For Abolition: Prisons and Police Are More Than Brutality, They're State Terror

By Frank Castro

In his speech "Terrorism: Theirs and Ours," now deceased Professor Eqbal Ahmad elucidated five types of terrorism: state, religious, mafia, pathological, and political terror of the private group. Of these types, the focus in mainstream political discourse and media has almost always centered itself on discussion of just one: "political terror of the private group"-organizations like al-Qaida, the Taliban, and ISIS. But as Ahmad ( and Ben Norton ) pointed out, this is "the least important in terms of cost to human lives and human property." Rarely discussed is state terror, which has the highest cost in terms of human lives and property. According to Norton, Professor Ahmad estimated that the disparity of "people killed by state terror versus those killed by individual acts of terror is, conservatively, 100,000 to one."

Undoubtedly, the professor's observations were meant to provide insight into the material costs of global militarism, where millions, if not billions, have found themselves caught in-between or on the receiving end of state domination. While this may invoke imagery of American drones scalping the Middle East and North Africa for resources, its aircraft carriers patrolling international waters, or even thousands of refugees huddled into camps outside cities under siege, these are only instances of the United States' most visible crimes. They are the sites of its most demonstrative, and yet least diffuse, violence. In the turmoil and spectacle of U.S. foreign policy, often other forms of state terror remain relatively unknown, their intersections with overarching structures of oppression obscured beneath overt cruelty.

But Professor Ahmad's analysis of state violence can be applied directly to operations within state borders as much as it can be applied internationally. Militarism outside America, paired with its domestic institutions of terror, ought to be viewed inseparably as two sides of the same coin. Here, imperial power compliments prisons and policing as institutions for producing obedient, governable subjects, both locally and globally. It does so in a variety of ways: By supplying local police departments with an ever-escalating arsenal of repression, by constantly reconstructing the context for social control, and by extending white supremacy and colonial rule into the 21st century. Combined, governments like the United States' have been responsible for far more terror than any private group, possibly, in history.

Our task is to understand and to decide what we are going to do about it.

Bigger Than Police

Though widely used, "police brutality" is an isolated term. In some ways, and for many people, it obscures the more encompassing descriptor of state terror. Criticizing police is not necessarily an indictment of America's entire patriarchal, white, and capitalist power structure, but rather it pinpoints only that structure's enforcers. It compartmentalizes state violence and creates a focal point that, perhaps, is more comfortable since it feels manageable, more capable of bringing in line with a vision of the world that is not so painful that we can move through it without feeling its weight. On the other hand, "state terror" drafts far more questions into our hearts, the answers to which would indict everything about the world in which we live. And like Pandora's Box, once you see you can never again claim ignorance.

Police are meant to enforce the law. But law in any society reflects the values and prejudices of the empowered class, and therefore provides a measure of control to its benefactors. Crimes in Western society have ranged from atheism to murder, homosexuality to bribery, miscegenation to sedition. The intent of bourgeois law has been to uphold a specific moral code inline with a patriarchal, white, and capitalist status quo. And though criminal acts are committed by all sorts of people, the overwhelming number arrested, convicted, and imprisoned are poor, Black, Brown, Native, and/or LGBTQIA. They are disproportionately imprisoned not because they are "criminal" and white, upper class people are not, but because they have been made "targets of "law enforcement" and are discriminated against by police, by courts, and within prisons."

We have long known that police have been, first and foremost, an institution of terror erected to control the political and economic potential of the labor class in the North and slaves in the South. In the Carolinas in particular, slave patrols modeled the evolution of its police force by providing a form of organized deterrence to potential runaways and slave revolts. Yet a critique of police alone is insufficient if it does not dislodge the entire edifice which mandates its existence. Our analysis must include a broader view of state violence which challenges its moral and ideological underpinnings, and which excavates its techniques of power from the imperial to the interpersonal. After the death of TT Saffore, a Black, trans woman from Chicago, organizers published a statement that captures the scope necessary to reimagine a world without police:

"State violence is more than just police shootings. It is the police and prison systems themselves. It is the criminalizing of sex work, of the survivors of abuse. It is a legal order which treats Black, trans, and cis women who defend their lives as insolent, in need of punishment. It is homelessness. It is the calculated impoverishing of Black communities. It is the closing of public schools and mental health clinics, the slashing of HIV prevention and other healthcare services, while militarization devours the lion's share of public funds. It is gentrification. It is the poisoning of natural resources. It is all the structures-including the police and prison systems-which uphold and depend on violent masculinity, reinforcing the disposability of women and femmes, of trans and [gender nonconforming] communities, of the earth itself."

From Battlefield to Battlefield

War profiteering has a formulaic pattern. No conflict? No problem. The Pentagon will just create one and enrich a tiny minority (remember the Bush administration's claim that Saddam Hussein had " weapons of mass destruction "). The pattern continues by pointing out the devastation of war, then, like a revolving door, it uses the conflict it stirs as justification for more. This is how the United States has been embroiled in the Middle East for the better part of 50 years, how it armed and supported Osama bin Laden as a " freedom fighter " against the Soviets only to later have cultivated the forefathers of al-Qaida and ISIS. Meanwhile, weapons manufacturers have steadily supplied arsenals to the battlefield, and like any capitalist enterprise, it requires new markets-and new battlefields-to survive.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon introduced the ultimate market to arms manufacturers. The "War on Drugs" provided increased federal funding to local police departments. But more importantly, in 1990 Congress enacted the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which enabled the Secretary of Defense to "transfer to Federal and State agencies personal property of the Department of Defense, including small arms and ammunition, that the Secretary determines is-(A) suitable for use by such agencies in counter-drug activities; and (B) excess to the needs of the Department of Defense." Section 1208 states further, under the "Conditions for Transfer," that any property transferred must be "drawn from existing stocks," meaning any purchased surplus can be offloaded to local police agencies with little to no obstruction.

The consequences of which have been far reaching. Today, municipal police departments serve as a release valve for the overflow of military grade weapons produced by arms manufacturers. Amended versions of the NDAA have provided local law enforcement agencies with armored personnel vehicles, grenade launchers, high-caliber assault rifles, and an ever-escalating stockpile of combat-ready equipment. It is not just weapons either. Imperial war has imported the ideology of military combat, blurring the distinction between the "Rule of Law" and the "Rules of Engagement," and brought it to bear upon the intimate details of everyday life. We have seen an escalation of military-styled "special ops" teams within police agencies, the dismantling of the 4th amendment, and heightened advocacy for complete submission to the state in the name of national security, no matter how intrusive.

But no matter what manifestation state violence takes, as physician Gabor Maté accurately observed, it is never waged against inanimate objects, it is waged against people. In the case of the "War on Drugs," "we are warring on the most abused and vulnerable segments of the population," an observation that remains true internationally as well. If there were no wars waged against the most vulnerable of the planet, none to constantly supply with arms to subjugate the poor, it stands likely that there would be drastically less weapons to be wielded against the addicted and destitute in our streets.

Expanding State Terror

As New York State prisoner David Gilbert noted, there is simply no way the "War on Drugs" was a "well-intentioned mistake" with Prohibition having proven such an abysmal failure. Rather, he writes, it "was conceived to mobilize the U.S. public behind greatly increased police powers, used to cripple and contain the Black and Latinx communities, and exploited to expand the state's repressive power." Gilbert's poignant observations notwithstanding, the "War on Drugs" did not mark the first time U.S. government used drugs as an instrument to develop state dominance. It has been done many times before. In " Drug Wars," Professor Curtis Marez demonstrates how the United States has historically wielded the drug trade not to end it, but to channel its flow in order to enhance imperial power:

"The use of drug traffic to support the state is evident in a number of ways. First, the United States has supported drug traffic to finance imperial wars. U.S. participation in the cocaine trade as a means for funding rightwing military proxies such as the Contras could be viewed as the refinement and expansion of the strategies first deployed during the Vietnam War, in which the United States promoted heroin trade in order to support anti-communist Hmong forces in Laos. Second, at the same time as it fostered drug traffic internationally, the state used the "drug problem" as an excuse for the criminalization and suppression of domestic dissent… And finally, the United States has indirectly promoted drug consumption as a method for controlling people of color… Drugs have been deployed, in other words, as weapons of counterinsurgency that aimed to dissipate or sedate oppositional energies."

The techniques of wielding the drug trade have roots closer than Vietnam or Central America. They rest in U.S. attempts to disrupt and destroy indigeneity, first with alcohol through the 1800s, but more recently through substances such as peyote. By prohibiting or restricting access to drugs, government creates the pretext for selective enforcement and criminalization, and ultimately generates substantial leverage for social control. Marez reveals the circularity of this process, noting that "criminalization generates the very forms of criminality it is supposedly mean to prevent, which in turn provides new opportunities for further criminalization." In other words, "the law does not work simply through the prohibition of crime" but also through a "production of criminality" placed principally upon minorities.

Political prisoner Leonard Peltier once wrote, "When you grow up Indian, you don't have to become a criminal, you already are a criminal." Through the drug trade, U.S. government has effectively marketed the policing and imprisonment of minorities as the key to public safety, and therefore marked them as targets of state terror. This unearths how Native men can be incarcerated at four times the rate of white men, how Native women can be incarcerated at six times the rate of white women. It demonstrates how the flooding of crack cocaine into Black communities during the '70s correlated with a sharp increase in minimum sentencing laws that helped put 1.7 million Black people under some form of correctional control. It reveals how native Hawaiians, who represent just 20 percent of the state's population, can comprise 40 percent of the its incarcerated.

It also explains, in part, how America's imprisoned population exploded to 2.4 million since the start of Nixon's "War on Drugs"- an increase of 700% . But mass incarceration, like most drug policy, has little to do with safety and everything to do with the maintenance and expansion of state power. With the exception of capital punishment, the ability to revoke a person's freedom, to condemn one to a lifetime in a cage, is the ultimate exercise of state violence. To visit Michel Foucault's seminal text " Discipline and Punish," "There can be no doubt that the exercise of the [state] in the punishment of crime is one of the essential parts of the administration of justice. […] The right to punish… is an aspect of the [state's] right to make war on [its] enemies: to punish belongs to 'that absolute power of life and death.'"

As we have seen, however, when "crime" is engineered around selective enforcement it is constructed to control the political and economic aspirations, and the very bodies, of the oppressed. Indeed, of minorities and the poor it fashions enemies of the state with the intent to exercise terror. From the origins of police, to the school-to-prison-pipeline, to the vast network of U.S. incarceration, this has been the enduring legacy of the American judicial system-not safety, and certainly not justice. For the legal system which reigns over the poor, the marginalized, and the disenfranchised has not been of their own design, but was created entirely by a white, patriarchal upper class that is incapable of expressing anything but malcontent for those whom struggle against it.

Follow the Money

Answering a nation-wide call to stop prison slavery, September 9, 2016 marked the beginning of the largest prison strike in U.S. history. According to Popular Resistance, an estimated "72,000 incarcerated workers in 22 states refused to provide their labor to profit the prison industrial complex." One of the first of its kind, the nationally coordinated effort has targeted combating what many workers identify as slave-like labor conditions. The U.S. Constitution's Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, at least partially, but it left a loophole for people convicted of crimes. This means that prison workers can legally be paid little to nothing for their labor. Prison administrators, in response, have attempted to break the strike by shutting-off access and communication to the outside world.

Private prisons have morphed into a multi-billion dollar industry since the "War on Drug" started. The companies reaping the largest profits from America's prison industry are Geo Group and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), operating upwards of a 170 incarceration facilities with juvenile and undocumented detention centers included. Earlier this year the Guardian reported that "CCA made revenues of $1.79bn in 2015, up from $1.65bn in 2014," while "Geo Group made revenues of $1.84bn, a 9% increase on the previous year." How the private prison industry continues to increase profits can be explained in one of two ways: Increasing the incarcerated workforce (meaning jail more people) or squeezing existing laborers for more production. For many years it has pursued both.

Of course, it is not just private prisons that incentivize incarceration. There is an entire supporting cast dedicated to its proliferation as well: The aerospace industry and arms manufacturers (which supply drug enforcement planes, helicopters, drones, armored vehicles, weapons, ammunition, and surveillance technology), chemical companies (which produce the poisons often used to sedate and execute prisoners, as well as the tear gas used in prison strikes and protests), the bail bonds industry (which finance the ability or inability for a person to await trial in or out of jail), U.S. banks (which launder billions of dollars for drug cartels and finance the prison industry), and of course numerous politicians (which accept money from these industries in exchange for pushing favorable legislation).

The end result is a sprawling cornucopia of state violence supported at every level of America's social structure-and which relies principally on police for enforcement. After all, we should never forget that every single person convicted for a violent or a non-violent crime, every single person wrongly convicted, every single person corralled for simply being different or standing up for justice, every single person unable to navigate poverty, homelessness, or addiction, who is placed in a cage to work in servitude or slavery, was put there by a cop. It follows that if ever we are to mobilize to dismantle mass incarceration, it must also be a movement to extract the final breath from policing itself, and to abolish for all time every manifestation of state terror.

Towards Abolition

In the struggle for freedom, an abolitionist framework is indispensable. It enables us to identify the correlations between the imperial, the police, and the prison, and to say the name of its intersections aloud. Doing so illuminates how separate deployments of state terror scaffold each other: how, like a relay race that never stops, each cannot begin or end with itself but must always recruit and pass on power. It also teaches us how to better build and sustain the communities necessary to fight back, and how to generate movements that do not create silos of resistance but identify fulcrums to dismantle oppression for the benefit of all. As Dan Berger wrote, abolition "pushes us to think and act better than the systems that confine, cage, and kill," and it "names a past as well as a future: it reminds us… that structures of violence have a beginning and can therefore have an ending."

Because the edifice of state violence rests atop a myriad of oppressions, accepting that any effort to uproot the entanglements of its power centers on confronting dangerously racist, gendered, and classist hierarchies is the first step towards abolition. It recognizes that battles will be waged both within ourselves, as we attempt to deconstruct everything we once believed about policing and incarceration, and in the world around us as we confront state institutions with our minds, our energy, and our bodies. And though our task is enormous, we cannot let the daunting reality of our ambition swallow us. If ever we feel lonely, it is not a testament to our inability to impact the world, it is a testament to the need for connection. The place where we realize our fullest capacity to generate change is in communion with each other.

In 1974, Ursula K. Le Guin reminded us that collective strength is the only path towards freedom: "The individual cannot bargain with the State," she said. "The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself." When we understand the magnitude of state terror, we must remember that we are not meant to suddenly feel inspired to challenge it alone. There is an unavoidable degree of loneliness and helplessness embedded within its realization. And refusing to confront these feelings is part of how the system functions to subvert resistance, by substituting isolation and alienation for opportunities to collectively learn, live, and fight for freedom in ways we may have never dreamed possible. But we must always reserve room in our hearts to build bridges-too many depend on us for it.

In the words of prisoners themselves:

"We need support from people on the outside. A prison is an easy-lockdown environment, a place of control and confinement where repression is built into every stone wall and chain link, every gesture and routine. When we stand up to these authorities, they come down on us, and the only protection we have is solidarity from the outside. Mass incarceration, whether in private or state-run facilities is a scheme where slave catchers patrol our neighborhoods and monitor our lives. It requires mass criminalization. Our tribulations on the inside are a tool used to control our families and communities on the outside. Certain Americans live every day under not only the threat of extra-judicial execution… but also under the threat of capture, of being thrown into these plantations, shackled and forced to work."

Abolition, then, is the only answer to a system whose currency is terror.

Epistemological Apathy and Egomania: The Not-so Mysterious Case of Donald J. Trump and the Implications for American Democracy

By Bryant William Sculos

Over the past several months, there have been a number of articles written exploring how to typologize Donald Trump ideologically. Is he a fascist? Is he a conservative? A populist? A liberal? A sexist racist xenophobe? Some irrational combination of all of them? A cursory look at the comments sections of Internet new sites, the blogosphere, and social media shows that there are a variety of preferred terms used by people responding to the incalculably racist, bigoted, hateful, and often wildly outlandish or incoherent comments and policy proposals of firebrand Republican Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. Most of these labels, while probably accurate, are vulgar and not worth repeating here, but two of them stand out as potentially having a great deal of accuracy and indeed political significance. Trump is often referred to as either an asshole or a bullshitter (which is equivalent to being "full of shit" for the purposes of this essay), and sometimes he is referred to as both at the same time. Assuming that these "expert" political commentators do not genuinely believe that Donald Trump's body is full of male bovine feces nor that he is an exceptionally large anus, these labels likely refer to more sarcastic idiomatic meanings. What the creative masterminds who use these epithets (again, however accurate they are) likely don't realize is that these terms refer to rather well-defined concepts in contemporary philosophy and sociology, specifically developed by Harry G. Frankfurt and Aaron James respectively.

In their respective books, On Bullshit and Assholes: A Theory, Frankfurt and James offer specific conceptualizations of "bullshit" and "assholes." Taken together, looking at the political campaigning of Donald Trump, it becomes quite obvious that, strictly technically speaking, Donald Trump is a bullshitting asshole. As such, I argue, Trump is not so much unique as he is a manifestation of what our contemporary social condition produces, and as such Trump exists as an extreme caricature of an increasingly cold, narcissistic, self-righteous capitalistic mentality that must be a central concern for all of us as we aim to move beyond the present towards an emancipated and habitable future.

Theorizing Bullshit and Assholes

According to Harry G. Frankfurt (1988), bullshit is an epistemological category that, though not itself a product of modernity, has become a hallmark of it. Bullshit is not a lie. It is a deception based on a complete apathy towards the truth. For the bullshitter, the truth is irrelevant. Beyond the traditional binary of honesty and lying, bullshit is a category of knowledge that is defined by its emphatic disconnect from knowledge itself (125). In order to be honest, one must know the truth (or at least have the intention of speaking what one believes to be the truth). To lie, one must also know the truth. In the case of lying, one needs to have a sense of the truth in order to effectively avoid speaking it. "There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed" (127).

The question as to what produces bullshit is a complicated one, and for Frankfurt, it could have any number of sources. In all of the examples he gives (any situation where a person is expected to know more than they do, a situation where one could benefit from seeming like they know more than they do, or more academically in the anti-realist or postmodern philosophical critique of Truth), bullshit typically has a social source-but it is a social source that is directly channeled through agents. It is not that the bullshitter does not know that they are full of it; they do. The origins of bullshit lay in the social relations that incentivize and normalize bullshitting (Frankfurt 1988, 132-133).

Aaron James (2012) takes a similar approach to Frankfurt's in his typology of assholes.[i] In his recent book Assholes: A Theory, James explicates various types of assholes, all sharing these basic qualities: [1] systematic enjoyment of special advantages, [2] due to a deep-seated belief in their own superiority, and [3] belief in their own superiority to such a degree that they ignore any potential obligation to justify their special advantages to others (5).

The asshole…sees no need to wait for special circumstances to come his way in the normal course of things. The asshole feels entitled to allow himself special advantages as he pleases systematically, across a wide range of social interactions….He rides people with wearing comments-veiled criticisms, insinuating questions, or awkward allusions to topics not normally discussed in polite company. He is often rude or more often borderline nasty….More important, the asshole gains special advantages from interpersonal relations, not by stroke of continuous luck, but because he regards himself as special….If one is special on one's birthday, the asshole's birthday comes everyday. (James 2012, 15-16)

The asshole is thus a special kind of elitist, but they aren't born that way-though some certainly have psychopathic traits. More relevant to my argument here though, according to James, assholes are created, created by a culture of self-centered hyper-individualism that allows people-and indeed encourages people-to feel that they are superior (James 2010, 88-100). It is the most extreme version of when your Mom told you in grade school 'not to worry about what other people think'. Assholes internalize this sentiment to the extreme, taking it to mean that they deserve respect to the point of servility, simply because of how great they believe they are. For the asshole, there is a complete lack of perspective, self-reflection, and humility. The asshole may feign these traits, but according to James, in most cases they wouldn't even bother. After all, who cares if people think you're an asshole if you know you are better than they are?

Taken together, a bullshitting asshole would be a personal who consistently speaks without regard for the truth, in a way that is insulated by an inflated sense of their own worth, entitlement, and superiority. Let us turn to the recent evidence Donald J. Trump has provided us in order to decide if he fits this categorization.

Typologizing Donald Trump

One of the key areas that Donald Trump is clearly bullshitting about-in a purely technical sense-is immigration. Trump has said on a number of occasions that his plan is deport as many illegal aliens present in the United States as can be rounded up and then construct a gigantic wall along the US-Mexico border, regardless of the cost (which he plans to somehow pass on to the Mexican government). Ignoring the fact that he has presented no evidence or speculation about how he would get the Mexican government to pay for this massive construction project nor where the funds for the mass deportation initiative would come from. Trump is completely ignoring the vast evidence (which we have no way of knowing that he is even aware that this evidence exists, due to his apparent apathy towards evidence in general) that tells us that the most common way that people who end up in the US without legal documentation is by overstaying their legally obtained entry visas. Though it is important to note that this is fairly old data, but the Pew study this information comes from makes it clear that more than 40% are not crossing the Rio Grande. If the goal of Trump's immigration plan is anything more than to excite the xenophobic crypto-fascists (who have, in his view, too long been silenced in this country), we can assume the goal is a more secure state and a more open employment market for US laborers, a common neoliberal argument. More recent data suggests that there is currently a reverse migration wave occurring due to the downturn in the US economy, meaning that Mexican immigrants are leaving the US in greater numbers than are entering. Does Donald Trump know this? Does he care whether he knows?

In a related instance of epistemological bullshit, Donald Trump has continued to refuse to acknowledge that Barack Obama is not a Muslim. This is not mere lying, because we can't be sure that Trump neither knowingly believes that Obama isn't a Muslim nor do we have any evidence that Trump cares about whether it is true or false.

We can see this particular brand of bullshit in several recent events: James brings up Trumps earlier leadership of the "Birther" movement when Barack Obama was elected and even when he was running for re-election in 2012, but this tendency, while it has become a more subtle part of Trump's campaign, has not dissipated. When confronted by a supporter during a campaign rally who suggested that getting rid of Muslims was a crucially important issue and explicitly stating that the current President was one of those Muslims, Trump refused to correct the supporter. Trump has continued to refuse to state clearly that he knows Obama is not actually a Muslim.

More recently, Trump has taken multiple positions on a few issues, including abortion and transgender bathroom use. In a matter of forty-eight hours Trump changed his position on abortion at least three times. For most of his public life Trump has been pro-choice, but as he began to drift towards the precipice of reactionary politics, he drastically shifted his position suggesting that abortion should be made illegal and women who have abortions should be legally punished. Apparently he meant the doctors…apparently he meant that states should decide…apparently he has no ungodly idea what he thinks. He doesn't seem to care either, and more fantastically, neither do his millions of supporters-which includes one or two women I believe. On transgender bathroom use, he has also changed his tune, now saying that this issue should be resolved by the states.

Beyond Trump's proclivity for bullshit, he also evinces characteristics of James' asshole typology (something James explicitly states, though he focused narrowly on Trump's "moralizing" about Barack Obama's birth certificate, which makes sense because when the book was written Trump had not ascended to the GOP's top spot) (James 2012, 67).

Towards the beginning of his primary campaign Trump took the bold step of criticizing Senator John McCain's status as a war hero due to surviving as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, because as Trump says he "likes people who weren't captured…." There is certainly a smug superiority to this claim, especially coming from someone who has never served in the military. There was also a refusal to provide justifications-only the rationalization that he was kidding, but the basic premise was accurate.

After that lovely comment, Trump kicked Univision journalist Jorge Ramos out of a briefing because Ramos refused to be silenced by Trump's bloviating. Trump characterized Ramos as being overly-emotional, but kicking a reporter out of a press conference is nearly unheard of for a Presidential candidate. Trump never apologized nor did he say much beyond asserting his completely unjustified authority to remove reporters he doesn't like for whatever reason he wants. This is the epitome of unjustified entitlement and refusal to respond to the concerns of others.

Completely unsurprisingly this wasn't Trump's last contribution to his increasingly well-deserved label "asshole." During the August 7th republican primary debate Trump made a very gentlemanly reference to debate host Megyn Kelly's menstrual cycle with regard to her emotional state when asking him questions. He said "she had blood coming out of whatever." When asked about the clear implication of his comment, Trump accused anyone of thinking that he was talking about her being on her period as having a sick mind (Yan 2015). Again, he immunized himself from any criticism. These example provide evidence for the systematic requirements of James' typology. Trump seems to be the sociological asshole, par excellence.

In the most recent incident of Trump's egomania, in his GOP nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, regarding the many many problems facing America (which of course he wildly exaggerated), he claimed "I alone can fix it." While it very may well be in his power to solve the problems he has invented in his own mind and convinced millions of people are real, the kind of megalomania that is takes to assert that one can solve the problems alone is further evidence of Trump's well-earned asshole status.

These systematic episodes of completely unjustified elitism, condescension, and refusal to subject himself to the complaints of others (including his victims) and pervasive and outright refusal to engage in the now minimally popular practice of "being a good person," Trump evinces nearly all of the traits of James's various typologies of assholes (e.g., the boorish asshole, the smug asshole, the presidential asshole, the corporate asshole, the asshole boss, the self-aggrandizing asshole, and the category where James actually places Trump, "the self-aggrandizing asshole with a thin moral pretext")(James 2012, 37-67).

Why Should We Care About Bullshitting Assholes?

Why does any of this matter? Why does it matter that the nominee for one of the two major parties in the United States is a bullshitting asshole? After all, it is likely that "bullshitting asshole" is a socio-philosophical label that applies to many politicians, so why does it matter? It matters because these categories, however humorous it might be to write an entire essay with them, are politically dangerous and antithetical to democracy. Democracy, especially representative democracy-even one that doesn't work all that well for most people-requires some degree of interpersonal trust among the people and between the people and politicians. People listen when leaders speak, and if we come to realize that these leaders are assholes who don't care about the truth or their constituents, it can either breed apathy or resentment. Apathy or resentment towards the current system can either be turned into further apathy or it can be deployed for extreme political movements. While Occupy Wall Street was certainly a nascent positive example of this, the Tea Party or the recently emboldened Trump-supporting white supremacists (see David Duke) can hardly vouch the same credentials in regard to fighting against injustice. Bullshitting assholes in power are dangerous.

Maybe Trump is a fascist, but it seems to be more immediately problematic that even if he isn't, he's likely to be a very dangerous President (I'd need another whole article to detail the similar, though not identical, dangers of Hillary Rodham Clinton's risk to the poor in the US and around the world given her corporate neoliberal history as well as her hyper-militaristic foreign policy approach-but that's for another time and place).

Bullshit and assholeishness in political leaders are not conducive to democracy, whether we agree with Hardt and Negri (2012) that representation immediately and inherently separates the people from power, or we accept Chomsky's (2013) more moderate position that representation, when done properly, can produce a lot more justice and equality than we are used to at the moment. Chomsky's position is that effective representation can indeed make peoples' lives better while we wait for or work for revolutionary change like Hardt and Negri's autonomist revolution. Bullshitting assholes are a reflection of the ideological structures that undermine both reform and revolution by normalizing a corrupt notion of representation and mystifying the true relations of production and hierarchy that must be the target of revolution.

Thus from this admittedly crude analysis of an admittedly crude figure, there are insights for a twenty-first century democratic-socialist strategy. Combined with the rich resources of Critical Theory, democratic-socialist strategy must begin with a demystifying strategy in service of human emancipation. Furthermore, it must include the practice of pointing out who the bullshitting-assholes are as well as where they come from. While these are certainly pathologies; there's no reason to believe they are naturally occurring.

Capitalism and other instantiations of oppressive hierarchy like racism, sexism, heterosexism and others continue to exist primarily because most people fail to see their continued functioning (even as they experience them), and when they do acknowledge these oppressions, they locate those instances in individual behavior and not the social structure. While we can still focus on individual manifestations of bullshitting and assholeishness, we must also being to see them as structural characteristics as well: systemic bullshit and assholeish systems.

While we should be concerned about the social roots and political reproduction of these traits, we need to remember that for those of us that are even somewhat aware of these things: Individual behavior matters. Trump shows us that. Individuals matter, not because if we simply change a few people the world would be entirely different, but rather because in a hyperindividualistic society, even if we accept that solidarity-based collective action is the only avenue for systemic change, individual still need to decide to get involved (though this use of the term decision here is not to imply this is a choice made "outside" or "beyond" ideological social conditioning). Individuals are also sources of persuasion. They can inspire and drive mobilization. It is not just about us making our choice to get involved (or not), but also our capacity and indeed moral responsibility to persuade others to join us.

Additionally, scholars on the Left should be interested in individuals. In their social contexts, individuals provide avenues for critical scholars and social critics an opportunity to point to the social origins of individual behaviors and societal norms. Why is Trump an asshole? Why is he so full of shit? Why are politicians so often assholes? Why are they so often full of shit? What produces, and indeed encourages, incentivizes, and normalizes, these characteristics? What is the relationship between people who possess this characteristics and the social, economic, and political context from which they emerge and inhabit? What makes Trump, Trump, and why should we care so much?

What makes Trump well, Trump, is not that he is unique but rather that he is a caricature of the latent beliefs and urges that contemporary neoliberal capitalism encourages. Trump is the embodiment of the alienated cruelty, apathetic reified epistemology, and insulated self-centered elitism that characterizes a nearly purified form of a capitalistic mentality; a mentality that identifies success with being a bullshitting asshole who has a lot of money.

We live in world where being a bullshitting asshole is increasingly the norm, whether we're talking about Trump, Ben Carson, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Kim Kardashian, or anyone on a show that begins with "Real Housewives of…"(not to say that these examples all fit this typology in identically egregious or dangerous ways). Maybe the past was just as bad for different reasons. Maybe it was exactly the same, but that is irrelevant. What matters is that we pick up our shovels and extricate the bullshit from our politics, and perhaps the shovel could even be useful to deal with the assholes too-though I think simply raising more compassionate people who are driven by more (or something completely other) than profit and fame would be more humane that pitchforks, torches, and shovels aimed at our plutocratic elites. A society long built on and by bullshit and assholes will not be just; nor will it be sustainable. We are thus left with a choice: we can either organize with and vote for (and probably be or become over time) bullshitting assholes or we can choose to care about truth, honesty, one another, and the world we inhabit-but it is impossible to do both.

The real problem is not that there are people like Trump who embody something akin to the Platonic Form or Weberian ideal-type of a bullshitting asshole, but rather that everyday people are increasingly encouraged to get closer and closer to that character-type, often times just to make a living (or so they are led to believe). Though Trump has yet to attempt to co-opt their music, Green Day may have preemptively written the best slogan for Trump's campaign: "Nice guys finish last [and most Mexicans are drug-smuggling rapists]." We need not-and should not-accept this conclusion. Let us hope and act in a way that moves the truth a bit closer to "Bullshitting assholes finish last." Whether there is or will be a dialectical moment soon where people notice, name, and reject the bullshit and the assholes and build a mass resistance to them and the systems that (re)produce them remains to be seen, but the continued normalization-and indeed glorification-of assholeishness and bullshit does not bode well for that goal.

Bryant William Sculos is a contributing writer with The Hampton Institute and a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at Florida International University, whose research uses Critical Theory as a basis to explore the relationship between capitalism, democracy, and global justice. His work has been published in New Political Science, Class, Race and Corporate Power, Political Studies Review, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, and New Politics. Bryant is also an at-large member of Socialist Alternative-CWI in the US. He can be reached at bscul005@fiu.edu .

References

Frankfurt, Harry G. 1988. "On Bullshit" in The Importance of What We Care About. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

James, Aaron. 2012. Assholes: A Theory. New York: Doubleday.

Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. 2012. Declaration. New York: Argo Navis.

Chomsky, Noam. 2013. On Anarchism. New York. The New Press.

Notes

Though this article was written prior, while it was under revision, Fareed Zakaria released a brief editorial making the claim that Trump mirrored Harry Frankfurt's concept of "bullshit." His short analysis can be read here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-unbearable-stench-of-trumps-bs/2016/08/04/aa5d2798-5a6e-11e6-831d-0324760ca856_story.html?utm_term=.8db96bc6e9d0

In fact, James cites Frankfurt's essay on bullshit as an inspiration for writing a book about such a controversial and crude concept.

From Solidarity to Trump: White Working-Class Culture in the Rust Belt

By Michael McQuarrie

Before embarking on my current career, I worked as a labor organizer, mostly in West Virginia and Ohio. In the course of doing that work, I probably did two thousand "housevisits" with people I was attempting to organize. The purpose of these meetings was to understand people's motivations and interests in order to assess how they would vote in a union recognition election (as the union president once said to the organizers: "I don't care if you lose, I care if you can't count") and assess their leadership potential for either the union's organizing committee or for management's anti-union efforts.

The work entailed a never-ending confrontation with the slow social death of a region. Proud people-who once possessed the social honor that came with hard work, supporting a family, and meeting one's civic responsibilities-were confronting the fact that their skills, their values, and their mores were not only no longer valued, but had become an object of ridicule. This is on my mind these days as I look at my RSS feed, awash as it is in horror that populist revolt, which has already claimed Brexit, Poland, and Austria, will soon claim the American presidency.

I sympathized, and I understood the people I visited. Not all of it, of course; not the racism, misogyny, or jingoism-all often coded in the language of merit and worthiness. What was refreshing about it was that it amounted to a rejection of the material calculus that dominates in so much of our political culture and in academic theories of action. In school I learned that politics was about delivering material incentives to people in order to win their support. Democrats win because they deliver the welfare state. When they vote for Republicans, people are being fundamentally stupid in a way that warrants intrepid journalistic explorations of how it is that people can have motivations they do (what's the matter with Kansas?). But of course, Republicans have much to offer too: assertive nationalism, moral righteousness, and validations of white privilege and heteronormativity, to name a few.

The working class of the Rust Belt has been in its death throes for decades. Deindustrialization first began to take hold with the "Southern Strategy" of American manufacturers who moved to the southern United States where "right to work" laws ensure an environment that is hostile to unions. But Japanese competition accelerated the problem. Then there was Bill Clinton, a Democrat, who abandoned the working-class base of the party in his pursuit of free trade agreements. Companies received tax breaks for moving jobs overseas. Then there were the tax preferences for financial investment over manufacturing investment, practically guaranteeing that money would flow out of the industrial economy. In a valiant defense of their social order, workers in Youngstown and Wheeling tried to stem the tide by purchasing their plants and hoping that they would remain viable if only profit could be subordinated as a motive. The plants closed anyway.

Wages stagnated and even shrank for many. It was open season on unions not just because of deindustrialization, but aggressive union-busting. Today, the United Mine Workers, which once had 800,000 members and the fortitude to strike in the middle of World War Two, now has 60,000 members. My partner, also a former union organizer, recalls the elderly retired miner she met on a housevisit who bragged about happily paying union assessments to cover John L. Lewis's legal fees when Roosevelt had him thrown in jail. Lewis, unlike many labor leaders today, was happy to fight a losing battle in the name of a principled defense of working-class autonomy and dignity. His combativeness earned loyalty. But West Virginia workers don't have unions anymore to help them fight the decline of their communities.

With income stagnation the norm in the 1990s and 2000s, Democratic policy often focused on helping people maintain their standard of living through the possession of assets. Policy encouraged homeownership and investment in securities. Predictably, people lost their pensions or retirement savings in the tech bubble, and then lost their homes in the foreclosure crisis. The Democratic President, Barack Obama, chose to bail out bondholders while leaving homeowners to rot. He then pursued more free trade policies, expanding the number of countries that American workers would have to compete with. Cities like Cleveland had a windfall in their stock of postindustrial porn. In addition to rusting plants they now had naked and rotting houses. Suburban houses lost as much as 75% of their value in postindustrial Ohio. They were never worth anything to start with in West Virginia. Since that time, the problems of disinvesment and unemployment have been compounded by drug addiction. These are problems that, thanks to scholars like William Julius Wilson, we once associated with the urban black working class. They are now the problems of white, small-town America too. It turns out race isn't the relevant variable for explaining the crisis of the family.

Young people are rare in many of these communities. Nursing homes have replaced mines and mills. Working as a nurse's aide is a young person's work, but not in this part of the country, especially in rural areas. The nursing homes I encountered were staffed by women who went back to work when their partner lost his job as a miner or a steelworker. Back then it wasn't surprising to encounter a forty year-old nurses' aide working two jobs, "one for the bills and one for health insurance." Not only is the structural decay of towns a constant reminder of the demise of a way of life, but the decay of the people themselves is as well. It is hard to sustain optimism when the young people most imbued with the characteristic are gone.

Men lose their breadwinning jobs, making the justification for their authority in the household precarious. Women return to work. I was organizing at a moment when women carried with them an attitude towards bosses and unions that their husbands had learned in decades of struggle in their workplaces. This wasn't all good, workers had plenty of fights with their union representatives too. But it did sustain a culture of combativeness and solidarity that was possible to transfer into healthcare, with modifications, of course. Patients had a different significance for healthcare workers than rivets did for autoworkers. Healthcare workers wanted to use unions to defend their patients against the depredations of the profit motive, though they probably didn't mind the health insurance and wages they won in the name of patient care. As for the men, pride and combativeness can easily become authoritarianism and misogyny when they're dependent on a female breadwinner. A shibboleth in the local I worked for recounts ex-UMW members opposing the unionization of their wives and girlfriends: "We know that if you teach them to fight the boss at work, they'll know how to fight the boss at home," they said.

In order to stave off the indignity of dependence on their wives and girlfriends, some men would go to extreme lengths that illustrate the value of white working-class identity for people who haven't known anything else. I'll never forget the autoworker I encountered on a housevisit to his wife, a nurse at a local hospital. He liked unions and what they stood for. He told me about the notorious Lordstown Strike against GM in 1971. He participated in the torching of a motel that was housing strikebreakers. He didn't seem to regret it. When I met him he was still working as an autoworker. His UAW contract meant he could bid on jobs in other plants with seniority rights. Laid off at Lordstown, three times per week he would carpool with friends for the five-hour drive to another plant in order to maintain his income and, one had the sense, his working-class identity. Other men figured out that staying at home and maintaining their income meant a switch to healthcare and nursing, but that work didn't confer status in the same way as manufacturing work did, it was "women's work." A Youngstown-area hospital I was organizing had a huge number of male nurses (nationally, about 12% of nurses are men, in Youngstown back then it was more like 25%). Obviously for them, the money was worth more than working-class pride.

The serial destruction that has faced the Rust Belt has not occurred without a struggle. "Fighting the good fight" was extremely important to many Rust Belt workers, as if it were a matter of social honor and recognition. And fight they did, often enough anyway. Why did they fight? Was it for material gains as so many assume? Sometimes. There is always the nurse that will throw some Randian entrepreneurial freedom stuff at you (workers read too), but that particular ideology wasn't that common, despite the assumptions of economists, pundits, and union busters.

Union busters use a kit, a sort of paint-by-numbers sequence of things to talk about and do in the run-up to a recognition election. One standard item is the checks. This is a mock-up of a check with the worker's name and current weekly pay. Next to it will be a comparison check with the costs of a strike deducted. How do workers react? Certainly some were influenced. People have different economic circumstances and different reactions to them. But often enough the response was something like: "that's a small price to pay to tell the boss to fuck off." And there it is. The value that many workers place on being able to express their opinion or fight just for a chance to speak is an awful lot higher than many expect. Workers stage sit-down strikes, even though they are completely illegal and could result in the bankruptcy of the union. Transit workers did this in New York in 2006, but nursing home workers were doing it in Ohio too.

Perhaps such a fight is worth a few dollars, but surely there is an underlying material instrumentality, isn't there? Union staff often told the story of a contract fight for county mental health workers in Mentor, Ohio. The county had told the workers that if they refused to accept the contract the county would simply stop funding mental health altogether, costing all of the workers their jobs. As the votes were counted, it became clear that the workers had placed more value on their right to protest the behavior of their employer than they did on their own job. They ratified the contract, told the boss what they thought of his threats, and, presumably, headed for the unemployment line.

In 1998, I found myself on a picket line in front of a prison in Lima, Ohio. We represented the social service professionals who worked for the state: doctors, psychiatrists, nurses, social workers. That year the union representing the non-professionals negotiated a concessionary contract with the state. We could either also accept the concessionary contract or fight it despite having very little workplace power. But our members and our president wanted to fight, not least to show everyone what cowards the other union was. Our picket had signs like: "Grandmas shouldn't have to strike." Prisoners were jokingly shouting "we want a contract too!" out their cell windows. We won. The threat wasn't because our workers were off the job, and it certainly wasn't because the guards respected the picket (though a few did). But the prisoners rioted. State troopers had to be called in to quell riots, including one at the notorious Lucasville Prison. It turns out representing nurses isn't such a weak hand after all, at least when you're striking a prison. The culture of solidarity reaches far in the Rust Belt, especially when people choose to fight the boss.

I have long thought that the workers of the Rust Belt and their communities were an underutilized political resource. Unions once did important work holding white workers in the Democratic coalition, despite the fact that Democrats have been ignoring them for three decades. But unions have mostly been destroyed in the Rust Belt. Michigan, the birthplace of the UAW and Industrial Unionism, became a Right to Work state two years ago, joining Wisconsin and soon to be followed by West Virginia. States which once had 40% of their workforces represented by unions now have 10-11%. As a result, the populist outrage of the white working class is available to both the Right and the Left. Over the years various Democratic candidates, Tom Harkin, John Edwards, and Bernie Sanders among them, have attempted to recapture white workers for the Democratic Party and, in the process, reorient the Party away from its deference to finance capital. These efforts have failed. The Democratic coalition is a party of free trade, finance, and tech with a diverse base recruited on the basis of social liberalism and fluency with identity politics. This is not a party of the working class and is especially not a party of the white working class.

Trump has stepped into this political vacuum and it has served him well, enabling him to trounce establishment and Tea Party Republicans in the primaries. Trump seems to be furious at the establishment politicians that long ago wrote off the Rust Belt. He is combative, he doesn't defer to the political correctness that is sensitive to the feelings of everyone other than the white poor and working class. Trump's performance emphasizes action as much as words and ideas, which exasperates the educated, but appeals to Rust Belt workers. Ideas and rational consistency are not, academic dispositions aside, particularly important to people without Ph.Ds. Trump performs the combativeness of Rust Belt culture, the lack of deference to odds or the focus-grouped lowest common denominator. He seems as lost playing the politically-coded game of pandering and recognition that people in Portsmouth, Ohio, are. He is a manifestation of the "fuck you" id of the Rust Belt that leads workers to fight their bosses even when they will probably lose. And sure, it isn't exactly about the working class, but if Trump has been consistent on any issue, it has been trade. He promises to rip up the trade agreements that forced workers to make a choice between their dignity and their jobs, and that forced them onto an unfair playing field against workers with government health insurance or lower housing and food costs. He promises to protect them from immigrants that are somehow simultaneously competing for their jobs and sucking state coffers dry.

Hillary Clinton had a word for the Rust Belt in her convention speech, just like she did for every other constituency in the Democratic coalition. She pointed out that Donald Trump's merchandise is made overseas. My first thought was that it was a good opener, but that was it. No policy, no recognition, just "That guy is a liar". Now, granted, Rust Belt workers do get pissed off about stuff like that. For years the draw for the Central Labor Council annual picnic in Dayton, Ohio, was the destruction of a Japanese car with a wrecking ball. Watching a crane destroy a perfectly good automobile is exciting, but it's downright cathartic when that car represents an existential threat to your existence and an offense to your patriotism. But I fully expect that Rust Belt voters, many of whom are pretty familiar with the dynamics of these issues (thanks unions!) would hear that and think: "ok, she's taking us for suckers… again". Just because that stuff worked with patrician Romney (and it did) in no way means that it will work with combative, disrespectful, trade-deal trashing, and immigrant-deporting Trump. Clinton's move was calculated and condescending. She volunteered for an authenticity fight with Donald Trump, a fight she will lose.

Trump has nailed down populism for the Right. Sanders made a bid to win it back for the Left, but no one named Obama or Clinton is going to win it back for Democrats. Now pundits and Trump's campaign are plotting a path to the presidency through the Rust Belt. Trump's (former) campaign manager has said that victory depends upon winning Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania . Trump has talked about extending the map to Michigan and Wisconsin which, after all, are enthusiastic enough about Republicans to vote them into power in every branch of government and watch them pass Right to Work laws and create punitive social welfare regimes. The electoral map might be realigning to situate Democrats as the representatives of the New Economy and Republicans as the champions of Smokestack industries and their workers. Trump has made it clear that this potential political opposition is real.

But the anxiety and the worry is misplaced. There is no Brexit majority here. The path through the Rust Belt is actually a cul-de-sac, not because Trump lacks appeal with white workers, but because there are so few of them left. Cities aren't filled with factories and working-class neighborhoods anymore; they're filled with artist studios, tech startups, coffee bars, and criminalized hyper-ghettos. Latinos have been moving to Chicago, Cleveland, and Milwaukee, but they sure aren't voting for Trump. White people have been leaving many of these states which has increased the minority share of potential voters. Trump polled at 0% among African-Americans in Ohio during the Republican Convention. The Rust Belt economy has been diversifying. Unemployment in Ohio and Pennsylvania has mostly been below the national average since the financial crisis. Ann Arbor, Madison, Grand Rapids, Toledo, Columbus, Cincinnati, Lansing and others have been increasing in importance. These towns are hubs for tech and pharmaceutical startups, advanced manufacturing, and software engineering. They have concentrations of educated people who are less likely to vote for Trump.

The work of economic transformation has already been done in the Rust Belt and the demographic results are real. Trump missed the window for exploiting the alienation of the Rust Belt as a path to national office. White workers were angrier, more numerous, more combative, and more motivated twenty years ago when they were smashing Japanese cars at picnics. But back then unions had more capacity to hold white workers in the Democratic coalition. Unmoored from unions, racism and terrorism can be exploited to harvest white votes. Trump's combativeness is the ideal vehicle for effective exploitation, but the harvest is getting smaller every year. Trump can tap into the dispositions of the white working class, and speak to the issues of Rust Belt workers, but it is doubtful that he can overcome the demographically- and economically-determined fact of their declining relevance.

This was originally published at New Politics .

Michael McQuarrie is Associate Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics. Prior to graduate school, he worked as a labor organizer in West Virginia, Ohio, and New York and as a community organizer in the South Bronx.

'Our Revolution' is Not a Revolutionary Movement

By Dan Arel

On August 24, Bernie Sanders officially launched his post-presidential bid project, Our Revolution. Hoping to build on his primary success, Our Revolution looks to endorse and financially support down-ticket Democratic candidates around the country. This is part of the vision Sanders laid out about reforming, or in his words "revolutionizing" the Democratic Party.

It offers an ambitious, and a somewhat respectable goal, to fight to push a center-right party further to the left. However, as many have noted Sanders himself while being much further left than his Democratic counterparts, is not the bastion of leftist politics the media, and many of his supporters think he is.

Sanders campaign, which he called revolutionary, only offered revolutionary politics inside the Democratic Party. To his credit, he gave the party a big scare, he offered a viable alternative to the neoliberal politics of Hillary Clinton, making such waves that party officials even conspired to possibly use Sanders lack of religion against him. Leaked emails showed that a few DNC officials wanted to out Sanders as an atheist in two southern states they feared Clinton could lose.

Sanders also inspired millions of young voters to become interested in politics. His campaign was reminiscent of Barack Obama's 2008 campaign in that regard. Tens of thousands packed auditoriums to hear Sanders speak up for the 99%, to stand up for Native American rights, and to demand workers be paid a higher minimum wage. Yet, his politics still came from a liberal, pro-capitalist mindset, and so does Our Revolution.

What Sanders is selling as a revolution, is, in reality, nothing more than an attempt to reform a capitalist, centrist party. Our Revolution cannot be revolutionary in this sense, as it is simply not possible to revolutionize a counter-revolutionary party. At the end of the day, Our Revolution is still supporting capitalist candidates who by and large support the Affordable Care Act over universal healthcare, or at least support slowly progressing the struggling health care plan towards some version of socialized care, meanwhile courts around the country pick apart the plan, leaving it in shambles and as further rises in health insurance costs skyrocket, leaving what might be left of the affordable part of the plan on the cutting-room floor.

Candidates being endorsed by the new organization include the likes of Tulsi Gabbard, a United States Congresswoman from Hawaii who has criticized President Obama's foreign policy as not being tough enough against the likes of ISIS. Her criticisms of his lack of military action have earned her critiques for being a right-wing hawk when it comes to fighting ISIS in the Middle East. The organization also threw its support behind a now-failed bid to oust Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz by supporting the anti-Iran, vocally pro-Israel supporter, Tim Canova.

These are not revolutionary candidates, and they are hardly reform candidates. In reality, they are simply candidates who either vocally supported Sanders in the primary, or in the case of Canova, offered a challenge to Wasserman Schultz, someone Sanders knew was fighting to ensure he did not receive the Democratic presidential nomination.

Throughout the Our Revolution endorsements you will find candidates who are outside of the Democratic norm, but all are still liberal, capitalist, mainstream candidates who are not rocking the Democratic boat too far and who don't step out of the liberal mindset to join the left.

While even those on the left can appreciate the election of further-left Democrats, as they do, to a degree, make the life of many Americans better, a greater understanding of the party tells us that even the most domestically left Democrats still generally fall into foreign policy imperialism and American exceptionalism. Those being endorsed by Our Revolution do not break that mold.

Our Revolution is not revolutionary, and it should not be discussed as revolutionary. Revolutionary politics will only come from outside the two-party establishment and will likely not come by playing by the establishment rules. Even parties such as the Green Party are not bringing about revolutionary change as they seek to gain power through the already established system and offer no path to changing or overthrowing that system. They wish to reform our politics, not revolutionize them.

As socialists, the goal should be to educate the influx of young voters who are seemingly attracted to the socialist label, but only understand it in the context of Bernie Sanders. When speaking to a crowd at the University of Georgetown, Sanders proclaimed that his brand of socialism didn't involve workers owning the means of production.

If the mainstream understanding of socialism in the United States becomes offering partly socialized programs through the means of capitalism, the goals of socialists around the country become a greater uphill battle than ever before. Socialists still find themselves explaining that socialism isn't aligned with Stalinism and the USSR, and now have to further explain that it doesn't support "fixing" capitalism. Even the term democratic socialism has been muddied by Sanders campaign. What Sanders thinks of as socialism is merely an old-school, post-New Deal Democrat. A liberal who understands the importance of a welfare state, but who cannot see past the blinders of capitalism to understand why this economic system makes welfare necessary. Instead of fighting to change the system, they instead fight to put band-aids on it. The world socialism should be nowhere near that.

With that said, we can admit that Sanders can be praised to some degree for removing a lot of the stigma around the "S" word, while at the same time realizing that by using the label for his liberal version of socialism, he has also done damage to what the word means.

Ambivalence in the Next Left

By David I. Backer

As the end of history ends and neoliberalism shakes its last convulsions before dying completely, the strategy of building a stronger political organization is emerging across groups on the Left in the United States.The Democratic Socialists of America wants a party (lower case p),Freedom Road wants a movement,Solidarity is with the DSA, Socialist Alternative wants a Party (upper case P), and the Stansbury Forum has endorsed an ambiguous mixture of these options. They are all versions of a strategy in thinking about how to capture the energy of Bernie Sanders's presidential primary campaign (who himself is launching a 501(c)4 Our Revolution for similar purposes). The Green Party is posturing ambiguously as just the kind of organization to do all this. In general, the Next Left wants some kind of structure and organization (party, Party, movement, or campaign offshoot).

If this is true, it leaves two basic options for those seeking to build the Next Left: build the organization or don't build the organization. But an important third option exists here: ambivalence.

At a Jacobin reading group event last year a large group gathered to discuss excerpts from Vivian Gurnick's Romance of American Communism. The question put to us, a group of young socialists, labor organizers, and former Occupy activists sitting in a fourth grade classroom, was whether or not we wanted a party structure on the Left. Some said yes, others were hesitant; everyone--even after an hour of discussion--agreed that "yes and no" was the best response. There was a sense of ambivalence.

Ambivalence is when you feel two contradictory things, like a love/hate relationship. While the word sometimes means detachment or resignation, it also means having two valences about a single thing--valuing it in two different ways. Ambivalence can be personal. You love your parents and you want to throw them out the window. You love your partner and you treat them badly. You want people to pay attention to you and you feel uncomfortable when they do. But ambivalence can be political too. You want to take an Uber ride because it's so easy and you don't want to because they treat workers badly. You want to vote for Jill Stein because the Green Party platform is fantastic and you don't want a third party to inadvertently help Donald Trump.

Ambivalence happens because consistency of self is impossible, and nobody can know themselves entirely. All kinds of conflicting influences and interpellations, traumas and successes, loves and losses have shaped us as we grew up and orient us towards the present as we continue developing. These past influences shape our reactions to things now and our reactions end up being contradictory. Most of the time we're not totally aware of the force of these influences. In other words, we have conscious and unconscious selves, both of which come to bear on day-to-day life.

While strong join-rhetoric flows from star Leftists like Kshama Sawant and Chris Hedges, and old liberals in the Democratic Party haunted by ghosts of Cold War ideology pander anti-socialist rhetoric, there may be a potent apprehension among the rest of us. It is possible--likely, in fact--to be ambivalent about what to do on the Left, particularly as what Craig Calhoun, in response to Wolfgang Streeck, has called the interregnum between neoliberalism and neofeudalism sets in. Folks may both want to join a political organization and not want to join it for various reasons, feelings, and desires.

This third place is more difficult to give a rousing a speech about, but is perhaps more descriptive of where Leftists are at in their experience at this moment in the conjuncture where the New Left is old news and the Old Left looks more like the future than the past. Maybe we want to build a political organization to make gains for progressive and liberating purposes and we don't want to build a political organization because of red baiting, hard-to-condone cadre organizational practices, or a generalized fear of ideology.

Whatever composes it, holding this ambivalence as a valid and real position--rather than trying to bully it one way or the other--must be part of Next Left strategy, whatever shape it takes in the coming year.

White Workers Resisting Capitalism and White Supremacy: An Interview with RedNeck Revolt

By Devon Bowers

Below is the transcript of an interview I had with the admin of the Facebook page RedNeck Revolt, where we discuss the history of the page/organization, white working-class resistance to capitalism, and how the white working class is being manipulated by Trump.

So, what exactly led you to create Red Neck Revolt?

Redneck Revolt came out of the original work of the John Brown Gun Club, a working group of the Kansas Mutual Aid Collective based out of Lawrence, Kansas from 2002-2008. The John Brown Gun Club focused on attempting to simultaneously grow a militant and armed culture within already existing liberatory and revolutionary movements, and attempting to stem the tide of right wing reactionary recruitment within white working class communities. Our work had two main focuses then: providing armed community and tactical defense trainings to build the capacity of our movements and demystify the firearm, and to be present at social and economic gatherings of white working people where groups like the Klan, Minutemen, and white reactionary militias recruited. Over the course of several years, we trained hundreds of members of social movement organizations from across the country, as well as attended dozens of gun shows and similar events to head off racist recruitment.

When Kansas Mutual Aid ended its work in 2008, the John Brown Gun Club went with it. In early 2009, Redneck Revolt was founded in Colorado, and enjoyed a limited life within local gun shows as well as being present at Tea Party rallies in the Denver area. Redneck Revolt started to focus less on armed defense within already existing social movement organizations, and to refocus on the other goal of the John Brown Gun Club: to engage in anti-racist movement building within the white working class.

Redneck Revolt went on hiatus in late 2009. A decision was made to dust off the concept and the project in June of 2016, as the rise of street level fascism and reactionary ideology has swept across the United States in response to the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump. Several of us felt that it was far past time for this project to be active again. We feel that the specific analysis offered by Redneck Revolt is essential at this historical moment as part of a multi-faceted strategy for combating this rise in reactionary politics.

Do any of you have a particular political ideology? If so, what led you to it? If not, why?

Overwhelmingly, our members are anti-capitalist libertarians, or anarchists. Our politics are colored by primarily coming from working class communities and seeing the failures of capitalism and the nation-state project that protects it. We come out of communities already deeply seething with distrust for politicians, bosses, rich people, and law enforcement.

This class background and a focus on class within our organizing also makes us markedly different than groups like SURJ (Standing Up For Racial Justice) in that we are organizing around the impact that white supremacy has had on the white working class, and not just our roles in replicating and perpetuating white supremacy.

What we see is that historically, the white working class continues to align themselves as the foot soldiers of capitalism by adhering to a politics of white supremacy. We end up becoming the enforcers of the rule and will of the capitalist and political classes. Our goal is to push the understanding that this doesn't just harm, threaten, and destroy communities of color, but also ends up ensuring that working class whites accumulate little to no economic or political power as well. White supremacy is a tool used against us, even as we end up being the people wielding it against people who are not white.

We don't believe in a politics built upon white guilt, white savior paternalism, or merely being proper or good allies to other people's struggle. We see our struggle as enmeshed within the struggle of working class communities of color. We understand that we have a stake in seeing white supremacy abolished and capitalism and the nation-state project also dismantled and replaced with a truly liberatory, social, economic, and political project.

Talk about white resistance to capitalism. It isn't something we really learn about, beyond some minor discussions in school about the US labor movement.

White working people have been resisting capitalism since its inception. Just as white poor and working people resisted Feudalism and all other forms of economic and political subservience. Whenever a system of domination has been cemented into dominant culture, there has been resistance to it. From the Luddites in Europe, to the Paris Commune, to the revolutions that waged across Spain and Russia, to the massive labor movements here in the United States, there has been resistance to capitalism.

However, the times that this resistance has been truly potent in North America, is when white workers also see a joint struggle with communities of color and start to build movements across race, gender, religion, etc.. to create a truly revolutionary working class movement. We can see historical moments like that embodied in struggles like the Redneck War/Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia in 1921, when thousands of white workers, alongside black and Italian migrant miners, created an armed insurrection against the mining bosses and fought for nine days in open warfare. The U.S. Army was brought in to quell the worker insurrection. Ultimately, the strike was defeated by overwhelming force, but the lessons remain: the gravest threat to capitalism is when white working people see that they have mutual interests with working people of color. When white workers stop being the foot soldiers of repression and oppression and instead fight for liberation of all people, the capitalist class is in real trouble.

How did Socialists and Communists in the 19th and 20th centuries attempt to bridge the racial gap between all workers?

While not necessarily a Communist or Socialist, we can't really talk about attempts to "bridge the racial gap between all workers" in the 19th century without talking about John Brown and the somewhat limited legacy of white militant resistance to chattel slavery in the early to mid 1800's. While John Brown was not the only militant white to aid in the struggle against slavery, he was perhaps the most effective and has become the symbol of white resistance to white supremacy.

Brown believed that whites had to put their lives on the line and wage a revolutionary war against slavery and servitude. And he did just that. He helped wage an intense war in Kansas and Missouri for the abolition of slavery, and then eventually led a small armed band to seize and briefly hold the Federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry (in what was then Virginia, but now West Virginia). Brown and nearly all of his co-combatants paid the ultimate price for their attempted insurrection. But Harper's Ferry became a pivotal moment that propelled the country toward what would be the Civil War.

Socialist, communist, and anarchist organizing in the late 19th century and early 20th century had a unique presence in recent migrant communities, mobilizing poor and working class migrant labor for strikes and other workplace action. Liberatory organizers pushed for the desegregation of trade unions, as well as building inclusive unions like the Industrial Workers of the World, that focused on organizing all workers, regardless of race, religion, language, or gender.

Later in the 20th century, one of the most important political formations of recent history was created, when the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in Chicago allied itself with formations from a variety of national-liberation and working class struggles and created the Rainbow Coalition (not to be confused with the reactionary formation of the same name started by Reverend Jesse Jackson). The Rainbow Coalition was a street level working class formation that brought together groups like the Young Lords, the American Indian Movement, Brown Berets, I Wor Kuen, and Young Patriots (among other organizations) to form a cross race movement against capitalism.

This single act by Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party perhaps represents one of the most potent and dangerous efforts of the BPP, bringing together, black, brown, white, and Asian working class youth into a street level movement that could threaten the very foundations of white supremacy and capitalism in the United States. Ultimately, Fred Hampton would be assassinated for his efforts at building the Rainbow Coalition among other successes of his organizing in Chicago.

Would you say that there is currently a racial gap between workers, given the tensions surrounding immigration?

Definitely. Migration has always been among the factors that splits the working class in the United States and internationally. It was this conflict between migrant workers and "nativist" workers in the late 19th century and early 20th century that made it difficult at many junctures for the efforts of organized labor to be more effective. This was one of the main reasons why the Battle of Blair Mountain was such a potent threat. Members of the United Mine Workers had started to work directly with and encourage union membership of not only black workers, but also migrant workers, primarily Italians, who had been shipped into the region to destabilize worker cohesion and union organizing.

Migrants and people of color become easy scapegoats for the failures of capitalism. As long as you can blame some outsider for the problems you and your community are facing, you don't look at the real enemy: the primarily white rich class profiting off everyone else's misery and exploitation.

Would you say that due to this economic climate of joblessness, free trade deals, and outsourced labor, it is easier to espouse an anti-capitalist ideology? That people are more receptive to it?

We are at a historical moment where many people from a broad spectrum of the working class are truly questioning capitalism. However, being anti-capitalist is not enough. In fact, being anti-capitalist but also reactionary can be genocidal. As Fascism is also inherently an anti-capitalist ideology, we have to understand that at this historical moment, when many are suffering under capitalism, and looking for better ways to live, that the working class, and particularly the white working class, is much more susceptible to reactionary and fascistic ideologies and influences. It is precisely because capitalism is a failure for nearly all people, including the white working class, that white supremacy has a foothold in the first place.

We, as people who want a liberatory world, must be very committed at this historical moment to working within the white working class to help change the trajectory away from reactionary and white supremacist politics. We have to not only speak from some moral platitude about how white supremacy is "wrong". We have to speak to the physical conditions of working class communities. We have to be able to show white working people that their misery is not caused by black, brown, or migrant working people. We have to be able to help point them at the actual enemy: the rich, mostly white people profiting at our communities' expense.

People are becoming more desperate as capitalism continues to unravel. Will we just let them become the shock troops of a new version of white supremacy? Or will we be there to show an alternative?

Given the recent events in Dallas, what do you think are going to be the short-term effects? We are already seeing stories being spread such as there being a plot to kill Baton Rouge cops.

Obviously the game has changed somewhat, especially for those of us who espouse armed defense as a viable tactic within our toolbox. However, something important and remarkable happened after the Dallas and Baton Rouge shootings that didn't happen after the assassination of police officers in New York City in 2014: the street movement intensified. After the attacks in New York City, the movement recoiled and allowed some relative social peace to return. The opposite was true after the incidents in Dallas and Baton Rouge. Being in the streets in the immediate aftermath, nearly no one was talking about Dallas or the police being shot. It was nearly impossible for the energy to be redirected or recuperated by the political class.

However, one immediate outcome that we must respond to is the increased response by right wing paramilitary formations to street level demonstrations by organizations like Black Lives Matter. In Phoenix, Oregon, Missouri, and other locales, there were immediately reports of demonstrations having sizeable armed reactionary elements standing against them. We have to prepare for the armed right wing to have a renewed and sizable response to our demonstrations and protests.

This is definitely the wrong time to be talking about disarming our own social movements.

What do you make of the fact, as was noted in the article This Was All Inevitable, that "the same right-wing reactionaries who call on people to arm themselves against their despotic government will rush to the defense of law and order and the state, and the police who serve these ends?"

The white working class has steadily been pushed to have more allegiance to those who protect what they assume are white interests, even if in doing so, these same white working folks contradict their supposedly deeply held stances on the state. The reactionary elements of the white working class tend to be anti-state until the topics of border patrol or law and order are discussed. It's precisely because these white working people have been fooled into thinking their interests are determined by their race, or the relative privileges they receive because they are white or "legally" in this country. However, for most of these people, this choice isn't as intentionally calculated as it may seem from the outside.

How is the white working class getting played by Trump? Do you think that the situation will worsen when Trump isn't elected?

The white working class gets played by all sides; we should be clear on that. When it comes to institutional organizations and political parties, we get played by the right wing, and we definitely get played by the left wing. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have the interests of any members of the working class at heart.

But Trump is speaking a language that the white working class understands and can relate to, even using some language from more liberatory elements of the left when discussing economics and conditions within working class communities. He stands against Free Trade, for example, a hallmark of globalized capitalism. He talks about bringing jobs back to the United States. And then he mixes in attacks on migrants and other xenophobic remarks that speak to the fear in the white community. He plays off the fear and misery that white working people feel. He speaks in clear and easy to understand soundbites. Although he is a billionaire, he has convinced millions that he speaks for them and their conditions.

The problem is that for decades now, those of us on the liberatory left have abandoned the white working class to the right wing. We don't enter those communities to do the hard work of organizing. We have relegated white working people to be backwards and inherently racist. While groups like SURJ and other "anti-racist" white groups use the same language of white supremacy to dictate that white people all experience the same privileges and power within our society, regardless of class or real economic or political power, upper class liberals have consistently positioned themselves as being superior or better to working class whites, especially from rural areas. We have all created a situation where working class whites have been alienated and pushed toward the right wing, where reactionaries stand with open arms to welcome white working people into the fold.

This is not to say that the white working class has not historically earned some of this venom and derision. After all, the white working class has overwhelmingly found itself on the wrong side of history and on the wrong side of the struggle of other working class people. But that said, how have the efforts of those on the Left helped cement that relationship? How has the Left been complicit, especially in the last twenty years, to handing the white working class on a platter over to the racist right wing?

Whether Trump wins or loses, the terrain is dangerous and deadly at this current moment. Which brings us back to one of the other main focuses of our former work with the John Brown Gun Club that we want to revisit and revive. We need real formulated responses for the upsurge in reactionary and racist violence. We need armed community defense programs in every community. We need to be ready to rapidly respond to the armed right wing threat that menaces our communities. We need to stop being reactionaries when it comes to the topic of armed defense. We are approaching truly dangerous times. Will we be ready?

In what ways can white people support Black Lives Matter?

Again, it's important to conceptualize struggle in a way that does away with moral platitudes and calls for white people to feel guilt for their situations. It's nearly impossible to get most white working people to admit they have some relative privilege in society and that racism does in fact exist, when they are struggling to make ends meet and not get evicted from their decaying home. So, we must first understand that until we start to build movements in a way where white working class people also see that their interests are tied in ending white supremacy, white working class folks will consistently be found on the wrong side of social struggles including Black Lives Matter.

It is up to us then, as whites, to organize within white working class communities, speaking to the conditions on the ground, and building off the rich history and culture of white working people standing in solidarity with poor and working people of color to challenge capitalist, state, and white supremacist power. Putting out ally checklists and having endless workshops on white privilege will never cut it, and has helped maintain the situation we find ourselves in. We need people on the ground. At the gun shows, at the NASCAR races, at the swap meets and flea markets... We need people in the white working class communities speaking their language and bringing them over to the a liberatory political orientation. We need to be able to relate the conditions that white working people face to the conditions on the ground in communities of color.

We have to abandon paternalistic ally politics that speak of white working class people through the same language of white supremacy. White working people do not have more in common with white rich people merely because we are all white. We have more in common with working class people from all races and religions. Until we as anti-racist white working people put in the work to shed light on that reality to others from our community, then we are failing.

Black Lives Matter and communities of color don't need more feel good white allies. They need white accomplices who are preventing other whites from being the footsoldiers of genocide and colonial capitalism and bringing those whites over to our side. The real question is whether other white people are up to that task. Because we have a lot of work to do, and the current efforts of the vast majority of "anti-racist" whites are more counter productive than anything else at creating this reality.

How can people keep up with RedNeck Revolt?

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Email: redneckrevolt@riseup.net

To Live Among Broken Men: Theorizing Rape and Incest

By Danny Shaw

On April 9th, Ronald Savage rocked the hip hop world with his testimony about the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of Zulu Nation founder, Africa Bambaataa. Initially, the Zulu Nation dismissed the allegations "as nothing more than a continuation of the decades long HIP HOP COINTELPRO campaign to discredit and destroy the Universal Zulu Nation." However, as more survivors of Bambaataa's abuse emerged, the momentum shifted. It was clear that Bambaataa had abused children, other leaders had covered up for him and that a thorough investigation and process of healing was necessary.

While many people are understandably shocked that sexual abuse could penetrate the inner-most circles of pioneering Zulu Nation, this is also an opportunity for our communities to reflect on just how commonplace sexual abuse, incest, pedophilia and rape is.

The May 21st gang-rape of a 16-year-old girl in Brazil by 33 men and Brock Turner's rape of a 23-year old woman behind a dumpster at Stanford University are the latest high-profile examples of the everyday terror exercised against women.

Ronald Savage's story, my family's story, my story and so many other stories of survival highlight the need for a Marxist historical interpretation of sexual violence & incest. Marxism-the painstaking, socio-economic investigative method-does away with the vacuous theory that sick, depraved abusers are merely an aberration of the human spirit. The wide prevalence of sexual violence speaks volumes about the criminal, decadent nature of capitalism. There is a specific system that engenders the widespread abuse of women and children. The facts speak for themselves-one in four girls will be sexually abused before they turn 18 years old and one in five women will be raped at some point in their lives.[1] 40-60% of Black women are abused before they reach 18 . 3% of men report they were raped.

A political orientation towards sexual violence and trauma reveals that it is the product of a specific, temporal confluence of factors. The dialectical materialist method, a profound examination of the deep-seated causes of a social phenomenon, explains why sexual violence and incest are both widely prevalent and inevitable under capitalism.

This article will examine the connections between poverty, patriarchy, rape and incest both in my own life and family and in the writing of organic intellectuals and community leaders who have honestly grappled with this urgent issue.

My story

I am a survivor of sexual abuse. Two different AAU basketball coaches, Jim Tavares and Jack McMahon, whose teams I played on, were known pedophiles. A 1999 Sports Illustrated article , "Every Parent's Nightmare," outlined the sexual abuse that hundreds of us survived at the hands of Jim Tavares.

Tavares preyed upon me and other young boys who came from poor homes where there was only one parent trying to make ends meet. He gained access to our homes by giving us money and taking us on trips across the U.S. to play in national Junior Olympic AAU championships. If I had a father or a family with money, I would not have been an easy prey.

Just as the marksman knows how to hunt and snipe, the molester knows how to prey on children and attack.

There is no need for me to repeat the details as the article outlines Tavares' pattern of abuse. Predictably, the authors, William Nack and Don Yaeger treat Taveres and the other coaches as society's outliers, extremely demented individuals who went astray. This article argues a different perspective-that rape and incest are inevitable and predictable products of a specific social system that we have the power to unmask, confront and overcome.

Theorizing rape and incest

I was raised by woman warriors. Many of the women in my family survived horrific episodes of rape, incest and sexual terrorism which I have written on elsewhere. From my earliest memories, I felt the pain and trauma of my mother, my sisters, aunts, grandmother and other women in my family seethe through my own being. Why did my loved ones and I endure degrading, sadistic abuse? Their scars and my own have been formative in my story. With no strong male role models, I was mentored by the pain and survival of women. All of the suffering they experienced and survived made me question from an early age the source of so much horror.

Sexual violence is bigger than African Bambaataa, the priests convicted of child molestation within the Catholic church and the sexual violence that occurred within my own family. Sexual violence is an endemic, society-wide phenomenon that we must tackle and resist with a broad, revolutionary approach if we want to spare our children from the trauma so many of us survived.

My family of mixed Irish, Scottish, English and Finish roots was not unique in terms of the intensity of what we survived. As I discovered through my travels to other continents, hearts, islands and memories, there are survivors of rape and incest spread across the world. The U.S. has the thirteenth highest rate of rape in the world.[2] My family, then, was not an exception, but rather the very incarnation of larger social forces at work.

A critical view of rape and incest challenges the widespread view that men intrinsically act like "pigs" and "dogs." No one can dispute that many of us men act like pigs and dogs, but what explains the pigicization or dogification of male behavior?

Feminist sociologist Maria Mies explains that "human sex and sexuality have never been purely crude biological affairs. 'Human nature' has always been social and historical. Sex is as much a cultural and historical category as gender is" (Patriarchy and Accumulation 23). In more proletarian terms, men are not born as piglets but are rather pigified-or groomed to be pigs-over time. The inverse is also true; we can fight to undo patriarchal socialization and create a safer, healthier world to raise our children in. It is this political orientation towards sexual trauma that guides our work as revolutionaries. We fight for another world not just because of the pain of the present but because of the infinite promise of the future.

Scarred children

The social scientist seeks to unearth the nature of the childhood that the rapist / molester experienced. A baby is not born a rapist or a sadist. The mainstream media's dominant perspective that rapists are biologically-flawed, unredeemable sociopaths projects a pessimistic view of humanity. While there may be individual examples of perpetrators who were biologically or mentally engineered towards violence, this is a rare exception and not the rule.

According to Family Violence Interventions for the Justice System, men who witnessed their fathers' violence are 10 times more likely to engage in spouse abuse in later adulthood than boys from non-violent homes.[3]

Men who commit brutal violations of children's inner-sanctity most often experienced this violence themselves as children. They internalized their own skewed view of themselves and the world. They never knew what it meant to be complete, integral, loved or healthy. Broken from an early age, if not in the period of gestation, they learned to reproduce the insidiousness. Buried in their own self-torment and self-hatred, they struck out against what was most precious and vulnerable around them, children and women. Deprivation begat deprivation.

A system of patriarchy shapes the behavior of the rapist who shows an utter disregard for the humanity of women. The potent combination of poverty and patriarchy mold the acting out of the self-depreciation in a particular way. Having never known inner peace, the impoverished and unhealthy psyche annihilates the peace closest to it. Only a thorough exploration of the violator's childhood and formative years can begin to connect the missing dots.

Broken men

In addition to being criminal and perverse, sexual violence against children, women and men is a self-effacing behavior. To subject a defenseless child or woman to sexual abuse is the work of a broken man. The question before us is what overarching forces convert so many men into vile, demented creatures, who carry contempt for life itself in their fractured hearts?

Black Panther Soledad Prison Field Marshal, George Jackson asserted before white supremacy: "You will never count me among the broken men!"

A 25-year-old sociologist-with a PhD earned in the streets of LA and the prison cells of San Quentin-Jackson theorized about the outward reflexes of the broken man. Informed by a keen understanding of the wanton ruthlessness that surrounded him in America's internal colonies (ghettos) and prisons, Jackson refused to become ensnared in the trap that pitted Black on Black, man against woman, and oppressed against oppressed.

In Soledad Brother, Jackson charted the source of the broken reflexes-petty fights, alcoholism, rape and murder. From solitary confinement, within an 8-by-12 foot prison cell, Jackson sought to dominate the insidiousness so that it did not dominate him.

Like another great anti-colonial thinker, Frantz Fanon, who was writing in the same time period in Algeria, Jackson observed how his contemporaries acted out their trauma in reactionary ways because of their conditioning and precisely because they were deprived of a penetrating, revolutionary understanding of social reality.

The political economy of rape, Part I: The abuser

It is only in the social laboratory of intense class exploitation and misogyny that so many rapists can be called into existence. My analysis is not an attempt to justify Bambaataa's abuse nor apologize for the rapist but rather an effort to explore the malignant social forces that call so many rapists into existence.

In such a profoundly patriarchal society, different social-psychological forces act on men and women's psyches. Men are expected to be protectors and breadwinners. But what happens when their whole world-and with it their entire self-image-has been obliterated by material reality?

Too many men-conditioned by misogyny and deprived of employment and dignity-are broken men. In their deranged psyches, formed in the crucible of a materialist and patriarchal society, they seek to assert and insert themselves in twisted ways as "men" in a society that rejected and emasculated them. The inability to live up to their socially contrived ideals renders them depressed and broken.

Women in oppressed communities are hit the hardest by rape. Some 34.1% of Native American women have been raped. The next highest percentage was among mixed race women, 24.4% of whom reported being raped.[4] Incapable at this historical juncture of articulating their social rage in a revolutionary direction, the oppressed misdirect their fury in reactionary ways.

Rape is about power. Rape is one demented form of misdirected vengeance in which the oppressed assert power when they have lost control over their surroundings. Soldiers, under stress of battle, also often become ruthless perpetrators of rape, or gang rape, while pillaging the wealth of the conquered.[5] Alcohol and drugs-the traditional opiates of the oppressed-further distort reality, ensuring the stunting of proactive, revolutionary sentiments.

The origin of patriarchy

Two questions now confront us: what is the nature of the dog-eat-dog, patriarchal rat race that defines everyday working-class survival and how did we arrive at this point?

Bourgeois science argues that sexism and racism are inevitable. Because they see these learned behaviors as a product of man's nature, they seek to convince everyone that these systems of domination have always existed.

History proves otherwise, debunking the prevailing ideas of the historical defeatists.

Friedrich Engel's The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State documents the existence of matriarchal societies for thousands of years. Thoroughly researching what he calls "primitive communist societies," Engels shows that for the bulk of the human timeline, women were in positions of power in the family and community.

One prominent example was in the Taíno culture of Quisqueya, what is today Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The warrioress and cacica (chief), Anacaona, went off to battle and led resistance against the Spanish invaders, with her partner, Caonabo, taking charge of the home and raising the children. In 1503, upon capture she was publicly executed because she refused clemency in exchange for being the concubine of one of her captors. The Spanish colonizers were determined to eradicate the leaders of any resistance to their double enslavement of Native and African women.

Marxists pinpoint the emergence of private property, surplus and profits-or class society-as the origin of patriarchy. The origins of rape, incest and violence against women are the result of what Engels called the "world historic defeat" of women. With the development of private property and "the right" to inheritance, the son was elevated above the daughter as the heir to the estate. Just as the enslaved of the colonized countries existed as chattel property for the colonizers, women too were converted into their property; the masters and lords could do as they wanted with "their" women.

Under feudalism, the lord's "droit de seigneur" empowered him to take a "serf's wife" into his bed before she married and slept with her husband for the first time. In other words, the lord was allowed to rape the daughters and mothers of the exploited class because they were his property. This "droit" or "right" also entitled the lord of the estate to prey on peasant girls and to violate their virginity whenever he chose. This was often ceremoniously witnessed by male members of the court who were powerless to intervene.[6]

Social systems theory

Every social system merits its own analysis but feudalism, slavery and capitalism share these predominate features: 1) the sanctity of private property 2) the prioritization of profits over human dignity and 3) the relegation of women to a position of the slave's slave in the productive process.

Where does patriarchy fit into this exploitive economic base?

Maria Mies' Patriarchy and Accumulation tracks how for centuries women's unpaid, invisible work enabled the massive theft of the surplus labor of the wage earner. The productive process rested on the exploitation of the workers' labor which was not possible without the wife's behind-the-scenes toil. The woman then was the serf's serf, the slave's slave and the wage laborer's laborer.

To dig up the historical roots of the monstrous epidemic of rape and incest in the U.S. context requires a profound historical reckoning with one of its original sins-slavery.

The legacy of slavery

Through the dehumanization of Blackness, the slavocracy justified infinite predations upon the bodies of Black women and Black men.

The entire slave quarters were at the disposal of the slave traders and masters. The Portuguese slavers built their castles with a master bedroom that had two doors leading to two corridors. One corridor led to the slave quarters, where there was an army of slaves at the master's sexual disposal. The other corridor led to confession, where the slavers asked their priests and their gods for forgiveness for their acts, before committing the next round of transgressions.

W.E.B. Du Bois' masterpiece Black Reconstruction in Americacaptured the white Southerners' attitude toward the Black man and woman. In order to capture the dehumanization process, Du Bois cited a visiting German sociologist, Carl Schurz, who was hired by President Andrew Johnson to study the South: "Men who are honorable in their dealings with their white neighbors, will cheat a Negro without feeling a single twinge of their honor. To kill a Negro, they do not deem murder; to debauch a Negro woman, they do not think fornication; to take the property away from a Negro, they do not consider robbery."[7] In his gripping sociological portrait of the antebellum South, Du Bois breached theunbreachable and spoke the unspeakable: "Southerners who had suckled food from black breasts vied with each other in fornication with Black women, and even in beastly incest. They took the name of their fathers in vain to seduce their own sisters. Nothing-nothing that Black folk did or said or thought or sang was sacred" (p.125).

The very essence of slavery was the breaking of the Black mind, body and soul.

A culture of white rape of Black women-hiding behind its antithesis, the publicly-flaunted, genteel South and morally-robust Bible Belt-has traversed centuries. The myth of the "Black rapist" was used to mask the identity of America's original rapists-a wealthy class of roughly 60,000 white slave owners. The myth of the Black rapist served to deflect focus away from the slave master's abuse of Black and white women and funnel mass discontent into "populist" campaigns, such as lynching and state executions. Society was mobilized in pursuit of "the boogey man" while the true "boogey-man" held the noose.

Describing the typical slave master, Du Bois wrote: "Sexually they were lawless, protecting elaborately and flattering the virginity of a small class of women of their social clan, and keeping at command millions of poor women of the two laboring groups [Black and white] of the South" (p. 35).

Lawrence Konner's remaking of Alex Haley's Roots in June 2016 served as a vivid reminder that the slave owning class used rape as a weapon against the Black family.

Slavery birthed patterns of rape and incest that our society has yet to heal from.

Rape and brokenness in Beloved

Toni Morrison's Beloved is a gripping account of the twin terrors of sexual violence and slavery.[8] A cursory examination of the central characters of Beloved reveals the wanton, white supremacist terror unleashed on Black America.

Halle and Paul D represent generations of Black men pinned down and broken by slavery. Sexual violence against Black men, women and children was one of slavery's preferred weapons "to break" their slaves.

Halle was Sethe's partner and father of her children. After witnessing a gang of white men rape his wife, Sethe, and then drink her breast milk, Halle went crazy. Feeling powerless, he disappeared for ever from the family unit because what "he saw go on in that barn that day broke him like a twig" (68).

Paul D, Sethe's friend, confidante and a fellow slave, alludes to a rape he suffered on the Sweet Home plantation: "Saying more might push them [Sethe and Paul D] both to a place they couldn't get back from. He [Paul D] would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lids rusted shut. He would not pry it loose now in front of this sweet sturdy woman, for if she got a whiff of the contents it would shame him" (73).

The scars from the whip, tattooed onto Sethe's back, form a chokecherry tree, symbolizing the slave experience. The barefoot, poor white woman Amy who helps Sethe deliver her fourth child, Denver, describes the scar: "A trunk-it's red and split wide open, full of sap, and this here's the parting for the branches. You got plenty of branches. Leaves, too, look like, and dern [darn] if these ain't blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your back got a whole tree on it. In bloom" (79). According to Morrison's' poignant metaphor, "the fire on her back" is the Black nation, which despite the indescribable abuse, is strong and full of life, giving birth to future generations who will carry the scars but resolutely confront the slave master's terror.

Slavery and rape pushed Morrison's characters to extremes. When the slavecatchers came to abduct Sethe's four children and sell them out of state, Sethe resisted the only way she could. As she breastfed her youngest daughter, Denver, she simultaneously beat her other daughter, Beloved, to death, to save her from the horrors of slavery. Her two young boys and Denver were soaked in their sister's blood and only survived the grueling scene because of the intervention of another slave.

Toni Morrison recreated these tormenting images in order to bring slavery alive for the reader. Without understanding this original sin, little else can be understood in the American narrative.

Historical trauma

Dr. Joy Degruy Leary explored the effects of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome on generations of African Americans.[9] The slave system was a breeding ground for incest within the slave quarters, as well. Upsetting the traditions and stability of the family, slavery disempowered the husband figure and humiliated the father figure. Slavery was crafted to make the oppressed internalize a sense of shame and humiliation.

Men, women and children were packed into barns and stables unfit for human existence. In his autobiography, Frederick Douglas described the barbarism he was born into in Baltimore, Maryland.[10] Deprived of space and privacy and unable to clothe their children, the masters packed multiple families into shacks, without mattresses, blankets or adequate clothing. Slavery was a vortex of bestiality that spiraled out of control destroying human connections.[11]

Unable to stand down the oppressor, the emasculated slave-the trapped lion-projected his hatred towards those at home.[12] Sexual transgressions were the reincarnated transgressions of the master, once again unleashed on the double victims, Black women and children.

This historical trauma-set in motion-by a four-century long reign of terror reappears in families today. The conventional wisdom and oft-repeated, racist claim that "slavery occurred so long ago and Black people should just get over it" is designed to disconnect the terror of the past with the terror of the present. Sethe, Baby Suggs, Beloved and Toni Morrison's other characters remind us that the legacy of slavery lives within, and part of that legacy is sexual trauma.

History offers context for the harrowing fact that 40-60% of Black women are sexually abused before they are 18 . Failure to spiritually and consciously come to terms with the historical trauma damns the present fighters to wallow, unconsciously or semi-consciously, in the past. This is an apt metaphor for the survivor of sexual violence, whose only way out of the trauma, is through it.

From chattel slavery to wage slavery

The enslavement of Africans in the Americas was one branch of the patriarchal system Engels denounced and the most vicious reenactment of boss-worker relations which played out in other social systems. Slavery was America's original sin, upon which the descendant systems of exploitation were based.

The heir to slavery, capitalism-through its disempowerment of women-continues to be a breeding ground of sexual violence.

The following formula synthesizes the reproduction of the class system and the cycle it sets in motion. An exploitative economic base (i.e. serfdom, slavery, industrial and extractive capitalism) gives birth to internalized discord, self-hatred and a distorted sense of identity among the exploited, leading to the acute need to numb and escape (i.e. alcoholism) which is intertwined with violence projected outward and acted out at home, resulting in the victimization of the next generation, which grows up damned by both the exploitative economic base and a demoralizing family environment.

This exploitative economic base and internalized oppression again sets in motion a cycle that repeats itself with individualized symptoms that are reflective of the same disease.

The political economy of rape, Part II: The abused

The disempowerment of women is both economic and psychological and transcends national borders. Rape has a specific economic, not geographic, terrain. Not unique to the U.S., the dominant economic model-patriarchal capitalism-produces dependency.

Because housework is not compensated, the mother figure finds herself trapped.

Deprived of an empowering education, self-esteem and social and economic rights, many oppressed women cannot see beyond their immediate environs. The coterminous forces of women's oppression feed off one another, trapping women and children within the male-dominated, misogynist household.

Testimony

The testimonies and writing of organic intellectuals struggling against patriarchy and capitalism highlight the fact that the political economy of rape traverses national boundaries.

A scene from Germinal, Émile Zola's epic novel, captures the power dynamics within the miner's home. Half-starved and still sullen from the coal mines, the protagonist, Maheu arrived from the bowels of the earth demanding his dinner and sex. Showing total disregard for his wife, Maneude's humanity, he bends her over, raping her in front of the children, as they prepare to bathe in a basin. This scene from a French mining family's home was a snapshot of the twin evils of capitalism and patriarchy that have acted upon women for centuries.

In Don't Be Afraid Gringo, Elvira Alvarado described the typical social existence of the Honduran campesina (peasant woman). In her testimony, Elvira provides poignant snapshots of the cruel social terrain where patriarchy and economic disempowerment produce violence against women and children. Like the French miner a century before, the banana plantation worker existed to produce surplus value for transnational business. The housewife in the plantation worker family produced the conditions necessary for the exploitation of the wage laborer. She was doubly exploited. For both the boss and the sub-oppressor, for 365 days a year, it was open season on women like Elvira Alvarado.

Describing her everyday routine, Alvarado explained that she worked the land and attended to her husband and eight children: "Even when we go to sleep, we don't get to rest. If the babies wake up crying, we have to go take care of them-give them the breast if they're still breast-feeding, give them medicine if they're sick. And if our husbands want to make love, if they get the urge, then it's back to work again. The next morning, we're up before the sun, while our husbands are still sleeping" (p. 52). Robbed of autonomy in both spheres of her life, Alvarado existed to produce for the oppressor and sub-oppressor.

Enraged by his powerlessness, Elivira's husband subconsciously recreated his exploitation lower down on the social hierarchy where his violence had no repercussions. The state's monopoly of violence ensured that his humiliation had no positive, externalized revolutionary social outlet. Meanwhile, he was socially sanctioned to drink himself into oblivion and lash out at home. Family was the private domain where the exploiteds' pent-up anger crystalized. Having learned well from his boss, he recreated the violence onto his wife and children, the only social figures disempowered enough to tolerate the wanton abuse.

What the husband considered sex or "his marital right," constitutes rape for many women like Elvira Alvarado. Her words deliver the point home: "I've heard that there are men and women who make love in all different ways, but we campesinos don't know anything about these different positions. We do it the same all the time-the man gets on the woman and goes up and down, up and down and that's it. Sometimes the woman feels pleasure and sometimes she doesn't. We don't have any privacy either, because our houses are usually one big room so we have to wait until everyone is asleep and then do it very quietly. We just push down our underpants and pull them back up again" (47). For the Honduran housewife, sex, like cooking and cleaning, was a chore or an obligation. Stripped of her self-determination, both the home and the wider society were a forcing house of male domination.

'Stay in your place'

Employing the same literary genre as Elvira Alvarado, the Bolivian mining activist, Domitila Barrios de Chúngara, wrote Let me Speak! The Testimony of Domitila A Woman of the Bolivian Mines.[13]

Her autobiography deepens our understanding of patriarchy as a weapon to divide the miners. The misnamed "barzolas" were working class women employed by the mining bosses as reactionary shock troops to attack and humiliate the miners' wives.[14] When the Housewife Committee refused to stay quiet and confined in their homes and came into the streets to protest, the "barzola" shock troops threw tomatoes at them, accused them of sleeping around and physically attacked them.

The disempowerment of the Housewives' Committee was the disempowerment of the working class. Preoccupied with secondary contradictions, the exploited protagonists-the miners-lost sight of the primary contradiction between labor and capital. Blind before the oppressor's strategy to keep them in their confinement, they prevented the fruition of class unity. The divide and conquer strategy sought to confine women to the home, "shame" them and stunt their ability to make world-historic change.

"Women hold up half the sky" but when they are held back, the entire working class is confined to a social inferno. Capitalism and patriarchy have a codependent relationship; they feed off one another. The crushing of one hierarchical system necessitates the overthrow of its twin.

Women's liberation is humanity's liberation.

The role of class

Centuries of state-sanctioned and state-enforced rape established a legacy that continues to play out today.

Angela Davis' Women, Race and Class looks at the triple burden Black women confronted the span of American history.[15] Davis examined the rampant sexual abuse committed by white male employers within the home against Black women forced by poverty into domestic labor. How many bosses, supervisors, sex tourists and other men in high positions still believe they have unfettered access to Black and Brown women's bodies?

There is also sexual abuse in other layers of class society. Daughters and sons of rich families have survived sexual trauma. The widespread occurrence across class divides illustrates the omnipotence of sexism under capitalism. A rich woman may also find herself psychologically stuck. In contrast to a working-class woman, she may possess the economic resources to flee but may face the judgement of her family who will threaten to "cut her off" if she dares to forge her own independence. Raised to be pretty and thin, some upper class women may not possess the skills to move on. Patriarchy is pervasive and even privileged women-who from an outside perspective appear to have it all-struggle within their gilded cages.

A culture of impunity

In addition to raising the rapist, capitalism offers the rapist free reign.

The story of the anonymous young woman who was drugged and raped behind a dumpster at Standford is chilling. Although her rapist, Brock Turner was caught and found guilty by a jury, a judge only gave him six months in jail because "a prison sentence would have a severe impact on him."[16]

Turner's light sentence is not the exception. Factoring in unreported rapes, only 6% of rapists will ever spend a day in jail; 15 out of 16 will walk free.[17] Every 107 seconds a woman is raped in the U.S. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, twenty million women in the United States have been raped. The study asserts that the number could be three times as high because only 1/3 of sexual assaults are reported.[18] There is no accountability. There are no popular reprisals. In too many cases, no one dares confront the perpetrator. Often, the sadist moves from one generation to the next.

In my own abuse case, when I was 16, I contacted the Plymouth county District Attorney's office in 1997 to file a report. It was four years after the abuse. The DA said he had 73 similar complaints against the basketball coach, Jim Taveres. After hearing my statement, the public official concluded, for at least the 74thtime, that he "did not have conclusive proof" to put Jim Tavares back away in jail.

Capitalist society, from the U.S. to Brazil is, in essence, a school of unchecked patriarchy and pedophilia.

On May 21st on this year, a 16-year-old Brazilian girl was gang-raped by 33 men, some of whom then went on social media to boast about their acts. It is tragic that it took such a heinous case to re-highlight the rape culture that threatens every Brazilian woman.

In Brazil, the statistics are even more deplorable than in the U.S. According to the Brazilian women's organization, Rio de Paz, every 72 hours, 420 women are raped in Brazil.[19]

The liberal observer remains shocked at the harrowing rape statistics while failing to realize the very cause of the horror; a depraved system can only produce depravity. Incest and rape are not natural or inevitable phenomena, but rather symptomatic of the current economic and social order. Token efforts to raise awareness among children about their rights and to facilitate violence prevention workshops are important in the short run but will do little to erase the overall problem. An end to the suffering requires a systematic overhaul of existing class relations.

Denial is complicity

There is another rung in the social inferno that is oppression to which we must descend in order to more fully understand the plight of the survivor.

There are other social actors who become complicit in the crimes spawned by a criminal system. Many mothers-too traumatized to stare the truth in its eyes-became indirect apologists for the offender, giving cover to the crimes with their silence. Feeling powerless before the crime of the century, too many times they have internalized and projected their own subconscious guilt and self-hatred onto the victims. Instead of appearing on the historical stage as the ultimate defenders of their daughters, how many mothers have appeared as collaborators of the crime?

Silence, reproduced between generations, extends the lease life of the pain. Silence within the family is collusion. Denial is collusion. Covering up is collusion.

Sapphire's novel Push, brought to the cinema in the 2009 film Precious, graphically documented the complex relationships that resulted from incest.[20] Sixteen year-old Claireece "Precious" Jones is pregnant with her father's second child. The heartbreaking novel examined how Precious' mother, Mary, instead of protecting and defending her daughter from her rapist husband, Carl, turned the blame on her daughter. Precious was the object of her mother's scorn. Stripped of a childhood and her parents' affection, Precious had to learn to navigate society on her own.

The mothers, grandparents, aunts and uncles who looked the other way were knee-deep in the swamp of insidiousness. Patriarchy pervaded their lives; more concerned with protecting the reputation of the family before the good town-folks, they sacrificed their children's health and happiness-their childhoods-so they could keep smiling at church on Sundays. They too were deeply affected by patriarchy and rape culture. Converted into silent bystanders, enablers and perpetuators of the insidiousness, they ignored the truth and blamed the victim. They too were broken; the illusion of an "American dream" was worth more to them than truth and redemption.

Internalized blame

When we paint the entire sorry portrait, we see the convergence of the different social-emotional factors acting on the survivors. Overwhelmed by the insidiousness, the matriarch escapes into booze or god. The primary witnesses often subconsciously rewrite history. Denial buries the dagger deeper into the chest of the abused. Searching for acceptance and validation, they find blame and hatred.

Unable to externalize their anger; the pain consumes the survivor, resulting in the cyclization of the insidiousness i.e. heroin, addiction, cutting, anorexia, morbid obesity, alcohol etc. Every form of self-injurious behavior is an agonized cry for help.

Heroin, bulimia and other self-loathing behaviors are a giant middle finger to America; no one ever cared about me, so why should I care about myself? Heroin and bulimia are rebellions devoid of direction and grit, a quest without a compass.

Robbed of support from the patriarchal society, the survivor slips into self-torment. Nince Inch Nails' lyrics, famously covered by Johnny Cash, capture the "Hurt:"

I hurt myself todayTo see if I still feelI focus on the painThe only thing that's realThe needle tears a holeThe old familiar stingTry to kill it all awayBut I remember everything.

What have I become?My sweetest friendEveryone I know goes awayIn the end.And you could have it allMy empire of dirtI will let you downI will make you hurt.

The Somali writer, Warsan Shire writes: "Not everyone is okay with living like an open wound. But the thing about open wounds is that, well, you aren't ignoring it. You're healing; the fresh air can get to it. It's honest. You aren't hiding who you are. You aren't rotting."

The suppression of pain is ineffective because pain will only find other outlets. We, survivors, can run and escape all the way to the grave but until we cough up all of the pain, there can be no thorough-going healing. Silence is not an option. Some form of therapy is necessary to help survivors understand the roots of their self-harm and to find meaning in an alienating society.

Ronald Savage and other survivors of abuse are heroes. Protectors of future generations, the survivors fought to overcome "the shame" patriarchy imposed on them and tell their stories.

Digging up and speaking the pain is the first step but it cannot happen without outside support. Because class society seeks to atomize and isolate the survivor, there must be an effort to collectivize our pain in a supportive, conscious community setting. There are 12 step programs and support groups called Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous and Incest Survivors Anonymous. There are also research-validated treatments such as Dialectical Behavior Therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy that are effective for assisting those whose trauma has led to severely self-harming or suicidal behavior. These methods help the survivor see things differently and not blame themselves. Healing occurs when the survivor recognizes that they are good and beautiful and let's go of the poisonous negative thoughts and low self-esteem that the abuser and patriarchy have instilled within them.

As I argued in an article on trauma, addiction and capitalism, a survivor who is able to theoretically grasp the hell-hole they were born into, begins to empower themselves to turn on the class system, the source of their trauma. A revolutionary's work is to provide a political orientation towards trauma. If overcoming fear and denial is the individualized part of healing, revolutionary organizing against the monster, responsible for the crimes of the century, is the collective part of healing.

Therapy, support groups and the party, working together, all play their role in helping the survivor rise up on the society that violated them.

Our responsibility

Afrika Bambaataa was a pioneering hip hop voice who resisted injustice and capitalism, but this did not mean that he was beyond all of its insidiousness-patriarchy, white supremacy and homophobia.

On June 1st, 2016, Julien Terrell, cofounder of The Renaissance Zulu Chapter 64, issued the following statement condemning the covering up of Bambaataa's sexual violence against teenage boys and announcing the chapter's separation from the traditional Zulu Nation: "Many have said that Bambaataa's accomplishments in hip hop should not be included in the critique of his so called personal life. I say that any so called political and cultural commitment that does not transfer to your personal actions is NOT a commitment at all. It's nothing but talk and the time for putting ego aside has come. He [Bambaataa] is still lying but there is space for humility and compassion that the victims have offered despite the pain he caused. I hope those that are close to him support him in stepping to the allegations with integrity. That is what this culture is supposed to represent."

As revolutionaries and community leaders, we all carry the social baggage of the old world and must hold one another accountable for our actions. As Terrell explains, we have a responsibility to uproot and go to war with all of the contradictions, less they chaotically spill out and hurt others.

Socialism is healing

Experiments in rehabilitation in the U.S. are limited today because of the "lock them up and throw away the key" strategy of the state. In a transformed society, the abuser would undergo isolation, therapy, rehabilitation and slow reintegration. Reconciliation would involve the recounting of their own childhoods and the social crimes they went on to commit. There is no healing in denial. Anything short of a full, public admission and acceptance falls short of justice.

In a socialist society, inherited with all of social baggage of capitalism it will take generations to do away with all of the wicked inheritance-white supremacy, sexism, homophobia, individualism, consumerism etc. As the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and other socialist societies can attest, in a new world born of the old-with all of the birth marks of wickedness and depravity-there will be no shortage of challenges for nations reborn.

The ruling class vilifies these human experiments in social re-organization in order to contain our dreams and ground our visions, less we conceive of emancipation from the current social disorder. The unofficial religion of the U.S. today is anti-communism, for this very reason.

From the perspective of the extractors of surplus value, what has to be protected is not the right of a little girl to a childhood but their own unfettered access to profits. The anonymous survivor of rape at Stanford, the 16-year-old Brazilian girl, Ronald Savage and all of the nameless survivors-caught in the crosshairs of patriarchy and exploitation-demonstrate the urgency to organize for the toppling of the capitalist system.

Dr. Martin Luther King called for "a revolution in our nation's priorities." A socialist society would immediately and decisively intervene to halt and reverse the monstrous patterns of incest and rape.

Towards a culture of women's liberation

What would a world based on freedom-as opposed to necessity-look like? There is no way to predict the future but we can assert that it will not look anything like the degradation-what Engel's called "pre-history"-that today's oppressed communities and families confront.

In a healthy future, crystal meth, domestic abuse, and trauma itself will be remnants of a dark, distant past from which we will have emerged.

The goal then is to convert our current society into a school of women's liberation.

Society's superstructure must be torn up from the roots and reorganized to concretely confront the scourge of misogyny. The advertising industry sexually objectifies women. Viacom, General Electric and the entire mass media produce music and videos based on chauvinist caricatures of women as objects, shallow gossips, video vixens, hoes, thots and gold-diggers. Many actors in capitalist, consumer society are guilty in playing a role in the reproduction of rape culture. They cannot be let off the hook.

Socialist society will project empowering reference points through billboards, education, TV and social media.

In Cuba, where class relations are organized differently, the incidence of such crimes against women and children is far less common. After 1959, Cuba outlawed the exploitation of women in advertising. Housing, education, transportation, health care and a job were guaranteed social and economic rights. A society that had ceased to be a patriarchal, dog-eat-dog world took the bite out of the dog.

Though we can only make conjectures about the future, we can be sure that it will look nothing like this hell-on-earth that exists today.

Only a new, socialist society can provide real healing and in the words of martyred Irish revolutionary, Bobby Sands: "Our revenge will be the laughter of our children." We fight so that no little child or adult ever again has to live with what Ronald Savage and all survivors live with-the pulsating scars of incest, abuse and rape buried beneath their skin.

Thank you to Emmanuella Odilis for the feedback, edits and support. As the tears and truths emerge, the words and strength stream fourth…

This was originally published at Liberation School.

Notes

[1] "Statistics about Sexual Violence." National Sexual Violence Resource Center. 2015.

[2] Chemaly, Soraya. "50 Actual Facts about Rape." Huffington Post. December 8th, 2014.

[3] 1993.

[4] National Institute of Justice and Centers for Disease Control & Prevention. Prevalence, Incidence and Consequences of Violence against Women Survey. 1998.

[5] It is not uncommon for cops to use their batons to violently penetrate their captives. This has nothing to do with homosexuality, but are rather acts of aggression, power and contempt.

[6] Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's well-known opera Marriage of Figaro is about precisely this, peasants and servants, in the early dawn of the revolutionary movement in France, conspiring and outsmarting a philandering count who sought to prey upon the young women of an Italian village.

[7] Page 136. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1935.

[8] New York: Penguin. 1987.

[9] DeGruy, Joy. Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing. Uptone Press, 2005.

[10] Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Boston: 1845.

[1] Frederick Douglas' testimony conjured up images of what Haitian families endure today in exile in the Dominican Republic. According to my research living and organizing within the Haitian communities of the D.R., the results are eerily similar with women and children twice victimized - by a system of anti-Haitianismo and by the alienated male sub-oppressors within the exploited Haitian community.

[12] There is a reactionary, "nationalist" trend that posits that Black men are damaged because they were not allowed to play a "traditional" patriarchal role. This chauvinist position submits that the solution is to allow the Black male to assume their "proper" place as patriarchal protectors. It should be stated that patriarchal "protection" in any class society, including pre-colonized Africa, has its own antithesis of rape and abuse.

[13] Originally published in Spanish as Si Me Permiten Hablar. New York: Monthly Review Press. 1978.

[14] This group expropriated the name of Maria Barzola, an Aymara activist assassinated in 1951 by the Bolivian government.

[15]On the plantation, Black women were at the same time domestic, breeder and field slave. As she picked cotton, tobacco or sugar, she laid her baby down beside her just out of arm's reach. Still reeling from the pain of childbirth, she was forced to contribute to the productive process. She was thrice enslaved.

[16] Fantz, Ashley. Outrage over 6-month sentence for Brock Turner in Stanford rape case. CNN. June 7, 2016.

[17] Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) calculation based on US Department of Justice 2010 Statistics.

[18] "Raising Awareness about Sexual Abuse Facts and Statistics. U.S. Department of Justice.

[19] Bearak, Max. "Women's Underwear Strewn on beach in Rio to protest Brazil's rape culture." The Washington Post. June 8th, 2016.

[20] Vintage. 1997.

Intersections (A Poem)

By Suzanne Adely

As global NGO regimes strengthen, movement spaces become increasingly de-politicized. In the U.S. one of the most striking examples of de-politicized 'activism' is the almost complete lack of acknowledgment of US Empire and its' political, social and economic manifestations around the globe. To organize today one must regard identity and intersectionality above all else, yet the most valuable elements of those ideas have been distorted. This poem is a response to self identified 'radical' colleagues who use the language of intersectionality to control political discussion, while refusing to see the intersections of Empire. This poem is also inspired by the memories of all that has passed in the Arab world in my lifetime.

I

his name
a relic
its letters tracing
brilliant memories
of time passing
in squares

her name was a thought
a recognition
every pronouncement
a dream
of bright courtyards
and green almonds

All of we,
All of us,
find ourselves
in the outline
hear ourselves
in the echoes

names and their memories
kept alive
in the margins
kept alive
deeper than our core
farther than our borders

II

his forsaken evening
my solitary morning
on the burning screen
he asks, tudkari?
yes habibi I do
la habibi, I don't

the sweetest sour
the brightest dark
her name was a relic
his name a thought
a knowledge
a dream

Haidar
Maryam
Omar & Nerdeen
Ali, Muhannad & Ayoub

treasured names
thrown
shattered
muted syllables
unrecognized
in this brooklyn room

Haidar
Maryam
Omar & Nerdeen
Ali, Muhannad & Ayoub

did you know they pictured their lives in color?
like the deep red earth around them

that they dreamt of their futures in song?
beats, melody and verse

that they held their cousins
with the tenderness of a mother?
as soon as their arms could unfold

​vanished

from our arms
over and over and over again
in darkness, at dawn
in spring ,winter and the autumn
in summer

'I never dreamed you'd leave in summer.'

names are hostile memories

III

a brooklyn room
an invitation
forced,
distorted intersections
a token to your well-funded identity

we pronounce their names
and tell the stories
of their well-funded death
the vicious intersections
of their well-funded death

pronounced
without knowledge,
thought or recognition
in hostile silence

names
are muted
shattered
unrecognized
fading to whiteness
in this brooklyn room

Suzanne Adely is a long time Arab-American community organizer from southwest Yonkers. I became a middle school teacher for several years before working for the Arab American Action Network in Chicago. By mid-life, I became a lawyer and global labor organizer. I have been blessed to live and work and witness movements and struggles in NY, Chi-town, MENA region and India. Some of my organizational affiliations are: Al-Awda-NY, US Palestine Community Network , Labor4Palestine, Global Workers Solidarity Network.

The Science of Corrosive Inequality

By Nick Partyka

Pictured: "Sharing the Wealth" (Oil on Canvass 66" x 48") by Mark Henson

As the Presidential campaign season begins to get into full-swing, inequality will become a prominent topic, and misleading conventional narratives will abound. Both the presumptive nominees of the two major political parties have addressed this topic at length already, and will certainly have much more to say as the general election phase kicks-off. Inequality is a prominent topic because we are still dealing with the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis that spawned the Occupy Wall-Street movement, which did much to put the issue of economic and political inequality back on the table for discussion. This is why the topic came up in the 2012 Presidential election cycle, and why during this election cycle one candidate in the Democratic Party's primary was able to attract a very large following by focusing predominantly on this issue. The success of both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump shows that the issue of inequality, and its various social, political, and economic effects, still resonates deeply with large portions of the electorate on both sides of the mainstream partisan divide. This is the case, principally, because a great many non-elite Americans are still living with the economic consequences of the financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession.

Inequality, political and economic, not only helped to inflate the bubble whose bursting caused the crash, but it also determined in large measure who benefited from the bailouts and the "recovery". Rising inequality from the 1970s on helped funnel more and more wealth to the top of the income scale. These people spend their money very differently from others. When this group has surplus income, they are very likely to purchase financial instruments. As more and more wealth was channeled into their hands by the economic and political policies of neoliberalism, as championed by the likes of Reagan and Thatcher, the demand for financial products grew correspondingly. Further, after the financial sector was deregulated in the late 1990s, this process of financialization only picked up speed. Once home mortgages were securitized, that is, made into financial instruments, the stage was set for the collapse. After the crash, elites used their political and economic clout to divert bailout funds from America's proverbial 'main streets' to Wall-Street. This, combined with fiscal policy choices, that is, the choice by bourgeois politicians not to use it as a tool to combat unemployment, is why the so-called "recovery" has not extended all that far down from the top of the income scale.

In order to know what kinds of solutions are necessary to address the problem of inequality it is important to know what kinds of problems it produces, as well as their scale. Scientists and scholars studying inequality, and its various impacts, have revealed a number of striking conclusions about the nature and extent of the social, political, and economic, impacts of inequality. When taken together these various research results paint a very clear picture of the corrosive effects of economic inequality on society, economy, and democratic politics. The totality of these wide-ranging effects constitutes a significant threat to a society aiming to be democratic and egalitarian. In what follows, we will examine some of these interesting studies and their results to see what they reveal about the multifaceted impacts of inequality on persons, societies, and democracy. What we will find is that the scale of the problem far outstrips the scale of most of the mainstream solutions proposed; even those put forward by the self-proclaimed (though quite incorrectly)"socialist" candidate in the Presidential primaries.

Piketty on Inequality

It seems a safe bet that few would have predicted the overwhelming success that a hefty tome on economic inequality by a French economist would achieve in the spring of 2014.[1] The 2011 Occupy Wall-Street movement did much to bring the issue of economic inequality in society, as well as its many social and political effects, into the public consciousness, as well as into political debates. Nevertheless, Thomas Piketty's book, and its success, caught many totally by surprise, and set off a vigorous debate, and vitriolic reaction, upon its translation into English. Both liberals and radicals pointed to his work as evidence, as confirmation, of what they have been saying for many years. On the other side, conservatives seemed wither to accept his findings, but dismiss his policy suggestions, or to find technical "flaws" with his data or methodology as a way of undermining all his conclusions. Using mainly tax-return records, from several countries, Piketty's work presents the most comprehensive view of the historical evolution, and structure, of income inequality throughout the industrialized world. Several highly significant, and well-established, conclusions result from his research.

First, Piketty confirms empirically several notions the left has asserted, namely, income inequality in the United States has returned to a historic high level, and it has been rising since the 1970s. The level of income inequality in the United States, especially the growth of incomes at the very top of the income spectrum, has, according to Piketty, revived the social significance of capital in the 21st century, and is bringing back the more patrimonial economy that dominated earlier centuries, until the period between 1914 and 1975. That is, once dynamic and equalizing societies are now increasingly reverting to the kinds of more rigidly defined, and largely hereditary, social relationships and attitudes that dominated the economy and society of the Gilded Age, as well as preceding centuries.

Second, and very importantly, Piketty's research provides much needed context for perceptions of growth, both of capital and wages. What Piketty's historical research reveal is that average annual growth rates, even in this most recent and most fecund epoch, are actually rather small. Average annual growth rates for the most productive societies, in the most productive era, are still only about 1 - 1.5% per annum. Capital, on the other hand, has grown on an average of 4-5% per annum over the same historical period. This observation gives rise to one of Piketty's fundamental conclusions, namely the law (r>g).[2] This law is the biggest source of divergence in market economies, because it directly implies that a capital, however small, will with time invariably become a large capital; exogenous shocks, natural catastrophes, and acts of God notwithstanding. What this law also implies, and very significantly, is that the economic and social landscape of the mid-20th century is an economically and historically unique, and likely non-replicable period.

Why did economic inequality decline in the United States during the middle part of the 20th century? Piketty's answer is that this decline was largely the result of the confluence of historical events, namely the World Wars and the Great Depression. It is the historical conjuncture of these events in this period, as well as the political and social response to them, that accounts for the uniqueness of this era. Piketty's fundamental law (r > g) was able to be broken in this period because of the exigencies of combating foreign military foes and domestic economic woes. One of the most significant results of the efforts to combat both is that working people in the Unites States accumulated during the war years the largest stock of disposable income ever. It was the spending of this money, as well as exploiting the United States' position as global hegemon, that fueled the post-war economic boom up until the mid-1970s. When the economic effects of the 1914-1945 period wore off, inequality began to rise again.

Inequality & Social Mobility

One of the major implications of Piketty's conclusions was on the topic of social mobility in the United States. Many on the left have been arguing for some time that social mobility in America is much lower than commonly thought, and Piketty's data on inequality seems to support just such an argument. If economic inequality in a society is very high, and growing, then social mobility is likely to be low. The reasons for this are that as economic inequality increases, so the economy comes to be more and more patrimonial, and thus economic divisions come to settle more and more into sharp caste divides. This is, of course, because in a capitalist society, income determines the extent of an individual's, or a family's, ability to consume, that it, their income determines the range of their consumption choices.

One thing Piketty's work demonstrated clearly was just how stark income inequality is in America. What he also, very importantly, showed that the growth of inequality in the United States since the 1970s is due principally to the rise in the incomes of the wealthiest 1%, and .1% of income earners. [3] This increasing concentration of wealth among the wealthiest certainly bodes ill for high levels of social mobility. One of the main features of a patrimonial economy is that, at least from the point of view of social mobility, it is not dynamic. Piketty appeals to interesting evidence from 19th century Victorian literature to demonstrate this fact. In a highly patrimonial economy the ability of individuals at the very bottom of the economic scale to advance into the "middle-classes", let alone into the top 10% or 1%. A patrimonial economy also makes it very easy for those who have accumulated wealth to be fairly confident of never falling below the "middle classes", if one falls out of the elite classes at all. One of the most striking features, at least to modern readers, of Piketty's use of the economic evidence in Victorian novels, is that with conservative management an accumulated fortune is unlikely to be dissipated, and thus to be transmitted to the next generation.

The notion that classes, or castes, define American society is anathema to many pundits and commentators. Thus the vigorous attempts to rebut, dispute, and discredit Piketty's work and conclusions. This image of a patrimonial economy does not square well with the cherished nostrum of capitalist society as dynamic and highly socially mobile. To some extent this belief in mobility is evidenced in empirical studies. What these studies often compare are the economic, or educational, outcomes achieved by parents and their children. What they reveal is a strikingly low-level of social mobility, at least as defined by the "rags to riches" mythos of America. Indeed only .2% of those born into the bottom 20% of the income scale will end up rising into the top 1% of income earners. And, as one might expect, the picture is more bleak for persons of color, and other marginalized groups.

What some researchers found is that the picture of social mobility in America is much more complex than simplified narratives from right or center-left suggest. The reality for the majority of Americans is rather fluid, in that people enjoy bouts of relative prosperity and affluence, as well as bouts of relative poverty and deprivation. If such a picture of social mobility were not shocking enough, research taking a different tack suggests that social mobility is actually much lower that the picture presented by inter-generational studies mentioned above, and has been very low throughout history. [4] Economist Gregory Clark studied the prevalence and endurance of 'elite' surnames in elite institutions as a way of measuring social mobility with societies.

Using a variety of sources, including Census records, tax returns, death records, graduation records, and others, Clark makes a case that the rate of social mobility in the United States is much lower than contemporary estimates suggest. He argues that the common perception of very slow long-term mobility is more accurate than the estimates presented by social scientific research. For the case of the United States, Clark first identifies certain elite surname groups, as well as underclass surname groups. Then, he looks to test the prevalence of both groups among occupations identified as high status. Clark uses membership lists, mainly from professional associations, of doctors and lawyers as the high status occupations. Among the elite surname groups in America Clark lists Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, what he calls the 1923-1924 rich, and pre-1850 Ivy League graduates. The underclass groups are black Americans, and a groups Clark terms New French settlers. What his research concluded was that elite surnames show a very strong persistence, between 0.7 and 0.9, over the long-term, that is, for Clark, at least three generations.[5]

Another very interesting body of research suggests that humans have innate physiological and physiological reactions to the particular stresses induced by scarcity, by having less than is needed to make ends meet. Researchers found that these reactions impair humans' long-run decision making faculties, even if boosting short-term focus, resulting in patterns of behavior that lead the poor to be likely to remain in poverty. [6] The experience of scarcity causes people to 'tunnel', that is, focus on immediate goals and concerns, and thus to neglect many other important goals or other things one values. While this focus does yield an important benefit in increased productivity, the long-run consequences can lead to what researchers call a 'scarcity trap'. As one tunnels in on pressing immediate goals, the things that fall outside ones view are neglected, and thus become shocks as they suddenly appear on the tunnel of the person experiencing scarcity. As one reacts to each successive shock, even when "shocks" are predictable and routine events, one resorts to increasingly dodgy schemes to make ends meet. This is how people end up in, and unable to extract themselves from, one or another of the many kinds of scarcity trap.

This is only compounded by the fact that the experience of scarcity imposes a kind of tax on humans' cognitive capacities, such that as scarcity increases one comes to have less and less of the most important mental resources for escaping scarcity. Will-power is a finite resource, and the effects of scarcity are such that this resource is heavily depleted by scarcity, and the tendency of humans to psychologically obsess about their deprivations. Moreover, scarcity erodes intellectual capacities, in some studies the effect was the equivalent of as much as 13 or 14 IQ points. Thus, as scarcity taxes one's cognitive capacities, shocks continue to arise, and one must constantly react, always seemingly one step behind. Thus, one will end up making poorer, more impulsive decisions that meet short-term needs, but at the expense of the individual's long-term goals and interests. Scarcity, in this way, perpetuates scarcity, leading people to remain locked into debt and poverty. Unfortunately, even when poor people do escape poverty, or debt, they often fall back in because they lack any kind of buffer or cushion. The truth is that the poor tend to stay poor because of the physiological and psychological effects of the experience of scarcity, and the rich tend to stay rich because of the effects of abundance.

Inequality and Personality

Beyond its effects on the rates of social mobility, and how this affects people's lives, inequality also seems to change who people are on a deeper level. Inequality has some interesting, and disquieting, impacts on what people think, their attitudes, their moral values, their perceptions of situations and of other people, and more. Wealth, or the lack thereof, impacts on individual's personality in many ways. It directly provokes the question of whether the wealthy and the poor are qualitatively different sorts of persons, or whether they are constructed that way by their social environment. The results of empirical research suggest that the experience of inequality, from the top or the bottom of the economic scale, has profound effects on our personalities. The clear implication is that our personalities are in some very significant ways shaped by the contingent realities of the social environment.

In the wake of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, and its aftermath, came much scorn, and condemnation of Wall-Street's recklessness and greed. The Great Recession brought increased scrutiny to the 1% as a class, and to the mis-deeds and cupidity of the finance industry and financial institutions in the lead-up to and during the 2007-2008 Crisis. The treatment of the whole matter by the federal government angered many citizens, and further fueled the public's fury and indignation. One of the threads that emerged from this storm of vitriol that was poured on Wall-Street bankers was comparing corporate CEOs to sociopaths. The callousness, selfishness, and nonchalance with which many in the financial industry profited from the crash which they themselves had both created and precipitated, even as others were being fired en masse, made many Americans think of corporate CEOs as basically sociopaths. Some pundits took this to the logical conclusion and compared clinical symptoms of sociopathic behavior to the characteristics of successful CEOs. As it turns out, a growing body of empirical research is suggesting that the wealthy are indeed very different from others, e.g. morally and emotionally, as a result of their wealth.

A series of creatively designed studies by researchers Paul Piff, Dacher Keltner, Michael Kraus, Stephane Cote, and a host of collaborators, has revealed some very interesting results about the moral and emotional differences of rich people from persons of lower social class. Piff and Keltner, et al , demonstrated in both naturalistic and laboratory settings that those of higher social class, i.e. the wealthy, are more likely to lie, cheat, steal, and break the law than their counterparts in lower social classes.[7] On the naturalistic side, they found that wealthier drivers, as determined by the model of the car, were more likely to illegally cut-off both other drivers at intersections and pedestrians at crosswalks. On the laboratory side, they found that in experimental simulations those of higher social class, even if artificially created, were more likely to lie, cheat, and steal in order to win prizes. Moreover, in experimental simulations, even those whose position of wealth and dominance had been engineered as part of the experiment, showed the signs of feeling entitled to their totally un-earned wealth. Other research found that those who had attitudes characteristic of social dominance were found to be more likely to come to feel entitled to their position in the inequality hierarchy, or to believe the "legitimizing myths" of inequality. [8]

Other studies have produced similarly striking results. One study showed that lower-class individuals were more "empathically accurate" than their wealthier counterparts. 'Empathic accuracy' here refers to the ability of persons to correctly judge or predict the emotional states of others. [9] They hypothesize that since poorer people have to rely more on others to get by, they become more accurate at judging other people's emotional states, since their success in obtaining cooperation depends on managing the emotions of others. In another study, Kraus & Keltner demonstrated that the wealthier subjects in their experiments were less likely to pay attention to others, as demonstrated by a prevalence of "disengagement cues", e.g. looking at one's cell phone while others are talking.[10] A further study revealed that the wealthier subjects were more likely to have a predominance of "self-oriented affect", that is, the rich are more likely to think about themselves before others. [11] In yet a further study, Stellar, Keltner, & colleagues, demonstrated that wealthier subjects were not only slower to feel compassion, but reported feeling less compassion, for others experiencing suffering.[12] Higher social status individuals were also shown in one experiment to be stingier than their less wealthy counterparts.

Inequality, in addition to warping the perceptions and sensibilities of the rich, also distorts the perceptions of the working-classes. Kraus, Piff, and Keltner found in one study that those of lower social class position were more likely to favor contextual explanations over dispositional ones, because of a perceived lack of personal control over the outcome.[13] This means that poorer people tend to explain, or rationalize, their own choices, or the events of their lives in terms of external causal factors, that is, factors over which they as individuals do not have control. This perceived lack of control is characteristic of how researchers Melvin Kohn, Carmi Schooler, and their collaborators, understand the concept of alienation.[14] Their research demonstrated important connections between inequality in levels of alienation between high and low status groups in the workplace. The difference between the high- and low-status positions in the workplace roughly matches the colloquial "blue collar", "white collar" distinction, where the latter type of jobs contain an abundance, and the former a paucity, of opportunities to exercise "occupation self-direction", that is, control over their work. Each of these groups was found to have a distinct set of values and social orientations associated with it.

The correlation between the social stratification position of lower-status workers within the firm, and the personal values, social orientations, and psychological functioning that predominate among these workers is troubling.[15] The results obtained by Kohn and Schooler, et al, demonstrate that the more alienated low-status group are more likely to have specific set of values, attitudes, and social orientations. In particular, more alienated, "blue collar", workers tend to take on personality traits like authoritarianism, conformity to authority, resistance to change, and a focus on the letter rather than the spirit of the law. This is in turn related to the lower levels of psychological functions, or intellectual flexibility, observed among the high-alienation, low-status workers. This research also shows that the observed connection between these traits and social-stratification position within the firm are mediated by the division of labor in the typical capitalist firm, whereby the low-status workers are denied opportunities to exercise self-direction at work. Of course, we should note that an individual's social-stratification position with the firm is in many ways correlated with, and even determined by, that individual's social class in society generally. This latter is not a conclusion issued by the research we've been discussing, but rather a more general observation about the fit, under capitalism, between low-status persons and those who perform the low-status work in society.

One very telling, and worrisome, result of the work of Kohn and Schooler, et al, is that alienation experienced in the workplace spilled over into the non-work life of workers, effecting their leisure time preferences. The rate of interest in discussing non-political matters was found to be consistent across both the high- and low-alienation groups. However, interest in discussing political topics was distinctly lower among the high-alienation group. Moreover, the intellectuality of the preferred leisure time activities among highly alienated workers was seen to be much lower than among their counterparts in the low-alienation group. As a further kind of informal test, the researchers conducted their survey in two separate parts. One part of the survey covered non-political topics, the other political topics. After controlling for Swedes' cultural tendency to comply with researches requests, they found, quite suggestively, that the political part of the survey was returned later on average by the high-alienation group. This specifically political withdrawal by the high-alienation, low-status workers will have profound implications for the well-being of political democracy.

Inequality & Health in both Individuals and Societies

A growing body of research in public health has shown that economic inequality is highly related to certain significant socials ills, e.g. high levels of violence, as well as higher rates of illness and early death among those of lower class position in society. Building off this work on the "social determinants of health", Richard Wilkinson presents an argument that societies with more inequality are also, e.g. less trusting, less cohesive, less sociable, more prejudiced, and more violent. [16] He begins by noting an apparent paradox. Modern societies are more wealthy and productive, and with more luxuries readily available, than most of our ancestors would have ever dreamed. He cites the example of indoor plumbing and hot and cold running water as luxuries often taken for granted. And yet, modern societies also appear rife with unhappiness, e.g. high rates of suicide and depression, illness, violence, and early death. Wilkinson links the sources of these manifestations of unhappiness with economic inequality and its social, as well as physiological, effects.

Wilkinson's work successfully showed that almost all the social problems that are indicators of unhappiness, are more concentrated in poor areas, and more common among poor people. He argues that, as a result of the "epidemiological transition", the most common causes of death for all in developed countries shifted from infectious diseases to degenerative diseases. What he found is that health is graded by social status, that is, largely by income. His results demonstrated that as income increased so did health, according to a range of metrics, and vice versa. He appeals to a range of studies to help show that social problems indicative of unhappiness are caused by the same sources of stress as chronic diseases. Wilkinson points to three main categories of psychological risk factors, namely, early childhood social and emotional development, being more socially isolated, and high or low social status.

As inequality in a society rises, Wilkinson argues, the social relationships of that society increasingly become characterized by relations of dominance and subordination, that is, by increasing social distance. The more this latter is the case, the more the sense of autonomy, or of self-direction, decreases for the proverbial have-nots as their dependence on the haves increases. In Wilkinson's causal mechanism, increased inequality leads to increased competition for social status, and subsequently the adoption of anti-social values and attitudes as people become more detached from and less reliant on others. These latter values progressively erode social relations and community life, and thus contributing to the social problems afflicting society. Basically, the psychological factors that create unhappiness, produce ill health and other social issues through increases in stress associated with inequality, and deprivation. For, indeed, as Wilkinson acknowledges, the connection between economic inequality and ability to access consumption goods will play a large part in explaining the connection between inequality and ill health.

On the one hand, inequality makes societies less healthy. For example, one study based on data from the U.S. General Social Survey by Kawachi and Kennedyet al, Wilkinson cites, demonstrates that states with higher inequality were less trusting than in more equal states. [17] Two studies by Robert Putnam and colleagues, one conducted in the U.S. and the other in Italy, found that the strength of community life varied with the level of inequality. The more inequality there was, the less likely people were to be involved with social, or civic organizations or activities.[18] Building off others' data for ten U.S. cities, the more inequality there was the more hostility three was.[19] Moreover, as Wilkinson notes, there are more than fifty studies showing a relationship between inequality and homicide rates.[20] Other studies have shown that higher rates of economic inequality were related with increased racial prejudice, as were lower social status for women. [21] Lastly, but by no means least, studies have shown that where inequality is greater political participation decreases, when participation is measured by propensity to vote.[22]

On the other hand, inequality also makes individuals less healthy, resulting in the early death of those on the short-side of social inequalities. All three of the main psychological risk factors for unhappiness and stress, and thus illness, that Wilkinson identified are directly related to economic inequality. Pre-natal and early childhood stress have been linked by studies to a range of later life health problems. The scientific evidence points to the stress hormones like cortisol as an important influencing factor.[23] Social isolation, that is, lack of embeddedness with a robust network of friendships, and other social connections, has been shown to be related to higher mortality rates. [24] Low social status has also been shown to be related to higher rates of mortality. What may be the most striking thing about what some of the research in this area suggests that, yes the material conditions attached to poverty matter, but that the position of inequality, of subordination and deprivation, itself produces negative consequences for health.[25]

Compounding these effects of inequality on health is the visibility of inequality, which research has found further increases inequality. [26] Subjects were experimentally manipulated into higher and lower status groups, the higher the status the more the initial endowment of the participant. The subjects participated in a game designed to test their choices given specific incentives. Basically, the experiment consists of a turn-based game where fake money is waged. The participants can choose to act cooperatively, i.e. contribute to a common pool or bank. Alternatively, players can also choose to act selfishly, and defect from cooperation, and thus gain more money for themselves than if they had cooperated. The outcome of each round depends on the choices of each of the players, and each of the player's choices effects the choices of each of the other players. The researchers found that when the levels of inequality were more visible in these experiments the outcomes of the games were more unequal distributions of wealth than in games where the levels of inequality were invisible to the players. If the visibility of wealth increases inequality in the distribution of wealth, then it stands to reason that, given the link between inequality and social health, visibility of inequality will exacerbate the negative health effects of inequality.

Inequality is Anti-Democratic

I am in deep agreement with Wilkinson when he asserts that the surprise should not be so much that inequality is as harmful to ourselves and to society as it is, but rather that we should have forgotten this. For, indeed, when we look back into the history of our modern democratic political culture, we see that the concern about economic, and thus social and political, inequality has been a major one. Both the ancient Greek and Romans had important laws, not always scrupulously abided, that limited land ownership by individuals. The idea behind these laws was to attempt to preserve a wide distribution of land-ownership, because owning land and political and social independence were linked. Indeed, in ancient minds, the former was the necessary material foundation of the latter.[27] For the Greeks , someone who depended on another for work, for a livelihood, would be thought of as an unreliable citizen. This was because the relationship between employer and employee, patron and client, is one of domination and subjugation. If one's ability access important subsistence goods hinges on the disposition of another, then one is unlikely to oppose that other politically; especially in a time when political debate and voting was done face to face, and in public. The rise of patron - client relationships was in part responsible, in the case of the Romans, for the fall of the republic.

Consider the classic slogan of the French revolution, "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité", or liberty, equality, and solidarity. As Wilkinson rightly notes, each one of these values, is a demand, and is addressed or related to inequality. We've seen already that inequality lead to subordination, which is the anti-thesis of democratic political relations. Solidarity has to do with our understanding of social relations themselves, and their quality. A robust democratic culture must maintain a certain level and quality of social cohesion, built on relationships that affirm liberty and cooperation. We've see already that research shows that as inequality increases the quality of social relations decreases, importantly, inequality was found to decrease levels of participation. Equality can thus be seen as the basic pre-condition for liberty and solidarity. This is because of the importance of the material bases of liberty and solidarity, and the link between access to these material bases and income. Thus, the most essential foundation of any democratizing reform must be a change in the distribution of levels of access to the material pre-requisites of a decent life, the enables substantial political participation.

Inequality is also anti-democratic because it skews the outcome of public political deliberative institutions and processes, as well as "competitive" elections. A recent study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page demonstrated that that the majority of the U.S. electorate had little or no control over the legislative outcomes of their "democratic" institutions. That is, as their research shows, there is no statistically significant connection between the preferences of the majority of voters and the legislative outcomes of their political institutions.[28] The wealthiest elites have a statistically significant lead over the rest of the American citizenry in the likelihood of their preference being realized in public policy and law. The recent Citizens Untied ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court only further entrenched the role of money in the contemporary American political system, by legally equating money with speech. It is very likely because people perceive the way that their political elites serve economic elites and their interests much more than those of the proverbial "common man". This is also very likely behind the deep decline in voter participation in America over a period of many years. It is also almost certainly part of why other research found that a full one third of survey respondents replied "not at all" when asked, "(H)ow democratically is your country being governed?"[29]

Conclusion

Economic inequality is thus highly corrosive of democracy because it limits social mobility, creates ill health and social problems, warps the personalities of those involved in un-democratic ways, and distorts the outcomes of the political process in favor of the wealthy. Inequality lowers mobility and results in more rigid social hierarchies divided by class, that is, by income. The result of this is a society in which a great gulf opens between these classes as their social, political, and economic experiences become increasingly divorced from each other. Further, because of the link between income and consumption, there is a connection between income inequality and health; both in persons and in societies. Inequality makes people more stressed, triggering physiological reactions, that when sustained over long durations produce consequences leading to more illness and earlier death. Inequalities in societies, in particular inequalities in income, resources, and opportunities, help produce unhealthy social maladies like increased violence and crime, reduced levels of compassion, higher levels of hostility, reduced levels of trust. In essence, inequality tends to decrease social cohesion, and the robustness of participation in community life, leading to increased levels of social isolation. Inequality also leads to the creation of social and economic conditions, and structures of work, under which individuals are incentivized to become persons with anti-democratic values, attitudes, and preferences. Increases in exposure to relationships of domination and subordination lead those subordinated to taken on adaptive preferences, e.g. the specifically political withdrawal noted in the work of Kohn & Schooler et al.

What we can see now is that the responses to the problem, really problems, of inequality are woefully inadequate to address the wide range of maladies created or exacerbated by inequality. Raising taxes on the rich, and spending that money on social programs sounds like an appealing solution. But, from what we have just seen, this strategy is not capable of providing real solutions to the variegated social, economic, and political problems related to high levels of inequality in society. Tackling the problem of inequality will require much more robust measures. What should be clear from what we've discussed here is that the political and economic problems of economic and political inequality cannot be addressed singly or in isolation. Only a comprehensive strategy addressing them all simultaneously will suffice to effect real change. The economic power of capitalists gives them political power, which they use to preserve and even enhance their economic power. Unless the very social and economic foundations of this feedback loop are extirpated, the hold of bourgeois elites on both economic and political power is unlikely to be broken. This is why even a successful "political revolution" would be ineffecti ve in combatting inequality; let alone reversing the four decade old trend towards rising inequality. The only effective means of combatting inequality, and its myriad of detrimental consequences, is the seizure of political and economic power from the capitalist class by a working class that is conscious of itself as a class both in-itself and for-itself.

Notes

[1] Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the 21st Century. Tr. Arthur Goldhammer. The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2014.

[2] In this equation r = average annual rate of growth of capital, and g = average annual rate of growth of income, or output. See Piketty, (2014), 25.

[3] See Piketty (2014); figs.8.5 - 8.10

[4] See Clark, Gregory. The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility. Princeton University Press, 2014.

[5] See Clark (2014) ch.3.

[6] See Mullainathan, Sendhil & Eldar Shafir. Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives. Picador, 2014.

[7] Piff, Paul, et al. "Higher Social Status Leads to Increased Unethical Behavior". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Vol.109 no.11 (2012): 4086-4091.

[8] See Wilkinson (2005), 196.

[9] Kraus, Michael W., Stephane Cote, & Dacher Keltner. "Social Class, Contextualism, and Empathic Accuracy". Psychological Science. Vol.21 no.11 (2010):1716-1723.

[10] Kraus, Michael W., & Dacher Keltner. "Signs of Socioeconomic Status: A thin Slicing Approach". Psychological Science. Vol.20 no.1 (2009): 99-106.

[11] Kraus, Michael W., Paul Piff, & Dacher Keltner. "Social Class as Culture: The Convergence of Resources and Rank in the Social Realm". Current Directions in Psychological Science. Vol.20 no.4 (2011): 246-250.

[12] Stellar, Jennifer, V.M. Manzo, Michael W. Kraus, & Dacher Keltner. "Class and Compassion: Socioeconomic Factors Predict Response to Suffering". Emotion. Vol.12 no.3 (2012): 449-459.

[13] Kraus, Michael W., Paul Piff, & Dacher Keltner. "Social Class, Sense of Control, and Social Explanation". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol.97 no.6 (2009): 992-1004.

[14] Kohn, Schooler, and their colleagues take their conception of alienation from work done by Melvin Seeman in the early 1960s. See; Seeman."Alienation and Social Learning in a Reformatory". American Journal of Sociology. Vol.69 no.3 (1963): 270-284. Also see; Seeman, & John W. Evans. "Alienation and Learning in a Hospital Setting". American Sociological Review. Vol.27 no.6 (1962): 772-782.

[15] See; Kohn, Melvin. Class and Conformity: A Study in Values. 1969. University of Chicago Press, 1977. Also see; Kohn and Schooler, et al. Work and Personality. Ablex Publishing, 1983.

[16] See; Wilkinson, Richard. The Impact of Inequality: How to Make Sick Societies Healthier. The New Press, 2005.

[17] Kawachi, I., B.P.Kennedy, K.Lochner, &D.Prothrow-Smith.1997. "Social Capital, Income Inequality and Mortality. American Journal of Public Health. Vol.87 no.1: 21-32.

[18] See; Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster. 2000. Also see; Putnam, R.D., R. Leonardi, & R.Y. Nanetti. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton University Press, 1993.

[19] Wilkinson (2005), 51.

[20] Wilkinson (2005), 47-50.

[21] Kennedy, B.P., I. Kawachi, K. Lochner, C.P. Jones, & D. Prothrow-Smith. "(Dis)respect and Black Mortality. Ethnicity & Disease. Vol.7 (1997): 207-214. Also see; Blau, F.D. & L.M. Kahn. "The Gender Earnings Gap - Learning from International Comparisons". American Economic Review. Vol.82 (1992): 533-538.

[22] See Mahler, V.A.."Exploring the Subnational Dimension of Income Inequality". Luxembourg Income Study Working Paper 292, January, 2002. Also see; Blakely, T.A. B.P. Kennedy, & I. Kawachi. "Socioeconomic Inequality in Voting Participation and Self-rated Health". American Journal of Public Health. Vol.91 no.1(2001): 99-104.

[23] Wilkinson (2005), 81-85.

[24] Wilkinson (2005), 78-81.

[25] Wilkinson (2005), 73-76. Also see; Shively, C.A., & T.B. Clarkson. "Social Status and Coronary Artery Atherosclerosis in Female Monkeys". Arteriosclerosis & Thrombosis. Vol. 14 (1994): 721-726.

[26] Nishi, Akahiro, Hirokazu Shirado, David G. Rand, & Nicholas A. Christakis. "Inequality and Visibility of Wealth in Experimental Social Networks". Nature. Vol.526 Oct., (2015): 426-429.

[27] See; ; Havell. H.L.. Republican Rome. 1914. Oracle Publishing, 1996. Also see; Hanson. Victor Davis. The Other Greeks. University of California Press, 1999.

[28] Gilens, Martin & Benjamin I. Page. "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens". Perspectives on Politics. Vol.12 no.3 (2014).

[29] See World Values Survey Wave 6 (2010-2014).

There is No "Honor" In Killing: The Problematic Language Used To Describe Violence Against Women

By Cherise Charleswell

The term "honor killing" is used to describe an act of murder against a relative, usually a girl or woman, who is perceived to have brought dishonor to the family's reputation by engaging in what is deemed an "immoral" act within their given culture or society. In this respect, they can be looked at as a form of domestic violence, one that is colluded and facilitated, not only by a family, but also the external members of the same community; patriarchal views are used to justify these murders. Also, in many cases, these murders are carried out based on rumors and unfounded suspicions, which resemble witch hunts. It is believed that the only way to restore the family's "honor" is through murder - or punishment by death. These "honor" killings have been carried out by fathers, brothers, and cousins; and female relatives, including mothers - out of fear and/or cultural indoctrination - often are complacent and remain silent about these murders. Even worse is the complacency of society, in that these murders often go unpunished. There are no arrests or trials carried out to seek justice for the deceased. Instead, it seems that the social norms justify the murders - finding the women guilty of inappropriate behavior and thus deserving of capital punishment.

Currently the practice is most commonly associated with regions (and cultures) in North Africa and the Middle East, and with those in the Islamic faith; however, these acts pre-date Islam, and have been carried out in other regions of the world. The practice has a long history, and this likely has much to do with the fact that women and girls, for many centuries, have been subjugated and treated as nothing more than property. It was carried out in the ancient world, including ancient Rome, where the pater familias, the senior male of a household, was afforded a number of rights that were not extended to Roman women, including the right kill a daughter or other female relative engaged in pre-marital sex, or a wife having extra-marital relations (Goldstein, 2002). In fact, the Roman law justified homicide "when committed in defense of the chastity either of oneself or relations". (Blackstone, 1966). The Hammurabi Code of the Babylonian civilization had a number of rules that pertained to adultery, and among these rules was that an adulterous wife must be tied to her lover and thrown in the river to drown. The specific text is as follows for laws 132 and 133:

[132] If the "finger is pointed" at a man's wife about another man, but she is not caught sleeping with the other man, she shall jump into the river for her husband.

[133] If a man is taken prisoner in war, and there is a sustenance in his house, but his wife leave house and court, and go to another house: because this wife did not keep her court, and went to another house, she shall be judicially condemned and thrown into the water.

While ancient civilizations in the Americas, such as the Aztec and Incas, allowed their own form of "honor" killings: Inca laws allowed husbands to starve their wives if they were suspected of adultery, while Aztec laws permitted stoning or strangulation as punishment for adultery (Goldstein, 2002). Honor-based murders were also codified and practiced in medieval Europe, where early Jewish law mandated death by stoning for an adulterous wife and her partner (Brundage, 1987). Catherine Howard, the fifth wife of England's King Henry VIII, was beheaded based on allegations of adultery, as was the fictitious character Desdemona, in Shakespeare's play, Othello.

Women's roles, and increased independence, sexual liberation, etc., did not begin to take root until the 19th century, and was not advanced until the latter half of the 20th century. For many women in the world, these things have not yet been achieved, and the persistence of "honor" killings is an example to this. The following are some of the recent and brutal murders that have been described as "honor" killings:

- The killing of a 26-years-old Pakistani social media star and model Fauzia Akeem, known as Qandeel Baloch, by her brother in the name of preserving their family's honor. Fauna challenged social norms with her glamorous photos and videos that she posted on social media on sites such as Instagram. Reports about her death stated that she was strangled and/or subjected to things that were far more sinister.

- The case of Mohammad Shafia an Afghani man residing in Ontario, Canada, who murdered his three daughters, Zainab 19, Sahar 17, and Geeti 13, after he deemed them to be treacherous. Shafia's anger stemmed from the fact that he felt ashamed that his eldest daughter married a Pakastani man, and he reportedly stated the following when speaking about his daughter's deaths, "I would do it again 100 times,"

- The 2008 movie, The Stoning of Soraya M., is based on the true story of an Iranian woman who was falsely accused of infidelity by her husband, because she refused his request for divorce so that he could marry a 14-years-old girl, only to be ostracized by her community, rejected by her sons, and ultimately sentenced to death by stoning. Soraya was subjected to beatings by her husband before he began the plot against her, and his need to rid himself of her was because he could not afford to support his wife, their children, and the other bride that he sought after. Soraya's story was recounted by her aunt, to a French journalist, and it provides an example of how barbaric these acts of violence against women are, while also illustrating how vulnerable women are in various societies and within their families. This vulnerability stems from the fact that a family's honor is tied to a girl's/woman's body, ultimately stripping them of their rights to decide how to adorn their body, in which settings to allow themselves to take up space, whose company they can keep, and most importantly who they share their bodies with. There was also the movie Sound of Tears, made by Cameroonian director Dorothy Atabong and set in Canada. The movie followed the lead protagonist, a young woman and immigrant, who made the decision to forego a pre-arranged marriage in order to run-off with the man who she loved, and whose child she carried; a man who happened to be White. The movie ends with her being murdered by her brother, and closes with a scene of her mother knowingly sitting in a chair, waiting to receive confirmation that the deed had been done.

These twisted and illogical beliefs allow people within these communities to deem the act of murder as "honorable", or capable of restoring honor, and these out-dated beliefs continue to be a problem in the modern world, where according to United Nations statistics, some 5,000 "honor" killings are reported a year, worldwide. This count, of course, does not include the murders that go unreported. Further, they are not a problem that only affects those living in the Middle East or Africa, as there have been cases taking place in the United States, Europe, and Canada. In 2015, a report found that there were 23 to 27 documented honor killings in the United States each year (again, does not capture what is undocumented). In 2009, a report released by the Council of Europe warned that so-called honor killings were far more extensive in Europe than previously believed. The Department of Justice of Canada has even launched a preliminary examination of so-called honor killings.

These acts of violence carried out against women by their relatives should not be referred to as "honor killings" because they are actually dishonorable in nature. There simply is no honor in carrying out brutal and premeditated murder. Therefore, I offer a few suggestions to replace the term "honor killings":

• Family-Directed Killings

• Patriarchal Killings

Masculinity So Fragile

What these acts of violence against women and girls, and in some cases men, particularly LGBTQ men, make clear is that masculinity is extremely fragile, in that the actions of another, and what they choose to say or do with their bodies, allows men to feel as if their masculinity has been diminished and their honor ruined. Any time someone chooses to tie their worth and dignity to the actions of another, it speaks to their fragility. It also speaks to their need to overcompensate and protect their fragile masculinity through the use of brute force and oppression.

Ultimately, masculinity is so fragile and readily becomes problematic because it is often steeped in patriarchy, which not only oppresses and negatively impacts women and girls, but also the men who have to uphold it. Patriarchy dictates to them what actions are deemed acceptable, such as what color clothes they should wear, how close they can respectfully sit next to another man, as well as making it shameful to cry or show any emotion. Consequently, patriarchy makes masculinity fragile, leaving men in a constant and daily battle to protect it. This constant assertion of manhood is often done at the expense of women and girls, and is carried out through oppressive and sexist cultural and social norms, and in some cases through public policy. An example of the political aspect would be laws such as those in Saudi Arabia which prohibit women from driving. To be clear, it is not an official or state law, but one that is upheld by societal views, based on deeply held religious beliefs of clerics who wield a great deal of power and influence. They argue that female drivers "undermine social values." There has been a great deal of pushback to these archaic beliefs, such as the 2011 campaign "Women2Drive" organized by women in Saudi Arabia, which encourage women to disregard the laws and to even dare to post images of themselves driving on social media in an attempt to raise awareness and spark dialogue for reform. Unfortunately, campaigns such as this have not been a major success, and women continue to face punishment for getting behind the wheel of a vehicle. In this case, masculinity is so fragile that the mere thought of women being able to move about freely without the approval and assistance of men is viewed as a challenge to their manhood - a manhood that once again depends on the actions of another.

So, this is what makes masculinity so fragile - the fact that it can be diminished and stripped away by the actions of another. It is extremely problematic in that the ways in which men must prove their masculinity- through specific labels and behaviors - often result in mental, emotional, and physical consequences for both men and women.

Your Honor Cannot Be Based on Ownership of Women's and Girl's Bodies

The most critical problem with "honor" killings is the fact that the entire concept of honor is based on ownership of women's bodies. The ability to dictate what the women in one's family does with their bodies, and being able to show or prove that they have adhered to these rules, and have not rebelled or done what is forbidden. Even when the forbidden involves them taking agency over their bodies and lives.

This cannot be stated in a more simple manner -- No one's honor can be based on the ownership of women's and girl's bodies.

A joke made by comedian Chris Rock comes to mind when thinking about this topic of honor-by-ownership. It is a joke where he shared that his "Only job in life is to ensure that his daughters stay off of a pole," or something to that effect. Basically, stating that his honor as a man and success as a father is inherently tied to his daughters' sexuality and personal decisions. One can only imagine what would occur if father's of the millions who engage in sex work, such as strippers, decided that their daughter's profession was so dishonorable that they too had to be punished by death. Another problem with the joke is that it exemplifies the sexist views held by many, and reinforced by both women and men. It is the same view that deeply condemns, vilifies, and looks down upon the strippers but not the men who spend their money and time to simply gaze at naked women's bodies. Their morality is not called to the table. Also, these views are the same that criminalize prostitutes while not applying the same degree of scrutiny and punishment to the johns that pay for sexual services. In many societies, including those in the Western World that likes to pretend it is more progressive, prostitutes - including those who are forced into sex trafficking -- are ostracized, while the men who exploit prostitutes are again often free from shame and public scrutiny. Many former prostitutes or those still engaged in this work often speak about this shame and how it affects their ability to return home to their communities, villages, etc. and ever have a "normal life." (More on thathere,here, and here)

These "honor" killings uphold a patriarchal dichotomy that views women as either Virtuous or Whores. There is no in-between, and worse yet men are not held to similar standards. They are not deemed to be whores based on the number of sexual partners that they may have had, or their chosen style of dress. In fact, the opposite occurs. Men are praised for their sexual prowess, and are often referred to as "lady's men" when their sexual exploits gain notoriety. Even within cultures where these "honor" killings take place, men are not condemned to death or shunned if they engage in premarital sex, sex with prostitutes, or sex outside of their marriages. These acts are acceptable because of the perceived belief that men have sexual needs and desires that must be fulfilled, while ignoring the fact that women may have the same. So, men can engage in dishonorable and immoral activities as long as they have control over women's bodies. This control can be used to ensure that their honor remains intact.

Before We Condemn Let's Discuss Western Hypocrisy

When hearing about these so-called honor killings it is easy to respond with condemnation, as well as xenophobic reactions about a certain culture and religion - particularly Islam - but the truth of the matter is that those responses are hypocritical. Violence against women, particularly rape culture, is just as problematic for women in the West, and within other cultures and societies. Sure, those carrying out these acts may not be carried out primarily by relatives (although incest, pedophilia, intimate partner violence is often carried out by relatives), it does not take away from the fact that women and girls are victimized by gender-based sexual violence. A recent study in the UK, referred to as the "Femicide Census," found that the vast majority of homicides and violence committed against women were due to the result of intimate partner violence (More on thathere, and here). These killings may not be motivated by a need to restore "honor," but they have commonality in the need to control women and their bodies. If the United States government would restore funding for gun violence research originally earmarked by the 1996 Dickey Amendment (which interestingly restricted the CDC from using its funding to "advocate or promote gun control"), I am quite sure that a similar pattern regarding homicide and women would be revealed. One-hundred and forty-one medical, public health, and social organizations, including the Southern California Public Health Association, for which I serve as President, have joined in on a coalition being led by Doctors for America, which is urging Congress to Restore Funding for Gun Violence Research. Letters have been sent directly to four senior members of the House and Senate Appropriations Committee. (See the press release from Doctors for America here)

The language used to discuss violence against women and girls is quite problematic globally, because it is steeped in patriarchy and masculine fragility which normalize victim blaming. Those who speak out against street harassment and molestation are simply told that they are being whiny and cannot take a compliment, even when that compliment involves another person believing that they have a right to place their hands on another's body. These arguments are being made despite the fact that women/girls have been killed for simply stating 'no' - for saying that they did not want to give a man their number or didn't want to stay in a relationship with a man. One of the most graphic examples of this occurred when a young woman was stabbed to death in the middle of a crowded commuter train in Chicago. At the root of these retaliatory acts of violence is the fact that these men felt not only rejected, but as if they had been dissed--and thus disrespected. In other words, they too believed that their honor was diminished.

Normalized language of violence against women/girls made it possible for people like Daniel Holtzclaw, a former Oklahoma police officer convicted in December 2015 of rape, sexual battery, forcible sodomy and other charges, to sexually abuse and exploit women; as well as for the exploitation of Celeste Guap in Oakland, California, who has spoken out about engaging in sexual acts (while under the age of legal consent) with dozens of police officers from throughout the Bay Area under the guise of protection. Guap's ordeal has led to a scandal that involves the resignation of a number of police chiefs. In each case, the women involved remained silent because of the way they are viewed in society, and referred to by the media. They are rarely seen as the victim, and in other cases victims are simply blamed for what has transpired against them. This is the basis of rape culture, and rape culture has become so toxic with the advent of social media that men have used these platforms to harass, stalk, and make threats of rape and murder against women (Examples of this problemhere,here, and here).

In consummation, the current language used to describe violence against women and girls is beyond problematic. It helps to perpetuate patriarchal views of ownership and control of women and their bodies, particularly in the use of the term "honor killings," which ties a man's perceived honor to the choices made by a woman, regarding her life and body. There is absolutely no "honor" in killing.

References

Matthew A. Goldstein, "The biological roots of heat-of-passion crimes and honour killings," Politics and the Life Sciences 21,2 (2002): 28-37.

William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1765- 1769, Book Four, Public Wrongs, (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1769, reprinted by Wildy & Sons Ltd., London, 1966): 181.

James A. Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, 55.