their supporters. At least five people died in the panic, while about 200,000 Afghans were directly killed by the failed invasion and 20-year long occupation, led by the empire ruled from DC.

September 16: Working in tandem, the resistance forces of Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah break the imperial siege on Lebanon, delivering much-needed Iranian fuel. The courageous operation exposed the permeable nature of illegal US and EU “sanctions,” which had triggered shortages, fuel scarcity, inflation, and a deadly economic crisis in Lebanon.

September 16: Thumbing his nose at the empire, Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador invited his Cuban counterpart, Miguel Díaz-Canel, as guest of honor for Mexico’s independence day celebrations. AMLO used the opportunity to reiterate his calls for an end to the 61-year-long US economic blockade of Cuba.

November 7: Daniel Ortega, leader of the Sandinista revolution that defeated the US-backed Somoza dictatorship and overcame the subsequent counter-revolutionary assault of the US-funded and trained Contra paramilitaries, was re-elected as president of Nicaragua. The result came as no surprise because Ortega has presided over a broadening of social programs and a strong Nicaraguan economy since his return to power in 2007. “The Nicaraguan people believe in their government and their electoral system,” wrote electoral monitor Dan Kovalik. “And one of the things they believe in is the government’s right, and indeed duty, to protect the country and its sovereignty from outside intervention, and in particular the incessant intervention by the US, which has been interfering in Nicaragua — often through local quislings — in quite destructive ways for over a century.”

In 2021 the rabid mainstream media assault on Nicaragua’s democracy accused Ortega of jailing his opponents, after a court order prevented Cristiana Chamorro from running due to illegal foreign campaign contributions. Chamorro’s NGO received over $6 million from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) since 2015, more than half of which went to influencing the 2021 elections.

November 15: Heavily publicized in Western media, this day was supposed to see a great popular uprising in Cuba, a supposed resurgence of the protests that had shaken the nation in early July, when Cuba suffered its worst COVID-19 problems.

“The nationwide ‘Marches for Change’ was scheduled for November 15,” wrote Ted Snider. “The Biden administration endorsed the demonstrations. So did Congress: on November 3, the House of Representatives voted 382–40 — and you thought they couldn’t agree on anything — for a resolution declaring ‘strong solidarity’ with ‘courageous Cuban men, women, and youth taking to the streets in cities and towns across the country.’ What the media and the government doesn’t want to tell you is that, once again, it didn’t happen.” The non-event was dubbed #15Nada.

November 21: Venezuela’s violent opposition returned to the political fray for the country’s regional and municipal “mega”-elections. These were carried out in relative peace, without any credible allegations of fraud, by Venezuela’s internationally acclaimed electoral system. The results were a sweeping victory for the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). The PSUV captured 19 of 23 state governorships (including the capital district), and 213 of 325 mayoralties.

November 29: Perhaps the most inspiring and surprising of the year’s significant electoral victories, in Honduras Xiomara Castro unseated US-backed narco-dictator President Juan Orlando Hernández. Castro is representative of the rising anti-imperialist political forces in Latin America. Her husband, Manuel Zelaya, was overthrown by the Honduran military — with Hillary Clinton’s blessing — in 2009, after he promised to convoke a Constituent Assembly to write a new Constitution, raise the minimum wage, and join the ALBA-TCP regional alliance founded by Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez in 2004.

December 9: Nicaragua resumed diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China, recognizing the One China principle and the sovereignty of China in Taiwan. Nicaragua thus ceased to consider Taiwan as a country and severed all contact and official relationship with Taipei. This expands the scope of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Latin America and at the same time diminishes US imperial authority in the region.

2021 was marked by a series of embarrassments and defeats for the empire ruled from DC, the decisive end of US hegemony, and the birth of a new multipolar world, which promises to continue asserting itself in the face of informational and military assault throughout 2022 and beyond.

This item was originally published on January 23, 2021 by Orinoco Tribune

Please feel free to repost, translate, republish, use, reuse, in part or in whole, any of the content found on this particular page. You have my permission to do so, free of charge. If you have questions or comments please send me a message through my Twitter account.

From the Trenches, This is How We Heal: A Discussion Between Frontline Protestors in Portland, Oregon

By Susan Anglada Bartley and Lexy Kahn

Note from the authors: This collaboratively written article by two Portland protest community members, Susan Anglada Bartley and Lexy Kahn, is the result of conversations we had after participating in protests, both as frontline protestors and as movement-side writers and journalists. Throughout the article, we switch font colors (Lexy in Red, Susan in Black) when we switch voices, offering two perspectives on healing and resistance. We hope that the processing we offer here can be a catalyst for our comrades here in Portland and for comrades worldwide who need to come together to do the work of sorting through it all to figure out how to heal and walk forward. Throughout the process of writing this article, we were both working 40 hours per week, parenting, and working on our own healing, while also continuing our resistance work. Thank you for expecting and accepting our imperfections. Thank you for noticing our strengths. Thank you for the blood you shed. Thank you for still being willing to walk forward and heal with us after you have already given so much. Thank you for the words you will have to add to this narrative. Thank you for the errors you see, the ways you disagree.

CONTEXT

[Lexy] Out of that storm of apocalyptic uncertainty and a slew of deeply traumatic collective traumas, back to back to back, one on top of the other, with no time to process any of it between, it was in the context, of that tense and highly turbulent climate with death and disease all around us, when somehow a sliver of light broke through. And with it a small shred of hope that we could finally tackle these issues of systemic racism and police brutality/accountability that have been so deadly and devastating to Black America and all other marginalized groups in this country for so long. Not just in our lifetime, but since it’s very conception.  

That tiny shred of hope, inside that sliver of light, shining through the pressure cracks of this outdated inequitable system, was enough to send ten million racial justice activists, abolitionists and lost souls, sprinting hard for those cracks of light to try and breakthrough the obstacles that kept them trapped all their lives. Obstacles and defenses that their oppressors had laid out for them, that they could now sense were in a weakened state, not as formidable as they once had been. Just that one shred of a possibility that we had a chance to disrupt the brutal and corrupt status quo of policing in America was enough to make us All go, All in. 

And now nearly two years later, with a long list of accomplishments juxtaposed by a long list of errors and setbacks, this movement stands at a whole new crossroads. Flustered and fragmented, but still standing...and still all in. Still, all that trauma changes a person, and this group in particular has been hit with a great deal of intensive trauma in a short period of time. And in this climate where just existing within the current state of the world is traumatic in itself, we may have to look back and resolve some of the traumas of our past and these last two years, to be able to move forward and forge ahead in building the more equitable world for our children and future generations. 

[Susan] It was that tiny shred of hope that drove us out of our homes, but for many a mass reckoning around white privilege was also a motivating factor. The geographic, social, and economic demographics of Portland, a city deemed 'The Whitest City in America', a city located in a state that was originally founded as a white supremacist utopia, a city also known for both Anarchist underpinnings and quirky white liberal Portlandia finickyness, was the only place where this could have happened exactly as it did. Portland was already known for massive protests. The history of protest in Portland in the past twenty years must be acknowledged as part of understanding how we got here. This historical recounting will not be perfect. It is non-academic. It is written in the cracks between work and mothering and street level protest. It is missing pieces that I hope others will fill in. Yet, it is written by a person who was right there involved in it and who saw it happen and also took part in those happenings. So take from it what is helpful and add to it what is missing.

Many of the protests of the early 2000s were active rejections of U.S. imperialism and furious responses to Bush agenda colonialism in the Middle East. Climate justice and its relationship to all of the above also drove people to the streets in those early years at the start of the century. By 2011, the Occupy Portland movement straddled adjacent two city parks in front of the Justice Center, which by no coincidence would become the heart center of the Black Lives Matter and Antifascist Movement of 2020/2021.

Human Rights organization Don't Shoot Portland must be credited with doing the work to shift the gaze inward toward white racism within the city of Portland through their ongoing activism and support of artistic production around police violence and murder of Black people, hyperpolicing of Black youth, and the history of racism in the state of Oregon and the city of Portland. Of course, dozens of Human Rights activists from many organizations spoke and protested prior to the rise of Don't Shoot as a trusted and reliable source of information, but we acknowledge the work of Don't Shoot due to their clear focus on exposing racism within Portland in the decades prior to the uprising of 2020 and 2021. This does not mean they were the organizer. As we say on the streets, Britney Spears is the organizer. We acknowledge the work of Don't Shoot PDX in order to highlight the consciousness and political energy-raising factors that preceeded the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing public response.

Likewise, the Occupy Ice Movement, supported by multiple antifascist  groups, Direct Action Alliance, several Antifa and mutual aid groups, and Portland DSA, in 2018, helped to focus the gaze of Portland protest community lenses around the intersection between colonialism, institutional oppression, race, and class. Occupy Ice was an immigrants rights movement, but also an indigenous rights movement, an anti-colonial movement, an anti-federal power movement, and an anarchist movement. One could enter from any of those invisible doors. Once inside, the rhetoric sparked discussions and even deep divides around race, class, gender, sexuality, protest, and organizing that bled right into the protests of 2020/21 through the veins of those of us who were involved in both. 

Decentralized leadership was operant in Occupy Ice (relevant becuase Occupy Ice was the largest, most recent anti-colonial and anti-racist movement in Portland prior to 2020/21). Some of the same expectations (not naming organizers, protecting Black and Indigenous voices) were the norm (or attempted norm) in 2020/21; however, in the 2020/21 movement, voices of Black women who wanted a movement that was truly intersectional (meaning centering Black women including trans women if you are really using Dr. Crenshaw's definition of intersectionality) were sometimes drowned out by the decentralized approach, and often they were still arrested, harassed, and targeted anyway. There were internal power struggles and ideological divisions among members of decentralized leadership that caused splintering. Within this reality, there was also the reality of thousands of high school students, most but not all who were white, with a lot of spare time on their hands and who were ready to roar. In identifying the youth protestors as majority white, it must be acknowledged that Black, Indigenous, Asian, and youth of multiple backgrounds, sometimes in leadership roles, did in fact hit the streets.. Bands of young people began to Bloc up for Black Lives Matter. Instagram handles told which park to meet at, how to Bloc up, how to make a shield, what to do if you were arrested.

Portland has a history of anarchist organizing. Reed College is purportedly an Anarchist institution (though that didn't seem the case when they kicked me off the grounds of Ren Faire just because I wasn't a student in 2001). As a non-Reed student who spent time with Anarchist Reedies at the turn of the century, I can tell you that this looked like a whole lot of dumpster diving, food sharing, zine-making, reading Anarchist literature, and punk rock music played in damp Portland basements. 

But Anarchism also lived outside of the academic nest that is Reed college. On Division street in the early 2000s, the Red & Black Cafe was a worker-owned coffee shop that was a center of Marxist and Anarchist thinking and activity. Pockets of Anarchism and anti-authoritarianism dwelled in little puddles around the city, often in the shape of young artists collectively renting buildings or houses to create underground galleries, hold metal shows basements, and hide in that space before big developer gentrification when housing was still cheap and working class artists could afford to hold paint brushes rather than shields.

That the throngs of white youth who showed up in 2020 were dubbed white Anarchist youth, however, was in part a mistake. As I’ve already established, the people who came out for the Portland Antifascist and BLM protests were not all white youth. The narrative that the protestors were all young white Anarchists is absurd. Many ethnic backgrounds and people who identify in many and multiple racial identities took part in all actions. There were and are many Black, Indigenous, and Asian people who are Anarchists or interested in Anarchist and Marxist philosophy living in Portland. Throughout the movement, local media created a divisive narrative in which they juxtaposed, “White Anarchists” with, “Black Lives Matter Protestors”. In doing so, they both erased the presence of Black, Indigenous, and Asian Anarchists, and inflated the lie that white or white appearing people on the streets were fighting for Anarchism, but not for Black Lives Matter.

That said, a hell of a lot of white youth who had not previously been politically engaged did, in fact, come out for the first time in 2020 and many came out under the banner, or shall we say umbrella, of Anarchism. Some had knowledge of the political philosophy due to the availability of antifascist and even Anarchist literature and ideologies in their own Portland homes (maybe some of their parents were once the Anarchist 20-somethings of the 90s and early 2000s). That knowledge likely grew through communication and pamphlets available at movement activities, but there were also white kids who had no knowledge of Anarchism other than how to tag the A and just wanted the chance to fuck shut up. And did.

Since decentralized leadership also meant that no single group or individual held the power, the rhetoric coming from megaphones and mics (which people just grabbed on a fairly regular basis) also ranged the full gamut of political underpinnings, from tacitly pledging allegiance to state power to Anarchistic direct action. City Council candidates who received donations from the PPB spoke at BLM children's marches on the same weekend that Black voices holding the megaphone at street-level protests shouted "Every city, every town, Burn the precinct to the ground," while marching through the night, surrounded by eager white youth. But I cannot speak on this as if I were an outsider listening in. Like many fellow protesters of a great variety of backgrounds, I was right there chanting too, motivated by the sincere belief that the police, criminal "justice" system, and the system of mass incarceration are indeed corrupt institutions that perpetuate racism, genocide, and harm to humanity.

Within the movement, there were common threads and hashtags. #wearenotamonolith became a commonly repeated explanation for serious ideological discrepancies in the movement used to normalize Black people not all having to share the same perspective because they are Black.

Another common thread was a constantly combusting discussion about the deeper meaning of Black Lives Matter and the need for whites to repair historic and ongoing wrongs. Fellow activists often questioned whether the very urgent and immediate daily focus on hitting individual Venmos or Cash Apps was in fact distracting the movement from the needed focus on demanding reparations for all Black and Indigenous Oregonians, through money and land that they deserve. This perspective did not intend to suggest that the aspects of the Revolution that operated through Venmo and Cash App were all the way wrong; the needs in the movement were and are real and these and other apps and mutual aid actions helped to address immediate needs and keep people housed and supported. The economic and personal needs that emerged in movement circles were also byproducts of apocalyptic capitalism and racism, and many needed urgent support so that organizers and protesters could keep doing the work or simply keep living, but this can be true while it could also be true that the movement can and will win more for those who are most impacted by demanding reparations from the city of Portland, the state of Oregon, and the Federal government.

A third common thread was respect for both decentralized leadership and diversity of tactics. Protest policing was widely eschewed, meaning it was not cool to tell anyone else how to protest, whether they were lighting a fire or silently meditating. Above all, it was essential to keep showing up. White people had the responsibility to listen, to front line if able, and to continue to disrupt white supremacy, especially in spaces where they (we) had privileged access due to race.  

Not far from the start, these demands were made by multiple members of decentralized leadership:

• Defund and Abolish the Police

• Fund the community

• Make reparations for historic and ongoing racism in Oregon

Organization Unite Oregon followed up these demands with a detailed set of budget suggestions and actions for City Council and the Mayor (Fuck Ted Wheeler) to adopt. 

Some people marched with knowledge of what was on the table. Others marched for other reasons. Communication was imperfect. But in that chaotic context, the movement continued to multiply and subdivide. It continued to attract both sincere protestors and grifters. It's messages were both reproduced, surveilled, and tainted by fear or polluted by ego. We experienced infiltration by those with corporate protest agendas (groups who came down with the intention of soliciting votes or supporting particular agendas), politicians hoping to gain capital in every way they could through the opportunity to speak to large numbers, the FBI, and the Portland and Oregon State police.

Trusted voices emerged in the depths of street protest. Trusted voices emerged far away from stages, in parks, on street corners, behind umbrellas, faces hidden. Brief but historic conversations happened outside of precincts. There were moments where no microphone was present, but the truth was told.

Trusted political actors also emerged–people who were intentionally silent, unseen, acting on behalf of the movement. Firecrackers, yes, but also actions never to be heard, seen, or mentioned again. 

The movement felt scattered like gas canisters on the street after a Portland protest, yet furious, chaotic, unpredictable, and still on fire. 

[Lexy] After decades of dancing in denial over racist policies within the US justice system, it only ended up taking those three fateful words to expose nearly every closet racist in this entire country. Outside of the system and within, all the way up to the potus. After gaslighting Black America and our most marginalized communities for decades with false narratives that wealth inequality and poverty is based only on their own lack of merit, rather than lack of available resources or systemic racism, the racial justice protests of 2020/21 and the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement forced many white Americans to see and acknowledge the thinly veiled layers of white supremacy that permeate every aspect of this nation’s power structure, to finally face their own complacence and privilege within those frameworks. It did not take long for the bigots to come crawling out from the ideological muck and sludge like slugs after a fresh rain to tell Black America that they weren't allowed to say that their lives mattered. And when that same racist version of white America realized they could not control or suffocate this civil rights movement with their hate speech alone, it led to visible collective rage and a volatile response that reverberated through the far right and manifested itself in many episodes of right wing, neo nazi hate groups from out of state, invading the city, leading to frequent clashes with Homegrown Antifascists, who were forced into defending themselves and their homes. As writer Mark Bray reminds us, “Militant anti-fascism is inherently self-defense because of the historically documented violence that fascists pose, especially to marginalized people”.

Those of us on the ground in Portland that year were probably much less surprised and shocked than the rest of the nation when the events of the January 6th Capitol Riot transpired. The white American cis male bigot for far too long has been enabled and placated by the powers that be and they panicked and flailed and clung to their prejudiced ideoligies in a perverted carnival freakshow-like display of childish tantrum combined with the very real and extreme dangers of mob mentality, so its not a wonder that they literally trampled some of each other to death in the process. 

Meanwhile the organizers of mass protests on the far-left were diligent in creating measures for de-escalation, and touting chants like ‘we keep us safe’ or ‘we take care of us’, as a way of instilling safety measures into the minds and routines of the participants. Always keeping intersections blocked and barricaded from motorists who would use their cars as weapons against us during marches or demonstrations. Helping to ensure medics were in attendance at large rallies as well as ASL translators for accessibility. Food and water were always made accessible and provided for free, fueled by donations of supporters of the movement and dispersed by the efforts and labor of the community (shouts out to Riot Ribs in those early days). So much emphasis was placed on keeping our marches as safe as possible because we knew if we were going up against a violent system of injustice that imposes what’s seen as ‘law and order’ it was going to be dangerous and there would be disorder as a natural result and in the process people were going to get hurt. Seeing as police brutality was the very reason for this uprising in the first place, we inherently know how violent US policing is as an institution and if we stood firm against it, that violence was going to follow and some of our people were going to take wounds from the punches delivered by the violent right arm of the system we were all in to abolish or at the very least, bring a much stronger measure of accountability to. Nothing else would do and we could settle for nothing less, and so some windows would have to break, some precincts would have to burn, and worst of all some of our people would have to bleed before the needle could even start to move. But credit where credit is due, this community worked extremely hard to keep each other alive or from being seriously disfigured even in the most chaotic and lawless of circumstances. In the aftermath of clashes with neo nazis or 12, you’d always see comrades tend to each other’s wounds, carry each other to the closest available medic or wash the bear mace from each other’s eyes with saline. Assigning groups to walk injured comrades to safe houses or to take them to the hospital when it was necessary which wasn’t often with all the support we had from our heroic protest medics on the street level.

Work

[Susan] And yet we were workers. 

We were workers who held children on our hips. We were workers who did what we had to for tips. We were workers who loaded boxes at the supermarket in the middle of the night. We were Grub Hub, Burgerville, and food cart workers. We were librarians, social workers, and public school teachers. We were childcare workers, EMTs, artists, cannabis clerks. We were bus drivers, nurses, herbalists, students, and professors. We were retail workers, sex workers, and we were also great masses of unemployed workers. 

We were exhausted by day, fighting by night. We were willing to meet anytime anywhere to stand for what we knew was right. We changed out of uniforms, shook off the 8 hour shift. We arranged for childcare, some took turns with partners, so we could Bloc up and fight.

We met in the park at the place where race, class, gender, and human power flexed into a muscle that was The Revolution. For some of us, it was the Revolution we had seen up ahead and organized toward for years. For others, it would be the first time tasting the gas. 

We were both leaderless and guided by voices. We were both marching in the impeccable solidarity of the heart, and each needing to express that sacred rage that kept our feet marching when our souls were tired.

It was both always all for George Floyd (fly in power) and also for those shattered parts of each of us, dominated our whole lives by racist, classist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic authoritarianism that decided upon his death to scream our truths. It was always about Black Lives Matter, and it was also our biggest mistake to fail to admit that we were also doing it for ourselves. 

Here enters our trauma. Here our lies. Here our unspeakable truths. Here our addictions. Here our imprisonment. Here our egos. Here our fear. Here our fury. Here our failures. Here our demise.

The Battle of 1312 and the attempted federal occupation of an ‘Anarchist Jurisdiction’

[Lexy] And as we were clashing with each others egos in a constant battle of ideological motives that sometimes devolved into power struggles based on popularity contests or scene politics, what was most enlightening in all of that was the way all of that drama and toxicity and venom we were directing at each other would suddenly melt away and evaporate into the void the second the police came pushing down on us in their riot gear. And once again for the brief clash against the foot soldiers of our real oppressor, we all would be united as one against a common enemy we all could agree was one of the most glaring problems in our community looking right back at us, with eyes hungry for violence from behind those shielded helmets. Dressed in body armor, boots and state issued gas masks, the so called ‘peacekeepers’ were back to restore law and order from the ‘unruly mob’ who kept insisting that Black Lives Did in fact matter and had to be beaten, gassed, tazed, shot at and maced for saying so. 

But even if the police were itching to bash some heads, there was not a single night that the police truly wanted to be out there. On the flip side of that you better believe that those of us within the group they came to try and disperse wanted to be out there… Needed to be out there, if only to challenge the brutality of a state that desperately needed to be challenged, with the lives of our own community members hanging in the balance, especially BIPOC and those from marginalized communities. Endangered by the same police thug element we were fighting and those state issued .45 caliber handguns that they were always so quick to draw from out of the holster that hung on their hip. And in those moments, even with one of our leading mantras being ‘no gods, no masters’ we were almost always as close to one unified faction as we ever were and you would’ve had no idea that just five minutes earlier multiple people in that same group were at each other’s throats, about to come to blows over differences of opinion or petty squabbles. Such is the anger and hatred for the police and their masters to so many of us in the working class majority. 

The Battle of the Portland Police Association, June 30th, 2020

[Susan] Could there be a Love that was strong enough to win?

We met at Peninsula Park just before dusk. The rule “no whites on the microphone” in full effect, I remember playing the role of cleaning the mic for each speaker, one of whom was my partner, whose words illustrated the relationship between colonialism, racism, and police violence as the sky turned from grey to a shade of indigo above us. Numerous speakers took the mic before it was time to move as a collective to the precinct where we would stand outside and demonstrate our unified rejection of police violence toward Black and Indigenous people in this society. As we arrived at the precinct, we knew to expect police photographers to snap pictures of all of the speakers from the park. At this point, we knew they were always trying to surveil us, especially targeting Black and Indigenous people who had the courage to speak their minds at the microphone. For this reason, we had to be increasingly careful to avoid any actions other than expressing our right to Free Speech.

There was no “violence” that night, other than the violence of the police themselves. Just minutes after our march arrived (no fires, no broken windows, just people marching into the night speaking their minds and hearts) a blockade of heavily armed and shielded police marched toward us, their automated, authoritarian white male voice declaring our mobilization a riot and demanding we disperse. I heard only the voice of a Black woman--one of the women who was the first to the Justice Center upon the death of George Floyd, shouting, "Hold the Line!" into her megaphone right behind my head. 

My partner and I were that line right in front of her. Due to my racial privilege and ability, I knew I better not turn the fuck back now. 

In front of me was one thin line that included a bike activist who was holding their bike as a shield. Next to him was a deeply-committed but frail man I knew had a significant leg injury. To my left was my partner, a Puerto Rican man who I knew was also not turning back. 

"Hold the Fucking Line! We've got us!" she screamed again.

As the riot-gear clad police charged with their clubs out, I saw the bike get grabbed away, the frail man was lifted up and pushed back into us like a doll. I kept pushing forward until I felt myself choking on the gas. I felt my partner disappear into the front line battle with the police.

Choking, I felt a spray of pellets on my shins. People were running away behind me. There I was floating in the smoke, trying to regain my focus as I saw cops pinning people on the ground up ahead. I was fucking alone, about to get pinned, trying to locate my partner, who had run forward trying to get the fuming gas canisters away from the protestors. I struggled to see through my clouded goggles, stumbling, trying to walk, not run. 

In that moment in the smoky, dark of night, a woman I vaguely knew from Occupy Ice grabbed my arm, linked me, stabilized my path, and saved my ass. Never in my life have I believed more in Love. Never in my life have I found a greater sisterhood. She walked arm-in-arm with me in the smoke until my partner retreated from the front line and found us. As the police charged, we ran down a side street where everyone was dispersing. Running behind him, I saw that the police had shot him right toward the balls with green glow-in-the-dark paint. As we neared a dark corner near a dumpster, a blonde white male comrade who we had never met said to my partner, pulling out a pair of black Adidas running pants, "Dude, you're hit. Take these. Put them on over so they can't see you!"

My partner went behind the dumpster and quickly put them on.

Out on the residential side street where neighbors watched from their porches and driveways, we saw comrades strewn about like broken dolls, choking on the gas. Near our vehicle, which was fortunately on that street, a 6'2" blonde, early-20-something white man lay on the grass patch between the street and sidewalk crying and choking because he had been maced directly in the face by the police. We got water from our car and my partner helped him flush his face (milk was not available in that moment). His close comrades soon came to find him, help him up, and hobble him away.

We departed, needing to return for the babysitter. It wasn't until we got home that I saw the blood and the open wound beneath my partner's pants. It wasn't until the next day that we found out they were intentionally shooting Black and Indigenous men toward the balls. It wasn't until the next day that I realized my partner had helped a white man while he himself was injured and bleeding, but he was glad he did it, and in those moments and into forever, you better believe we learned what it means to be a comrade.

But this isn't intended to make a happy spectacle of our wounds. This is meant to offer a glimpse into one moment of police-induced trauma, to illustrate the pressure we were under throughout this protest period. 

Go home and kiss your child. Hug 'em tight. Get up and go to work. Black Lives Matter. The bruises will go away. End White Supremacy. Where does the pain go? Black Lives Matter. What is that noise in the night? What does it do to a person, facing police and military violence in bike helmets and science class goggles, homemade shields, and combat boots?

There are ways in which it made us way fucking stronger. Firstly, one of the greatest victories of the movement was won that night…and in the years that followed. Human Rights organization Don’t Shoot PDX proved that the munitions used on protestors were in fact illegal munitions. The lawsuit, which they won on behalf of our Free Speech, both documented exactly what happened, affirmed our right to Free Speech, and created a strong boundary to protect future protestors from illegal munitions like those that were used on us that night. We as a protest family thank Don’t Shoot for standing with all of us who were impacted by the munitions that night and every night. There is no way we could ever forget.

There are bonds created in those battles that can and never will die, but there are also ways in which the constant and continuous assault from the Portland Police and Federal Government systemically broke people and the movement the fuck down. And we cannot tie that up in ribbons and bows. We have to uncuff it, recognize the trauma, realize how it impacted us individually and as a collective, and move forward with both the wounds and the recognition that we are welded together by our sacrifices and our pain.

White Supremacy is Trauma

[Lexy] There were times things got a little out of control and times where it got downright out of hand. Just thinking back on some of it takes some pretty severe inner fortitude. Even though the police were always the instigators of actual violence against non violent demonstrators, there was a louder outcry from white Portlanders over the graffiti and boarded up windows, than they had ever shouted with, over the issue of police brutality. Whether it was a police killing of a BIPOC high school student or the beating of non violent protester, white liberal Portland never screamed or shouted about any of it with as much dismay as they did over statues of white racist colonizers getting knocked down on October 2020’s Indigenous day of rage (which the Oregonian intentionally mislabeled as simply the ‘Day of Rage’, leaving Indigenous out of the title completely in an obvious attempt to discredit the work done that night as wanton property damage and the work of white anarchists). Or the way they howled out their grief over the boarded-up windows and graffiti in the Pearl and other downtown shopping districts. And even though all that property damage was a symptom of the police brutality and systemic racism of the city’s failed power structure, it was still somehow the demonstrators who took the brunt of the criticism from liberal white Portland and the local media, who constantly portrayed us as the more militant side rather than as a resistance to militant policing. This city isn’t suddenly falling apart as the result of these protests. It’s coming apart from failed leadership, mismanagement of resources and the ongoing severity of the opiate epidemic and houseless crisis. The continued protests and unrest in this city are all secondary bi-products and consequences of militaristic, hyper-aggressive policing, inhumane rent increases, and heedless gentrification. The 2020/21 protests and unrest only applied the pressure and provided the clarity needed to magnify how badly this city’s leadership had failed their constituency. But someone had to be scapegoated for the city's own failures, to answer for all that graffiti and scattered glass on the streets. And to understand how to move forward from here we still have to dive deeper into our collective trauma to further understand how and why we got here, and why those windows had to break. Why and how those panes of glass that had once filled the windows of the banks, department stores, and office plazas of downtown Portland were being shattered as quickly as our country's own faith in itself.       

Where to even start with the list of all these combined traumas? They came back to back to back in a steady rapid stream. Compounded one on top of the other with little to zero time between to process any of it before the next disaster or crisis hit. A global pandemic and a state by state lockdown already had the world shaken and upside down. A Black Liberation and anti police brutality movement like we had never seen had swept the globe and racial justice activists took to the streets in huge numbers all across the US after the death of George Floyd, and as we’ve been discussing at length, our non-violent demonstrations were once again met with force and excessive brutality by police. The very bizarre political climate, and unrest in the streets prompted the Trump White House in conjunction with the federal government and department of homeland security to invade one of its own cities, Portland, OR which had become a kind of unofficial protest hub, and the atrocities piled up as a result, all seemingly for the agenda driven purposes of Trump admin optics leading up to a contentious election. And when the feds touched down and started snatching people up in unmarked cars, a couple hundred protesters suddenly turned into five thousand, igniting the spirit of the revolution into a group of people who were feeling less powerless by the second, riding high off of their collective civil disobedience, suddenly ready to stand up to the authoritarian abuses they had turned away from their whole lives but were now seeing on a terrifyingly heightened level.

The more they brutalized us it seemed the more people turned against the cops and the state, and the stronger we became as a group. More and more people would rally to our cause or put their support behind what they saw a glimmer of light and hope in us, while the world was growing darker and more unpredictable around them. Many of us had waited our whole lives for this moment and were more than ready to take up the call and throw our everything into it, but the sacrifices along the way were very real and some of our best and brightest were lost. 

Those of us who are still here were left with wounds that will take a lifetime to heal. From nightly clashes with the police and being subjected to their unhinged violence just for speaking up and standing firm in opposing their violence in the first place. From at least weekly clashes with armed white nationalists and/or neo nazis who were allied with the bureau. From the assassination of one of our comrades, which was openly plotted by the white house and carried out by US Marshalls according to the callous boasts of then president, donald trump himself. From the rampant nightly use of chemical warfare, LRAD and heavy crowd control munitions by police and DHS agents against non violent protesters, press, and bystanders alike. All the wildness that swirled around the eviction blockade/neighborhood occupation of our triumph over the Portland Police Bureau and wheeler admin at Red House (a Black and Indigenous family was scheduled to be evicted and their home taken, so comrades established a blockade and this became another central organizing site for the movement). The explosion of gun violence citywide and the continued police killings of unarmed houseless Portlanders on mental health calls. And the work, all the while, included always remaining aware of and confronting the continued violence and killings by the PPB and other bureaus in the nation against Black Americans and against our own houseless community. The list of internal and external traumas goes on and on and as we have already acknowledged, such traumas take a toll. 

[Susan] As fellow frontline protestors, we acknowledge the ways in which the trauma caused by interactions with the police like those described above injured comrades, both physically and emotionally. We also illustrate how the sheer pressure of the nightly uprisings against state and police power had many of us living in a frantic state of exhaustion. In this section, we also acknowledge the role that white supremacist thinking that walked into the movement inside of fellow white protestors corroded the movement like an invisible poison. We will identify and break down the ways that we saw elements of white supremacist thinking enter into Movement spaces and relationships to cause both disillusionment and the breakdown of important relationships between comrades. The processes identified below also caused the breaking off of many Movement visitors who were in fact not comrades, but individuals who eventually returned to their passive stance and did not continue the work of Movement building, Abolition, or deconstructing White Supremacy in society. Through examining these factors, we also identify aspects of the movement that were helpful and effective. We ask for understanding that these passages may not be comprehensive or complete. They are an attempt to expose what we understand some of what we know now to the light so that we can heal and further dialogue, and so that others can heal, converse, and add to the discussion in their own safe spaces.

Over time, it became clear that one common response to being traumatized by police, facing authority, and being under surveillance was to develop an attitude of paranoia toward fellow protesters, thereby redistributing police-induced trauma back into the movement. The movement clearly needs ways for participants to identify one another as comrades and to prevent infiltration by law enforcement. Unfortunately, police-induced trauma caused deep paranoia that impacted relationships between people who were in fact trustworthy, which helps police to achieve their goals and causes our Movement to falter. Cop Shit--shifting the focus from combating systems of oppression to surveillance attitudes toward comrades, is op shit. Op shit means those doing this paranoid trauma-induced work are in fact operating on behalf of the police and systems of oppression, not on behalf of the comrades. Cop shit & Op shit harmed the movement by planting distrust, and establishing feelings of distrust without clear systems to identify true commitment. In the worst form, this hyper-paranoia combined with people’s genuine anger or jealousy ( human emotions that regularly exist in groups if there are not means to process them) caused people to falsely claim that others were ops with the goal of destroying their platform or position. We acknowledge the role of capitalism and white supremacy in pre-teaching people to be competitive. We now see the import of exposing these factors, both for fellow whites and for any comrade who wants to examine the destructive role of white supremacy and perhaps to examine how these factors can show up as internalized racism as well.

It is also clearly known that a massive number of fellow white women came out for the movement in 2021. As a person who has been involved in Movement organizing for more than two decades, I noticed a phenomenon of clout and recognition seeking, features that literally came with white women who came out for the Movement with the best intentions. I do not exempt myself from seeking or receiving recognition nor self-promoting throughout my years in Movement. What differs is that facing my own racism led me to understand my recognition-seeking and develop systems of accountability in my own life and in Movement over decades. And guess what? I still have to look at that aspect of myself. I do not blame any person, raised in a white supremacist capitalist society, who enters all spaces seeking recognition or clout. That is what we are taught and the media, social media, capitalism constantly reinforce it. But the movement requires that a good part of our work is done anonymously. This anonymity is the deeper value of the very concept of Bloc. Bloc means we give up aspects of our identity for the Movement. Good Bloc--the total negation of personal identifiers--is rewarding because through it we achieve a deeper solidarity. The Movement doesn't and should not offer badges for Anarchist work. The tendency to try to re-create the girl scouts, to implement a system of hierarchy and rewards, was harmful to the movement because it caused people to chase the wrong results--selfish results, not movement results, name and social media recognition, even financial profits, not recognition for movement goals, media, not substantive messages.

Throughout the movement, we saw new "organizations" and non-profit organizations try to pop up. Suddenly, a person who literally just started protesting was the CEO of a new protest non-profit. For Movement veterans, this was hilarious and sad, an obvious admission of not being part of the movement at all. In Movement, we seek to deconstruct hierarchical structures. We view hierarchy as how white supremacy operates in society. When people attempt to establish hierarchies within Movement, they are reproducing white supremacy instead. Are we suggesting a deepening of annoying self-critical attitudes that can also be the demise of people’s attempts to experience their own power as people, organize, and create viable systems? Yikes. Overly critical attitudes are another dangerous part of the Portland Protest culture. Perhaps we can’t offer an answer here, but a question: How can we move forward with an awareness of hierarchy, competition, and recognition of aspects of white supremacist culture while also avoiding the harsh critical attitudes that mirror white paternalism?

As a member of a program of Recovery, I often wished that just one norm from Recovery, We Do Not Gossip, could become pervasive in the Movement. This part of the article does not pertain to any concerns regarding abuse, but to straight up gossip between people in the movement, unrelated to abuse or claims of abuse. Gossip is another way in which white supremacist ideology invaded the movement with a destructive outcome. Gossip was sometimes incited by paranoia, but it was also likely to walk right in with people claiming to be comrades. It wasn't just white women by any means...but it is an example of internalized white supremacy. Even when multiple people repeatedly tried to set boundaries with others in private conversations, many people simply do not see a difference between gossip and processing. Yet others used gossip intentionally to harm others and move forward their own agendas, thereby betraying the collective. Don’t get me wrong, processing is necessary and healthy! But hateful, vile comments, jealous remarks, and straight up lies invaded and destroyed crucial relationships. These behaviors caused harm and have no place in movement. From all of this we can identify the need to have stronger systems in place that keep us focused on collective Movement goals, expose and illustrate negative coping mechanisms that perpetuate white supremacy, while providing safe processing models for comrades.

The intention of this article, though, is not to become hypercritical of the Movement in a similarly damaging way. The point is to demonstrate the practice of self-analysis and to promote the idea that collective self-reflection and basic communication between comrades must be operant in order for us to win. While factors came in that damaged the Movement and impeded progress, there were also beautiful wins, effective strategies,  and triumphant moments of coming together.

Specifically, the use of public parks as meeting spaces, throughout the entire movement, was one of the most successful organizing strategies. For the most part, the people of Portland know our public parks better than the police who don't live here. Normalizing the practice of meeting at parks was one of the most enduring and powerful organizing strategies. In many cases, a microphone or space was opened for anyone who needed to communicate. The downside of meeting in the dark at parks in bloc was that it is easy for outsiders to infiltrate. The upsides are the creative use of public space, the use of indigenous land to organize against state domination (especially when Indigenous voices were centered), the availability of hiding spaces, the safety of open air venues, and the space for open communication between comrades.

The deepening of Mutual Aid systems is another beautiful aspect that emerged throughout this time period. Dozens of gardeners, medicine makers, food sourcers, shield makers, and medics came together to both protest and provide supports for comrades at parks prior to marching and at the street level. At one point, comrades had an actual ambulance that was painted and re-purposed as a movement-side ambulance. It was parked near the protests and staffed with actual movement-side medical professionals. Networks of mutual aid (including UMAN (United Mutual Aid Network) which we co-operate with comrades, still continue to operate today. Mutual Aid networks, even if they seem to only focus on one very specific aspect (like food, or herbs, or shields) are essential to long-term sustainability of the movement as a whole because they are also places where we can move information, step up and step back, yet stay connected and continue to organize for the battles to come.

[Lexy] Jail support was an example of one of the thriving support networks that was set up and operated by community members and has been one of the most essential resources and support services to activists on the ground throughout the timeline of this uprising as well. In some ways it was one of the glues that held us together. Organizers and community members would roam the crowds at any given protest shouting “jail support” and writing the phone number on the bodies of any activists who wanted it in ball point pen (since the police would confiscate your phone and belongings, the number had to be penned somewhere on your skin), for a direct link to bail funds or lawyers. In almost any case any activist that was taken in for a targeted arrest during a protest, you could call that number for ‘jail support’ written on the back of your hand or sideways on your arm and get your bail posted as soon as you were eligible. It was a great support to the racial justice activists on the ground but still those trips in and out of jail left lasting scars on many of us, as well. 

Our best shields and protectors on the front line were as fearless as they were relentless, and as a result of some of their selfless heroics they took the heaviest burden of those targeted beatings and arrests at the hands of hyper-aggressive, heavily armed and armored riot police. As being caged up and treated like a stray animal will make just about anyone feel dehumanized or less than, it was also the resulting court cases, probation and legal fallout from those arrests that became consuming enough to make many frontliners have to walk away. And then there was the deceptive deputization of Portland and state police as federal agents as an extra protest deterrent. So even if the charges were dropped by local and state authorities, they would most often get picked up again and revisited by the feds, making for an already tedious and exhaustive process of getting your name cleared at least twice as long. But many never wavered no matter how many times they got hauled in, beaten or arrested. Some as many as a dozen times over the course of the unrest so far. I remember one of my frontline comrades and I laughing together about how everyone who worked nights at Inverness, in Multnomah County Jail booking knew their info by face and name on sight from so many recent repeat visits.

So while there has been property damage, rioting and lawlessness on certain occasions, more often than not our resistance was organized, non violent, and more mindfully structured than many (including myself) would’ve ever believed possible in such a decentralized movement. That sustainability is attributed to the intensive amount of labor, effort and shared resources put in by our organizers, BIPOC leadership and our community members. 

This happened with protest communities across the country as well, as they banded themselves together to create mutual aid networks and support systems for the movement, to provide for themselves and their communities what the state was not. Without this, our ongoing collective resistance to these police killings would’ve fallen apart and unraveled quickly and never grown to be the largest, most mobilized civil rights movement in the history of this country.

And in the process of attempting and succeeding on most levels to create order in the midst of disorder, we proved that we can replace everything the system and its institutions have ever given us, from medical attention, to public safety, food and even shelter, all by our own means without the support of the state or from corporate institutions. And we also proved, the powers that be are helpless against our organized resistance, when we are unified and working together, towards a specific goal or purpose. We were successful in swiftly chasing the feds out of town. We placed constant pressure on the Portland police bureau, which continues to splinter under the weight of a mass exodus of sudden retirees and resignations. And there is the victory of our defensive stand and neighborhood occupation at Red House keeping it in the Kinney family's possession, even against all the city's forces trying to push them out. These are some of the most glaring examples of that collective power over the span of 2020/21 uprising. Now it’s time to finish the job. 

And as we find ourselves transitioning out of one chaotic and tumultuous year and into the unpredictability of what 2022 will bring, we find ourselves at this busy unmarked intersection of inbetweens and uncertainties, bumbling through haphazardly. On top of the trauma we’ve endured in the movement, we’ve also lost so many people in the last year and a half. Not just from this virus directly but also from the illnesses that went untreated because of it. The thousands of addicts who overdosed or lost their housing and stability due to relapse when the support groups and resources they relied on for their recovery evaporated in a puff of smoke, as the whole world shut down. The upsurge in white nationalist terrorism. The explosion of violent crime rates and gun violence as a result of  unemployment, desperation and overall instability. We’ve lost so many in such a short amount of time. Just existing in this present reality is utterly exhausting. And we still have to contend with going back to work or school to pretend as if everything is business as usual, even as the world and system we’ve lived within is burning down all around us.   

Existing within this climate is fraying our nerves and those who haven’t completely totally lost their shit are displaying an immense amount of inner strength and resilience. I’m not sure how to find the balance between self care and the relentless mindfulness it takes to keep our sanity through this gauntlet. All I do know is that acknowledging your vulnerabilities and addressing your own fears, anxieties and insecurities is more courageous than charging through it while pretending nothing is wrong and projecting a false image of strength. As our comrades are constantly reminding each other... hyper-independence is also its own trauma response. 

[Susan] As I meditate on how to close this process of reflection, I am on the mend from a three week take-down by Covid. I am glad to be alive, but also grateful that I will not fail to exhale the virus into this article. For while we fought, we also experienced the pressure to risk our lives in order to operate capitalism. While we fought, some comrades needed soup and zinc while others needed pain balm to take away the sting of pepper bullets and bruises of police batons. We know that Latin American, Indigenous, Pacific Islander, and Black comrades and family members faced illness and losses at the highest rates. Covid did not level the playing field or end racism, but it did enlighten millions of workers to the deeper reality of our own exploitation. The spiritual, psychological, emotional, economic, and geo-political outcomes of this endless layer of pain and suffering that impacts comrades globally cannot yet be predicted. But we do know that people are quitting their jobs in record numbers. We do know that a great reckoning with capitalism and its multi-layered systems of oppression is part of how we heal. 

To suggest that we have all of the answers, or even any specific answers for healing the nuanced individual pain of others, is ludicris. To suggest that maybe, our process of using our relationship as comrades, as well as our creativity, to do the ongoing work of discussing and healing our trauma is a form of mutual aid that could benefit the movement long term, feels true.

It is true that access to counselors, addiction recovery resources, and medicines (all of which also need to be examined for and healed of white supremacist, capitalist culture) will be needed to heal the damage caused by the carceral state, the police, and the capitalist system that pays white supremacy. Yet, it can also be true that some needed answers will not be found under the rubric of professional mental health services. If we are talking about Revolution, we need to have the courage to look beyond the healing modalities offered up by the system. 

For the Movement to fully realize our potential, priority must be placed on creating safe access to healing. This doesn't mean accepting the deeply colonial medical "care" system as it is. It means utilizing perspectives on healing that include, at their inception and in the way they function, the common goal of overthrowing systems of oppression. Witchcraft, Brujeria, Santoria, Espiritismo, Anti-racist pre-colonial Celtic spiritual practices, and Indigenous healing traditions are excellent directions to look in, but we must simultaneously learn about and work on our own healing, yet avoid appropriation and look back in the direction of our own heritages rather than invading spaces that do not belong to us. Creating music, art, literature, and rituals that help us to process our losses as individuals and micro-societies will be essential to understand and transmute our pain. To build a movement that heals, we must work beyond the physical realm while seeking healing in our emotional and spiritual selves. The harm is everywhere. The answers differ for each of us, but if we can walk forward accepting that holding one another through our withdrawals, through our revelations, through our betrayals, and through our small wins is as important as linking arms and holding space against the tear gas, we have a fighting chance.

[Lexy] So how do we continue the work in the meantime and cope? At our own pace. With our own coping skills and knowledge of self. By monitoring our inner dialogue and respecting our self care practices. Through self love and acceptance. But first through acknowledging the depth of our experiences and how they've impacted us. And it’s important to note that while this is the story of our collective trauma, all of us on the ground still have our own individual sets of physical and psychological trauma we endured throughout the course of these events that we will all have to heal from in our own ways, time and through our own processes. 

We have to stay in lockstep with each other more than ever with the current upsurge in recruiting and organization of white nationalist hate groups and far right militias. With the system unraveling in front of our eyes more everyday, the lines have been drawn and the side that is more pacifist will likely be the losing side. The police and the state have nothing to gain from defeating white supremacy, their power is predicated on it, after all. We are the only real shield against the rising tide of fascism and white nationalists in this country. And we’re all going through this as one, even while so many forces are trying to divide us. Those who care about others have to stick together like never before right now. Speak kindly and gently to yourself and if you catch your demons poisoning your inner monologue, check that bitch. You deserve all the credit in the world for standing up and keeping it together when so many others are content and complacent to look the other way and function only out of their own self interest. Hold your loved ones closely and focus on building community. With No gods and No masters, we gotta stay together and we gotta stay tight. 

Revolution in an Age of Resurgent Fascism

By Atlee McFellin

The late sociologist Erik Olin Wright used the phrase “ruptural transformation” as stand-in for revolution, inaccurately summarizing this as “Smash first, build second.” [1]  His immensely popular and useful work also unfortunately erased historical European anti-fascist strategy whose approach to revolution differed from the caricature he presented.  To move beyond Wright’s important, yet misleading framework, one can even turn to DSA-founder Michael Harrington’s last book, Socialism: Past and Future.

Published in 1989, Harrington expanded upon his own earlier critique of the German social democratic party, specifically the electoral path to socialism as strategy against Hitler and the Nazis. [2] Harrington would ultimately look to a leading member of that same party at the end of this book as the basis for what he referred to as a “new middle class” on the march of “visionary gradualism.”  That “new middle class” is not the “irreversible feature of the system” he thought it would be though.  Despite his misplaced optimism, rather than an electoral path to socialism, Harrington argued for the proliferation of “little republics” across the so-called USA, looking to Antonio Gramsci on a cross-class “historic bloc” and the Paris Commune of 1871. [3]

This Paris Commune was catalyzed in defense against an outside force invading the city to restore the power of a monarch, a dictator supposedly appointed by god.  The commune in Paris sprung from socialist clubs that had formed throughout the city, and where feminists had been building internal systems of mutual aid for decades. [4] They learned from a similar experience during the decline and fall of the republic twenty years earlier.  Marx referred to those socialist clubs in 1851 as “constituent assemblies” constituting a “proletarian commune” to sustain general strikes as a systemic alternative during that republic’s fall to dictatorship. [5] Back then though, the left remained dependent on electoral approaches until it was too late.  Twenty years would pass before that dictator was overthrown and the Paris Commune of 1871 was born.

When it came to the German left against Hitler and the Nazis, Harrington criticized socialist strategy that solely relied on the republic and its supposed capacity for managed capitalist development.  Throughout Germany there were also autonomous councils in communities and workplaces, formed by people in both the socialist and communist parties who rejected orthodoxy in recognition of the threat posed by fascism.  Though these councils were identical to the socialist clubs in France, they also looked to the successful 1917 revolution in Russia, similarly catalyzed in defense against violent forces who sought to restore the power of a monarch. 

 Against the Nazis and using the Russian word for council, this approach was best described as a “Soviet Congress for a Soviet Germany,” socialist clubs as dual power with inherent mutual aid to sustain general strikes as another republic declined and fell. [6] Harrington never wrote on this particular commune against Nazi fascism, but whether it is a little republic, soviet, assembly, council, or socialist club, they were all meant as systemic alternative, dual power in the midst of crisis.  

But this is just European history.  No matter how important it is to learn from these past struggles, our fight against resurgent fascism is taking place in the settler colony known as the USA.  However, we can relate these European movements to historical forms of Black abolitionist mutual aid, communes, and the solidarity economy along with contemporary queer, feminist, Indigenous perspectives on communal resistance.  

Going back to at least 1780, Black communities in both the north and south pooled resources, financial and otherwise, democratically deciding how to sustain the movement for abolition, most often led by women.  In some cases, this resulted in the formation of rural communes for raids on slave plantations.  Over time and up to the first decades of the twentieth century, “mutual aid societies” spread across the country.  These democratic organizations operated their own internal solidarity funds so members could support one another and from which the nation’s first Black church, first Black labor union, and first movement for Black reparations were born. [7]  They were like European socialist clubs, but far more sophisticated.

This important yet still largely hidden history informed Ella Baker’s work running the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League from 1930-1933.  As a chapter-based organization, each would first form a council made up of young Black leaders.  These councils sought to identify what critical infrastructure was needed in the community to then learn enough about cooperative development and solidarity economics to turn those ideas into reality. [8] Importantly, many of these chapters were located in the Jim Crow south.  The YNCL practiced a socialist strategy meant to help communities survive conditions of racial segregation and white supremacist violence, conditions that inspired Hitler himself. [9]

Hitler was also inspired by the genocidal origins of the USA, the “cult of the covenant” at the core of our settler colonialism. [10]  As such, Nazi fascism sought Lebensraum or “living space” in pursuit of their own version of the American Dream as “summons to empire” for war and holocaust. [11]  Though fighting for bread and butter issues is imperative, especially in these times of profound crisis, the dream of universal middle classes masks a genocidal settler nightmare.  The actual alternative to resurgent fascism is not a more inclusive settler colony, but the proliferation of communal societies like what has repeatedly emerged from within sites of Indigenous resistance like Standing Rock, i.e. “caretaking relations, not American dreaming.” [12]

Constant warnings of constitutional crisis means that defeating fascism at the ballot box is essential, but also fundamentally insufficient for the cause of multi-racial democracy and socialism.  The elections of 2022 and 2024 could lead us down the path of a possible quasi-constitutional fascist coup.  Without our own systemic alternative as dual power rooted in mutual aid and the solidarity economy, including to sustain an uprising, we could again be dependent upon the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military to supposedly save democracy in a “color revolution” inspired by the CIA. [13]  Instead of repeating the mistakes made as other republics declined and fell, we have the chance to build an alternative as communes of resistance in process of formation from the midst of crisis. 

References

Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias, (New York: Verso Press, 2010). P. 303 ; Ibid, How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the Twenty-First Century, (New York: Verso Press, 2019).

Michael Harrington, The Twilight of Capitalism, (New York: Macmillan Press LTD, 1976). P. 208-215 ; Ibid, Socialism: Past and Future, (New York: Arcade Publishing, Inc., 1989). P. 53-59.

 Ibid, 275-277.

Carolyn J. Eichner, Surmounting the Barricades, (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2004). 24-26 and 130.

Karl Marx, Class Struggles in France 1848-1850, (New York: International Publishers, 2018). P. 83 and 98-99.

Clara Zetkin, “Fascism Must be Defeated,” in Clara Zetkin: Selected Writings, (New York: International Publishers, 1984). P. 175.

Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice, (University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014). P. 27-47.

Ibid, 112-125.

Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003). P. 86-88.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014). P. 45-51.

Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2016). P. 13-14, 28, and 325.

Marcella Gilbert, “A Lesson in Natural Law,” in Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NoDAPL Movement, edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019). P. 281-289. ; Kim TallBear, “Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming,” Kalfou, Volume 6, Issue 1 (Spring 2019). P. 24-38.

Frances Fox Piven, Deepak Bhargava, “What If Trump Won’t Leave?” The Intercept, August 11th, 2020. https://theintercept.com/2020/08/11/trump-november-2020-election/

Organizing in the “Inferno of Misery”: Jewish Workers’ Struggles in Britain Between 1900 and 1914

By Panos Theodoropoulos

Introduction: Why study the history of migrant workers’ movements?

When Rudolf Rocker, one of the central theorists of anarcho-syndicalism, began exploring London in the turn of the 20th century, he witnessed “an abyss of human suffering, an inferno of misery” (Rocker 2005: 25). Eager to get acquainted with the workers and the movements in his new city, he started going to the East End to attend meetings and socialize with fellow migrant socialists and anarchists. Many recent Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe had congregated in the area, which was “a slum district”. He remembers “a church at the corner of Commercial Street, at the Spitalfields end, where at any time of the day you would see a crowd of dirty, lousy men and women, looking like scarecrows, in filthy rags, with dull hopeless faces, scratching themselves. That was why it was called Itchy Park”. The Jewish working-class Londoners who attended these meetings, primitive cells of what would soon become a powerful migrant trade union movement, “looked sad and worn; they were sweatshop workers, badly paid, and half starved” (Rocker 2005: 26-27). The destitution he saw in London led him to conclude that, contrary to popular beliefs that revolution is triggered by a worsening of living conditions, “there is a pitch of material and spiritual degradation from which a man can no longer rise. Those who have been born into misery and never knew a better state are rarely able to resist and revolt” (2005: 25). A social movement in these locations, targeting these specific circumstances, had to be based on more than abstract theory. It had to directly fight for the improvement of living conditions, while at the same time providing resources for the masses of Jewish (and English) workers to expand their horizons, emerge from the alienation of daily life, and imagine alternatives. This is a conclusion that remains relevant today.

The history of migrant workers’ movements in the United Kingdom remains, largely, unwritten. Plenty of books have been written focusing on specific ethnic groups or on specific time periods. However, no singular book or study exists that specifically surveys the historical struggles of migrant populations as migrants and as workers, attempting to draw connections between the experiences of different ethnic migrant groups and, ultimately, lessons for movements wishing to organize with migrant and marginalized people today. This is, however, an incredibly important task, as these groups not only had been organizing along broadly intersectional lines long before these concepts were formally introduced in the 1970s, but also because their methods of organizing offer fruitful suggestions for working around the effects of precarity, transience, alienation, language and cultural difficulties, and disorientation that frequently debilitate attempts by migrant solidarity movements to organize (with) these populations. Broadly speaking, despite the innumerable differences that stem from different ethnic groups’ cultural backgrounds, positions within the labor and social hierarchy in their host countries, locations on the gradient of whiteness, etc., all the migrant groups that managed to organize themselves in the UK did so by acting on at least three crucial ideas.

Primarily, they understood that, rather than fight for acceptance within the dominant structures of society and trade unions (which were often outright racist and exclusionary), their exclusion necessitated their autonomous organization. Critically, this autonomy emerges historically not as detrimental, but actually beneficial to, the empowerment of the working class as a whole. Secondarily, their autonomy and continuous empowerment depended on their physical embeddedness within the communities that they represented. Third, this embeddedness, and their wider analysis and praxis, had to extend beyond the narrow domain of class politics; they understood that cultural symbols play a key role in maintaining the illusion of disempowerment amongst oppressed groups, and thereby operationalized a broad, non-economistic conception of capitalism which recognized its multi-faceted, culturally dependent character. The example of the Jewish workers’ activities in London, specifically those coalitions that were established around the Arbeter Fraint group, is one small but inspiring instance of how a completely marginalized, hated, divided, and alienated mass of migrant workers managed to not only disprove Rocker’s initial pessimism, but also support the very same British local working class that excluded them.

The wider context: Struggling in a hostile environment

While migrant worker groups in the UK during the 1900s varied in countries of origin, occupations, and specific experiences, they shared some characteristics in terms of the social exclusion and exploitation they faced upon arrival. These characteristics bear significant resemblance to those experienced by migrant populations currently in the West. In the early 1900s, minorities in the UK consisted mainly of West Indian, Caribbean, Asian and Irish populations, all of which arrived through the networks fostered by Britain’s expansive imperial activities (Ramdin 2017; Virdee 2014; Freyer 1984). Migration in Britain is deeply historically structured by imperialism, and the role of Empire cannot be ignored when analyzing migrant lives and trajectories. As such, the experiences of migrant groups have been determined by an interplay of both the demands of British capitalism and an imperial ideology of racial difference and superiority, which enabled and justified their exploitation and socio-political exclusion (Virdee 2014; Tabili 1994).

Migrants were swiftly inserted in those occupations that demanded workers or were otherwise kept as a reserve army of labor until demand rose again (Ramdin 2017; Virdee 2014; Tabili 1994). Located in the most insecure and exploitable segments of the labor hierarchy, a variety of interrelated factors impeded migrants’ chances of joining trade unions. Perhaps the biggest contributor to this were the attitudes of the British trade union movement, which was active in anti-immigration campaigns under the claim that migrant workers represented “unfair competition” to British labor. Lack of familiarity with the English language and culture, spatial segregation, de-skilling, and the unwillingness of many bosses to employ migrants pushed them to the lowest paid and most exploitative occupations; importantly, these occupations were usually not covered by the union victories that had been gained by many British workers in the course of their historic struggle. These same characteristics, alongside a necessity to constantly fight for one’s survival stemming from their precarious circumstances, were also a contributor in migrant workers being used as strike-breakers in various instances of labor struggle. For example, when the skilled tailors from the West End of London went on strike in 1911, the owners turned to Jewish labor from small and mostly unskilled East End workshops (Rocker 2005: 127).

These factors combined in making it easy for unions, bosses, British workers, the local media and politicians to draw a fictitious connection between migrant labor and the threat to established labor rights, which was used to establish and expand a climate of hostility and exclusion that further cemented migrant disempowerment, and therefore, exploitability (Fishman 2004). Migrant workers mostly found themselves outside the organizing priorities of the major unions and were regularly directly blamed for the wider economic difficulties of the British working class. Their exclusion from mainstream unions combined with the aforementioned cultural and subjective factors to create a highly vulnerable and exploitable population.

The Arbeter Fraint and the organization of London’s Jewish workers

Williams (1980) locates the beginning of significant numbers of Jewish migration to the UK in the 1840. However, in response to an increase in pogroms and wider anti-Semitic activity in Europe, Jewish migration to the UK peaked between the 1880s and 1914, with the Jewish population increasing from 60,000 to approximately 300,000 (Virdee 2014). Between 1881 and 1882 more than 225,000 Jewish families fled Russia, with many settling in the East End of London (Fishman 2004). Newly arrived Jewish workers were predominantly absorbed by the tailoring industry, finding themselves in a complex network of independent workshops, many of which were sweatshops (Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004; Buckman 1980;). Over time, Jewish workers became fully connected in popular imagination to these workshops, which further curtailed their chances of finding other types of employment (Fishman 2004). Caught between being heavily exploited by wealthier members of their own communities, known as Masters (the owners of the workshops), and being excluded from most significant trade unions while facing intense racism from wider society, Jewish workers were forced to organize themselves and struggle for both labor and social rights (Virdee 2014; Fishman 2004; Buckman 1980). In so doing, they engaged with and directly aided the wider working-class movement, with individuals such Eleanor Marx playing key organizing roles in the social struggles of the time.

The competition inherent in capitalism combined with the general poverty of migrant Jewish communities to create a constant race to the bottom in terms of working conditions in the workshops. Rocker (2005: 89) writes that “the clothing industry in the East End was run by hundreds of small master-tailors who were sub-contractors for the big firms in the City and the West End. In order to get the contract they under-bid each other mercilessly, thus creating their own hell. They passed that hell on of course to their workers. The new immigrants, the greeners, as they were called, who had just arrived from Poland or Russia or Romania and had to earn their bread, went to these small sweatshops to learn to be pressers of machinists. They started as under-pressers or plain-machinists, working for about six months for a skilled presser or machinist, doing the first preparatory work for him, till they learned to work for themselves.”

To further complicate matters, the skilled presser or machinist was usually responsible for paying and organizing the labor of the workers under him, while he was being paid directly by the master. This is illustrative of the wider chain of relationships that created the adverse labor conditions experienced by Jewish workers: large firms and industries, themselves engaged in competition with each other, constantly demanded lower prices from masters; therefore, masters demanded more work for less remuneration by the skilled workers; who, in turn, demanded the same from the “unskilled” workers under them. Jewish workers, especially the newer arrivals, were poor and willing to accept whatever conditions saved them from starvation. According to Rocker, “the evil of the sweating system was that it was so contrived that each drove everybody else” (2005: 89). There were frequent attempts by individual workers to amass the money required to open a private workshop and join the ranks of the masters; however, this proved very difficult and only a few managed to sustain their businesses. Most workers remained workers (Fishman 2004).

The unionization of Jewish workers was rendered difficult due to a variety of factors, including the fact that organizers had to contend with the exploitation stemming from within the community as well as hostility from without. Class divisions quickly solidified as Jews were simultaneously excluded from the wider labor market and therefore pushed to find work within their communities (Buckman 2008; Fishman 2004). Jewish masters were adept at forming coalitions amongst themselves when threatened by strike or other activity and were supported by other industrialists (Williams 1980; Buckman 1980). To further problematize matters, early arrivals were unacquainted with the traditions of English unionism, exasperating local organizers when they attempted to engage with them (Buckman 1980). Furthermore, the structure of the industry meant that there was a high degree of mobility; workers moved between sweatshops as well as gradually gaining skills and rising up the hierarchy. The oscillations of the trade meant that during one season there could be a large pool of workers ready for union activity, while in the next season the majority of those workers could be unemployed (Rocker 2005; Buckman 1980). This precarity also acted as a barrier to workers’ readiness to engage in potentially risky oppositional actions. However, the most significant barrier to Jews joining unions were the unions themselves: despite some notable exceptions, generally unions were unwilling to work with Jews and were active campaigners in favor of stricter migration controls (Virdee 2014; Rocker 2005).

Despite the difficulties, the exclusion and exploitation experienced at all levels of social existence led Jewish workers to approach some local unions and to eventually begin organizing themselves autonomously as migrant workers (Virdee 2014; Buckman 1980). The efforts of the Socialist League, which included the Jewess Eleanor Marx in its ranks, were instrumental in providing an initial impetus for organization as well as material support. The Socialist League was one of the few British socialist formations of the late 19th century that explicitly rejected refused to subscribe to a myopic, white and British-centered view of the working class, instead promoting internationalism, anti-imperialism and migrant solidarity (Virdee 2017; 2014). The Jewish working class, which already had members with highly developed radical ideas, resonated with the SL and began organizing. Crucially, the SL managed to forge alliances between Jewish and British elements of the working class. In 1889, for example, the Socialist League pressured for an alliance between the Leeds Jewish tailors and the anti-immigration Gasworkers union. The tailors joined the struggle for the eight-hour movement, which culminated in a successful strike that won the demands within days (Buckman 1980). This, and subsequent victories by the Leeds Jewish Tailor’s Union made a significant contribution in the battle against anti-immigrant sentiment, while at the same time advancing the interests of the wider working class in the UK (Buckman 2008).

The years between 1900 and 1914 also witnessed a period of intense organizing and victories by Jewish workers in the East End of London (Virdee 2014; Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004). The first seeds for radical activity in the region had been sown in the 1870s through the establishment of the Hebrew Socialist Union, led by Aron Lieberman (Fishman 2004). The HSU was involved in a plethora of campaigns, its main purpose being to spread socialism amongst the Jewish working class and assist in their organization in trade unions. While the group was short lived, it set the stage for subsequent actions. A variety of Jewish unions began emerging in the late 19th century, including “the Hebrew Cabinet Makers’ Society, Stick and Cane Dressers’ Union, International Furriers’ Society, Tailor Machinist union, Tailors and Pressers Union, Amalgamated Lasters; Society, United Cap Makers’ Society and International Journeymen Boot Finishers’ Society” (Fishman 2004).

In the early 1900s, a group of Jewish radicals and anarchists centered around the radical Yiddish newspaper Arbeter Fraint expanded these attempts (Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004). The existence of the newspaper was fundamental in unionization processes because, since most British trade unions were unwilling to organize Jews, it was imperative that they organize themselves. For that, political education was of paramount importance (Rocker 2005). The paper’s readership increased significantly through the years, gaining thousands of readers and becoming firmly embedded in both local and international movement circles. Most importantly, it was read and supported by the working-class, with Rocker (2005: 96) remembering that “young girls who slaved in the sweatshops of a weekly pittance of ten or twelve shillings, literally took the bread from their mouths to give the movement a few pennies.”

In 1906, the Arbeter Fraint group opened a social club in Jubilee Street which was to play a major role in the East End Jewish workers’ movement (Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004). It quickly became one of the centers of community life, organizing events that connected Jewish workers to their culture as well as maintaining a commitment to political education and providing meeting spaces for workers to organize. It consisted of an 800-capacity gallery, some halls with space for meetings and various events, and a library. It offered classes in English, history and sociology, as well as hosting a range of cultural events, including debates, live music, and poetry readings. Importantly, most of these provisions were open for everyone regardless of club membership or background (Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004). An example of the club’s activities which illustrates the organizers’ priorities is the annual trip to Epping Forest, regarded by many workers as “the highlight of their lives, in contrast with the everyday gloom and drudgery of the sweatshop” (Fishman 2004: 262). People would bring their families, and, following a long walk, would then congregate to listen to Rocker lecture on topics ranging from literature to history and politics (Fishman 2004). Rather than simply viewing workers as faceless units in need of strict labor organization, emphasis was placed on substantial empowerment, experience of beauty, and the destruction of the alienation experienced in the course of their daily occupations.

The constant agitation and work inside the community eventually led to a wave of militant union activity, extending beyond the narrow spaces of East London (Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004). At its peak, Rocker (2005: 6) claims that the East End had “the most powerful migrant movement that had developed in Britain.” Years of political education had resulted in the mass meetings of the Federation of Jewish Anarchists being attended by “five, six, seven thousand people” (2005: 6). Crucially, and in contrast with many other immigrant communities, Jewish immigrants had no intention of returning to their countries of origin, which resulted in them becoming fully invested in the improvement of their daily lives in the UK (Rocker 2005). When, in 1912, the skilled tailors of the West End commenced strike activity, the Arbeter Fraint group used the opportunity to agitate for a general strike amongst East End Jewish tailors, many of whom were being used as strike breakers.

Thousands attended the general meeting that was called, and more than 13,000 workers participated in the strike in the first 2 days. They attempted to permanently do away with the sweatshop system, demanding a normal working day, the abolition of overtime, higher wages, and the closure of small workshops with unhygienic conditions. As this community was not wealthy, many participated in the strike without strike pay. They forged alliances with the contemporaneous London dockers’ strike and held joint meetings and demonstrations. The strike was ultimately successful after 3 weeks: the masters conceded shorter hours, no piecework, better conditions, and committed to only employ unionized workers. Emerging victorious, the Jewish workers didn’t stop there: seeing the dockers’ strike drag on, they decided to ask Jewish families to care for the dockers’ children, and over 300 were taken in Jewish homes. This strike represented the culmination of decades of organizing, its results ranging far beyond narrow material gains: it succeeded in abolishing sweatshops in the East End, while at the same time challenging the dominant British perceptions about Jewish workers and establishing strong bonds of solidarity with the local workers’ movement (Rocker 2005; Fishman 2004).

Between the East End and the future

This wave of radicalization ultimately faded away with the onset of the First World War and the British government’s crackdown on all radical activity. Rocker and many of his comrades were imprisoned, and the legacy of the East End Jewish workers was largely forgotten as it was erased from most accounts of history emanating from British trade unions. However, despite the vast differences that exist between the 1900s and now, there are several crucial lessons that can be drawn from the Jewish workers’ methods of organizing. They address structural barriers to organization that are shared by many migrant groups today: namely, their exclusion from most mainstream trade unions (despite the lip service paid to notions of “equality” and diversity”), their precarity and transience in the job market, their spatial segregation in specific neighborhoods and areas, and their exclusion from the host society more generally.

In the example of the East end workers and their club in Jubilee Street, the issues of patience and embeddedness emerge as paramount to organizing the excluded. The first noteworthy attempts at unionization and collective resistance from Jewish workers in Britain can be located at least as far back as the mid-1800s, slowly sowing the seeds for the powerful movement that emerged in the early 1900s. These consistent efforts laid the groundwork for establishing physical entities which the workers could access outside of their workplaces: this was critical for their capacity to organize because, 1) being based close to where they lived, it provided a space to come together despite the transitory and precarious nature of their labor trajectories, 2) it was a safe space to organize away from the masters and their cronies, and 3) far from myopically attempting to organize workers purely on the basis of their class status, it was a space which enabled the generation of various activities that aimed at substantial empowerment.

These elements were all undoubtedly impacted, to some degree, by the Arbeter Fraint’s broad, non-economistic conception of capitalist oppression. Their analysis, informed by anarchism, Marxist economics, but also sociology and philosophy, was able to understand how marginalization and alienation not only debilitate oppressed groups’ capacities for action now, but also penetrate deep into their psyches and foreclose those possibilities for the future as workers begin to naturalize their circumstances. The Arbeter Fraint’s patient agitating work, and the existence of a physical space that became a beacon of hope in the East End, were direct, tangible examples that another world is possible. And that we can collectively begin crafting this world today, in our daily interactions.

The combination of embeddedness and a broad conception of capitalist oppression is perhaps the most critical lesson the East End movement has to offer in terms of organizing (with) oppressed groups today. In the West’s hyper-precarious realities, where social bonds have generally grown weaker and liquified, where migrant workers are not only marginalized and exploited but are actively hunted and imprisoned, where worker transience has expanded to almost all sectors of the lower rungs of the labor hierarchy, and where capitalism is increasingly becoming naturalized as an unalterable quasi-natural phenomenon, social movements and those wishing to organize with oppressed groups must focus on becoming rooted in the communities they claim to represent. Furthermore, they must offer imaginative, inspiring alternatives that engage with workers as full human beings, rupturing the sterile and literally depressing one-dimensionality of capitalist realism. Recall how the Jubilee Street club’s annual retreat to Epping Forest represented, for many workers, the highlight of their year.

These activities are inseparably connected to the movement’s militant success: as anarchists and socialists, we are not simply fighting for improvements in our socioeconomic statuses. We are fighting to develop the conditions for all humans to have the resources, space, time, and ideas to fully actualize themselves, to emerge from the drudgery of daily alienation into an empowered state where everything is possible, as long as we work towards it together. Although we are workers, our outlook is geared towards the emancipation of labor, and towards emancipation from the status of wage laborers. In response to capitalism’s tendency to minimize, regiment, and direct the complexity of human existence purely towards the production of surplus value, the Jewish migrant workers in the East End foregrounded culture, education, community, and, crucially, having fun. These characteristics were vital in inspiring others to join their ranks as empowered individuals uniting for a collective cause, and can be equally powerful and inspirational today. To reach these horizons, community embeddedness, especially through the establishment of autonomous, open, and radical social spaces, emerges as an inescapable necessity.

This article includes segments of Panos’s PhD thesis on the barriers to the organization of precarious migrant workers in Scotland, available in full and for free here.

References

Buckman, J. (1980) Alien Working-Class Response: The Leeds Jewish Tailors, 1880-1914. In: Lunn, K. (ed.) (1980) Hosts, Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Responses to Newcomers in British Society 1870-1914. Kent: Dawson

Fishman, J. (2004) East End Jewish Radicals. Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications

Freyer, P. (1984) Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto Press

Ramdin, R. (2017) The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain. London: Verso

Rocker, R. (2005) The London Years. Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications

Tabili, L. (1994) “We Ask for British Justice”: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain. New York: Cornell University Press

Virdee, S. (2014) Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider. London: Palgrave Macmillan

Williams, B. (1980) The Beginnings of Jewish trade Unionism in Manchester, 1889-1891. In: Lunn, K. (ed.) (1980) Hosts, Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Responses to Newcomers in British Society 1870-1914. Kent: Dawson

About the author:

Panos Theodoropoulos is a sociologist based in Athens, Greece, and is currently active with the Libertarian Syndicalist Union (ESE). His Ph. D thesis was focused on examining the barriers that precarious migrant workers in Scotland experience in regard to labor organization. Previously active with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), he has been involved in various organizing campaigns as a migrant worker in the UK and is currently focused on using sociology to develop theoretical tools that can practically assist social movements organizing towards our complete liberation.

Populate the Internationalist Movement: An Anti-imperialist Critique of Malthus and Neo-Malthusianism

[Image: Ints Vikmanis / shutterstock]

By Michael Thomas Kelly

The 2018 documentary Germans in Namibia opens with an interview in which a wealthy, German-descended landowner blames the economic plight of poor Namibians on overpopulation and unchecked breeding. Malthusian “overpopulation” remains a powerful and frequently used shorthand to deflect from the ongoing legacies of genocide, colonialism, and neo-colonialism. In this paper, I argue that Malthus’ thesis on natural scarcity was primarily a normative argument against social welfare and economic equality. Malthus was wrong, then, in an ethical and political sense in that he provides an ideological framework for population control policies that imperialism and racial capitalism pursue by design – and broadly use to cause harm and maintain systems of oppression. I begin by briefly summarizing Malthus’ original thesis and clarifying how Malthus made a political, not predictive, argument against social equality. I show how neo-Malthusianism works as an ideological justification for how capitalism and imperialism generate surplus populations and maintain inequality – highlighting racial, gender, and spatial components. Drawing from neo-Malthusianism’s critics, I present a different theory of population across geographical space based on anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism.

In his 1798 Essay on Population, Thomas Malthus put forward a vision of natural scarcity, inevitable class division, and checks on exponential rises in population. Malthus asserted that finite resources and unchecked population growth through procreation – “fixed laws of our nature” (Malthus 1798: 5) – inevitably come into conflict. Barnet and Morse (1963: 52) summarize: “The limits of nature constitute scarcity. The dynamic tendency of population to press continually to the borders of subsistence is the driving force.” The conflict between natural resource scarcity and natural population growth, Malthus argued, must necessarily fall on the poorest members of society: “no possible form of society could prevent the almost constant action of misery upon a great part of mankind, if in a state of inequality, and upon all, if all were equal” (Malthus 1798, 11). Malthus also identified “positive checks” on population growth: “Hunger and famine, infanticide and premature death, war and disease” (Kallis 2019, 14).

Critics of Malthus and his original writings explain how he was consciously making a political intervention against revolutionary or redistributive demands. According to Kallis (2019), Malthus had issued “a rebuttal of revolutionary aspirations” (9) and argued that “revolutionaries would cause more harm than good. Malthus wanted to see the abolition of the Poor Laws—a proto-welfare system that provided free food in the parishes” (12). Malthus’s thesis “was not meant as a prediction” (Kallis 2019: 22) but an argument “for the impossibility of a classless society” (23). Similarly, Harvey (1974: 258) characterizes Malthus’ essay “as a political tract against the utopian socialist-anarchism of Godwin and Condorcet and as an antidote to the hopes for social progress aroused by the French Revolution.” Aside from any logical consistency or merit, the essay’s “class character” (Harvey 1974: 259) is what reveals the political intention and function behind the essay and the ideologies it set forth.

More recent proponents of neo-Malthusianism use Malthus’ ideological groundwork to defend private property, uneven development, and structural racism in the context of climate change. For example, Malthus’ Essay presaged arguments that bourgeois economists later made rejecting “redistribution and welfare in the name of free markets” (Kallis 2019: 19). According to Harvey (1974: 262), “Malthus was, in principle, a defender of private property… Private property arrangements inevitably mean an uneven distribution of income, wealth, and the means of production in society.” Both Kallis (2019) and Ojeda, Sasser, and Lunstrum (2020) highlight the popularity – and danger – of natural limits arguments in modern environmental circles. Kallis (2019: 44-45) describes how some 1970s environmental movements “inherited the logic of Malthus,” basing arguments on the fear and supposed impossibility of infinite growth on a finite planet. More recently, Ojeda, Sasser, and Lunstrum (2020: 319) explain: “Influential Western leaders and trend-setters have… argued that climate change can be mitigated by addressing overpopulation.” Highlighting “sharp, uneven geographies,” arguments for “natural scarcity… misdiagnose the causes of climate change, often placing blame on marginalized populations” while doing “little to address the root of the problem” (Ojeda, Sasser, and Lunstrum 2020, 317-318).

Capitalism has a specific use for population – within structurally determined class and social relations – quite apart from the natural limits Malthus invoked to justify inequality. Unlike Malthus, whose theory of population was rooted in human nature and natural scarcity, Marx posited a “law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production” (Harvey 1974, 268). Marx ([1867] 1993: 782-793) argued that an industrial reserve army of labor, or relative surplus population, is necessary under capitalism to discipline the employed working-class and absorb the expansions or contractions of the capitalist market. Relative surplus population is inherent to capitalism and produces poverty and guaranteed unemployment by design: “Marx does not talk about a population problem but a poverty and human exploitation problem. He replaces Malthus’ concept of overpopulation by the concept of a relative surplus population” (Harvey 1974, 269). Ojeda, Sasser, and Lunstrum (2020: 324-325) highlight a contemporary example in which the expansion of palm oil plantations in Colombia had uneven spatial and gendered effects on local populations: “the entry of mitigation projects in the region has resulted in more gender inequality, more dependency of women towards their male partners and their circumscription to domestic spaces” (325). In this case, “natural limits” and “overpopulation” offer no accurate or worthwhile explanation. Instead, this concrete example is better understood as one in which a new plantation market absorbed male wage workers, caused gendered harm in a Global South nation, and showed the limits of climate mitigation in a system in which private property and ownership structures remain intact.

Imperialism and neo-colonialism similarly drive predictable, uneven effects on populations globally, which population control policies and discourses serve to obscure. Harvey (1974: 274) explains: “The overpopulation argument is easily used as a part of an elaborate apologetic through which class, ethnic, or (neo-) colonial repression may be justified.” For example, “several years after Hurricane Katrina, former Louisiana Representative John LaBruzzo… proposed paying people who received state welfare assistance $1,000 to undergo surgical sterilization” (Ojeda, Sasser, and Lunstrum 2020, 320). Also, the US justifies its military presence in Africa through tropes of “overly-reproductive, resource-degrading women” and “the perceived urgency of preemptively addressing climate conflict” (Ojeda, Sasser, and Lunstrum 2020, 321). In both cases, the political function of Malthusianism – that overpopulation will collide with natural resource scarcity – obscures the actual underlying power dynamics. The increased intensity of storms and drought in desert regions are attributable to industrial capital’s emissions of CO2 and play out unevenly across existing racial segregation in the US and neo-colonial underdevelopment in Africa (Rodney [1972] 2018). Global capitalism drives climate apartheid and racialized, gendered poverty, which Malthusians wrongly ascribe to unchecked population and natural limits.

Critiques of Malthus and neo-Malthusianism offer pathways for a different theory of population rooted in principles of anti-imperialism and internationalism. Kallis (2019: 98) locates the following example in terms of limits, but perhaps it is better understood as a struggle over Indigenous sovereignty: “it is the… marginalized who draw limits to stop others from encroaching on their space; think of a community that prevents a multinational corporation from logging its sacred forest.” Relatedly, Ojeda, Sasser, and Lunstrum (2020: 324) explain the gendered aspects of “‘planetary care work’ (Rocheleau 2015), as local communities are largely made responsible for containing and reversing the effects of climate change.” In both cases, ongoing, Indigenous-led efforts to restore relations of stewardship with the world’s land and biodiversity – and overturn existing private property relations and US policy abroad – could better serve oppressed populations. Citing Marx, and critiquing Malthus’ separation of humans and nature, Harvey (1974: 267) suggests that humans can achieve a “unity with nature.” In fact, the “emergence of an abstract nature” in some environmentalist rhetoric implies “the invisibilization of alternative productions of nature and myriad forms of resistance… including localized and feminized experiences of climate change from impoverished and racialized communities in the global south” (Ojeda, Sasser, and Lunstrum 2020, 325). Moving past “human” versus “nature” permits us the necessary nuances, contradictions, and local differences within both non-universal categories of human and nature. Lastly, Kallis (2019: 98) again posits the following demands in terms of limits – minimum wage increase, progressive taxation, working-day reduction – but these are also demands to reduce capital’s essential drive to accumulate, seek profit, and expand. Furthermore, these demands can be strengthened and better contextualized when one considers the working-class’ global dimensions and how relative surplus populations are created and used across various geographical, international, and gendered scales.

Debates over theories of population have important implications for future research and political organizing. Environmental movements can recognize Malthusian arguments as part of a political project against redistribution and revolutionary socialism. Scholars and activists can also grasp how guaranteed unemployment, population control, and ecological damage are attributable to structural, changeable systems of racial capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy – not natural laws. On that principle, organizers can work to build an internationalist movement that understands population, production, and scarcity as socially produced categories that can be placed under forms of collective ownership.

References

Barnett, H.J. and Morse, C. (1963). Scarcity and growth: The economics of natural resource availability. Washington, D.C.: Resources for the Future, 51-71.

Harvey, D. (1974). Population, resources, and the ideology of science. Economic Geography, 50(3), 256-277.

Kallis, G. (2019). Limits: Why Malthus was wrong and why environmentalists should care. Stanford, C.A.: Stanford University Press.

Malthus, T. (1798). An essay on the principle of population. London: J. Johnson, in St. Paul’s Church-Yard.

Marx, K. ([1867] 1993). Capitalism Volume 1. London: Penguin.

Ojeda, D., Sasser, J., and Lunstrum, E. (2020). Malthus’s specter and the Anthropocene. Gender Place and Culture, 27(3), 316-332.

Redfish Media. (2018). Germans in Namibia. Redfish Media. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0U2g5K8JaJk

Rodney, W. ([1972] 2018). How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London, U.K.: Verso.

The Base-Superstructure: A Model for Analysis and Action

By Derek Ford

Although Marx himself only mentioned the “base” and “superstructure” in (by my count) two of his works, the base-superstructure “problem” remains a source of serious contention for Marxists, our sympathizers, and our critics. Despite its outsized role in Marxist debates, the model can, when contextualized and understood in its nuances, be quite useful for analyzing capitalist society and organizing for socialism [1].

Marx explicitly introduces the distinction between the base and superstructure in the preface to his 1859 A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In the preface, Marx builds on his previous work with Engels, The German Ideology, writing:

“In the social production of their existence, humans inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” [2].

The base of society—which is also translated as “infrastructure”—includes the relations of production and the productive forces. Productive forces name labor-power, instruments or tools used by workers, and the materials workers transform in the production process. The relations of production entail the social organization of production and reproduction, or how the re/production of life is structured. It’s important to emphasize that the base isn’t just the forces of production but production relations, which are not only economic but social.

The superstructure comprises the political-legal system of the state and consciousness—or ideology—in general, which manifests in culture and art, religion and spirituality, ethics and philosophy, etc. The superstructure emerges from the totality of the relations of production. Political activity and intellectual processes and products are conditioned by the mode of production (the relations and forces of production). And as we’ll see below, elements of the superstructure in turn impact the base.

According to Engels, he and Marx laid so much emphasis on the importance of the base because of their historical and material context, because they were responding to those who denied the importance of production. In an 1890 letter to the German socialist Joseph Bloch in which Engels clarifies their model, he notes that “we had to emphasize the main principle vis-à-vis our adversaries, who denied it” [3]. Earlier in the letter, he writes that “the ultimately determining factor in history is the production and reproduction of real life,” and that “if somebody twists this into saying that the economic factor is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, absurd phrase” [4].

Engels infers that Bloch’s questions come from his study of secondary literature only, and he asks Bloch to read the primary sources, referring him in particular to Marx’s 1852 book, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, perhaps the only other place Marx mentioned the superstructure explicitly (although he alludes to it elsewhere). In this earlier work, Marx formulates the superstructure like this:

“Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought, and views of life. The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding relations” [5].

Classes, that is, collectives defined by their location in the totality of social production, produce ways of feeling, thinking, and understanding life.

The context and relations of the base and superstructure

That the model isn’t a mechanical formula—in which the base unidirectionally produces the superstructure—is evident when we consider the context in which it appears.

A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy was the product of Marx’s ongoing work on Capital. What were some of Marx’s main critiques of political economy? First, it took appearances for granted and didn’t ask about the underlying structures that generated such appearances. Second, it viewed political economy and the world as a series of independent objects and subjects, when they were interconnected and interrelated parts of a unity or totality that was in constant motion. Third, and as a result of the first two critiques, it didn’t take a historical-materialist approach to understanding these transformations, projecting present categories back into the past and the future, so that capitalism as a social system was figured as eternal.

Those who take the base as independent and static thus side with Marx’s bourgeois adversaries. It’s not an economistic formula in which changes in the economy automatically and predictably lead to changes in society. The base-superstructure is a “spatial metaphor” that serves descriptive purposes [6]. While it can lend itself to a reading whereby what happens below determines what happens on top, if read as a Marxist model it’s helpful for understanding and analyzing the dynamics of the class struggle.

This is why Marx used the superstructure in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: to “distinguish still more the phrases and fancies of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality” [7]. He goes on to partially locate the failure of the 1848 Paris revolution and the success of the 1851 coup of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in the emergence of social-democracy, which

“is epitomized in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as a means, not of doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labor, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony. However different the means proposed for the attainment of this end may be, however much it may be trimmed with more or less revolutionary notions, the content remains the same” [8].

The social-democratic forces, while using revolutionary phrasings, didn’t seek to overthrow the existing relations of production but to manage them in a more equitable manner through the capitalist political and legal superstructure.

Marxism and the base-superstructure model

Given the above, it’s clear that the model is dialectical. As a historical-materialist, Marx understood that the base and superstructure of society change over time and are context-dependent. Neither the base nor superstructure, nor the relationship between the two, are unified, static, or ahistorical.

The relations of production in U.S. capitalism are neither unified nor even strictly economic in the sense that they’re structured and divided by race, nationality, gender, dis/ability, sexuality, and other hierarchies. Engels affirms that the relations of production are social (and racial) in an 1894 letter to the German anarchist Walther Borgius. Responding to Borgius’ request for clarification on the role of the base, Engels acknowledges that “economic conditions… ultimately determine historical development. But race itself is an economic factor” [9]. Clearly race is part of the base, yet it’s obviously superstructural as well, in that 1) race is a historically constructed and evolving category and 2) it’s maintained and ordered not just by economic forces and relations but by elements like culture, the media, and the legal system.

In fact, Engels soon after says that “political, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development is based on economic development. But all these react upon one another and also upon the economic base” [10]. The boundaries between the base and superstructure are not static or fixed, and superstructural elements in society work to reproduce elements of the base.

Capitalism requires, for example, the legal system of the state to enforce private property rights. In this instance, it’s crucial to the reproduction of the base. Because the capitalist legal system arises from capitalist relations of production, changes in the legal system might alter the existing relations of production, but they can’t fundamentally overthrow them, for that requires the creation of a new social and economic system.

Although Marx didn’t spend much time studying the political economy of cultural activity, another example of the dynamism of the model appears in his argument that artists and other cultural workers are productive agents. He distinguishes those who produce surplus value from those who don’t, although both can be forms of wage-labor (for example, working for the state doesn’t produce surplus value but is a form of labor-power sold to another). Marx conceptualizes intellectual work, dancing, writing, singing, and other “artistic” or “cultural” actions, when performed through the commodity of labor power, as forms of wage labor [11]. Such forms of work can thus be viewed through the prism of the base or superstructure.

All of this highlights that the base and superstructure is a metaphor and model for Marxists, a way to analyze and approach society and social transformation rather than an easy explanation.

Smart phones: An example

To get a better handle on the relationship between material production and ideas or mental conceptions, think about the proliferation of “smart phones.” When, in order to e-mail, we used to have to sit at a computer and connect via cables to the internet, we had a different idea of time and communication than we do now that many of us can e-mail wherever and whenever. A 2021 Pew Research Poll found that 85 percent of people overall (and 73 percent of people earning less than $30,000 annually) in the U.S. have smart phones, so this isn’t a minor phenomenon [12].

The technology makes it possible for your boss to require you to respond to e-mails (e.g., to work) at night. It blurs the distinction between work and life, let alone between work and leisure. How many of us respond to work e-mails on vacation? The smart phone makes it possible for me to ask you a minor question or a series of them throughout the day, rather than wait and type one single e-mail. We begin to think of time differently, and we begin to relate to each other differently. When I was a student, for example, it was normal for teachers to respond to e-mails within a few days. Now the expectation is that teachers respond within hours.

Even our feelings and bodies change. Have you ever felt your phone vibrate in your pocket only to realize it didn’t? This is called “phantom vibration syndrome.” A 2011 study of 290 undergraduate students found that around “89% of the sample had experienced phantom vibrations, and 40% experienced these vibrations at least once a week” [13]. Yet the smart phone didn’t arise spontaneously, it wasn’t dropped from the heavens. Workers conceived of it, designed it, produced it, and made it all possible. It’s a productive material force that changes our forms of consciousness, ways of feeling, senses of time, and more. Yet the reason smart phones were produced and subsequently distributed throughout society is because they increase the productivity of labor. The same object that, when used for work, enters into the base, when used for non-work purposes, enters into the superstructure.

Utilizing the model for the revolutionary movement

The socialist revolution can’t come without changing the base of society, as it entails transforming private ownership into collective ownership, abolishing capitalist relations and constructing socialist relations. But the superstructure reacts on the base and informs it. There’s a dynamic interplay between the two, and the question is not so much what is located in which part of the model as what is the most strategically significant for advancing the class struggle in a particular setting? The abolition of wage labor—the socialist revolution—has to focus on the superstructure and the base and understand their composition, contradictions, and potentials.

In the chapter on the working day in Capital, Marx describes the decades-long struggle for a “normal” working day. He quotes horrific details about the abuses of industrial capitalism on workers from factory inspectors. At the end of the chapter he declares that “the labourers must put their heads together, and, as a class, compel the passing of a law, an all-powerful social barrier that shall prevent the very workers from selling, by voluntary contract with capital, themselves and their families into slavery and death.” In other words, the tactical objective is to establish “a legally limited working-day” [14].

This is a clarion call for a change in the superstructure, for a legal reform. It’s a significant fight to reduce the working day, not only to protect workers from the abuses of bosses but also to give workers more time to organize. At the same time, it impacts the base of society as well, because given a limited working day, capital has to pursue other avenues to accumulate extra surplus value. In fact, it’s with these limitations that capital turns to the production of relative surplus value, which is when capitalism as a mode of production properly comes into being [15].

Another example is Marx’s critique of Alfred Darimon, a follower of Proudhon, who wanted to introduce a “socialist form” of money that would represent the actual time that workers labored. While Marx acknowledged that “one form [of money] may remedy evils against which another is powerless… as long as they remain forms of money” they’ll reproduce these evils elsewhere in the same way that “one form of wage labour may correct the abuses of another, but no form of wage labour can correct the abuse of wage labour itself” [16]. Capitalism can’t be overthrown without changing the relations of production.

Revolutions require objective and subjective conditions. Without changes in mass consciousness—which are superstructural but relate to and impact the base—no crisis of capitalism will lead to a new mode of production. A crisis in the capitalist system can, in turn, help change that consciousness, but is not in itself sufficient. Neither can be viewed or approached in isolation, and have to be approached as interacting within the shifting totality of capitalist society. In response to these approaches, our tactics and strategies change.

References

[1] Thanks to Jon Greenway for feedback on an earlier draft of this article.
[2] Marx, Karl. (1859/1970).A contribution to the critique of political economy(New York: International Publishers), 20-21.
[3] Engels, Friedrich. (1890/1965). “Engels to Joseph Bloch.” InMarx-Engels selected correspondence(New York: Progress Publishers), 396.
[4] Ibid., 394, 396.
[5] Marx, Karl. (1852/1972).The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte(New York: International Publishers), 47.
[6] Althusser, Louis. (1995/2014).On the reproduction of capitalism: Ideology and ideological state apparatuses, trans. G.M. Goshgarian (New York: Verso), 54.
[7] Marx,The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 47.
[8] Ibid., 50.
[9] Engels, Friedrich. (1894/1965). “Engels to W. Borgius in Breslau.” InMarx-Engels selected correspondence(New York: Progress Publishers), 441.
[10] Ibid., 441-442.
[11] Marx, Karl. (1939/1990). “Appendix: Results of the immediate process of production.” In Karl Marx,Capital: A critique of political economy (vol. 1), trans. B. Fowkes (New York: Penguin), 1044.
[12] Pew Research Center. (2021). “Mobile fact sheet.”Pew Research center, April 7 Availablehere.
[13] Drouin, Michelle, Daren H. Kaiser, and Daniel A. Miller. (2012). “Phantom vibrations among undergraduates: Prevalence and associated psychological characteristics.”Computers in Human Behavior28, no. 4: 1493.
[14] Marx, Karl. (1867/1967).Capital: A critique of political economy (vol. 1): A critical analysis of capitalist production, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers), 285, 286.
[15] See Majidi, Mazda. (2021). “Relative surplus value: The class struggle intensifies.”Liberation School, 18 August. Availablehere.
[16] Marx, Karl. (1939/1973).Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy (rough draft), trans. M. Nicolaus (New York: Penguin), 123.