What the Titan Submersible Says About Capitalist Culture

By Saheim Patrick

It is ironic that the name of the doomed sub that captivated the minds of Americans this past week, contains the suffix: -gate, a morpheme that has become de facto synonymous with conspiracy theories. The irony stems from the fact that conspiracy theories, or at least the ones that attach -gate to their title, are a direct product of the type of distracting, unified discourse characteristic of our current, US society that has allowed the topic of the OceanGate submersible to thrive.

The story, largely irrelevant for reasons which will be divulged, goes like this: five men aboard a twenty-two foot carbon-fiber and titanium craft, named the Titan, planning to tour the ruins of the famed Titanic shipwreck. At an hour and forty-five minutes into their expedition, contact was lost with their surface ship: the Polar Prince. In the days following, the story and question of whether they were alive or not, left the public reeling, and the media magnates sensationalizing. It is important, for the sake of critiquing the discourse surrounding it, to note that the men aboard paid 250,000 USD each for this trip. This particular detail has stoked a fire in the discussions of the event, namely on Twitter, and has promoted a false dichotomy, a false binary, in talking about the sub. The sides that you can take are presented as: finding the likely deaths of these men a tragic event, or ridiculing and showing apathy towards their deaths. It is not uncommon for a simplification of this sort to happen in modern discourse.

The dominant medium of communication in the US is social media. It is easy to believe it to be the Internet as a whole, but the difference between a technology and a medium must be noted (not only for this clarification, but for our understanding of modern discourse as a whole). Neil Postman’s 1985 treatise on dominant mediums of communication throughout history and television as a medium, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, tackles specifically this difference.

We might say that a technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind. Like the brain, a technology is a physical apparatus. Like the mind, a medium is a use to which a physical apparatus is put. A technology becomes a medium as it employs a particular symbolic code, as it finds its place in a particular social setting, as it insinuates itself into economic and political contexts. A technology, in other words, is merely a machine. A medium is the social and intellectual environment a machine creates.

In other words, a technology is a machine, and a medium is the use of that machine. It then becomes clear that while the Internet is a dominant technology today, the dominant medium, its dominant use, is social media. And with this in mind, it becomes abundantly clear as to why discourse today is the way it is.

There is a constant, pervasive threat of irrelevance anytime one posts on social media, and I am sure that anyone who has spent more than a few days on any given platform can attest to the rapid speed at which one buzzing topic moves to the next. As a result, arguments, ideas, and discussions are spewed out quick and without any nuance. Actual engagement with the ideas being talked out cannot be risked. In the time it takes you to study, read a book, or to genuinely think about the subject you are so fervent about, there is a new point of mass interest, and you are left speaking into a void which no longer cares to hear what you have to say.

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It is then not surprising to me that discourse on Twitter has taken such an extreme split; such a sharp turning away from the simple and foundational idea that multiple things can be true about a given thing at once. It is possible to believe that the deaths of the billionaires aboard the Titan are sad. Objectively, I think if any one of us were in that situation, ignoring of course the circumstances that got them in the situation in the first place, we would be primally and utterly terrified. That is a chilling thought. However, it is also possible to believe, at the same time, that the reaction this has caused in us is utterly terrifying. What is there to happen when people believe that they have to passionately defend billionaires’ sanctity of life? What does this mean for revolution in America?

I will put it this way: we are slaves on a plantation. Our plantation’s master has gone away on a boating trip with neighboring plantation masters. On this trip, an accident happens which leads to our master, and his master friends, dying. If you asked me, a slave, to put myself in the master’s shoes, and to divorce myself from the fact that I as a slave do not even have the resources to take a boating trip, I would surely say that would be a scary moment for me and I may feel your idea of empathy. However, my master has died, his plantation still exists, a new master will come soon to rule that plantation, and I am still a slave. Therefore, that idea of empathy that you have has its limits on me. As well, if there were a group of slaves on the plantation so intensely tore up about master’s death and scolding other slaves for not being as tore up, it would lead me to fear that when the time to fight for our liberation comes, these fellow slaves will not be able to be counted on. It brings into question whether someone is truly for the people; for if you are not staunchly for the people, you are against them.

The even more frightening factor here is that people so loudly championing empathy for the billionaires are not even aware that they are serving capitalist interests. They cannot tell that — by the way that the meticulous, scientific system of capitalism works — anytime you defend billionaires, you are defending capitalism. It is no coincidence that this story was pushed as hard as it was. Within three days of the submersible going missing, a documentary on it has already been filmed, produced, edited, and sent to air. Ask yourself, and I mean seriously ask yourself: why do we not hear the stories of the people who are ruthlessly exploited by billionaires as much as we do this? In that answer is also the answer as to why you will not hear the same people championing empathy for these billionaires, also championing empathy for their victims, whom are countless and suffering daily.

Aside from the political thought that this story may inspire, it is a synecdoche of a larger culture of irrelevant news and information that has been in place for centuries in US. What so many people fail to recognize about this story, and its parts, is that it simply does not matter.

What bearing does this have on your day-to-day life? I am not asking this to say that any story or information that is not directly related to you cannot have value, but I am saying that a lot of the information sensationalized by US media has no actual value, and for a reason.

It is the job of the capitalist system to keep the people subordinated and unconscious. If the system succeeds in doing this, people will blindly practice, uphold, and promote the interests and values of capitalism. For if the masses of people took even the most simple view of capitalism, it would become abundantly clear how unjust it is. A handful of people control and own not only the means of production, but the production, while those who work on these means of production and produce have no stake in where they work and often can’t even access what they produce. It is clear from even this base-level understanding of capitalism that it is a system built on exploitation. By extension, to keep people subordinated, unconscious, and unaware of this, they must remain uninformed; or, better yet, consumed with useless information. As Kwame Ture once put it, “the capitalist system makes the people think they’re thinking, when in fact they are not thinking.” Therefore, when the people waste our time discussing a situation which has no true effect on our lives, convinced that value can be traded for entertainment — and then, at that, discuss without a tinge of nuance, critical thinking, or rhetoric — the capitalist rejoices! This is because all while doing this, the people truly believe we are contributing to an important cultural discourse. Sure, the culture is having discourse, but what is it doing for the culture?

This irrelevant news disguised in a cloak of being relevant is not new. As Henry David Thoreau incisively remarked in 1849:

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate .... We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

My point is this: if you can tell me five facts about the Titan submersible, or any other nationally syndicated story, but not five about the community directly around you, you are not an informed person, you are a distracted one. And this battle of focusing and reshifting toward real issues and real change is one we must be constantly waging, because capitalism is constantly waging against that.

On the Concept of "Time Poverty"

[Photo credit: Marisa9 / iStock / Getty Images Plus]

By Rugveda Sawant

“In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour-time.”

-Karl Marx

There is a considerable amount of literature on “time-poverty” concocted by researchers and policy-makers. The term is used to denote lack of time an individual experiences to devote to personal and social activities which ends up negatively impacting their well-being.

Apart from the already established definition of the term, a fresh deconstruction of it may lead one to observe that if poverty is understood as a lack of (financial) resources, time-poverty may be understood as a lack of (financial) resources to purchase time rather than lack of time itself. The worker who does not own any means of production and has nothing but his labour-power to sell in order to sustain himself, must do so by lending it out for a certain duration of time to the capitalist who purchases it in order to extract surplus value. However, it becomes important to note that what is being sold and purchased here is not time, but labour-power. Time is not a commodity- it can be a measure of value but has no value in itself; it cannot be produced or purchased. Defining “time-poverty” as “lack of time” helps mask this simple contradiction; we are stuck with a term that fails to delineate the exact relationship between time and poverty, leading to the proposal of flawed solutions for a legitimate issue.

Even though a more liberal understanding is that people, no matter what their financial status, can experience “time-poverty”, a more sophisticated argument observes that it is an issue more relevant to and persistent amongst the income-poor. [1] To avoid ambiguity, let us replace “poor” with the working class and “rich” with the capitalist class. The working class earns its money through ‘wages’ while the capitalist class earns it through ‘profits’. The following illustration by Engels will help us understand how ‘wages’ and ‘profits’ are earned:

“The capitalist takes the labourer into his workshop or factory, where all the articles required for the work can be found – raw materials, auxiliary materials (coal, dyestuffs, etc.), tools, and machines. Here, the worker begins to work. His daily wages are, as above, 3 shillings, and it makes no difference whether he earns them as day-wages or piece-wages. We again assume that in 12 hours the worker adds by his labour a new value of 6 shillings to the value of the raw materials consumed, which new value the capitalist realizes by the sale of the finished piece of work. Out of this new value, he pays the worker his 3 shillings, and the remaining 3 shillings he keeps for himself. If, now, the labourer creates in 12 hours a value of 6 shillings, in 6 hours he creates a value of 3 shillings. Consequently, after working 6 hours for the capitalist, the labourer has returned to him the equivalent of the 3 shillings received as wages. After 6 hours’ work, both are quits, neither one owing a penny to the other.

“Hold on there!” now cries out the capitalist. “I have hired the labourer for a whole day, for 12 hours. But 6 hours are only half-a-day. So work along lively there until the other 6 hours are at an end – only then will we be even.” And, in fact, the labourer has to submit to the conditions of the contract upon which he entered of “his own free will", and according to which he bound himself to work 12 whole hours for a product of labour which cost only 6 hours’ labour.

Similarly with piece-wages. Let us suppose that in 12 hours our worker makes 12 commodities. Each of these costs a shilling in raw materials and wear-and-tear, and is sold for 2.5 shillings. On our former assumption, the capitalist gives the labourer .25 of a shilling for each piece, which makes a total of 3 shillings for 12 pieces. To earn this, the worker requires 12 hours. The capitalist receives 30 shillings for the 12 pieces; deducting 24 shillings for raw materials and wear-and-tear, there remains 6 shillings, of which he pays 3 shillings in wages and pockets the remaining 3. Just as before! Here, also, the worker labours 6 hours for himself – i.e., to replace his wages (half-an-hour in each of the 12 hours), and 6 hours for the capitalist.” (Frederick Engels, Wage Labour and Capital, 1891)

Profits are earned by appropriating unpaid labour of the working class. Profit constitutes the amount of time that the worker has spent in producing value that does not belong to him. The magnitude of profits can be increased by increasing intensity of labour, productiveness of the labour or by increasing the length of the working day. But no matter how these three variables shift, (relative) wages and profits remain in inverse proportion to each other. [2] Lower the wages, more the profit. More the labour-time that remains unpaid, more the capitalist gains. Once this is clear, one can start to see how “lack of time” that one class of the society faces is a gain for the other. The issue of “lack of time” devoid of class analysis leads to vague rhetorics [3] and empty solutions. All sincere critique must elucidate how the “lack of time” that the “poor” face and which affects their “well-being” is an inevitability under capitalist production. [4]

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It is argued that women are the most “time-poor” since they are ones who usually perform domestic and household work which (widely) remains unrecognized and unpaid. The burden of performing these tasks leaves them with very little time for themselves. Recognition, remuneration and provision of alternative arrangements of such work will lead to diminution of the time deficit that women face. Researchers by employing the methodology of time-use surveys have made proclamations like “rich women work harder than poor men”. [5] Such statements are as contrived as the terms “rich” and “poor” are abstruse. Women unarguably are burdened with domestic and household work, which to a very large extent remains gendered. However the premise that it is “unpaid” is false. Even though this work may not be remunerated directly, it is accounted for in the wages earned by the worker:

“The manufacturer who calculates his cost of production and, in accordance with it, the price of the product, takes into account the wear and tear of the instruments of labour…In the same manner, the cost of production of simple labour-power must include the cost of propagation, by means of which the race of workers is enabled to multiply itself, and to replace worn-out workers with new ones. The wear and tear of the worker, therefore, is calculated in the same manner as the wear and tear of the machine.

Thus, the cost of production of simple labour-power amounts to the cost of the existence and propagation of the worker. The price of this cost of existence and propagation constitutes wages. The wages thus determined are called the minimum of wages. This minimum wage, like the determination of the price of commodities in general by cost of production, does not hold good for the single individual, but only for the race. Individual workers, indeed, millions of workers, do not receive enough to be able to exist and to propagate themselves; but the wages of the whole working class adjust themselves, within the limits of their fluctuations, to this minimum.”  (Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, 1847) 

Therefore, even if household and domestic work was to be paid for separately, it would lead to a relative decrease in wages, not leading to any sort of substantive improvement in the life of the working class. The gendered nature of the oppressive burden of household work can be understood as an effect of the patriarchal system but the cause of it lies in the exploitative nature of class relations under capitalism. The patriarchal system itself, at the outset, is a result of the historical division of labour within a class society. The condition of women being domestic slaves to their husbands will not be made better, in any real sense, by demanding for household work to be remunerated.[6] According to the calculations of the capitalist, it is already recognised and paid for in the wages of the worker. As explained above, the impoverished status of the working class is directly linked to the prosperity of the capitalist. Therefore, any demands for alternative arrangement or socialisation of domestic work that might emancipate women from their current state of slavery and proposals about providing free goods and services via public policy, remain incompatible with and a utopia under the capitalist mode of production.

The burden of “unpaid work” that leads individuals to face a “lack of time” is a legit issue. However, it cannot be understood in isolation from the process of production of which it is a part. Marx writes:

“All the slave’s labour appears as unpaid labour. In wage labour, on the contrary, even surplus-labour, or unpaid labour, appears as paid. There the property-relation conceals the labour of the slave for himself; here the money-relation conceals the unrequited labour of the wage labourer.” (Karl Marx, Vol 1., Capital, 1887)

It is this very phenomenon that can so easily lead one to think of household work (domestic slavery of women) as unpaid while overlooking the exploitative nature of class relations within the capitalist mode of production. The concept of “time-poverty“, which wrongly posits time as a commodity, furthers the concealment of the worker’s unpaid labour. The worker appears to be selling his time and not the value creating source that is his labour-power. It becomes easier then, for the price of this “time” to be detached from and determined independently of the value created by him. Terms like “time-poverty” when undisguised reveal themselves as nothing but plain, old poverty. Averse to the dilution and deviation that this term begets, one must not lose sight of the fact that the fight for personal and leisure time is inextricably tied with the fight for socialism.

Notes

[1] “...time-poverty among the better off accounts for very little of the total, and that genuine time poverty is more than a qualitative loss resulting from individual choices. Rather, most people who are time-poor are also income-poor and suffer from other (often multiple) deprivations.” Ghosh, “Time Poverty and the Poverty of Economics,” 2.

[2] “The share of (profit) increases in the same proportion in which the share of labour (wages) falls, and vice versa. Profit rises in the same degree in which wages fall; it falls in the same degree in which wages rise.” Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, 37.

[3] “Though it is difficult to say how much leisure or free time a person needs, one can say that a person who does not get enough leisure is under time stress.” Hirway, Understanding Poverty, 28.

[4] “Capitalist production, therefore, of itself reproduces the separation between labour-power and the means of labour. It thereby reproduces and perpetuates the condition for exploiting the labourer. It incessantly forces him to sell his labour-power in order to live, and enables the capitalist to purchase labour-power in order that he may enrich himself.” Marx, Vol. 1. Capital, 406.

[5] Ultra-poor women rank at the bottom in terms of burden of total work. They spend 32.74 per cent of their total time (53.42 hours) on work. They are followed by non-poor women (and not by ultra-poor men) who spend 31.66 per cent of their time (53.18 hours) on work. That is, rich women work much harder than ultra-poor men in terms of the time put into work. Hirway, Understanding Poverty, 35. Also quoted by Jayati Ghosh in “Time poverty and the poverty of economics” with an addition that “This partly reflects the lack of paid work for poor men as well as the greater burden of unpaid work borne by women in their own households.”

[6] “Payment for the housewife’s “reproductive labour” in the house, i.e. for domestic slavery, in addition to keeping the working family’s standard of living the same, and consequently the level of the housewife’s freedom on the same level as before, is something that would serve to perpetuate the idea of the housewife as the beast of burden that bears on her back all the social pressure exerted on working-class homes (including psychological and physical abuse). It would keep her away from social life, imprisoned within the four walls of her house, making her numb with chores that mangle her body and dull her mind.” Rey, Is housework an “unpaid” job?

Reflections on My Visit to Cuba: A Response to Calla Walsh

By Gus Griffin

Calla Walsh’s May 29th op-ed, Biden Calls Cuba Terrorist While the People Demand and End to U.S. Terrorism against Cuba, was correct!

Having been born after its revolution in 1959, I, like anyone else growing up in the United States, have been subjected to a very one-sided characterization of the island and its government.

This year, through the National Network on Cuba in the U.S. and the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) 16th annual Mayday Brigade, I finally got the opportunity to visit the island and observe and draw my own conclusions. I was among some three hundred others in the U.S. delegation. About thirty other countries sent delegations from five different continents.

It is impossible to fully relay what I observed and the amazing accomplishments this tiny island of about eleven million has achieved despite an illegal economic embargo for over 60 years. Having said that, I’ll list a few:

• While the U.S. is facing a growing diabetes crisis, Cuba has a promising treatment for the disease. However, due to the blockade, U.S. citizens are not allowed access to this treatment. This is an example of how the embargo can have life or death consequences for both U.S. citizens as well as Cubans;

• Cuba also has one of the largest adults Covid 19 vaccination rates in the world despite the embargo hindering its capacity to acquire syringes. This is thanks to the faith the Cuban people have in their world-renowned healthcare system and the country’s development of five different Covid 19 vaccinations which also are beyond the reach of U.S. citizens again due to the embargo;

• Other bio-medical advancements include a tic vaccine that helps preserve their livestock but does not kill the tic;

• The country’s Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) established in 1999 provides a tuition free medical education with the only condition being that graduates commit to practice medicine in poor and underserved communities after graduation. Two hundred and twenty of its graduates are currently working within the U.S. without the crippling burden of medical school student loan debt. The average U.S. medical school graduate owes $250,990 in total student loan debt. Seventy-three percent of medical school graduates have educational debt. One of ELAM’s graduates is an alum of my employer, Montgomery College and we are in the process of bringing her to the campus in the fall to talk about ELAM and her experience;

• An extension of the country’s internationalism is its health care and educational ambassadorship which sends doctors and other health care workers and literacy educators to the world’s most underserved areas. They are currently serving in thirty-two different countries around the world; 

• There is a home ownership rate of 85% which explains why I saw none of the homeless encampments we routinely see in the U.S.; and

• The country recently updated its Family Code which now recognizes same sex marriages and other family structures previously excluded from the benefits of marriage.

This list is by no means complete! The country can and is doing so much more, and the people of the U.S. and the rest of the world would benefit if the embargo, a relic of the cold war, were ended. 

In this year, the 200th anniversary of the infamous “Monroe Doctrine” from which the U.S. declared all the western hemisphere its hegemonic domain, there is no better time to renounce this ideology which is at the root of the Cuban embargo. The Washington D.C. Council is among the latest to take a step in that direction recently by passing a resolution urging the lifting of the embargo and removal of Cuba from the list state sponsors of terrorism. A third action would be to return Guantanamo Bay back to the island as a piece of its sovereign land. This sentiment represents a growing international movement. Of 193 United Nation members, 185 voted to condemn the blockade last year.  This trend has been consistent for about 30 years.  

It is my hope that other governing bodies and organizations will join the world chorus by condemning the blockade against Cuba. 

Gus Griffin is a professor at Montgomery College and a member of Black Alliance for Peace and Ujima People’s Progress Party.

Tipped and Tricked: It's Time To Pay Service Workers A Living Wage

By Liam Easton-Calabria

Republished from Socialist Alternative.

If you’ve recently been out to eat, grabbed a cup of coffee, taken a Lyft, or gotten a haircut, you’ve likely given someone a tip. Leaving a tip as a sign of appreciation is a regular practice in the U.S., and is more common here than any other country in the world. Tipping has become increasingly prevalent across different service sector jobs, and as wages have stagnated and the cost of living has increased dramatically, tips make up an important part of the income of roughly five million workers in the U.S. While tipping is a lifeline for workers in today’s current working conditions, the economic model of tipping as a whole is anti-worker and negatively impacts both the worker and the customer. 

Most tipped workers would say that they really need tips. A restaurant server, thought of as the “classic” tipped worker, usually earns a majority of their income through tips, while getting a subminimum wage from their employer. In many states, this subminimum wage is only the federal minimum of $2.13 an hour. Servers are therefore wholly reliant on customers at restaurants to tip between 15-20% of sales in order to make ends meet. When customers tip below this, or not at all, it can put servers and their families in financially strenuous positions. The difference in tipped wages month to month can determine whether a family is able to pay their rent.

A Growing Problem

Tipped work has changed over time, however, and tips now play a larger role in work outside of just the restaurant industry. There are more service jobs than ever before. This March, the leisure and hospitality sector saw the most growth with 72,000 new positions, while the manufacturing, construction, and retail sectors all saw job losses. An economy dominated by service jobs means many more workers holding multiple jobs in precarious industries. The custom of tipping has expanded to include thousands of counter-service workers, including baristas and food service, and gig workers that work for companies like Uber or Doordash. These workers make minimum wage and typically make far less in tips than servers. The pathetic state of the $7.25/hr federal minimum wage means tips are still vital to making rent, buying groceries, and generally scraping by. In the age of persistent inflation and stagnant wages, even $15/hr is a poverty wage across the U.S. To many workers, tips make it possible to survive, and therefore tipping itself can feel like an act of solidarity between working people. 

However, at the heart of the matter, tipping allows bosses to shove the burden of providing a subminimum wage onto other workers, i.e. customers, generating even more exorbitant profits off the cheap labor of their employees. This relationship becomes abundantly clear when looking at the origins of the custom. Tipping began in the U.S. after slavery was abolished following the Civil War. Employers in the service industry took advantage of the limited economic opportunity for Black people recently freed from slavery by letting them “work” but paying them no wage at all. Instead, bosses pressured customers to provide a small extra charge to their server. The extreme racism of the post-Reconstruction-era U.S. allowed employers to continue profiting off the free labor of an underclass of workers and continue a slavery-like business model. 

Tipped work today has sanitized its image and is a far cry from the horrors Black workers endured in the post-Reconstruction period. But the power imbalance created by the tipping system remains the same, pitting service workers against working class customers. Customer-facing tipped workers endure far greater levels of harassment and exploitation than their non-tipped counterparts. The reliance we have on our tips means we are much more vulnerable to mistreatment and are financially incentivized to withstand verbal and even physical abuse while on the job. Whether a customer has an angry outburst about their overcooked burger or makes a sexist comment to their barista, the tipped worker has to judge how their response will affect the tips from their customer and those around them. Smiling through these types of situations is often the choice that workers have to make. Some of my coworkers at Starbucks would actually switch positions or step off the floor when customers with a record of harassment were seen waiting in line, but this wasn’t always possible Far from being on the side of their employees, managers and supervisors are financially incentivized to downplay or ignore instances of mistreatment and penalize workers who speak up.

Sexual harassment is one of the biggest abuses increased by the tipping system. All tipped workers report higher rates of sexual harassment, but women are by far the most affected. 71% of female restaurant workers report having been sexually harassed on the job, and not only from customers – 41% report facing harassment from a manager or supervisor! Our low wages make the financial exchange from customer to employee extremely important, and in our deeply sexist capitalist society, that power imbalance manifests in extreme objectification of women service workers. In a recent trend on TikTok, female servers test out and report back that wearing their hair in pigtails results in significantly greater tips. While these servers recognize that this is because men are sexually infantilizing them, many say they are going to keep wearing their hair up after testing the “pigtail theory.” As one server put it with a shrug, “single mom,” pointing to herself. This trend is just one of many examples of how women in the service industry are pressured to withstand abuse and even normalize their own objectification.

Gig workers like Uber, Lyft, and Doordash drivers face a different side of the problem: consistent undertipping. While it has long been expected that customers leave a solid 20% tip for taxi drivers, the tradition hasn’t translated to app drivers in the same way. Multiple reports show that Uber drivers average under 10% in tips. This may be because of the depersonalization of the app experience or because these companies pile on junk fees that inflate the price of their service. App drivers are subject to very inconsistent wages because of fluctuating demand, especially since the pandemic. This, compounded by the high price of gas, means tips are all the more important for drivers, sometimes to just break even for a food delivery. Black and Hispanic workers are much more likely to work these jobs than their white counterparts. 

Make The Bosses Pay!

Ultimately, customers are paying the price for this tipping culture. The Square app may give a suggested tip amount of $1, $2, or $3 when a worker takes 30 seconds to scoop your ice cream or pour your black coffee, and even suggests a tip for the server staff of 20% when picking up food, not dining in. Our tips go to workers (usually), but allow the bosses to keep wages at the bare minimum while lining their pockets. The point-of-service tipping model pressures the customer to tip on things that we may not have in the past, and with companies using inflation as an excuse to blatantly price-gouge us, this extra cost can sting. The anxiety that comes with this has come to be known as “guilt-tipping” because most people know service workers deserve more than what they’re getting, but rightly feel as though they shouldn’t be the one to pay for it.

For the time being, we absolutely shouldn’t stop tipping. We should stand with unionized Starbucks workers fighting for credit card tipping, as it would dramatically improve workers’ lives and especially because it’s been used as a bargaining chip against the union drive. Making the bosses pay for our labor, not other workers, will require mass unionization of the service industry, built on campaigns for the best possible wage increases, so we can begin to phase out this anti-worker custom and replace it with a stable and livable income for all.

Leftist Thought and Social Media in the Information Age

By Zoe Thomas

Republished in modified form from The Michigan Specter.

Fifty years ago, people encountered leftist thought primarily through activism, published works, and educators. In recent years, however, this has changed drastically. Today, for better or worse, the internet is the primary means through which leftism is disseminated and consumed. 

As a vehicle for spreading progressive ideas, the internet has largely been a democratizing force. Ideology is no longer solely the terrain of a relatively educated, elite vanguard. These days, you do not need to enroll in a class or even buy a book to learn about socialism. The information is freely available online and thus far more accessible to the average person.

Of course, more traditional, academic sources are available online, which does increase access to the scholarly writing of Marx and Marxists. However, this kind of literature can be intimidating and largely inaccessible to some people. Theory written centuries ago, or even modern theory written by academics, can even represent another language that enforces a kind of class divide along educational lines. To combat this and reach a broader audience, many modern leftist creators present similar ideas in a more entertaining, comprehensible way. 

Their efforts have gone a long way toward demystifying leftist ideas. This has allowed hisorically-obscured views to filter into the mainstream. But the new brand of leftist content isn’t just more accessible; it is also more relevant to the average person. Rather than just presenting centuries-old ideas, socialist creators are applying them to contemporary issues to foster practical social consciousness.

As leftist creators gain a foothold online, they are counterbalancing the conservative skew of platforms like Twitch and Reddit. And having such content in these spaces matters. It challenges the right-wing media monopoly head-on and obstructs dangerous pipelines that threaten to brainwash vulnerable young people with reactionary and regressive ideology.

But new leftist media is not without its flaws. While simplifying complex issues can be helpful, creators too often oversimplify them for marketing reasons. Moreover, some creators cultivate troubling cults of personality, touting their opinion as fact and punishing intracommunity dissent.

Indeed, many of the new left-wing personalities are of questionable moral character and frequently engage in blatant hypocrisy by clout-chasing. Of course, there are levels to their indiscretions, ranging from the purchase of expensive sports cars to using racial slurs in an attempt to win over the Right.

Perhaps the most worrying trend in new leftist media is that much of it falls prey to debate culture. Progressive commentators frequently engage with the arguments of their mainstream opponents, creating an industry of “responding to the Right.” But this approach mostly fails to win hearts and minds. Instead, it usually redounds to a battle of wits that leads nowhere.

When two career commentators debate online, it can give the appearance of real people having a conversation in which both parties listen and consider one another’s ideas. Yet, in these fabricated interactions, they both always come out on top, profiting off of important political issues that affect people’s lives. This is yet another area of politics where monetary incentives are a thoroughly corrupting force.

Although the benefits of exposing more people to leftist thought with social-media tactics are incredibly valuable and important, the manner in which it is being done leaves a lot to be desired. To be successful and remain true to its cause, online leftism must not just “fight the Right,” but exist independently from it, so as to promote the people and ideas that have given the movement its power.

Zoe Thomas is an undergraduate studying political science at the University of Michigan and a staff writer for The Michigan Specter.

How Ordinary People Become Nazis: A Review of Robert Gellately's 'Hitler's True Believers'

By Charles Wofford

Imagine a political speech so venomous, so hate filled, so threatening, that at times it is impossible to understand the speaker. He rages against enemies foreign and domestic, against capitalism, against communism, against ethnic and political minorities, against disabled people, and insists on the superiority of his own nation. Thousands of torch-bearing zealots respond with orgasmic delirium. Is it not obvious who this image is supposed to evoke?

The image of German fascism as an overwhelming, cult-like madness is common and is re enforced by the Hollywoodization of the Nazis. In popular media Nazis might as well be demons who merely appear as human. As a result the protagonist may kill them without any guilty conscience. Ironically, this same mechanism of spectacle-induced failure of conscience found extensive use in German fascism. The radical Othering of the Nazis is comforting; it ensures us that it couldn’t happen here, it couldn’t happen to us, because the Nazis are not us, they are the radical Other.

In Hitler’s True Believers: How Ordinary People Became Nazis, Robert Gellately shows that the German fascists were far more rational and normal than we often imagine. This is not his endorsement, of course. Gellately’s real accomplishment is in showing how normal the Nazis were without “normalizing” them, showing how rational they were without “rationalizing” their atrocities. The Nazis were not the radical Other; most of them were not very different from us. They went to work, followed the law, and loved their families. The lesson is how easily it all happened to the German people, how every step along the way made sense at the time, and by implication how easily the same thing could happen to us. Perhaps it already has.

The German people were aware of the regime’s crimes; indeed, they were in many cases active participants. If it were not for mass grassroots initiative the Nazis would not have been as successful as they were. Gellately writes of racial persecution, “It was all so public and impossible to overlook. […] The public did more than stand idly by, because numerous individuals cooperated in the enforcement of racial policy, before and after the milestone reached with the Nuremburg Laws in 1935” (263).

The most difficult lesson for those of us on the Left is recognizing that the “socialism” in “National Socialism” is not just a moniker but had real content. German fascism was a broth of nationalism, socialism, and antisemitism. The nationalist angle put it in opposition to the international socialism of Marxism, and the socialism positioned it as a foe to the bourgeois democracies of France, Britain, and the United States. Though the Nazis were hostile to the idea of abolishing all private property, they did seriously attempt to abolish finance capital (which, of course, they linked with Jewish influence), and they did attempt to nationalize several industries to wield them in the name of the German people. The antisemitic conspiracy mongering enabled the fusion, as the German fascists cast their capitalist foes and their Marxist foes as two sides of the same Jewish-led effort at world domination. The negative manifestation of this worldview culminated in the Holocaust. The positive vision was the Volksgemeinschaft.

Volksgemeinschaft is the National Socialist utopia; a futuristic vision of a society living in harmony with nature. “Nature” here is conceptualized in terms of a bogus blood-and-soil theory, but that was not an invention of the Nazis. Similar forms of racism were widely entertained throughout the global scientific community. “Volk” literally means “people,” but refers to a racialized concept of it as in the Völkisch Movement of late 19th century Germany. “Gemeinschaft” may be translated as “community,” but refers more to tight-knit communities of people who know each other personally (contrast Gesellschaft, a more rationalist conception of society as defined through social contracts, rational self-interest, etc.) Volksgemeinschaft is what emerged from the blending of nationalism and socialism. Its racism makes it repugnant to an internationalist or humanist perspective championed by the Left, while its community-oriented nature is repellant to today’s neoliberal individualism. The point here is that the Nazis were anti-humanist and reactionary, but they were also futurist and modern. They were not conservative.

But that recognition puts us in a difficult spot. Today’s popular left discourse has committed itself to an outright denial of any authentically socialist character to German fascism. So acknowledging that National Socialism is one of the infinite conceivable varieties of socialism leaves the Left rhetorically exposed. One of the foundational premises of socialism is that society is what we make it. We can therefore arrange society however we wish. But our time and place is so hyper capitalistic, and its ideology so individualist, that any and all socialisms are seen as equivalent. Yet the figures who became major Nazi leaders had, in Gellately’s words, “an obsession about socialism. Indeed, thanks to the creation of a welfare state from 1881 onward, reinforced by the social impact of the war, a degree of socialism engrained itself in German society and was enshrined in the Weimar Republic’s constitution” (41).

The place of socialism in the Nazi vision was not unambiguous, and there were internal debates. Gellately relates a debate between the Nazi Left represented by Gregor Strasser and the Nazi Right represented by Alfred Rosenberg.

If Gregor Strasser bowed to Hitler’s authority or at least his political abilities, he still advocated a more socialistic line. As might be expected, Alfred Rosenberg, as one of the party’s self-styled ideological experts and a die-hard anti-Bolshevist, pushed back in a newspaper article in early 1927. Nationalism in its purest form, he said, united with socialism and, if stripped of any internationalism, represented the nation’s spirit of liberation. Hence, emphasizing the socialism in the Party’s name (as Strasser and his comrades wanted) was wrong, because the main point of their activity was to rescue the nation. Strasser replied quickly that socialism meant more than merely using the state to protect the people from capitalist greed, as Rosenberg would have it. Instead, it aimed to create another form of economic life and implied the participation of workers in ownership, profit, and management. This socialism accepted that private property was the basis of all culture and because capitalism was an immoral system that stole the nation’s goods, the state had to step in to restore fairness (77).

These debates abated as the Right wing of the party took greater control. Eventually the Strassers were marginalized, and the working class elements of the party leadership liquidated in a series of purges. But their socialist contributions were still a part of Nazi doctrine, and if they did not represent a powerful wing of the party there would have been no need to purge them in the first place.

Another difficult lesson: many devoted Nazis in the 1930s had been equally devoted communists and socialists in the 1920s. The Nazis did not come to power primarily through violence; they persuaded the vast majority of Germans (and Austrians, and many others across Europe) that they really were the way forward. A big part of that was refuting of the Treaty of Versailles. The humiliations it imposed on Germany were despised by the entire population, so that anything done to escape its terms was met with enormous praise, and even foreigners were in admiration of Germany’s unwillingness to stay down.

Hitler’s True Believers belongs to a genre of “How the Nazis Came to Power.” It is not a strictly historical genre, and it includes such varied titles as Max Horkheimer’s The Eclipse of Reason and William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. No matter the angle, the point is generally the same: this movement of German National Socialism, which culminated in mass murder on an industrial scale and the self-immolation of European civilization, emerged from beliefs and social structures that had been present in Europe for centuries, and every step of its development made sense at the time. National Socialism was not an aberration or explosion of barbarism in the midst of an otherwise civilized world. It was the culmination of particular processes of civilization which contained these murderous possibilities from early on. The hideous racism of the Nazis was well-supported by the scientific establishments of the time. Hitler’s survival-of-the-fittest mentality was derived from theories in the natural sciences (particularly Darwin) applied to the social realm. The Nazis saw Bolshevism as the death of civilization and the Western democracies as its decay. Thus they were (in their own minds) the sentinels of civilization, driven by science, united in their desire for progress toward a newly unified society, the Volksgemeinschaft.

One clear parallel to our own predicament is in the rhetoric employed to defend American military presence around the world. Neuroscientist and public commentator Sam Harris, for instance, is known for arguing that American-committed atrocities just aren’t as morally bad as those committed by official enemies, since we are “well-intentioned,” while they are not. But that merely brings us back to the issue of a failure of conscience. For the Nazis it was that they were Das Herrenrasse (the master race) while their victims were Die Untermenschen (sub-humans). For the French it was the cultural appeal: they were “civilized” and on a “civilizing mission” (Mission Civilisatrice), while the colonized were primitive. Whether we appeal to the Nazi blood theory, the French cultural theory, or Harris’s intention theory, the end is to facilitate that same failure of recognition, that same failure of conscience, which we also inflict on ourselves through our representations of the Nazis in popular media.

Hitler’s True Believers will remind leftists of the importance of internationalism. Yet even this concept is too limiting. In an era of mass anthropogenic environmental destruction and mass extinction, not even humanism is sufficiently broad. After National Socialism there is no excuse for blindly trusting humanism, enlightenment, science, rationality, technology, “the People,” “the Proletariat,” or any other idealized construct to save us from ourselves. These ideas must be engaged critically, their limits registered, and their employment must be razor-sharp. If we fail this challenge, then we may already have one foot in the jackboot.

My copy of Hitler’s True Believers shows on its cover a crowd of bright-eyed Germans giving the Roman salute, presumably to their Führer off camera. The focus of the photo is a young woman, flanked by several soldiers and many children. The exuberance on their faces is beautiful. It is hard to see anything political inspiring such admiration in 21st century America. Consider how defeated, how humiliated, how despairing many Germans were after World War I; is it so hard to understand why they would want to believe in something that could inspire that sort of joy? Our contemporary situation is also marked by widespread depression, anxiety, and despair about the future. How easy would it be for a Hitleresque figure to bring us all, by dint of our own reason, to the brink?

Charles Wofford is a Ph.D. candidate in historical musicology and critical theory at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Our Freedoms Shrink as Our Military Expands

By Brad Wolf

Republished from Counterpunch.

The Merchants of Death even own our sidewalks. That’s what we were told when we arrived at Raytheon Technologies in Arlington, Virginia, on Valentine’s Day, February 14th, to issue a “Contempt Citation” for Raytheon’s failure to comply with a subpoena issued last November by the Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal, a People’s Tribunal scheduled for November of 2023.

Raytheon knew we were coming. The police were waiting and would not permit us to enter the enormous building even though other businesses and a public restaurant resided inside. “You’re not allowed in,” the police said. “The owner of the building said no to you.” Others were free to enter for lunch or to conduct business. The officers were polite. Respectful. “We are only doing our job,” they said, seeming more like a hired corporate police force than a public police force.

“And you cannot remain on the sidewalk,” the police said. We responded that it was a public sidewalk. “Not anymore,” the police said. “Raytheon bought the sidewalk. And the sidewalk across the street.” When asked how a private corporation can buy a public sidewalk, the officers shrugged not knowing the answer. “You can move down there,” they said, pointing to a corner across the busy street.

We asked to see a deed proving this bizarre acquisition of public property. Lo and behold, the police dutifully produced a deed stamped by the recorder of deeds office indicating Raytheon did in fact own the sidewalk all the way to the street.

Using US tax dollars, including the dollars of those of us who stood there, Raytheon bought up the very freedom they claim they’re building weapons to defend. Freedom of speech and assembly is drastically reduced when corporations as powerful as Raytheon control the halls of Congress, the Pentagon, the White House, and our corporate media.

In fact, in the belly of the beast of the Raytheon building was the corporate media itself, an ABC television affiliate which refused to talk to us last November. When we had approached an ABC spokesman outside, they refused to admit they worked for ABC despite wearing ABC attire. From corporate wars to corporate police to corporate media, all in one monstrous, taxpayer-funded building.

In 2023, approximately $858 billion will be taken from the paychecks of US citizens to help squelch our most fundamental Constitutional rights of privacy and assembly.

Across the street from Raytheon, we unfurled our banners and carried our signs. We held Raytheon in contempt for refusing to comply to a subpoena issued by the people of the world. We noted their shame of their own corporate behavior such that they purchased police and public sidewalks to keep public scrutiny away.

A young woman approached, noticing our signs. She was an Afghan refugee who had been there during the invasion. She and her family had suffered immensely from the US bombing. Her father barely made it out alive. She was crying as she spoke. Off to the side, a man in a suit carefully took pictures of each of us. We were photographed everywhere we went this Valentine’s Day.

To evidence Raytheon’s complicity in war crimes, we read the names of the 34 victims—26 of them schoolboys—killed in the horrific 2018 bombing of a school bus in Yemen. The bomb, a 500-pound Paveway laser-guided bomb was made by Lockheed Martin while Raytheon was responsible for the infrared system which targeted the bus.

Under the careful eye of our National Security State, we traveled to the Pentagon to deliver a subpoena compelling Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to testify before the Tribunal. Mr. Austin, before being Secretary of Defense was, of course, on the Board of Directors at Raytheon. This, after retiring from the military.

Mr. Austin had cashed in at Raytheon and was now in the catbird seat at the Pentagon sending billion-dollar contracts to his former employer. He is certain to cash in a second time when he leaves his current office. And so, we had a subpoena asking Secretary Austin to speak about these allegations epitomizing the “Revolving Door” between the military, defense contractors, and public office.

A dozen police waited. They counted the number in our group making hand signals between themselves. “You’ve just come from the Raytheon building,” they said to me. “And you plan on spending one hour here. And then you’re going to the Hyatt Hotel for a protest.” I asked how they knew that, especially the information about the Hyatt Hotel since that had not been made public, and the police officer smiled and said, “We have our ways.”

We were told we could protest in a small, fenced-in grassy area away from the metro stop, out of sight from most. We, the people, had been corralled behind a fence in a small grassy patch to peacefully exercise our freedom of speech as the billion-dollar behemoth of war and death, surveillance and repression, stood before us.

Similar actions of subpoena delivery had been carried out the same day in San Diego, California; Asheville, North Carolina; and New York City. Surveillance and corporate resistance had occurred at each location.

Valentine’s Day, this day meant for the opening of hearts, was one of recognizing the Orwellian state in which we live, funded by our own dollars. Our military not only consumes our money, but our freedoms as well.

We again read the names of the dead, sang, some prayed. As we were leaving, one of the police officers cheerfully said, “It’s 64° outside and a beautiful day. Why not enjoy it and go play golf.” A frightfully common thought in such perilous times.

Brad Wolf is a former prosecutor, professor, and college dean.  He is the Executive Director of Peace Action Network of Lancaster and writes for numerous publications.

Ghost Stories of Capitalism: Racism is REAL, and it's a Class Struggle

By Danny Haiphong

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

In today’s political climate, the word racism has become taboo. Some on the “Left” take issue with the term because of how it has been co-opted by the neoliberal elite. This is understandable, since the neoliberal Democratic Party has indeed exploited race relations in the United States to forward a “lesser evil” but no less dangerous brand of U.S. imperialism. Racism is thus increasingly viewed as an ideological weapon of liberalism rather than a material force of oppression. So-called “conservatives” have pounced on the limitations of neoliberal racial politics to strengthen their own brand as crusaders against the “woke” politics of the Democrats.

The problem with all of this is that racism is a very real manifestation of class struggle. Racism isn’t merely the hateful words and behaviors acted out by individuals. It isn’t simply a set of “institutional” problems that can be reformed away at the workplace or the criminal justice system, either. Some on the liberal “left” say that racism is “systemic,” but even this is misleading. Failing to name the system, U.S. imperialism, decontextualizes racism from its roots in class and power.

Understanding racism as an expression of class power is not merely a thought exercise. U.S. race relations permeate every aspect of material life for working people. Racist ideology has a clear psychological impact and disparities in policing, incarceration, healthcare, unemployment, and wages have life and death consequences. The purpose of the “Ghost Stories of Capitalism” series is to strengthen a leftist analysis of political economy and exploitation through the personal experience of this author. By telling our stories, we strengthen our capacity to move others to participate a class struggle for genuine liberation from the imperialist system at the root of oppression.

My earliest encounters with racism were marked by the pernicious Yellow Peril ideology which has flourished under the U.S.’s New Cold War regime against China. Many of these encounters happened outside of the home as my Vietnamese mother and white father navigated their own racial contradictions. They also happened outside of the formal education system since U.S. schools are notorious for whitewashing history and valorizing slave owners and their capitalist project. My race consciousness, so to speak, was planted by peers. Race was an unavoidable fact of life.

The words “chink” and “gook” were frequently employed by peers on the playground and in the streets. Many would cackle at me with stretched eyes to demonstrate that they looked more “Asian.” I was frequently reminded of racist stereotypes about the lack of sexual prowess possessed by “Asians.” Some took my perceived Chinese or “Asian” identity as an excuse to steal my belongings or enact some other kind of violence. Many years would pass before I understood these experiences as an outgrowth of U.S. imperialist policy. Anti-Asian racism manufactured consent for immigration laws banning Chinese laborers beginning the mid-to-late 19th century and the U.S.’s wars of aggression against China, the Philippines, Korea, and Vietnam later in the 20th century.

Mistreatment from peers, while infuriating, was not the primary force that awakened me to the interconnection between race and class. Witnessing struggle and oppression was the main catalyst. Once I entered adulthood, I realized that we were all children being force-fed reactionary and divisive ideology. Racism was not just about my suffering  but the suffering of masses of people.  Such revolutionary empathy is rooted in a number of experiences that reflect the inner workings of a capitalist system reliant on dehumanization to reproduce relations of exploitation.

I remember a seventh-grade social studies teacher who reinforced my school’s racist school tracking system by asking me to transfer classes so I would stop “hanging with the knuckleheads,” a euphemism for poor Black youth. I remember being stopped and frisked in my first year of high school by a city cop and watching my Black peers swiftly rush ahead of the scene to avoid the same, if not worse, treatment. I remember the white woman who ran clutching her purse when she spotted my Haitian friend speaking to me at the gate of my building. By the time I turned 21, I had attended the funerals of three Black youth very dear to my heart who died prematurely of suicide, preventable illness, and homicide. One doesn’t easily forget the screams of pain coming from their loved ones.

I came to understand racism as a mechanism of class warfare in my college years. There was nothing like being surrounded by rich, white elites for the first time in my life to cultivate rage at the system. During my sophomore year, an Afro-Dominican student and friend at the college was arrested and charged with a hate crime for getting into a fight with a white person in town and allegedly calling him the “n-word.” The school immediately suspended him and his entire future at the university was placed at risk. This seemingly absurd yet unjust turn of events spurred me into activism.

I quickly wrote an op-ed in the school newspaper which caused such a stir among residents and students alike that anonymous death threats came in my direction. I made contact with likeminded students and we began organizing around issues of race on campus. Our efforts helped create an environment where the charges against the student were dropped and he was allowed back on campus to finish his education. But we didn’t stop here. We continued our activism to tackle other issues such as the lack of an ethnic studies or Black studies program on campus. Burnout mounted as liberal identity reductionism and “dialogue” were favored by administrators and student activists over significant changes in policy, placing insurmountable barriers in front of change.

My frustrations ended up being a blessing in disguise. They led me to a semester-long trip to New York City and a foray as an intern in the labor movement. Occupy Wall Street had just begun, and activists were having intense conversations about race and class. These conversations were often fraught with tension. People spun in circles arguing about whether race or class were more important to movement politics.

The arguments felt worse than fruitless; they felt out of touch with reality. I knew racism and class warfare were interconnected, but I didn’t have the language to explain why or how. I began to develop such a language after several friends introduced me to the science of Marxism at the end of my New York semester. Huey P. Newton, Claudia Jones, Fidel Castro, Vladimir Lenin, and a host of revolutionary socialist leaders of the 20th century taught me that U.S. imperialism requires racism to reproduce class relations of exploitation. Capitalists accumulate profit from the exploitation of workers and their system of race-based benefits places a critical in front of the solidarity necessary to wrestle off the shackles of such a class arrangement.

This is no abstraction. Black workers in the U.S. are paid as low as half the wages of white workers for the same employment and are twice as likely to be unemployed. Incarceration and police brutality are experienced at far higher rates by Black workers than white workers. Life expectancy is falling for all U.S.-based workers but it is falling fastest in Black American and Indigenous communities. Any class struggle that fails to give these disparities their proper attention is bound to fail.

Furthermore, racism is a key pillar of the American Empire. All U.S. wars, whether on Indigenous peoples in North America or the people of Iraq, have been sanitized by a psychological campaign of dehumanization. American exceptionalism itself is a racist ideology. The U.S. is said to spread “democracy” and “freedom” around the world despite the innumerable war crimes that it has committed. In the last decade alone, the nations of Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, Russia, China, Cuba, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, the DPRK, and many more have been subject to some act of U.S. warfare. Racist propaganda against each one of these nations has rendered U.S. war crimes that much more effective by creating an endless list of “enemies” from which to fear.

Propaganda is one of the biggest fronts of the American empire’s endless war regime. Those who are genuinely interested in winning the class war at hand must seek truth from facts. The fact is that racism is a very real phenomenon that shapes every facet of U.S. imperialism. Solidarity with and among the oppressed is only possible if the scourge of racism is defeated, materially and ideologically. This doesn’t mean we conduct a witch hunt for individual “racists” but rather that our efforts to win political power possess a built-in and organized intention to develop new human beings. It also means that we deeply study the ways in which racism divides humanity for capitalist profit and domination as we search for the correct methods to wage class struggle and restore the needs of humanity.

Danny Haiphong is an activist and journalist in the New York City area. He and Roberto Sirvent are co-authors of the book entitled American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People’s History of Fake News—From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror (Skyhorse Publishing).He can be reached at wakeupriseup1990 [at] gmail.com or @SpiritofHo.

"Everything That Is Human Is Ours": The Political and Cultural Vanguardism of Antonio Gramsci and José Carlos Mariátegui

By Christian Noakes

Republished from Monthly Review.

Within the heterogenous tradition of Marxism there are two diametrically opposed conceptions of popular culture: the elitist and vanguardist. The former is far from unique to Marxism, and it could be argued that such positions are antithetical to the popular sentiments of Karl Marx’s revolutionary thought. Such an orientation represents a dominant intellectual trend more generally, wherein the popular culture of the masses is considered devoid of positive value and categorically distinct from so-called high culture.1 Within Marxism, this elitism tends to assume that the ruling class has an absolute monopoly on popular cultural production. This position is perhaps best represented by Theodor Adorno, who categorically dismisses popular culture as insidious and debased. In his analysis of popular music, he goes as far as to distinguish between popular and “serious” music.2 Such positions overlook popular agency and the need to combat capitalist ideology on a social, rather than individual, level.

In contrast, vanguardists consider popular culture as a fundamental vehicle for mass education and the propagation of a particular worldview, in concert with a corresponding and underlying socioeconomic order. Proponents do not dismiss popular culture outright or conceive of it as inherently “bad” or “low,” but instead ask: popular culture for which class and toward what ends? Vanguardist praxis treats popular culture as “a terrain of contestation.”3

Another distinguishing characteristic of vanguardism is the belief in the intellectual capacity of the populace. Vanguardism is not simply a matter of being the most advanced. It also implies the ability to lead or give direction to the masses. On the intellectual field of culture, this entails a raising of consciousness. In response to the critique that ideas put forward in socialist publications were too complex for the working class to grasp, Antonio Gramsci observed the following:

The socialist weeklies adapt themselves to the average level of the regional strata they address. Yet the tone of the articles and the propaganda must always be just above this average level, so that there is a stimulus to intellectual progress, so that at least a number of workers can emerge from the generic blur of the mulling-over of pamphlets and consolidate their spirit in a higher critical perception of history and the world in which they live and struggle.4

Gramsci, therefore, rejects the extremes of both infantilizing anti-intellectualism (i.e., tailism) or isolated elitism. This is illustrative of how vanguardists can meet the people “where they are,” so to speak, and then work to move them to higher levels of class consciousness.

Gramsci and the lesser-known Peruvian Communist José Carlos Mariátegui—who is himself often compared to Gramsci—were not merely theorists of vanguardism. They actively practiced it and indeed, led this aspect of the class struggle in Italy and Peru, respectively. Both treated cultural and political issues as being deeply intertwined and sought to promote politically and intellectually developed popular culture for the working class and oppressed peoples in order to counter the dominant popular bourgeois culture. Their revolutionary praxis materialized in publications such as Gramsci’s L’Ordine Nuovo and Mariategui’s Amauta.

Gramsci looked with admiration at the strides made by the Soviet Union in making the arts accessible to the working class and the proliferation of revolutionary cultural institutions such as the Proletkult. The revolutionary fervor in the Soviet Union and the increasing militancy of Italian workers inspired Gramsci to create an institution for the development and propagation of proletarian culture in Italy. Out of this desire came the newspaper, L’Ordine Nuovo: Weekly Review of Socialist Culture, which Gramsci founded in 1919 with a group of intellectuals and revolutionaries that would later become a core group in the Communist Party of Italy. In its pages, readers found works of political prose alongside theater and literary criticism. The paper also introduced many to Communist artists and intellectuals from abroad, such as Anatoly Lunacharsky, Maxim Gorky, Henri Barbusse, and Romain Rolland. Reflecting on the initial impetus for the publication, Gramsci said,

The sole sentiment which united us… was associated with our vague yearning for a vaguely proletarian culture.5

The June 21, 1919, edition marked a significant shift in the publication from this somewhat eclectic initial phase into an organ for a concrete political program. Ordine Nuovo became not only a publication, but a core group representing something of a tendency or faction within Italian socialist politics—with a particularly heavy influence on labor struggles in Turin. Central to this solidification of political purpose was the factory council movement, which Ordine Nuovo fueled with its program to turn internal commissions of Turin factories into Italian soviets or councils. By directly empowering the workers to manage production themselves, Gramsci asserted that the councils would prepare the working class of Italy to take power and provide them with the competence to build and maintain a socialist society. The Ordine Nuovo group put its energies toward fostering a culture, by means of the councils, in which the workers would see themselves as producers within a larger cooperative system of production, rather than as atomized wage-earners.6 This culture was organically fostered through direct dialog with the workers themselves. With an air of satisfaction, Gramsci remarked that “To us and to our followers, Ordine Nuovo became ‘the newspaper of the factory councils.’ Workers loved Ordine Nuovo… [b]ecause in its articles they found part of themselves.… Because these articles were not cold, intellectual architecture, but were the outcome of our discussions with the best workers. They articulated the real feelings, will, and passion of the working class.”7

At the request of the workers, Gramsci and other members of Ordine Nuovo spoke regularly at council meetings. In September 1920, the revolutionary potential of the councils reached a high point when workers occupied factories and took direct control over production. At this time, the publication ceased, and Gramsci and the other members joined the workers in the factories “to solve practical questions [of running a factory] on a basis of common agreement and collaboration.”8

While the editorial line of the newspaper became more defined and motivated by concrete political goals, it still focused on fostering an organic popular culture of the working class, which it treated as an integral part of building socialism. This included the creation of the School of Culture and Socialist Propaganda, which was attended by both factory workers and university students. Among the lecturers were Gramsci and the other members of Ordine Nuovo, as well as several university professors.9 Such efforts were vital in the intellectual and ideological preparation for the establishment of an Italian socialist state, at which time “[b]ourgeois careerism will be shattered and there will be a poetry, a novel, a theatre, a moral code, a language, a painting and a music peculiar to proletarian civilization.”10 While Italy would soon see the horrors of fascism—rather than the establishment of this proletarian civilization, and thus the full development of a national proletarian culture—the militant working class culture fostered by Gramsci and Ordine Nuovo could never be fully snuffed out by the Mussolini regime. The cultural politics of Gramsci would also have a lasting influence beyond Italy.

Such influences are apparent in the works of José Carlos Mariátegui, who had been in Italy at the time of the founding of its Communist Party and identified most closely with the Ordine Nuovo group. After returning to Peru, Mariátegui put his newfound Marxist convictions to use in a variety of endeavors, including the production of the journal, Amauta, which was heavily influenced by Gramsci.11

Published from 1926 to 1930, this groundbreaking and visually stimulating journal was Mariátegui’s primary vehicle for uniting the cultural and political vanguards of the time.12 In his introduction to the inaugural issue, Mariátegui states: “The goal of this journal is to articulate, illuminate, and comprehend Peru’s problems from theoretical and scientific viewpoints. But we will always consider Peru from an international perspective. We will study all the great movements of political, philosophical, artistic, literary, and scientific renewal. Everything that is human is ours.”13 Along these simultaneous lines of inquiry into Peruvian society and internationalism, Amauta brought together leading artists, intellectuals, and revolutionaries of Peru, Latin America, and Europe. In addition to featuring much of Mariátegui’s most enduring works, it featured other key Peruvian figures, such as the feminist activist and poet Magda Portal and leading indigenist artists José Sabogal and Camilo Blas. Reaching beyond Peru’s borders, the journal also featured contributions by Diego Rivera, Pablo Neruda, Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, and Georg Grosz. Likewise, its readership was also international. In addition to being available throughout much of Latin America, it was also distributed in New York, Madrid, Paris, and Melbourne, Australia.14

Mariátegui was at the center of the vanguardista movement in Peru. This youthful and creative movement concerned itself with the creation of a “new Peru,” which would break from the prevailing oligarchic traditions inherited from Spain.15 While diverse in focus and orientation, vanguardistas sought to create new social, political, and cultural forms. According to Mariátegui,

A current of renewal, ever more vigorous and well defined, has been felt for some time now in Peru. The supporters of this renewal are called vanguardists, socialists, revolutionaries, etc.… Some formal discrepancies, some psychological differences, exist between them. But beyond what differentiates them, all these spirits contribute to what groups and unites them: their will to create a new Peru in a new world.… The intellectual and spiritual movement is becoming organic. With the appearance of Amauta, it enters the stage of definition.16

For its part, Amauta promoted anti-imperialism, gender equality, and internationalism as core principles of its national vision.

A new Peru would have to resolve the “Indigenous question”—the most pressing issue for Mariátegui. To aid in this endeavor, the journal laid bare the semi-feudal/semi-colonial nature of Peru’s economy, which relied on the socioeconomic subjugation of the country’s Indigenous population, and acted as national forum and network for otherwise regionally isolated Indigenous peasant organizing.17 Every issue also promoted a plurinationalism that included Quechua and Amari people in the Peruvian identity and body politic. In stark contrast to the national bourgeoisie, which saw Spain as the source of Peruvianness, the journal promoted a national identity and culture centered around the country’s Indigenous population, as was reflected by the majority of its content. This included articles analyzing racialized relations of production, Indigenous-centered art, and even the very name of the journal, Amauta being Quechua for “wise one” and a title given to teachers in the Inca Empire. As Mariátegui states in his introduction of issue 17 (September 1928), “We took an Inca word to create it anew. So that Indian Peru, Indigenous America might feel that this magazine was theirs.”18 Previously excluded and infantilized, Indigenous people were central to the pages of Amauta, and to the national culture it fostered.

Amauta aimed to polarize Peru’s intellectuals and bring readers under the banner of Marxism-Leninism.19 Its content was particularly important in organizing and providing direction to the country’s rural and Indigenous populations.20 It also helped to establish Indigenismo as Peru’s dominant school of art, thereby fostering a national culture in opposition to the colonial culture inherited from Spain.21 As the most popular Latin American journal of its time, it was central in the propagation of an Indigenous and peasant-centered Marxism that would come to characterize socialist movements throughout Latin America.

The works of Mariátegui and Gramsci were instrumental in the development and dissemination of popular subaltern culture. Through dialog and collaboration, Amauta and L’Ordine Nuovo would come to be leading outlets in the education of the masses along explicitly revolutionary lines. In contrast to both anti-intellectualism and elitism, the cultural projects of Mariátegui and Gramsci represent the vanguardist conviction that the masses are capable both of understanding complex or advanced ideas and of developing their own organic culture divorced from the ruling.

Christian Noakes is an associate editor at the journal Peace, Land, and Bread.

Notes

1. Peter McLaren, “Popular Culture and Pedagogy,” in Rage and Hope: Interviews with Peter McLaren on War, Imperialism, and Critical Pedagogy (New York: Peter Lang, 2006) 213.

2. Theodor Adorno, “On Popular Music,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, ed. John Storey (Athens, GA: University of Georgia, 2006).

3. McLaren, Rage and Hope, 214.

4. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgas and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Chicago: Haymarket, 2012), 33.

5. Quoted in Giuseppe Fiori, Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary (New York: Schocken 1973), 118.

6. John M. Cammett, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967), 95.

7. Quoted in Antonio A. Santucci, Antonio Gramsci (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 68.

8. Fiori, Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary, 139.

9. Cammett, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism, 81.

10. Gramsci. Selections from Cultural Writings, 50—51.

11. Marc Becker, Mariátegui and Latin American Marxist Theory (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1993).

12. David O. Wise, “Mariátegui’s ‘Amauta’ (1926—1930), A Source of Peruvian Cultural History,” Revista Interamericana de Bibliografia 29, no. 3—4 (1979): 299.

13. José Carlos Mariátegu, “Introducing Amauta,” in “The Heroic and Creative Meaning of Socialism”: Selected Essays of José Carlos Mariátegui, 75—76.

14. Wise, “Mariátegui’s ‘Amauta’ (1926—1930),” 293.

15. Kildo Adevair dos Santos, Dalila Andrade Oliveira, and Danilo Romeu Streck, “The Journal Amauta (1926—1930): Study of a Latin American Educational Tribune,” Brazilian Journal of History of Education 21, no. 1 (2021).

16. Mariátegu, “Introducing Amauta,” 74—75.

17. Mike Gonzalez, In the Red Corner: The Marxism of José Carlos Mariátegui (Chicago: Haymarket, 2019).

18. José Carlos Mariátegui, “Anniversary and Balance Sheet,” in José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology, ed. Harry E. Vanden and Marc Becker (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 128.

19. Wise, “Mariátegui’s ‘Amauta’ (1926—1930)”; Jesús Chavarría, José Carlos Mariátegui and the Rise of Modern Peru, 1890—1930(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979).

20. Harry E. Vanden, National Marxism in Latin America: José Carlos Mariátegui’s Thought and Politics (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1986).

21. Wise, “Mariátegui’s ‘Amauta’ (1926—1930),” 295.

Sin Fronteras: Dispatches from Mexico City

[Pictured: A mural by Jose Antonio Aguirre]

All photos of the event, included in this article, were captured by Carmen Harumi V. Leos.

By David A. Romero

“Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar. (Voyager, there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks.)”

—Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Nov 15-19, 2022 — A delegation of Chicano poets, artists, and intellectuals flew to Mexico City for five events over the course of four days across the city. 

It all began with a series of emails and social media messages flying across the Mexico–United States border. 

One poet, Matt Sedillo, Literary Director of the Mexican Cultural Institute of Los Angeles, and one academic, Alfonso Vázquez, founder of the Chicanxs Sin Fronteras project in Mexico City, first made their acquaintance virtually, and eventually, made plans together to bring a delegation from the U.S. to Mexico.

“In my first conversation with Alfonso, I told him I had spoken all over the world, that I had even spoken at Cambridge. While that was a huge honor, my real dream was UNAM,” said Sedillo of those early exchanges.

A professor at FES Acatlán (UNAM), and the author of a history of Chicano cinema and media representation in Spanish, Chicano (University of Guanajuato, 2018), Vázquez knew he could make Sedillo’s dream a reality.

“There is a great reception and interest in Chicano culture in Mexico.” Said Vázquez in an interview with Nancy Cázares, of La Izquierda Diario.

Alongside his partner Abril Zaragoza, Vázquez has created Chicanxs Sin Fronteras to “disseminate and bring young people and the general public closer to Chicano culture beyond the stereotypes that have been imposed on the Mexican who lives in the United States.”

Sedillo and Vázquez developed a four-day literary and arts series of events across Mexico City – with the coordination of the Mexican Cultural Institute of Los Angeles and Chicanxs Sin Fronteras, along with the latter organization’s frequent collaborators: Tianguis Literario CDMX (a collective led by young poet Yasmín Alfaro) and Gorrión Editorial (a publishing house run by poet and professor Abraham Peralta Vélez) – collectively entitled: Desfronterizxs. Homenaje a la escritora Gloria Anzaldúa. Encuentro de poesía chicana.

Sedillo’s delegation flying in from the U.S., a mix of those born in the U.S. and in Mexico, was a “dream team” that included the Director of the Mexican Cultural Institute of Los Angeles, the muralist Jose Antonio Aguirre, poets and professors Norma Elia Cantú and Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs (both of whom knew the series’ figure of homage, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, personally), community activist and author of Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. (Atria, 2005), Luis J. Rodriguez, the sociologist and organizer of delegations to Cuba, Jose Prado, the art curator and organizer of events at El Camino College in Los Angeles, Dulce Stein, and myself, David A. Romero, the author of My Name Is Romero (FlowerSong Press, 2020) (and writer of this article).

Norma Elia Cantú, along with the sharing of her poetry, carried the special honor of giving a multimedia presentation on Anzaldúa’s life, work, and philosophy. Cantú’s own reputation, as the recipient of over a dozen awards and the author of dozens of books, including Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera (University of New Mexico Press, 1997) preceded her in CDMX and many of the professors and students in attendance were excited to meet her in person.

The delegation from the U.S. presented from November 15-19, 2022 at locations as varied as the universities FES Acatlán (UNAM) and La Casa de la Universidad de California en México (UC system), the high school CCH Naucalpan (UNAM), the activist café La Resistencia, and arts center Gimnasio de arte y cultura in Roma (formerly the home of the Partido Popular Socialista (PPS)).

At FES Acatlán, La Casa de la Universidad de California en México and CCH Naucalpan, the delegation from the U.S. presented with introductions from Vázquez, and organizers at their respective campuses: María del Consuelo Santamaría Aguirre, Jeohvan Jedidian Silva Sánchez, Keshava R. Quintanar Cano, Eva Daniela Sandoval Espejo, and Efraín Refugio Lugo.

At La Resistencia and Gimnasio de arte y cultura, the delegation was joined by the Mexican poets, writers, and performers: Pita Ochoa, Cynthia Franco, Sara Raca, Abraham Peralta Vélez, Yasmin Alfaro, Bajo Palabra, Rubikon, Omar Jasso, Lumen Eros Vita, Imperio Soul, and DJ Paolo Guerrero, all of which were excited to share their work alongside the delegation and to represent their country.

The delegation from the U.S. was embraced in all places by their Mexican hosts, who welcomed them into their institutions, presented them with certificates of thanks, took photos with them and purchased their books, escorted them on trips throughout the city to visit historic places of interest and for many members, even welcomed them into their own homes and the homes of their extended families.

Outside of the events, the trip held special meaning for members of the delegation. For Jose Antonio Aguirre, who holds dual citizenship and makes frequent trips to his homeland, the trip to Mexico City was nevertheless an opportunity to meet up with his daughter and to reconnect with an old friend. For Luis J. Rodriguez and Dulce Stein, it was an opportunity to connect with family members they had never met. In the case of Rodriguez, those family members were the children of his aunt Chucha, the namesake of his cultural center in Sylmar, Tia Chucha's, which has served its community for over twenty years. 

For Sedillo, the author of Mowing Leaves of Grass (FlowerSong Press, 2019) the trip to Mexico City had a less direct, but still profound cultural and spiritual meaning, “It's every Chicano's dream to be welcomed back home—to Tenochtitlan.”

The historical significance of the Chicano delegation to Mexico City

Gloria Anzaldúa traveled to Mexico City to teach a graduate seminar “La Identidad Estadounidense” at UNAM’s main campus in 2013, and a handful of other noted writers of Mexican descent born in the U.S., including Sandra Cisneros and Roberto Tejada, have both lived in the metropolis on and off for decades and have given readings in the city, sometimes inviting their contemporaries from the U.S. to join them.

However, there is no bridge that has been regularly maintained, neither by universities nor cultural centers in Mexico City that has been built to bring in Chicano writers and poets to share their work and build a connection between the communities in earnest.

For over a century, the populations have been separated: by border, by language, by history, by culture. It may have seemed unlikely, if not impossible, for the Chicano and Chilango to come together and to build together.

In the U.S., Chicanos, whether those with longstanding ties to the borderlands, or the children of immigrants, are often treated as second-class citizens, lumped into a category known as “minority,” or more generously, as “people of color,” thereby still subject to microaggressions, labor exploitation, criminalization, and violence. Ours is a history of struggle and poverty. Of the antagonism between assimilation and resistance. Of constantly being uncertain of our futures and of who we are. Of being, "ni aqui, ni alla." We are a people often defined by what we are not.

The Mexicans of Mexico City, the Chilangos, can seem to be the opposite, as people who are certain, who are defined, who are. They are the majority population. The normal. The normative. The unquestioned. They live in their capital, a world city, cosmopolitan and international in their tastes. Everywhere, they pull from the character of their nation, producing a synthesis, one that may vary from neighborhood, but that is proud. That is Mexican. They are fluent in Spanish, because prima facie, that is their language. Everywhere in CDMX, there is a tie to both the recent and ancient past. They live in Tenochtitlan; the ruins of Templo Mayor within arm's reach and mere feet away from the Zócalo and the National Palace. Monuments to their heroes abound in bust and sculpture—and their heroes all look like them.

For a time, it could seem that we, the Chicano and the Chilango, could not be more different. What sense would the tales of uncertainty and second-class citizenship make to a Chilango? How could the Chicano, who directly, or indirectly, benefits from U.S. imperialism, respond to accusations that they are implicit in the modern-day gentrification and subjugation of their motherland?

And yet—culture connects us: music, art, film, literature. As in Japan and Thailand, Chicano culture has saturated Mexico City. The cholo is cool. Chicano is cool. Chicano es chido. But, unlike in Japan and Thailand where the connection is deeply felt, but somewhat cosmetic, the Chilangos know that, although divided, although different, the Chicano and Chilango share the same blood. We are the same people.

“The borders aren’t real. They’re not like the rivers or mountains. They weren’t made by God. They were made by man. This land is one. All of the Americas are our community.” Luis J. Rodriguez, the former poet laureate of Los Angeles, said, passionately, to the students at FES Acatlán.

During a short presentation at CCH Naucalpan, Jose Antonio Aguirre described himself, humorously, “I am from Ciudad de Mexico. I am a Chilango. But I have also lived in the United States for a long time, and am influenced by the Chicanos. So, I call myself a Chicalango.”

In one of the most powerful moments of the event series, Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, the author of Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia (Utah State University Press, 2012) , asked the over one hundred in attendance at CCH Naucalpan for a show of hands. “How many of you have family in the United States?” Almost everyone in the audience raised their hands. She added, speaking of Chicanos in Mexico, "This is our country, too."

Alfonso Vázquez, a Chilango with family in California, knows this isn't an isolated phenomenon, “Many of our families, many states of the Republic have a great tradition around to migration, they are migrant states: Michoacán, Jalisco, Guanajuato, Zacatecas, are states with a great tradition. There are also many migrants in Mexico City, it is a place from where many people leave for other states, and to the United States of course.”

Vázquez partnered with CCH Naucalpan and Gorrión Editorial to collect work from the writers of the delegation from the U.S., with translations of works in English into Spanish, and art by Jose Antonio Aguirre, into a special collection entitled, Ellos son nosotros (They are us).

The message from the Chilangos to the Chicanos could not be clearer.

A bridge that goes both ways

“We thank you. For creating a bridge into Mexico.” Matt Sedillo said, at Gimnasio de arte y cultura to close out his set, wiping sweat off his brow, addressing the crowd of Mexican organizers and artists present. “I recognize, a bridge goes both ways. It’s not just for us to come here. But for us [Chicanos], to host you [in the United States].”

The words of Anzaldúa ring, “Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar.”

For Sedillo, who has sailed to the island of Elba, taken trains to Paris, flown to Ravenna to receive the Dante’s Laurel, and likewise, traveled to Cuba, England, Mexico, and Canada, the task of continuing to work with Vázquez to build such a bridge between Mexico and Los Angeles, is not merely a challenge, as the Literary Director of the Mexican Cultural Institute of Los Angeles it’s in his job description, and is the greatest opportunity he can imagine.

David A. Romero is a Mexican-American spoken word artist from Diamond Bar, CA. Romero is the author of My Name Is Romero (FlowerSong Press), a book reviewed by Gustavo Arellano (¡Ask a Mexican!), Curtis Marez (University Babylon), and founding member of Ozomatli, Ulises Bella. Romero has received honorariums from over seventy-five colleges and universities in thirty-four different states in the USA and has performed live in Mexico, Italy, and France. Romero's work has been published in literary magazines in the United States, Mexico, England, Scotland, and Canada. Romero has opened for Latin Grammy winning bands Ozomatli and La Santa Cecilia. Romero's work has been published in anthologies alongside poets laureate Joy Harjo, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Luis J. Rodriguez, Jack Hirschman, and Tongo Eisen-Martin. Romero has won the Uptown Slam at the historic Green Mill in Chicago; the birthplace of slam poetry. Romero's poetry deals with family, identity, social justice issues, and Latinx culture.