Who's Afraid of Mazdak? Prophetic Egalitarianism, Islamism, and Socialism

By Derek Ide

The year was 1974. Algeria's National Liberation Front (FLN) had liberated their country from the French occupying forces and the pieds noirs (French settlers) only twelve years prior. Under the leadership of Ahmed Ben Bella (1962-5) and then Houari Boumédiène (1965-78), Algeria underwent a series of state-building initiatives immediately following independence. The Algerian leadership operated within the parameters of a loosely defined "socialism" that became the organizing ethos under which they constructed the newly independent state.

Algeria was still in the midst of its "socialist" transformation when, a year earlier in 1973, the president of Egypt, Anwar al-Sadat (1970-81), embarked upon his neoliberal Infitah ("Opening") program. This nascent economic program significantly augmented Western capitalist institutions control over Egypt and would eventually overhaul the "Arab Socialism" that had been arduously built from the top-down by his predecessor, the pan-Arab nationalist hero Gamal abd Al-Nasser (1954-70). To deal with the remnants of the Nasserist and Communist left in Egypt, Sadat slowly released many members of the Ikhwaan (Muslim Brothers) from prison. While they had been locked up under Nasser, Sadat viewed the Islamists, including al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya (Islamic Group), as a counterweight to the still active Egyptian left, especially on university campuses. Violence against the left was often encouraged, and the Islamists eventually came to dominate many university settings.[1]

While the Islamists engaged in violence against the left in Egypt on behalf of the state, the Islamists of the Maghrib launched a new ideological war against the "socialist" states in North Africa. In 1974 Abdellatif al-Soltani published what historian Benjamin Stora called the "first manifesto of the Islamist movement in Algeria." This "virulent critique" of the "Socialism of the Algerian leaders" invoked the name of none other than the 6th century Zoroastrian prophet and Iranian reformer Mazdak. Al-Soltani's polemic was titled "Mazdakism is the Origin of Socialism" [2] and it denounced the moral decay of the "destructive principles imported from abroad." All political action must emanate from "within the framework of the party of God, as opposed to the party of Satan," it proclaimed, implicating that the "socialist" policies of the Algerian state as deriving from the latter. Al-Soltani continued that there must be a "single state with a single leader, founded on Muslim principles."[3] For the Islamists like al-Soltani, socialism was something foreign, a contaminant that could not be reconciled with the all-encompassing totality that was Islam.

Yet, the Algerian state during its "socialist" stage was far from secular in any sense of the word. Even at the peak of these state-building and industrialization exercises, the Islamic lexicon was dominant and the state was heavily adorned in religious garb: Islam was the official state religion, no future law could ever "target the state religion," jumaa became the official day of rest, gambling and alcohol sales to Muslims were illegal, Muslims couldn't raise pigs, the president had to be a Muslim, the amount of masajid more than doubled (2,200 to 5,829) from 1966 to 1980, and government sponsored seminars on Islamic thought took place annually.[4] Thus, critiques of the Algerian state on the basis of any perceived secularism were relatively desiccated. Instead, the primary enemy for the Islamists was the socialist model of development; their issue was with "socialism" in any form or degree, not with the professed religiosity of the state. Not only was Marxism an "imported" ideology foreign to Islam, socialism was also an ideological descendent of Mazdakism, a dangerous heresy against God that any good Islamist ought to struggle against.

But who was Mazdak, and why was this pre-Islamic Iranian prophet's name being pejoratively drug into Islamist political discourse in 20th century Algeria? Mazdak was a Zoroastrian prophet who lived and preached during early 6th century. Although details of his life are tenuous at best, a few tenants of his ideology and religious teachings have been established. Mazdak claimed to be a prophet of Ahura Mazda, the monotheistic god of Zoroastrianism. However, Mazdak's Zoroastrianism was an egalitarian rejection of the mainstream clerical establishment and most of his teachings were considered heresy by the Zoroastrian clergy. A significant element of Mazdak's religious thought focused on economic egalitarianism, including an emphasis on developing communal property and community work where all people benefited. Although Mazdak himself was a Zoroastrian Mobad (priest), his teachings were radically anti-clerical in the fact that they accused the mainstream Zoroastrian clergy of oppressing the Persian population and causing poverty through excessive accumulation.

Mazdak's socially conservative critics accused him of extending "communal property" to the point of "sharing wives" and "free love." Despite these allegations, Mazdak's real crime was his economic message. It was his radical egalitarianism that caused him to become a target of the state. Zoroastrian scholar M.N. Dhalla articulated the core teachings of Mazdakism:

"The account of Mazdak's system is very meagre; but it is known that he accounted Jealousy, Wrath, and Greed as the three main causes of all evil in the world. Everyone, according to Mazdak's teachings, should be given equal opportunity and equal share of the enjoyment of the earthly possessions of God. So it was originally ordained by God, but that natural order has been upset by the aggressive strong for their own self-aggran­dizement. Society should therefore return to that original ideal state. These revolutionary teachings thrilled for a time Iran, and exercised a powerful fascination on the masses. The crisis was brought to a head when, far from taking any initiative to stamp out the heresy, the king encouraged it, and finally embraced it. His son, Prince Noshirvan, summoned the Dasturs and Mobads to consider the situation. It was certain that the cult would spread and the young prince adopted severe measures to suppress it, lest it should menace the public peace. The clergy who viewed the new heresy with great alarm, advised rigorous measures to extirpate the threatening creed. Mazdak did not live long to preach his doctrine, for the prince arranged a banquet for him and his followers and put them all to the sword in A.D. 528."[5]

Thus Mazdak and his followers were executed by the state and the religious establishment for the "excitement" they encouraged amongst the Iranian masses. A variety of accounts of Mazdak's death show the gruesome hatred ruling elites harbored for Mazdak. One narration suggests that Mazdak was presented with the spectacle of a "human garden" by his executors when three thousand of his followers were buried alive with their feet sticking from the ground. According to this account Mazdak himself was then hanged upside down and shot with arrows. Other stories of his execution employ equally morbid methods of torture.

Overtime Mazdak and "Mazdakism" became a common pejorative utilized by religious scholars, both Zoroastrian and Islamic, to denigrate any radically egalitarian religious philosophies within their respective traditions. While medieval Muslim historiography often condemned the "socialist" aspects of Mazdakism, this critique was carried over effectively into the 20th century, and not just by way of al-Soltani and the Algerian Islamists. As early as 1919 the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Mohammed Bakheet, was vehemently condemning Mazdakism as a predecessor of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia. Bakheet wrote that the communists in Russia represented an "ancient 'way' and it is the creed of a Persian hypocrite named Zoroaster." [6] But this "ancient way" was only spread to the masses by a "man from Mazria called Mazdaq" who "taught communism of property and of persons, and put it in their mind that this, although it might not be from religion, was at least honorable in the doing." Mazdak's "heresy" furthermore articulated the idea that "God furnished the means of living to be divided equally among the people… [so] they decided to take from the rich and give to the poor… [and] the masses seized this opportunity wholeheartedly with Mazdaq and their followers aiding them in all their views." After condoning the slaughter of Mazdak and his followers, the Grand Mufti goes on to explain that "Islam was introduced and swept this false way aside." Furthermore, Bakheet proclaimed, God himself had "undertook the distribution of the means of living among His creatures by saying 'We divided up their livelihood among them' and 'God gives the livelihood to whom He wishes from among His servants,' and so on." Thus God had ordained prodigious inequality, and it was no place for mere humans to challenge God's will in this regard. Bakheet furthers his critique of the Bolsheviks, proclaiming that their "way" is:

"…one which destroys all Divine laws… it legalizes blood-shedding, allows trespass upon the property of others, treachery, lies, and rape… demolishes human society, destroyed the order of the world, leads to apostasy from religion, threatens the whole world with horrible distress and bitter troubles, and instigates the lower classes against all systems founded upon reason, morals, and virtue.

Accordingly, every true Moslem ought to avoid such people and their misguided views and false doctrines and deeds, because they are undoubtedly apostates." [7]

Indeed, it is this historical memory that al-Soltani and other Islamists drew upon in 1974 to validate their "Socialism as Mazdakism" critique of the Algerian state.

It is no wonder then that the United States and other imperialist powers often viewed the Islamists as appropriate vehicles through which they could combat pan-Arab nationalism and left-wing movements in the Middle East. At nearly every turn the Islamists presented themselves as enemies of left-wing and progressive movements and as such could be readily absorbed into the larger imperialist framework. When the Islamic Salvation Front (ISF) finally took power in Algeria in the 1990s, they hastened the privatization of the state sector and the dismantling of any remnants of the socialist project. But examples of the Islamist movement serving the interests of imperialism go far beyond Algeria. Islamists of the Maghrib undermined the legitimacy of anti-imperialist states like Libya and Syria. Egyptian leaders used the Ikhwaan to undermine the pan-Arab and nationalist left. While the Palestine Liberation Organization, including its second largest party the communist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), engaged in militant guerrilla war against Israel, Palestinian segments attached to the Egyptian Muslim brothers (those that would eventually become Hamas) refused to fight for decades. Instead they opted to try to "Islamicize" Palestinian society before engaging in the struggle and focused on developing enough cadre to position themselves at the forefront of the Palestinian national liberation movement. During the events of "Black September," the Jordanian Muslim Brothers sided with the Hashemite monarchy, originally installed by the British, in its brutal repression against and expulsion of the secular Palestine Liberation Organization. Most explicitly, the "brave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan" (as they were infamously eulogized in the Rambo film) worked in tandem with the United States to overthrow the revolutionary communist government of Afghanistan established in 1978. Thus, wherever the modern incarnation of "Mazdakism" needed to be undermined, the Islamists were there to do it.

Not all Islamic theology has been predicated upon disdain for radically egalitarian messages, however. For some Mazdak was even a religious figure that could be rehabilitated within the framework of a sort of "Islamic liberation theology," one shares some characteristics with its Catholic counterpart in Latin America. For instance, as Shireen Hunter notes the Iranian scholar Ali Shariati "believed the Iranian mind has always been attracted to ideas of social activism for the sake of justice." Shariati, who spiritualized Marxist notions of class conflict and social struggle within the lexicon of Shia Islam, appeared to have held an interest in Mazdak himself.[8] Shariati brilliantly satirized the arguments put forward by the class of religious elites, such as the Grand Mufti quoted above, who perpetually told the poor to be content with their lot in life.

"Have patience, my religious brother. Leave the world to those who are of it. Let hunger be the capital for the pardon of your sins. Forebear the hell of life for the rewards of paradise in the Hereafter. If you only knew the reward of people who tolerate oppression and poverty in this world! Keep your stomach empty of food, O brother, in order to see the light of wisdom in it. What is the remedy? Whatever befalls us. The pen of destiny has written on our foreheads from before: The prosperous are prosperous from their mother's womb and the wretched are wretched from their mother's womb. Every protest is a protest against the Will of God. Give thanks for His giving or non-giving. Let the deeds of everyone be accounted for on the Day of Reckoning. Be patient with oppression and give thanks for poverty. Do not breathe a word so that you do not lose the reward of the patient in the Hereafter. Release your body so as not to require clothes! Do not forget that the protest of a creature is protest against the Creator. The accounting of Truth and justice is the work of God, not the masses. In death, not in life. Do not pass judgment for the Judge of the judgment is God. Do not be shamed on the Day of Resurrection when you see that God, the Merciful, the Compassionate forgives the oppressor who you had not forgiven in this world. Everyone is responsible for his own deeds." [9]

Thus, for Shariati these views that condemn the poor to a life of misery were mere religious facades intended to placate the population and perpetuate economic inequality. The religious leaders who tell the masses to wait for their pie in the sky and dare not shake the foundations of social inequality while on Earth were the real scoundrels.

In stark contradistinction to the Sunni Islamists who condemned "Socialism as Mazdakism," Shariati laid forth his revolutionary and radically egalitarian theology in the quintessential work The Philosophy of History: Cain and Abel. There Shariati posited that "History represents an unbroken flow of events that, like man himself, is dominated by a dialectical contradiction, a constant warfare between two hostile and contradictory elements that began with the creation of humanity and has been waged at all places and at all times, and the sum total of which constitutes history." This "contradiction" began with the origin of human history, the struggle between Cain and Abel. Abel, as the manifestation of pastoralism, represents a sort of "primitive communism" where accumulation is impossible. Alternatively, Cain is a reflection of agricultural modes of production and represents the first schism between social classes in human society. Thus:

"In my opinion, the murder of Abel at the hands of Cain represents a great development, a sudden swerve in the course of history, the most important event to have occurred in all human life. It interprets and explains that event in a most profound fashion scientifically, sociologically, and with reference to class. The story concerns the end of primitive communism, the disappearance of man's original system of equality and brotherhood, expressed in the hunting and fishing system of productivity (equated with Abel), and its replacement by agricultural production, the creation of private ownership, the formation of the first class society, the system of discrimination and exploitation, the worship of wealth and lack of true faith, the beginning of enmity, rivalry, greed, plunder, slavery and fratricide (equated with Cain). The death of Abel and the survival of Cain are objective, historical realities, and the fact that henceforth religion, life, economy, government and the fate of men were all in the hands of Cain represents a realistic, critical and progressive analysis of what happened…

The wing represented by Abel is that of the subject and the oppressed; i.e., the people, those who throughout history have been slaughtered and enslaved by the system of Cain, the system of private ownership which has gained ascendancy over human society. The war between Cain and Abel is the permanent war of history which has been waged by every generation. The banner of Cain has always been held high by the ruling classes, and the desire to avenge the blood of Abel has been inherited by succeed­ing generations of his descendants‑the subjected people who have fought for justice, freedom and true faith in a struggle that has continued, one way or another, in every age. The weapon of Cain has been religion, and the weapon of Abel has also been religion…

This inevitable revolution of the future will be the culmina­tion of the dialectical contradiction that began with the battle of Cain and Abel and has continued to exist in all human societies, between the ruler and the ruled. The inevitable outcome of history will be the triumph of justice, equity and truth.

It is the responsibility of every individual in every age to determine his stance in the constant struggle between the two wings we have described, and not to remain a spectator. While believing in a certain form of historical determinism, we believe also in the freedom of the individual and his human responsi­bility, which lie at the very heart of the process of historical determinism. We do not see any contradiction between the two, because history advances on the basis of a universal and scientif­ically demonstrable process of determinism, but "I" as an individual human being must choose whether to move forward with history and accelerate its determined course with the force of knowledge and science, or to stand with ignorance, egoism, opportunism in the face of history, and be crushed."[10]

Whereas Bakheet condemned Mazdak for inciting revolution amongst the masses and Al-Soltani issued his invective of "Socialism as Mazdakism," Shariati invites the revolutionary and egalitarian struggle. Far too many Islamists have lent their services to the "system of Cain" contra the socialist and left-wing "system of Abel." Naturally, Mazdak was a manifestation of the latter. It is imperative for the future of humanity that we follow in the footsteps of Mazdak and Shariati's Abel, not the oppressive forces of Cain and their religious interlocutors.

Notes

[1] See Hossam El-Hamalawy, MERIP, http://www.merip.org/mer/mer242/comrades-brothers

[2] Alternatively translated as "Socialism is the Descendent of Mazdakism."

[3] See Benjamin Stora, Algeria 1830-2000: A Short History, 171-2.

[4] Stora, 171.

[5] M.N. Dhalla, History of Zoroastrianism, http://www.avesta.org/dhalla/history5.htm

[6] See Tareq Ismael and Rifa'at El-Sa'id, The Communist Movement in Egypt, 1920-1988, 164.

[7] See Ismael and El-Sa'id, 166-7.

[8] Shireen Hunter, Reformist Voices of Islam: Mediating Islam and Modernity, 54.

[9] See Ali Shariati, Religion vs. Religion.

[10] Ali Shariati, The Philosophy of History: Cain and Abel.

Capitalism as a Form of Human Sacrifice: The Comedy of Innocence and The Comedy of Guilt

By Nick Partyka

The mention of human sacrifice is likely to conjure a bevy of fantastic notions, images of exotic locales, and perhaps visions of pre-historic peoples dancing around a fire or an altar. For some, the idea may even trigger a visceral disgust. Despite killing untold numbers of persons for heresy or apostasy, the main religions of the Western world reject human sacrifice as a part of their practice of religious worship. The God of Abraham, that little episode with Isaac notwithstanding, does not require the shedding of human blood as a feature of the way He proscribes being worshiped. Many things may still be sacrificed as part of Christian religious practice, but blood, human or animal, is not one. Certainly this God, through the medium of his Earthly spokespersons, has commanded, or at least endorsed, the shedding of others' blood, e.g. that of Jews, Muslims, Pagans, and heretics. But, even here, the shedding of blood is not a mainstay of conventional worship. We rational, modern, scientifically minded people are quick to dismiss the idea of human sacrifice. Though the form has changed, we still practice human sacrifice, and it remains an important part of how society and community are reproduced. Moreover, we preserve significant features of sacrificial rituals as practiced by ancient people.

Among Marx's first words in the Manifesto are his famous, and oft quoted, line, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles".[1] But, importantly, he continues, "Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another".[2] Class society is based on hierarchy, that is, on social relations of domination and subordination. And this social relationship of domination is not an end in-itself, but rather it is the means by which wealth, resources, status, and opportunities are funneled into the hands of the dominating class. Class society has always functioned in this way, as a fundamentally predatory mechanism whereby the wealthy exploit the poor. And, as long as class-based society persists, so too will this mechanism of predation and exploitation, as well as the inequalities and divisions that come with it. This is one of Marx's most essential points; wealth and poverty go together, because poverty is the direct result of the accumulation of capital.

Ritual sacrifice is typically thought of as a relic of the ancient past, something barbaric or ignorant peoples engaged in, as something enlightened societies eschewed once they developed a truly scientific, i.e. modern, way of thinking. Unfortunately for the victims, ritual human sacrifice is a widespread practice in contemporary society. It is the very foundation of how the dominant class reproduces its wealth, power, and position. We share with our ancient peers the need to justify human sacrifice, to rationalize our actions, and thus to appease our conscience. It is in this vein that while the ancient Greeks made use of a "comedy of innocence", we modern Westerners have adopted the "comedy of guilt". The ancient Greeks needed their sacrificial victims to be willing in order to appease their guilty conscience. Perhaps the most salient example is Agamemnon's sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis. We moderns also need our victims to be responsible for their own murder, that is, they must be the authors of their own demise. Thus, for example, the string of incoherent, blatantly racist, exaggerated, and downright preposterous legal excuses given for the murder of unarmed citizens by police, especially people of color.

Just as with the ancient Greeks, myth helps sustain our preferred justifications for ritual sacrifice. Myth is essential because at the heart of ritual sacrifice lies the deadly contradiction. Namely, the question, as Walter Burkett asks it, "Can what is not a gift really be a sacrifice?" If society can't get the victim to agree to be sacrificed, then the act is much more a murder than a sacrifice, and hence an unworthy form of offering for a God(s). Complicating the matter is one major difference, namely, that unlike the ancients, we specially select, and then groom for the purpose, the eventual victims of sacrifice. In their ritual comedy, the ancient Greeks only had to trick an animal into a performing a simple gesture, our modern ritual comedy requires highly elaborate, sophisticated, and inter-connected social, economic, and political institutions. Within these institutions lurk apparitions like the welfare queen, the food-stamp surfer, the ghetto gang-banger, the lazy immigrant, et cetera. These are myths created by the dominant class to rationalize and justify the ritual sacrifice of some members of the community.

The Comedy of Innocence

For the ancient Greeks, ritual sacrifice was an integral part of the practice of their religion.[3] The sacrificial ritual consisted of the killing, butchering, and eating of the sacrificial animal. Blood sacrifice was one the most important ways in which the ancient Greeks connected to their Gods. The obvious similarity of animal blood to human blood, the sense of worshiping a God in animal form, the wearing of clean clothes, the wearing of animal masks during the ritual, all point to the way in which the animal sacrificed stood in for human sacrifice. The Gods required sacrifice in order to be propitiated, and thus provide the things Greek people needed in order to flourish. There is a certain quid pro quo about this practice. The Gods want things, and human wants things. So, humans give the Gods what they want, and thus the Gods will give humans what they want. Humans, of course, want things like good weather for growing crops, calm seas for sailing and trading, for favor in battle, et cetera. Human sacrifice, despite appearing in Greek literature, was certainly considered to be taboo by the ancient Greeks; in fact, the Furies are thought to hunt down and wreak vengeance upon those who commit blood crimes. Indeed, there remains no archeological evidence for human sacrifice among the Greeks. Thus, the sacrificial animal stands in for humans, and also for the God, in the ritual sacrifice.

The sacrificial ritual was an important way that community was re-created by the Greeks. Most members of the community had roles to play in the ritual. This ritual was an elaborate process, and it would begin with cleansing, and festooning the chosen animal. Because the Greeks made use of animals like cattle and sheep, the most important sacrificial animals, for their secondary products, they would have been older animals, chosen based on having a suitably healthy and unblemished appearance. The Gods demand a good looking sacrifice, not an ugly or deformed one. The process then moved on to a ritual procession to the sanctuary which included singing and dancing, and invocations to the particular God the sacrifice is intended for. Once the procession reached the sanctuary the comedy of innocence would then be performed. After this, the clan chief, a person of political and thus also religious power, would kill the animal, catching its blood in a basin, then spatter some over the altar, and the rest being burnt. Then the animal would be skinned and butchered, the inedible bits set aside for reconstituting the animal symbolically. These innards, the splanchna, are then burned on the altar. Lastly comes the cooking and eating of the meat.

The offerings to the Gods must be burnt, for it is in the form of smoke that the sacrifice rises to the sky, that is, to a place where the Gods can consume it. If the blood of a sacrifice was allowed to drain into the ground, this would be a sacrifice to chthonic Gods, that is, the Gods of the underworld. Moreover, the Gods require sacrifice because without it, they cease to exist. Indeed, there is no God where there is no sacrifice, no ritual observance of the God. The Gods thus depend on sacrifice to sustain their own existence. This comes out in Aristophanes' The Birds, where two disaffected Athenians defect to form a new kingdom in the sky with the birds, after which they begin an embargo on humans' sacrifices to the Gods, in effect threatening to starve the Olympians. Whether the offering is burned up or poured out, if the Gods do not receive sacrificial offerings, and in the appropriate form, they will eventually perish.

Even without potential embargoes, as described in Aristophanes' play, the mechanics of the sacrificial ritual posed problems for the Greeks. They utilize myth, and the comedy of innocence to alleviate the moral dilemmas their form of religious worship created. Consider again Walter Burkett's question, How can something that is not a gift be a sacrifice? The Greeks get the meat of the animal, all the useable pieces, and the rest is symbolically reconstituted, and then offered to the Gods. Why, one might reasonably ask, are the Gods satisfied with what they receive? Here the myth of Prometheus helps the Greeks have their cake and eat it too. In one form of the myth Prometheus tells the humans to sew up innards and entrails, the inedible bits, back inside the skin. He then helps the humans by tricking Zeus into choosing the "reconstituted" animal instead of a pile of meat. In a different version of the myth Zeus intentionally picks to get the worse end of the deal, no doubt because of his benevolence. In fact, in the first version of the myth, it is precisely because Prometheus tricked Zeus, that Zeus took fire away from humans. This is why Prometheus then has to do what he becomes best known for, namely, stealing fire from Mt. Olympus and giving it back to humans. This is how, through myth, the Greeks could answer Burkett's question in the affirmative.

The other problem that had to be confronted was that the idea of a cow, sheep, ram, or pig consenting to be sacrificed by a human in the name of a God is laughable. Humans and animals possess no reliable means of communicating, especially for such a complex notion as ritual sacrifice. Moreover, even if a machine enabled humans and animals to communicate, it is by no means clear that we could sufficiently explain to them notions like God and ritual sacrifice for them to make a suitably informed choice that could alleviate humans' guilt. Thus, the Greeks made use of the comedy of innocence to resolve their feelings of guilt at killing an animal they have raised, and have a relationship with, and stands in symbolically for humans. As we saw above, this process would occur at the beginning of the sacrificial ritual. The human participants would stand in a circle, water would be brought in a vessel, and there would be a ritual washing of hands. Water would then be offered to the animal, or perhaps sprinkled on its head, inducing the animal to make a gesture that the humans could interpret as it giving its assent to be sacrificed. In another variation of this process a select few animals might be arrayed around the altar, upon which were places some food item cows would find hard to resist. The first animal to move in for a taste of the treats displayed before it could then be interpreted as assenting to be sacrificed. Since the animal could be said to go "voluntarily" to the sacrificial altar any feelings of guilt the Greeks had would be assuaged.

One can see now how the practice of ritual sacrifice in ancient Greek religion made a comedy, a mockery, of the innocence of the sacrificial animal by conducting a sham of a ceremony through which the animal agrees to be killed. This is how the Greeks again answer Burkett's question in the affirmative. Something which is not a gift can be a sacrifice, if the sacrifice itself consents to be sacrificed. The sacrificial animal in effect makes a gift of itself. And then, since the animal stands in for both God and human, each makes itself the sacrifice, giving itself as a gift to the other. This reciprocal giving formed the basis of the on-going relationship between humans and the Gods. It also helped re-create and reinforce the sense of community through participation in the ritual sacrifice and meal. Thus, through myth and comedy the Greeks were able accomplish two important tasks in how they rationalized their practice of ritual sacrifice. First they were able to obtain important elements of reproducing their community, that is, meat products, and at the same time to appropriately honor the Gods.

The Comedy of Guilt

Ritual sacrifice is no less a part of contemporary society than it was ancient Greek society. One important difference is that while the ancient Greeks may or may not have actually engaged in human sacrifice, contemporary capitalist society definitely does.[4] And, where the ancients situated their comedy at the beginning of their sacrificial ritual, we moderns place our comedy at the end of our sacrificial ritual. Unlike the ancients we select our sacrificial animals more or less at birth, and then groom them assiduously for their role. The most important difference between us and our ancient Greek counterparts is that while they made a comedy of the innocence of their sacrificial victim, we moderns make a comedy of the guilt of our sacrificial victims. Only if presented with "choices" at the beginning, and then voluntarily making the wrong choice can we moderns revel in the joy of the punishment of the sacrificial victim. We go out of our way, quite a ways out sometimes, to establish the guilt of the sacrificial victim. For, indeed, there can be no joy in punishment unless the victim is guilty. However, the institutional structure of capitalist society is such that the mechanisms for establishing guilt are so decisively flawed that it constitutes a comedy of guilt.

Capitalist society precisely structures inequality so that those on the bottom have the least wealth, the fewest resources, the fewest opportunities, the worst schools, the worst healthcare, the unhealthiest neighborhoods, are destined for the worst jobs, for social marginalization, mass incarceration, political disenfranchisement, and for an early death. These people try to make their ends meet as best they can, and when this requires bending or breaking the law, they are punished severely. A society based, most fundamentally, on private property delights in seeing people punished for crimes against property. This makes the observers feel more secure in their property holdings, and helps reaffirm the basic notions and prejudices of a form of community based on the ownership and exchange of private property. Just like with the ancient Greeks, the comedic aspect to our modern sacrificial rituals helps assuage our collective guilt, it helps us to answer Burkett's question in the affirmative. The comedy of guilt, just like the comedy of innocence, makes the voluntary action of the would-be sacrifice the key element. Modern capitalism needs its sacrificial victims to be willing, or, as it is in our case, unwilling to abide by the eminently reasonable prescriptions of a system of law designed to uphold the bourgeoisie as a class, and thus the system of social relations that sustains their position of ideological hegemony.

One particularly dark variation on this ritual comedy of guilt can be observed in the extremes to which authorities, pundits, and everyday people on social media, will go to place blame for their own death on those unarmed, mostly people of color, killed by police. Legally speaking, we simply allow the police to claim that they felt that their lives were in danger, thus excusing the use of deadly force. In these instances one can observe the comedy of guilt being played out as predominantly white officers try again and again to explain how and why they felt so threatened that they had to kill an unarmed civilian. Darren Wilson, in one particularly ghastly instance of this ritual, went so far as to make Michael Brown out to be a demon, to imbue him with super-human qualities, and thus perceive him as posing a deadly threat to Wilson's life. In another, rather macabre, instance of the comedy of guilt there is the case of Tamir Rice. Many attempted to place the blame on this little boy because the officer perceived him as older, and as more threatening. Many even tried making his own murder Tamir's fault by blaming him for playing with a realistic-looking toy gun in public, which he should not have been doing in the first place. In this same vein one can observe the comedy of guilt being played out in cases like that of Trayvon Martin & Dontay Ivy, Eric Garner & Freddy Gray, Laquan MacDonald & Jamar Clark, Sandra Bland & so many many others. "If only the now deceased citizen hadn't done x when confronted by the police", or "if they had only said y when stopped by the police", "if only they hadn't been engaging in z low-level criminal offense at the time, or just prior", are the refrains sung during the ritual comedy of guilt.

More mundane variations on this sacrificial ritual, and the comedy that accompanies it, occur on a daily basis. Indeed, they form the very foundation of capitalist society. Without ritual sacrifice, the form of community which is most central to reproducing bourgeoisie society cannot be sustained. For the Greeks, ritual sacrifice was also about sustaining community. In their case the sustenance is more physical in nature, that is, they needed the calories. The Greeks sacrificed animals because they needed to eat, but also to honor the Gods. Today, we also need to eat, but the way we feed ourselves is much more complex than it was with the ancient Greeks. The sustenance derived from ritual sacrifice is, however, much more financial in nature today than in more distant epochs. The plain truth is that capitalism profits from the use, exploitation, and destruction of the poor, in particular black and brown bodies, and the bodies of women. This is as true today as it was in the halcyon days of the Atlantic slave trade. After slavery there was Segregation, after Segregation there was Jim Crow, after Jim Crow there arrived mass incarceration. Mass incarceration is the modern form taken by the capitalist machine which feeds on the poor, on black and brown bodies, and on the bodies of women, and profits from their poverty, captivity, marginalization, and also their deaths.

Poverty and inequality are the structural products of capitalism. They are also the main drivers of the feelings of desperation and exclusion that incline many to engage in illegal activities. Simply put, capitalism is a pyramid scheme whereby the opulence of the few is subsidized by the exploitation of the many. Thus, the kinds of material and social circumstances that studies have routinely shown to be criminogenic are the direct result of the "healthy" operation of a capitalist economy. Thus, capitalism can never be without crime, since it creates so many potential criminals, and incentivizes the rewards of successful crime so heavily. This is the main reason why the search for guilt, after certain kinds of individuals commit certain kinds of crimes is so comedic, to the point of being a mockery, a sham. Capitalist society chooses, almost from birth, those it will subject to the kinds of social and material pressures that drive people to crime in order to meet their needs, either for material resources or for social status. Then, after some of these people succumb to the pressures and incentives arrayed before them, capitalists utilize their power to organize public rituals of sacrifice, or as we call it, the criminal justice system. Capitalist elites intentionally dis-invest in public social services, e.g. education and healthcare, then when people find it impossible to live with dignity, they resort to any means necessary to provide. Capitalist elites criminalize this behavior, then apprehend, try, and if convicted, punish those who refuse to accept the social station assigned them. One grotesque example of the comedy of guilt in this connection is the widespread criminalization of homelessness.

One other prominent, and almost Kafkaesque, example of the way capitalist society makes a comedy of the guilt of its sacrificial victims is the insidious school to prison pipeline scholars have done much work to illuminate. The poorest students - usually people of color - are crowded into the worst neighborhoods, are segregated into the worst schools, and are suspended, expelled, and otherwise disciplined at an alarmingly disproportionate rate. These students are, without a sufficient education, left to fend for themselves in an economy we're constantly being told is globalizing and shifting to reward highly educated, high-skill workers. These people, again, mostly people of color, are increasingly caught up in the criminal justice system, where they are stopped and questioned, arrested, charged, tried, and convicted much more often than their white peers. Then they are given more sever treatment at sentencing, less lenience at parole, few to no resources for re-integration upon release, then thrust into the same job market for which they were originally poorly suited, only now at a further disadvantage; and also likely formally politically disenfranchised. Capitalist society condemns an entire segment of the population, the working classes, to systematic deprivation of resources and opportunities, and then punishes these people when they do whatever they have to in order to get by. Once these poor and marginalized persons have been caught-up in the criminal justice system their labor is exploited for profit by the prison-industrial complex. Dis-investing in resources for the re-integration of former convicts into their communities ensures that recidivism rates will be high enough to produce a reliable pool of labor to exploit. The privatization of prisons, which are proliferating in America, only exacerbates these incentives by cutting out the middle-man of the allegedly impartial "democratic" state.

Outside of, though certainly many times in conjunction with, the prison-industrial complex, the poor and marginalized are preyed upon and exploited by other elements of the capitalist ruling class. Sub-prime loans, student loans, and payday loans are all ways that the desperation, humiliation, and aspiration of the poor and marginalized are used against them for profit. The dominant neo-liberal narratives about education and the job market, for example, endlessly repeat how essential a college education is for success. And yet, poor students who reach for a better future by getting a college degree are finding that education is not a silver-bullet for social mobility, nor a panacea for income inequality. Large debt loads, a recession weakened labor market, structural changes in the capitalist global economy, as well as racism, patriarchy, and elite privilege all combine to sharply limit the avenues of social mobility truly open to graduates from the lower classes. Even those who major in highly remunerative disciplines, get excellent grades, and graduate, often face significant obstacles to success in their chosen field, e.g. the prospect of years of unpaid internships in order to have a resume appropriate to the job one ultimately wants, that they simply cannot afford. Payday loans, with their egregiously high interest rates and heavily punitive system of fees and fines, have been decisively shown to be nothing more than economic traps to bilk the poor of what little they may have. These companies take advantage of poor people, whose delicate economic equilibrium are easily disrupted by exogenous shocks, and who typically have insufficient savings to absorb those shocks; if they have any savings at all. Payday loans offer a quick fix to the cash-strapped poor, which quickly and reliably spiral into a mountain of crushing debt the poor borrower has little to no chance of ever paying off.

And then, after the poor and marginalized have fallen victim to the trap set by predators in our rigged economy, the elite, and of course their sycophants, blame the victims for their victimization. Recent college grads should have not gone to college if they couldn't afford to pay back the loans, debtors should have forgone whatever luxury they borrowed money in order to maintain. In this elite narrative it is always the moral failings of the individual that produce their impoverished, and desperate situation. The sub-prime loan crisis at the bottom of the housing collapse in 2007-2008 is a perfect example. Poor families were targeted by the big banks for risky loans that the banks assumed, even without a financial crisis, those families could not pay back. In the boom stage, elites and their institutions proclaim to the poor that prosperity is within reach; "easy credit can get you that home in the suburbs with the good schools". When the securitized debt instrument trend caught fire the incentives for financial institutions to create debt only multiplied. Then, after the crash, all the blame was placed at the door of those greedy poor families trying to live beyond their means, i.e. live with dignity outside the ghettos assigned to them. If only those people hadn't fallen for the insidious trap set for them by the sophisticated con-artists and loan sharks on Wall-Street, then the economy wouldn't have collapsed. This is a great example of the comedy of guilt being played out before our eyes.

Conclusion

Over the years, elites have developed an elaborate lexicon and discourse that they use to condemn the poor and justify the violence visited on them. The prejudices of the bourgeoisie against the poor are reified in formal law codes, sometimes approved by "representative" governments, and then used to justify the brutality needed to harness the labour-power of the poor to the apparatus of capitalist accumulation. These prejudices can be millennia old. Interestingly, this ancient pedigree can be seen in the very word at the heart of the controversy. "Democracy" is an oft invoked concept these days, but one about which there is not always a great deal of clarity. The word comes from the Greek words, Demos, meaning 'the people', and kratos , meaning 'power'. In the ancient world the term 'democracy' would have been used by elites as a pejorative for a kind of polis where the "common man", especially those with no property, had a voice in the government. Thus, 'democracy' translates as "the force of the people". Though, one must mention here that Demos does not refer to "the people" in the way modern readers will likely infer. The demos refers to the body of native-born adult male citizens of the polis. And, even more specifically it is used to refer to those native-born adult males wealthy enough to afford the hoplite panoply.

In the ancient world, 'demokratia' was invoked by elites in much the same way that the term 'anarchy' is used by elites today. However, the word 'anarchy' comes from the Greek 'an', a prefix implying the negation of what follows, and 'archos', meaning 'ruler'. Thus, 'an archos' translates as "without a ruler". The difference is that a ruler has some kind of legitimacy on their side, whether they are a tyrannos or a basileus. A demokratia, on the other hand, has no, and can have no, legitimacy at all; it is by definition an illegitimate regime, based on use of force by the majority of the worst people against the minority of the best people. One finds this echoed in the Romans' use of the concepts of libertas and licentia. The former refers to the legitimate power of the senatorial class to make the law, and to dominate the most important functions of the state. The latter referred to the illegitimate use of force by the lower classes against the nobility. A political regime imposed by, and for the Plebian order, in the eyes of the Patricians, could never be said to act with or from libertas, even though they were acknowledged to be free men and Roman citizens. A political regime dominated by the Plebian order could only ever be said to act from licentia, that is, from wantonness, lust, and instinct. The Plebians could never act from freedom, because they are led around by their dominant pursuits, pleasure and luxury, thus they can only act from licentia.

Suchlike forms of prejudiced language are still an integral part of the acting out of the comedy of guilt in capitalist society. This is because these vocabularies help elites ritually express their rationalizations for sacrifice, and thus absolve themselves of guilt. Only once they have been self-absolved can the moral guilt of sacrificing an unwilling victim be dissolved in the mind of the elite, who have always been the ones who organized and performed sacrifice. The comedy of guilt must be continually re-performed in order for the ruling class of capitalist society to square the circle implicit in Burkett's question; How can that which is not a gift be a sacrifice? By shifting blame for the problems and peril associated with poverty and precariousness onto the poor and exploited, the elite are able to turn unwilling victims into consenting sacrificial animals. So, when the process of capital accumulation requires the consumption, degradation, and exploitation of human life, as it inherently does, elites are ready with a bevy of convenient rationalizations that deflect blame; and, in a way that allows elites to continue to feel good about enjoying their opulence, even amidst appalling poverty. The ideology of the elite has always been flexible enough to accommodate the needs of the ritual comedy of guilt. Medieval Christian rulers found a way to rationalize the exploitation and persecution of Jews for profit; early modern Europeans found a way to rationalize the Atlantic slave trade; contemporary Americans have, in this illustrious tradition, found a way to rationalize a school to prison pipeline and prison-industrial complex that continues the super-exploitation of black and brown bodies which has fueled the capitalist development of the, now, "developed" countries.

Notes

Marx, Karl. "Manifesto of the Communist Party". The Marx & Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker.:473

Ibid, 474

For excellent resources on the religion of ancient Greece see Burkett, Walter. Greek Religion. 1977. Trans. John Raffan. Harvard University Press, 1985. Also see Meineck, Peter. "When Gods Walked the Earth: Myths of Ancient Greece". Barnes & Noble Audio. Portable Professor Series: 2005.

Scholarly opinion is divided on this question. Though there are literary references to human sacrifice, e.g. Achilles' sacrifice of Trojan captives during the funeral of Patroclus, there is as yet no archeological evidence of the practice of human sacrifice among the Greeks.

The Gathering Storm: Donald Trump and the Hollowed-Out American Heartland

By Sean Posey

During the winter of 2016, the ever-present visage of Donald J. Trump remained burned into television sets and computer screens across America. In the well-manicured lawns of the modest working-class homes of Austintown, Ohio, situated in long-struggling Mahoning County, "Team Trump. Rebuild America" signs began popping up everywhere.

Formerly a sparsely populated farming community, Austintown grew as a working-class suburb in the decades after World War II. Steel and autoworkers could commonly afford vacations and college tuition for their children; the community, in many ways, symbolized the working-class American Dream. By 1970, Austintown, along with the neighboring township of Boardman, was part of the largest unincorporated area in the state. [1] The township's population peaked in 1980 at 33,000. Today, however, it's a very different place. Job losses in the local manufacturing sector and the graying of the population led Forbes to label Austintown as the "fifth-fastest dying town" in the country in the midst of the Great Recession. The township's poverty rate had already reached nearly 14 percent in the year before the meltdown of Wall Street.[2]

The 2016 Ohio Republican primary in Mahoning County witnessed the largest shift of Democratic voters to the Republican Party in decades. "Most of them crossed over to vote for Donald Trump," remarked David Betras, Mahoning County Democratic Party Chairman.[3]

This used to be Democrat country. But like so many other places in America, the brash billionaire's message is remaking the local political landscape. Trump narrowly lost the Ohio primary to incumbent Governor John Kasich. However, he won the majority of Republican primary voters in Mahoning County and in neighboring Trumbull County, home to the city of Warren - one of the most embattled municipalities in the state. Winning his home state should have been a given for Kasich; instead, Trump pushed the twice-elected governor to the brink.

Ohio is not the only place in the heartland the Trump tornado is sweeping through. Scores of America's most insecure communities are joining the once prosperous Buckeye State in flirting with or joining the mogul's camp. Yet, for as much attention as has been paid to Trump and the often controversial movement behind him, far less has been said about the cracking core of a country that is currently looking for a savior, any savior, in such enormously troubled times.

Years before America's most famous real estate and reality television personality descended a gold escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for president, long-time journalists Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson began a cross-country journey to document America in the wake of the 911 attacks.

"On one trip," Maharidge writes, "I drove from Chicago to Johnstown, Pennsylvania. In places like this, the abandoned shells of factories, all broken windows and rust, make this country look like it was bombed in a war. In other places it's as if an economic neutron bomb hit-with trees and houses intact but lives decimated, gone with good jobs."[4]

Traditionally, this part of the heartland represented the economic engine of industrial America, filled with good-paying jobs in manufacturing. However, the great economic dislocations of the past forty-odd years have rendered much of this landscape a void, one more akin to the developing world than that of the United States. Even for the more outwardly normal communities, as Maharidge mentions, looks can be deceiving. Heroin is hitting the inner core of the country with a hammer force, destroying young lives already beset by economic insecurity and the end of upward mobility.

Perhaps even more disturbing is the declining life expectancy for a large swath of working-class whites, one of Trump's key constituencies. For the past sixteen years, death rates have risen for Caucasians between the ages of 45 and 54 and also for those between the ages of 25 to 34. [5] These are notable exceptions to the overall increase in life expectancy for all groups, regardless of race or ethnicity. While working class whites in Europe continue to experience increases in life expectancy, their counterparts in America are dying from drugs, suicide, and despair.[6]

The relationship between growing white death rates and support for Trump appears in the voting data. "Trump seems to represent a shrinking, in part dying segment of America," writes Jeff Guo in a detailed analysis of election results for the state of Iowa.[7] This holds true for other states as well. Guo goes on to demonstrate that, with the exception of Massachusetts, "the counties with high rates of white mortality were the same counties that turned out to vote for Trump." Many of these same voters are located in former industrial centers which themselves, in many ways, are also dying.

The deindustrialization of America first appeared in the Northeast and then in the former "Industrial Belt" (now dubbed the "Rust Belt" for the region's numerous decaying factories), stretching from Central New York to Illinois and Wisconsin. However, offshoring and free trade agreements have also severely damaged manufacturing centers in the "Right to Work" states of the South. Anger over free trade deals is driving much of Trump's populist economic rhetoric; a similar, though smaller effect, is being felt with Bernie Sanders's campaign on the Democratic side.

Despite regional changes, overall employment in manufacturing remained at a steady level until the end of the 1990s. Free trade agreements like NAFTA and the granting of "most favored nation" status to China (along with China's entry in the WTO in 2001) greatly undermined American manufacturing employment, which has almost continually declined over the past two decades. Aside for the traditional Rust Belt states, Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi are among the top ten states in terms of loss of total share of manufacturing jobs.[8] Trump won all but Kansas during the Republican primaries. His campaign also looks to be pursuing a "Rust Belt strategy" for the general election, which could see the wooing of disaffected former Reagan Democrats and independents who will never embrace the Clinton candidacy. So, if Trump were to falter in states with large Latino populations, he could (in theory) potentially take economically troubled swing states like Ohio (no Republican has won a general election without it) and Michigan. Trump's appeal with working class voters could put traditionally Democratic states such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in play as well in November.

Much is being made (rightfully) of the violent clashes at Trump rallies-often connected to the nativist and authoritarian overtones of the campaign itself. Yet far less attention is paid to the outlet Trump is providing by borrowing populist strains from the political left and right. With the exception of Bernie Sanders, who is facing increasing hostility from the party elite, the Democrats appear unwilling to tap into the mounting frustration over inequality, free trade deals, deindustrialization, and stagnant wages.

After their apocalyptic defeat in the 1972 presidential election, the Democratic elite began to push for the transition from a labor-oriented party to one rooted in the professional (upper) middle class. The process greatly accelerated under the auspices of the Democratic Leadership Council and Bill Clinton in the 1990s. It brought the party electoral success, but as the upper 10 percent of the country prospered-including the new elite professional class loyal to the Democrats-economic conditions deteriorated for the party's old base and for the majority of the country at large.

In Thomas Frank's latest book, Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People, the acerbic author takes a painful look at the effect of the unmooring of the Democratic Party from its roots in the working class: "Since 1992, Democrats have won the plurality of votes in every single election except one. For six of those years, they controlled Congress outright. But on matters of inequality they have done vanishingly little: They have stubbornly refused to change course when every signal said stop."[9]

It is indisputable that Republican policies during the same period also greatly increased inequality; however, the old liberal class of Franklin Roosevelt's party should have been the antidote to supply-side poison. They failed. And while the Republicans are paying the price for offering disaffected white workers the wages of identity politics (while advancing policies that destroy their livelihoods) the Democrats are likely next in line for the blowback.

"If you read mainstream coverage of Donald Trump, it's all focused on the bigotry and intolerance," Thomas Franks writes, "but there is another element, which is [he] talks about trade and he talks about it all the time."[10] Where is the Democratic Party on trade? It took the Democrats and Bill Clinton to succeed where George H.W. Bush failed and get NAFTA passed, which devastated whole regions and cost the country 700,000 jobs.[11] President Obama and Hillary Clinton both championed the Trans-Pacific Partnership-which will also cost working class jobs-over the objections of labor. (Clinton has since tried to walk back her initial support.) According to analysis by The Atlantic, "The trade pact will increase the importation of competing goods, which will drive down the cost of U.S.-made goods, putting downward pressure on wages." Even Breitbart News, a stalwart conservative publication, condemns the TPP for its likely effect on the working class, while the Obama Administration relentlessly pushes for its passage:

The question that conservatives must answer in the on-going debate over President Barack Obama's proposal to rewrite the rules for the world's economy through the Trans-Pacific Partnership is whether following General Electric's agenda to flatten the world's regulatory regimes to produce efficiencies in manufacturing and labor is in the interests of the United States? [12]

It is difficult to imagine President Obama ever uttering such words about a free trade deal.

Only Senator Sanders has rallied to the defense of labor and the sections of the country hard-hit by trade; Clinton by contrast is seemingly ready to turn her back on the traditional manufacturing heartland in the Midwest and parts of the South. In reality, the Democratic Party's record over the pasty twenty-five years on everything from trade to protections for labor is a fantastically dismal one.

The best strategy to counter Trump's rise would be to focus on the legitimate grievances of much of his constituency while countering his appeal to identity politics. Democratic elites who view the white working class as hopelessly racist are playing into Trump's hands (while also discounting the racism of the professional class). But while they dither, the thunder of a movement inspired by the storm that is Donald Trump continues to coalesce. And even if Trump disappears from the political radar tomorrow, the backlash he has inspired will live on.

From the crumbling factory walls of the Rust Belt to the shuttered main streets of the Deep South, a revolt is underway. The long forgotten "flyover country" is erupting in a paroxysm of anger and despair over the generations of decline that have battered once solid bastions of white working and lower-middle class America. With progressive voices replaced by neoliberal orthodoxy, no constructive outlets remain to channel the cacophony emerging from the heartland. With a fading Bernie Sanders and a rising Trump, the outcome might already be decided. If both parties fail to come up with economic solutions for decaying sections of the country's interior (and if no radical movements emerge from the grass roots), the potential for the worst possible right-wing backlash will remain. It is certain that America will never right itself until it deals with this crisis; if it does not, the forces of nativism and demagoguery will win the day. And from there, we will all reap the whirlwind.

Notes

[1] Charles Etlinger, "Mahoning Valley Faces 70s Crisis," Youngstown Vindicator, September 27, 1970.

[2] "Austintown 5th-Fastest Dying Town in U.S. Says Forbes," Vindicator, December 20, 2008.

[3] Peter H. Milliken, "The Elephant in the Room," Vindicator, March 20, 2016.

[4] Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, Homeland (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004), xlii.

[5] Wonkblog, Jeff Guo, "The Places That Support Trump and Cruz are Suffering. But That's Not True of Rubio," Washington Post, February 8, 2016.

[6] Olga Khazan, "Middle-Aged White Americans are Dying of Despair," The Atlantic, November 4, 2015.

[7] Wonkblog, Jeff Guo, "Death Predicts Whether People Vote for Donald Trump," Washington Post, March 4, 2016.

[8] Economic Policy Institute, "The Manufacturing Footprint and the Importance of U.S. Manufacturing Jobs," January 22, 2015.

[9] Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2016),9.

[10] CBC Radio, "It's not Bigotry but Bad Trade Deals Driving Trump Voters, Says Author Thomas Frank," CBC online site. http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-march-16-2016-1.3493397/it-s-not-bigotry-but-bad-trade-deals-driving-trump-voters-says-author-thomas-frank-1.3493433 (accessed March 22, 2016).

[11] Economic Policy Institute, "NAFTA's Impact on U.S. Workers," December 9, 2013.

[12] Rick Manning, "A Rebuttal to National Review's Claim that White Working Class Communities Deserve to Die," Bretibart News, March 17, 2016.

Interdisciplinary Feminism: Why Building Alliances is Critical

By Cherise Charleswell

In a previous article entitled Feminism is Not Just for Academics: Overcoming Disconnect and Division , I explained that the roots of feminism are not grounded in academia and theory, but through the collective action of working-class women; concluding with:

To be fair, it needs to be reiterated that academic feminism serves it purpose and is simply one avenue of feminism which one may choose to travel down. Overall, feminism is an empowering framework from which a person may understand, critique, and change the world, while defining their place in it. Central to the tenets of feminism is the matter of choice. Feminists should be free to self-identify as feminists, and should also be allowed to carve out their own path within feminism, whether it is in an academic career in women's studies or working within the realm of social justice activism and women's rights organizing. Feminism must remain inclusive and should not be dominated by any sub-group.

An oversimplification of the words of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian writer, politician, political theorist, philosopher, sociologist, linguist, and founding member of the Communist Party of Italy, in which he called for "traditional intellectuals," who are representative of today's academics, to join with the "organic intellectuals" from the working class to effect social change, best describes the path forward that feminism should choose.

In the 2014 article, If We Want Feminism to Have a Real Impact, Then Let's Stop Teaching So Much Theory , Elizabeth Sergan echoed my critiques:

For three years, I taught feminist theory to undergraduates while working on my Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. There was a time when Berkeley was the epicenter of radical feminism: In the 1970s, women's rights activists regularly stormed campus buildings , demanding birth control, abortion, self-defense classes, and childcare. But when I started teaching in 2007, nothing particularly radical was happening anymore.

Far from being sites of activism and empowerment, Berkeley's Women's Studies classes were weighed down by theory and jargon. Using departmental guidelines, I crafted a syllabus that was meant to help my students think critically about gender, but what that really meant is that we spent our days wrestling with dense and difficult texts, parsing the works of Gayatri Spivak, Monique Wittig, and Judith Butler. We devoted inordinate amounts of time to asking whether gender and sexuality were social constructs, rather than biological facts. We casually threw around words like "subalterneity," "essentialism," and "phallogocentrism" as if they really meant something.

In keeping with these sentiments, I would like to further explain why interdisciplinary feminism, organizing and coalition-building outside of the halls of academia are imperative to identifying, calling out, and combatting gender-racial-sexuality-based discrimination; and working towards more inclusive and equal societies.

In order to be Intersectional, feminism must be Interdisciplinary

The case for intersectionality, what it is, how it can be applied in practice, and so on, has been discussed in women's studies and in feminist circles for almost three decades. Therefore, it should be well understood, but unfortunately that is not always the case. There are constant examples where it is not even considered, particularly when it comes to Western/white feminists. The backlash to Viola Davis's statements about women of color and opportunities in film and television, made during her win at the 2015 Emmy Award, is a recent example of this.

However, having intersectional approaches to feminism and women's rights activism is not enough. These approaches should also be interdisciplinary--and actually do more than just theorize and debate what issues are of importance to women; and actually include women working outside of academia in these conversations. Women do not live our lives in a bubble, and many continue to primarily work outside of the home (because being a stay-at-home mother is actually a class-based privilege for many who depend on two household incomes), and it is outside of the home that they are bombarded with various types of discrimination and prejudice. Discrimination and prejudice that feminist should be aware of and finding ways to mitigate. Thus, engaging women across multiple disciplines, and realizing that the vast majority of disciplines remain male-dominated; is critical.

For example, in the fashion industry, which has been problematic for many reasons-- including racial and cultural insensitivity, appropriation, and representation-- the majority of the prestigious or well known fashion houses were begun and continue to be led by men, and truth be told white men. Just consider: Versace, Gucci, Isaac Mizhari, Ralph Lauren, Zac Posen, Roberto Cavalli, Alexander McQueen, and so on.

The same can be seen in education, where women often hit a glass ceiling. For instance, university presidents in the United States continue to be overwhelmingly white men over age 60. The American Council on Education released a 2012 report on this, and it continues to be an issue discussed by others (see here and here). However, it is not just at the university level. Globally, while women are the overwhelming majority of those who work in education at the primary and secondary level, men continue to dominate positions as school principals. (For examples of these discussions see here -UK, and here- South Africa).

Although women are continuing to make strides in government, with a number of women having served as heads of state. Unfortunately, women continue to be underrepresented in governments around the world, with only 21.9% of national parliamentarians were female as of December 1, 2014. In the article Disproportionate Representation: A Look at Women Leadership in Congress, I discussed this disproportionate representation in great detail. The issue is extremely dire in the United States, where there has never been a woman head of state, and when looking at the 2015 Congress women held only 19.4% of the 535 seats.

Still, the issue of underrepresentation, glass ceilings, and other discriminatory issues have become well known and thoroughly discussed in fields such as: STEM, film and television--both behind the scenes and in front of the camera, radio and broadcast media--where male (and conservative) voices such as Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage continue to dominate, and also the construction and automotive industries, as well as in corporate America. Consider the sad sick reality that major news outlets---whether print or television--continue to turn mainly to male sources for their take on the economy, politics, the criminal justice system, the military, as well as topics that are deemed to be women's issues (abortion, birth control, Planned parenthood, etc). When you look at the majority of those who work in these industries, particularly in positions of leadership, it truly seems like "It's a man's world". And a closer look will reveal that there is a representation of women of color in the news media, and the highly public departure of Melissa Harris-Perry from her show on MSNBC, exemplifies that problem.

Women who experience marginalization and discrimination in these different sectors do not have the time, or perhaps the desire to think about theory, nor are they readily able to reach across disciplines to uncover and discuss these common themes of oppression; but this shouldn't discredit them as feminists or experts on gender relations. They have an intimate understanding of workplace sexism, disproportionate representation in leadership, and other ways in which women are discriminated against in their fields. Who else would be better qualified to discuss these issues, and offer solutions and strategies to address them, than those who have a clear understanding of and experience dealing with the various problems?

Further, why is it often only academic "feminist" who are brought in as political pundits and commentators, regardless of the issue or field that is being discussed? Why are there not more women who are clinicians and biomedical researchers asked to discuss underrepresentation in the STEM field? I have actually attended conferences where speakers have presented their research on the topic, but (1) they have never worked in the STEM field or (2) none of their co-panelist/presenters had work in the STEM field either.

Also, why are women working in fields where men greatly dominate, like the automotive industry, called upon to discuss not only workplace discrimination, but other labor issues?

Then there are those instances where women who did not major in gender studies (or attended any university for that matter) are marginalized or silenced, by other feminists, as if their observations and experiences, are lacking legitimacy. These are the women who may not know about the various waves of (Western) feminism, but understand the need for women's health research funding, have been subjected to police profiling and/or brutality, are screenwriters who may be coping with having their scripts rejected, because they refuse to develop stereotypical characters (damsel in distress, loud & crude Black woman, sassy Latina, submissive and unopinionated Asian), and are actively joining protest movements to counteract it, or are mothers living in food-insecure communities. These women are no less feminist than those who can readily quote bell hooks or Gloria Steinham, and they should be provided spaces and platforms to speak as "experts".

Practicing an intersectional and multidisciplinary feminism requires being inclusive, and recognizing that the experts are often those who have lived experiences and insights to share.

Conclusion

Grassroots feminism across disciplines is critical, not only in post-colonial nations working to remove the yoke colonialism and deeply-embedded patriarchy, but even in the West; particularly in the US where extremist religious, sexist, and bigoted attitudes are prevailing. There are the constant attacks on rights to abortion and other reproductive rights, attacks on voting rights, environmental justice issues--such as lead poisoning of the water supply in Flint Michigan and the gas leak in Porter Ranch California, located in Los Angeles country-- that directly impact women and families, as well as the threat of environmental degradation brought along by the XL keystone pipeline or fracking; which is actually supported by Hillary Clinton, the DNC's front runner, who we---women, feminist---are told that we should vote for, simply because she is a woman. To truly understand the problem with that line of thinking, I would suggest reading my article Disproportionate Representation, andHillary's Woman Problem, as well as Why Hillary Clinton Doesn't Deserve the Black Vote: From the crime bill to welfare reform, policies Bill Clinton enacted-and Hillary Clinton supported-decimated black America.

There are even questions about what constitutes legitimate rape, as well as as seething epidemic of campus rape. Additionally, there continues to be an issue of the exploitation and devaluing of the lives of women of color, which is seen with the case of Daniel Holtzclaw and his predatory rape and molestation of only Black women, the unlawful arrest and untimely death of Sandra Bland, the need for campaigns such as #WhatAboutOurDaughters and #SayHerName to highlight state sanctioned violence against Black women and other women of color, and the continued media silence on an epidemic in indigenous communities--of rape and disappearance of Native American women.

Ensuring that these issues and others that impact the lives, health, and wellbeing of women and girl are raised and addressed will require not only an intersectional approach to feminism, but one that is interdisciplinary. One that calls on the testimonies and expertise of women from across various disciplines, who can coalesce around their shared and varied experiences with sexism, misogyny, misogynoir, colorism, racism, homophobia, ableism, ageism.

Socialism, Popular Education, and the Fight Against Racism in the Soviet Union

By Derek R. Ford

While in the U.S. the veil of anti-communism is beginning to lift and the word "socialism" isn't as dirty as it once was, the Left still has a lot of recuperating to do. The virulent campaign against communism in the U.S. is deep and multi-faceted, and it has taken on many different forms. And it seems like we constantly forfeit one of our greatest assets in the struggle to recuperate communism: our own history. Instead of critically appreciating the history of the actually-existing workers struggle and the social formations it has produced, we instead seek to separate ourselves from that legacy, to claim that they weren't and aren't really communists. This is an easy way of dealing with the propaganda that is delivered through our media and schools on a regular basis, for we can tell people, "Well, what your teachers were talking about wasn't really socialism." This is, however, just another form of American exceptionalism, left American exceptionalism.

I'm not going to make an argument about the economic and social systems of various social formations throughout history (if you are interested in that argument, read Albert Szymanski's book, Is the Red Flag Flying?), but I am going to demonstrate that the history of socialist struggle provides us with inspiring and effective examples of how we can fight against oppression. In particular, because we are enjoying our month-long relief from another white history year, I want to give two examples of the way that the Soviet Union mobilized popular education to confront racism.

Harry Haywood was recruited into the Communist Party USA in the early 1920s, and was soon sent to the Soviet Union, first to study at KUTVA (the University of the Toilers in the East named for Stalin) and later at the Lenin School. During his time in the Soviet Union Haywood participated in the Sixth Congress of the Communist International, witnessed the debates between Trotsky and Stalin, and played a pivotal role in theorizing the Black Belt Thesis, the concept that Black people in the U.S. constituted an oppressed nation.

Haywood, a Black man originally from South Omaha, Nebraska, spent several years in the Soviet Union. In his autobiography, Black Bolshevik, he recounts a few instances of racial encounters and racist actions. For the racial encounters, Haywood writes that he and his fellow delegation of Black communists from the U.S. would attract attention for their skin color in the Moscow streets. "If we paused to greet a friend," he writes, "we found ourselves instantly surrounded by curious crowds… It was a friendly curiosity which we took in stride" (169).

Haywood notes that during his stay he only encountered one instance of racist hostility. While on a streetcar one evening to visit a friend, a drunken passenger stepped aboard and said "something 'about Black devils in our country'" (170):

A group of outraged Russian passengers thereupon seized him and ordered the motorman to stop the car. It was a citizen's arrest, the first I had ever witnessed. "How dare you, you scum, insult people who are the guests of our country!"

What then occurred was an impromptu, on-the-spot meeting, where they debated what to do with the man. I was to see many of this kind of "meeting" during my stay in Russia.

Some passengers wanted to excuse the passenger's behavior, blaming it on his drinking. Ultimately, however, it was decided that they would take him to the militia station to press charges. The motorman proceeded to drive everyone to the station, where he spent the night in jail.

In 1930, Haywood's last year in the Soviet Union, an incident took place in Stalingrad that, he writes, "forcibly brought home to me the contrast between the socialist world which I was leaving and the racist world which I was about to re-enter" (339).

Unlike the capitalist world, which was in the throes of the Great Depression, the Soviet Union was suffering from a labor shortage. As a result, U.S. workers were flocking to the Soviet Union for jobs. Several hundred white technicians were brought to work in a tractor factory in Stalingrad, and they had their own restaurants and shops in the area surrounding the factory, forming something of a small colony. One day, Robert Robertson, a Jamaican native and U.S. citizen, joined the colony. He was brought over from Detroit to train workers in tool-grinding. His first morning there he entered the American dining room for breakfast and was accosted, beaten up, and thrown out of the restaurant by two white U.S. workers.

This attempt to transplant American racism to Soviet soil was met with outrage. It was made a political issue of high order by the Soviet trade unions and Party organizations. Factory meetings were called throughout the Soviet Union which denounced this crime and expressed the outrage of Soviet workers… The slogan of the day became, "American technique yes! American prejudice no!" It was given the widest publicity; the culprits were arrested immediately, not for assault and battery but for white chauvinism, a social crime and therefore far more serious.

A mass public trial, with delegations sent from factories all over the country, was held. The white technicians were sentenced to two years imprisonment which was commuted to deportation to the United States. (340)

Robertson remained in the Soviet Union, where he eventually gained citizenship.

These two examples document the seriousness with which the Soviet Union-its people and its state-took racism. When racist incidents occurred, they were not explained away or swept under the rug. Instead, they were put in the spotlight, becoming the subject of dialogue, deliberation, and justice. The state apparatus was wielded to snuff out racism and national chauvinism, and the masses were mobilized-the masses self-mobilized-to address racism head-on. They give educators a perfect example of what popular education is. Imagine what they would have done to a George Zimmerman!

References

Harry Haywood. (1978). Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American communist. Chicago: Liberator Press.

Albert Szymanski. (1979). Is the Red Flag Flying? The political economy of the Soviet Union today. London: Zed Books.

Derek R. Ford is a teacher, organizer, and writer living in Philadelphia. He earned his PhD in cultural foundations of education at Syracuse University in 2015. He is co-author (with Curry Malott) of Marx, Capital, and Education: Towards a critical pedagogy of becoming (Peter Lang, 2015), and his latest book, The Secret Struggle of Study: For a commonness against is forthcoming through Lexington Books later this year. He is Co-Chair of the Education Department at The Hampton Institute and an organizer with the ANSWER Coalition.

From Chiapas to Rojava: The Rise of a New Revolutionary Paradigm

By CIC

" Power to the people" can only be put into practice when the power
exercised by social elites is dissolved into the people.

- Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism

The largely unknown until recently Kurdish city of Kobane managed to attract the attention of the world with its fierce resistance [i] against the invasion of the Islamic State and became an international symbol, compared to the defence of Madrid and Stalingrad. The bravery and heroism of the People's Defence Units and the Women's Defence Units (YPG and YPJ) were praised by a large spectrum of groups and individuals - anarchists, leftists, liberals and even right-wingers expressed sympathy and admiration for the men and women of Kobane in their historical battle against what was often seen as IS "fascism." The mainstream media was forced to break the silence over the Kurdish autonomy and soon numerous articles and news stories were broadcasted and published, often depicting the "toughness" and determination of the Kurdish fighters with a certain dose of exotisation, of course. However, this attention was very often selective and partial - the very essence of the political project in Rojava (Western Kurdistan) was left aside and the media preferred to present the resistance in Kobane as some weird exception to the supposed barbarism of the Middle East. Without surprise, the red star, shining on the victorious flags of the YPG/J was not a pleasing image in the eyes of the Western powers and their media. The autonomous cantons of Rojava represent a home-grown solution to the conflicts in the Middle East, encompassing grassroots democracy, ethnic, social and gender rights and all this in rejection both of IS terror but also of liberal democracy and capitalist economy . Although the West preferred to stay silent on this issue, this ideological foundation is the key for understanding the spirit that wrote the Kobane epopee and fascinated the world, as the Kurdish activist and academic, Dilar Dirik, claimed recently[ii].

As the battles for every street and corner of the city were intensifying, Kobane managed to captivate the imagination of the left and specifically of the libertarian left as a symbol of resistance and struggle and soon it was placed on the pantheon of some of the most emblematic battles for humanity, such as the defence of Madrid against the fascists in the 1930s. It was not by accident that the Turkish Marxist-Leninist group MLKP, which joined the YPG/J in/on the battlefield, raised the flag of the Spanish republic over the ruins of the city in the day of its liberation and called for the formation of International Brigades[iii], following the example of the Spanish revolution. It was not the battle for Kobane itself, but the libertarian essence of the cantons of Rojava, the implementation of grassroots direct democracy, the participation of women and different ethnic groups into the autonomous government that gave ground to the comparisons with the Spanish revolution. Another association was mentioned briefly in several articles - the revolution in Rojava and its autonomous government were compared to the Zapatistas and their autonomy in the south of Mexico. The importance of this comparison might be crucial in order to understand the paradigm of the revolutionary struggle in Kurdistan and what it means for those who believe another world is possible.

The Zapatista movement is probably one of the most symbolic and influential elements of the revolutionary imaginary in the world after the fall of the state-socialist regimes in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the morning of January 1, 1994, an unknown guerrilla force, composed of indigenous Mayas, took over the main towns of the southern-most Mexican state - Chiapas. The military operation was carried out with strategic brilliance and combined with the innovative back then use of the internet to spread the message of the revolutionaries, it echoed around the globe to inspire international solidarity and the emergence of the Alter-Globalisation movement. The Zapatistas rebelled against neoliberal capitalism and the social and cultural genocide of the indigenous population in Mexico. Ya Basta, Enough is enough, was their war cry that emerged from the night of "500 years of oppression", as the First Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle stated. The Zapatistas rose up in arms when global capital was celebrating the "end of history" and the idea of social revolution seemed to be a romantic anachronism that belonged to the past. The Zapatista Army for National Liberation was forced out of the cities in twelve days of intense battles with the federal army but it turned out that the deep horizontal organisation in the indigenous communities could not be eradicated by any military intervention or terror. The masked spokesperson of the rebel army, Subcomandante Marcos, challenged the notion of historical vanguard as opposed to revolution from below, which does not aim to take power but to abolish it and this concept became central to the most mass anti-capitalist movements since - from Seattle and Genoa to the Syntagma and Puerta del Sol occupations and even the Occupy Movement.

Where are the similarities with the Rojavan revolution?

From Marxism-Leninism to Autonomy - a shared historical trajectory

The roots of the democratic autonomy in Rojava can be understood only through the history of the Workers' Party of Kurdistan (PKK), the organisation, which has been central to the Kurdish liberation movement since its creation in 1978. The PKK was established as a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla organisation in Northern Kurdistan, part of the Turkish state, combining the ideologies of national and social liberation. It grew to a substantial guerrilla force under the leadership of Abdullah Ocalan and managed to challenge the second biggest army in NATO in a conflict that claimed the lives of more than forty thousand people. The Turkish state displaced hundreds of thousands and reportedly used torture, assassination and rape against the civilian population but did not manage to break the backbone of the Kurdish resistance. Since its inception, PKK has expanded its influence both in Turkey and in the other parts of Kurdistan. The leading political force in the Rojavan revolution - the Democratic Union Party (PYD) is affiliated with it through the Kurdistan Communities' Union, KCK, the umbrella organisation that encompasses various revolutionary and political groups sharing the ideas of the PKK. The ideology, which unites the different civil and revolutionary groups in the KCK is called democratic confederalism and is based on the ideas of the US anarchist Murray Bookchin, who argued in favour of a non-hierarchal society based on social-ecology, libertarian municipalism, and direct democracy.

Although the Zapatistas are famous for their autonomous government and rejection of the notion of historical vanguard, the roots of the organisation were also related to Marxism-Leninism and just like in the case of the PKK, the idea of self-governance and revolution from below were a product of a long historical evolution. The EZLN was founded in 1983 by a group of urban guerrillas, predominantly Marxist-Leninists, who decided to start a revolutionary cell among the indigenous population in Chiapas, organise a guerrilla force and take power through guerrilla warfare. Soon they realised that their ideological dogma was not applicable to the indigenous realities and started learning from the communal traditions of governance of the indigenous people. Thus, Zapatismo was born as a fusion between Marxism and the experience and knowledge of the native population that has been resisting both against the Spanish and later the Mexican state.

This shared ideological trajectory demonstrates a historical turn in the understanding of revolutionary process. The Zapatista uprising and establishment of the autonomy in Chiapas marked a break with traditional guerrilla strategies, inspired predominantly by the Cuban revolution, this was made more than clear in the letter EZLN spokesman, Subcomandante Marcos, wrote to the Basque liberation organisation ETA:

"I shit on all revolutionary vanguards on this planet. [iv]"

It was not the vanguard to lead the people now; it was the people themselves to build the revolution from below and sustain it as such. This is the logic PKK has been shifting towards in the last decade under the influence of Murray Bookchin and this shift demonstrates an evolution of the organisation from movement for the people to a movement of the people.

Cantons and Caracoles - freedom here and now

Probably the most important similarity between the revolution in Rojava and the one in Chiapas is the social and political reorganisation that is taking place in both places that is based on the libertarian ideology of the two organisations.

The Zapatista autonomy in its current form originates from the failure of the peace negotiations with the Mexican government after the uprising in 1994. During the peace negotiations the rebels demanded the government to adhere to the accords of San Andres, which give the indigenous people the right to autonomy, self-determination, education, justice and political organisation, based on their tradition as well as communal control over the land and the resources of the areas that belong to them. These accords were never implemented by the government and in 2001 president Fox backed an edited version that was voted for in congress but did not meet the demands of the Zapatistas and the other groups in resistance. This event was labelled as "treason" and it provoked the EZLN to declare two years later the creation of the five rebel zones, centred in five Caracoles (or snails in English) that serve as administrative centres. The name Caracoles came to show the revolutionary concept of the Zapatistas - we are doing it ourselves, we learn in the process and we advance, slowly, but we advance. The Caracoles[v] include three levels of autonomous government - community, municipality and Council of the Good Government. The first two are based on grassroots assemblies whereas the Councils of the Good Government are elected but with the intention to get as many people as possible to participate in the Government over the years through a principle of rotation. The autonomy has its own educational system, healthcare and justice, as well as cooperatives, producing coffee, cattle, handcrafts etc.

We learn as we make things, we did not know about autonomy and that we were going to build something like it. But we learn and improve things and learn from the struggle - told me my Zapatista guardian Armando, when I visited the autonomous territory at the end of 2013. Freedom could only be practiced here and now and revolution was a process of constantly challenging the status-quo and building alternatives to it.

The Rojavan cantons indeed resemble the autonomy in Chiapas. They were proclaimed by the dominant PYD in 2013 and function through the established popular assemblies and democratic councils. Women participate equally in the decision-making and are represented in all elected positions, which are always shared by a man and a woman. All ethnic groups are represented in the government and its institutions. Healthcare and education are also guaranteed by the system of democratic confederalism and recently the first Rojavan university, the Masepotamia Academy, opened it's doors with plans to challenge the hierarchical structure of education, and to provide a different approach to learning.

Just as it is in the case with the Zapatistas, the Revolution in Rojava envisions itself as a solution to the problems in the whole country, not as an expression of separatist tendencies. This genuine democratic system, as claimed by the delegation of academics from Europe and North America [vi], that visited Rojava recently, points to a different future of the Middle East, based on direct participation, women's emancipation and ethnic peace.

Women's revolution

Gender has always been central to the Zapatista revolution. The situation of women before the spread of the organization and the adoption of women's liberation as central to the struggle, was marked by exploitation, marginalization, forced marriages, physical violence and discrimination. This is why Marcos claims that the first uprising was not the one in 1994 but the adoption of the Womens' Revolutionary Law in 1993, setting the framework for gender equality and justice and guaranteeing the rights of the women in the rebel territory to personal autonomy, emancipation and dignity. Today women participate in all levels of government and have their own cooperatives and economic structures to guarantee their economic independence. Women were and still form a large part of the ranks of the Zapatista guerilla force and take high positions in its commandment. The takeover of San Cristobal de las Casas, the most important city the Zapatista troops captured during the uprising in 1994, was also commanded by women, headed by comandanta Ramona, who was also the first Zapatista to be sent to Mexico city to represent the movement.

It is not difficult to compare the mass involvement of indigenous women in Chiapas in the Zapatista ranks to the participation of women in the defense of Kobane and in the YPJ - the Women's Protection Units, both depicted in a sensationalist manner[vii] by the Western media in the last months. However, their bravery and determination in the war against ISIS is a product of a long tradition of women participation in the armed struggle for social liberation in Kurdistan. Women have played a central role in the PKK and this is undoubtedly connected with the importance of gender in the Kurdish struggle. The Rojava revolution has a strong emphasis on women's liberation as indispensable for the true liberation of society. The theoretical framework that puts the dismantling of patriarchy at the heart of the struggle is called "jineology", a concept developed by Abdullah Ocalan. The application of this concept has resulted in an unseen empowerment of women not only in the context of the Middle East but also in the context of western liberal feminism. The women's assemblies, cooperative structures and women's militias are the heart of the revolution, which is considered incomplete if it does not destroy the patriarchal structure of society, which is one of the fundamentals of capitalism. Janet Biehl, an independent writer and artist, wrote after her recent visit to Rojava that women in the Kurdish revolution have the ideological role of the proletariat in the XXth century revolutions.

The ecology of freedom

The Ecology of Freedom is probably the most important among Bookchin's works and his concept of social ecology has been adopted by the revolutionaries in Rojava. His idea that "the very notion of the domination of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by human" links patriarchy, environmental destruction and capitalism and points at their abolition as the only way to a just society. Such a holistic approach has been advocated and implemented by the Zapatistas as well. Sustainability has also been an important point of emphasis, especially after the creation of the caracoles in 2003. The autonomous government has been trying to recuperate ancestral knowledge, related to the sustainable use of the land and combine it with other agro-ecological practices. This logic is not only a matter of improving the living conditions in the communities and avoiding the use of agrochemicals, it is a rejection of the whole notion that large-scale industrial agriculture is superior to the 'primitive' way the indigenous people work the land and as such it is a powerful defiance of the logic of neoliberalism.

The road to Autonomy - the new revolutionary paradigm

The similarities between the system of democratic confederalism that is being developed in Western Kurdistan and the Autonomy in Chiapas go far beyond the few points I have stressed in this article. From slogans such as Ya Basta, adapted in Kurdish as êdî bes e to the grassroots democracy, communal economic structures and participation of women, the similar path the Kurdish movement and the Zapatistas have taken demonstrates a decisive break with the vanguardist notion of Marxism-Leninism and a new approach to revolution, which comes from below and aims at the creation of a free and non-hierarchal society.

Although both movements have received some bitter criticism[viii] from sectarian elements on the left, the very fact that the only major and successful experiments in radical social change originate from non-western, marginalised and colonised groups, comes as a slap in the face to the white and privileged dogmatic "revolutionaries" of the global north who have hardly been successful on challenging oppression in their own countries but tend to believe it is their judgement what is and what is not a real revolution.

The revolutions in Rojava and Chiapas are a powerful example for the world, demonstrating the enormous capacity of grassroots organisation and the importance of communal links as opposed to capitalist social atomisation. Last but not least, Chiapas and Rojava should make many on the left, including some anarchists, trash their colonial mindset and ideological dogmatism.

A world without hierarchy, domination, capitalism and environmental destruction or as the Zapatistas say, the world where many worlds fit, has often been depicted as "utopian" and "unrealistic" by the mainstream media, education and political structures. However, this world is not some future mirage that comes from the books - it is happening here and now and the examples of Zapatistas and Kurds are a powerful weapon to reignite our capacity to imagine a real radical change in society as well as a model we can learn from in our struggles. The red stars that shine over Chiapas and Rojava shed light on the way to liberation and if we need to summarize in one word what brings these two struggles together, it would definitely be Autonomy.​​

Originally published by the Cooperativa Integral Catalana.

Notes

[i] Dicle, Amed (2015) Kobane Victory, How it Unfolded

http://kurdishquestion.com/index.php/insight-research/analysis/kobane-victory-how-it-unfolded.html

[ii] Dirik, Dilar (2015) Whi Kobane Did Not Fall
http://kurdishquestion.com/index.php/kurdistan/west-kurdistan/why-kobani-did-not-fall.html

[iii] International Brigades Form in Rojava (2014)
http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2015/01/international-brigades-form-in-rojava-no-pasaran-video-3100250.html

[iv] Marcos (2003) I Shit on All Revolutionary Vanguards on This Planethttp://roarmag.org/2011/02/i-shit-on-all-the-revolutionary-vanguards-of-this-planet/

[v] Oikonomakis, Leonidas (2013) Zapatistas Celebrate 10 Years of Autonomy With Escuelitahttp://roarmag.org/2013/08/escuelita-zapatista-10-year-autonomy/

[vi] Joint Statement of the Academic Delagation to Rojava
https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/joint-statement-of-the-academic-delegation-to-rojava/

[vii] Dirik, Dilar (2014) Western Fascination With "Badass" Kurdish Women
http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/10/western-fascination-with-badas-2014102112410527736.html

[viii]

Anarchist Federation Statement on Rojava (2014)
http://www.afed.org.uk/blog/international/435-anarchist-federation-statement-on-rojava-december-2014.html

Debt, Underemployment, and Capitalism: The Rise of Twenty-First-Century Serfdom

By Cherise Charleswell and Colin Jenkins

Systemic contradictions of capitalism have only intensified in the neoliberal era. Structural unemployment, a phenomenon directly related to capitalist modes of production, has continued unabated, creating a massive and ever-growing "reserve army of labor" that has been disenfranchised on an unprecedented scale.

Working classes, en masse, have been corralled into legalized systems of education debt with false promises of "middle-class" lifestyles, only to be tossed into a job market that can no longer keep up with the system's inherent deficits and inability to provide a living wage to the masses. Massive inequality and unprecedented wealth accumulation and concentration have paralleled uncontrollable costs of living and widespread housing insecurity for the working-class majority.

The twentieth-century liberal experiment has failed, bringing down with it the delusional hopes of constructing a manageable and benevolent form of capitalism. The ripple effects of capitalism's structural failures, intensified by modern forms of government-facilitated debt slavery, job markets that can no longer keep pace with wage demands, and interrelated housing insecurity and displacement, have pushed us into a twenty-first-century serfdom. We are left wondering how long this balancing act can last.

Capitalism and Underemployment

Unemployment is not a natural occurrence within society. It is a purely capitalist problem that arises from artificial economic arrangements, most notably the advent of wage labor, which forces people to serve as commodities. This is an important point that is often missed, especially in regards to modern assessments of the labor market and popular reports that focus on the fiction of an unemployment rate. In the United States, since the 1950s, the official unemployment rate has fluctuated between 4.4 percent and 10 percent.1 Full employment in a capitalist system is neither possible (without government intervention) nor desirable to capitalists or those who benefit from the system. Rather, substantial and perpetual unemployment is both a byproduct of the system's relational mechanisms and a necessity that serves a systemic purpose in regards to profitability and wage reduction (or stagnation). The never-ending search for profit by those who have access to capital, and the means to reproduce it, places those who must sell their labor power to survive in a perpetual state of insecurity. Other than the fundamental extraction of profit through the labor process (surplus value), the most basic method in regenerating profit comes from replacing variable capital (living labor) with fixed capital (machines), a relationship that Marx referred to as the "organic composition of capital."2 While the process of creating surplus labor value consists of paying wages that equal a fraction of the value created, the process of increasing productive capacities through the implementation of machinery leaves living labor in an even more precarious situation. This process leads to the creation of what Marx referred to as the "Industrial Reserve Army" (the unemployed)-a phenomenon that becomes both a byproduct and a leveraging tool within the capitalist system.

Attempts to circumvent capitalism's tendency to create and maintain high amounts of unemployment and underemployment have been carried out by industrialized capitalist societies utilizing Keynesian economic programs. By calling on a high degree of governmental involvement in the economic system vis-à-vis taxation and supplementation, John Maynard Keynes believed that structural problems like "involuntary unemployment" could be remedied. 3 When coupled with the post-World War II economic boom in the United States, Keynesian techniques appeared to make positive steps towards remedying structural unemployment. Between 1948 and 1970, the official unemployment rate in the United States was relatively low by historic measures, typically fluctuating between 3 and 5 percent, and falling below 3 percent on a few occasions during the 1950s.4 The marginal tax rate during this time-also a byproduct of Keynesian thought-was a major factor in the economic success experienced by much of the U.S. population, including the white working class in its ascent to "middle class" status, and also helped create historically low unemployment rates. From 1948 to 1963, the top marginal tax rate remained at 91 percent, with the exception of 1952 and 1953 when it was raised to 92 percent.5 In 1964, this top rate was lowered to 77 percent, and from 1965 into the 1970s, it was set at 70 percent.6

The Keynesian experiment came to an end in the 1980s, when neoliberalism took form as a class project. Coupled with the phenomenon of globalization, which fused formerly industrialized labor markets (unionized with living wages) in the global core with formerly colonized labor markets in the global periphery, underemployment has become an epidemic with disastrous effects. Marx warned of such developments when writing, "The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. … It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, and establish connections everywhere."7 The global consequence of this constant pursuit of profit is not only the establishment of new markets of consumers and laborers, but also the proliferation of imperialism. For the former industrialized working classes, such as in the United States, it means an intensification of capitalist mechanisms that create unemployment and underemployment. Because of this, the replacement of manufacturing jobs by low-wage service sector jobs has become a distinguishing characteristic of American capitalism since the 1980s. Government involvement in this system has become a necessity, not for the purpose of obstructing it (as many right-wing critics claim), but for the purpose of supplementing it and propping it up via infusions of money and for maintaining the minimum of social welfare programs. The former can be seen in the increased importance of the Federal Reserve and monetarism (including the practice of quantitative easing), while the latter can be seen in the working class's increased reliance on things like food stamps-a direct result of the disappearance of living wages.

The type of government involvement that became common in the 1980s was nothing like its Keynesian predecessor. Rather than seeking public programs and fiscal policies that created jobs, neoliberal intervention seeks to supplement profit accumulation for those at the top of the socio-economic ladder. This is carried out with mantras like "getting government off our backs," lowering taxes for so-called "job creators," and even blatantly allowing for massive profits to be justified under a promise of such money "trickling down" to the masses. As neoliberalism represents an intensification of capitalism, not only through the dismantling of Keynesian-style interventions but also through a 180-degree reversal in using government to supplement the capitalists rather than the workers, the neoliberal era has brought on a uniquely precarious existence for the working class in the United States. Thomas Palley explains:

Before 1980, economic policy was designed to achieve full employment, and the economy was characterized by a system in which wages grew with productivity. This configuration created a virtuous circle of growth. Rising wages meant robust aggregate demand, which contributed to full employment. Full employment in turn provided an incentive to invest, which raised productivity, thereby supporting higher wages.

After 1980, with the advent of the neoliberal growth model, the commitment to full employment was abandoned as inflationary, with the result that the link between productivity growth and wages was severed. In place of wage growth as the engine of demand growth, the new model substituted borrowing and asset price inflation. Adherents of the neoliberal orthodoxy made controlling inflation their primary policy concern, and set about attacking unions, the minimum wage, and other worker protections.8

The culmination of the disastrous neoliberal measures that began in the 1980s was realized with what has been labeled the Great Recession of 2008, whose effects are only starting to be fully understood nearly seven years later. Some alarming statistics should be emphasized: Between 2008 and 2014, the U.S. labor market lost a total of 1.4 million full-time jobs; more than 20 percent of workers who were laid off as a result of the Great Recession still have not found a new job; when considering those workers who have given up looking for employment, the unemployment rate is closer to 12 percent; of all "prime-age workers" (ages 25 to 54) in the United States, 23.3 percent were "not employed" as of November of 2014.9

A January 2014 study conducted by Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute, entitled, "Is There Really a Shortage of Skilled Workers?" countered a popular argument presented by the mainstream analysis, which claimed there was a shortage of qualified workers to fill so-called "skilled" positions. 10Fred Goldstein, writing on Shierholz' research, said,

The study found that no matter what the skill level of workers, their unemployment rate went up by 150 percent to 190 percent from 2007 to 2013. The unemployment rate for workers with less than high school education was 10.3 percent in 2007 and 15.9 percent in 2013. For high school graduates, the unemployment rate was 5.4 percent in 2007 and 9.6 percent in 2013. For workers with some college, the unemployment figures jumped dramatically from 4.0 percent in 2007 to 7.3 percent in 2013; for college graduates, it went up from 2.4 percent to 4.5 percent and for those with advanced degrees, it went from 1.7 percent to 3.2 percent, that is, almost double.11

This highlights perhaps the most alarming effect of the recession, which has been a mass replacement of living-wage jobs with low-wage jobs in the service sector. In sectors that experienced severe job losses during the Great Recession, workers were earning 23 percent less in 2014. In manufacturing and construction, the average salary fell from $61,637 in 2008 to $41,171 in 2014. The jobs that have been added during the "recovery" (2009-2014) have been largely low wage, confirmed by the fact that $93 billion in "lower wage income" has been created during this time period.12

Toward Twenty-First-Century Serfdom: Debt, Student Loans, and Rising Costs of Living

The net result of prolonged and skyrocketing unemployment and underemployment and the increasing stagnation of wages is the mounting epidemic of debt. Debt, in the form of medical bills, housing costs, and ballooning mortgage payments, has contributed to people having to file for bankruptcy as well as finding themselves homeless.13 This new-age form of debt has effectively divided the United States into an income-bound set of castes, the "Haves" and "Have Nots." The awakening to this unequal balance of wealth and debt set the stage for the Occupy Movement uprisings, which spread globally and advocated on behalf of the 99 percent, the workers who collectively hold much less economic wealth than the richest 1 percent. In real terms, according to the IRS, those who belong to the lower 99 percent of U.S. income distribution are those with a household adjusted gross income of less than $343,927. This valuation not only illustrates how wealthy the 1 percent must be, but it also speaks to the fact that there is still much socio-economic stratification within the 99 percent, including differences in the likelihood of financial hardship and debt.14 While the outsourcing of jobs has greatly contributed to unemployment, those who are lucky enough to still have a job are finding themselves working long hours or having to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. Despite the noted rise in hours worked, which should logically translate into higher annual incomes, Americans are finding themselves falling into debt at unprecedented rates.15

All of this has helped to give rise to what can only be referred to as a twenty-first-century serfdom. An example of the indebted economy is the fact that mergers, monopolies, and concentrations of influence have created the present reality of workers finding themselves employed by, and simultaneously indebted to, the same corporate entities. The "pay" that is earned is immediately shuffled back to these corporations in the form of student loan payments, mortgage payments, cable payments, health insurance premiums, and so on. The feasibility of paying off these employer/debt-holding entities in a timely matter, or at all, is difficult or nearly impossible, especially when considering that they are the very ones who set and keep wages low and transfer the profit from workers' increased productivity to the pockets of CEOs, investors, shareholders, bankers, and so on.

Debt is a Byproduct of Capitalism

Within this current era of unchecked capitalism, where citizens must take to the streets in protest to persuade the government to intervene and create policies that will support a living wage or protect workers' rights, debt and inequality are the most recognizable and predictable byproducts. The process of financialization, which began in the 1970s, depends on widespread loosening of banking regulations, environmental laws, and labor laws. Inequality is inherent in capitalism due to its concentrating of wealth in the hands of the few, in the form of monopolies and by the exploitation and maximizing of profits at the expense of, or through the labor of, the masses-the twenty-first-century serfs. Neoliberal capitalism has allowed for unprecedented concentrations of not only wealth, but power, creating a landscape where the wealthy are modern representations of feudal lords. As in feudal societies, it is the pauper (serf) who pays the biggest percentage of taxes (or dues for land usage in the case of serfs), and this is even true under Democrat-led administrations in the United States. Just consider the fact that corporate taxes decreased from 25 percent during the Bush Administration to 12 percent under Obama, while workers' tax rates remained the same or increased.16

The Student-Loan Debt Crisis

The biggest driver for debt in the past twenty-five years has been the rising cost of tuition and student-loan debt. This debt crisis may eventually represent the proverbial "final straw that breaks the camel's back," as there do not seem to be any plans for immediate relief. Instead, politicians spend election seasons making false promises and arguments in favor of student debt relief, but do not offer any concrete measures to bring this into fruition. Further, those outside of socialist and progressive movements remain ignorant of, or will not be honest about, the fact that capitalism is structured to produce exploitation, concentrated wealth and profitability, and debt. Capitalism's constant pursuit of profit has led to the transformation of higher education into a no-holds-barred profit-seeking venture. This process can be summed up as follows: Colleges and universities are using decades of cutbacks in state and federal funding for higher education to justify massive increases in tuition, the proliferation of adjunct professor positions, and budget cuts to educational and other services upon which students depend. A 2008 study published by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities made headlines when it shared that on average states are spending $1,805, or 20 percent, less per student than before the recession; some states, such as Alabama, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina, which are for the most part states where there is a Republican stronghold, have slashed their higher education funding by more than 35 percent since 2008, and they are topped by Arizona with a decrease of 47 percent.17 Back in 1988, in the not so long ago past, public colleges and universities received 3.2 times as much revenue from state and local governments as they did from students.18 This simply means that the student did not carry the bulk of the burden to finance higher education, which was instead paid for by public dollars, collectively sharing these costs.

As wages go down, the cost of tuition continues to climb, leaving behind an educated populace that is saddled with debt. Tuition jumped 28 percent between the 2008-2009 and the 2013-2014 school years, while real median income fell by approximately 8 percent over this period. To understand the bigger picture, consider that since 1973 average inflation-adjusted college tuition cost has more than tripled-an increase of 270 percent-but median household income has barely changed and is up by only 5 percent;19 this represents the core of the crisis. What are graduates to do? How are they to survive and afford their most basic needs while working low-paying jobs and still being forced to pay back a student loan that they cannot even write off in bankruptcy, like the corporations and banks do with their debts?

There is no greater evidence of the burden of student-loan debt than the accounting of loans that have fallen into delinquency. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a 2015 report that shared that delinquent student loans (those whose payments are 90 days or more past due) increased to 11.5 percent of the $1.9 trillion (yes trillion!) in education loans.

Essentially, the burden of financing the exorbitant costs of education has been passed on to the students, and the high cost with dwindling returns (where are the higher-paying jobs?) has begun to discourage would-be college-goers, a process that is equally by design. Higher education was once looked on as a means to develop a cultured, well-rounded, and informed citizenry. However, this is no longer the case, since cultivation of thinkers would only lead to questioning of the prevailing system of inequality. The Great Society programs that gained steam in the 1960s set out to make sure that students who could not otherwise attend college could do so, without the burden of having to work excessive hours to help cover the cost of education. In fact, at one time students could actually use their summer vacations to "work their way through college," something that is now impossible. In the current landscape, students are forced to take out mortgage-sized loans from financial lenders who are profit-driven corporations and who inevitably put their bottom lines before the needs and best interests of students.

This student-loan crisis has ensured that the last two generations are worse off than were their parents, ending the historical progression of improvements in the quality of life with each subsequent generation. Over a lifetime of employment and saving, someone with $53,000 in education debt can expect nearly $208,000 less wealth than a similarly educated person without debt.20 Crippled by this debt and entering a job market with lower and stagnant wages, graduates, who were sold the falsehood of the American Dream, are unable to afford the lifestyles that their parents and grandparents once enjoyed. Dispensable income is becoming a scarcity, while more money is being spent to cover the rising costs of food, health care, transportation, clothing, and housing. With this reality the feudal lords, the wealthy 1 percent, are gaining exponential profits through this multi-dimensional exploitation of the working class.

Conclusion

The proliferation of the capitalist system through the neoliberal era has resulted in a modern form of feudal society where there is great inequality and wealth is concentrated among the few. Policy changes, and perhaps a restructuring or change in the current systems of governance, are needed, but this will largely depend on the actions of the working-class majority: the growing number of impoverished, overworked, unemployed, or underemployed serfs whose labor and bodies are being exploited and who have been left wholly disenfranchised.

Despite the need for mass action, it has yet to materialize. Despite dire circumstances, there remains a great reluctance to challenge the status quo of inequality. This stems from the fact that far too many are still hopelessly reliant on the illusion of the American Dream, believe in the falsehood of rugged individualism, or merely fear the prospects of instability and the unknown. The motivation for revolutionary change exists throughout, yet many fundamental questions remain unanswered. Some may not have an answer until steps are taken. For instance, if the current system of government-which has become no more than a "dollarocracy"21 that does not represent or even consider the views or needs of the working-class majority-is overthrown, what would happen next? Fears of the unknown persist and are perpetuated by corporate-sponsored media, which thrives on the sensationalism of doomsday reporting, ignoring the fact that fluctuations in the stock market and other macroeconomic indicators are far removed from the daily lives of many who actually work for a living.

Despite this widespread reluctance and fear that has been peddled to the majority, action is needed. Addressing debt is an immediate concern. Action does not need to be instantly revolutionary, but may be accomplished through gradual steps and reformist means. Some steps include:

• Continue building movements around issues of debt, unemployment, and inequality-movements that are multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-generational. An intersectional approach to such movements will effectively attack the divisions that have been artificially created to ensure that the status quo continues. Examples of this division are most visible throughout the impoverished states of the U.S. South, which despite having vast income inequality and being susceptible to corporate exploitation, also happen to possess high rates of historical, intra-working-class, racial animosity. Hate, fear, and ignorance cause many to vote and act against their own interest.

• Get behind efforts that are working to remove moneyed influence over the U.S. political system; some of that influence comes through the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling that has the audacity to state that corporations are people. Be ready to accept that the entire system itself may need to be dismantled.

• Demand that the federal government gives us a New Deal that can address the problems of unemployment and the crumbling infrastructure. Bridges and highways need to be repaired, and high-speed rail needs to be laid out.

• Join and support unions, which are under assault, because they are the only stakeholder who truly bargains and fights for the working-class majority. Expanding the number of active unions will only benefit the workforce-those who are union and non-union alike.

For short-term and immediate relief of student-loan debt, which has become a critical issue:

• Shift direct-lending administration to the federal government and regulate and reduce interest rates on loans. Work toward de-profitizing higher education, making higher education a civic value.

• Reduce the military budget and replenish the diminished funding to schools, colleges, and universities that once helped to keep tuition costs down or made possible free tuition to public schools.

• Allow for student-loan debt to be included in bankruptcy claims, allowing for full or partial forgiveness of the debt to those who are without the means to pay.

The brief period of Keynesian consensus that ruled from the 1940s to the 1970s is over. The neoliberal imperative that has ruled since is currently subjecting an ever-larger share of the population to brutal austerity measures. Skyrocketing levels of debt and structural unemployment are the most visible manifestations of how far neoliberalism has penetrated into the structures of American society. However, in the years ahead, it will prove increasingly difficult to disguise the full nature of the crisis, and new opportunities to advance programs of systemic change can and will present themselves. If the left does not find a way to rise to the occasion, then it is unclear which track the country will take as it makes its way toward collapse.

This essay was published in the Winter 2016 edition of New Politics.

Notes

1. U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics.

2. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 3: Part II, Chapter 8.

3. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment Interest and Money (London: Macmillan and Co., 1936), 15.

4. U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics.

5. U.S. Federal Individual Income Tax Rates History (Nominal Dollars).

6. U.S. Federal Individual Income Tax Rates History (Nominal Dollars).

7. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848). Chapter 1.

8. Thomas I. Palley, "America's Exhausted Paradigm."

9. Colin Jenkins, " The Great Recession, Six Years Later: Uneven Recovery, Flawed Indicators, and a Struggling Working Class ," The Hampton Institute, November 5, 2014.

10. Heidi Shierholz, "Is There Really a Shortage of Skilled Workers?" January 23, 2014.

11. Fred Goldstein, "Marxism and Long-term Unemployment."

12. Jenkins, "The Great Recession."

13. O. Khazan, " Why Americans Are Drowning in Medical Debt ," The Atlantic, Oct. 10, 2014.

14. R. Wile, " Student Debt Has Turned Millennials into Carless, Homeless, Basement Dwellers Who Can't Borrow ," Fusion, Feb 2, 2015.

15. D.S. Logan, " Fiscal Fact: Summary of the Latest Federal Individual Tax Data." Tax Foundation, 2011: No.285.

16. D. Gilson, " Overworked America: 12 Charts That Will Make Your Blood Boil ," Mother Jones, July/Aug 2011.

17. J. Geler, "Capitalism's Long Crisis,"International Socialist Review (No. 8, 2010).

18. E. Blake, " State funding for higher education in US slashed by 20 percent since 2008," World Socialist Web Site.

19. M.D. Weiss, " Student Loan Debt: America's Next Big Crisis ," USA Today, Aug 23, 2015.

20. R. Hiltonsmith, "At What Cost? How Student Debt Reduces Lifetime Wealth," Demos.

21. J.Nichols, Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex Is Destroying America (Nation Books, 2014).

Religion and the Russian Revolution

By Sonia Calista

In his 1905 article "Socialism and Religion", Lenin explained the Social Democratic Labour Party's attitude towards religion in general and the Russian Orthodox Church in particular. Noting the proletarianization and resulting secularization of the urban workforce in pre-revolutionary Russia, he wrote:

The modern class-conscious worker, reared by large-scale factory industry and enlightened by urban life, contemptuously casts aside religious prejudices, leaves heaven to the priests and bourgeois bigots, and tries to win a better life for himself here on earth. The proletariat of today takes the side of socialism, which enlists science in the battle against the fog of religion, and frees the workers from their belief in life after death by welding them together to fight in the present for a better life on earth.[1]

Lenin lays out a dichotomous proposition for the proletariat and the party: the choice to struggle either for heaven or earth; one must accept materialism and "scientific socialism" or religion. Many within the church's hierarchy and among the parish clergy similarly framed these two competing worldviews as incompatible. Naturally, these churchmen rejected materialism and socialism, favoring secular and religious traditionalism and the promotion of charity while typically stopping short of endorsing structural reforms to address urban exploitation or solve the problems of land reform that had plagued Russia for decades.

Yet, in the years leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917, urban clergy, orientated towards the workers' struggle sought to bridge the divide between these two choices. For these urban clergy of pre-revolutionary Russia, the world and its material conditions could be transformed by a social justice oriented Gospel. After the revolution, these Russian clergymen found themselves in an uneasy alliance with the new Soviet authorities, and by 1922 these "renovationist" clergy had organized themselves into the Живая Церковь, or "Living Church"- a church organization that would be controlled in large part by Soviet authorities in a war to undermine and destroy the traditionalist and usually politically reactionary Russian Orthodox Church from which it had sprung. These Living Church clergy became participants in a war against tradition and, unwittingly, against all varieties of religious belief and practice. The Living Church was eventually rejected as a pseudo-Church by most ordinary believers and the Soviet assault on religion, broadly speaking, intensified. Though the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church was deeply wedded to an oppressive, autocratic state, and was thus understandably challenged by Soviet rule, religious belief in general need not have borne the brunt of militant atheism. This is especially true in light of recent research that explores the role of urban clergy intent on reform and social uplift. Not only did the policy of militant atheism undermine basic religious freedoms, it was a poorly conceived political strategy, turning large swaths of the peasantry into enemies, and ultimately doing little to advance the goals of the revolution.

Context

To understand the position of the Russian Orthodox Church in the early 20th century one must look back to the secular and religious reforms of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the eighteenth century Russia underwent a dramatic transformation that resulted in the formation of the Imperial Russian state. On the foundations laid by Peter the Great, eighteenth century Russia moved from the traditional and culturally guarded world of old Muscovy to a more secular and westernized modern state. Naturally, the Russian Orthodox Church, the centerpiece of Russian spiritual and cultural life, was affected by these changes.

The abolition of the Orthodox Patriarchate in 1721 and its replacement by a more tightly controlled Synod based on existing Swedish and Prussian models worked to restrict the Church's autonomy. Peter took another blow at the Church's independence by placing it on a state budget and confiscating its lands, thereby limiting its economic autonomy and power. As a result, ecclesiastical authority became more subservient to the will of the state. It is within this context of increased rigidity that the Church functioned, with the results "trickling down" to the clergy.

As a result of Peter's reforms the clergy, once solely responsible for service and obedience to the Church, were forced to become servants of the state on economic, legal, and ethical levels. The Petrine state demanded service from all groups within society according to their particular station. Since Peter did not view the clergy as a social group, but another service order, clergy came to lose rights previously held in old Muscovy. The influence of the state upon the Church as well as the clergy's own desire to protect and provide for their own, transformed the white clergy (i.e non-monastic parish clergy), "into a clerical estate-caste"[2]. A combination of state service obligations, tax status, juridical status, mixed with old cultural trappings and ways of thinking eighteenth century clergy existed, according to historian Gregory Freeze, in a closed sub-culture separate from mainstream society. The clergy found themselves on one side faced with Petrine reforms coming down from above while on the other faced the will of their parishioners. Freeze alludes to the idea that this caste-like but non-culturally cohesive group of clergy was rendered basically ineffectual to "check the whims of landlords, soften the crunch of serfdom, or even hold the stormy peasants in pious submission". [3] This weakness, Freeze suggests, allowed for revolutionary sentiment to foment in the century to follow.

In 1722, a year after the abolition of the Patriarchate, Peter forced clergy to reveal any subversive information that had been confessed by a penitent as well as to swear allegiance to the tsar and state's interests. The relationship between priest and bishop also underwent a change in the eighteenth century. The main catalyst for this change was the bishop's subordination to the Synod that restricted the autonomy the bishop formerly enjoyed. The Synod took steps to standardize the relationship of priest and bishop as they tried to create uniformity and regularity in their bishop's practices. "The Church", Freeze writes, "internalized the state's model of bureaucratization". As a result of this strengthening of administrative ability, the bishop was able to exert more control upon the actions of priests at the parish level. Part of this control existed in the bishop's demand that more sermons be given by priests in order to combat heresy and to increase the knowledge of the "simple minded" parishioners. In an effort to raise the status of the clergy by creating an educated clerical class, Petrine reforms called for the building of seminaries and compulsory religious education for potential clerics. From the point of view of the Church hierarchy the seminary would come to serve three major purposes. First, it could train priests to perform services better. The seminary would also serve the function of teaching priests Orthodox theology and by doing so aid in the fight against Old Belief and superstition. The seminary would also serve the Church by creating more educated candidates to take high-ranking positions within the Church.

Further isolation of the "clerical estate" occurred as a result of a weakening of the bond between clergy and parish community during the eighteenth century. In pre-Petrine Russia the parish stood as an autonomous cultural and commercial center within the community with parishioners exerting great control over the life of the parish. The reorganization of parishes according to lines drawn up by bishops, Freeze suggests, resulted in a loss of a sense of community. Contributing to the breakdown between clergy and parish community was Peter's demand that priests reveal anti-state confessions and read state laws in the church. This "spying for the police imposed on the 'servants of God'"[4] is what Lenin criticizes in his 1905 tract "Socialism and Religion". After the Petrine reforms, even if the Church had "internalized" models of state bureaucratization, the alliance between state and Church was indeed strong, and remained so for the next two centuries.

Eve of the Revolution

At the time of the Great Reforms of the 1860s the caste-like nature of the clerical estate was challenged. In 1867, the clerical estate was abolished, and the church schools were opened to people of all classes. This opened the door for believers to pursue a genuine religious calling. Additionally the monastics and bishops, who had often harbored contemptuous attitudes towards a parish clergy they saw as ignorant, backwards, and drunken, began to have their authority challenged by the initiatives of the less powerful parish or "white" clergy who had deeper ties to the people. Between 1860 and 1890 parish priests began to preach more and more on moral issues, becoming true "pastors", not mere "servers" administering the sacraments. Extra-liturgical preaching, or beseda, were created, which consisted of open discussions of faith - initiated in large part as a response to a similar contemporaneous Catholic initiative. In time, secular philanthropists, clergy, and the laity began working together for the alleviation of poverty and social uplift.[5] Russian Orthodox thinkers began to argue more forcefully that the Church had a greater responsibility to society, and that it should place greater emphasis on leading believers towards building a new society based on the gospel and its principles- principles like justice, mercy, and charity. After the Revolution of 1905 many of St. Petersburg's parish clergy, to the chagrin of their more moderate brother priests, began to intensify this push for reform and the social application of gospel principles. In this context, Lenin drew a line in the sand, making something of an appeal to the more reform-minded and sometimes radical clergy:

However abject, however ignorant Russian Orthodox clergymen may have been, even they have now been awakened by the thunder of the downfall of the old, medieval order in Russia. Even they are joining in the demand for freedom, are protesting against bureaucratic practices and officialism, against the spying for the police imposed on the "servants of God". We socialists must lend this movement our support, carrying the demands of honest and sincere members of the clergy to their conclusion, making them stick to their words about freedom, demanding that they should resolutely break all ties between religion and the police. Either you are sincere, in which case you must stand for the complete separation of Church and State and of School and Church, for religion to be declared wholly and absolutely a private affair. Or you do not accept these consistent demands for freedom, in which case you evidently are still held captive by the traditions of the inquisition, in which case you evidently still cling to your cozy government jobs and government-derived incomes, in which case you evidently do not believe in the spiritual power of your weapon and continue to take bribes from the state. And in that case the class-conscious workers of all Russia declare merciless war on you. [6]

These "awakened" clergy, as Lenin described them, leaned towards socialism as early as 1905 when a group of thirty-two parish priests joined with lay Christian socialists to propose reforms that included the separation of church and state, democratic church administration, a move to the Gregorian calendar (instead of the Julian), and the use of the vernacular (instead of archaic Church Slavonic) for church services. [7] Hailing primarily from St. Petersburg, these highly educated priests typically studied at the St. Petersburg Ecclesiastical Academy and had regular contact with other students and intellectuals pursuing secular careers. Defying the stereotype of the backwards, drunken, uneducated rural priest with no religious vocation, these priests were well equipped to grapple with Russia's most pressing problems. Moving beyond simply performing liturgical rites, they saw their mission as deeply connected to the world around them. In this vein, these priests created the Society for Moral-Religious Enlightenment, in which they developed an Earth-centered Social Gospel message for late Imperial Russia- a message not dissimilar to the one promulgated by their contemporary in America, Walter Rauschenbusch, whose 1907 Christianity and the Social Crisis conjured up the voices of the Old Testament prophets to critique American capitalism.

The most prominent of these renovationist clergy was Alexander Vvedenskii, who attributed the decline of the Church to reactionary clergy and the Church's rejection of science. His goal was to renew the church in order to correct the causes of clerical conservatism. On becoming a priest in 1914 Vvedenskii immediately began implementing liturgical innovations that, he hoped, would enliven parish life through greater inclusion of the laity in church services. Similarly, Boiarskii, a priest and close friend of Vvedenskii, took an interest in the plight of factory workers and became more radical- eventually accepting a kind of fusion of Christian morality and the ideals of the burgeoning revolutionary movements. The renovationists made some advances after the abdication of the Tsar when Vladimir Lvov became the chief procurator and purged a number of conservative bishops from the Church, laying the groundwork for a long awaited church council that would save the Church from the stagnation and backwardness brought on by the Petrine reforms of the 18th century. In March 1917, the reforming and and radical clergy of St. Petersburg created the Union of Democratic Clergy and Laity- an organization that was socialist in character, opposed the restoration of the monarchy, and advocated for the separation of Church and state. [8]

From the fall of the provisional government in February 1917 the renovationists remained in a kind of limbo. Long awaited Church reforms had not come quickly enough and the future of the Church, so intimately linked to the state, was uncertain. It was not until after the October Revolution that the renovationists, in the form of the Living Church, would find their place in the new Soviet society. The Bolsheviks were initially reluctant to take the renovationists on as partners, but in 1921 the Soviet government sought to use the renovationists as a wedge against what they considered to be a reactionary official Orthodox Church.

The 1921 famine created a pretext for an attack on the Church. The Bolsheviks confiscated Church valuables and liturgical items containing precious metals and jewels were seized from the churches and monasteries and sold in order to mitigate the effects of the famine. This confiscation of wealth weakened the Church and, by 1922, helped prepare a path for Soviet sponsored renovationist control of the Church. The Bolsheviks' goal was not to present an alternative vision for religion in Russia, but to divide and destroy the Church in its entirety. The renovationists then established their own supreme Church Administration to replace the former Church administration; however, lay believers saw the renovationists as traitors who had displaced legitimate Church authority, including the authority of the much loved Church leader Patriarch Tikhon, who had been accused of sabotage and put under house arrest in Donskoy Monastery during the famine.[9] At the first council of the Living Church in 1922 the goal was was to remove reactionary leaders, close monasteries, and to allow bishops to marry- goals of a number of progressive Church reformers before the revolution. Living Church hierarchs enlisted the help of the state to institute these measures because much of the Church opposed them. At this point splintering occurred among the renovationists themselves, some of whom thought the reforms were too radical. In 1923 Patriach Tikhon was released from house arrest and was deposed by a council of the Living Church; however, the majority of the laity flocked back to Tikhon, rejecting the decrees of the Living Church. By then the Living Church's short stint as leader of Russian ecclesiastic life was over. Caught between the hatred of much of the laity and the suspicions of the new Soviet authorities, they were left with no support.

Following the downfall of the Living Church, the new Soviet government ramped up its persecution of religious activity. The 1929 Religious Laws forbid all manner of Church societies and Bible study, and relegated churches to the performance of rituals. By 1930 all monasteries were shut down. This led to an underground network of believers who met secretly to pray and, in some cases, continue living as monks and nuns "in the world". In the years that followed it became professional and social suicide to be seen entering a place of worship.

These attacks would, in part, cost the revolution the support of large segments of the peasantry during Stalin's drive for forced collectivization who, rather than viewing the Soviet authorities as liberators, would see them in nearly apocalyptic terms- as godless militants, intent on destroying their cherished traditional culture. The peasants of Ukraine, the Volga, the Northern Caucasus, and other areas resisted Stalin's collectivization policies, uniting as a class- the village against the state- to defend their traditions and livelihoods. These peasants understood the state's incursions not as economic policy, but as a "culture war" leveled by an anti-Christian conquering power. After the treatment of the Church in the first decade after the revolution, the traditionally religious peasantry had reasons to be suspicious. And while the Bolsheviks' stated aim was an end to the role of the exploitative Kulaks, they were also intent on eradicating the culture and local economies of the "pre-modern" peasantry. [10] Rumors of a return to serfdom swept the countryside, along with tales of slaughtered peasants, and fear of the beginnings of the reign of the antichrist. The peasants, rightly, equated communism with atheism, and responded accordingly. Collectivization efforts were met with forms of agricultural luddism- the destruction of crops, livestock, and machines, culminating in the March Fever of 1930, a mass peasant uprising. By the late 1930s the collective farm had won out and resistance took new, subtler forms- refusal to work, sabotage, and laziness. [11]

One wonders if a different approach to the "problem" of religion in Russia- and more specifically to the reactionary character of the Russian Orthodox Church- could have led to a different kind of Soviet state. While many Church leaders were staunch monarchists [12], and Russian Orthodoxy generally served as a bulwark against socialist conceptions of the state and morality, other progressive and even revolutionary minded clergy and laity shared common goals with socialist revolutionaries by 1917. Perhaps a more organic revolutionary process could have unfolded if religious sentiment was understood as an ally on the road to socialism. Instead, traditional structures of religious life were upended and religious life was dogmatically understood as antithetical to Marxism. Yet, focusing on the material origins of religious feeling, Lenin wrote that: "The combating of religion … must be linked up with the concrete practice of the class movement, which aims at eliminating the social roots of religion."[13]

He continues:

No educational book can eradicate religion from the minds of masses who are crushed by capitalist hard labour, and who are at the mercy of the blind destructive forces of capitalism, until those masses themselves learn to fight this root of religion, fight the rule of capital in all its forms, in a united, organised, planned and conscious way.[14]

If material conditions and exploitation are the rotten roots that give rise to religion, then these roots must first be addressed. The continued existence of religious feeling in "really existing" socialist states presents an interesting problem for the materialist who expects the demise of religion once the conditions that "produce" religion are "remedied". In a similar vein, Marx wrote that, "religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions."[15] If religion is the "sigh of the oppressed", then the Marxist should not look to critique religion on ideological grounds, but to address the roots of oppression that give rise to religious feeling. But what if after the revolution people continue to "sigh"?

In their firm faith in dialectical materialism, the Bolsheviks believed that the establishment of the socialist state would, in time, give way to the "withering away" of religion. Perhaps it was this firm conviction (one might say dogmatism) that led them to opportunistically divide and conquer not just the reactionary elements in the Orthodox Church, but to attack all expression of religious faith and feeling, as if the two were one and the same. But perhaps no amount of material progress will quell the urge to answer life's ultimate questions: Why am I here? What is the purpose of life? Do my loved ones live on after they die? Why am I inspired by beauty and why do I feel, at times, like I was made for another world? Perhaps the fact that this spiritual yearning pre-dates class society is a sign that it is, to use a phrase generally maligned on the left, elemental to "human nature" and that it cannot be uprooted en masse, nor should it be if we are to respect human dignity.

The Soviet state, both under Lenin and Stalin, did not wipe out religious sentiment - it simply drove its expression underground and, when advantageous, channeled it for the state's purposes, both in the form of a tightly controlled patriarchate under Stalin and subsequent Party leaders, and when the state needed to comfort and inspire the nation. Eleven days after Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin spoke to the people of Russia. After addressing the crowd with the customary greeting of "comrades", his language shifted. For the first time he employed language that would have been familiar and comforting to many, but seemed, in this instance, out of place. He addressed the people not just as "comrades", but as "brothers and sisters". This form of intimate address was the language of the Church- the language of the opening greetings of a prepared sermon.

Notes

[1] Vladimir Lenin, "Socialism and Religion," Marxists Internet Archive, December 3, 1905, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1905/dec/03.htm.

[2] Gregory Freeze, The Russian Levites (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1977), 218.

[3] Ibid., 222.

[4] Lenin, "Socialism and Religion".

[5] Jennifer Hedda, His Kingdom Come (Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008), 62.

[6] Lenin, "Socialism and Religion".

[7] Edward E. Roslof, Red Priests: Renovation, Russian Orthodoxy, and Revolution, 1905-1946 (Indiana: Indiana University Press: 2002), 7.

[8] Roslof, Red Priests.

[9] Ibid.

[10] See Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press), 1996.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Indeed, a number of leading bishops fled Russia during the Civil War and established the monarchist Russian Orthodox Church in Exile which broke off communication and liturgical concelebration, on principle, with the Russian Church throughout the Soviet period.

[13] Vladimir Lenin, "The Attitude of the Workers' Party to Religion," Marxists Internet Archive, May, 1909, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1909/may/13.htm.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Karl Marx, "A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," Marxists Internet Archive, January 1844, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm .

The Value of Utopia: The American Tradition of Radical Utopianism

By Nick Partyka

For many centuries persons, peoples, and civilizations, have dreamed about what an ideal society (utopia) would look like, and worried about ways in which society could be much worse (dystopia). Utopian dreams and dystopian worries are powerful tools for thinking about what sorts of changes a society should pursue or avoid, and what underlying dynamics these proposed changes expose. This series examines the tradition of utopian and dystopian thought in western culture, beginning with the ancient Greeks, but continuing on into the modern period. Our focus in this series will be on the important social, political, and economic ideas and issues raised in different utopian stories. When we look into utopian stories, and their historical times, what we'll see reflected in the stories of utopia are the social, political, and economic concerns of the authors, their societies, and or their particular social class.

The meaning of the word 'utopia' comes to us from ancient Greece. In our modern world the word takes its current form because of Thomas More's 1516 book of the same name. Indeed, it is this book from which most of the modern western European utopian tradition takes its origin; or at least, this work inaugurates its most common trope. Where we have in our lexicon one 'utopia', the Greeks had two. The difference, even confusion, between them marks an essential cleavage. For the Greeks, there was both Eu- topia, and Ou-topia. Both are derived in part from the Greek word topos, which means "place", and the suffix 'ia' meaning land. Translated into English, 'Ou-topia' means something like, " No-place land", whereas 'Eu-topia' translates as "good-place land". More succinctly, the difference is between the idea of the best place, and an impossible place. It is the difference between a place which does not exist, because it has not yet been realized, and a place which cannot, and could not, ever exist.

Our modern word is pronounced as the Greeks pronounced 'Eutopia'. However, the meanings of these Greek words were confused by modern writers, who ended up with the spelling 'utopia', from the old English 'Utopie' as opposed to "Eutopia", as meaning "good place". This basic confusion about utopias, between "good place" and "no place", inserts an important ambiguity directly in the center of thinking about utopias. This ambiguity forces one to wonder of utopian writers, Are their visions supposed to be dreams of possible futures meant to incite us to action, or are they impossible dreams meant as reminders that the world is not easily re-shaped by human effort? Is a utopia supposed to be a good place or a no-place? Is the author supporting or condemning the practices of the fictional societies they describe?

One qualification must be made right away. A utopia is not a paradise. There is a colloquial usage of 'utopia' and 'utopian' that seem to suggest that it is a paradise. And compared to the societies in which actual humans lives, many of the fictional utopias would have indeed been seen as paradises, relatively speaking. However, we must draw a technical distinction between a paradise or a golden-age, and a utopia. In a paradise or golden-age no work and no effort are required by humans to obtain the things they want and need. Perhaps the most famous golden-age many are familiar with would be the Biblical Garden of Eden. Another well-known paradise is described in the mid-14th century poem The Land of Cockaigne, where fully cooked turkey legs literally fly through the air and into one's mouth. In this place the only effort one need put in is to chew.

The whole idea of a Cockaigne, or a paradise, is that everything one would ever need is abundantly supplied without any effort. The natural world is just so constructed - either at random or by design - that there springs forth automatically an abundance of everything necessary for everyone, all the time, always. In this kind of society, or world, there never arises anything resembling what we - or most societies in the history of our world - call a political problem. Everyone has enough of everything. So there is no cause for argument. There is no inequality, because everyone has everything everyone else has. Or at least, everyone has access to just as much of what others have whenever they would like it. In this kind of world what causes could there be for strife, or for civil war? A paradise, or a golden-age, is thus totally non-political, and not terribly interesting.

What this means is that utopias are enough like our own condition, our own world, that we can take inspiration from them. They are enough like the social conditions we know that we can learn lessons for and about ourselves and our societies by examining at them. This is exactly what makes utopias so interesting. As we will see, utopian literature has a long, very long, history with human beings. The enduring appeal of and, interest in utopias testifies to their relevance. This is the reason that we too are looking at utopias. We are all concerned with, or at least we are all effected by, the way our society is organized. By looking at how other ideal societies might be organized we can explore the merits, and demerits of various kinds of social institutions, and of the various ways of structuring those institutions. We are concerned to change our own society, and utopias allow us to think about the direction of that change.

We have a colloquial usage of the word 'utopia' and 'utopian' in contemporary society that works to prohibit much creative thought, and dismisses utopian thought as feckless, and as such, worthless. Part of the aims of this series is to demonstrate the value of this "worthless" endeavor. Dreaming, far from idle, far from impotent, is essential. Without wonder, without questions, the human imagination will atrophy. The value of utopia is that thinking about utopias allows us to both critique present societies, and also to articulate a vision of how we'd like our societies to be different. The deeper value of utopian thinking is that it sets us free, free to speculate and more importantly to give expression to our striving, to our desire for a better world. Everything human beings can be must first be dreamed by human beings. This is the value of utopia and dystopia. Thus, the first pre-requisite for this series is the rejection of this colloquial notion of utopia and the utopian. Dismissed from the start, it will not be a surprise if we fail to learn anything from our utopian traditions.

Introduction

Brief, but spectacular. That is how I think of the Occupy movement. An article I read recently lamented that the anniversaries of this movement seem to come and go now with but a murmur, a faint echo of the voice that all too briefly seemed capable of shaking American society out of complacency, of opening up new possibilities. There have by now been enough autopsies of this movement, and its failures, that there is no need for another. One thing that stands out is of course the fact that the movement never coalesced around a set of demands, never formulated a coherent political programme. Whether or not the Occupy movement did a good job distilling its critique, and its vision, neither were sufficiently theoretically developed or promulgated. Occupy in many senses seem to try to be a leaderless and theory-less movement. Of course, the main reason for the end of the Occupy movement was the physical clearance of the encampments by the thugs of the ruling class, that is, the police.

Much more fruitfully, when we look to the practice of Occupy, and the many encampments around the country, and indeed around the world, we can see that there is certainly a clear political, and moral ethos animating the activity and structure of the movement. What emerged from the Occupy encampments was an ethos of self-organization, free association, of de-centralized participatory democracy, and non-market modes of distribution. In Occupy encampments around the country people organized themselves to provide many kinds of basic, and some more advanced, services and community infrastructure, e.g. free meals, free educational opportunities, free healthcare, and much more. The diversity of services offered by different Occupy encampments was truly an amazing display of cooperation, solidarity, and self-organization. And indeed, this is what was really threatening about the occupy movement, it offered a robust vision of a more participatory, more solidaristic form of community, and worked diligently to create this, first within the bounds of its camps, and then the communities around the camps. Building up a vision of a new society, and a physical representation of that vision, became a major challenge to the ruling class because of the speed with which this movement grew and gathered strength.

Occupy was not the first time "utopian" ideas of more democratic, more participatory, more egalitarian, forms of community captured the imagination of Americans, and threatened the ruling class by becoming a movement. This has happened several times in our history, but, as one might expect, these lie outside the mainstream narrative of U.S. history. Thankfully, in the wake of Howard Zinn, much work has been done to recover and disseminate the knowledge and memory of the existence of radicals and revolutionaries, not to mention their important role, in American history. Utopian ideas, and vision of better societies have captured the imagination of Americans, and become large movements more than once. These largely forgotten episodes include the Bellamyite movement in the 1890s, and the Fourierist movement of the 1840s. These latter two represent the more secular and political end of the spectrum of utopian experiments in American history.

Looking Backwards, on Bellamyism

While it is almost totally forgotten now, at the end of the 19th century, the only American works of fiction to sell more copies than Edward Bellamy's Looking Backwards were Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Ben-Hur. His book, and the ideas and vision contained in it, was so wildly popular that is spawned an intense, but short-lived political movement in the form of Bellamyite "Nationalist Clubs"; indeed they were often called "Bellamy Clubs". These clubs arose quickly following the release of Bellamy's novel, and while the first club originated in Boston, chapters soon popped up in cities across the nation. These clubs, via coordinated activity, became a political force as a movement in the first half of the last decade of the nineteenth century, before disappearing after merging with the Populist movement. They turned Bellamy himself into a politician, although he was perhaps not well suited to the role of leader of a socialist political movement.

When Looking Backward was published in 1888 its popularity owed much to its readability, engaging narrative, but especially to its grand vision of a utopian future. Another big part of its popularity was conditioned by the times in which its author lived. Over the course of Edward Bellamy's forty-eight years he saw a great deal of turmoil, indeed, he would have been around fifteen the year the Civil war ended, and not quite twenty five when the Long Depression began in 1873. After the war American society experienced the rise of giant integrated capitalist firms - the infamous trusts - to positions of monopoly power; it had experienced a series of sometimes devastating economic recessions and depressions; it was experiencing increasing labor militance and strikes, for example the Great Strike of 1887; in conjunction with the latter, there was much radical socialist political agitation, see for example the 1886 Haymarket Affair and its highly controversial aftermath. Over this time the social effects of capitalism and industrialization became more pronounced. As is the still the case, it was workers, and the poor who bore the costs of material "progress". From the end of the Civil war to the turn of the century was when American capitalism really came into its own, when it rose to social and political dominance. As material prosperity of society increased, it looked to increasingly many Americans that, economically and politically, the decked was stacked against them, and that the lion's share of these gains were being accumulated by the wealthy.

Bellamy adopts the Rip Van Winkle trope and has his protagonist fall asleep in then present-day 1887, and wake up over a century later in the year 2000. Bellamy's hero, Julian West, finds himself in a utopian future society in which the evils of the world of 1887 have been rectified through application of reason, science, and technology. The book takes the form of a kind of guided tour of the future given to Julian by his host, a Dr. Leete, who is caring for Julian after he wakes up. Dr. Leete and his family take turns escorting Julian around, showing him different aspects of the future, and answering his many questions about how the world of the future works, and how things came to be that way. Long story short, the Unites States of the future has been transformed by a rational and irresistible bloodless revolution into a socialist utopia, as one giant national trust, operated for the public benefit. All industries have been nationalized, and are democratically controlled by their workers; there is centralized distribution of important goods; there is gender equality; the economy has been reorganized as a rational and egalitarian "Industrial Army". As Bellamy describes this future, there are no wars, no government, no bankers, no corruption, no jails, and no more "buying" and "selling".

The social revolution that brings about the society of the future, as Bellamy presents it, occurs much like Marx describes. The revolution is a natural occurrence, and as such irresistible, that happened once society developed to a certain level of rationality. Once people become sufficiently rational they simply perceive the need to radically transform society, and then do so in the form of a revolutionary mass social movement that peacefully takes power and then restructures society. Bellamy, like many of his age, was not keen to abandon the benefits of industrialization, and mass production, but wanted to change the composition and distribution of what is produced. Thus, his vision of the future economy is one where society takes the form of one large trust, but because it will be run democratically by worker-citizens, it will pursue their interests. Bellamy's vision is a kind of syndicalism, in which a congress of industrial unions forms the core of the national government. Moreover, because the people of the future are so rational they organize their society along the most rational, and thus egalitarian, lines. This is why, for example, in Bellamy's utopia social classes are not abolished but re-organized on rational lines, which for him means according to age. This there is a course of age-based classes, or stages, all persons pass through. All the stages are designed to maximize the development of citizens' personal talents and capacities, to effectively train people to be competent workers fit for important jobs, as well as to be active and engaged citizens.

The application of reason to social problems results, in Bellamy's utopia, in progressive policies like equal educational and occupational opportunities for women; everyone must work between 21 and 45; universal basic education for all until 21; occupations decided, as much as possible, by aptitude; remuneration based on effort; college open to all, with admissions based on social need and individual merit; free universal healthcare. In keeping with his syndicalist vision, Bellamy's utopia has a political structure framed around industrial unions. Bellamy's novel envisions the future President of the United States as the general of the Industrial Army, and serving a five year term. This person is to be elected by a vote of all those worker-citizens who have retired, i.e. those over forty five years of age. In this utopia there would be ten industrial departments, or unions, each with its own head, or chief, elected by the retied members of the individual departments; the group of these chiefs serves as a kind of cabinet to the President. There is a national congress, which meets every five years to pass or revise laws. He proposes a separate entity he calls, the Inspectorate, to pursue consumer complaints, fraud, abuse, misconduct, et cetera. The job this agency is to seek out graft, inefficiency, or waste, as well as health, safety, or environmental hazards.

The central metaphor of Bellamy's novel is presented in his analogy of the General and the Balloon. Dr. Leete in trying to explain the reasoning behind the organization of the society and economy of the future tells Julian, "It is easier for a general up in a balloon with perfect survey of the field, to manoeuvre a million men to victory then for a sergeant to mange a platoon in a thicket". [1] It is most rational to organize society into one big corporation because this will facilitate macro-level social and economic planning in the public interest. The idea is to harness the power of the large trusts, because their centralization afforded them a larger view of the economic landscape, and allows them to plan accordingly. Under capitalism this planning took the form of the great trusts trying to manage competition between oligopolists to keep prices and profits high. When all the nation's industries were organized under centralized control, like in a trust, and all these trusts nationalized, society would be able to engage in the kind of economic planning that can create the utopian society Julian West encounters.

The idea for the Bellamy clubs emerged very soon after the novel debuted. A reporter in Boston, Cyrus Field Willard, is credited with coming up with idea, as there is a surviving letter in which he ask Bellamy for permission to found a club to promote Bellamy's ideas. Bellamy assented, and the ball began rolling. In the fall of 1888 Willard's "Nationalist Circle", merged with the independently organized "Boston Bellamy Club" of Charles E. Bower & Arthur F. Deveraux to found the first permanent Bellamyite group. The Bellamyite movement was at this point more a moral association than a political party. In 1889 they began publishing a magazine, The Nationalist. Groups were very quickly founded in large Eastern cities like New York, Chicago, and Washington D.C.. The movement was particularly strong in California. That state had sixty five local clubs, whereas, even a large and populous state like New York had only sixteen local Bellamyite groups.

The early Bellamyite movement eschewed political action, that is, participation in a 'democratic' political process they felt was rigged. They focused instead on propaganda, e.g. organizing public lectures, printing and distributing pamphlets and periodicals. As the fever pitch of labor and socialist militance and agitation, combined with events like the Great Strike of 1887 and the Homestead Strike of 1892, the Bellamyite movement reversed course and engaged furiously in political activity focused on more immediate gains, with a particular emphasis on the elections of 1892. The economic and political climate of the age created other reform minded groups in addition to Bellamyites, groups which would cooperate and compete with each other as they often had large segments of over-lapping memberships. Economic depression, political corruption, financial speculation and market manipulation, all fueled the rise of the Populist movement, and of the People's Party. Bellamy, and many other members of the Nationalist clubs were so supportive of the People's Party that eventually the Bellamyite movement merged into the Populist movement. The failure of Bellamy as a political candidate did not help the situation, as the alliance of the People's Party and the Bellamyites rendered most of the latter's organizational functions redundant. In the wake of the 1892 elections the Bellamyite movement began to dissipate as it was largely subsumed by the Populist movement.

In early 1894 Bellamy's own journal, The New Nation, was forced to close due to financial difficulties. Later in this same year Bellamy ceased his political activity on behalf of the movement that bore his name. Other Bellamyite periodicals continued to be published over the next couple years, but in dwindling numbers. By 1896 there were only a handful of Bellamyite groups still active, for example those in Wisconsin which were organized enough to run candidates for state offices that year. After this, the Bellamyite movement basically vanishes as a movement, save for a scattering of die-hards. Bellamy himself would die only two years later, on May 22nd 1898. Though he claimed that he did not write his novel with the aim of providing an explicit plan of economic and political reform, his utopian vision of a more democratic, more equal future resonated deeply with a nation weary of the effects of capitalism.

Political Utopias in Antebellum America

The populist and reform movements of the 1880s and 1890s, as well as the socialist movement emerging in this era, had important precursors in American history. Indeed, the success of a radical utopian inspired movement like Bellamyism will not surprise one acquainted with the utopian movements of antebellum America. There was a very limited Owenite movement in America during the 1820s, the culmination of which was the experimental community at New Harmony, Indiana. Much more extensive and successful was the Fourierist movement that emerged in the 1840s. [2] This movement attracted a fairly large following, and was able to establish a number of experimental communities, called Phalanxes. In contrast to Bellamyism, which was an American movement, both Owenism and Fourierism are European movements which crossed the Atlantic. The success of Fourierism, and relative lack of success of Owenism, in transplanting to America is explained in part by the differences in the economic climates in which they came to America. Fourierism resonated more deeply with Americans than Owenism mostly because they were more open to radical utopian experiments in the wake of the economic crisis of 1837, and the depression that followed. If not for the economic crisis of 1873 and the ensuing depression, the 1886 Haymarket Affair, the Great Strike 1887, the crash of 1893 and the depression that followed, Bellamyism may not have emerged as a mass movement.

One major difference between Owenism and Fourierism, and a factor in their respective levels of success, is in the manner of their transplantation to America. While Owenism was brought to America by Owen and his sons, Fourierism was brought back to America by an American disciple of Fourier's, Albert Brisbane. Owen purchased the town of New Harmony in Indiana from its previous occupants with the intention of founding a utopian community there based on his philosophic principles and the lessons learned in operating his mills at New Lanark in Scotland. American Fourierists began with editing Fourier's ideas into a coherent form, and then propagandizing on behalf of these ideas. When these agitation efforts combined with economic depression in the wake of 1837, with the lingering effects of the second Great Awakening, the example of successful utopian communities in America, and the sympathetic affinities of various immigrant groups Fourierism became a rather large movement. At its high point the Fourierist movement could boast of dozens of Phalanxes across America.

Owenism

The Owenite movement in America was comprised almost entirely of the experimental utopian community the movements' founder Robert Owen established, and his efforts to acquire funding and attract personnel for this community. Though there were other Owenite communities in the U.S., the story of Owenism in America is largely the story of the New Harmony colony. Unfortunately, Owen found little success in America, less than some of the experiments within Great Britain, and his utopian experiment lasted only four years before the colonists abandoned the Owenite philosophy. The community at New Harmony persisted, but they were no longer an Owenite utopian project. Owen had originally purchased the land, and a few buildings, from the previous residents at New Harmony. These previous occupants were Rappites colonists, a mostly German Protestant religious sect, which had moved to Indiana from Pennsylvania to more freely practice their beliefs and communal way of life. After establishing the first group of settlers at his community, Owen left his son William in charge at New Harmony and returned east to find more funds and colonists for his project. When Owen returned in April of 1825 he found the community of several hundred residents in chaos. He did his best to put matters in order, and succeeded fairly well, he departed again in June 1825 in search of more funds and colonists. In all, Owen spent only a few months residing at New Harmony.

Within two years of its founding as an Owenite utopian experiment the New Harmony community was an economic failure, that is, it was not financially or materially self-supporting. There are a host of reasons that account for the failure of the Owenite experiment at New Harmony. The colony had trouble attracting residents, and those who did come were not always of the highest caliber. While New Harmony did bring in many ideologically committed Owenites, it also welcomed in many types of people. In a letter, Robert Dale Owen, one of Robert's sons, describes the population of New Harmony as, "a heterogeneous collection of radicals, enthusiastic devotees to principle, honest latitudinarians, and lazy theorists, with a sprinkling of unprincipled sharpers thrown in".[3] In another letter, William Owen, another of Robert's sons, says that besides committed Owenites, New Harmony had attracted, "crackpots, free-loaders, and adventurers whose presence in the town makes success unlikely". [4] There was a laundry list of complaints about why the New Harmony project failed; not enough skilled craftsmen; not enough unskilled laborers; insufficient and inexperienced management and supervision; not enough housing; not enough land; not enough privacy; too much freedom; not enough freedom.

Robert Owen was often away from the colony and, like him, many colonists only stayed a few months. This high turnover, as well as the problems listed above, seemed to doom this project from the outset. Between the motley collection of colonists, the factional infighting, and the lack of economic viability, the New Harmony settlement ended as a failure for Owen. The lack of economic success and factional squabbles over questions of theoretical principles and practical organization led to a large schism at New Harmony in 1826. A group carried on the Owenite project for another couple years, but finally gave up the ghost in 1829. In 1827, Owen severed ties with the community he founded, transferring ownership to his sons. After 1829 the town abandoned Owenism, and converted their community to a traditional capitalist private property system.

While the town was a failure as a utopian experiment, it did produce some very interesting and significant results and persons. Under Owenite leadership New Harmony could boast of the first free public library, and the first free public school. It also became a leading center of scientific discovery in the natural science, in particular in geology where Owen's third son David Dale achieved prominence. Robert Dale, the oldest son of Robert Owen, in addition to publishing many books and pamphlets, served in both the Indiana state legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives. He advocated for women's rights, for free public education, and opposed slavery. It was in fact Robert Dale Owen who introduced the bill which founded the now world famous Smithsonian Institution.

Fourierism

Like the Owenites, the practical activity of the Fourierist movement in America was directed towards the founding of utopian communities. In the minds of the Fourierists these communities, or rather the network of these communities, would form the basis of the new society, and the transformative effects would radiate out from these communities. Though the Fourierists did much to expound and promulgate their theories in writing, their main energy was directed at founding and linking Fourierist phalanxes. A working example of their vision of a utopian way of life would, in their estimation, be the best piece of propaganda they could have. An operational model Phalanx was more likely to attract actual converts than hundreds of pounds of printed literature. One quite decisive advantage of the Fourierists was that they, unlike Owen, were not intensely skeptical. Indeed, the embrace of religious arguments, appeals to religious morality, and the use of religious modes of presenting Fourierist ideas very much helped Fourierism gain a large following in America.

The Fourierist movement was more successful than the Owenite movement in America, and thus it was larger and more diverse. It was however, more distant in its ideology and practice from its founder than the Owenite movement was from Owen. The experience of the movement is not so directly tied to any one individual community. This movement was, like Owenism, short-lived, despite many Fourierists being intensely passionate. Albert Brisbane, an American traveling in Europe, became a votary of Charles Fourier and his utopian socialist philosophy. In the early 1830s Brisbane returned to America and eagerly set to work proselytizing for Fourier's ideas; edited and parsed by Brisbane for American audiences. By 1840 he was publishing The Phalanx, a Fourierist journal, but his big break came in 1842 when Horace Greeley allowed Brisbane to purchase a front-page column in his popular newspaper The New York Tribune. This platform allowed Brisbane to bring Fourier's ideas to the huge audience of the Tribune's readership. Running for about a year and a half, and reprinted in dozens of other newspapers, Brisbane's column, helped ignite the spark of the American Fourierist movement. We should note that Brisbane was not alone in working to advance Fourier's ideas in America, nor was his journal the only Fourierist publication, though it was among the earliest.

Over the next decade, Fourierist phalanxes sprung up across the country, perhaps the most famous of which was the Brook Farm community in Massachusetts. The organized Fourierist movement established at least thirty phalanxes, and at it height, the movement consisted of perhaps as many as fifty Fourierist communities. One must be cognizant that there were several strains of Fourierism in America, and so deciding which communities count as Fourierist can sometimes be a matter of debate. The "phalanx" was the name Fourier gave to his ideal utopian communities. They were largely agricultural, but did not reject machinery. They were designed to self-sustaining communities in which all participants would have a chance to prosper. Fourier's phalanxes were not communist, since they were supposed to contain inequalities, that is, individuals were to be rewarded both for their effort as well as their contribution of capital. By the mid-1850s however, all but a hardy few phalanxes remained. What few did survive the collapse of the movement, were wiped out by the Civil war. Most Fourierist phalanxes lasted, on average, only a couple years; indeed, critics labeled Fourierists, 'four-year-ites'. The longest lasting community was the North American Phalanx of Colts Neck, New Jersey, which was in continuous operation for twelve years.

There is one very important way that the experience of the Brook Farm community was characteristic of the larger Fourierist movement. The Brook Farm community was originally established as a utopian community by Transcendentalist-inspired reformers. In the spring of 1841 George Ripley, and a small coterie of fellows, decamped to Brook Farm and established an experimental utopian community. Their aims were to counter the effects of a depersonalized and unequal society by removing themselves from that society, and forming a more ideal communal way of life. The Brook Farmers rejected Emerson's more individualistic, more isolationist, vision of Transcendentalist "self-culture". After four years of disorganization, factional quibbles, and lack of a cohesive vision, inhibiting the communities' prosperity, the Brook Farmers decided to adopt Fourierism in1844 because it offered a more concrete plan and structure. This is what attracted many, beyond Transcendentalists, to Fourier's system, and to Fourierist phalanxes, in this era. It was a detailed plan of action for forming communities in an age when so many utopian schemes were vague and ill-defined.

The Fourierist movement, brief as its life may have been, as well as the legacy of its example, made important contributions to later American political movements. Several important legacies of the Fourierist movement stand out. First, in the 1840s the Fourierists were among the earliest and strongest critics of the nascent industrial capitalist order. The Fourierists criticized capitalism as an anti-democratic system of "industrial feudalism" which subordinated workers to employers. Fourierism, and indeed the whole communitarian movement, achieved its prominence at a kind of tipping point in American history, and its failure to stop the advance of the burgeoning industrial capitalism set American society on different path than had this movement had more success. On a longer view, the legacy of the Fourierist movement continued to be seen in the communitarian aspects of the American socialist movement, as well as in the American labor movement, especially in its advocacy of producers' and consumers' cooperatives. The Fourierist movement has an additional interesting legacy in the way that it influenced the thinking of Edward Bellamy. Indeed, several important elements of Fourierist philosophy appear in Bellamy's utopia.

Conclusion

The utopian alternative was very much alive in 19th-century America. The threat various utopian movements constituted can be seen in the sheer numbers of people who flocked to religious or secular utopian communities all over the country. From the 1820s through the 1850s thousands and thousands of Americans experimented with utopianism, joining one or another experimental community. Over these decades nearly one hundred different utopian communities and projects were launched in America. Some lasted just a few months, others only a few years. Others, however, enjoyed some longevity. In general, the utopian communities that tended to last longer were the religiously inspired ones, which also very often had the advantage of being ethno-religious groupings. Many utopian groups like the Rappites or Harmonists, the Amish, and the Hutterites, were largely German Protestant sects. Though there were religious groups, e.g. the Shakers, who were successful at converting many different kinds of people to their way of life. Other utopian groups attempted to create new religions, e.g. the Mormons, and the Oneida community.

In a fairly common pattern, people turned to utopian communities when economic hardship became most acute, and then left when conditions improved. The very existence of alternative, non-for-profit, ways of living posed a threat to the nascent capitalist order in America. It was only in the decades after the Civil war that most kinds of utopian communities became economically unviable as corporate consolidation, mechanization of production, and economies of scale replaced durable hand-made goods with cheaper but less durable factory-made goods. Utopian communities, as small-scale industrial producers of craft goods could simply not compete. Though many of these communities continued to be self-sufficient and survived as communities, their prosperity at first slowly, and then rather quickly, diminished, making attracting new followers and maintaining their communities difficult.

What the experience of utopian communities, both religious and secular, testifies to is the ability of possibility to capture the imagination, and to inspire action. Their many different aims and principles notwithstanding, these utopian movements all sought to transform the lives of human beings through radically transforming social relations. Beyond utopian experiments in communal living, utopian thinking provided some inspiration for more practical movements like the early women's suffrage movement, the abolitionist movement, and the prohibitionist movement. The Occupy movement, brief but spectacular, is part of this utopian tradition in American history. Its memory is worth preserving, its anniversaries worth noting, because of the utopian aspect of its existence. Even for a brief time, just as with our 19th century forebears, a utopian political movement allowed a great many people the freedom to participate in the dream that a better world is possible, to experience the thrill of feeling that such a possible better world could be realized.

Notes

Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward: 2000-1887. 1888. Quote from Claeys, Gregory & Lyman T. Sargent. The Utopia Reader. New York University Press, 1999.

For an excellent history of the American Fourierist movement see; Guarneri, Carl J.. The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in 19th Century America. Cornell University Press, 1991.

Quoted from; Clayton, Joseph. Robert Owen: Pioneer of Social Reforms. A.C. Fifield, 1908.

Quoted in; Wilson, William. The Angel and the Serpent: The Story of New Harmony. 2nd Ed. Indiana University Press, 1967.

A Long-War Strategy for the Left

By William T. Hathaway

As the viciousness of capitalism engulfs ever more of us, our yearnings for change are approaching desperation. The system's current leader, Barack Obama, has shown us that the only change we can believe in is what we ourselves create.

To do that, we need to know what is possible in our times and what isn't. The bitter probability is that none of us will see a society in which we'd actually want to live. Even the youngest of us will most likely have to endure an increasingly unpleasant form of capitalism. Despite its recurring crises, this system is still too strong, too adaptable, and has too many supporters in all classes for it to be overthrown any time soon. We're probably not going to be the ones to create a new society.

But we can now lay the groundwork for that, first by exposing the hoax that liberal reforms will lead to basic changes. People need to see that the purpose of liberalism is to defuse discontent with promises of the future and thus prevent mass opposition from coalescing. It diverts potentially revolutionary energy into superficial dead ends. Bernie Sanders' "long game" campaign is really only a game similar to that of his reformist predecessor, Dennis Kucinich, designed to keep us in the "big tent" of the Democratic Party. Capitalism, although resilient, is willing to change only in ways that shore it up, so before anything truly different can be built, we have to bring it down.

What we are experiencing now is the long war the ruling elite is fighting to maintain its grip on the world. The current phase began with the collapse of Keynesian capitalism, which flourished from the 1950s into the '70s, when the primary consumer market was in the capitalist headquarter countries of North America and Western Europe. Corporations were able to stimulate domestic consumption and quell worker discontent there by acceding to labor's demands for better wages and conditions. That led to a 30-year bubble of improvement for unionized workers, predominantly male and white, that began to collapse in the '80s as capitalism gradually became globalized.

Then to maintain dominance Western corporations had to reduce labor costs in order to compete against emerging competition in low-wage countries such as China, India, Russia, and Brazil. Also international consumer markets became more important than the home market, but reaching them required low prices. So capitalist leaders reversed hard-won reforms, forcing down paychecks and working conditions in the West. And they tried to keep control of crucial Mideast oil resources by tightening their neo-imperialist hold on that region: overthrowing governments, installing dictators, undermining economies.

This aggression generated armed resistance: jihadist attacks against the West. Our response has been the current holy war against terror. All of this horrible suffering is just one campaign in capitalism's long war for hegemony. Any dominator system -- including capitalism, patriarchy, and religious fundamentalism -- generates violence.

Since we are all products of such systems, the path out of them will include conflict and strife. Insisting on only peaceful tactics and ruling out armed self defense against a ruling elite that has repeatedly slaughtered millions of people is naïve, actually a way of preventing basic change. The pacifist idealism so prevalent among the petty-bourgeoisie conceals their class interest: no revolution, just reform. But until capitalism and its military are collapsing, it would be suicidal to attack them directly with force.

What we can do now as radicals is weaken capitalism and build organizations that will pass our knowledge and experience on to future generations. If we do that well enough, our great grandchildren (not really so far away) can lead a revolution. If we don't do it, our descendants will remain corporate chattel.

Our generational assignment -- should we decide to accept it -- is sedition, subversion, sabotage: a program on which socialists and anarchists can work together.

Sedition -- advocating or attempting the overthrow of the government -- is illegal only if it calls for or uses violence. Our most important job -- educating and organizing people around a revolutionary program -- is legal sedition, as is much of our writing here on The Hampton Institute.

For subversion we could, for example, focus on institutions and rituals that instill patriotism in young people. School spirit, scouts, competitive team sports, and pledges of allegiance all create in children an emotional bond to larger social units of school, city, and nation.

Kids are indoctrinated to feel these are extensions of their family and to respect and fear the authorities as they would their parents, more specifically their fathers, because this is a patriarchal chain being forged. It causes us even as adults to react to criticism of the country as an attack on our family. This hurts our feelings on a deep level, so we reject it, convinced it can't be true. It's too threatening to us.

This linkage is also the basis of the all-American trick of substituting personal emotion for political thought.

Breaking this emotional identification is crucial to reducing the widespread support this system still enjoys. Whatever we can do to show how ridiculous these institutions and rituals are will help undermine them.

For instance, teachers could refuse to lead the pledge of allegiance, or they could follow it with historical facts that would cause the students to question their indoctrination. When a teacher gets fired, the resulting legal battle can taint the whole sacrosanct ritual and challenge the way history is taught in the schools.

Subversive parenting means raising children who won't go along with the dominant culture and have the skills to live outside it as much as possible.

Much feminist activism is profoundly subversive. That's why it's opposed so vehemently by many women as well as men.

Spiritually, whatever undercuts the concept of God as daddy in the sky will help break down patriarchal conditioning and free us for new visions of the Divine.

Sabotage is more problematic. It calls to mind bombing and shooting, which at this point won't achieve anything worthwhile. But sabotage doesn't need to harm living creatures; systems can be obstructed in many ways, which I can't discuss more specifically because of the police state under which we currently live. They are described in my book Radical Peace.

We'll be most successful by using both legal and illegal tactics but keeping the two forms separate. Illegal direct action is sometimes necessary to impair the system, impede its functioning, break it in a few places, opening up points of vulnerability for coming generations to exploit. This doesn't require finely nuanced theory or total agreement on ideology, just a recognition of the overriding necessity of weakening this monster, of reducing its economic and military power. It does require secrecy, though, so it's best done individually with no one else knowing.

As groups, we should do only legal resistance. Since we have to assume we are infiltrated and our communications are monitored, illegal acts must be done alone or in small cells without links to the group. Security is essential. Police may have the identity of everyone in the group, but if members are arrested and interrogated, their knowledge will be very limited. The principles of leaderless resistance provide the most effective defense for militants.

Using these tactics, we can slow down this behemoth, curtail its expansion, make it a less effective murderer. The government will of course try to crush this resistance. But that very response can eventually seal its doom because it increases polarization and sparks more outrage. People will see the rich have not only taken away our possibility for a decent life, but now they are taking away our freedom. Then the masses revolt.

When the police and military have to attack their own people, their loyalty begins to waver. They realize they too are oppressed workers, and they start disobeying their masters. The power structure grinds down, falters, and falls. At this point the revolution can succeed, hopefully with a minimum of violence. Then the people of that generation, with the knowledge and experience we have passed on to them, can build a new society.

This is not a pleasant path of action, and those whose first priority is pleasantness are repelled by it. That's why reformism is so popular: it's an illusion that appeals to cowards. But when their backs are to the wall, which will inevitably happen, even they will fight back. And there's something glorious in that revolutionary fight even in its present stage -- much more vivid and worthwhile than the life of a lackey.

William T. Hathaway is an adjunct professor of American studies at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. His new book, Lila, the Revolutionary, is a fable for adults about an eight-year-old Indian girl who sparks a world revolution for social justice. Chapters are posted onwww.amazon.com/dp/1897455844. A selection of his writing is available at www.peacewriter.org.