Democracy, Higher Education, and the Ivory Tower Critique of Neoliberalism

By Jacob Ertel

Few dedicated to any semblance of left politics are celebrating the state of higher education in the United States today. From unprecedented student indebtedness to budget cuts to attacks on tenure, the future of academia looks bleak. Yet for the general concurrence on the symptoms resulting from the neoliberalization of the university, it is less established how this process of neoliberalization is best conceptualized. Analyses of neoliberalism tend to fall largely into two camps: one that describes a series of economic policy moves with varying degrees of deliberation or foresight, and one that describes a markedly new form of governmentality. These critiques are not mutually exclusive, but they often do diverge in their understanding of capitalism's historical progression, its underlying logic, and its most pronounced effects. In particular, the latter camp (largely comprised of cultural theorists) that evaluates neoliberalism as a paradigm shift in governmentality risks romanticizing the Fordist-Keynesian regime of publicly financed mass production and consumption, and the nominal freedoms typically associated with post-war governance. By adhering to the paradigm shift schema, this line of thinking loses sight of the historically contingent movement of capitalism, and in doing so erroneously leaves open the possibility of a return to a prior era. This is not only inaccurate analytically, but entails a range of counterproductive assumptions regarding the political nature of capitalism and liberal democracy. Looking at the higher education system in this light can be instructive for thinking through the political-economic changes of the last several decades, as well as how we can re-conceptualize resistance to ongoing processes of neoliberalization without resorting to a nostalgic imaginary.

Of central importance to any discussion of neoliberalism is that we know what we want. To be sure, since the 1970s inequality has increased, along with the privatization of public goods and services, the incorporation of poor and working class people into the financial sector, and the disembowelment of the already precarious welfare system. While these trends are serious and palpable, and emerge from a range of contradictions endemic to the Fordist-Keynesian arrangement-including low growth, high inflation, worker militancy, and destabilizing foreign inflows of capital-we need to be careful in discussing neoliberalism as a veritable paradigm shift. This is not to understate the realness of neoliberalism, but to argue to that it represents a historically contingent escalation of capitalism's underlying tendencies towards capital concentration, uneven development, and crisis. This distinction holds implications for formulating any sort of left political imaginary. If we accept neoliberalism as a paradigm shift, how much inequality under capitalism are we comfortable tolerating? A common response might entail what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten would term a 'restorationist' argument, which laments neoliberalism's abandonment of ostensible democracy or democratic institutions. Restorationist arguments can have radical theoretical origins, but fall more fully in line with humanist and social democratic affiliations that critique neoliberalism on the grounds of its moral baseness rather than its concrete functionality. Such critiques can be useful in helping us articulate our relationship to political and economic centers of power, but they often idealize pre-neoliberal iterations of such power. Instead, we should look to reconfigure our relationship to neoliberal institutions, especially if we decide that our objections to them come not from their neoliberalization but from their social function throughout capitalism's development.

Wendy Brown's critique of the neoliberalization of the university exemplifies a kind of restorationist nostalgia. In her recent Undoing the Demos, Brown portrays neoliberalism as a distinctly new governing rationality that constitutes a clean break from post-war governance. In so doing, Brown idealizes the university's historical role within the United States while equating democracy with liberal arts education. Brown conceives of neoliberalism as "an order of normative reason that, when it becomes ascendant, takes shape as a governing rationality extending a specific formulation of economic values, practices, and metrics to every dimension of human life."[1] For Brown, the notion of the free market as a governing rationality fundamentally reconfigures our self-understanding-we become "homo oeconomicus" (a term borrowed from Foucault), or human capital, that constantly must work to leverage our ability to compete and enhance our self-worth.[2] Brown contrasts neoliberal from liberal rationality in three ways. First, whereas liberalism allowed for a degree cultivation of personal interests, under neoliberalism our identity as human capital becomes a singular and ever pervasive subject position. Second, as opposed to the impetus under liberalism for human capital to compete in order to participate in the purchase of use-values, neoliberalism mandates the infinite appreciation of self-as-exchange-value. Finally, neoliberal human capital operates in the sphere of financial or investment capital, rather than entrepreneurial capital. [3]

Brown explains that this neoliberal rationality is dangerous less so because of the material consequences of intensified economic polarization, but because it undermines our potential to effectively participate in democracy (broadly articulated as the ability for people to control their own political decision making process). This limitation is not due to a repressive state power or the impact of financialization on people's livelihoods, but to what Brown calls a reconfiguration of the higher education system in accordance with neoliberal rationality. For Brown, "Citizens cannot rule themselves…without understanding the powers and problems they are engaging," and that understanding must come first and foremost through education, and liberal arts education more specifically.[4] If "the dramatic thinning of key democratic values coupled with this intensification of nondemocratic forces and conditions threatens to replace self-rule with a polity in which the people are pawns of every kind of modern power," then the only way to combat "people's wholesale ignorance of the forces shaping their lives and limning their future" is through an educational model that challenges neoliberalism's professionalizing imperative.[5] This model looks to the post-war period in which, Brown claims, the university "promised not merely literacy, but liberal arts to the masses…it was a time in which a broad, if not deep college education-one of the arts, letters, and sciences-became an essential element of middle-class membership."[6] Here Brown misrepresents the university's social function as fundamental to the production of the "intelligent citizenry" needed for democratic self-rule. Though she often provides stipulations when discussing the pre-neoliberal university in the United States, such disclaimers are effectively rendered mute by her insistence on the university's (and in particular, the public university's) construction as a means for egalitarianism, social mobility, and democracy.[7] According to Brown, this conception of the university destined citizens "for intelligent engagement with the world, rather than economic servitude or mere survival."[8] Brown admits that this model is a classically liberal ideal, but one that is founded on a commitment to egalitarianism, humanism, and the public good. [9]

Yet why should economic mobility rest on a liberal arts education? Why should entering into the 'middle-class' be contingent on any particular kind of education? And how is classical liberalism commensurable with any kind of redistributive ethos? The goal here is not to take up Brown's understanding of the pre-neoliberal university as an institution of egalitarianism by arguing that the university is a purveyor of false consciousness or brainwashing. Rather, it is to assert that her views regarding what constitutes intelligence are rooted in unfair assumptions about education and democracy, and thus fail to provide an alternative to the tendency towards professionalization that she argues is unique to the neoliberal university. Even if we set aside the race-blind character of her analysis here, Brown's equation of liberal arts education to democracy is fundamentally elitist: its corollary is that those without such an education are unfit for participation in self-rule, as if exposure to Plato and Aristotle rather than accounting or marketing better qualifies one to truly understand one's own interests. This line of thinking is of course disengaged from the lived experiences of those who voluntarily seek vocational training (there is no voluntary activity for Brown), or those whose livelihoods depend on such preparation. One's contribution to society is determined through one's access to a particular kind of education. In making such claims Brown paradoxically accepts the neoliberal logic she writes against, and she does so without questioning the undemocratic nature of pre-neoliberal institutions themselves. Brown's democracy implies a flattened understanding of power, one that takes the notions of citizenry and nation-state for granted.

In particular, the claim that a university-educated citizenry precedes democracy performs a theoretical sleight of hand, as it inadvertently refers back to a logic of social intelligibility that codifies competency via institutional validation. Brown calls for a return to the vague democratic pluralism that has been eroded by the requirement for "skilled human capital, not educated participants in public life and common rule." [10] This understanding of democracy actually occludes an engagement with power, as such pluralism is distinct from the power-ridden selection process that determines which desires are legitimized and enacted. If we follow Brown's claims about the democratic nature of the post-war educational system, then it is puzzling as to why such a system would have eroded in the first place, unless neoliberalism is the natural outcome of a democratically engaged polity. In this sense, construing neoliberalism as a paradigm shift in governing rationality from the Fordist-Keynesian period-while avoiding a serious discussion of that regime's engrained racialized inequities, its economic contradictions, and its deepening militarization-fails to examine how the intensification of these tendencies under neoliberalism is endogenous to capitalism itself. This shortcoming is particularly acute when it comes to the academia: the professionalization Brown laments is part and parcel of the university under capitalism.

Here we may find Harney and Moten's work on the university instructive. In contrast to Brown's view of the pre-neoliberal, liberal arts university, Harney and Moten aver that self-identified critical academics must by nature of their position recognize and be recognized by the university. In other words, some buy-in is required. So-called critical education, apropos of Brown's appeal to the liberal arts, is thus constituted "in an opposition to the unregulated and the ignorant without acknowledging the unregulated, ignorant, unprofessional labor that goes on not opposite them but within them." [11] Academia's purpose is not to encourage a free flow of ideas-it is a striated and hierarchized field that envelops and regulates, but is also fallible in its own capacities. In contrast to Brown, Harney and Moten understand the university as a space of conflict that can serve as refuge but never enlightenment.[12] True subversion lies not in the call for a more critical education, but in stealing from the university what one can, in rendering oneself unintelligible within its mode of professionalism. Critical education's paradoxical relationship to professionalization entails a negligence of those who operate both within and outside of the university through a politics of deception, of theft, and of a true unprofessionalism. Such negligence then constitutes the crux of professionalization, while this professionalization is the means through which negligence is carried out.[13] To recognize or accept this logic is to simultaneously render oneself intelligible to it, and thus to adhere to Brown's call for pluralism. Such reasoning does not include this unprofessional group (for Harney and Moten, "the undercommons") in its understanding of democracy, and in so doing it accepts the claim that participation in the polity requires institutional codification. Meanwhile, the unintelligible sneak in to these institutions and work to bring them down. If this is what democracy actually means-institutionalization-then perhaps we need to reconsider our axes of opposition to neoliberalism. We need to go beyond the critique of the neoliberal university, to consider the intimate linkages between critical academia and the professionalizing tendencies endemic to the university under capitalism, neoliberal or not.

The problem with Brown's ivory tower critique of the neoliberalization of the university is not about an error in identifying this process's outcomes; the effects of neoliberalization are quite clear. The argument here is simply that rather than understanding neoliberalism as a new governing rationality, we should look to it as an exacerbation of capitalism's internal logics. Analyzing the conundrum of the neoliberal university in this way allows us to begin to analyze capitalism in a way that Brown is unwilling to do: we are better prepared to analyze the relationship between democracy and the state, more attuned to the experiences of the poor and the working classes, and able to move away from restorationist nostalgia.

Notes

[1] Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), 30.

[2] Brown, Undoing the Demos, 10.

[3] Ibid, 33.

[4] Ibid, 175.

[5] Ibid, 179.

[6] Ibid, 180.

[7] Ibid, 184.

[8] Ibid, 185.

[9] Ibid, 187.

[10] Ibid, 177.

[11] Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Autonomedia, 2013), 32.

[12] Harney and Moten, The Undercommons, 26.

[13] Ibid, 31.

Media Monsters: Militarism, Violence, and Cruelty in Children's Culture

By Heidi Tilney Kramer

"10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction." 

- Susan Sontag

Who ever thought there would be torture scenes in G and PG rated American children's films or that a video game would allow one to feel the rush of killing? Who would have imagined in their worst nightmare that the Disney corporation would try to trademark "SEAL Team 6," especially right after this elite military group killed Osama bin Laden, so they could use it for toys, Christmas stockings, and snow globes? Or that a child would write a few loving words on her desk and be arrested in front of her classmates? Who could have believed that the U.S. would torture real children in the "war on terror" campaign?

Consider that there are now only five big media conglomerates controlling over 90% of everything seen and heard. Media in the U.S. is engaging in post-9/11 rhetoric even in the world of children. Seeing little Boo, the toddler who can barely speak in Monsters, Inc., strapped in the torture chair - equipped with holes in the seat's bottom like electric chairs have for drainage of bodily fluids - convinces us to look closer at what American kids and children the world over are watching as their purported entertainment.

As cartoon images of militarism and prison fill children's heads, the school-to-prison pipeline is active in the schools of poor neighborhoods and those of color mimicking the prison system - and these children have largely been slated for a life in prison or the military. Pushing students out of the classroom and into the criminal justice system - often for minor offenses such as getting behind in their homework! - is as disturbing as the JROTC instituting programs on the middle school level as a way of getting especially inner-city, racially targeted recruits.

This is against the U.N.'s Convention on the Rights of the Child's (C.R.C.) Article 38: "Children under 15 should not be forced or recruited to take part in a war or join the armed forces...The Convention's Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict further develops this right, raising the age for direct participation in armed conflict to 18 and establishing a ban on compulsory recruitment for children under 18." The United States, along with Somalia and South Sudan, refuses to ratify this document under the guise of parental rights, but that decision allows the following problems: 21% of U.S. children are living in poverty; the U.S. is the only high-income country not to grant paid maternal leave; and the U.S. is the only country in the world sentencing under-18-year-olds to life without parole. These infractions are all against the C.R.C. Over twenty-five years old, the document will never be ratified by the United States because it interferes with business as usual, and Michael P. Farris, president of Parental Rights, actively fights the treaty. His group fears that, if instituted, "[a nation] would have to spend more on children's welfare than national defense." As the old saying goes, "It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber." The grand total in 2013 for U.S. Homeland Security and National Defense was an astounding $931 billion, or nearly $1 trillion, and part of the funding has come from cutting the school-lunch program. China has the next largest military budget, estimated at $136 billion.

Yet the propaganda continues...The Incredibles shows the 9/11 trope of a plane bent on destruction heading toward a U.S. city while the entire family ends up on the torture rack; the film also shows Mr. Incredible blasted by viscous bubbles similar to new, real-life (theoretically) less-than-lethal incapacitant sticky foam weapons being proposed for crowd control in the U.S. and abroad. And what are the children to think when their beloved Buzz Lightyear - a friend to all for two of the three films - is tortured, his personality changed, and he becomes, in Toy Story 3, prison guard for the cruel overlord in the surveillance-laden dystopia?

Children's beliefs about others are molded from a young age - just think how characters in Aladdin contributed to persuasion for the first Gulf War as even children came to see the Arabic world as mean-spirited. Henry A. Giroux explains that Disney not only included offensive language toward the region in this (and its follow-up) film, it didn't even bother to write actual Arabic where it was called for in the film, instead choosing to scribble the substitute of nonsensical scrawl.

In addition to death language, war scenes, and general barbarism, there are other disturbing depictions in G and PG rated children's movies. Nearly all African-American characters have an inner-city vibe as we see in Turbo. Often Spanish-speaking characters are presented as poor and lazy or loud as observed in the aforementioned and in Open Season. Women are shown as either "bitchy" or subservient. If you want evidence, just watch Beauty and the Beast - it's a primer for women to learn how to endure an abusive relationship (as in, "If I'm just nice enough, he'll come around"). Or watch how Ratatouille presents a woman as psychotic. Native Americans are depicted as mysterious and speak monosyllabically, as seen in Rango. Children themselves are presented as either endangered or as monsters, sometimes both, as is the case in both Toy Story and Nanny McPhee. Guns, cruelty, and bullying are in just about every kids' film in the U.S., but the Motion Picture Association of America doesn't care that the violence component is through the roof as long as no one hears cursing or sees drugs or alternative lifestyles.

How are people affected by that last one? Ritual ridicule in a brutal gender binary system is largely responsible for the mass school shootings. Our definitions of what it means to "be a man" are injected early on. Seeing Ken - depicted as supposedly effeminate - bullied and threatened by Barbie in Toy Story 3 tells boys to be wary of having nice hand-writing or any other purportedly feminine behavior. There are many, many examples of gender policing in American kids' films - take how the minion is teased for wanting affection in Despicable Me as just one example.

Meanwhile, over 6,000 were killed from the U.S. drone assassination program in Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Palestine in 2015 alone - some of the victims are children and 90% of victims are innocent bystanders. You won't see this on American TV or in the country's films. The U.S. veteran homelessness rate is appalling - and suicide rates among armed services veterans and active duty personnel have sky-rocketed. You won't see this either. The world is grappling with how to handle refugees from the fashionably long-lasting wars amid - and aiming specifically for - civilians. You'll see the refugees but no coverage of why these victims are fleeing. You won't hear the name Omar Khadr, a 15-year old Canadian citizen tortured by the U.S. or that of 14-year old Chad-citizen Mohammed El-Gharani who suffered the same fate. You won't see coverage detailing that those of Arabic/Islamic origin or background rounded up in the U.S. after 9/11 were ALL found innocent. Instead, you will see over 900 mostly Hollywood films vilifying these groups over the past century so the military-industrial complex has an eternal "enemy."

U.S. children are busy at school being patted down and going into lockdown mode, learning how to kill from video games, repeating cruelties learned from their films, and watching playground fights on YouTube, while American tax dollars are hard at work being used for nationalistic ceremonies at pro sports events and censoring directors who don't promote "patriotism." That citizens shudder at fellow hijab wearing citizens shows how the U.S. public has been sucker-punched.

We are undergoing a paradigm shift of monumental proportions wherein some are awakening to possibilities on a dimming horizon. Doing so has never been more imperative because our very survival depends on seeing what is true: that we are more alike than we are different and that the "have nots" have a my-voice-matters stake in which way life proceeds. It is time for us, "the 99%," to stand against the media and political giants engaged in separating us from one another. God bless the whole world: NO EXCEPTIONS.

"Of course the people don't want war...That is understood...But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them that they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

- Hermann Goering (at the Nuremberg trials)

Heidi Tilney Kramer is a mom and independent scholar focusing on Critical Children's Studies and U.S. Media. She has written two theses: "Visionary of Control: The efficiency, expertise, and exclusion of Alexander James Inglis," which reviews elitist changes made to the U.S. education system during the Progressive era in order to ensure a stable workforce - said changes resulted in sexist, racist, and classist policies which continue in the modern world; "Monsters Under the Bed: An Analysis of Torture Scenes in Three Pixar Films" highlights the ways in which torture is framed in G and PG rated films - as state/corporate control in Monsters, Inc., the prison/concentration camp theme of Toy Story 3, and the 1960s spy thriller trope used in The Incredibles. She lectures and teaches about childhood in the U.S. Her recently released book, Media Monsters: Militarism, Violence, and Cruelty in Children's Culture, available through Amazon, explores the history of propaganda and exposes the powerful forces pouring billions into influencing children with militaristic, violent, and cruel images at increasingly younger ages. Her quest is two-fold: 1) to identify negative messages children are receiving in their formal training and entertainment (and she would love for you to send her any examples you find), and 2) to uncover the ramifications of being conditioned to accept cruelty. Her latest project is the analysis and categorization of the entirety of American children's films. There is a Facebook page, Media Monsters R Against Kids, as well as a website, mediamonsters.us. She can be reached at: megamediamonsters@gmail.com or mediamonsters2016@gmail.com.

White, Working-Class America: My Family of Addicts

By Susan Anglada Bartley

There is a pain that many of us hide, a truth that is hard to bear. It's a pain that starts slow, like a pin-prick, but flames into a fire that burns forever, until we are all consumed. We are a family of addicts. May I speak to you privately, family? White addicts and family members of addicts in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona, Florida, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, and nationwide, especially those who voted for Trump, this is for you. As a fellow family member of multiple heroin​ addicts, I feel your pain, but family, hate will not heal our broken hearts.

Where did it start for your family? Was it your Brother, your best friend? Was it your beloved Mother? How long did you deny it? How much time, money, and energy did they steal? When did you lose your ability to trust? Can you ever regain it? What did you see that you can't unsee? Who did you lose that you will never, ever hold close again? How is the hole in your heart today?

At four years old, in 1982, I remember pressing my face close to the glass, making halos of steam on the inside of the window, staring out at my favorite Uncle-a brilliant, 30-something Irish-American man with shocking red hair, a man whose stories mesmerized neighborhood strangers. I waited for those stories, for days, for hours, for years sometimes. And there he was, waiting outside on a freezing winter day. He was not allowed to come inside the house because he was addicted to heroin and would steal everything we had. He stood out there waiting for hours, for days, through a whole Buffalo, N.Y. winter. He wasn't waiting for love. He wasn't waiting for justice. He was waiting for my grandmother to give him money to buy heroin.

Sometimes, when my Mother and Father weren't home, she let him inside the house. He came upstairs into her small room, talking her out of her social security check while I played with buttons on the floor. I waited for a wink, for a smile, for a flash of brilliance from his light blue eyes; I waited outside of his window for the day when he would break through his addiction, coming back to my childish heart, which revered him.

Anyone who really knows heroin knows that he never really did come all of the way back. He came back in fits and rages; he came back in bouts; he came back in moments of extraordinary storytelling; he came back in strums of his guitar; he came back in calls from jail; he came back from prison; he came back to life from suicide; but there was something in him that stayed far, far away forever.

And I still fucking miss him.

And that wasn't the whole story. The whole story is too hard to paint with a poetic brush. So I'll say it this way. They were a band of brothers living in Detroit during the Vietnam era. Due to one-eyed blindness that runs in the males in my family, they avoided the draft. Their Father, an Irish alcoholic who was an amateur boxer, horse-trainer, and expert auto-upholsterer before being fired from every auto-plant in the city of Detroit, was murdered and thrown in a ditch when my Mother was 18. At that time, the brothers fell deep into the Hippie Movement in Detroit, they all took up guitar; they were all taken by the needle.

When I was six months old in 1978, my Uncle James Fitzpatrick died of an aneurysm while battling heroin addiction. My Uncle Kearney, after fighting and playing with heroin and other opiates for the past thirty years, died an addict a few years ago. My beloved Uncle who waited outside the window, attempted suicide two months ago, and continues to battle with depression while managing his relationship with methadone and other substances.

Lately, I hear a new rhetoric about addiction--many Black and Latino writers say that the new efforts to remove the stigma of addiction are racist. In a 2016 PBS article, critical of Obama's campaign to end the national opioid epidemic, Judy Woodruff writes, "Back then, when addiction was a black problem, there was no wave of national compassion. Instead, we were warned of super predators, young, faceless black men wearing bandannas and sagging jeans." When I read Woodruff's words, which I know are true, there is still a part of me that asks does she really know what it is like to have a family member live and die in addiction? She must not really know because if she knew the reality of living with family members addicted to heroin, she could never speak against the work being done to destigmatize it.

The answer, though, is yes, she does know. F​or Woodruff and other Black and Latino family members of addicts, along with addiction, they also face the brutality of a system that incarcerates and kills their family members on a systemic level. Where I had thirty years, off and on, with two severely addicted Uncles, Black and Latino people actually faced the pain that we are feeling right now, while also experiencing racial hatred in society, and taking all of the stigma and shame of the beginning of our society's addiction only to see that now that their loved ones are dead or in prison. We want to take off the mask and ask for compassion for our pain.

When I think of all of you tonight -- family members of opiate addicts in a nation facing unprecedented levels of addiction in almost every state -- I want you to know that I truly feel that pain that you experience on a daily basis. What I need to say is that, statistically, it is evident that many of you also voted for Donald Trump. Have you thought about the way that he appeals to that last shred of pride in you, that part that hasn't been taken by your addiction, or your family member's addiction to opiates? Have you thought about the way that, in a moment when you and your family were hurting, he came along to say what you needed to hear--that you, your family, and your country could be great again?

I know the blindness that heroin causes in families of addicts. Are you unconsciously blaming Black and Latino communities for the presence of heroin and opiate-based pills, when really Big Pharma is profiting off of working-class whites like you as you vote a man to power who will boost their corporate reach, making a killing off of your family and friends?

Dig deeper. Those of us who have survived ancestral legacies of addiction must come together to unite against hate, despite the pain that we feel. We cannot blindly follow an individual who is promoting Nazis while promising us a stronger economy. Be honest. Seek the healing that you need as an individual; don't sacrifice your humanity for the promises of a rich executive who wears a mask while stabbing you and your loved ones in the back. Love yourself more. Love your faith more. Love your country more. Reject the hate machine of Donald Trump.

Susan Anglada Bartley is an activist, writer,​and teacher in Portland, Oregon. She earned her B.A. from NYU, and her M.Ed from Portland State University. She was awarded a National Education Association H. Councill Trenholm Human and Civil Rights Award in 2013 for her work to end racism in public education. She presented her work on Systemic Barriers to AP and IB Courses for Black, Native American, and Latino Students, and co-presented with Pedro Anglada Cordero, MSW on Invisible Fences: Removing Obstacles for Latino Students at the Teaching for Social Justice North West Conference and at the Evergreen Education Association Diversity and Social Justice Conference. She has published articles with Artvoice Buffalo, Literary Arts Portland, The National Education Association Magazine, NEA-Ed Votes, and The Hampton Institute: A Working Class Think Tank.

"How Much Do You Cost?": A Story of Sexual Neo-Colonialism

By Sonasha Braxton

I'll start at the beginning. Here is who I am…I am an African-American woman. I am 32 years old. I was born in the United States. My parents are from the United States. My parents' parents are from the United States and so on. Many of my ancestors were already here…Some of my ancestors were brought here in chains, and sold on auction blocks. I consider myself African by nature, American by nurture.

Once upon a time when I was 21 years old, I was a student at United States International University in Nairobi, Kenya. It was my first time in Africa. I had been there about for about two months, when I was out at a bar with my friends, very close to the campus. My friends and I were all college students, and dressed accordingly so. I walked myself to the bar and took 200ksh out of my pocket to buy my myself a beer. Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around. It was a Caucasian male in his late 40s with scraggly hair. This man was slightly out of place in a college bar, but not an unfamiliar sight in the Nairobi nightlife. The music was blaring. I couldn't hear him well, but he seemed to be pointing to another corner of the bar and making motions towards the beer I had already ordered. I side-eyed him and shook my head. Whatever it was I wasn't interested. I had what I came for. He tapped me on the shoulder again and motioned for me to bring my ear closer to his lips so he could tell me something without yelling. I sighed and conceded, bending down slightly. "My friend would like to buy you a drink," he said. I, beer already in hand, raised my beer and pointed to it. "I'm okay! I just bought myself a drink, but thanks!" I sashayed away back to my friends, and started dancing.

Scene 2. I was thirsty again. I walked back to the bar. The same 40-something white man with the scraggly hair was there. This time he stood up directly in front of the space I thought I would be able to squeeze into the bar. "My friend wants to buy you a drink! He wants to meet you!" he yelled, again pointing over to some dark corner. At this point somewhat curious, and one Tusker in, I replied "why can't your friend talk to me himself?". "He's shy," he responded. Amused that we had reverted to middle school interactions, and half expecting him to deliver a paper which said "will you go out with me" with "yes", "no" and "maybe" as boxes to check, I became curious. I thought, maybe his friend is a cute 20-something Kenyan banker, a gorgeous 30-year old Ugandan lawyer… I thought, who knows. "He's right over here" he insisted. I said "ok" and followed him just a few steps away from the bar, to a high top in the corner. The friend was an unattractive 50-something Caucasian- American. He greeted me, shook my hand, asked my name, and where I was from. I answered, recoiled my hand, said "nice to meet you, but I'm going to go back to my friends". He motioned for me to join them. I shook my head and hustled back to the table where my friends were.

Scene 3. Last drink. Same man. Same spot. Same question. Same refusal. Followed by the question, the first of many of the same design, with different accents, languages and configurations, that I would hear often while living in Kenya, "my friend wants to know how much". I said, "how much what?", totally confused. "My friend wants to know how much it would cost for him to sleep with you?". What happened next, is somewhat of a blur. I know that a fury engulfed me. I remember walking outside. I felt like I was suffocating. I remember coming back. I remember using a lot of expletives. But what I will never forget is how the situation was resolved. I was asked to leave the club… I was told I was making too much noise. I was disturbing business. This was not the last time something like this would transpire. It would go on to happen in Djibouti, and in Ethiopia, and in Ivory Coast. I Black woman, minding my own business, sexually propositioned by he, White man with a few dollars in his pocket, was at fault for disrupting a totally unacceptable and disrespectful attempted "transaction".

Since this first occurrence back in my 20s, I have learned to contain myself somewhat better, to learn to listen for the response to the question I now pose genuinely curious, "what makes you think you can buy me?". I have heard everything from "oh I'm sorry…I thought you were from (insert country here)" to "everything can be bought"; everything equally as insulting. All that these answers have amounted to is this, "as a Black woman, your body is a commodity, that I as a White man, have the right to purchase it/you". While this is a personal narrative, I do not share this burden alone. It becomes important as it makes the case of what I will call "sexual neo-colonialism", a legacy of the exploitation of the bodies of women of color. If we understand neo-colonialism, as the last stage of imperialism, as did Kwame Nkrumah, as its most dangerous stage; as a stage in which sovereignty is only a façade and that power is used for "exploitation rather than development", than we must too understand neo-colonialism as the most dangerous stage not just for the "developing state" but for its people, particularly its women. The African female whether in diaspora or continental stands to lose her sovereignty, and too be exploited, rather than space intentionally made for her to develop herself the way she sees fit.

Colonialism left in its wake the destruction of pre-colonial political, social and economic systems in which women ranked highly, and replaced them first with "native authorities" exclusive of women followed by clientele-patronage systems, which too excluded women. Women often lost tremendous power during the colonial period as well as economic autonomy. This resulted from women's exclusion from the global marketplace and new reliance of women's unpaid labor. Customary laws developed under colonialism and inherited from Europe, disadvantaged women favoring men. They accorded particular rights to men, such as the right to testify in trials, that were closed to women. Women were removed from power as heads of associations often with the final say over market or agricultural disputes, and replaced with men[1]. Simply colonial rule restructured family, sex, gender and sexuality by creating legal mechanisms to control women's positions in society, positions in their families, and expressions of their sexuality, for the sake of White Western capital.

The trickle-down effect of the disempowerment of the African woman has also emboldened the White hetero male to assume his place in the hierarchy of African affairs is one of superiority, and one in which any Black woman continues to be for sale. This is further reinforced often by the colonial mentality, the internalized colonialism of many members of African society, which favors and in fact protects unfettered white male hetero sexuality and promotes its unbridled exploits. It is this internalized colonialism, in actuality, the reaction of those around her, that asks the Black woman either to suppress her reaction to verbal sexual violence totally, or to react within the confines of what white hetero-males have sanctioned as polite gender normativity; to smile and say "no thank you", to gently brush away prodding hands, to repeat "no" quietly, avert our eyes, and meekly insist that we decline such advances. This internalized colonialism of its witnesses says she is "overreacting", when she yells, pushes away, tells, or even says no firmly. It says that "well, most other women would have said yes".

Someone will say that this will stop when African women stop having relationships with such men. Someone will say that when these women, who may find poverty less miserable than sex with the occasional dream peddling foreigner, simply say no, then all African women will stop being objectified. To which I would respond that until the system that has systematically underdeveloped not only Africa but the entire Global South, a system which has destroyed indigenous spirituality and replaced it with a White savior both hanging in the homes of its believers and walking the streets as sex tourists, is dismantled, then Black women, Brown Women, all women of color, will continue to be harmed by it.

This returns me to my story. The man in question was an American. There was no question of impoverished conditions. I clearly stated that I too was American, but this did not prevent the proposition, nor has it on multiple occasions. I, due to the intersectionality of my race and gender, was considered a commodity, buyable, and expendable. I am not the only woman of color who has had such an experience. I often exchange stories with my expat women of color friends, who have often witnessed and experienced the same. The globally internalized white hetero male superiority complex and systemic inherited exploitative North-South relations that support the continued effort to colonize, conquer and commodify the woman of color's body, as an economic enterprise, must necessarily change, and sexual neo-colonialism, must be destroyed and at last put to rest….

So I will finish at the beginning. I am an African-American woman. I am 32 years old. I was born in the United States. My parents are from the United States. My parents' parents are from the United States and so on. Many of my ancestors were already here. Some of my ancestors were brought here in chains, and sold on auction blocks. But, "How much do I cost?"…I am priceless. We are priceless. Not even on the auction block were my ancestors' souls for sale.

Black Lives Under Surveillance: A Review of Simone Brown's "Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness"

By Brandi Thompson Summers

Modern capitalism has always placed an undue burden on black bodies. Slavery, forced labor, and dispossession have moved hand in hand with forces of surveillance and the power of the state. In cities like Ferguson, Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Oakland-and countless others that have never reached national awareness-abysmal economic conditions have found an intimate partner in police patrols, drones, security cameras, and citizen-on-citizen reporting.

Today, poor communities of color are under constant surveillance and on the receiving end of brutal market forces. Where high unemployment, inadequate public transportation, and segregation are the rule, surveillance performs the work of control. Rebellions against state-sanctioned violence are inspired by feelings of both oppression and neglect, a contradiction at the core of capitalism's relationship to black people and black bodies. The supposed freedom and equality of the marketplace depend upon the contempt of the overseer.

Our American capitalism, founded in slavery, bore the antagonist twins of blackness and surveillance. Examining this birth and its afterlife, Simone Browne argues in her recent book Dark Matters, will help us come to grips with contemporary practices of surveillance that are often coded as technical and race-neutral advances in safety and security-and are usually anything but. Through her analyses of maps, newspaper articles, fugitive slave advertisements, slave narratives, personal correspondence, government documents, memoirs, and treaties, Brown exposes how blackness was shaped and produced through surveillance practices during slavery.

Slaves were a particularly unpredictable form of capital-they could congregate, organize, plot, and even escape-making their traceability essential. Browne examines the finely honed architecture of slave ships to show how important surveillance was to making black bodies into property, extracting wealth from their humanity. The capitalist discipline of black bodies starts with the design of this "maritime prison," the site of horrifying violence that thousands of men, women, and children did not survive. The strict compartmentalization of slave bodies, stacked one on top of the other, functioned to limit slave insurrection and other kinds of resistance. Furthermore, the documentation and examination practices that took place from slave trafficking ports on the African coast, through the Middle Passage voyage across the Atlantic, to slave auction blocks and plantations, prefigured modern carceral institutions meant to regulate and discipline black bodies.

Even in freedom, black bodies required surveillance. Government records such as the Book of Negroes instituted the tracking of black bodies through written text. This 18th-century document listed three thousand Black British Loyalists (self-emancipated former slaves) who boarded British ships to Canada during the American Revolution. The Book of Negroes, Browne argues, was the "first large-scale public record of black presence in North America," used by slave owners to distinguish fugitive slaves from freed black subjects.

Both before and after formal emancipation, capitalism marked blackness as a visible commodity. Defining the spaces where black bodies could or could not reside or move, what activities in which they could or could not engage, "racializing surveillance," as Browne names it, lay in what John Fiske calls the "power to define what is in or out of place." [1] Such social control, Browne notes, bound surveillance to the violent practices of making and deploying racial hierarchies that plantation owners and others could exploit for profit.

Accurately measuring, counting, and sorting black bodies also required constant visibility. So, slavers employed violent technologies like branding and "lantern laws" to account for slaves and deter escape. Lantern laws were instituted in cities like New York and Boston in the 18th century and required black, indigenous, and mixed-race slaves to carry candle lanterns after dark. Legislation like New York's "A Law for Regulating Negro and Indian Slaves in the Night Time," approved in March 1713, demonstrates how state-enacted technologies were used to surveil and control black populations. "Black luminosity" via lantern laws, as Browne suggests, operated as a "form of boundary maintenance occurring at the site of the black body, whether by candlelight, flaming torch, or the camera flashbulb that documents the ritualized terror of a lynch mob."

The surveillance of unfree black bodies remained central to capitalism's dominance post-emancipation. After the Civil War, oppressive systems like "Black Codes," convict leasing, and sharecropping tied black bodies to the land, despite the fact that they were no longer legal property. These repressive measures generated significant revenue for several Southern states and were fundamental to the economy after slavery. States like Alabama relied heavily on convict leasing in coal mines, with nearly 73 percent of the state's total revenue coming from the system in the late 19th century.

The state-enacted Black Codes, in particular, both established the architecture of modern policing and ensured black people's limited access to capital. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor explains in 'From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, Black Codes' were "imposed only on African Americans, criminalized poverty, movement, and even leisure." In some cases, laws prohibited the congregation of black people after dark and required black workers to be monitored by and in the service of their former owners. This legal subjugation of blacks in the postbellum South was justified under the logic of the tragically familiar language of "law and order." As Taylor argues, police were used to enforce various measures that limited black movement, black work, and even the right to accrue property.

Because capitalism has relied on the subjugation of black people as workers and largely excluded them from its material benefits, the specter of black uprising and criminality provokes police departments and other authorities to develop and adopt novel technologies of surveillance, like biometric measurements that verify, identify, and automate the production of bodily evidence. Deployed under a rhetoric of racial disinterest, these innovations draw on the long history of tracking blackness. They are far from identity-neutral. Recently, Georgetown University's Center for Privacy and Technology has found that police departments around the country use facial recognition software that track and racially profile African Americans disproportionately. [2] Biometric surveillance technologies form the background of urban life and continue to manage black freedom and mobility.

The protection of property underlies such quotidian acts of surveillance. In an effort to "curb shoplifting," Georgetown-area businesses worked with police through a mobile app, "Operation GroupMe," to secretly message each other about "potential suspects," who were almost always black. [3] Empowered by the ubiquity of surveillance and the ease of digital media, the race vigilante takes on the guise of the citizen shopkeeper.

In the post-civil-rights era, a black elite has emerged who have benefitted from the spoils of capitalism. They do not share the interests of the black poor or working class. As these elites have risen to political leadership they have intensified surveillance of those excluded from capitalism's prosperity. They have blamed "bad people" for making "bad choices," rhetorically cleaving black communities into deceitful criminals who must be monitored and virtuous citizens who deserve protection. The political elite then roll out more surveillance to protect precarious black wealth.

Taylor argues that surveillance also allows some political leaders to profit from the same population of poor black citizens they profess to protect. For example, Randy Primas, the first black mayor of Camden, NJ, supported the New Jersey Department of Corrections' construction of a $55 million prison in the largely black neighborhood of North Camden. Taylor quotes the mayor's bald declaration: "I view the prison as an economic development project. In addition, I think the surveillance from the two prison towers might stop some of the overt drug dealing in North Camden." Primas linked the building of prisons to increased employment, increased city revenue, and reduced crime. Yet this project also turned the landscape of North Camden into a prison itself. Watchtowers now surveil both those inside and outside the prison's gates. This kind of surveillance does more than impose the eye of the state on formally free neighborhoods; it marks North Camden as black, rendering the city subject to ever more monitoring.

It is because of this tacit connection between race, surveillance, and capitalism that, Taylor shows, we have seen the proliferation of the police state, expansion of the prison industrial complex, and laws putting more poor and working-class black people in debt and prison. No wonder, then, Black Lives Matter has emerged, even under the nation's first black president. Taylor argues that the movement constitutes a point along the decades-long arc of black community resistance to widespread police brutality and racial violence under capitalism. Over the past 40 years, we have encountered a War on Poverty, War on Drugs, and War on Terror, all of which increased surveillance and consolidated power in the hands of law enforcement. The proliferation of the police state, expansion of the prison-industrial complex, and laws putting more poor and working-class black people in debt and prison tie together race, surveillance, and capitalism in ways that both demand resistance and help to explain the rise of BLM.

State surveillance of BLM and similar organizations should be expected. Everyday practices of surveillance join the exceptional targeting of artists, writers, and musicians (especially hip-hop artists) under the guise of national security. [4] Extralegal programs like J. Edgar Hoover's infamous Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which ran between 1956 and 1971, explicitly targeted and attempted to disrupt black civil rights organizations, activists, and leaders. Most recently, as detailed in a 2016 ACLU report, law enforcement agencies employed a powerful surveillance program using data from social media sites to track protest activity in Oakland and Baltimore. [5] Black Lives Matter has deftly employed social media to expose the killing of black men, women, and children at the hands of law enforcement, yet the medium is an especially ambivalent space, as government agencies track social media and employ surveillance tactics to monitor organizers and activists. [6]

How then can we transcend capitalism and challenge the strictures of surveillance? Browne employs the term "dark sousveillance" to introduce the "tactics employed to render one's self out of sight." Dark sousveillance, she argues, is a productive space "from which to mobilize a critique of racializing surveillance." At the same time, exposure and visibility can be tactics of freedom, as for example in the use of camera phones to film police. Dark sousveillance can be a means of achieving parity with the state, Browne contends. "What does it mean," though, "when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?," as Audre Lorde famously asked. Lorde also provided an answer: "It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable." [7] Dark sousveillance offers critique, but not resistance. Acts of witnessing racializing surveillance have severe penalties. The civilians who filmed the state-inflicted deaths of Eric Garner, Alton Sterling, Freddie Gray, and Philando Castile were all subsequently arrested. None of the police officers has been convicted. We must use different tools.

Taylor raises a question parallel to Lorde's: whether the current economic and political conditions, structured by institutional racism, can be altered under capitalism. In other words, can we radically improve and humanize capitalism? The short answer is no. Capitalism continues to be exploited by elites to justify inequality. Rather than searching for new forms of capitalism, we ought to focus on alternatives.

Black enslavement was fundamental to the establishment and growth of capitalism and black oppression continues to feed it. Even black capitalists, Taylor argues, cannot hope to exist outside the constraints of white supremacy. Fighting capitalism requires coming together across the divisions and hierarchies that fuel it. With the recent election of Donald Trump as President, the imperative has only grown more urgent. Capitalism cannot be used to achieve black liberation. Only solidarity will free us all.

This review appeared at Public Books.

Notes

[1] John Fiske, "Surveilling the City: Whiteness, the Black Man and Democratic Totalitarianism," in Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 15, no. 2 (1998), p. 81.

[2] See Craig Timberg, "Racial Profiling, by a Computer? Police Facial-ID Tech Raises Civil Rights Concerns," Washington Post, October 18, 2016.

[3] See "Hip Hop and the FBI: A Little-Known History," Esquire, June 4, 2014.

[4] Matt Cagle, "Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter Provided Data Access for a Surveillance Product Marketed to Target Activists of Color," American Civil Liberties Union, October 11, 2016.

[5] See Terrence McCoy, "The Secret Surveillance of 'Suspicious' Blacks in One of the Nation's Poshest Neighborhoods," Washington Post, October 13, 2015.

[6] The Baltimore Police Department, for instance, has implemented various surveillance tools to listen in on calls and track mobile phones and developed secret aerial surveillance programs to trace vehicles and the movement of criminal suspects in the city. See George Joseph, "Exclusive: Feds Regularly Monitored Black Lives Matter since Ferguson," The Intercept, July 24, 2015 ; Monte Reel, "Secret Cameras Record Baltimore's Every Move from Above," Bloomberg Businessweek, August 23, 2016.

[7] Audre Lorde, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" (1979), in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 4th ed., edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Kitchen Table Press, 2015), p. 94.

America Needs a Network of Rebel Cities to Stand Up to Trump

By Kate Shea Baird and Steve Hughes

With Trump in the White House and GOP majorities in the House and Senate, we must look to cities to protect civil liberties and build progressive alternatives from the bottom up.

"I want New Yorkers to know: we have a lot of tools at our disposal; we're going to use them. And we're not going to take anything lying down." On the morning after Donald Trump was declared the victor in the US presidential election, Mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, wasted no time in signaling his intention to use the city government as a bulwark against the policy agenda of the President-Elect. The move made one thing very clear; with the Republican Party holding the House and Senate, and at least one Supreme Court nomination in the pipeline, it will fall to America's cities and local leaders to act as the institutional frontline of resistance against the Trump administration.

However, cities can be more than just a last line of defense against the worst excesses of an authoritarian central government; they have huge, positive potential as spaces from which to radicalize democracy and build alternatives to the neoliberal economic model. The urgent questions that progressive activists in the States are now asking themselves are, not just how to fight back against Trump, but also how to harness the momentum of Bernie Sanders' primary run to fight for the change he promised. As we consider potential strategies going forward, a look at the global context suggests that local politics may be the best place to start.

The election of Trump has not occurred in a vacuum. Across the West, we are witnessing a wholesale breakdown of the existing political order; the neoliberal project is broken, the center-left is vanishing, and the old left is at a loss for what to do. In many countries, it is the far right that is most successful in harnessing people's desire to regain a sense of control over their lives. Where progressives have tried to beat the right at its own game by competing on the battleground of the nation state, they have fared extremely poorly, as recent elections and referenda across Europe have shown. Even where a progressive force has managed to win national office, as happened in Greece in 2015, the limits of this strategy have become abundantly clear, with global markets and transnational institutions quickly bullying the Syriza government into compliance.

In Spain, however, things are different. In 2014, activists in the country were wrestling with a similar conundrum to their counterparts in the US today: how to harness the power of new social and political movements to transform institutional politics. For pragmatic rather than ideological reasons, they decided to start by standing in local elections; the so-called "municipalist wager". The bet paid off; while citizen platforms led by activists from social movements won mayoralties in the largest cities across the country in May of 2015, their national allies, Unidos Podemos, stalled in third place at the general elections in December later that same year.

In Spain, this network of 'rebel cities' has been putting up some of the most effective resistance to the conservative central government. While the state is bailing out the banks, refusing to take in refugees and implementing deep cuts in public services, cities like Barcelona and Madrid are investing in the cooperative economy, declaring themselves 'refuge cities' and remunicipalizing public services. US cities have a huge potential to play a similar role over the coming years.

Rebel cities in the USA

In fact, radical municipalism has a proud history in the US. One hundred years ago, the "sewer socialists" took over the city government of Milwaukee, Wisconsin and ran it for almost 50 years. They built parks, cleaned up waterways and, in contrast to the tolerated level of corruption in neighboring Chicago, the sewer socialists instilled into the civic culture an enduring sense that government is supposed to work for all the people, not just the wealthy and well-connected.

More recently, too, cities have been proving their ability to lead the national agenda. In the last few years alone, over 200 cities have introduced protections against employment discrimination based on gender-identity and 38 cities and counties have introduced local minimum wages after local "Fight for 15" campaigns.

Now we need a dual municipalist strategy that includes both supporting and putting pressure on existing progressive city governments from the streets, and standing new candidates with new policy platforms in upcoming local elections so that we can change institutional politics from within.

Why cities?

There are a number of reasons why city governments are particularly well-placed to lead resistance to Trumpism. Most obviously, much of the popular opposition to Trump is physically located in cities. With their younger, more ethnically diverse demographics, urban voters swung heavily against Trump and, in fact, played a large role in handing Hillary Clinton the majority of the national popular vote. Not only did Clinton win 31 of the nation's 35 largest cities, but she beat Trump by 59% to 35% in all cities with populations of over 50,000. In most of urban America, then, there are progressive majorities that can be harnessed to challenge Trump's toxic discourse and policy agenda.

But alternative policies will not be enough to create an effective challenge to Trump; different ways of doing politics will also be needed, and local politics has great potential in this regard. As the level of government closest to the people, municipalities are uniquely able to generate new, citizen-led and participatory models of politics that return a sense of agency and belonging to people's lives. This new process must have feminism at its heart; it must recognize that the personal and the political are intimately connected, something that is clearer at the local level than at any other.

It's for this reason that the municipalist movement need not be limited to the largest cities. Though large cities will inevitably be strategic targets in any 'bottom-up' strategy, given their economic and cultural power, all local politics has radical democratic potential. Indeed, some of the most innovative-and successful-examples of municipalism around the world are found in small towns and villages.

Bringing the political conversation back to the local level also has a particular advantage in the current context; the city provides a frame with which to challenge the rise of xenophobic nationalism. Cities are spaces in which we can talk about reclaiming popular sovereignty for a demos other than the nation, where we can reimagine identity and belonging based on participation in civic life rather than the passport we hold.

Why a network of rebel cities?

By working as a network, cities can turn what would have been isolated acts of resistance into a national movement with a multiplier effect. Networks like Local Progress, a network of progressive local elected officials, allow local leaders to exchange policy ideas, develop joint strategies, and speak with a united voice on the national stage.

On the issue of racial equity, an essential question given the racist nature of Trump's campaign and policy platform, cities across the US have already started to mobilize to combat Islamophobia, as part of the American Leaders Against Hate and Anti-Muslim Bigotry Campaign, a joint project of Local Progress and the Young Elected Officials Action Network. The campaign pushes for local policies to tackle hate crimes against Muslims, including the monitoring of religious bullying in schools, intercultural education programmes, and council resolutions condemning Islamophobia and declaring support for Muslim communities.

Climate change will be another contentious issue over the coming years. While much has been made of the policy implications of Trump's claim that global warming was invented by the Chinese, it has been local administrations, rather than the federal government, that have led on the environmental agenda over recent years. Sixty two cities are already committed to meet or exceed the emissions targets announced by the federal government and many of the largest cities in the country, including New York, Chicago and Atlanta have set emissions reductions goals of 80 percent or higher by 2050. US mayors must continue on this path, working with international networks of cities like ICLEI and UCLG to exchange good practices and to lobby for direct access to global climate funds in the absence of support from the federal government.

Even on issues that are under the jurisdiction of the federal government, like immigration, cities have some room for maneuver. For example, although Trump has pledged to deport all undocumented immigrants from the US, 37 'sanctuary cities' across the US are already limiting their cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainer requests to reduce deportations. The mayors of New York and Los Angeles have already pledged to continue with this practice, and De Blasio has promised New Yorkers that the city will protect the confidentiality of users of the city ID-card scheme and continue to ensure that police officers and city employees won't inquire about residents' immigration status, predicting that Trump will face "a deep, deep rift with all of urban America" if he does not re-evaluate his stance on sanctuary cities.

What next?

First we must push our allies who are already in office at local level, including self-identified 'Sanders Democrats', to use all available means to act against any attempt by the federal government to roll back civil liberties, cut services or sow division among communities. Such cities must work, not only to counteract the worst excesses of the Trump administration, but also to continue to move forward on issues like gay rights and climate change, as well as forging new ground by standing up to corporate interests, increasing citizen participation in decision-making, and promoting the social and cooperative economies.

But we also need a new generation of local leaders, particularly women and people of color, who are prepared to take the leap from protest to electoral politics. The recent announcement by Black Lives Matter activist, Nekima Levy-Pounds, that she will be standing for election as mayor of Minneapolis is an inspiring example of the kind of candidate that is needed; someone with real-world experience and an insider's understanding of social movement politics. But the search for new local leaders needs to be scaled up so that there is a pipeline of candidates to stand for school boards, zoning boards and local councils in 2017 and beyond. This is something that the Working Families Party is already doing successfully in many states, as well as supporting these candidates in primary campaigns against Establishment Democrats.

Finally, we must undertake new ways of doing politics at the local level to prove that there is an alternative to corporate lobbying, secret donors and career politics. There is no reason why candidates should wait until taking office to invite people to participate in decision-making. Local candidates should open up their policy platforms to public participation, integrating demands from social movements and local residents. There is also no reason why elected officials should use only the most generous interpretation of the law to guide their conduct; in Spain, the citizen platforms drew up their own codes of ethics for their elected representatives, including salary and term limits and strict transparency requirements. By leading by example, local movements can send a very powerful message: there is another way.

A resurgence of rebel cities in the US would tap into a long-forgotten American tradition of radical municipalism and align with a new and growing international network of municipalist movements. Now is the time for us to seize this opportunity and to reclaim democracy from the bottom up.

This article was reprinted from Medium .

ESPN'S Journal of Black Respectability Politics: The Undefeated, and the Surrender of the Black Middle Class

By Jon Jeter

". . . before you know it, we'll have Negro Imperialists."

- Fred Hampton

In a June 1st article for ESPN's new African-American focused property, the Undefeated, celebrity intellectual Michael Eric Dyson takes darker-skinned blacks to task for their begrudging refusal to exalt in the accomplishments of lighter-skinned blacks such as the National Basketball Association's two-time Most Valuable Player, Steph Curry.

"The resentment by darker blacks of the perceived and quite real advantages accorded to lighter blacks has sometimes led to a wholesale repudiation of all fairer-skinned blacks. There is, however, a big difference between asking for racial transparency in light privilege, and the unvarying treatment of fairer-skinned blacks as automatically guilty of exploiting their status."

As a work of either reportage or critical inquiry, Dyson's 2,000-word essay is an abysmal failure. Didactic, artless and populated with misshapen straw-men, it fails to identify a single African American who articulates anything resembling envy or disdain for Curry, let alone anyone whose resentment is grounded in his fair complexion. In fact, the two African Americans who Dyson quotes at length, current NBA player Kevin Durant, and the retired Hall-of-Famer Allen Iverson, are effusive in their praise of Curry.

But as a written reprimand to blackness, or a textbook example of how a feckless Black elite has corroborated the white settler state's attempt to alibi its criminal enterprise by manufacturing the Other, Dyson's critique is a singular achievement.

Consider that at no point in his polemic does Dyson mention the word "rape," for doing so would be tantamount to handing up an indictment for a 500-year-old crime spree that is unlike anything the world has ever seen. Virtually from the moment they alighted in the Americas, European expatriates set upon indigenous and African women, creating, from whole cloth, a language of sexual defilement - -mulattoes, octoroons, quadroons and Latinos - and giving birth, quite literally to the New World, and the Steph Currys that populate it.

"God, forgive us," writes a Civil-War era diarist wed to a South Carolina planter, "but ours is a monstrous system, a wrong and an inequity! Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattos one sees in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all mulatto children in everybody's household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds."

It is unfathomable that the Ivy-League educated and employed Dyson, is unfamiliar with this history, or unaware that skin-tone has played no discernible role in the radical black political movements that are the sine qua non of liberal democracy in the US. Hence, the reddish-colored, first black mayor of Dyson's hometown of Detroit, the late Coleman Alexander Young, is as revered by African Americans in the Motor City as much - if not more - than the blue-black former mayor of Washington DC, Marion Barry.

Dyson's cognitive dissonance is hardly accidental and these clumsy but willful misrepresentations are a staple of the Undefeated, which is not an online chronicle of the African American experience so much as a literary journal of black respectability politics, or better yet, a declassified dossier of tribal dysfunction. Since it debuted in mid-May, the Undefeated´s virtually-all black staff has consistently trafficked in narratives in which history is inert, racism exists only inasmuch as it vexes Obama, and no injustice is so grave that it cannot be resolved by black folks pulling up their pants.

In his groundbreaking 1978 book, the late Edward Said posited that the West has historically sought to qualify its imperialism by assigning men of science and letters the exercise of shifting the blame for colonialism, from the colonizer, to the colonized.

Said named this brand of racist pseudo-science for the unfortunate term coined by the West to describe the Arab world to its East - - Orientalism - -and dated its practice as far back as France's 1798 invasion of Egypt, when Napoleon encouraged artists, writers, and anthropologists to re-imagine the Nile's inhabitants, or to Orientalize the Orient.

Of the famed French novelist's depiction of a 19th-century dancer, Said writes:

Flaubert's encounter with an Egyptian courtesan produced a widely influential model of the Oriental woman; she never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence, or history. He spoke for and represented her. He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess (her) physically but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was "typically Oriental."

It does not require a postcolonial scholar to recognize the elasticity of Said's theory and how it provides a framework for contextualizing Rudyard Kipling's poetry, DW Griffith's landmark 1915 film, Birth of a Nation, King Baudouin extolling the civilizing virtues of Belgian colonialism on the eve of Congo's liberation in 1960, or the 2009 Sandra Bullock vehicle, the Blind Side. Orientalism even explains the 2003 remarks made by former Harvard College President Lawrence Summers when he sought to exorcise patriarchy from the body politic by wondering aloud if women aren't underrepresented in American laboratories because they lack the "aptitude" to succeed in math and science professions.

They do not, and the scientific consensus had said so for nearly 50 years.

Yet, if scholars define Orientalism as white people writing about people of color for white people, then the rise of a Black Jacobin class that is all-too-eager to validate a hierarchy in which they are invested has reformulated the colonial syntax. With the American Empire at its nadir and seeking both absolution and scapegoats, black journalists, academics, police, filmmakers and philanthropists in the Obama age are increasingly charged with Niggerizing the Nigger.

Orientalism is the new Black.

A May 18 Undefeated profile of the African American quarterback Robert Griffin III practically rebukes readers for believing their lying eyes. In 2012, Griffin set NFL rookie records for passer rating, and led the league in rushing yards-per carry. But his play tailed off sharply after the Washington Redskins' January 6, 2013 playoff loss when even a casual fan could plainly see that the rookie was hobbled and playing on an injured knee. And yet the veteran coach, Mike Shanahan - who once suggested in an interview that an All-Pro black quarterback was too dumb to understand the playbook - - refused to substitute for him until late in the contest.

"Look at his face, Daddy," former Washington Wizards center Etan Thomas quoted his seven-year old son, Malcolm, asking him in a Washington Post editorial published the day after the playoff game. "Why is he still playing if he is in that much pain?"

Seemingly intent on helping Shanahan land another coaching job, however, the Undefeated posited that Griffin is the real villain in this sporting drama, because, he's, well, uppity.

"Talk to people who worked with Griffin in Washington, and most will tell you he had chances - too many - to salvage his starting position and that many of his problems started with him. Griffin was too focused on his endorsements. He overindulged in social media. He alienated teammates by deflecting blame for his poor performances and ran his mouth too much in interviews. He should have spent more time in the film room and less on enhancing the cult of RG3."

Why would African-Americans traffic in such seditious caricatures, particularly at a moment when dehumanizing stereotypes conspire with wrenching austerity policies to produce material circumstances reminiscent of 1930s Germany when a demagogue blamed that country's immiseration on a population he categorized as nonwhite?

I was first confronted with the notion of black Orientalists when I read a fawning 2005 New York Times profile of Harvard Economist Roland J. Fryer, whose research explores genetics as a critical factor in racial disparities in intelligence. That no such disparities exist did little to discourage former New York City Public Schools Chancellor Joel Klein from hiring the African American Fryer as a consultant to help untangle the student achievement gap.

Fryer was followed in quick succession by the likes of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, Dyson, and most recently, the historical illiteracy of Ta-nehisi Coates who asserts that Obama is the heir to Malcolm X's political legacy, and that blacks should eschew the game-changing traditions of political resistance for a monthly reparationscheck, cut by the US Treasury.

To be sure, financial remuneration partly explains the phenomena of Black Orientalists, but more than anything, the defection of the Black Vichy class is grounded in the twilight of the American century, and the post-industrial epoch that Gramsci refers to as the interregnum, in which the "old is dying, and the new cannot be born."

This was also the case a century ago when a precarious new economy and social order was beginning to take shape and mobs of alienated white youths terrorized the country in waves, climaxing in 1919 when racial violence washed over the country like a foamy, heaving sea.

Atlanta's Black unwashed rescued the city's Black elite from marauding white mobs in 1906, dutifully patrolling segregated neighborhoods with pistols and shotguns a-ready. When the smoke cleared, Atlanta's Urban League sought to reassure their white patrons of their fealty by organizing neighborhood clubs to teach "better housekeeping" practices to black maids and washerwomen, Karen Ferguson wrote in her book, Black Politics in New Deal Atlanta.

The domestics complied initially, listening intently to lectures on cleanliness and punctuality. But when, they began to wonder, would the forum address the subject of pay raises for making an extra effort? Told that no pay raises would be forthcoming, the black domestics bolted, giving their Urban League sisters the side-eye as they left.

Similarly, an effort to organize black workers at the cigarette-maker RJ Reynolds in 1919, was met with opprobrium by Black mercantilists in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. According to Robert Rodgers Korstad, author of Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth Century South, one Black banker, J.H. Hill, implored "my people" not to be tempted by "strangers. . . There is no need for a poor laboring class of people to try to make demands on any rich corporations. We are dependent upon these corporations for employment"

Underwhelmed, black tobacco workers boycotted stores that did not support the union, and threatened to withdraw their money from Hill's bank if he didn't relent. Conversely, Reynolds management tried to slow the employees' momentum by proposing a company or "yellow dog" union, recruiting another black merchant, Simon Atkins, to champion its advantages at a meeting with workers. But, Rodgers Korstad wrote, "Black workers. . .did not look to the middle class for their cues" and responded with "hoots and jeers."

Blacks' frustration with what W.E.B. DuBois famously heralded as the Negro's most "talented tenth" detonated following the 1931 arrest of nine black teenagers who were falsely accused of raping two white women on a freight car just outside of Scottsboro, Alabama. The NAACP's timid, ineffective legal defense paled in comparison to that of the Communist Party who hoped to make inroads in the country by defiantly putting American racism itself on trial, organizing rallies as far away as Chicago, New York, London, Moscow and Johannesburg, and featuring as actors rather than victims, the plain-spoken but sympathetic mothers of the accused teenagers.

Initially reluctant to even accept the case for fear of tarnishing their brand, the NAACP's attitude towards the mothers was one of condescension; they soon withdrew from the case, leaving the Communists' to eventually win the release of all 9 accused.

Six days after excoriating Griffin, the Undefeated published an article by the veteran sportswriter Michael Wilbon that parrots the NAACP's gradualist approach in the Scottsboro case. Too clever by half, Wilbon's essay laments black indifference to the the new analytics methodology that is all the rage in NBA front offices. Wilbon dismisses out-of-hand the trope that blacks are incapable of understanding mathematical concepts, and while he stipulates that there is no demonstrable value-added to analytics in evaluating players, he still urges blacks to assimilate.

"For more than a few moments I felt guilty as hell for hating the intrusion of advanced analytics as much as I generally do. Because even though the reliance on this stuff seems to be a new safe haven for a new "Old Boy Network" of Ivy Leaguers who can hire each other and justify passing on people not given to their analytic philosophies, an entire group of people can't simply refuse to participate in something as important as this phenomenon. The cynical me can easily make the argument this is a new path to exclusion, intentional or not. Or is it creating an entirely new way of approaching sports that's reserved for the few?"

In Ferguson's book, Black Atlanta professionals wrote to New Deal bureaucrats to offer their services as race interlocutors in an effort to "help the Negro masses to adjust themselves to the type or world in which they must live."

The problem is that the Negro masses had no intention of living in such an immutable world, and in the days, months and years following the Scottsboro Boys' arrest, began to join Communists, and other working-class white allies to turn bad jobs into good ones, democratize the state, and create the singular achievement of the Industrial Age: the American middle class.

During World War 2, the Black RJ Reynolds employees who the Winston Salem elite had earlier scolded, collaborated with their white co-workers to integrate the union, but they didn't stop there, using the reconstituted collective as a springboard to produce what is likely the closest iteration this country has ever seen to the Paris commune. Led by an African-American, lesbian Marxist named Moranda Smith, Local 22 promptly proceeded to register thousands of African American voters, who in turn helped elect a black minister to the City Council, the first since Reconstruction to win an election in the Deep South against a white candidate. With their proxies at City Hall, Local 22 spearheaded efforts to build public housing, adopt price controls, improve schools, and expand bus service and jobless benefits.

Wilbon's call for black acquiesce mirrors that of his antecedents in Atlanta, North Carolina and Scottsboro, and like the Undefeated itself, does not account for the laboring classes' cycle of resistance, triumph, reversal, replayed endlessly as if on loop.

In the Orientalist war of narratives, the Undefeated, ironically enough, views African Americans as a thoroughly defeated people, and the Black elite as a kind of advance squadron trapped behind enemy lines, its reportage a kind of Morse code, tapped out daily on fiber-optic cables to warn the rear encampments that we are hopelessly outgunned.

"Do-Stop-Not-Stop-Attempt-Stop-A-Stop-Counteroffensive-Stop."

But Wilbon, the staff of the Undefeated, and the Black middle class writ large would be wise to revisit the words of an African American named William H. Crogman, who in the days following the 1906 Atlanta riots, wrote a letter to a northern white liberal crediting the Black proletariat-lumpen and otherwise- for coming to the defense of the black elites who lived in an aspirational neighborhood known as Dark Town.

"Here we have worked and prayed and tried to make good men and women of our colored population, and at our very doorstep the whites kill these good men," wrote Crogman, who would go on to become president of Clark College. "But the lawless element in our population, the element we have condemned fights back, and it is to these people that we owe our lives."

This was originally posted on Jon's personal blog.

Jon Jeter is the author of 'Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People,' and the co-author of 'A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Bright Nights and Dark Days in Obama's Postracial America.' He is a former Washington Post Bureau Chief in southern Africa and South America, a former producer for This American Life, and twice a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.

My Students Are Terrified: Teaching in the Days After Trump

By Bryant William Sculos

Teaching today, November 9th at 11 am - as neoliberal Democratic Party candidate and likely popular vote winner, Hillary Clinton, delivered her concession speech to her supporters and vicariously to President-Elect and neo-fascist Donald Trump, who, with a message of anti-immigration, anti-free trade, hyper-capitalism, anti-climate justice, sexism, and nationalism, was able to turn reliably Democratic states red -- was torturous.

For me personally, I have been terrified of both candidates for months and months now. Thinking of choosing between largely domestically-palatable liberal identity politics, irredeemable corporate capitalism, and criminal imperial hyper-militancy and the unpredictable bigoted narcissism of Donald the Orange's neo-fascism, was never one that left me sleeping very well. I chose Jill Stein, but it didn't really matter in the end.

Bernie gave me hope. He gave the Left hope. If he had been the nominee of the Democratic Party, my students-and the world-would be less terrified today. Yesterday, the morning of November 8th, I was planning my lecture for today and I was struggling to find the right way to encourage my first-year writing students to push the impending President-Elect Hillary Clinton to live up to her progressive agenda, which was much more popular with college-age people than it was with the general electorate.

I didn't need those notes today. I needed something different. Waking up after three restless hours of sleep, I had nothing. After forty-five minutes of traffic, I still had nothing. After the walk from my car to my classroom, I still had nothing. I didn't know what to expect from my students or myself. Typically still quiet and half-awake when I walk in, my students were talking a lot today-and no one looked very happy. As I would come to find out, they were-and are-terrified.

My students are black and white; they are women and men and transgender; they are gay and straight; they are largely first or second generation immigrants; some are citizens and some are not; some have children; some care for elderly relatives; most work part or full-time jobs while going to school full-time. I am terrified for them. In truth, I would have been terrified for them, and people in other countries even more so, if Hillary Clinton would have won, but they probably wouldn't have been-for better or worse.

I sat on the table in the front of the classroom and we had an open conversation. Since this is a freshman writing course, I decided to then give them a free-writing exercise to explore their thoughts and feelings a bit more. Anonymized and with their permission, here is some of what they wrote-and I wish I could say I was surprised:

"…I am afraid of what's to come. Will there be more social chaos throughout the states? Is he [Trump] truly fit to govern decisions for millions of people with [his] racist and misogynistic mentality[?] I am petrified of what will occur in the upcoming months."

"…I am afraid of the message that his [Trump's] election sends out to the society. If the President is disrespectful to women and is a racist, others might feel that's okay."

"…I'm worried about all the minority groups being affected because of Trump's win. [With] Many of the things he claimed to [do]: building the wall, deporting illegal residents, imprisoning LGBT couples, as said by Vice President [-elect] Mike Pence….people will have their lives changed by Trump's presidency."

"I am afraid that with the stances Republicans hold, my parents will be forced to work their stressful menial jobs well past their retirement date. I am also concerned that with Trump's unwillingness to support climate change reform and renewable energy, we will begin to see the effects of our dying planet much sooner than anticipated. I am scared for a nation that I no longer feel at home in."

These responses are partial, but generally representative of the rest of the responses. Only three of my twenty-two students were even somewhat optimistic, hopeful, or excited for potential changes to the US political system they think Trump's presidency could bring. The rest are completely terrified.

Now the question remains: what am I supposed to do next week when we have our next class? Next month? Next year? Honestly, I'm not entirely sure yet.

I do know something that I will do moving forward, something I did today after seeing their fear, something that I should have been doing a better job of all along: I will remind my students to take care of one another, to take care of those who are most vulnerable in their universes, and when the politics of the day presents them with increasingly unpalatable options, to speak out, to organize with one another, and to exercise their rights in ways that make sense to them.

For my part, I will continue to be more aggressively political in my scholarship and engagement with political struggle beyond academia. I owe this to myself, to my students, and to future generations alike. This isn't a strategy per se, but it's the start of one-I hope.

I want to end this with a message written and posted on social media by my younger sister, a freshman undergraduate at Lesley University, which speaks to the kind of disposition we need (and still would have needed if Clinton were elected, but in battling neo-fascism, the need is more urgent that ever):

"[T]o my fellow women, the LGBTQIA+ community, the disabled, abuse survivors, [people of color], immigrants, the mentally ill-my hand is in yours, and no matter what, I love you. [Y]our life is important. [Y]our existence is fundamentally necessary. [I] will welcome you with open arms forever and ever. [W]e will fight through this fire together and we will (somehow) come out on the other side."

*A special thanks is owed to my Fall 2016 ECN 1101 students for their openness and willingness to allow me to share their thoughts here. This piece is dedicated to them.

This piece was originally published in Class, Race and Corporate Power.

Fight Back or Go Under: A Modern, Working-Class Call to Action

By William T. Hathaway

The presidency of Donald Trump is going to be a slap in the face of American workers that will wake us up to the reality of social class. Big T's pedal-to-the-metal policies will show us clearly that we are one class, the ruling elite are another class, and our interests are diametrically opposed. Our declining standard of living is essential for maintaining their wealth, and they will do whatever is necessary to continue that. They will jail us, deport us, kill us, anything to crush resistance.

But in the long term they won't succeed.

Why not? Because we, the working people of the United States of America, are stronger than the ruling elite. We are the 99%. Everyone who has to work for someone else for the essentials of living is working class, but many of us have been indoctrinated to emulate and admire the owners. They are a small, parasitical class that has stolen our labor for hundreds of years. The wage slavery they impose saps and undermines our lives, our energies, our futures, even our sense of ourselves. They are truly our enemies.

Their attempts to crush us will teach us that. We'll realize that the rich have not only taken away our possibility for a decent life, they are now taking away our freedom. When we choose to fight back rather than go under, we'll become tougher. The struggle will temper us. Our outrage will become revolt.

The forces of repression will gradually become less effective. Police and soldiers aren't machines; they are workers who have chosen the wrong side. When they realize they are attacking their own people, their loyalty will begin to waver. They'll start disobeying their masters. Eventually, the power structure, weakened from within and without, will grind down, falter, and fall. Then the revolution can succeed with a minimum of violence.

To avoid the unpleasantness of this conflict, many people hope that capitalism can be reformed. That's why progressives and pseudo-leftists such as Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein are popular.

Reformism has been tried ever since the Fabians of the late 19th century, without bringing any lasting changes. Reforms have had only a temporary impact. From the 1950s to the '70s unions were able to force through higher wages and better working conditions in many industries. Back then, capitalists could afford this because the main market for products was the home country, and higher wages stimulated consumption. This Keynesian approach created a bubble of prosperity in North America and Europe that has now burst and can't come back. The hard-fought gains of those days are being reversed because the world market has become more important than the home country. To compete globally with low wage countries such as China, India, and Brazil, corporations here have to slash their labor costs. The pressure of international competition is being shifted onto us, the workers. We are beginning -- just beginning -- to get the same treatment as third world workers.

These conditions will inevitably intensify; capitalism needs ever more profits to keep growing. It finances its expansion through bonds and bank loans, so it needs increasingly more money to pay the interest charges. And it must invest more in plant and equipment to stay competitive. Its rate of profit is always under pressure. And if it stops growing it dies.

Those pressures are increasing as the global economy approaches its limits of exploitable resources and markets. The rival capitalist blocs are fighting among themselves in a dog-eat-dog struggle for survival. To lower costs and hold on to its markets -- to remain top dog -- the US elite are pursuing repression at home and war abroad. The smiley mask that covered the face of the establishment has dissolved, revealing the predatory beast beneath.

A kinder, gentler capitalism is impossible, and the hopeful rhetoric of progressive reformists isn't going to change this economic reality. Their program is designed to divert potentially revolutionary energy into the dead-end of tinkering with the system, trying to fix it. But capitalism isn't broken; this is how it functions. We have to junk it, not fix it. It needs to be replaced with socialism. The two systems are mutually antagonistic, and the struggle between them can't be comprised.

We can win this! It's no more difficult than other evolutionary changes humanity has mastered. This is our time - a historic battle for liberation.

But to defeat the beast we need to be unified. For that we have to heal the divisions the elite fuel within the working class: the antagonisms of white vs. black, men vs. women, straight vs. queer, earlier generation immigrant vs. recent immigrant.

The decisive battleground is not the streets or the ballot box but the workplace. That's where our true power lies, where we can fight and eventually win. Workers run the profit machine. When we stop working, profits stop flowing. Withholding our labor through general strikes is a step towards breaking the power of the owners who have been getting rich from the profits we produce.

This requires being organized, and not in the sell-out capitalist unions we now have. We're going to have to take over these unions and throw out the labor bureaucrats, or form independent militant organizations that really represent us.

Then we'll be able to seize the companies and run them democratically to benefit humanity rather than the elite. It could take 50 years, though, before we're ready to do that. Those years are going to be filled with hard struggle -- not an appealing prospect.

But what's the alternative? Increasingly degraded lives. If we start fighting now, we'll discover a glory in that battle even in our losses, because they teach us and make us stronger. Rebelling is invigorating. It's an authentic life, not the superficial pleasantries of a lackey life.

To eventually win and give our grandchildren a better life (which is really what the human endeavor is about) we must build a revolutionary party that can lead the working class with a successful program. Leftist organizations are now in the process of discussing what that program should be. The more people involved in this discussion, the better the results will be. That's revolutionary democracy.

To take part, not just in the discussion but in the whole magnificent struggle that lies before us, we need to be in an organization. Just being angry isn't enough; unless we actively join with others, we won't be able to build a successful alternative to the capitalist parties.

An organization enables us to support and assist workers' battles. The debates within the group can broaden and clarify our own positions. Working with comrades is an antidote to the isolation that can afflict those who try to go it alone. Bonds of companionship and solidarity sustain us in difficult times. As the system's decay increases and conditions worsen, we're going to need all the help we can get ... and give.

In this protracted fight against capitalism many of our efforts won't show immediate results. An organization is our link to the future. It gives us concrete assurance that when the objective conditions for revolution have finally been achieved, knowledgeable and committed people will be there to make it happen: to overthrow capitalism and build socialism, in which the resources of the world are used to meet human needs rather than to generate profits for a few owners.

To work towards that, each of us should examine the parties and organizations on the Left, find one that matches our orientation, and actively support it. This list of US groups is a good place to start: http://www.broadleft.org/us.htm. The best program I've found is the Freedom Socialist Party's: www.socialism.com.

William T. Hathaway is a Special Forces combat veteran now working to overthrow the empire he previously served. He is the author of Radical Peace: People Refusing War, which presents the true stories of activists who have moved beyond demonstrations and petitions into direct action: helping soldiers to desert, destroying computer systems, trashing recruiting offices, burning military equipment, and sabotaging defense contractors. Noam Chomsky called it, "A book that captures such complexities and depths of human existence, even apart from the immediate message." Chapters are posted at http://media.trineday.com/radicalpeace.

Ushering in the Closing Chapter of the Human Species

By Kenn Orphan

The epic assaults being carried out against the vulnerable around the world at this very moment will determine the fate of our species and the living earth itself. To the powerful this statement is hyperbole at its extreme, but to those of us on the other side there is no condemnation that is too exaggerated when it comes to the destruction of communities and of the biosphere itself. The attacks are taking place along ancient rivers in the American Dakotas, in the life drenched rain forests of Ecuador, in historic olive groves in Palestine, in the melting tundra of the Arctic circle, in the sun baked Niger Delta, and in the war torn or misery laden shanty's of Aleppo, Kolkata, Jakarta, Nairobi and beyond. These may seem like separate instances to some, but they are a part of a global struggle and the outcome will in all likelihood determine our collective future and that of millions of other species that we share this planet with.

I believe that the intersectionality of these conflicts are indicative of a broader struggle over guiding principles and mythologies. Some may see this as an oversimplification, and while I would agree that we should be careful to consider and respect nuance, context and individual histories, there are some general themes which may unite us while there is still time. These conflicts have been with our species since we began to walk upright. But now they are global in scale and there are two sides that should be identified above all others.

One side values living beings over profit, and sees protection of the water and the soil and the air as the most fundamental responsibilities of any society. It values cooperation and generosity above individual ambition. It shuns all forms of violent coercion, land theft and repression. It is against aggression and wars of conquest. It is the way of Community. The other is based upon the dominance of the physically powerful and suppression of the weak. It sees the living planet merely as a means for amassing material profit. It commodifies everything, living and non. It values avarice and ruthless competition over cooperation. It believes the only viable way forward is through suppression of dissent, ridicule, marginalization of the poor and the downtrodden, jingoistic nationalism and organized State violence. It is the way of Empire.

The language of Empire is duplicitous. It employs the parlance of pale euphemisms like sustainability, austerity or free trade to obscure its true authoritarian and feudalistic intentions. It encourages nationalistic sentimentality and racial and ethnic division to obscure the reality of its imposed classism. It objectifies the living planet through clever marketing and branding with such subtle ease that it becomes ever more difficult to decipher and parse. But in the end the Empire cannot cloak the stench of a dying world forever with catchy jingles, cynical ploys, shiny new objects, paranoid bigotries or vapid distractions.

In their quest to maintain and grow their coffers, the powerful see the dissolving ice cap as a strategic business opportunity for geopolitical advancement. They see the growing difficulty in extracting high quality petroleum as an excuse to erase ancient mountaintops, pierce deep ocean trenches and scrape away primeval forests for less viable and more earth damaging fossil fuels. They see growing inequities between us and the handful of people who own half the world's wealth as opportunities for enhanced security walls and surveillance. They see hunger and famine as a chance to litter the world with pesticides and chemically or genetically altered food or factory farms which are little more than massive concentration camps for sentient beings. They see flattened forests and fouled rivers as a way of moving indigenous peoples into overcrowded, cordoned off corporate colonies for easier exploitation, social control and abandonment. And if they continue on their path the world they are forging will rival every other civilization in history in atrocity, repression and misery.

The war the Empire is waging is not about isms or ideologies, it is about power, exploitation and wealth. And to those of us being assaulted the cause is as urgent as it is dire. It is literally about life and death. We see the rising tides of an ever imperiled, acidic sea. We walk in the fallow fields where there may be no crops harvested tomorrow. We breathe the acrid air choked out by smokestacks of insatiable, blind industry. We see the walls and borders and checkpoints and guard dogs and police tanks and surveillance cameras and detention camps burgeoning as if unstoppable. We hear the drums of imperialistic war being beaten every day of every year. And we stand in shock at the unquenchable lust for wealth that stain the halls of power even as they dig our dusty mass graves. When we sound the alarm or even raise concern about any of this we can expect to be ignored, chided or silenced by the powerful in the media, corporations, the military or political establishment or even clergy. We anticipate being co-opted by the ruling oligarchy or by cynical corporate interests. But we are weary of this kind of marginalization and we aren't going down without a fight.

The powerful will not stop waging their war this year or next. It will undoubtedly play out and grow for the next few decades even as the planet's ecosystem's spiral and crash, because dollar signs and dominance are all they truly understand. This is not just another chapter in some unending saga of the human story. It is not something that any resident of planet earth can afford to sit out. If they are victorious this war may very well usher in the closing chapter of the human species and far sooner than anyone could ever imagine. We must join with each other if only to ease each others suffering, or bring one small amount of justice to the oppressed, or to protect one small river way or field or stretch of beach. This war they are waging is against the living planet and their own future whether they realize it or not. But even if they do not care about their children's future, we must.

This was originally posted at Kenn's personal blog.