The Party's Over: Beyond Politics, Beyond Democracy

By Crimethinc

Nowadays, democracy rules the world. Communism is long dead, elections are taking place even in Afghanistan and Iraq, and world leaders are meeting to plan the "global community" we hear so much about. So why isn't everybody happy, finally? For that matter-why do so few of the eligible voters in the United States, the world's flagship democracy, even bother to vote?

Could it be that democracy, long the catchword of every revolution and rebellion, is simply not democratic enough? What could be the problem?

Every little child can grow up to be President

No, they can't. Being President means occupying a position of hierarchical power, just like being a billionaire: for every person who is President, there have to be millions who are not. It's no coincidence that billionaires and Presidents tend to rub shoulders; both exist in a privileged world off limits to the rest of us. Speaking of billionaires, our economy isn't exactly democratic-capitalism distributes resources in absurdly unequal proportions, and you have to start with resources if you're ever going to get elected.

Even if it was true that anyone could grow up to be President, that wouldn't help the millions who inevitably don't, who must still live in the shadow of that power. This imbalance is intrinsic to the structure of representative democracy, at the local level as much as at the top. The professional politicians of a town council discuss municipal affairs and pass ordinances all day without consulting the citizens of the town, who have to be at work; when one of those ordinances displeases citizens, they have to use what little leisure time they have to contest it, and then they're back at work again the next time the town council meets. In theory, the citizens could elect a different town council from the available pool of politicians and would-be politicians, but the interests of politicians as a class always remain essentially at odds with their own-besides, voting fraud, gerrymandering, and inane party loyalty usually prevent them from going that far. Even in the unlikely scenario that a whole new government was elected consisting of firebrands intent on undoing the imbalance of power between politicians and citizens, they would inevitably perpetuate it simply by accepting roles in the system-for the political apparatus itself is the foundation of that imbalance. To succeed in their objective, they would have to dissolve the government and join the rest of the populace in restructuring society from the roots up.

But even if there were no Presidents or town councils, democracy as we know it would still be an impediment to freedom. Corruption, privilege, and hierarchy aside, majority rule is not only inherently oppressive but also paradoxically divisive and homogenizing at the same time.

The Tyranny of the Majority

If you ever found yourself in a vastly outnumbered minority, and the majority voted that you had to give up something as necessary to your life as water and air, would you comply? When it comes down to it, does anyone really believe it makes sense to accept the authority of a group simply on the grounds that they outnumber everyone else? We accept majority rule because we do not believe it will threaten us-and those it does threaten are already silenced before anyone can hear their misgivings.

The average self-professed law-abiding citizen does not consider himself threatened by majority rule because, consciously or not, he conceives of himself as having the power and moral authority of the majority: if not in fact, by virtue of his being politically and socially "moderate," then in theory, because he believes everyone would be convinced by his arguments if only he had the opportunity to present them. Majority-rule democracy has always rested on the conviction that if all the facts were known, everyone could be made to see that there is only one right course of action-without this belief, it amounts to nothing more than the dictatorship of the herd. But even if "the" facts could be made equally clear to everyone, assuming such a thing were possible, people still would have their individual perspectives and motivations and needs. We need social and political structures that take this into account, in which we are free from the mob rule of the majority as well as the ascendancy of the privileged class.

Living under democratic rule teaches people to think in terms of quantity, to focus more on public opinion than on what their consciences tell them, to see themselves as powerless unless they are immersed in a mass. The root of majority-rule democracy is competition: competition to persuade everyone else to your position whether or not it is in their best interest, competition to constitute a majority to wield power before others outmaneuver you to do the same-and the losers (that is to say, the minorities) be damned. At the same time, majority rule forces those who wish for power to appeal to the lowest common denominator, precipitating a race to the bottom that rewards the most bland, superficial, and demagogic; under democracy, power itself comes to be associated with conformity rather than individuality. And the more power is concentrated in the hands of the majority, the less any individual can do on her own, whether she is inside or outside that majority.

In purporting to give everyone an opportunity to participate, majority-rule democracy offers a perfect justification for repressing those who don't abide by its dictates: if they don't like the government, why don't they go into politics themselves? And if they don't win at the game of building up a majority to wield power, didn't they get their chance? This is the same blame-the-victim reasoning used to justify capitalism: if the dishwasher isn't happy with his salary, he should work harder so he too can own a restaurant chain. Sure, everyone gets a chance to compete, however unequal-but what about those of us who don't want to compete, who never wanted power to be centralized in the hands of a government in the first place? What if we don't care to rule or be ruled?

That's what police are for-and courts and judges and prisons.

The Rule of Law

Even if you don't believe their purpose is to grind out nonconformity wherever it appears, you have to acknowledge that legal institutions are no substitute for fairness, mutual respect, and good will. The rule of "just and equal law," as fetishized by the stockholders and landlords whose interests it protects, offers no guarantees against injustice; it simply creates another arena of specialization, in which power and responsibility are ceded to expensive lawyers and pompous judges. Rather than serving to protect our communities and work out conflicts, this arrangement ensures that our communities' skills for conflict resolution and self-defense atrophy-and that those whose profession it supposedly is to discourage crime have a stake in it proliferating, since their careers depend upon it.

Ironically, we are told that we need these institutions to protect the rights of minorities-even though the implicit function of the courts is, at best, to impose the legislation of the majority on the minority. In actuality, a person is only able to use the courts to defend his rights when he can bring sufficient force to bear upon them in a currency they recognize; thanks to capitalism, only a minority can do this, so in a roundabout way it turns out that, indeed, the courts exist to protect the rights of at least a certain minority.

Justice cannot be established through the mere drawing up and enforcement of laws; such laws can only institutionalize what is already the rule in a society. Common sense and compassion are always preferable to the enforcement of strict, impersonal regulations. Where the law is the private province of an elite invested in its own perpetuation, the sensible and compassionate are bound to end up as defendants; we need a social system that fosters and rewards those qualities rather than blind obedience and impassivity.

Who Loses?

In contrast to forms of decision-making in which everyone's needs matter, the disempowerment of losers and out-groups is central to democracy. It is well known that in ancient Athens, the "cradle of democracy," scarcely an eighth of the population was permitted to vote, as women, foreigners, slaves, and others were excluded from citizenship. This is generally regarded as an early kink that time has ironed out, but one could also conclude that exclusion itself is the most essential and abiding characteristic of democracy: millions who live in the United States today are not permitted to vote either, and the distinctions between citizen and non-citizen have not eroded significantly in 2500 years. Every bourgeois property owner can come up with a thousand reasons why it isn't practical to allow everyone who is affected to share in decision making, just as no boss or bureaucrat would dream of giving his employees an equal say in their workplace, but that doesn't make it any less exclusive. What if democracy arose in Greece not as a step in Man's Progress Towards Freedom, but as a way of keeping power out of certain hands?

Democracy is the most sustainable way to maintain the division between powerful and powerless because it gives the greatest possible number of people incentive to defend that division.

That's why the high-water mark of democracy-its current ascendancy around the globe-corresponds with unprecedented inequalities in the distribution of resources and power. Dictatorships are inherently unstable: you can slaughter, imprison, and brainwash entire generations and their children will invent the struggle for freedom anew. But promise every man the opportunity to be a dictator, to be able to force the "will of the majority" upon his fellows rather than work through disagreements like a mature adult, and you can build a common front of destructive self-interest against the cooperation and collectivity that make individual freedom possible. All the better if there are even more repressive dictatorships around to point to as "the" alternative, so you can glorify all this in the rhetoric of liberty.

Capitalism and Democracy

Now let's suspend our misgivings about democracy long enough to consider whether, if it were an effective means for people to share power over their lives, it could be compatible with capitalism. In a democracy, informed citizens are supposed to vote according to their enlightened self-interest-but who controls the flow of information, if not wealthy executives? They can't help but skew their coverage according to their class interests, and you can hardly blame them-the newspapers and networks that didn't flinch at alienating corporate advertisers were run out of business long ago by competitors with fewer scruples.

Likewise, voting means choosing between options, according to which possibilities seem most desirable-but who sets the options, who establishes what is considered possible, who constructs desire itself but the wealthy patriarchs of the political establishment, and their nephews in advertising and public relations firms? In the United States, the two-party system has reduced politics to choosing the lesser of two identical evils, both of which answer to their funders before anyone else. Sure, the parties differ over exactly how much to repress personal freedoms or spend on bombs-but do we ever get to vote on who controls "public" spaces such as shopping malls, or whether workers are entitled to the full product of their labor, or any other question that could seriously change the way we live? In such a state of affairs, the essential function of the democratic process is to limit the appearance of what is possible to the narrow spectrum debated by candidates for office. This demoralizes dissidents and contributes to the general impression that they are impotent utopians-when nothing is more utopian than trusting representatives from the owning class to solve the problems caused by their own dominance, and nothing more impotent than accepting their political system as the only possible system.

Ultimately, the most transparent democratic political process will always be trumped by economic matters such as property ownership. Even if we could convene everyone, capitalists and convicts alike, in one vast general assembly, what would prevent the same dynamics that rule the marketplace from spilling over into that space? So long as resources are unevenly distributed, the rich can always buy others' votes: either literally, or by promising them a piece of the pie, or else by means of propaganda and intimidation. Intimidation may be oblique-"Those radicals want to take away your hard-earned property"-or as overt as the bloody gang wars that accompanied electoral campaigns in nineteenth century America.

Thus, even at best, democracy can only serve its purported purpose if it occurs among those who explicitly oppose capitalism and foreswear its prizes-and in those circles, there are alternatives that make a lot more sense than majority rule.

It's no coincidence freedom is not on the ballot

Freedom is a quality of activity, not a condition that exists in a vacuum: it is a prize to be won daily, not a possession that can be kept in the basement and taken out and polished up for parades. Freedom cannot be given-the most you can hope is to free others from the forces that prevent them from finding it themselves. Real freedom has nothing to do with voting; being free doesn't mean simply being able to choose between options, but actively participating in establishing the options in the first place.

If the freedom for which so many generations have fought and died is best exemplified by a man in a voting booth checking a box on a ballot before returning to work in an environment no more under his control than it was before, then the heritage our emancipating forefathers and suffragette grandmothers have left us is nothing but a sham substitute for the liberty they sought.

For a better illustration of real freedom in action, look at the musician in the act of improvising with her companions: in joyous, seemingly effortless cooperation, they create a sonic and emotional environment, transforming the world that in turn transforms them. Take this model and extend it to every one of our interactions with each other and you would have something qualitatively different from our present system-a harmony in human relationships and activity. To get there from here, we have to dispense with voting as the archetypal expression of freedom and participation.

Representative democracy is a contradiction.

No one can represent your power and interests for you-you can only have power by wielding it, you can only learn what your interests are by getting involved. Politicians make careers out of claiming to represent others, as if freedom and political power could be held by proxy; in fact, they are a priest class that answers only to itself, and their very existence is proof of our disenfranchisement.

Voting in elections is an expression of our powerlessness: it is an admission that we can only approach the resources and capabilities of our own society through the mediation of that priest caste. When we let them prefabricate our options for us, we relinquish control of our communities to these politicians in the same way that we have ceded technology to engineers, health care to doctors, and control of our living environments to city planners and private real estate developers. We end up living in a world that is alien to us, even though our labor has built it, for we have acted like sleepwalkers hypnotized by the monopoly our leaders and specialists hold on setting the possibilities.

But we don't have to simply choose between presidential candidates, soft drink brands, television shows, and political ideologies. We can make our own decisions as individuals and communities, we can make our own delicious beverages and social structures and power, we can establish a new society on the basis of freedom and cooperation.

Sometimes a candidate appears who says everything people have been saying to each other for a long time-he seems to have appeared from outside the world of politics, to really be one of us. By persuasively critiquing the system within its own logic, he subtly persuades people that the system can be reformed-that it could work, if only the right people were in power. Thus a lot of energy that would have gone into challenging the system itself is redirected into backing yet another candidate for office, who inevitably fails to deliver.

But where do these candidates-and more importantly, their ideas and momentum-come from? How do they rise into the spotlight? They only receive so much attention because they are drawing on popular sentiments; often, they are explicitly trying to divert energy from existing grass-roots movements. So should we put our energy into supporting them, or into building on the momentum that forced them to take radical stances in the first place?

More frequently, we are terrorized into focusing on the electoral spectacle by the prospect of being ruled by the worst possible candidates. "What if he gets into power?" To think that things could get even worse!

But the problem is that the government has so much power in the first place-otherwise, it wouldn't matter as much who held the reigns. So long as this is the case, there will always be tyrants. This is why it is all the more important that we put our energy into the lasting solution of opposing the power of the state.

But what are the alternatives to democracy?

Consensus

Consensus-based decision-making is already practiced around the globe, from indigenous communities in Latin America and direct action groups in Europe to organic farming cooperatives in Australia. In contrast to representative democracy, the participants take part in the decision-making process on an ongoing basis and exercise real control over their daily lives. Unlike majority-rule democracy, consensus process values the needs and concerns of each individual equally; if one person is unhappy with a resolution, it is everyone's responsibility to find a new solution that is acceptable to all. Consensus-based decision-making does not demand that any person accept others' power over her, though it does require that everybody consider everyone else's needs; what it loses in efficiency it makes up tenfold in freedom and accountability. Instead of asking that people accept leaders or find common cause by homogenizing themselves, proper consensus process integrates everyone into a working whole while allowing each to retain his or her own autonomy.

Autonomy

To be free, you must have control over your immediate surroundings and the basic matters of your life. No one is more qualified than you are to decide how you live; no one should be able to vote on what you do with your time and your potential unless you invite them to. To claim these privileges for yourself and respect them in others is to cultivate autonomy.

Autonomy is not to be confused with so-called independence: in actuality, no one is independent, since our lives all depend on each other. The glamorization of self-sufficiency in competitive society is an underhanded way to accuse those who will not exploit others of being responsible for their own poverty; as such, it is one of the most significant obstacles to building community.

In contrast to this Western mirage, autonomy offers a free interdependence between people who share consensus.

Autonomy is the antithesis of bureaucracy. There is nothing more efficient than people acting on their own initiative as they see fit, and nothing more inefficient than attempting to dictate everyone's actions from above-that is, unless your fundamental goal is to control other people. Top-down coordination is only necessary when people must be made to do something they would never do of their own accord; likewise, obligatory uniformity, however horizontally it is imposed, can only empower a group by disempowering the individuals who comprise it. Consensus can be as repressive as democracy unless the participants retain their autonomy.

Autonomous individuals can cooperate without agreeing on a shared agenda, so long as everyone benefits from everyone else's participation. Groups that cooperate thus can contain conflicts and contradictions, just as each of us does individually, and still empower the participants. Let's leave marching under a single flag to the military.

Finally, autonomy entails self-defense. Autonomous groups have a stake in defending themselves against the encroachments of those who do not recognize their right to self-determination, and in expanding the territory of autonomy and consensus by doing everything in their power to destroy coercive structures.

Topless Federations

Independent autonomous groups can work together in federations without any of them wielding authority. Such a structure sounds utopian, but it can actually be quite practical and efficient. International mail delivery and railway travel both work on this system, to name two examples: while individual postal and transportation systems are internally hierarchical, they all cooperate together to get mail or rail passengers from one nation to another without an ultimate authority being necessary at any point in the process. Similarly, individuals who cannot agree enough to work together within one collective can still coexist in separate groups. For this to work in the long run, of course, we need to instill values of cooperation, consideration, and tolerance in the coming generations-but that's exactly what we are proposing, and we can hardly do worse at this task than the partisans of capitalism and hierarchy have.

Direct Action

Autonomy necessitates that you act for yourself: that rather than waiting for requests to pass through the established channels only to bog down in paperwork and endless negotiations, establish your own channels instead. This is called direct action. If you want hungry people to have food to eat, don't just give money to a bureaucratic charity organization-find out where food is going to waste, collect it, and share. If you want affordable housing, don't try to get the town council to pass a bill-that will take years, while people sleep outside every night; take over abandoned buildings, open them up to the public, and organize groups to defend them when the thugs of the absentee landlords show up. If you want corporations to have less power, don't petition the politicians they bought to put limits on their own masters-take that power from them yourself. Don't buy their products, don't work for them, sabotage their billboards and offices, prevent their meetings from taking place and their merchandise from being delivered. They use similar tactics to exert their power over you, too-it only looks valid because they bought up the laws and values of your society long before you were born.

Don't wait for permission or leadership from some outside authority, don't beg some higher power to organize your life for you. Take the initiative!

How to Solve Disagreements without Calling the Authorities

In a social arrangement that is truly in the best interest of each participating individual, the threat of exclusion should be enough to discourage most destructive or disrespectful behavior. Even when it is impossible to avoid, exclusion is certainly a more humanitarian approach than prisons and executions, which corrupt police and judges as much as they embitter criminals. Those who refuse to respect others' needs, who will not integrate themselves into any community, may find themselves banished from social life-but that is still better than exile in the mental ward or on death row, two of the possibilities awaiting such people today. Violence should only be used by communities in self-defense, not with the smug sense of entitlement with which it is applied by our present injustice system. Unfortunately, in a world governed by force, autonomous consensus-based groups are likely to find themselves at odds with those who do not abide by cooperative or tolerant values; they must be careful not to lose those values themselves in the process of defending them.

Serious disagreements within communities can be solved in many cases by reorganizing or subdividing groups. Often individuals who can't get along in one social configuration have more success cooperating in another setting or as members of parallel communities. If consensus cannot be reached within a group, that group can split into smaller groups that can achieve it internally-such a thing may be inconvenient and frustrating, but it is better than group decisions ultimately being made by force by those who have the most power. As with individuals and society, so with different collectives: if the benefits of working together outweigh the frustrations, that should be incentive enough for people to sort out their differences. Even drastically dissimilar communities still have it in their best interest to coexist peacefully, and must somehow negotiate ways to achieve this…

Living Without Permission

…that's the most difficult part, of course. But we're not talking about just another social system here, we're talking about a total transformation of human relations-for it will take nothing less to solve the problems our species faces today. Let's not kid ourselves-until we can achieve this, the violence and strife inherent in conflict-based relations will continue to intensify, and no law or system will be able to protect us. In consensus-based structures, there are no fake solutions, no ways to suppress conflict without resolving it; those who participate in them must learn to coexist without coercion and submission.

The first precious grains of this new world can be found in your friendships and love affairs whenever they are free from power dynamics, whenever cooperation occurs naturally. Imagine those moments expanded to the scale of our entire society-that's the life that waits beyond democracy.

It may feel like we are separated from that world by an uncrossable chasm, but the wonderful thing about consensus and autonomy is that you don't have to wait for the government to vote for them-you can practice them right now with the people around you. Put into practice, the virtues of this way of living are clear. Form your own autonomous group, answering to no power but your own, and chase down freedom for yourselves, if your representatives will not do it for you-since they cannot do it for you.

Appendix: A Fable

Three wolves and six goats are discussing what to have for dinner. One courageous goat makes an impassioned case: "We should put it to a vote!" The other goats fear for his life, but surprisingly, the wolves acquiesce. But when everyone is preparing to vote, the wolves take three of the goats aside.

"Vote with us to make the other three goats dinner," they threaten. "Otherwise, vote or no vote, we'll eat you."

The other three goats are shocked by the outcome of the election: a majority, including their comrades, has voted for them to be killed and eaten. They protest in outrage and terror, but the goat who first suggested the vote rebukes them: "Be thankful you live in a democracy! At least we got to have a say in this!"

This was originally published by Crimethinc.

Safe States, Inside-Outside, and Other Liberal Illusions

By Howie Hawkins

Bernie Sanders is on his way to an endorsement of Hillary Clinton, the candidate of War, Wall Street, and Wal-Mart. Sanders ran as a New Deal Democrat, but he will soon be campaigning for a plain old corporate New Democrat.

To keep his troops engaged through this transition, Sanders will stage a few rules and platform fights at the convention. But rule changes are irrelevant to the real party power structure of candidate organizations and their corporate investors. Any platform planks won will be irrelevant as well. No corporate Democrat will feel bound by them.

Faced with that demoralizing prospect, some Sanders supporters are recycling failed old strategies in an attempt to salvage Sanders' "political revolution" without opposing the Democratic Party.

Safe States

Seattle city councilor Kshama Sawant and her Socialist Alternativecomrades have called on Sanders to continue running as an independent, but only in non-competitive "safe states."

The Green Party tried this in 2004. After a controversial decision to nominate the safe states candidate, David Cobb, it quickly became clear that the approach was impractical. I compiled and contributed to a book about this experience where you can see the debate between safe states and independent politics evolve as the case for safe states collapses in the face of political realities. Cobb had to convert from "safe states" to "smart states," which meant running wherever local Greens wanted him to. That turned out to be every state, safe or battleground, with a Green Party. Cobb did not want alienate Greens in battleground states like Ohio and Pennsylvania who were knocking themselves out to overcome difficult ballot petitioning requirements and hoping for sufficient Green presidential votes to secure ballot access for local candidates in future elections.

It also became clear that few voters or reporters would take a candidate seriously in a non-competitive safe state who didn't believe his or her own third-party candidacy was important enough to carry into the competitive battleground states as well.

A hypothetical Sanders safe states run would face the same problems Cobb did on a larger scale. His supporters in battleground states would feel abandoned. That would split his base. And he would not be taken seriously by voters or the press because he would not be taking himself seriously enough to run in the battleground states and try to beat both Trump and Clinton.

Inside-Outside

Another liberal illusion is the inside-outside strategy toward the Democratic Party. The logic of an inside-outside approach leads increasingly inside in the party. To be accepted inside one must disavow outside options. Bernie Sanders conceded to this logic from the start of his campaign when he said would support the Democratic nominee and not run as an independent.

If Sanders had not made that pledge, he would not have been allowed on to Democratic ballots or debate stages. Soon after he pledged his Democratic loyalty, Sanders was signing fundraising letters on behalf of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Before long Sanders will be campaigning for Clinton.

When I wrote a critique of this idea in the Summer 1989 issue of New Politics, I was addressing the left wing of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, which proposed an inside-outside strategy of supporting progressives inside the Democratic Party and running progressive independents against corporate Democrats. By the time the next iteration of the inside-outside strategy was promulgated by the Progressive Democrats of America, which grew out of the Kucinich campaign in 2004, outside was now reduced to lobbying the Democrats for progressive reforms. Running independent progressives against corporate Democrats was not part of the outside strategy anymore.

The inside-outside proponents from the Rainbow Coalition believed their strategy would heighten the contradictions between progressive and corporate Democrats, leading to a split where either the progressives took over the Democrats or the progressives broke away to form a viable left third party with a mass base among labor, minorities, environmentalists, and the peace movement. But the logic of working inside meant forswearing any outside options in order to be allowed to inside Democratic committees, campaigns, primary ballots, and debates. Many of the Rainbow veterans became Democratic Party operatives and politicians whose careers depend on Democratic loyalty. Meanwhile, the corporate New Democrats consolidated their control of the policy agenda. And today the "outside" of the inside-outside strategy has been scaled down to pathetic attempts at political ventriloquism - clicking, lobbying, and demonstrating to try to get corporate Democrats to utter messages and enact polices that are progressive.

Party within the Party

The most longstanding liberal illusion is the party-within-the-party approach, an organized movement to take the Democratic brand away from its corporate sponsors. Some leaders of Labor for Bernie have beenexplicit about this. It is what Sanders has indicated he has in mind.

This approach is has been tried repeatedly by the liberal left since the 1930s and always failed. The inside path of "taking over" the Democratic Party has been tried by labor's PACs, waves of reform Democratic clubs, McGovern's new politics, Harrington's Democratic Socialists of America, Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, Dean's Democracy for America, Kucinich's Progressive Democrats of America, and many, many others, including the fusion parties in New York State over the decades that functioned as a second ballot lines for Democrats: American Labor, Liberal, and Working Families.

In every case, they failed. Worse, many of the reform Democrats went over to the other side and became career Democratic regulars. McGovern lieutenants like Gary Hart and Bill Clinton became leaders of the neoliberal New Democrats. The Jackson legacy is a Congressional Black Caucus stuffed with corporate money and almost universally in the Clinton camp.

The operatives and the pols backed by the fusion parties in New York State have not only become embedded in corporate-financed Democratic politicians' organizations, many have been corrupted. By the time it lost its ballot line in 2002, the Liberal Party had become the crassest of patronage machines, brazenly selling endorsements to the Democrats and Republicans alike in return for jobs and contracts. Its successor, the Working Families Party, kept backing Sheldon Silver, the fallen Speaker of the state Assembly (and Clinton Superdelegate), even after he was indicted for corruption. Silver was just sentenced to 12 years for selling his office for financial kickbacks and sexual favors. A top political aide to New York Mayor Bill De Blasio and former Working Families Party campaign manager, Emma Wolfe, has just been subpoenaed in a federal investigation of a scheme to skirt around New York State's campaign contribution limits. No doubt we'll be reading in the future about Sanders activists who became careerists and corrupt in corporate Democratic organizations.

Many are going to believe that this time it's different because the Sandernistas are stronger than earlier reform Democratic movements. Sanders is winning over 40% of the Democratic primary votes. These folks are going to pursue the party-within-the-party. Since it is inevitable that some large fraction of the Sandernistas are going to choose this path, the independent left should work with them in fighting for reforms like Improved Medicare for All even if we oppose their Democrats in elections. If they are smart, they will recognize that the independent left is their strategic ally. Without independent candidates giving progressive voters somewhere else to go, the reform Democrats will be taken for granted and lose their political leverage against the corporate Democrats.

Also if the reform Democrats are smart, they will fight for a membership-controlled party-within-the-party. The top-down mailing list left is the debilitating scourge of progressive politics today. Non-profits staffed by salaried professionals paid for by philanthropic capitalists decide what to mobilize people for, but don't help people organize to educate and make decisions themselves. If the mass base of small donors that the Sanders campaign has amassed is going to fund this reform effort, those same small donors should be organized into local clubs with membership rights to make decisions and elect and hold leaders accountable. For this to happen, Sanders will have to release his 2 million plus small donor list for local organizing. A party-within-the-party will have to demand that Sanders "Free the Lists!"

Vote for the Lesser Evil

The illusion of last resort for liberals is lesser evilism. They call on us to vote for the lesser evil Democrat to defeat the greater evil Republican.

Here is where Ralph Nader is invoked for "spoiling" the 2000 presidential election. In fact, as a major media consortium found in a thorough $1 million recount, Gore won Florida despite computerized racial profiling by the GOP that disenfranchised tens of thousands of black Democratic voters. The GOP stole the election and consolidated the coup by stopping the recount in a party line Supreme Court vote. But, like GOP climate change deniers, Democratic lesser evil proponents don't let facts get in their way. Instead of fighting the Republicans, they blame Nader.

Of course, a left third-party candidate could well be the margin of difference. The argument against lesser evilism is that voting for the lesser evil paves the way for greater evils. The classic example is the Social Democrats of Germany supporting the conservative Paul von Hindenberg in order to the defeat the Nazi Adoph Hitler in the 1932 German presidential elections. Von Hindenberg won and then appointed Hitler as Chancellor.

Hillary Clinton is the von Hindenberg of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Clintonite prevarication and triangulation will accommodate the right and bring us the greater evils we were afraid of. Hillary the Hawk trumps Trump for the neocons swarming to her campaign. She doesn't need the left to beat Trump. She's got the militarists and the corporate elites - and the lesser evil liberals - in a grand coalition for the status quo.

The lesser evilists call it strategic voting. It's really strategic suicide. The corporate center-right personified by Clinton will not defeat the hard right. She will use it to scare the liberal left into accepting her corporate and militarist agenda as the lesser evil. The most effective way to defeat the right is with a left that builds support and power by organizing and campaigning for its own distinct alternative.

Write In Bernie

The Bernie or Bust movement has raised another illusion. If Sanders doesn't win the nomination, then give him a write-in vote in the general election.

At least in this approach they do not lower their flag and disappear into the Democratic Party. But it has its own problems. A write-in vote for Bernie is a vote for Hillary Trump. It's a vote for Hillary because Bernie supports Hillary. It's a vote for Trump because it could be the margin of difference in a battleground state.

Fortunately, Bernie or Bust recently changed its pledge to "write-in Bernie Sanders or vote Green" and the number of pledgers quickly doubled to nearly 100,000.

A Left Third Party Without Illusions

Jill Stein's Green Party campaign for president ought to be the first stop for Sandernistas who refuse to vote for corporate Clinton. Stein will give voice to popular demands and movements and help shape political debate during the election. But more than anything, the Stein campaign is a party-building campaign. It's about securing ballot lines that can be used in future local elections for municipal, state legislative, and congressional seats. It's about creating campaign committees that continue after the election as local Green parties.

Local independent left candidates can win. Kshama Sawant has shown that in her Seattle city council races. Over 150 Greens have shown that in cities and towns across the country. These wins can be replicated all over the country.

Many states have non-partisan local elections where independents are not so hampered by partisan loyalties in the two-party system. Due to the gerrymandering of safe seats, most partisan election districts are in practice one-party districts where the other major party does not seriously compete. A left third party can very quickly become the second party in these districts on the road to becoming the first party. Running serious local election campaigns ought to be the second stop for independent Sandernistas.

Ballot access barriers, winner-take-all elections, private campaign financing, and inherited two-party loyalties are real obstacles to building a left third party. But the idea that they are insurmountable is just wrong because viable third parties have been built and independent candidates have won. The abolitionist, populist, and socialist parties from the 1840s to the 1930s garnered enough support to really affect American politics. Greens, socialists, and independent progressives, including Bernie Sanders himself, have won office in recent decades. What's been missing since the 1930s is a left that understands that independent politics is the road to power and change. Most of the self-described left today practices dependent politics. It depends on the corporate-sponsored Democrats to enact changes.

Sanders' campaign has revealed there is a mass base for left party that is ready to be organized. His campaign shows that millions are ready to vote for what public opinion polling has shown for decades - that there is majority support for progressive economic reforms like single-payer, progressive taxation, tuition-free public higher education, and climate action. Sanders' campaign also shows that millions will fund a campaign for these reforms with small donations at a level that can compete with the candidates of the corporate rich.

If the Greens are going to be the vehicle for an independent left political insurgency, they will need to reorganize as a mass-membership party with membership dues and local branches for sustainable self-financing, democratic accountability, and grassroots dynamism. The Greens will remain underfunded, weakly organized, and politically marginal if they continue to be organized like the Democrats and Republicans with an atomized base of voters who only have the right to vote in primaries, with no locally organized base to elect and hold leaders accountable, and with minimal funding from intermittent fund appeals.

It is no surprise that so many liberal illusions are being proposed in the wake of Sanders' campaign. The campaign itself was a liberal illusion that conflated liberal New Deal type reforms of capitalism with democratic socialism. It implied that the social, economic, and environmental crises we face are not systemic, but simply the result of bad leaders and policies that we can replace. Socialism means a radical restructuring of society that socializes and democratizes economic and political institutions. Without an independent left to articulate this socialist vision, "progressive" has come to mean a coalition of liberals and socialists behind a liberal program. The socialist left disappeared as an alternative voice and vision.

Working class independence has been the first principle of socialist politics since the pro-democracy uprisings of 1848 erupted across Europe and Latin America. Workers found they could not count on the professional and business classes to support their right to the franchise. They would have to fight for their rights themselves. Exiled "Red 48ers" were among the core of the American abolitionist and populist parties in the latter half of the 19th century.

The mass-membership working-class party was an invention of the labor left in the second half of the 19th century. It was how working people organized democratically to compete politically with the older top-down parties of the propertied elites, which had grown out of their competing legislative caucuses. In the U.S., the Greenback Labor and People's parties of the farmer-labor populist movement won hundreds of offices at all levels up to governors and U.S. senators. They forced their program - from greenback monetary reform and progressive income taxation to labor rights, cooperatives, and public ownership of railroad, telegraph, and telephone utilities - into the center of political debate. The Debsian Socialists, many of them former populists like Debs himself, continued this effective third-party tradition in the 20thcentury until 1936, when most of labor and the left collapsed into the New Deal Democrats' coalition. The left has yet to re-emerge as a distinct and visible voice that matters in American politics.

There is no shortcut through the Democratic Party to building a mass party on the left. That shortcut is a dead end. Hopefully, many new activists energized by the Sanders campaign will come to the realization that road to "political revolution" for "democratic socialism" lies not inside the Democratic Party but in an independent left party that is opposed to and starts beating the Democrats.

This piece was originally published at Counterpunch.

Brazil's Gramscian Moment: On Cultural Hegemony and Crisis

By Jacques Simon

With the Brazilian senate confirming Dilma Rousseff's impeachment procedure, it seems increasingly likely that Brazil could soon see the long-loved Workers Party (PT) out of office. Given the seemingly unshakable support that the party had up until a few years ago, the deep political crisis that Brazil faces today may seem a bit surprising. How is it that, after winning four consecutive elections, three by a landslide, the PT's Dilma Rousseff is now facing impeachment charges, and people are in the streets by millions? Why have Brazilians completely turned their backs on the PT, despite it having enjoyed fourteen years of political hegemony?

The mainstream media has identified two main causes to the current political turmoil in Brazil.

The first is corruption. Operacao Lava Jato (operation carwash), until recently led by the now famous Justice Moro, has shaken the political class to its core. Millions of reais flowing from top Petrobras executives into the pockets of the political elites have gotten widespread news coverage. Of course, this is not factually incorrect, but it disregards the fact that corruption has been the name of the game in Brazilian politics since the end of the military regime in 1985.

In fact, Lula's 2006 re-election happened in the midst of the Mensalão scandal, where the PT was accused of buying votes in congress. Transparency International has kept Brazil at a steady 76th on 167 in terms of global corruption between 2012 and 2015, even though the Petrobras scandal started in 2014.

Corruption is such a common occurrence in the country that a term has been created to describe Brazilian institutions' feeble reactions to shady business. In Brazil, when a scandal is said to "end in pizza," it means that charges where not laid out to the extent that they could or should have.

It seems that the corruptibility of the political elite is taken for granted by Brazilians. While it may have been an accelerating factor in the current crisis, it certainly does not seem to be the determinant variable in Rousseff's demise, who, in fact, is not even facing corruption charges unlike her opponents.

The second cause to the political crisis identified by the mainstream media has been the media itself.

Some have pointed the finger at the largely right wing and anti-PT bias of Brazil's largest news corporations. Once again, while not factually false, that position of the media is not a recent occurrence.

The same families have held the five main media companies for decades. Grupo Globo for instance, the country's largest media corporation, has been privately owned by the Marinho family since its creation in 1965. There has not been a recent change in the media's ideological affiliation: the right-wing mainstream media has been a constant throughout the PT rule.

Once again, it seems that this variable may be an accelerating factor in the PTs downfall, but it certainly does not seem to be the determinant variable.

In reality, two things have actively participated in Dilma's crash: an economic recession, and her turn away from the PT's traditional politics. All else is anecdotal.

Let's turn to an influential political theorist of the early twentieth century to further elaborate on that.

This conclusion can be reached by using Antonio Gramsci's concept of cultural hegemony. It might be a bit of an overstatement to say that the Italian philosopher is making a come back. Undoubtedly, most people still do not know who he was, and few are aware of the importance of his theories. It is however, somewhat satisfying to see that Google searches for his name have been growing exponentially since the early 2000s and show no sign of slowing down.

It seems that the global capitalist crisis of 2008, which shook the entire world, has made a few people question the strength and general positive nature of the economic system we are living in. This kind of uncertainty creates a fertile ground for previously outlier positions. In Gramscian terms: such important events destabilize otherwise anchored cultural hegemony.

This concept-that of cultural hegemony-is perhaps Gramsci's most important contribution to the field of political science. The idea is the following: power, in all its forms, is rooted in popular consent. In order to successfully establish a specific way of organizing society, you must first get the local population on board. In fact, people need to be so convinced that that specific organization is the way things must be that they should not question its basis.

Rival ideologies should not compete on equal terms. To take the place of the cultural hegemon, they need first to contest its de facto legitimacy, and then successfully claim its place in the hearts and minds of the people.

In Gramscian literature, this struggle will take place as communism inevitably takes the place of global capitalism. This remains to be seen, but while we're waiting this theory can be applied to smaller instances of ideological shifts. Brazil is living just that.

In order to demonstrate this, let us first take a quick detour by Brazilian political history.

Until 1985, the country was ruled by a military dictatorship, which relied on brutal repression to get its way.

Things changed during the '80s, an active period when it comes to democratization worldwide. Some political scientists-Samuel Huntington in particular-have gone so far as to call that phase the "third-wave of democracy." Along with other South American countries, Brazil saw its military regime come to an end, and hosted its first democratic elections in over two decades.

Since the 1985 election, at least three tendencies have become abundantly clear.

First, the country has had a history of inflationary problems. If we consider the rate of inflation over the last three decades, we see two peaks. The first, in 1990, reached an astonishing 6,800%. The second, in 1994, culminated at 5,000% in June of that year. But even if we disregard these extreme cases, Brazil has had far from a stable economy throughout the end of the twentieth century. For instance, the average inflation in 1987 was 363% and in 1992 it was 1,119%.

The second clear tendency is that when Brazilians are unhappy with a governing party, they let it know with their ballots. The third is that they rarely offer a second chance: the results of the three presidential elections following the fall of the military regime led three different parties in office.

First, in 1985, Tancredo Neves of the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (BDMP) was elected. Though, in a Hollywood-worthy turn of events he collapsed just before gaining office and died shortly after, his running mate and vice president, José Sarney, assumed the role of president.

Four years later, with inflation bordering 2,000%, Fernando Collar de Mello's Christian Labour Party (NRP) was elected with 53% in the second round. The BDMP only managed to secure 11.5%.

The following elections took place in 1994, just after the second inflationary peak. Once again, this economic fiasco led to the ruling party's political demise. The NRP secured an astounding 0.6% of the popular will, while the BDMP came fourth with 4.6%. The Brazilian people where still looking for their party: a whopping 95% of the population was not satisfied with what they had seen since the fall of the military regime a decade prior.

This time, Fernando Henrique Cardoso's Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) was elected in the first round with over 54% of the ballots: a landslide victory considering that the runner-up was Lula's PT with 27%. It is important to note here that this was the most left-leaning government elected since the end of the military regime. While all other parties had been right-of-center, Cardoso ran and governed in a clearly social-democratic manner.

FHC fought inflation tooth-and-nail (successfully-bringing it from an average of 3,000% in 1994 to 7% in 1997 by pegging the reais to the American dollar), opened the Brazilian economy to foreign investments (FDIs augmented threefold between 1995 and 2000), and privatized some industries in order to fund social projects. FHC is credited with creating social security and generalizing taxation in Brazil.

The Brazilian population responded positively to this newfound stability. A constitutional amendment was passed to allow Cardoso to run for a second term. In 1998, he was re-elected with a majority of 53.1% in the first round. During his four years in office, he had lost only one percentage point of support. He went from winning 25 out of 26 states, to 23. The surprising stability of the results of his two presidential campaigns shows how faithful his electoral base was. This popularity was not unconditional however. During his second term, the hens came back to roost: his desire to please both workers and capital created an influx in public debt.

During his 8 years as president, federal as well as state and municipal debt increased more than twofold. In an effort to save the national economy from an exponential debt crisis, and a freefalling export sector due to economic collapses around the world (Asia and Russia were seeing their economies crumble), he took a number of neoliberal measures. He liberated the reais from its US dollar parity, accepted a structural adjustment program from the IMF, and undertook a structural reforms of the economy in which privatization and austerity held a key role. The results where what one would expect: GDP per capita plunged, the value of the reais was cut in half, and capital flew out of the country at high rates.

Following the footsteps of recent history, the government swapped hands in 2002, when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was running his fourth campaign for the Workers Party (PT), won two thirds of the votes against the PSDB candidate. This was the beginning of an era for Brazil, one that we haven't seen the end of-yet.

The PT was the most left-wing government since the fall of the military regime. Under Lula's presidency, real social programs were put in place, yielding real results. To name only a few, the 2003 Fome Zero program aimed at eradicating extreme poverty in the country, the Bolsa Família and Bolsa Escola programs provided impoverished working class Brazilians with an allowance if their children were vaccinated and attended school, and the Progama de Aceleraçāo do Crescimento (PAC) had a multibillion reais budget to invest in infrastructure.

Make no mistake: Lula's presidency was not that of a socialist. In fact, the left wing of the PT was so disappointed with his lack of defiance towards capital that they split to form a separate party called the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL). But Lula did provide working class families with a net increase in their material condition. During his two terms in office, the gini coefficient of country (measuring wealth inequality) fell continuously, the GDP per capita increased substantially, as did the GNI. 98% of people born after 1990 now have at least a secondary education, compared to 70% for those born in 1970.

It was with this kind of mindset that Lula was re-elected in 2006, winning close to 50% in the first round, and then by a more than 20 percentage point margin in the runoff. Constitutionally barred from a third presidency, his protégé Dilma Rousseff ran in 2010, and won by an over 10 percentage point margin. Running again in 2014, she got re-elected-albeit not with as impressive result as previously.

This brief recap of Brazilian political history demonstrates two things:

First, the kind of legitimacy that has been enjoyed by the PT is a one-of-a-kind instance since the fall of the military regime. However, the second lesson is that this support is quite logical. Lula and Dilma have provided the working class with what it has been asking for since 1985: a stable democracy, and material returns for the working class.

From a Gramscian perspective, this legitimacy is rooted in cultural hegemony. Indeed, PT rule and the political scene since Lula's arrival in power have been causally linked in popular conscience. This means that any opposing ideology has an uphill battle before it: that of discrediting PT's social democracy.

As of now, the PT has won four consecutive presidential elections in Brazil; half of all those that have taken place since the end of the military regime. For a time, Lula's party looked like it was the country's natural party, as if the PT and the Brazilian people had some sort of indivisible bond. So how did we arrive to the place where we are now?

According to Gramsci, cultural hegemony is essential for the ruling class. The PT has undoubtedly acquired something of that nature. It has offered Brazil social democracy. It promised a capitalistic system with real returns for the people, and, to some extent, has delivered. The material condition of a large amount of people increased impressively during the Lula era and, to a lesser extent, during Dilma's early days. But if there is one thing capitalism has shown, it is that these kinds of honeymoon periods are always finite, and at some point the economy contracts over its own weight.

The party's cultural hegemony rested on two things: a booming economy, and social democratic policies. Both fell apart in the last two years. First, the country's rise to economic prosperity came to a halt. The economy that the PT had created was highly dependant on exports to countries like China or the US. With these countries' economies contracting, the model ceased to work. Brazil's GDP growth was divided by two between 2011 and 2012. The reais has plummeted in face of the US dollar since 2011.

Between mid-August 2014 and today the Petrobras stock, Brazil's largest company worth about 10% of the country's GDP has fell from $23.35 to $8.44. Brazil, in other terms, is facing the harsh realities of capitalism.

This left Dilma with two options: either take a left-wing approach and handle the crisis by stimulating demand, nationalizing big industries, and reforming the tax code to take money where it is, or, take the right-wing path.

She chose the latter.

2015 was the year of austerity in Brazil. Budget cuts, backpedalling on investment programs, cuts to social security… the Rousseff government fell to right-wing pressure and implemented capital-friendly policies. This came after she had won the elections one-year prior with a left wing discourse. This shift in position was one of many blows to the PT's cultural hegemony. By disavowing her party's traditional positions, Dilma legitimized dissident opinions. It is thus unsurprising that the lion's share of her critics, Temer included, come from her political right.

Indeed, now that Dilma is, at least temporarily, out of office, the interim government has already called for widespread neoliberal policies, which include cuts in public spending, decreases in welfare, and cutting jobs from the federal government.

The Rousseff government has dug its own grave by coming back on settled questions. The president and her administration have broken the ideological continuity of the PT rule, which in turn destabilized the foundation of their authority. She opened a door to her right, which allowed contestation. With the hegemonic left-wing personalities turning to neoliberalism, nothing was keeping public opinion from going in that direction.

The demographic participating in the ongoing protests further proves this. One image speaks volumes about the kind of people fuelling these events. A visible rich, white couple is seen marching alongside a baby carriage pushed by a black nanny. This photo sparked mass criticism in Brazil-a country where the racial and wealth divide is still very much a reality. Some have even reported protesters drinking champagne at anti-PT events. This segment of the Brazilian population is the one represented in Temer's provisional government. Clearly, what is being witnessed is not an uproar from impoverished favela youths, but rather a movement that is largely dominated by white, upper-middle-class individuals, whose right-wing bias has been gaining traction through legitimization.

Worst of all, a specter is haunting Brazil-the specter of inflation. Granted, we are far from the four digit numbers that plagued the country in the late '80s and mid '90s. But nonetheless, since 2014, inflation has almost double from about 5.5% to 10.5%-well above the average of 4% that the country had become accustomed to during Lula's time. In fact, 2015 was the year with the highest rate of inflation since the country has been under PT rule. This has sparked some concern amongst the general population, who fear the return of hyperinflationary pressure.

The point is the following: The PT had acquired a cultural hegemony, which mechanically provided it with popular legitimacy. The schematic being used, however, was based on a capitalistic logic of economics, which is fragile and ultimately unsustainable. When the inevitable turmoil arrived, the PT could have taken measures to ensure that material benefits from the working class were not withdrawn, but decided to dive into neoliberal reforms instead. By backpedalling away from their own logic, which was the backbone of their cultural hegemony, the PT delegitimized their position, providing a fertile ground for ideological debate. This is why the right-wing media and corruption scandals are gaining traction today, even though they have always been around.

This leaves Brazil in quite an awkward situation. The population is disillusioned by the Left and is turning to the Right in order to solve their problems. Presumably, this is a bad idea. But not all hope is lost. The possibility of having a new Left rise from the old one's ashes is still possible. For that, however, there would need to be a conscious effort to establish a new cultural hegemony.

Jacques Simon is a French national, currently studying politics at the University of Ottawa in Canada. His interests include political economy, comparative politics, and the study of radical politics.

Art, Race, and Gender: An Interview with Son of Baldwin

By Devon Bowers

Below is a transcript interview I had with the founder and operator of the Facebook page, Son of Baldwin, where we discuss comic books as a political medium and also as it relates to and in many ways reflects the current racial and gender structures we see in society.

What made you interested in comics? For me, personally, comics were an extension of my interest and enjoyment of animation.

My father bought me my very first comic books when I was four years old and I was hooked instantaneously. At that point, I had already been introduced to super heroes via the 1973 Super Friends cartoon and then the 1975 Wonder Woman television series. I was fascinated with the idea of these larger-than-life characters with incredible powers who used those powers to protect defenseless people from the evil and corrupt. That resonated with me on a primal level. Forty years later, it still does.

Comic books are the reason I'm a writer today. My earliest writings were me attempting to create my own superhero stories. Additionally, two superheroes in particular played a major role in the shaping of the very unsophisticated political consciousness of my childhood:Wonder Woman and her black sister, Nubia. Wonder Woman comics were filled with stories that touched on very basic, elementary feminist principles. And with the introduction of Nubia, a very clumsy race awareness was brought to the fore. Both impacted me in ways that I can't fully articulate, but suffice to say, they were my first child-like understandings of identity.

The fact that these were female characters was quite important. I wasn't drawn to Superman orBatman, or even Black Lightning and Black Panther in the same way. I believe that I was rejecting, on some subconscious level, the narrowness and rigidness of a particular brand of masculinity and the increasing and needless violence that came along with it. Wonder Woman and Nubia-with their bold strength, unabashed femininity, and desire to teach first and punch only if they had no other choice-seemed more balanced and free. The escapist fantasies I had with them allowed me the room to safely explore other, queerer aspects of myself, aspects that I was only beginning to become aware of and understand. At four years old, I couldn't know that this is what was happening, but looking back, it makes a great deal of sense.

Given the fact that so many movies and shows are flourishing due to diversity, why don't you think that companies don't have more diverse characters, if for no other reason than to cash in?

There are a great number of experts, theorists, and thinkers who believe racism, sexism, and other forms of institutional bigotry are tied to economics. The prevailing wisdom goes something like: to rid ourselves of these evils, we must disconnect them from their economic incentive; we must make bigotry unprofitable. But what that class analysis fails to contend with are the psychological benefits of bigotry. Bigoted ideology helps oppressive groups feel good about their actions, beliefs, practices, and thoughts. It warps their perception of reality so that any evidence contrary to their false ideas of supremacy are discarded and discounted. They'll invent flimsy excuses to uphold the status quo in the face of utter ruin. This benefit is separate from economics. It lives in that mental and emotional realm that allows poor white people, for example, to say: "I may be poor, but at least I'm not black!" or straight black people to say, "I may be black, but at least I'm not queer."

So when the research shows that inclusive media is actually more profitable than exclusive media , they regard that data as suspect and reject it. Simultaneously, when the exclusive media they promote fails financially, they behave as though they're baffled in regard to why that might be and continue to make more of the same stuff in the face of utter failures. As a last resort, they might test the research by releasing inclusive media, but that's always a game of gotcha. If the media does well, they say it's a fluke. If it does poorly, then it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It doesn't matter if what they thought was inclusive was actually tokenism dressed in offensive stereotypes. It doesn't matter how many inclusive forms of media do well or how many exclusive forms of media fail. The bigot isn't operating from a logical, rational, common-sense perspective. Even the capitalist bigot will choose losing money over allowing marginalized peoples and perspectives centralized locations in the production of media-especially marginalized peoples and perspectives they can't control.

Would you say that comics can be used effectively as a means of political engagement on some level?

Absolutely. I'd be loath to give my nieces and nephews a comic book without first reading it and then reading it with them, though. Many comic books contain really toxic messages about race, gender, gender identity, sexuality, disability, etc. I think comic books politically engage children in ways that I find abhorrent. Most comics teach kids that physical violence is the way to solve most problems; that women should always be subject to the gaze and whims of men; that queer people don't exist, or if they do, it's as the strange punchline or comic relief; that being disabled is the worst thing in the world to be and must be "corrected"; that all races should be subordinate to the white race, and so on. It's very, very rare that I come across comics that I would give to the children in my family (Princeless is a pretty good one). But I do find that my adult friends and family are politically engaged with the comic books they read. Mostly though, they, like me, find themselves in opposition to the overt and covert sociopolitical messages in them. Most mainstream comic books, I'm convinced, are created for white, heterosexual, cisgender, non-disabled men-which makes sense since that demographic, by and large, is the one creating them.

What are your thoughts on the fact that Scarlett Johansson is playing Major Motoko in an upcoming Ghost in the Shell movie ? Do you think that this is being used as a ploy of sorts to get people from criticizing Marvel for not creating a standalone Black Widow movie?

Scarlett Johansson to be playing an Asian character is blatant racism; it's yellowface. There's just no other way for me to view it. It's bold and proud racism masquerading as a necessary casting choice. Racists will always try to justify their racism and, in the justification, attempt to remove the racism label: "It was an economic decision! And Johansson is popular, so…!" They say that as though either of those plea cops shield them from the racist label. They don't. Racism is racism irrespective of the "justification."

There's just no way in the world I will see Ghost in the Shell without an Asian actor in the lead role. Period. The end. That goes for Doctor Strange, too. Ain't no way I'm supporting that film either. My response to Hollywood racism is to do everything in my power to ensure that their racist products fail. Not that they'd ever learn their lesson: How many Exodus' or Gods of Egypts have to flop before they get it? I learned that they don't want to get it. They dismiss my views by calling me a SJW (social justice warrior)-a term that they seem to think is a slur, which reveals much more about them than it does about me-and whining about how hard it is not to be a bigot.

So instead of trying to persuade bigots why it's wrong to be bigots, I give my money to those who already know why. That's why I make it my business to support ARRAY.

As far as a Black Widow stand-alone film , I don't think there's any way Marvel can protect itself from that criticism. There is no sleight-of-hand they can pull that could distract anyone from something so obviously and egregiously sexist.

Regarding the role of women in the comic book industry, would you say that there is some room for women in the industry in terms of women taking the lead in creating and producing comics?

I wish I could say yes. The industry is so incredibly hostile to women, though. Like openly hostile; so openly that it seems almost built into the industry's design.

For example, there's this situation at DC Entertainment where one of the senior editors has been repeatedly accused of sexual harassment-for years and years, by many women-and only now, after one woman spoke publicly and other survivors of this man's behavior spoke up and social media got a hold of their testimonies-is DC "investigating." And they made sure to use DC Entertainment Diane Nelson to make the public statement about the investigation in an oh-so-cynical Public Relations 101 stunt move. Like that wasn't absolutely transparent. It's almost like if the public never found out about the allegations, DC would have been content with allowing it to continue, like sexual harassment is a normal part of their professional culture.

And it's not just the publishers; it's the audience, too. Women have complained of harassment and worse at comic conventions and other comic-related spaces including comic book retail stores. And don't venture into the comment sections at every comic book news site or message board. Misogyny is a staple. If you were a woman, would you feel welcome in such a vicious environment?

And it's a shame that this is the state of the industry because there are so many talented female creators and eager female readers who could help boost the industry's lagging sales-especially DC's, whose market share continues to shrink.

I find it strange in some ways (though in some ways not), that in many cartoons such as Justice League Unlimited that have strong, well-liked female characters such as Vixen and Hawkgirl and yet people seem to think that movies or shows based on those characters wouldn't succeed. Why would you say that is?

The answer is bigotry. Bigots cannot understanding centering anything outside of their identity sphere. It doesn't matter how many times Batman, Spider-Man, or Superman fail, they will be given multiple chances to succeed. Because they are perceived as having inherent value due to merchandising, etc. But if Vixen was given as many chances to find her stride as Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman have over these many decades, maybe she would eventually find her popularity as well. Though I must say, Vixen comes out of a kind of stereotype about black women's sexuality and womanhood; a white, patriarchal gaze which regards it as animalistic, base, degenerate, evil, and wayward. Vixen needs a black woman writer to redeem and revitalize her, and remove her from the clutches of the white supremacist sensibility that imagined her. There's a dope character in there somewhere, but a black woman's vision is needed to realize it.

How are cartoons used to enforce gender roles? I say this as the show Young Justice was canceled by DC as they thought that women wouldn't purchase toys of the largely male cast. ( http://io9.gizmodo.com/paul-dini-superhero-cartoon-execs-dont-want-largely-f-1483758317 )

It's funny you should ask this. I just wrote an essay about a superhero cartoon called DC Super Hero Girls for The Middle Spaces that explores, in some ways, the function of cartoons.

What I've come to understand is that most American media aimed at children is propaganda designed to enforce very conservative and harmful ideas about class, disability, gender, gender identity, nationality, race, sexuality, and Otherness in general. There are some exceptions ( Steven Universe may be one, though I have some minor issues with that show as well that I hope someone can correct; but that's the topic of another conversation). But for the most part, this media is attempting to indoctrinate children into becoming a very specific kind of citizen, a very specific kind of laborer, a very specific kind of taxpayer, a very specific kind of soldier, to practice a very specific kind of religion, to form a very specific kind of family-and all of those things lean noticeably to the right.

That's why we have toy commercials where only boys play with racing cars and only girls play with dolls. Shit, we even call boys' dolls "action figures" to ensure that the line between genders is solidly drawn. Cartoons, which are little more than 15- and 30-minute commercials for toys and games, are design to reinforce these outdated and limiting notions. And, unfortunately, adults have been indoctrinated far longer than children. So most adults act as the police force ensuring their children absorb these restrictive, reductive ideas.

Why do you think that so many people who are into comics want to keep the entire medium to a small few, denigrating people who are just learning about the comics or who became interests in them via the movies as not being 'true fans?' Doesn't that hurt them in a sense as a major reason comic book movies were/are being made is because of those people who haven't yet/don't read the comics?

People, I've come to understand, are afraid of change. We become anxious when we perceive that something might change because we allowed some other group to be included. The comic book fanatic that denigrates new readers because they think the new readers might cause the industry to alter its priorities and storytelling to accommodate the new reader has much in common with the xenophobe who wants to build a wall at the southern border to keep Mexicans out of the United States because they think the Mexicans will "steal their jobs." Those fears are family. They live together. And they will, thankfully, die together. It's inevitable. They're scared of that, too.

What comics/graphic novels would you say had an impact on you on a personal level and why did they have such a major impact? [For me, I would say Solanin, Blankets, and Not Simple.]

I love this question. There are a few. I tend to like comic books/graphic novels that make me think, that make me question things, that encourage me to envision a better world and a better way of life, and invite me to be a better human being:

Erika Alexander and Tony Puryear's Concrete Park is the very first comic book/graphic novel that I've ever read about people of color that wasn't plagued by the white gaze. It's the very first comic book I've encountered in which people of color are centralized, are the default, belong in the landscape, are the norm. It's the very first comic book that I felt didn't ask permission to exist in this state. It avoids stereotypes. It allows its characters the full realm of humanity and is unapologetic in allowing its Blackness to begin with a capital B. And it's a Blackness that wasn't imagined by white folks who listen to rap music and had a black roommate in college so now they think they're experts on black people even though all they can manage to conjure is black pathology. With beautiful writing and beautiful art, this comic, more than any other, provides a way for me to envision fully realized black characters in my own stories.

Phil Jimenez 's Otherworld was such a smart examination of sociopolitical hierarchy. The backdrop was Celtic myth and science fiction, but the heart of the story was about the lovelessness that defines contemporary conservative ideology and how it can only lead to human extinction. Art wise, every page is a masterpiece. Every detail is rendered meticulously. And the colors were outrageous. The series only lasted seven issues when it was scheduled to go for 12. So I never got to read the conclusion, but what I did read impacted my personal politics in a very profound way.

Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie's Young Avengers broke all of the rules in terms of narrative and visual storytelling, and did so with elegance, grace, and aplomb. They literally broke the boundaries of the panels in their stories-the art often allowed the characters to actually use the white space between panels as weapons! And then they broke one of the biggest boundaries of all: In their final issue, they revealed that every member of the team was queer. Basically, all the things the industry would have said couldn't be done because it would affect sales, they did. Their fearlessness bolstered my own.

Robert Jones, Jr. is a writer from Brooklyn, N.Y. He earned both his B.F.A. in creative writing and M.F.A. in fiction from Brooklyn College. His work has been featured in The New York Times , Gawker , The Grio , and the Feminist Wire . He is the creator of the social justice social media community, Son of Baldwin, which can be found on Facebook , Google Plus , Instagram , Medium , Tumblr , and Twitter . His first novel is in the revision stage and he's currently working on the second.

Marxism, Intersectionality, and Therapy

By David I. Backer

Intersectionality and marxism are not on great terms, supposedly.[1] While some thinkers and activists recognize the need for intersectional insights in research and organizing, others maintain more negative attitudes and analyses towards such insights. The negative attitudes and analyses combine a new resent with the old tension between feminist and poststructuralist critiques of Marxist theory and the latter, sometimes named "identity politics" or "identarian politics." While intersectionalists claim that race, class, and gender (and other categories and discourses) compound, mingle, and mix in unique ways during particular events and experiences, Marxists allege that class trumps all with respect to oppression. The intersectionalists call for specific and particularized redress of compounded oppressions which sometimes do not include class or, in other cases, are lost when class is the sole focus (or any single category of oppression by itself). The Marxists, on the other hand, call for changing the relations of production, focusing on class. Racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and other oppressions will be ameliorated, or at least the conditions for their amelioration can only begin, after that shift in exploitative, alienating, and degrading relations of capitalist production. The debate leaves two conflicting camps on the Left. One with a particularized sensitivity to the complex layers of oppression, and the other with a fervent clarity regarding the link in the chain of domination which, if broken, will release the people from their bonds.

The choice is ultimately a false one, though the divisiveness it inspires is real. The matter deserves special attention, and some have begun to seriously consider it.[2] I want to focus on the term "relations of production," since, for the Marxists, everything comes down to a shift in these relations. Thinkers as diverse as G.A. Cohen and Louis Althusser confirm, in their readings of Marx, that relations of production are what defines a social formation as any given moment: you can have any set of productive forces, but the kind of society you have--the modes of production--is largely defined by the relations of production. Looking at the term "relations of production" again shows that the tension between intersectionality and Marxism is, frankly, dumb.

Marx defines production, at least in the Grundrisse, as tackling nature and making our lives together. [3] A "relation" of production is a kind of dynamic which forms between people when making their lives together, as well as a dynamic which forms between people and nonhuman things (like the means of production).[4] Marx's German word for "relation" in "relation of production" is Verhältnis. In the Grundrisse and the crucial opening chapters of Capital Vol. 1, the term has two meanings which fit with the definition I just gave.[5] The first meaning is in the sense of a mathematical ratio: a relation of production can mean an absolute or relative value of commodities in terms of other commodities, like prices or wages, for example. The second meaning is in the sense of person-to-person interactions like speech, action, and working together.

This division is useful for distinguishing different kinds of Marxist critique that have evolved over the years, one example being the critical theorists' distinction between recognition and redistribution (Nancy Fraser's is the best articulation of this [6]). Take exploitation of labor, for example. Exploitation, in its distributive sense, occurs as a mathematical allotment based on the value of work completed and value received in exchange for that work. It is a mathematical relation between employer and employee. The value of work completed is always greater than the value in wages received, leaving employees bereft of the full value of their work. You can never be paid fully for what you do when you work for a wage, since the wage relation is an exploitative relation of production. Exploitation in its recognitive sense, in contrast (sometimes called alienation), refers to what it's like when people are exploited, both subjectively and intersubjectively (think Hegel's master-slave dialectic). The distributive sense of "relation of production" is mathematical and the recognitive sense of "relation of production" is more subjective, identarian.

Here's my claim. We should read Marx as saying that relations of production are both recognitive and distributive: that a single relation of production has a recognitive and redistributive aspect. There are two meanings of "relation of production," so why shouldn't the term mean both? Making our lives together in production requires both recognition between persons and mathematical ratios in the distribution of resources among persons. Recognition and distribution are two senses of the same notion, two moments of one dynamic, two sides of the same coin: they are simultaneously occasioned in any given relation of production.

If a relation of production is both redistributive and recognitive, then changing the relations of production requires changing both recognition and redistribution. To reverse oppression, in other words, both are necessary and sufficient. Neither on its own is enough for revolution. Making life together justly--an emancipatory production--means having just distributions and just recognitions. The Verhaltnissen in a just society has to have each of these, conjoined, not a disjunction or causal implication. Thinking one is more important than one or the other, or that somehow one must be antecedent to the other, is dumb. Changing relations of production means changing ratios of distribution and changing interative practices so that they are recognitive and not misrecognitive.

Radicals in the past have understood this point clearly. Fred Hampton understood it very clearly, as did many members of the Black Panther Party and others in the Black Power movement of the 1960s. Even Lenin and Marx showed evidence of understanding this point, specifically regarding the United States. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor talks about this inclusive tradition in her excellent new book, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. [7] Though they may not have put it in these terms, some of the most effective activists and deepest radical thinkers in the leftist tradition understood that relations of production are dynamics composed of recognition and distribution, especially in the United States context.

There are at least two important kinds of oppression which flow from the two senses of "relation of production," whose conceptual relationship has been poorly formulated: distributive oppression and misrecognitive oppression. The dumb question to ask is: What causal role does an exploitative mathematical ratio of distribution play in oppression, generally speaking? How important is the first sense of verhaltnisse to the second?

One position, taken by some Marxists, is that there is a direct causal link between the two, going one way. If the mathematical ratio is evened out, if there are widespread non-exploitative distributions, then oppression's chokehold is broken. All the recognitive problems will collapse, like a body without bones, as soon as the correct ratios are put in place. Another position, taken by critics of the Marxists, is that the two are not causally linked. Other oppressions will survive and thrive (in fact, have survived and thrived) changes in the distributive ratios: women, people of color, marginalized sexualities and genders, and others will face the same recognitive oppressions whether or not they own the means of production together with others.

That these are two opposing positions is dumb. Rather than constituting some kind of crisis for the soul of the Left, they merely delimit two important aspects of liberation that both need to occur in tandem if the goal is changing the relations of production. Recognitive (misrecognitive) oppression must be redressed, and the way in which it is redressed must focus on the complexly layered, compounded experiences and events of those who face it by finding ways to unlearn old recognitive patterns and learn new ones. Distributive oppression must be redressed, and the way it is redressed must focus on securing the right kinds of mathematical ratios in distribution through changes in ownership of the means of production.

Perhaps "dumb" is too dumb a label for this false dichotomy. Given that distribution and recognition are both necessary and sufficient for relations of production, and the point of our work on the Left is changing relations of production, I propose the following. Whenever you start to think that a relation of production is not both recognitive and distributive (or you hear someone else talking like it is more one than the other), this a therapeutic issue, not a political one. By "therapeutic" I mean a kind of problem which is adjacent, but not identical, to the kinds of oppression activist work seeks to change. Therapeutic issues are made of traumas, desires, frustrations, projections, conflicts, and ambivalences. They are social and individual, and they are important for politics, but they are not political. These issues are not rational, but rather unconscious and implicit, and can compel you and others to think that relations of production are either recognitive or distributive, rather than both.

My proposal is that conflict over the hierarchy of distribution over recognition (or vice versa) in relations of production results from therapeutic problems in the relations of activism and not political problems in the relations of production which the activism is trying to change.

I think more people should go to therapy in general, but perhaps Leftists in particular would benefit from examining unconscious ambivalences and conflicts, specifically around this issue. Why would you come to think that redistribution is more important than recognition, or vice versa, rather than part of a singular relation of production? Therapeutic issues create disagreements about the relations of production when left unaddressed, like thinking there is some hierarchy between recognition and redistribution. Most likely, these "hierarchies" are just reified feelings of loss, frustration, or disappointment which neurotic persons have insinuated into the theoretical record.

I have been in therapy for years and I consider it part of my liberation, but not identical to my activism. The therapy helps me distinguish the conjuncture from my own baggage; or, better yet, therapy mobilizes my baggage so it compels me to take a more inquisitive approach to thinking about the conjuncture. These things--baggage and conjuncture--get confused, and the confusion trickles into how we work together to make another society. Too long has activism not been accompanied by liberatory therapy; too long have therapeutic issues been mistaken for political issues; too many political spaces have been hijacked for therapeutic purposes; too many meetings and debates have been spent going in exhausting circles. The confusion can lead to unhelpful splinters, petty fractions, and mismatching views of the conjuncture. Unfortunately, unaddressed therapeutic problems in the relations of activism can ultimately leave oppressive relations of production in place. A unified and inclusive view of relations of production as both recognitive and distributive, while creating access and then going to therapy, might help. It may show that Marxism and intersectionality are on the same side and more powerful when they work together.

David I. Backer is an author, teacher, and activist. For more about him, here is his blog.

Notes

[1] Eve Mitchell, "I am a Woman and Human: A Marxist-Feminist Critique of Intersectionality Theory, Unity and Struggle, http://unityandstruggle.org/2013/09/12/i-am-a-woman-and-a-human-a-marxist-feminist-critique-of-intersectionality-theory/ ; "Is Intersectionality Just Another Form of Identity Politics?" Feminist Fight Back, http://www.feministfightback.org.uk/is-intersectionality-just-another-form-of-identity-politics/ '
Mark Fisher, "Exiting the Vampire Castle," The North Star, http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=11299, Julie Birchill, "Don't You Dare Tell Me To Check My Privilege," The Spectator, http://www.spectator.co.uk/2014/02/dont-you-dare-tell-me-to-check-my-privilege/ My own thinking about this question was spurred by a tweet passed along by Benjamin Kunkel, which said "let them eat intersectionality."

[2] Kevin B. Anderson, "Karl Marx and Intersectionality," Logos, http://logosjournal.com/2015/anderson-marx/

[3] Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Penguin: New York, 1993, p. 85-90. We might reasonably stipulate that most mentions of "relation" (85, 99, 108, 109, 159, 165) are occasions of communicative recognition, though more study of the German could reveal otherwise. Marx appears to write the word Verhältnis for "relation," which can mean "ratio" as well as "relationship." The former sense is a correlation between ideas while the latter implies a correspondence between speakers.

[4] G.A. Cohen distinguishes the term like this in Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defense.

[5] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Penguin International, 1996, pp. 45-50.

[6] Fraser, N., & Honneth, A. (2003). Redistribution or recognition?: a political-philosophical exchange. Verso.

[7] Taylor, K. (2015). From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. New York: Haymarket, 2015, see chapter 7 pp. 205-209.

The History of Education as Colonial Apologist: A Marxist Critique

By Curry Malott

The three interrelated premises of historical development (i.e. the satisfaction of needs, the creation of new needs, and with them, the growth of the size and complexity of society), for Marx and Engels, are universal aspects of history that always exist despite mode of production, mode of cooperation, or degree and form of productive development.

Within capitalism the creation of new needs is driven by the capitalists' quest for expanding capital. The global expansion of capital was already presupposed by its emergence. The colonization of what would become the U.S., for example, represents one of capital's chief moments of primitive accumulation. This paper examines the way history of education texts have dealt with this fundamental aspect of the global expansion of capitalism. I argue that the genocide of America's Indigenous peoples and the theft of their lands have been downplayed in the history of education, even within Marxist approaches. This paper therefore argues that this shortcoming represents an unfortunate distortion of Marx who wrote extensively on how the European capitalist conquerors ruthlessly waged war on Native North America. Marx's last works, his ethnographic notebooks, focused on Native American societies and what they have to offer in terms of social existence after capitalism. The correction of so-called Marxist and traditional history of education texts is fundamental for building a socialist movement in the twenty first century based on the self-determination of oppressed nations and national minorities (i.e. true to the international solidarity of the Marxist-Leninist tradition). However, in responding to history of education texts that align themselves with the work of Marx I do not address their most common charges (i.e. functionalist economic reductionism), but rather, I focus on what I believe is their capitulation to the capitalist conquest of the Americas. As a result, this work, in my estimation, departs from some of Marx's more relevant and important insights for transforming capitalist relations into socialist ones in the contemporary era.

Marx's dialectical approach to constructing historical narratives always takes as its place of departure a critical engagement with existing narratives refracted through the light of empirical evidence and systematic reasoning. The error made by most history of education texts is that the connections between the settler-state, colonialism, and the uniquely capitalistic quest to perpetually expand capital are either loose and undeveloped or they are treated as separate, mostly unrelated spheres or aspects of human society. What follows is a critique of history of education texts' engagement with the colonial era. The following critique of history of education textbooks demonstrates the fields' disconnection with Indigenous studies. I present the analysis as a chronological history of the history of education and point to how its shortcomings can be overcome through an engagement with Indigenous studies (see, for example, Coulthard, 2014; Mohawk, 1999; Venables, 2004).

The Colonial Era

The discovery of America was another development of the desire for travel and discovery awakened by the Crusades. (Cubberley, 1919, p. 11)

This quote from Elwood Cubberley's 1919 history of education book represents a combination of what the late educational historian Michael Katz (1987) describes as an approach that seeks "superficial causes" (p. 140). Katz argues that this approach "signals a retreat from any attempt to find a principle or core within a social system," consequently, "the levers of change remain obscure" (p. 140). Clearly, Cubberley's explanation for European expansion and colonial pursuits as the result of a thirst for adventure can be described as "superficial." Cubberley's larger discussion of the history of education is unapologetically Euro-centric. We can observe this legacy of pro-capitalist Euro-centric apology reproduced in history of education textbooks in the decades following Cubberley. Vassar's (1965) history of American education text offers an example:

The missionary organizations were far more successful in their endeavors among the Negroes than among the Indians…in this great crusade…developing honest hard working Christian slaves…A large population [of Native Americans were] not slaves [adding to the difficulty of educating Indians]. (pp. 11-12)

While Cubberley's (1919) Euro-centrism stems from his glaring omission of even the mention of a Native American presence, Vassar's (1965) narrative is equally Euro-centric implying that the assimilation of Native Americans and Africans into bourgeois society represents a "great crusade." That is, Vassar presents colonialism, a process that led to centuries of physical, biological, and cultural genocide, as a positive force. Unfortunately, the racism and white supremacy of traditional bourgeois historians was either not discussed by the Marxist historians, or they themselves reproduced it. Consider:

The Western frontier was the nineteenth-century land of opportunity. In open competition with nature, venturesome white adventurers found their own levels, unfettered by birth or creed. The frontier was a way out-out of poverty, out of dismal factories, out of crowded Eastern cities. The frontier was the Great Escape. (Bowles and Gintis, 1976, p. 3)

I present Cubberley (1919) and Vassar (1965) next to Bowles and Gintis (1976) to demonstrate both the difference and continuity between traditional education historians and so-called Marxist education historians on the issue of colonialism/Westward expansion. As previously suggested, Bowles and Gintis' somewhat apologetic statement on the colonization of the Americas is not a position they borrowed from Marx for Marx was well aware of the barbaric destructiveness the expansion of capital had on the non-capitalist and non-Western societies it expanded into.

What is most obvious here is Bowles and Gintis' empathy for the children and grand-children of the expropriated peasant-proprietors of Europe who were "chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers" (Marx, 1867/1967, p. 734). The acknowledgement of the destructive and oppressive nature of capitalism here represents a clear break from the corporate apologist narratives that have dominated before and since Bowles and Gintis (1976). However, at the same time, there is a haunting silence within Bowles and Gintis' narrative seemingly more interested in the fate of immigrant laborers than the ancient tribes and confederacies that continue to struggle for national sovereignty within a colonial present that can too easily seem perpetual or permanent. This exclusionary tendency within much of the Marxist tradition, despite the contrary testimony of Marx's own work, has contributed to an unfortunate misunderstanding of the contributions of Marx.

Even progressive education historians in the 1980s and beyond continued to reproduce colonialist narratives. Button and Provenzo (1983/1989), for example, after explaining the colonization of the Americas as the result of a growing middle-class gaining wealth from a period of "peace, prosperity and trade" (p. 6), portray Native Americans as the helpless, primitive victims of progress:

The Native Americans…belonged to hundreds of tribes with almost as many different languages. In general, they had little in common with one another and did not unite to resist the settlement of their lands by the early colonists. The existence of numerous rivers and harbors, of a moderate climate, and natives unorganized for resistance, made North America splendid for colonization, if not for immediate exploitation. (p. 6)

Button and Provenzo (1983/1989) seem to offer this short passage as their explanation for the disappearance of Native Americans on the Eastern seaboard-an assumption that is patently false. Even more recent history of education texts written from progressive, constructivist perspectives too often reproduce the old colonial narratives. For example, it is astonishing that a book published in 2013 called Education and Social Change (Rury, 2013) would continue to depict American Indians or Native Americans as primitive victims helpless against the powerful onslaught of Europe's superiority.

Fortunately, there exists other history of education texts offering some diversity of narrative. For example, and to their credit, Wayne Urban and Jennings Wagoner (2009), in the fourth edition of their text, American Education: A History, reassess the old narrative reproduced by Boers (2007), arguing, instead, that the colonies were not established with the intention of building a new society, but rather, were a business venture, that is, an investment opportunity. To understand the first New Englanders' relationship with pre-existing indigenous confederacies, it is important to remember that the colonists faced the continent and its communities as religiously-mediated investors who came from a pre-existing English capitalist society that had long been primitively accumulated and normalized and naturalized traditions of private property and a market in human labor.

In Jamestown, VA, the continents' first permanent English settlement established in 1607, relied on a friendly relationship with the local Powhatan Confederacy for their own survival and for the success of their investment. However, the capitalist purpose of the colony, and thus its very existence, presented a major barrier to peace. At the same time, renowned American Indian historian, Robert Venables (1994), makes a compelling case that, before dissolving, the relationship between the colony and the Powhatan Confederacy was mutually beneficial.

…The London Company's investment in the highly profitable tobacco plantation business relied on peaceful relations with the local Powhatan Confederacy. Tobacco farmers supplied Powhatans with trade goods in exchange for food, which allowed colonists to invest their labor in the cash crop not worrying much about food. Powhatan's access to trade goods allowed them to grow stronger and defeat their rivals to the west thereby gaining access to trade with the copper-producing Indians of the Great Lakes (Venables, 2004, pp. 81)

Clearly, Venables does not see the Powhatans' as helpless victims, but as savvy negotiators committed to their own national interests. However, because of the labor-intensive nature of tobacco production and because of its profitability as a use-value, by 1619 a Dutch ship brought the first shipment of African slave-laborers to Virginia to keep pace with the demand for labor. Because of these reasons, it also made more sense to focus labor on tobacco production and continue to rely on the Powhatans for food. Consequently, fifteen years after their arrival, the colonists continued to rely on the Native communities for food, which might not have been a problem, but their numbers were forever growing, therefore placing increasing pressure on the Powhatan's food supply.

The colonists also came to the Americas with an old racist ideology stemming from an invented, Christian-related, European identity (Mohawk, 1999), which resulted in a long legacy of colonists viewing and treating Native Americans as inferior. Consequently, it was not uncommon for colonists to disregard Powhatan national authority and settle land without compensation or consultation, leading to tension and conflict with Native communities. Perhaps one of the last straws was the colonialists' plans to establish an Indian college, which American Indians saw for themselves no advantages. It was understood that adopting the settlers capitalistic ways would give the elites among the new settlers a major advantage by stripping the Powhatans of their own economy and means to satisfy and expand their needs. If the foreign capitalist becomes the ruler of the land, then the American Indians would forever be subordinate in the relationship. Eventually, having their land-base, food supply, culture, and very existence threatened, the Powhatans decided to terminate the colony. Commenting on this decision Venables (2004) explains:

In 1622 Powhatan warriors, intimately familiar with colonists routines from being their primary food vendor, simultaneously struck 31 locations across a 70 mile area killing nearly 350 of a population of 1200. (Pp. 81-82)

In the aftermath, hundreds of settlers sailed back to England. Cut off from their food supply as many as five hundred more colonists died of starvation that winter. As a result, James I took over the London Company's investment. That is, having been operated as a private venture for the first 17 years, Virginia, "became a royal colony in 1624 and control transferred to the Crown appointed governor" (Urban & Wagoner, Pp. 18). While this was an important development, following Venables and other historians, the ten years of bloody war that followed and the ways Indian policy were forever transformed (from co-existence to extermination), have had far more serious implications for the fate of the indigenous communities in North America. According to Venables (2004), "the 1622 attack did more than merely define future Indian policy in Virginia as one of conquest…It encouraged an already existent English colonial attitude of racial superiority" (p. 84). For example, after learning of the Powhatan war, the Pilgrims in Massachusetts erected a fort fearing the Narragansetts. However, the struggle for the Eastern seaboard was ultimately determined in 1633/1634 as smallpox wiped out Indians in a massive epidemic. Puritans, as might be expected, viewed this unintentional genocide as an act of God. Governor Winthrop:

If God were not pleased with our inheriting these parts, why did he drive out the natives before us? And why does he still make room for us by diminishing them as we increase? (Quoted in Venables, 2004,Pp. 89)

Following conquest, which was not the result of European superiority, but was made possible by an accident, settler-state policy toward indigenous communities has consistently eroded indigenous independence/sovereignty. A new Marxist history of education must therefore not only rethink the past, but it must embrace the national sovereignty of Americas' first nations as part of the movement for a socialist alternative to capitalism.

References

Bowles, S. & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. New York: Basic Books.

Boers, D. (2007). History of American Education Primer. New York: Peter Lang.

Button, H.W. & Provenzo, E. (1983/1989). History of Education & Culture in America: Second Edition. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall.

Coulthard, G.S. (2014). Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Minnesota University Press.

Cubberley, E. (1919). Public Education in the United States: A Study and Interpretation of American Educational History. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Marx, K. (1867/1967). Capital. Volume 1. New York: International Publishers.

Mohawk, J. (1999). Utopian Legacies: A History of Conquest and Oppression in the Western World. Sante Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishing.

Rury, J. (2013). Education and Social Change: Contours in the History of American Schooling. New York: Routledge.

Urban W. & Wagoner, J. (2009). American Education: A History (Fourth Edition). New York: Routledge.

Vassar, R. (1965). Social History of American Education: Volume I: Colonial Times to 1860. Chicago: Rand McNally & Company.

Venables, R. (2004). American Indian History: Five Centuries of Conflict & Coexistence: Volume I: Conquest of a Continent 1492-1783. Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light.

The Bosses' Utopia: Dystopia and the American Company Town

By Nick Partyka

This is the second part of a multi-part series. Read Part One here.

On The Value of Utopia

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 on 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 - recognize as 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 as such 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 this is that thinking about utopias allows us to both critique present societies, but 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

In another part of this series I discussed the American tradition of radical utopianism. Owenites, Fourierists, as well as various and sundry religious sects, all attempted experiments in communal living inspired by utopian political or spiritual ideologies. By removing themselves from the world, these groups sought to re-make society in miniature, as an example that could be replicated throughout the country as an alternative to the ascendant bourgeois society. American history also contains a dystopian tradition. Some individuals who came under the sway of certain utopian idea also happened to have large amounts of money, and or were proprietors of large business concerns. Several very wealthy businessmen cum would-be philanthropists embarked on many now forgotten utopian experiments. In some ways their schemes resemble Owen's original New Lanark project, in that a firm's profit-motive was used to argue for less abusive working conditions for workers. I am talking, of course, about the company town.[1] A term now, and for good reason, loaded with connotations of anti-democratic forms of dependence and surveillance, a modern industrial feudalism, that galled observers and greatly angered many worker-residents.

At many points in American history wealthy capitalists saw it as beneficial to construct planned communities for their workers. These ran the gamut from unsanitary ramshackle slums and ghettoes with little planning or services, to highly elaborate planned communities designed according to the proprietors' ideology of choice, in which even small details were prescribed and regimented. In some of these capitalist-inspired utopian experiments, designed to 'elevate' workers, one can see clear examples of many dystopian themes manifested in real-life. Looking at the experience of company towns one readily discerns significant dystopian elements, e.g. some rather reminiscent of George Orwell's now famous Big Brother. The high-handed, obtrusive, and moralistic scrutiny of private life; the regimentation of work and social life; the uniformity of living standards; strictly imposed and enforced moral codes, are all dystopian elements one can find in the work of the most well-known dystopian writers, e.g. Orwell, Huxley, and Zamyatin.

The United States has had a unique experience with company towns, quite different from the experience of European countries. America saw both a greater number of company towns, as well as greater diversity among them. The uniqueness of the American experience has to do mainly with the size of America and the prominence of the frontier, and the small-government sensibilities of the founding generation. That the country was expanding geographically, and that the government was typically disposed to take a laissez-faire stance on interference with the private undertakings of businessmen and entrepreneurs. These factors combined to allow private sector actors wide latitude in their ability to construct ideal communities, that is, communities that were ideal for the bosses in that they served the bosses' interests more than those of workers. This freedom for the private sector has sometimes resulted in neo-feudal conditions, e.g. like those that were found in many Appalachian coal towns, and other times in the more bucolic and rural utopian project of magnates like Milton Hershey.

In the Beginning There Was Lowell

The Pilgrims who came to North America had designs to create a 'city on a hill', a symbol to all the world of how to live justly and righteously. There is a certain obvious utopian aspect to this view. The chartered basis of these colonies, and their need to make a profit gave them some of the shades of the company town. They remained for many years trapped in a cycle of debt, always needing to consume more in supplies to sustain themselves than the value of their exports would purchase. This is one reason that the early colonists pursued whaling, as well as fur trading and trapping right from the start. Beaver pelts in particular were extremely lucrative, and it was the expressed intention of many colonial leaders to use export of pelts to pay for not only the debts incurred for the initial transportation to the American continent, but also the provision, supplies, and other goods the colonists would eventually want and need to import.

A famed British historian writes, "Whoever says Industrial Revolution says cotton".[2] Thus, we should not be surprised to see cotton, the company town, and utopianism come together in the early phase of American industrialization. As such, one must look first to Lowell, Massachusetts where its eponymous founder Francis Cabot Lowell established one of America's first water-mill operations, as well as one its first well-known company towns. Indeed, the town, famous for its past, continues to drawn large numbers of tourists year after year.

Francis certainly had some utopian ideas behind his designs in business, and community building plans. A wealthy Boston merchant, Lowell, toured England in 1811 where he saw first-hand the conditions in the mill-towns of industrializing Britain. What he saw there, especially in places like Manchester, shocked him, as it would many others including Friedrich Engels. The poverty, degradation, squalor, misery, disease, and "moral corruption", which was perceived to run rampant in the new large urban industrial city, disturbed Lowell. Those few capitalists who did have qualms about industrialization, and the rise of industrial society, tried to find ways to achieve the social benefits of industrialization, but to avoid the crushing desperation of life in industrial cities like Manchester. This is the inspiration for Robert Owen's brand of utopian socialism. His New Lanark mill-town was a model of reform, and saw the material improvement of workers and their living conditions as the basis of the transformation of society. It is in this same spirit that Francis Cabot Lowell conceived his American mill-town. Lowell sought to create the opposite of what he saw in Manchester, a bright, healthy and virtuous community. Yet, he also certainly sought the immense profits to be made in the textile industry. He certainly had no intention of operating his business at a loss. Owen, for instance, while certainly a prosperous businessman, had a moral and ideological mission, which balanced his quest for profits, and New Lanark was profitable.

Lowell imagined his mill-town as an intellectually and morally uplifting community, which would fit into the needs of American society at large, and in this way help form the economic basis of an American capitalist utopia. His community would help create that 'city on a hill' so many different groups had hoped to turn America into. Lowell's plan was to recruit his workforce from the younger women living and working on the farms in the area. These young New England ladies would come to work seasonally in Lowell, not become full-time proletarian toilers. In order to attract these workers Lowell advertised the intellectually stimulating, culturally vibrant, and moral upright way of life that characterized the community. He wanted these young women, and especially their parents, to think of their time in Lowell as a kind of preparation for adult life and for marriage. Francis was always keen to point out in his pitch that his lady workers had access to such essential icons of "middle class" life as books and pianos. He also highlighted the presence of older women who acted as supervisors of the boardinghouses where these young women were housed, and who enforced a strict 10pm curfew. Between studying music, or literature and poetry, attending free lectures or other amusements, life in Lowell was supposed by Lowell himself to be as good for the workers, their families, and even the country, as it was profitable for himself and his business partners.

The reality of the life of the town, and the experience of the people who resided in it, differed in several large respects from Cabot Lowell's intentions. Some aspects of the life of the community at Lowell we will see re-appear in company-towns throughout American history. The most important of these is despotism, in one or another of its many forms. The control wielded over the life of the town, and thus over the residents, by the company's owners would work to foster several dystopian and despotic elements in Lowell, as well as in later company towns. The company regimented the rhythms of life in town, fitting it to the needs of the production process, and it announced the progression of each day's routine through the sounding of bells. Workers were woken at 4:30am, and required to be to work by 4:50am. The working day ended at 7pm, and there was a 10pm curfew in town. The bells marked the transition from each part of the day to the next, when to get up, when to work, when to eat, when to rest. This regime was no doubt onerous to many. Lowell's vision of where his workforce would come from soon crumbled, as he failed to attract as many young New England ladies as he hoped. Thus, very soon Lowell and his partners had predominantly immigrant workforce in their town.

On the job, workers were subject to the personal discipline of the foreman. This was usually entirely arbitrary, and workers lacked any recourse against such depredations. Off the job, workers were subject to the scrutiny and censure of a system of "moral police" operating in the town. The older women boardinghouse-keepers were some of the main agents in this network of spies and informants, of which other workers might well also be a part. The company, i.e. its officials, could fine or fire any workers for immoral conduct, like consuming alcohol. Any employee that failed to fulfill their contractual one year of service, because they quit without the contractually mandated two weeks' notice or were not "honorably discharged", would be blacklisted from employment in the area. Workers were required to attend church services, and to pay a mandatory fee to support this church. They also had to pay a fee to stay in the boardinghouses, which apparently not lacking in food, were over-crowded, poorly ventilated, and lacking entirely in privacy. Workers came to live and work at Lowell despite these kinds of conditions because the pay was too good to pass up.

A striking vision of the lives of the women who toiled in the factories like these in antebellum America can be found in a lesser-known work by famed American author Herman Melville. In his short-story, The Paradise of the Bachelors & the Tartarus of the Maids, Melville paints a vivid picture of the drudgery of the actual work of producing cotton textiles in these early factories.[3] Though the workers in his story are making paper and not textiles, the main outlines of the workers' experience would have been much the same. Melville describes the entrance to his fictional, yet all too real, mill in the most daunting imagery, invoking the idea of "Dantean gate" one must pass through. In describing the operations, and workers of this mill Melville uses language that evokes the toil, degradation, over-bearing foremen, the sexism, being beholden to the whims and demands of the company on whom one depends. Melville is just one rather famous example of a common view at this time, that factory work, wage work, was a kind of slavery. At a time of rising sentiment of opposition to slavery, this was a potent objection to capitalism, and to the plans of capitalists, that it was slavery by another means, and not acceptable treatment for white people. This sentiment was also part of the inspiration for two strikes in Lowell in 1834 and 1836 largely in response to wage cuts announced by the company in reaction to falling prices for textile goods.

Utopian Paternalism

Francis Cabot Lowell was not to be the last American capitalist to dream of creating a model community where the vices and sins of the rapidly modernizing world would be excluded, and a more idyllic life re-created. First and foremost of these new modern ills, in the minds of capitalist utopian visionaries like George Pullman, Milton Hershey, and Henry Ford, among others, was labor strife, that is, labor unions. Thus, one of the main foci of the efforts of capitalist utopian was preventing workers from organizing and bargaining collectively. What we will see in each of the examples mentioned above is that these attempts at creating a more ideal kind of life within modernizing, and industrializing American society share certain dystopian elements. The most apt way to characterize the main themes of these capitalist - led efforts at building and operating planned communities is as utopian paternalism. Capitalists like Pullman and Ford certainly saw themselves as advancing the workers' own good, even when those workers' views about their own good were to the contrary. These men thought they knew better than workers what was in their best interests. Unsurprisingly, none of these utopian experiments was successful from the point of view of their founders, since they all failed to prevent the rise of labor unions.

In 1880 George Pullman, maker of the famous Pullman Palace Car, the ubiquitous sleeping car which made transcontinental rail travel more comfortable, began to construct an ideal community on the outskirts of Chicago.[4] The town of Pullman would feature several lavish public buildings, including a library and theater. The residences were supposed to be more commodious, most were connected to natural gas and running water, some even featured bathrooms. There was a wide array of shops housed in public buildings to accommodate the needs of the town's residents. Much effort was made to create a pleasant aesthetic in the town, from the design of the buildings to the layout of the community. Pullman desired to re-create a more bucolic atmosphere to contrast with the grit and grime of the cities. Pullman, based on a firm profit motive, believed that treating workers better would make them more loyal, harder working, and less likely to want to join a labor union. His model community would not only save money by locating workers near their place of work, but also would help to forge a new kind of worker. This new worker would be more dependable, more docile, more compliant, et cetera. This change would of course be more conducive to capitalists' accumulation of wealth.

One thing every building in Pullman had in common, from the work buildings, to the residential buildings, was that they were all owned by the Pullman company. Workers were compelled to be renters, and not permitted to own their homes. The rent payments for which were deducted automatically from workers' paychecks. Not just workers, but also all community organizations, were prohibited from owning buildings, and anyone could be evicted with a mere ten days warning. Moreover, what came to pass for a municipal government in the town of Pullman was completely under the control of the Pullman company. The foundations of community life were only further eroded by the use of "inspectors' by the Pullman company in its town, whose job it was to report on the workers, their activities, affiliations, and opinions. These inspectors were to report any resident who was found to have undesirable or immoral views, attitudes, or habits. The atmosphere of the town of Pullman was best described as a kind of, "benevolent, well-wishing feudalism" with George Pullman as its king.[5] Discontent with conditions in the town of Pullman contributed to the desire of workers to unionize, and helped spark the famous 1894 strike of the Pullman company by the American Railway Union led by Eugene V. Debs. [6]

Inspired to some extent by the example of Pullman, the man and the town, in 1903 Milton Hershey began work on his own planned industrial community. [7] His was to be modeled to a degree after the Mennonite villages familiar in the area of Pennsylvania Hershey chose. The area had one key virtue for him, lots of dairy farms nearby to provide the critical ingredient he needed for his chocolate, i.e. milk. Like Pullman, and others, Hershey was a critic of the growing urban society. The urban environment was seen as morally corrupting and physically unhealthy for the people who lived in them. Thus, Milton thought that by re-creating a more pastoral, healthier kind of life workers lives would be improved. What could also be improved was his profits, by reducing labor agitation. In the same profit-first motive of Pullman and Lowell, Hershey thought that contented works would be more productive, more loyal, workers. In a further echo of the Amish who lived in the area, Hershey envisioned a prosperous community full of clean-living residents. Even more than Pullman, Hershey invested in public buildings in his town, including the now famous Hershey Industrial School which housed and educated orphaned boys. His eponymous town would in this way, and others, serve as a living advertisement for his product, the wholesomeness of the one reinforcing that of the other.

The town of Hershey would also experience many dystopian elements, despite it is founders' intentions, though perhaps less intensely than in Pullman. In contrast to Pullman and Lowell, the high-handed moral despotism in Hershey would be doled out by the proprietor himself. In the town of Hershey, Milton was the moral police; he was also the mayor, chief of police, and fire chief, as there were no elected officials. The comfortable life available to worker-residents of Hershey came as part of a trade-off in which one sacrificed democracy. In exchange for having no control over their community, worker-residents received several benefits, medical coverage and a retirement plan; free garbage pick-up and snow removal; public buildings like churches and schools, including a junior college with free tuition for workers; and, despite having all this, there were no local taxes.

In many ways Hershey's plans came to fruition, and the town enjoyed a fairly harmonious existence for many years. Indeed, it was not long before the town achieved notoriety as a tourist attraction, both the chocolate factory as well as the "Hershey Park" amusement park. The modern world caught up to Hershey eventually, leaving a large black mark on the town's reputation. In 1937 labor violence in the town made all the wrong kind of headlines. Local dairy farmers dependent on selling to the Hershey factory brawled with striking workers. Outnumbered four to one, the strikers were badly beaten and chased away from company grounds by the mob of dairy farmers.

Henry Ford also fancied himself a philanthropic businessman, someone who could help educate workers and elevate their lives. His famous $5 a day plan was built on the same kind of hard-headed, profit-oriented logic we've seen in both Pullman and Hershey, as well as the capitalist utopian visions of the moral improvement of workers. And just like both of these others, Ford's generosity came at price. There was a rather dark side to Ford's desire to improve the lives of his largely immigrant workers. In exchange for a higher wage, workers had to pledge to live wholesome lives, that is, conduct themselves both on and off the job according to Ford's moral precepts. Just as we saw with Lowell, higher than average wages attracted an enormous glut of applicants. Workers came and they stayed, despite the brutish tactics of Ford's anti-union henchmen in the Service Department and the condescending racism of Ford's Sociological Department, because of the higher pay and benefits offered.[8]

The infamous Service Department at Ford was headed by Harry Bennett, a vicious enforcer whose egregious abuses of workers remained mostly secret from the public. He used fear, intimidation, and a paramilitary gang to pressure workers into doing as they were told. The main job of this secret police force was to prevent and disrupt and potential union organizing activity by Ford workers, by any means necessary. Surveillance and beatings were to main tactics Bennett and his thugs applied to suspected union activists. Bennett also constructed a huge network of spies within the company, so that potential agitators never knew if they were talking to one of his informers. Ford's Sociological Department was responsible for turning his immigrant workers into "real" Americans. In a racist and very insensitive way, workers were to be stripped of their foreign customs and beliefs, and then re-made to be as American as apple pie. Employment was conditional on workers learning English and American civics at company provided classes. Intentionally symbolically, the highly choreographed graduation ceremony for the Ford school began with workers in their native dress, and ended with them in American-style clothes. After graduating workers were supposed to have gotten rid of their old ways, and completely adopted American ideals and values.

Ford's Sociological Department was also responsible for a highly intrusive regime of surveillance of workers and their personal lives. Members of the Sociological Department interviewed workers, and their family members, often several times, asking extremely invasive questions about many different aspects of workers' lives. Though billed as a project aimed at social reform, the operatives of this department collected massive amounts of information about Ford employees and their families. How many times they were married, how much debt they had, how much money they remitted to relatives, and whether they had bank accounts, were all questions Sociological Department agents asked workers. These interviews were not one-off affairs. Two, three, even four, interviews would not have been uncommon, and this applies to the workers' family members as well. Workers were lectured by these company-men to maintain a certain standard of cleanliness and order at home. Naturally they were heavily discouraged from the vices of drinking, smoking, and gambling.

Industrial Feudalism

The darkest side of the American experience with the company town can be found in the example of coal and steel towns, as well as oil boom-towns. Hardy Green concisely describes this variety of the company town as, "exploitationville".[9] This title is largely self-explanatory. This is because the image of the coal town, especially the Appalachian coal town, has remained such a vivid part of America's popular consciousness. The reign of the company, its officials and its store, is legendary for its ruthlessness, brutality, arbitrary punishment, and oppression through debt. The famous song "Sixteen Tons" by Tennessee Ernie Ford affixes in the popular imagination the tyranny of the company in the coal town; the drudgery of the work; the inadequate pay; company theft of that pay; reliance on debt, and corresponding servitude to it, as well as the despair and despondency this way of life created. Often times these 'towns' were little more than camps or agglomerations of shacks, shanties, and hovels. There were often few or no public services, and when they did exist workers were usually forced to pay exorbitant prices for the most basic services, e.g. garbage collection and sanitation infrastructure.

Like other company towns, workers in coal towns were not allowed to own property, and thus forced to rent from the company at the prices it set. Workers were often paid in 'scrip', a form of local money only good at the company store. They were thus dependent on the company for everything they needed. As one might expect, workers were routinely bilked of their hard-earned wages by their unscrupulous employers through inflated prices for staple goods, as well as taxes and fees for basic services. Like in other company towns, there were usually no elected officials, and all law enforcement was overseen by the company. The 1871 Coal Creek War in Tennessee is a prominent example of the kind of reaction workers had to the many ways their employers dominated, oppressed, and robbed them. It is also a characteristic example of how employers in many different sectors dealt with organized labor in similar ways. Nor were such practices limited to the coal mining industry. Mining communities all over the country endured conditions, to one degree or another like those of the coal towns, from the omnipresent surveillance and spies, to the tyrannical foremen and threats of violence.

In many cases steel towns were not much better, though the housing might be better than the notoriously poor housing afforded workers in mining towns, particularly the coal towns. Gary, Indiana, and Homestead, Pennsylvania are two prominent examples of company towns in the steel industry. Both projects were motivated by the same utopian capitalist logic about making workers materially better off enough to reject union membership. The broad outlines of the story in both communities are familiar: inadequate, unsanitary, and or over-crowded housing; housing allocated by status; housing dependent upon employment; over-priced rents automatically deducted from wages; abusive foremen acting with impunity; workers forced to sing "yellow dog" contracts promising not to join a union as a condition of employment; no independent stores; workers paid in company 'scrip'; over-bearing moral codes imposed on workers by "moral police". Conditions at Homestead, in addition to issues like wages and hours, were one of the most significant factors in sparking the infamously bloody strike in 1892. Labor strife would come to Gary in a big way in 1919. Workers striking for improves wages, and reduced hours, were certainly also very upset about the living conditions in town. In both cases, the owners, with help from the state, used violence to disperse the workers and repress their demands and their organizations.

American Dystopias

It should be clear, after a look at the historical experience of company towns in America, that, in many, if not most, instances this experience contains many distinctly dystopian elements. Indeed, the experience of workers in company towns across America forms a unique American dystopian tradition, which contrasts sharply with its robust utopian tradition. When we look to the works of some of the great dystopian writers, we will notice the same themes that we saw in the real-life, historical experience of American company towns. George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Evgeny Zamyatin, all present visions of future dystopian societies which embody - in some cases to a fantastic extreme- the abusive treatment and horrible living conditions that characterized the life of many American company towns.

All three dystopian authors depict future societies in which an authoritarian government, composed of an elite minority, rules despotically over the rest of the population. Moreover, in all three, the activities of the dominated population are structured in a way that furthers the social, economic, and political aims of the ruling elite. All three of these dystopian societies make use of some particular combination of omnipresent surveillance, brutal and violent repression and torture, or some form of psychological conditioning to compel the population into compliance with the government's policies. The people of these dystopian societies are led, or forced, to believe that the current order of things is actually for everyone's benefit; though clearly some benefit more than others. All three are portrayed by their leaders as peaceful and harmonious societies, despite the fact that violence and repression, of one kind or another, are needed to maintain order in society.[10]

Whether Orwell's Big Brother in Oceania, Huxley's Alphas in the future London, or The Benefactor in Zamyatin's the One State, features from all three of these dystopian societies find analogs in American company towns: a single-minded and ideologically motivated founder or leader; the enforced dependence of the population on the state, that is the elite minority who run it; the abusive treatment of the population by the officials of the state; an unrelenting and intrusive propaganda offensive against the enemies of the state; monopoly on the press, and censorship of rivals as a form of persecution; universal surveillance of the population by the ruling elite, including an extensive network of spies and informers; unhealthy and degrading living conditions for the majority of the population, but opulence for the elite; systematic theft from, or exploitation of, the population to meet the needs of the ruling elite; thoroughly rational, totally invasive, and frustratingly stultifying regimentation of life both on and off the job.

Conclusion

The company towns in America all seem to share one thing in common, a pattern of boom and bust. This might be separated by decades, but all company towns seem to share a common fate. Namely, when the business dries up, or the industry collapses, the town dies. Sometimes the death is quick, other times long, drawn-out, and painful. The oil or gold boom-towns would be on one extreme, as they could disappear entirely over-night, and re-established at the next site in rapid order. Closer to the other end of the spectrum, company towns collapse because the industry changed or relocated, e.g. Lowell or Pullman. Other company towns collapse because their reason for existing disappears, e.g. the coal seam, or silver vein is tapped out. Sometimes company towns survive the collapse of the firms that dominate them, but as mere ghosts of their former selves, e.g. Gary. Only a very small successful few remain in operation, like Hershey. It is in light of this history of the company town in America that one should see the collapse of Detroit. One industry so dominated employment in that city, that as it fortunes flagged, so too did those of the city. Just as the industry declined, and resorted to new methods to remain competitive and continue to generate the profits shareholders expect, indeed demand, so too did Detroit decline. And, as a result, the city was forced to resort to measures that accelerated the city's decline by encouraging disinvestment, diminishing public services, and eroding quality of life.

To many Americans, fascism, as represented in regimes like Nazi Germany or Mussolini's Italy, is the ultimate real-life dystopia. Many Americans also think that this is a foreign problem, something embedded in the cultural DNA of the Old World. Many think of this kind of ideology is not, and cannot be, indigenously American. Hence the extreme xenophobia that arose during both world wars, and the antipathy many Americans felt towards the early labor movement. Yet, the historical experience of the company town in America demonstrates that these conceptions are quite misleading. When given freest reign, capitalists, have created social environments that resemble quite closely the kinds of literary dystopias that most haunt our imagination. Fascism, in fact, has an American pedigree in the legacy of the company town. The legacy of the company town also quite nicely illustrates that fascism is not only bigoted hate-groups waving swastika flags. It also comes in more patriotic, more benevolent and well-meaning forms, like the kind of utopian paternalism that was evident in most company towns. It can also be seen, naked and direct, in the violent and authoritarian regimes that dominated some company towns, especially those associated with the mining industry.

Notes

[1] For an interesting history of the company town, see; Green, Hardy. The Company Town: The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills that Shaped the American Economy. Basic Books, 2010.

[2] Hobsbawn, Eric. Industry & Empire. 1968.The New Press, 1999; 34.

[3] Melville, Herman."The Paradise of the Bachelors and the Tartarus of the Maids". 1849. Great Short Works of Herman Melville. Perennial Classics, 2004.

[4] See Green (2004): 27-35.

[5] Richard T. Ely quoted in Green (2004):31.

[6] For an interesting insight into the living conditions in Pullman, and the how they contributed to the 1894 strike see; Ginger, Ray. The Bending Cross. 1947. Haymarket Books, 2007.

[7] See Green (2004): 35-41.

[8] See Grandin, Greg. Fordlandia. Picador, 200: Ch.2 & 4.

[9] Green (2004); Ch.3

[10] See Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1949.; Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. 1932; Zamyatin, Evgeny. We. 1924.

Panama Papers: Capitalism Working Well for Obscenely Rich

By John Passant

The Panama Papers show us, once again, that capitalism is a system of absolute greed. It is a system where capitalist governments help their mates to hide their income and wealth while all the time businesses pretend they are paying their "fair share" of tax.

The 11.5 million leaked documents from Mossack Fonseca contain details of the 14,000 clients of the Panama headquartered company and the 220,000 shell companies it has set up for them in tax havens around the globe.

Why tax havens? Not only do these countries have no or low tax rates they also have secrecy provisions which protect the income and assets of wealthy individuals and companies from the prying eyes of state bodies like tax offices and company regulators.

Shell companies mean that the ostensible owners of the companies are often front men and women for the real owners or are companies whose ultimate owners are untraceable. One senior tax officer many years ago summed up tax havens for me when he said they kill the paper trail.

Take Wilson Security here in Australia for example. It runs the "security" on Australia's asylum seeker and refugee gulags, Manus Island and Nauru. It is owned by Wilson Offshore Group Holdings (BVI) Limited, a British Virgin Islands company set up by Mossack Fonseca to protect the true identity of the owners from any governmental scrutiny.

Thomas Kwok, one of those true owners, is in jail for fraud in Hong Kong. The other, his brother Raymond Kwok, was acquitted of similar charges. They had resigned as the directors of Wilson Offshore Group Holdings (BVI) Limited shortly after the charges were laid. Two companies, Winsome Sky and Harmony Core, replaced them as directors. The Panama Papers show the brothers control those two companies.

The reason for these arrangements? Wilson Security would not have won Australian government contracts if it knew that one of the real owners was in jail for fraud.

By the way, Wilson Security also supplies the guards for various government bodies, including the Australian Tax Office (ATO).

It is not just Wilson Security. The ATO is investigating 800 Australian entities named in the leaked documents. The Panama Papers refer for example to Australian banks and BHP Billiton. Banks are involved because you have to get the money out of your jurisdiction and into the tax havens, often via more reputable tax haven countries that supposedly aren't, like Singapore, Hong Kong, Switzerland, The Netherlands or Luxembourg.

Ripples

Iceland's Prime Minister, in the face of big demonstrations, has gone on indefinite leave (resigned) after it was revealed his wife held shares through a shell company in the very banks her husband was negotiating a bail out with. UK Prime Minister David Cameron inherited wealth from his Dad whose Panama shell companies made tax free money for 30 years.

Australia's current Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, one of Australia's richest men, has what appear to be high earning investments in or through the Cayman Islands. He used to have an investment in a vulture fund (a hedge fund that buys distressed debt) based in the Cayman Islands. He sold out of that and bought into some hedge funds (unregulated funds that long and short the assets they hold).

The point here is not whether they are legitimate or not or that the investors pay their "correct" amount of tax. It is that they are part of the game the rich and powerful play to increase their individual wealth and that that game is rigged in their favour by governments too afraid to crack down on "legitimate" investments in tax havens.

So the problem is the tax havens is it? Before we get too carried away with colonial outrage, remember that many tax havens exist today as outposts or former outposts of empire set up to hide the money of British colonialists and capital. Some of them, like the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands and Bermuda, are British Overseas Territories, still under some form of British control. At the centre of these tax havens is the City of London, one of the main financial hubs of British, and indeed, global capitalism.

The US has its own equivalent tax havens, in particular Delaware where half of all Wall Street companies are incorporated for the low state taxes and slack company regulation.

So the traditional view of tax havens as sunny places for shady people is actually not correct, unless climate change has turned the City of London into a tropical paradise.

Tax avoidance

These revelations are not new. They are the latest in a range of leaked and other information about the dark underside of capitalism. We have had the Luxembourg leaks, the Tax Justice Network which estimated that between US $21 trillion and $32 trillion is held in havens (about twice US GDP and five times the wealth of Australia all up), the TJN/United Voice report into tax avoidance by Australian companies, and the ATO release recently of tax data of public and private big business companies which shows that well over one third pay no income tax and the majority pay less than the statutory rate of 30 per cent. Apart from a bit of huffing and puffing nothing has happened to address rampant tax avoidance by big business.

Big business tax avoidance gives the lie to the Turnbull mantra that we have to live within our means. This mantra will be the justification for the ongoing cuts to public health and education, to public transport and to social welfare. There would be no budget crisis if we addressed big business tax avoidance. Our mantra in response to Turnbull should be to tax big business and the rich.

Using tax havens and shell companies is part of a wider capitalist dynamic of hiding assets and arrangements from prying tax and other State body eyes. It reflects the business view that any profit is "theirs," rather than the reality that it arises from the unpaid labour of workers.

As Google Chair Eric Schmidt said about his company's tax avoidance activities around the globe, activities which have seen it funnel almost $10 billion into Bermuda, saving $2 billion in taxes:

"The company isn't about to turn down big savings in taxes. It's called capitalism. We are proudly capitalistic. I'm not confused about this."

The problem of tax avoidance is systemic. It requires a systemic solution, a democratic and socialist revolution o put the vast majority in control of the assets of the world and to organise production to satisfy human need, not to make a profit. In such a world we would not need tax havens and shell companies.

In the interim we on the left must continue to argue for taxing the rich and to build all the campaigns against the injustices social and economic that capitalism creates, including the austerity agenda which is about transferring wealth from labour to capital.

We could tax the rich to fund better services. None of the parties of neo-liberalism - the Liberals and Nationals and the Labor Party - are going to really do that. At best they will offer minor changes as part of a smokescreen to give the impression of doing something without actually doing anything major to upset the rich and powerful, the capitalists, whose system drives them to avoid tax and hide their affairs in secrecy jurisdictions.

Now I know none of this tax the rich stuff will in reality get on the agenda willingly of the ALP. The answer is that when the current or future governments attack funding for workers or the poor, attack public schools, public hospitals and public universities, the fightback against those attacks has the potential to challenge the ruling class and its systemic tax avoidance and secrecy. To tax the rich we must build the fight against austerity.

Originally published by Solidarity.

"Why Don't You Just Get a Better Job" and Other Dumb Shit People Say to Low-Income Earners Stuck in Precarious Work

By Chloe Ann King

For most of my working life I have been stuck in the hospitality industry which is lowly paid, painfully precarious and poorly regulated. In New Zealand, where I live, hospitality employers mostly treat you as nothing more than an easily replaceable unit to turn-over-profit. I have spent over a decade in this industry and as such I have become acutely aware of the fact that no matter how many shifts I work or how many poorly paid jobs I undertake; I will never have enough money to meet rising living costs.

Sometimes, my life is a bit depressing. You know what I mean? I get up, I go and work one of my multiple jobs and I come home. Each week I check my bank balance and I feel pretty put-out about how low my pay is as compared to how hard I worked for it.

Obviously, working hard at minimum wage jobs is never going to land me economic security. No matter how hard I have worked in the hospo industry I have never ever received a pay-rise, not once. The lie of "hard work" serves to convince us that if we fail to achieve happy, healthy and joy filled lives which are economically secure thanks to well paid jobs, it is because we failed to work hard enough for it. Constantly we are told that external factors do not affect us. This type of pervasive 'positive' rhetoric isendlessly used by many self-help Gurus such as Tony Robbins, one of America's most well-known motivational speakers.

The lie of "hard work" is pitched to us - those from the working and lower classes, by not only self-help gurus and spiritualists but politicians and well intentioned high school teachers and even our parents, as being one of the best paths to prosperity. This myth is perpetuated and disseminated by the mainstream media as motivational newsworthy 'human interest' stories. However, there is very little which is human about these types of stories. The core of these news pieces has nothing to do with humanity or being human and everything to do with selfishness and individualism and play on insecurities and our need to compare our lives to others who we think or we are passive aggressively told, have it better than us.

A few months ago the NZ Herald (New Zealand's most read newspaper which controls the national narrative) ran yet another one of these "motivational" articles on a young landlord named Gary Lin. Who has managed to buy up a staggering eleven properties citing "hard work" as a reason for his success. He told the NZ Herald,

"Work hard, work smart, save hard, and invest smart. Wealth creation is not rocket science - perseverance and hard work can get you there."

As if wealth creation is something we should as young people, be aspiring to. In times of great wealth inequality, we should be demanding wealth dispersal not setting out to create and covet wealth for ourselves. Gary, unlike most of us, was given a hefty "leg up" or what we poor folk call a "handout" by his father in the sum of $200,000 as a wedding gift which allowed him to buy his first home which cost him $175,000. I guess for some people money really does grow on trees.

I hate to break it to you Gaz - can I call you Gaz? But "hard work" had nothing to do with your successes in life.

Gaz got lucky. He won the genetic lottery and was born into wealth - he did not earn the money that helped him buy his first home. It was given to him. Instead of using his unearned wealth to help others he made the choice to punch-down and profit off the growing number of people stuck in the rental trap by hoarding properties. Gaz has engaged in predatory behavior by renting his properties out at market rental rates. In an unregulated rental market the odds are never in favor of tenants. As George Minbiot wrote for the Guardian, "Rent is another term for unearned income."

People like Gaz rarely acknowledge their economic success is at the expense of those from the lower and working classes. To recognize this Gaz, might have to feel a little bit bad about how he came into his millionaire property portfolio. He might have some kind of world shattering epiphany that he is not as smart as he believes and his successes are owed more to an ability to stomach the ruthless actions and attitudes needed to 'make it' in a society that is quickly turning into a dystopian one. Which makes The Hunger Games, look like child's play. Sociopathy and luck had more to do with Gaz's successes in life than actual "hard work", talent and intelligence.

Lawyer and anti-poverty activist David Tong, responded to Gaz's flawed belief that anyone can own property if they just "work hard" enough, with these words:

"Motivational read from the NZ Herald: You too can be a rich property investor. If dad gives you a $200,000 gift"

"Hard work" and motivation don't mean shit in a broken economy that was built on the blood, backs and bones of the working class and the most marginalized and vulnerable. Increasingly, accessing upward mobility - which buying property can help you obtain as well as a better quality of life, is becoming an impossible task because of low wages, insecure work and a flooded job market. People are just struggling to get off minimum wage let alone save for a house.

***

The New Zealand Council of Trade Unions states that "At least 30% of New Zealand's workers - over 635,000 people - are in insecure work. We believe it may well cover 50% of the workforce." No matter how hard you work it is impossible to get ahead when your employer only offers you inconsistent hours and denies your basic right to a guarantee of minimum hours.

Casual contracts are used widely within the hospitality and service industries and state that your employer owes you "no minimum of hours." But the expectation is that you will cover and come in when needed and if you refuse you are often faced with penalties. Such as having your shifts cut the next week. Having the stability of a salary as opposed to waged work is a far off dream for so many of us. You can't budget let alone save money for a house when you never know what your pay-check is going to be from one week to the next.

Economic insecurity because of cut shifts and insecure hours has been a major feature of my working life. For example, last year just before Christmas I had my shifts cut in half. I went from working between four and five shifts a week down to only two. I was given six days' notice and when I pointed out how hard this would hit me economically to a Duty manager I was told, "I should go and find a second job" and reminded that "I was only on a casual contract so there was not much I could do about it."

For the last few months I had been back-breakingly flexible for this employer. I had come in whenever I was needed and covered shifts at short notice. I had worked hard to make every customer's experience an enjoyable one, all this for minimum wage. I spent most of December desperately scrounging around for a second job, as did two other workers who had suffered the same fate.

I popped into the same work soon after my shifts had been cut to collect my tips and one of the regulars who had been drinking, accosted me verbally and demanded to know why I was in such vocal support of the recent rolling strikes of Bunnings Warehouse workers. These workers had been subject to Zero Hour contracts, eternal bullying and harassment from managers and no guarantee of shifts or rosters. He said "why don't these Bunnings workers just go out and get a better job". This statement coming from a white male Baby Boomer who enjoyed free tertiary education and did not start his working life off in debt. All is crimson and gold in middle class Whiteywood, I guess.

"Why don't you just go and get a better job?" This singular narrative epitomizes the ignorant attitudes of people like Gaz and the regular from my work whose name is ironically Gary, as well. It also puts the sole responsibility of finding well paid and meaningful work onto the worker, while absolving a government's responsibility to push for job creation which serves their citizenry and the environment and to raise the minimum wage to a living wage, in New Zealand.

If over 30% of the workforce is stuck in precarious work and large sectors of the workforce earn below Aotearoa's living wage of $19.25 an hour, finding "better work" is statistically impossible for a vast majority of us. There are thousands of hospitality businesses in Auckland, New Zealand, and only a handful pay a living wage and nearly none offer a guarantee of hours. As such telling people to "get a better job" is like telling them to buy a lotto ticket and live in hope they take out the jackpot.

***

No matter what the Gaz's, Gary's and the self-help superstars such as Tony Robbins of this world have to say on the myth of "hard work" and perseverance paying off one day, the reality is our ability to access upward mobility; buy a house; obtain a decent standard of living is tied to what type of work you can access. External factors not only deeply impact people's lives they oppress those who do not benefit from certain types of privilege. Not all roads lead to Rome. More often than not for us poor folk they lead to roadblocks and hurdles that increase based on the colour of your skin, the class you were born into and/or your gender, how bodily abled you are and your sexuality or a combination of all of these.

People's situations are complicated and difficult and cannot be curtailed into passive aggressive motivational "one liners" that nearly always punch-down and not up. Our working class struggles cannot be solved by a set of self-help rules or keys or steps which are meant to guide anyone to economic stability and lead you to the life of your dreams and a perfect job. In the book, The New Soft War on Women, the chapter entitled 'Doing Well May Not Work Out So Well', Caryl Rivers and Rosaling C. Barnett, write,

"We like to believe that the workplace is fair and that if we do a good job, we will be rewarded. After all, that's the American way. But this belief is less true for women than it is for men. Indeed, too often women's performance which is stellar gets fewer rewards than men do - even men who are less than outstanding."

During a major speech at Wellesley College, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, talked about the role women can play in politics and public life, she said,

"We know we've got to keep pushing at that glass ceiling. We have to try and break it… Obviously. I hope to live long enough to see a woman elected president of the United States."

Encouraging women to break the glass ceiling is all well and good but what if moving off minimum wage and accessing a living wage, is no easy feat? In America alone, 6 out of every 10 women are stuck on minimum wage.

The Glass Ceiling is so high up most of us can barely even see it. Researchers at the non-profit group Catalyst point out, "[…] when you start from behind, it's hard enough to keep pace, never mind catch up-regardless of what tactics you use." Both Rivers and Barnett went on to write,

"Doing all the right things to get ahead-using those strategies regularly suggested in self-help books, coaching sessions and the popular press-pays off much better for men than it does for women."

As women, we do not struggle to "get ahead" because of personal failings but this struggle is born from structural sexism which creates gendered inequality.

Telling white women and women of colour to be more ambitious and just "work harder" if they want to smash the Glass Ceiling and obtain a decent standard of living is almost laughable. Considering many women, in particular, indigenous women and women of colour, are still struggling to make it out of the basement. Still, self-help gurus such as Tony Robbins preach to millions that none of what I am writing about actually matters: race, gender… whatever you were born as, and into, does not have to hold you back. You just have to believe in yourself and follow the Tony Robbin's step-by-step guide to snagging a life beyond anything you could ever dream of. Which he has called: '12 Keys to an Extraordinary Life'. You couldn't make this shit up. He said at a recent event:

"I don't care if you are young or old, I don't care what your colour is, what your gender is, what country you come from, if you understand the science of building wealth you can have an abundance of it. If you violate those rules [of the 12 keys to an Extraordinary Life] either because you're ignorant to them or you don't apply then, you are going to have financial stress"

Tony, who sounds uncomfortably like Gaz in his belief anyone can become a millionaire, may as well have just said "we are all one"! "Everyone can make it no matter what grinding and economically depressive situations you come from"! And be done with it.

Financial stress is not brought about because you have unknowingly violated one or more of the '12 Keys to an Extraordinary Life' which Tony has made tens of millions off. Violating female stereotypes of passivity have a lot more to do with our failure or success in the workplace than how hard we do, or do not, hustle for top positions and top earning brackets. Rivers and Barnett write, "Competent women violate the traditional female stereotype of passivity. And that violation can trigger a reaction of fear and loathing [in the workplace]."

Financial stress is brought about because of injustices such as the pay-gap and the coloured pay-gap. Something Tony, has clearly gone out of his way to ignore. Self-help gurus and people like Gaz and Gary tend to, "displace questions of social justice and frame their rhetoric by the individualist and corporatist values of a consumer society," as both Jeremy Carrette and Richard King wrote in the book, Selling Spirituality: the silent take over of religion.

Both Rivers and Barnett point out in relation to the American pay gap,

"Hispanic/Latino women have the lowest median earnings, earning just 55 percent of the median weekly earnings of white men; black women have, median weekly earnings of 64 percent of those of white men."

The pay gap for America's first nation indigenous women also sits at 55 cents in the dollar compared to white men, as non-profit AAUW reports. Indigenous women are faced with earning nearly half of what white men do in America.

Similarly, in Aotearoa indigenous Maori and Pasifika women, face significant coloured/indigenous pay-gaps compared to white men and women. TheDominion Post, reported last year, "Maori and Pasifika women are more likely to be in the lowest paying jobs, which increases the poverty in their lives and communities." The Human Rights Commission has been tracking unfairness and inequality at work and cites that Pasifika women on average earn $57,668 while white men earn $66,900. What this data shows us is that, "Men are paid more than women overall and within ethnic groups. The effects increase when combining several factors as is the case between New Zealand European men and Pacific women. These patterns have persisted over time."

These "patterns" of women of colour and Indigenous women being paid significantly less than white men and women, to do the same damn jobs have "persisted" all over the world from America to Aotearoa. Injustice and oppression is locally and globally connected.

A more accurate description of what the aspirational metaphor of the Glass Ceiling is made out of is to say it is made from lead. So many women are much more likely to fall off what Rivers and Barnett have labelled the "glass cliff" than triumphantly smash the glass ceiling into a million little pieces. Following Tony Robbin's guide to obtaining some magical, fairy-tale life, or any other pseudo bullshit glittery guides to financial freedom, aren't going to be very effective for women born into a system which was built to silence and eradicate them.

The only thing I am aspiring to "smash" is white imperial patriarchal systems that at best disempower women and at worst, brutally and often violently oppress them.

***

As workers we are criticized for our behavior whether we are told we need to be "more ambitious" or we "just need to work harder" in response to our perceived failure to land a great job with good pay and consistent hours. I am so tired of listening to people who endlessly tell me to go and get a "better job" or a "real job" (what does that even mean?!). And I have lost count of the times I have been told by people who hold anti-protester positions to "go and get a job" while I am on the picket line or the protest ground. As if the low waged work I do counts for absolutely nothing. As if service industry work is some kind of phantom job.

This is for anyone who has ever told a service worker to go and get a "job" or a "real job": why don't you make your own double shot soy latte, flip your own burgers and pour your own damn beer and make your own designer espresso martini, which costs more than I make in an hour.

When as a worker, I refuse to put up with horrible workplace conditions and hit the picket line or call the Union as a form of resistance I have been called a "trouble maker", "dirty hippy" and an "inconvenience". I am proud to be all of those things. I am glad I stood up and was brave and risked job loss (sometimes I have lost my job for speaking out) and arrest in an attempt to better my workplace conditions. The only people who are "dirty" are those who seize on disaster capitalism and economically benefit from the oppression of others… I am looking at you Tony Robbin's and Gaz.

We need more workers collectively rising up and following the lead of Health Care workers, Bunning Warehouse and Supermarket workers and more recently Bus drivers. Who have all relentlessly hit union backed picket lines to demand 'fair pay for fair work' and better work conditions, in New Zealand. And less people thinking magically one day their lives will get better if they just play by the rules and perform their duties at work without complaint. This is nothing but blind faith. It is like believing in god: no matter how long you patiently wait he is not going to come and save you.

People from the working classes and those who have been in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, disenfranchised from the middle and upper-classes can save each other. But we need to refuse to allow those who hold power to continue to pit us against one another in some kind of Capitalist Death Match. Where the only prize you get is some demeaning job where the wages are so low you have to pick between buying food or paying the electricity bill. Starving or freezing does not sound like much of a "win" to me. It sounds like bullshit.

The more people who push against injustice in staggering numbers the harder it is for the media to ignore us and distort our messages of resistance.

Many people's grinding situations have nothing to do with individual 'bad choices' or laziness or you know, violating the '12 Steps to an Extraordinary Life'. No matter how many times we hear rotten rhetoric like this we must refuse - absolutely - to accept these types of pervasive and dominant narratives. At their core these narratives use shame and ruggedly focus on the individual as a method to pacify and silence. We must disrupt language that is designed to disempower and divide workers while seeming to empower. We need to seek out ways to elevate the voices of our most vulnerable and the messages of people of conscience who can envision a better world and whose political imaginations outstretch the dominant reality.

Lastly, we need to fight and stand with other workers against employers who exploit their employees and view them as nothing more than units to turn-over capital. Jeremy Carrette and Richard King, went on to write in their before mentioned book:

"We are never obliged to accept the dominant version of reality (however conceived throughout history) without question."

Capitalism's Depleted Reserves: Recognizing and Preparing for Systemic Breakdown

By Ben Peck

The capitalist crisis of 2008 was rescued by an enormous transfusion of public money into the banks. The system has been on life-support ever since.

Despite this, the bourgeois see little prospects of a recovery for their system. Rather, they wring their hands and impotently grimace in anticipation of another slump. Many consider this now a question of "when", not "if".

An organism in crisis will begin to burn off its reserves of fat in order to survive. Austerity has been capitalism's economic equivalent of this process. The system has eaten deeply into its reserves, particularly in the advanced capitalist countries. All the accumulated reforms conquered by the working class in the preceding historical period; relatively decent wages, the welfare state, pensions, etc; in order to pay for a system in crisis have been, or are in the process of being, burned away.

One particularly rich reserve has been Chinese capitalism, which has been heavily depleted. In the wake of the crisis the Chinese pumped half a trillion dollars into their economy. It was one of the greatest Keynesian interventions the world has ever seen. Rather than merely propping up the banks, the intervention contributed markedly to the real economy. According to the former US treasury secretary Larry Summers, between 2010 and 2013 China poured more cement than America did in the whole of the twentieth century! Up until last summer a city the size of Rome was being built in China every two weeks. This intervention gave a clear impulse to the Chinese and world economy.

However, the Chinese reserve is now near exhaustion and the effects of the stimulus are turning into their opposite. Debt has ballooned from $7trn to $28trn - 282% of GDP. Imports and exports are falling. The massive economic stimulus has ended up in a massive crisis of overproduction, provoking a world-wide crisis of steel. In Redcar and Port Talbot in Britain steel works are closing, destroying communities. On the other side of the world, the same course is being taken in China itself.

Political reserves

The depletion of these "economic reserves" has had a corresponding effect on capitalism's "political reserves", which are also being burned away. The old political arrangements are falling apart, including many of the traditional workers' parties. According to a report in The Economist recently, the social democracies in Europe stand at their lowest level of support for seventy years.

The classic example is PASOK, which commanded forty-five percent of the electorate in Greece prior to the crisis. On the basis of its complete capitulation to the Troika and the collapse of the Greek economy it has been reduced to a mere four percent. PASOK is now hanging on to a place in parliament by its fingernails.

In Europe in 2015 the social democrats lost power in Denmark and recorded their worst ever results in Poland, Spain, Finland and also came very close in Britain.

In France the so-called Socialist President, Francois Hollande, is the most unpopular leader in seventy years. By attacking the labour laws his government has provoked a mass movement, which on March 31st carried out a general strike involving 1.2m French workers united against the socialist government.

The strike involved a significant participation of French youth, who now compose a very class conscious vanguard of the struggle. These youth did not go home, but stayed out in an occupation of the squares, the "Nuit Debout" movement, which is reminiscent of the Syntagma and Indignados movement in Greece and Spain. These movements were the basis for the rise of parties which have since supplanted the social democracies. It is not difficult to imagine the same process developing in France.

People are turning away from the social democrats in their droves everywhere, laments The Economist. The explanation is not complicated. Where the social democrats offer no alternative to austerity, but instead work hand-in-glove with the bosses to implement it, they completely undermine their reason for existence in the eyes of the working class.

Even in Britain, the two-hundred thousand-strong movement behind Corbyn is not necessarily enamoured with the Labour Party. In Greece, support for Syriza has collapsed to sixteen percent following its betrayal of the OXI movement and its resumption of the austerity programme of its predecessors.

This crisis of Social Democracy is part of the general crisis of bourgeois democracy, which is fast expending its political capital. This is a dangerous development for the ruling class, as noted by the Financial Times' Martin Wolf on February 2nd in an article entitled "Bring our elites closer to the people":

"...we already face the danger that the gulf between economic and technocratic elites on the one hand, and the mass of the people on the other, becomes too vast to be bridged. At the limit, trust might break down altogether. Thereupon, the electorate will turn to outsiders to clean up the system. We are seeing such a shift towards trust in outsiders not only in the US but also in many European countries."

The reference is to the Trump-Sanders phenomenon in the US, which was anticipated in Europe by the rise of Syriza, Podemos, the SNP and Corbyn on the left, and also the French NF and, more recently, the AfD in Germany, on the right. Class polarisation is tearing at the seams of capitalism's political veneer.

Consciously or unconsciously, when the bourgeois start to worrying about "outsiders" interfering in their system, what they actually express is the fear of the working class taking an interest in the way society is run, and interfering in their affairs.

When the next global downturn arrives, the period between that crisis and 2008 will mark a watershed period in the history of the capitalist system. It will be characterised as one in which the system, far from developing, burned away many of the reserve layers at its disposal, economically, socially and politically, which had acted as "cushioning" in 2008.

This will give the class struggles of the not-too distant future a far sharper character. The struggle on the part of the bourgeois will be far more desperate. The struggle on the part of the working class will take place after a period in which sick and enfeebled capitalism has been able to do nothing to solve its fundamental problems. Illusions that previously existed have been burned away, many defenders of the old system discredited. This is something we must prepare for, and intervene in, to build the forces of Marxism.

Originally published at In Defence of Marxism.