The Chasm: On State Socialists and Anarchists (An Interview)

By Brenan Daniels

Below is an interview I had with both Tom Wetzel and two members of the Facebook page Anarchist Memes discussing the history between state socialists and anarchists, with the above individuals representing an anarchistic view of the situation. Part 2 will discuss the same idea from the view of state socialists.

It is well known that there was a split between Marxists and anarchists at the First International. However, how were relations between Marxists and anarchists before the split and how did this split affect relations generally speaking?

JA: Despite the first international or the Hague conference a decade later or even Krondstadt, the attack on Makhno's forces or the '37 may-fighting in Spain...I think the overall tone and relationship between anarchists and Marxists has been one of comradery and socialist kinship.

That said, I think that anarchists are well aware of the fact that Marxism is not homogeneous - not least because anarchists (in my observation) tend to have been Marxists first before adopting anarchism. The tendency is not to hold all of Marxism responsible for the opinions and actions of "tankies". We are aware that the POUM fought with the CNT in the aforementioned may-days, we are aware of the Pannekoeks', Luxemburgs and Lukacs's within Marxism and hold these people and Marxists like them in high-esteem.

OM: I would generally say, that as soon as these two tendency formed from early Socialism, there were elements of both hostility and cooperation. The problem is that, historically, there has been a tendency by some Marxist currents (Leninism and its Maoist/Stalinist derivatives) to prefer a reactionary victory over the victory of a competing leftist tendency in any given conflict. With other tendencies of Marxism though, like Left or Council Communism, the relationship was much more harmonious and cooperative, as mentioned by [JA]. Today, both of these histories seem to inform Marxist-Anarchist relationships in varying measure, while I see the current resurgence of ultra-authoritarian Marxist tendencies seen among young activists today as a problem.

Wetzel: The label anarchism wasn't really used by the libertarian socialists in the International Workingmen's Association. Bakunin referred to his politics as "revolutionary socialism." The main disagreement was over Marx's advocacy of building labor political parties "to win the battle of democracy" (as he put it) through gaining government power. This was the beginning of the party-based strategy that has always been central to Marxism.

The libertarian socialists put the emphasis on building mass union organizations, and their potentially revolutionary role. Thus, the libertarian socialists in the first international were in many ways precursors of the type of revolutionary strategy that was called syndicalism in the early 20th century. Marx's statement "The emancipation of the working class is the work of the workers themselves" was strongly endorsed by the syndicalist militants of the 20 th century. Libertarian socialists have been influenced as well by Marx's analysis of how capitalism works.

In the US, it is known that anarchists and state socialists supported labor in their fight against capital, but how close was the relationship between the two groups at this time?

JA: The relationship between anarchists and Marxists in the United States has been overwhelming close, intertwined, and copacetic. Marxists and anarchists in the late 19th century and early 20th century shared common-causes and worked closely with one another - often co-mingling in abstractly socialist organizations like the knights of labor or the IWW (which is still welcoming to both anarchists and Marxists alike) and/or coming out to protest/agitate/strike etc. in defense of workers, marginalized, or imprisoned and/or executed Marxist/anarchist comrades.

OM: Not being from the US, I can add little to the situation there. In Germany, many radical leftists ID only as vaguely "radical left" without identifying fully with either Marxism or Anarchism, though.

Wetzel: In the period from early 1900s to World War 1, the growing revolutionary syndicalist movement of that era was influenced by both Marxist and anarchist ideas. There were a number of cases where Marxist and anarchist groups cooperated in building highly democratic worker organizations. In the IWW in the USA Marxists associated with the left wing of the Socialist Party cooperated with anarcho-syndicalists like Jack Walsh and Carlo Tresca. The important factory council movement in Turin Italy in 1919-20 was developed as a joint project of Antonio Gramsci's Socialist Party group and the Turin Libertarian Group. This was an independent shop stewards council movement based on stop work assemblies in Fiat and other factories. The councils were developed independently of the bureaucracy of the CGL (Socialist Party trade union).

This Marxist-syndicalist alliance was broken with the development of the Communist International in the early '20s. The Leninist parties insisted on working towards party hegemony in labor movements. Although the American Communist Party continued to adapt and use many syndicalist tactics and ideas in their organizing in the '20s and early '30s (such as elected negotiating committees, agitation around the flat incompatibility of working class and employing class interests), they were not opposed to top-down forms of labor organization in their ideology, and this became obvious after the turn of the Communist Parties to the Popular Front approach in 1936.

Talk about the situation between anarchists during World War 1 as it doesn't seem that that is too much discussed.

JA: WWI for anarchists was marked by controversy, activity, and suppression. Throughout Europe and the US, anti-war anarchists were incarcerated en-mass and hounded endlessly. Pushed further underground, many escalated their militancy (i.e. Galleaninists in the US who actively bombed targets and assassinated officials), while others waged free-speech fights and took part in all manner of anti-war and anti-capitalist activism. The rule that anarchists opposed the war was excepted by notable anarchist luminaries such as Kropotkin - and in turn, this support was denounced by others (and the majority) i.e. Goldman, Berkman, Malatesta.

OM: The rather marginal German Anarchist groups were heavily oppressed by the state, so they devoted relatively little time to internal controversy. Activities in general declined markedly, with military authorities often sending known Anarchists, along with other radical leftists, on suicide missions during WWI. Additionally, Anarchists lacked ideas and strategies for dealing with the war, being driven by events rather than taking on an active role.

Wetzel: Let's take each country separately. During the Russian revolution there were a variety of anarchist and libertarian socialist groups. Two groups that worked in an alliance during the revolution were the Union of Socialist Revolutionaries-Maximalist and the Russian Anarcho-Syndicalist Confederation. For example at the time of the October revolution the alliance between these two groups controlled the important soviet in Kronstadt and provided armed sailors to overthrow the Provisional Government. The October 1917 revolution occurred when the Soviet Congress took power and overthrew the unelected Provisional Government.

All the anarchist and libertarian socialist groups supported this move. However, the Bolsheviks got the Soviet Congress to let them centralize power in a new state via the Council of People's Commissars. The syndicalists and maximalists opposed this but continued to give "critical support" to the revolution because they believed they would be able to still organize for their view in the factory committees, soviets and unions. By 1921 however the militants of these groups were in prison and they were completely suppressed. Between 1918 and 1920 the Communist government also eliminated the last elements of worker collective control in industry and converted the soviets into rubber stamps of the party…including the overthrow of soviet elections that went against them.

The syndicalists and libertarian socialists of the '20s and '30s came to understand that Bolshevik policies and program had led to the creation of a new ruling class in Russia, based on the party and state bureaucracy…the industrial managers, elite planners, military officers, and the power of the party bureaucracy. The working class, in their view, continued to be an exploited and subordinated class.

In Spain the anarcho-syndicalist labor organization, CNT, was the majority union, especially in the industrialized regions of Catalonia and Valencia which contained 80 percent of Spain's manufacturing. Because of the long history of anti-labor violence and repression in Spain, both the CNT and the UGT (union shared by the Socialist and Communist parties) had armed groups. CNT had an organized system of clandestine armed cells in Catalonia, used for protecting workers in strikes. When the army attempted to seize power to crush the labor movement in July 1936, this clandestine armed organization smashed the army in Catalonia. CNT then built its own "proletarian army" with about 100,000 members and UGT built an armed militia also. Under cover of this armed power, the workers of Catalonia and other areas proceeded to engage in the most widespread direct worker seizure of capitalist property that has ever occurred…almost the whole of the economy in northeast Spain. Both the CNT and UGT farm labor unions had a revolutionary program and proceeded to collectivize millions of acres of farm land, creating more than two thousand collectivized village communities.

CNT proposed to replace the Republican state with a joint defense council of the UGT and CNT unions and a unified militia. They also proposed that the entire economy should be socialized under worker management. This was veto'd by the state socialists…the Socialist and Communist Parties. This was based on the Communist's naïve view that somehow they could get the capitalist "democracies" to let the anti-fascist forces buy weapons even though it was clear that a proletarian revolution was underway. So if they "respected government legality" this would protect the "international legitimacy" of the Spanish Republic. This didn't work.

The Communists in Spain pursued a strategy of trying to get control of the state through control of the police and army. After street fighting between CNT armed defense organizations and police in Barcelona in May 1937, the Communists were able to consolidate power in the national state and in 1938 began to nationalize the worker-managed industries, moving to create a managerialist type of bureaucratic class as they did in Eastern Europe after World War 2.

Various anarchist tendencies in the CNT also contributed to this result. At the outset of the revolution anarchists and syndicalists in the CNT were divided over the question of consolidating political or society-wide power. Some thought the decentralized and uncoordinated system of local committees was enough.

A minority wanted the CNT to take power in the regions where it could. This is what they did, under support of Buenaventura Durruti's large militia organization, in eastern Aragon in September 1936. The economy was coordinated via a regional congress of delegates and the village assemblies elected a defense council to replace the old state authority. But they failed to do this in Catalonia and Valencia which were the core industrial regions of Spain. Durruti thought they could negotiate with Francisco Largo Caballero (prime minister and head of the UGT and left wing of the Socialist Party) for an acceptable solution if they held their ground and went as far as they could in consolidating working class power.

Some anarchists in the CNT were confused about the concept of "power". Based on what happened in the Russian revolution, they thought of "taking power" as meaning that some new bureaucratic group would hold top down managerial power in some state. But "taking power" could also be interpreted as collectivizing power, via things like worker delegate congresses and coordinating councils. This would depend upon accountability to the masses via the base assemblies in the workplaces and neighborhoods. By rejecting the solution of building worker political power via workers councils in Catalonia, they found themselves forced into the hopeless situation of participating in the Popular Front government, where they were essentially captive to the socialist parties with their Popular Front strategy.

During World War 2, what was the situation in Spain and Russia, respectively, in which anarchists and state socialists found themselves on the same side or against one another? How did anarchists threaten the cause of state socialists or vice versa? How does this affect present relations?

JA: I don't think the present is affected by the internecine socialist fighting in Spain or during WWII. These historical episodes and the debates that still take-place about them, are not (as far as I can tell) having any negative impact per Marxist/anarchist coordination. Backing up a bit, I say internecine because Trotskyists and anarchists during this period often shared a similar fate and fought/died together - in Spain and Greece most notably.

Wetzel: I think there are several essential strategic goals that the radical left needs to work at:

First, there needs to be a revival of disruptive, collective strike actions by workers. Strikes are very important because workers have the power to shut down the flow of profits to employers, or shut down operation of government agencies. Doing this helps to change the mindset and outlook within the working class because it changes the situation from one where people confront their employers as powerless individuals to a situation where people can think in terms of "we". Strikes are learning experiences because people will learn how they confront all the institutions of the society - the media, the courts, the police, the union bureaucrats, the politicians. It develops "class consciousness" because people tend to think more in terms of "us" versus "them".

Workplace organizing is also important because the workforce has become much more diverse than in an earlier era and thus building mass worker unions with a democratic character means working to build bridges across the various differences in the working class and taking account of the different ways that groups in the working class are oppressed. This is another way in which a revived era of mass worker struggle would change the labor movement.

Rebuilding a real labor movement is not going to be an easy or simple task, partly because the inherited American unions are so intensely bureaucratized and controlled from the top. Back in the '30s radicals generally understood workers have to control their own unions. I think that rebuilding an effective labor movement is going to require building new unions outside the inherited bureaucratic unions of the AFL-CIO.

It's also more likely that working people will become more identified with unionism, if they are not so limited as they've been in their aims and not so controlled by staff and paid officers from HQ but are more authentically organizations workers form and run themselves. There have been various periods in the past where workers in the USA built organizations from below like this on a large scale, as during 1915-21 and 1933-35.

Secondly, and related to my first point, we need ways for working at training and supporting people who make the commitment to stick at the project of rebuilding worker organization and action. This would mean forms of public education outside academia developed by and for working class people. In rebuilding the "militant minority" in the workplace we're laying the groundwork for the radical left to once again have an actual presence and influence in the working class.

Third, for a long time there has been a general understanding by many on the left that fragmentation is a serious weakness. This takes various forms, such as single issue movements, or separation into a myriad of different kinds of movements - climate justice, Black Lives Matters, immigrant rights, tenant movement, each union focusing narrowly on its struggles with its employer, and so on,.

From a strategic point of view, I think we need to think in terms of developing a coalescing of forces into a kind of class front or working class social movement alliance. But I tend to think of this as a grassroots, horizontal kind of linkage, not via bureaucracies of unions and non-profits. This would be reflected in movements supporting the aims and struggles of other movements. There is some of this going on, but it will need to develop further.

It seems that due to the right wing onslaught in the 70s and 80s that much of the left has retreated to the academy. What are your thoughts on this and can it be reversed?

JA: I agree with your premise that the left has retreated to the academia and inward after defeats in the 60's and 70's. I don't know that this will be reversed any-time soon, but I am optimistic. I sense the youth of today are more politicized and enlightened than my generation (generation x), and that gives me hope. As well, the uptick in anti-fascist militancy (unfortunately, an uptick in fascism concomitantly) and propaganda-of-the-deed of late also gives me a sense (although, perhaps it's inflated or a product of my social-bubble) that an episode marked by a more tangible praxis is nigh.

OM: I would agree that there has been a retreat into the academy, but shortly followed by another retreat into subculturalism. With regards to reversal: Where I live, academic Anarchism has largely died out already (except for a few people in deep cover), while the subculture is slowly drying out due to self-isolation and increasing, self-imposed irrelevance. At the same time, I see a lot of discontent with Capitalism and popular demands for alternatives. At least theoretically, we should be able to build on this for a resurgence.

How is anarchism making a comeback today?

JA: Relative to our recent marginalization, I think so. My sense is that more people of know what it is and/or have some sympathy for it.

OM: If us Anarchists can get it together enough to publicly propose viable and attractive alternatives, I consider a comeback not only possible, but actually likely. The demand is there, but we need to deliver. For this, we need to abandon subculturalism and academic obscurantism and actually work in a more strategic and popularly appealing fashion.

How is state socialism making a comeback today?

Wetzel: With the Bernie Sanders campaign the concept of "democratic socialism" was widely popularized. This refers to a social-democratic perspective that doesn't really aim at replacing capitalism with a new socialist economy, but aims to use elections of people to state office to create laws and programs to restrict the predatory behavior of corporations and provide some benefits that would be of benefit to the masses, such as Medicare for All health insurance.

In Europe the old social democratic or socialist parties have been rotted out by commitment to neo-liberalism and austerity. This has led to either new left parties or things like change of leadership in the UK Labour Party, with an aim to pushing back against austerity and rebuilding support for the stronger social-democratic policies that were characteristic of Europe in the post-World War 2 era.

But this isn't really a comeback for the concept of socialism as state-management of the economy or centralized state planning. To the extent that "democratic socialists" or electoral socialists think beyond capitalism at all, they tend to think in terms of building worker cooperatives which would still operate in a market economy. So market socialism, in one form of another, has become the dominant vision for many socialists.

Can anarchists and state socialists ever work together? It seems that that would be so since they agree on so much.

JA: We excel in cooperation where specific issues are concerned...police violence or some local outrage etc. - what I think is difficult is getting socialists abstractly, together under a big umbrella that can connect our groupuscules up and harness our collective potential.

OM: In my experience, cooperation with anti-authoritarian Marxists (like leftcoms) is possible and productive, having participated myself in this. With the more authoritarian variants, only partial/punctual cooperation, usually on defensive issues like anti-fascism, seems practical.

Wetzel: They could work together I think in practical organizing projects such as building unions or cooperatives or tenant organizations or climate justice protests, etc. There have been state socialists as members in syndicalist unions like the IWW for example.

However, there may still be disagreements or conflicts in these areas. These disagreements are likely to happen over the question of how mass organizations are to be run. Libertarian socialists want mass organizations to be self-managed, that is, they want them to be controlled in a direct way by the rank-and-file members. They would oppose concentrating power in an executive body. Social-democrats and Leninists are likely to still favor some strategy of "boring from within" - changing leadership - in the inherited unions, rather than building independent worker committees, and grassroots unions apart from the inherited labor bureaucracy.

Dialogue might suggest areas where there can be agreement in relation to some goals or programs. But there is still the fundamental difference in how libertarian socialists and Leninists (and other state socialists) think about what socialism is. Workers self-management - and complete worker mastery of production -- is, in the libertarian socialist view, a necessary condition for working class liberation from the class system. It's not adequate to limit this to simply control of a coop or individual workplace but has to be generalized and coordinated throughout the economy, from a libertarian socialist point of view.

There is the related problem of how we view working class political power or society wide power. Even if libertarian socialists would support particular reforms in the context of the present system (such as Medicare for All in USA), in the end the old state has to be dismantled for the working class to be freed from its subordinate class position. That's because the state is based on top-down structures of managerial control that have the boss/worker relation of subordination built in. The state represents the concentrated defense of a system of class domination and exploitation, and the forms of inequality tied in with this. So working class political power would have to be based on some form of delegate democracy consistent with worker self-management everywhere and be accountable to the masses at the base, through workplace and neighborhood assemblies.

A form of direct communal power by the masses (via neighborhood and workplace assemblies) is also going to be essential to have a solution to the present worsening environmental crisis. The people need to obtain a very direct control over what gets put into the atmosphere and water through the economic system. So we can think of the socialist goal as having both a worker control and communal control dimension. But both require replacing the present hierarchical institutions - corporations and state - that dominate society.

Historically socialists have often defined socialism as democratic worker and community control over the political economy. Libertarian and state socialists have differed in working out the details.

Rethinking the Marxist Conception of Revolution

By Chris Wright

In the twenty-first century, as capitalism enters an epoch of unprecedented crisis, it is time to reconsider the Marxist theory of proletarian revolution. More precisely, it is time to critically reconsider it, to determine if it has to be revised in order to speak more directly to our own time and our own struggles. It was, after all, conceived in the mid-nineteenth century, in a political and social context very different from the present. Given the 160-year span from then to now, one might expect it to require a bit of updating. In this article I'll argue that it does need to be revised, both for a priori reasons of consistency with the body of Marx's thought and in order to make it more relevant to the contemporary scene. That is, I'll argue that when Marx conceptualized revolution in terms of a fettering of the productive forces by production relations, as well as in terms of a "dictatorship of the proletariat," he was the victim of both intellectual sloppiness and a misunderstanding of his own system. Accordingly, I will purify Marx's conception of revolution of his and his followers' mistakes. What we'll find is that the purification not only makes the theory more cogent but updates it for our own time, in such a way that it can teach activists strategic lessons.

In brief, I'll conclude that in order to make Marxism consistent with itself it is necessary to abandon the statist perspective to which Marx and Engels arguably were committed, and which they transmitted to most of their successors. It is necessary to conceive of revolution in a gradualist way, not as a sudden historical "rupture" in which the working class or its representatives take over the national state and organize social reconstruction on the basis of a unitary political will (the proletarian dictatorship). According to a properly understood Marxism, even the early stages of the transition from capitalism to post-capitalism must take place over generations, and not in a planned way but unconsciously and rather "spontaneously," in a process slightly comparable to the transition from feudalism to capitalism. I will also argue that my revision can be the basis, finally, for a rapprochement between Marxists and anarchists. [1]

*

Marx has, in effect, two theories of revolution, one that applies only to the transition from capitalism to socialism and another that is more transhistorical, applying, for instance, also to the earlier transition between feudalism and capitalism. The former emerges from his analysis of capitalist economic dynamics, according to which a strong tendency toward class polarization divides society, in the long run, between a small elite of big capitalists and a huge majority of relatively immiserated workers, who finally succeed in overthrowing the capitalist state and organizing a socialist one. It is the transhistorical theory, however, that I will focus on here. Its locus classicus is the last four sentences of the following paragraph from the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859):

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of th ese relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or-this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms-with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

This paragraph has inspired reams of commentary and criticism, but for our purposes a few critical remarks will suffice. First of all, it is clearly the barest of outlines, desperately in need of elaboration. Unfortunately, nowhere in Marx's writings does he elaborate it in a rigorous way. Second, it is stated in functionalist terms. Revolution happens supposedly because the productive forces-i.e., technology, scientific knowledge, and the skills of the labor force-have evolved to such a point that production relations are no longer compatible with their socially efficient use and development. But what are the causal mechanisms that connect this functionalist concept of "fettering of the productive forces" to social revolution? As far as I know, nowhere does Marx express his theory in causal, as opposed to functionalist, terms.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that, as it is stated above, the theory verges on meaninglessness. How does one determine when production relations have started to impede the use and development of productive forces? It would seem that to some extent they are always doing so. In capitalism, for example, one can point to the following facts: (1) recurring recessions and depressions periodically make useless much of society's productive capacity; (2) enormous amounts of resources are wasted on socially useless advertising and marketing campaigns; (3) there is a lack of incentives for capital to invest in public goods such mass transit, the provision of free education, and public parks; (4) the recent financialization of the Western economy has entailed investment not in the improvement of infrastructure but in glorified gambling that doesn't benefit society; (5) artificial obstacles such as intellectual copyright laws hinder the development and diffusion of knowledge and technology; (6) a colossal level of expenditures is devoted to war and destructive military technology; (7) in general, capitalism distributes resources in a profoundly irrational way, such that, for example, hundreds of millions of people starve while a few become multi-billionaires. Despite all this, however, no transition to a new society has happened.

Indeed, in other respects capitalism continues to develop productive forces, as shown by recent momentous advances in information technology. It's true that most of this technology was originally developed in the state sector;[2] nevertheless, the broader economic and social context was and is that of capitalism. It is therefore clear that a mode of production can "fetter" and "develop" productive forces at the same time, a fact Marx did not acknowledge.

In order to salvage his hypothesis quoted above, and in fact to make it quite useful, a subtle revision is necessary. We have to replace his idea of a conflict between productive forces and production relations with that of a conflict between two sets of production relations, one of which uses productive forces in a more socially rational and "un-fettering" way than the other. This change, slight as it might seem, has major consequences for the Marxist conception of revolution. It is no exaggeration to say that, in addition to making the theory logically and empirically cogent, it changes its entire orientation, from advocating a "dictatorship of the proletariat" that directs social and economic reconstruction to advocating a more grassroots-centered long-term evolution of social movements that remake the economy and society from the ground up.

My revision of the theory, then, is simply that at certain moments in history, new forces and relations of production evolve in an older economic, social, political, and cultural framework, undermining it from within. The gradual process of social revolution begins to happen when the old set of production relations fetters, or irrationally uses, productive forces in relation to the new set of widely emerging production relations . The "in relation to…" that I have added saves the Marxian theory from meaninglessness, for it indicates a definite point at which the "old" society really begins to yield to the "new" one, namely when an emergent economy has evolved to the point that it commands substantial resources and is clearly more "effective" or "powerful" in some sense than the old economy. The first time such a radical transformation ever happened was with the Neolithic Revolution (or Agricultural Revolution), which started around 12,000 years ago. As knowledge and techniques of agriculture developed that made possible sedentary populations, the hunter-gatherer mode of production withered away, as did the ways of life appropriate to it.

Similarly, starting around the thirteenth century in parts of Europe, an economy and society organized around manorialism and feudalism began to transform into an economy centered in the accumulation of capital. Several factors contributed to this process, among them (1) the revival of long-distance trade (after centuries of Europe's relative isolation from the rest of the world), which stimulated the growth of merchant capitalism in the urban interstices of the feudal order; (2) mercantile support for the growth of the nation-state with a strong central authority that could dismantle feudal restrictions to trade and integrated markets; (3) the rise, particularly in England, of a class of agrarian capitalists who took advantage of new national and international markets (e.g., for wool) by investing in improved cultivation methods and enclosing formerly communal lands to use them for pasturage; (4) the partly resultant migration of masses of the peasantry to cities, where, during the centuries from the sixteenth to the nineteenth, they added greatly to the class of laborers who could be used in manufacturing; (5) the discovery of the Americas, which further stimulated commerce and the accumulation of wealth.

In short, from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries, capitalist classes-agrarian, mercantile, financial, and industrial-emerged in Europe, aided by technological innovations such as the printing press and then, later on, by all the technologies that were made possible by the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. All this is just to say that in the womb of the old society, new productive forces and production relations evolved that were more dynamic and wealth-generating than earlier ones. Moreover, on the foundation of these new technologies, economic relations, and scientific discourses arose new social, political, and cultural relations and ideologies that were propagated by the most dynamic groups with the most resources, i.e., the bourgeoisie and its intellectual hangers-on. [3]

My correction of Marx's formulation of his hypothesis in the abovementioned Preface has another advantage besides making the theory more meaningful: it also supplies a causal mechanism by which a particular mode of production's "fettering of the productive forces" leads to revolution-indeed, to successful revolution. The mechanism is that the emergent mode of production, in being less dysfunctional or more socially rational than the dominant mode, eventually (after reaching a certain visibility in the society) attracts vast numbers of adherents who participate in it and propagandize for it-especially if the social context is one of general economic stagnation and class polarization, due to the dominant mode of production's dysfunctionality.

Moreover, this latter condition means that, after a long evolution, the emergent economic relations and their institutional partisans will have access to so many resources that they will be able to triumph economically and politically over the reactionary partisans of the old, deteriorating economy. This, of course, is what ultimately ensured the political success of the bourgeoisie in its confrontations with the feudal aristocracy. Likewise, one can predict that if capitalism continues to stagnate and experience massive crisis over the next century, a new, more cooperative mode of production that has developed in the interstices of capitalist society may eventually mount the summits of political power.

In short, my seemingly minor revision provides a condition for the success of anti-capitalist revolution, and thus helps explain why no such revolution has so far been successful in the long run (namely because the condition has been absent). Another way of seeing the implications and advantages of the revision is by contrasting it with the views of orthodox Marxists. A single sentence from Friedrich Engels sums up these views: "The proletariat seizes state power, and then transforms the means of production into state property." [4] This statement, approved by Lenin and apparently also by Marx, encapsulates the mistaken statist perspective of the orthodox Marxist conception of proletarian revolution.

This perspective is briefly described in the Communist Manifesto, where Marx writes, "The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class," and then lays out a ten-point plan of social reconstruction by means of state decrees. By the 1870s Marx had abandoned the specifics of his earlier plan, but his (qualified) statism remained, and transmitted itself to his followers. [5] It is true that orthodox Marxists expect the state, "as a state," to somehow (inexplicably) wither away eventually, but they do have a statist point of view in relation to the early stages of revolution.

This statist vision emerges naturally from Marx's famous passage quoted above, in that the idea of a conflict between the rational use and development of productive forces and the fettering nature of current production relations suggests that at some point a social "explosion" will occur whereby the productive forces are finally liberated from the chains of the irrational mode of production. Pressure builds up, so to speak, over many years, as the mode of production keeps fettering the socially rational use of technology and scientific knowledge; through the agency of the working class, the productive forces struggle against the shackles of economic relations; at long last they burst free, when the working class takes over the state and reorganizes the economy. These are the metaphors naturally conjured by the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

But there are logical and empirical problems with the statist view, the view according to which the substance of social revolution occurs after the seizure of state power. First of all, it is in tension with the Marxian conception of social dynamics. Briefly stated, Marx sees the economy-rightly-as the relative foundation of the rest of society, including politics, which suggests that a post-capitalist social revolution cannot be politically willed and imposed. This would seem to reverse the order of "dominant causality," from politics to the economy rather than vice versa. Moreover, such extreme statism exalts will as determining human affairs, a notion that is quite incompatible with the dialectical spirit of Marxism.

According to "dialectics," history really happens "behind the backs" of actors: it evolves "unconsciously," so to speak, as Hegel understood. Social and institutional conflicts work themselves out, slowly, through the actions of large numbers of people who generally have little idea of the true historical significance of their acts. As Marx said, we should never trust the self-interpretations of historical actors. And yet apparently he suspends this injunction, and his whole dialectical method, when it comes to the so-called proletarian revolution. These historical actors are somehow supposed to have perfect understanding of themselves and their place in history, and their historical designs are supposed to work out perfectly and straightforwardly-despite the massive complexity and "dialectical contradictions" of society.

The reality is that if "the working class" or its ostensible representatives seize control of the state in a predominantly capitalist society-and if, miraculously, they are not crushed by the forces of reaction-they can expect to face overwhelming obstacles to the realization of their revolutionary plans. Some of these obstacles are straightforward: for example, divisions among the new ruling elite, divisions within the working class itself (which is not a unitary entity), popular resistance to plans to remake the economy, the necessity for brutal authoritarian methods of rule in order to force people to accept the new government's plans, the inevitable creation of a large bureaucracy to carry out so-called reconstruction, etc. Fundamental to all these obstacles is the fact that the revolutionaries have to contend with the institutional legacies of capitalism: relations of coercion and domination condition everything the government does, and there is no way to break free of them. They cannot be magically transcended through political will. In particular, it is impossible through top-down directives to transform production relations from authoritarian to democratic: Marxism itself suggests that the state is not socially creative in this way. The hope to reorganize exploitative relations of production into liberatory, democratic relations by means of bureaucracy and the exercise of a unitary political will is utterly utopian and un-Marxist.

The record of so-called Communist revolutions in the twentieth century is instructive. While some Marxists may deny that lessons should be drawn from these revolutions, since they happened in relatively "primitive" rather than advanced capitalist countries, the experiences are at least suggestive. For what they created in their respective societies was not socialism (workers' democratic control of production) or communism (a classless, stateless, moneyless society of anarchistic democracy) but a kind of ultra-statist state capitalism. To quote the economist Richard Wolff, "the internal organization of the vast majority of industrial enterprises [in Communist countries] remained capitalist. The productive workers continued in all cases to produce surpluses: they added more in value by their labor than what they received in return for that labor. Their surpluses were in all cases appropriated and distributed by others." [6] Workers continued to be viciously exploited and oppressed, as in capitalism; the accumulation of capital continued to be the overriding systemic imperative, to which human needs were subordinated. While there are specific historical reasons for the way these economies developed, the general underlying condition was that it was and is impossible to transcend the capitalist framework if the political revolution takes place in a capitalist world, ultimately because the economy dominates politics more than political will can dominate the economy.

In any case, it was and is breathtakingly utopian to think that an attempted seizing of the state in an advanced and still overwhelmingly capitalist country, however crisis-ridden its economy, could ever succeed, because the ruling class has a monopoly over the most sophisticated and destructive means of violence available in the world. Even rebellions in relatively primitive countries have almost always been crushed, first because the ruling classes there had disproportionate access to means of violence, and second because the ruling classes in more advanced countries could send their even more sophisticated instruments of warfare to these countries in order to put down the revolution. But if a mass rebellion came close to overthrowing the regime of one of the core capitalist nations, as opposed to a peripheral one, the reaction of ruling classes worldwide would be nearly apocalyptic. They would likely prefer the nuclear destruction of civilization to permitting the working class or some subsection of it to take over a central capitalist state.

Thus, the only possible way-and the only Marxist way-for a transition out of capitalism to occur is that it be grounded in, and organized on the basis of, the new, gradually and widely emerging production relations themselves. This is the condition that has been absent in all attempts at revolution so far, and it explains why, aside from a few isolated pockets of momentary socialism (such as Catalonia in 1936), [7] they never managed to transcend a kind of state capitalism. They existed in a capitalist world, so they were constrained by the institutional limits of that world.

Ironically, Marx understood that this would be the case unless the revolution was international. He understood that "socialism in one country" is impossible. He knew that unless a revolution in Russia triggered or coincided with revolutions elsewhere, which on an international scale worked together, so to speak, to build a socialist mode of production, it was doomed to failure. What he did not understand was that the only way a revolution can be international is that it happen in a vaguely similar way to the centuries-long "bourgeois revolution" in Europe and North America, namely by sprouting first on the local level, the municipal level, the regional level, and expanding on that "grassroots" basis. The hope that the states and ruling classes of many nations can fall at approximately the same time to a succession of national uprisings of workers-which is the only way that Marx's conception of revolution can come to pass-was always wildly unrealistic, again because of the nature of capitalist power relations that Marxism itself clarifies.

The alternative paradigm of revolution sketched here is not only more logically consistent and realistic; it is also the only one appropriate to the twenty-first century. For we are beginning to see the glimmers of new production relations on which a future society will have to be erected. This article is primarily theoretical, not empirical, so I will not discuss recent developments in depth. It will suffice to mention that such ideas as public banking, municipal enterprise, worker cooperatives, and participatory budgeting are becoming ever more popular, as scholar-activists like Gar Alperovitz, Richard Wolff, and Ellen Brown, and magazines such as Yes! Magazine and In These Times, publicize them.

Incipient popular movements are coalescing around anti-capitalist institutions associated with the "solidarity economy," as this cooperative political economy has been called. For many years the World Social Forum has served as a venue to promote such non-capitalist initiatives, where activists from around the world can propose new ideas, publicize their work, connect with one another, and birth new regional or transnational organizations to spread the ethos of "cooperativism." One can predict that as society descends into prolonged crisis-economic, political, social, and environmental crisis-worldwide activism on behalf of a more cooperative, democratic economy and politics will grow in influence, ultimately making possible, perhaps, a gradual transformation of the corporatist political economy of the present into something more socialistic, i.e., economically democratic.

It will certainly not be a peaceful process, as innumerable political clashes with oligarchical authorities will have to occur. And it will not be consummated in the short term, likely requiring well over a century to carve out even the basic infrastructure of a post-capitalist society. Nevertheless, given the unsustainability of the global corporate-capitalist regime, it would seem that the only alternative to complete social collapse and an ensuing Hobbesian state of nature is this slow transformation-proceeding on the foundation of slowly emerging anti-capitalist production relations-to a more democratic political economy.[8]

Another advantage of the revision I have made to Marx's conception of revolution-besides providing an analytical framework to interpret the emerging solidarity economy-is that it shows a way out of the sectarian conflicts between Marxists and anarchists that have afflicted the left since Marx's bitter fight with Bakunin. The way to transcend these old divisions is to recognize that, in its prescriptions and ideals, Marxism is not so different from certain strains of anarchism, such as anarcho-syndicalism. Indeed, properly understood, Leninist vanguardism and elitism-or any other statist version of Marxism-is less Marxian than anarcho-syndicalism, or any school of thought committed to building the new society within the shell of the old.

"Every new social structure makes organs for itself in the body of the old organism," the anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker writes. "Without this preliminary any social evolution is unthinkable. Even revolutions can only develop and mature the germs which already exist and have made their way into the consciousness of men; they cannot themselves create these germs or generate new worlds out of nothing." [9] The institutions around which anarcho-syndicalists hope to construct a new society are labor unions and labor councils-organized in federations and possessing somewhat different functions than they have in capitalist society-but whatever one thinks of these specific institutions as germs of the future, one can agree with the basic premise of prefigurative politics (or economics). And it is this that is, or should be seen as, quintessentially Marxist.

We may recall, in addition, that the "economism" of anarcho-syndicalism that Gramsci so deplored is reminiscent of Marxism's materialism and economism. Both schools of thought privilege economics over politics and culture, focusing on economic struggles and such tools of working-class agency as unions and labor councils (though Marxists have generally acknowledged the potential utility of political parties as well). For both, the class struggle is paramount. For both, workers' self-organization is the means to triumph over capitalism. James P. Cannon has a telling remark in the context of a discussion of the anarcho-syndicalist IWW: "The IWW borrowed something from Marxism; quite a bit, in fact. Its two principal weapons-the doctrine of the class struggle and the idea that the workers must accomplish their own emancipation through their own organized power-came from this mighty arsenal." [10] The very life and work of Marx evince an unshakeable commitment to the idea of working-class initiative, "self-activity" (Selbsttätigkeit ), self-organization. The word "self-activity" evolved into the even more anarchist concept of "spontaneity" under the pen of Marx's disciple Rosa Luxemburg, who devoted herself to elaborating and acting on the Marxist belief in workers' dignity, rationality, and creativity. [11]

Traditionally, anarchists and Marxists had another conviction in common (aside from their shared moral critique of capitalism and vision of an ideal, stateless society)-a mistaken one, however. Namely, they both thought that a revolutionary rupture was possible and desirable. They had a millennial faith in the coming of a redemptive moment that would, so to speak, wash away humanity's sins. By concerted action, the working class would with one fell blow, or a series of blows, overturn capitalist relations and establish socialist ones. This is the basic utopian mistake that Marxism (if purified) can prove wrong but anarchism cannot, because it lacks the theoretical equipment to do so. Even anarcho-syndicalists, despite their verbal recognition that the seeds of the new society had to be planted in the old, shared the utopian belief in a possible historical rupture, not understanding that the only feasible way to realize their "prefigurative politics" was to build up a new mode or modes of production over generations in the womb of the old regime. And the only way that would be possible is in the context of the gradual, self-inflicted deterioration of corporate capitalism, such as we are beginning to see now, in the neoliberal era.

It is neoliberalism that has carried to their global consummation the destructive tendencies of capitalism, viz., privatization, marketization, the commodification of everything, suppression of workers' power, class polarization, integration of the world under the aegis of capitalist relations of production, ever-increasing capital mobility, and consequent despoliation of the natural environment. It is neoliberalism, therefore, that, in bringing about the climax of the capitalist era-sharpening the system's contradictions to the breaking point-will end up precipitating its demise and making possible the rise of something new.

All these speculations and conceptual revisions require a more extended treatment, which I have attempted in my above-cited book Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States . Much more, for example, needs to be said about the relation between anarchism and a purified, updated Marxism. Much more can be said about the historical logic of how a gradualist global revolution will proceed, and why progressive sectors of the ruling class-not understanding the long-term revolutionary potential of local experiments in cooperativism and new types of socialism-will support it and sponsor it (as, indeed, they are already doing in the U.S. with respect to worker cooperatives). [12] Hopefully the foregoing has at least suggested fruitful avenues of research and activism, and has shown how Marxism may be made relevant-rather than antagonistic-to cooperativism, interstitial/decentralized socialism, and the solidarity economy in general. Whatever logical and political mistakes Marxists have made in the past, these (for now) "interstitial" phenomena-which of course must be supported by popular movements and constant pressure on political authorities, including all forms of "direct action"-should be seen as quintessentially Marxist, and in fact as being a key component of any viable path to a post-capitalist order.

Chris Wright has a Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is the author of Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States and Notes of an Underground Humanist. His website is www.wrightswriting.com.

Notes

[1] This essay is a distillation of some of the ideas in Chris Wright, Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States (Bradenton, FL: Booklocker, 2014).

[2] See, for example, Arthur L. Norberg and Judy E. O'Neill, Transforming Computer Technology: Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962-1986 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).

[3] Among many others, see Phyllis Deane, The First Industrial Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Robert Brenner, "The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism," New Left Review I/104, July-August 1977, 25-92; Rodney Hilton, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1976); T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986); Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 1994); and Robert Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

[4] Quoted in Lenin, State and Revolution (New York: International Publishers, 1969), 15.

[5] See, e.g., ibid., 51, 52. Marx's pamphlet The Civil War in France, written in 1871, expresses an attitude close to anarchism, but it is not clear that this essay is a direct statement of his considered views. To a great extent it had to be a eulogy for the Commune and a defense of it against its bourgeois critics, not just a neutral discussion of what it did right and wrong. Elsewhere, Marx is critical of the Commune.

[6] Richard Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012), 109.

[7] See Sam Dolgoff, The Anarchist Collectives: Workers' Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936-1939 (New York: Black Rose Books, 1974).

[8] On the social and political logic of such a gradual transformation, see chapter four of my Worker Cooperatives and Revolution. On the anti-capitalist institutions and initiatives mentioned above, see Gar Alperovitz, What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution (White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013); John Restakis, Humanizing the Economy: Co-operatives in the Age of Capital (British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 2010); José Corrêa Leite, The World Social Forum: Strategies of Resistance (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005); Carmen Diana Deere and Frederick S. Royce, eds., Rural Social Movements in Latin America: Organizing for Sustainable Livelihoods (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2009); Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias (New York: Verso, 2010); Ellen Brown, "Banking for California's Future," Yes! Magazine, September 14, 2011; David Dayen, "A Bank Even a Socialist Could Love," In These Times, April 17, 2017.

[9] Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice (Oakland: AK Press, 2004), 58.

[10] James P. Cannon, "The I.W.W." (1955), available at http://www.marxists.org.

[11] See, e.g., Rosa Luxemburg, "The Russian Revolution" and "Leninism or Marxism?" (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961/2000).

[12] See Wright, Worker Cooperatives and Revolution, 68, 69, 115.

Here We Go Again: Socialists, Democrats, and the Future of the Left

By Charles Wofford

In his article "Want to Elect Socialists? Run Them in Democratic Primaries," Daniel Moraff, a self-described democratic socialist, demonstrates a thoroughly liberal and pedestrian understanding of how social change occurs. There are several errors of history and of reasoning in the article which I hope to illustrate here.

Our problems begin in the first paragraph, where Moraff conflates "winning elections" and "building power." As a socialist, one would think Moraff would understand that power is in the People, in the mass movements and organization that takes place in communities by and for community members. The People provide the labor and do the dirty work upon which the political class maintains its privilege. If the People get angry and decide in sufficient number not to participate in the system anymore, then the basis of political privilege will teeter and possibly collapse, and those in power would generally rather give up what's been demanded of them rather than lose their power entirely.

In the second section Moraff references Kim Moody's article in Jacobin magazine titled, "From Realignment to Reinforcement." Moraff writes, "One cannot argue with Moody's contention that those currently in control of the party are rich, powerful and odious. They are also, as Moody points out, firmly determined to repel left challenges within the party. These same interests poured millions into the Hillary Clinton campaign, and pour millions more into incumbency protection every cycle." Moraff misses however the part where Moody says, "The party structure and establishment has been fortified against its rivals, external and internal." Moody is correct; the party structure has been fortified against its rivals. Moraff falls into an individualist fallacy when he argues that it is simply about "odious" people, as though we can simply replace the people and the whole system will work. A socialist ought to know better.

If it were merely about corrupt people, then we wouldn't need to be anti-capitalist at all. All we would need is to make sure "progressives" got into political an corporate offices. Then we could have total, unfettered capitalism, and because those with power aren't "odious," we wouldn't need to worry about exploitation, environmental destruction, war, etc.

Some basic Marxist philosophy can help to clarify the point. In "The German Ideology," Marx writes, "The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the actual means they find in existence and have to reproduce...the nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production." In other words, people are born into their circumstances, not the other way around. The structures in which people live and work have greater influence on who they are as individuals than vice versa. So we cannot simply pin the problems of the Democratic Party on the "odiousness" of its leaders. Just as we condemn capitalism as a system, so must we recognize the Democratic party is part of that system which must be condemned.

Moraff asks throughout his article what alternatives there can be to running socialists as democrats. If you assume that winning elections is the same as building power (or the only way to do so) then it's hard to see an answer. But here are a few examples of progressive change in recent American history that I think illustrate the distinction between being in office and having power.

The first is the signing of the 1965 Civil Rights Act by President Lyndon Johnson. President Johnson did not sign that bill into law because he was a benevolent philanthropist and really felt for the struggle of colored folk. Remember, this was the president who escalated the Vietnam War into the hideous conflict it became. Descriptions of him by those who knew him and extant audio recordings show Johnson to be possibly the most arrogant president in American history. Yet he signed the Civil Rights Act into law. Why?

Because one of the main functions of the president is to preserve the nation. And as the demonstrations, boycotts, riots, strikes, and other forms of disobedience and popular organization and resistance began to take their toll on society, the power-that-were recognized the precariousness of the situation. The bottom was coming for the top, and the top had to do something. And, as stated above, those in power would sooner give up a little bit of their power than lose all of it. So in the end Johnson, as a representative of the power-that-were, was compelled to sign that act into law by virtue of the mass popular pressure applied to him.

A second example is Richard Nixon ending the Vietnam War. Anyone who thinks that Nixon was some peace-loving progressive has never opened a history book: Nixon's name is practically synonymous with the warmongering arch-conservative. Yet he ended the Vietnam War. Why?

Exactly the same reasons as above: the resistance at home, and the resistance of the military in Vietnam which was starting to collapse. Nixon, despite his personal wishes, was compelled to end the war because of the popular pressures placed on his administration and his duty-as defined by the structure of the institution-to preserve the nation.

Those are two recent examples, but that is how social change always happens. If we continue to divert our energies into the black hole that is the Democratic Party, then socialism will never come. You cannot elect socialism: it can only come about through a revolution that will overturn the legal fiction of private property, the protection of which the U.S. government is constitutionally predicated.

The lesson is this: We need not look to the powerful; we need only remember who the powerful truly are.

The Democratic Socialists of America seems to serve two functions: one is to be a kind of transition group for those who are gradually disconnecting from liberal ideology. The other is to act as a net to catch those who might otherwise go to actual radical organizations. There are DSAers who support democrats, and there are radicals in the DSA too. But sooner or later the DSA as an organization is going to have to choose which side it is on: the capitalists, or the revolutionaries.

No More Confederate Nostalgia in NOLA

By Darryl Barthe

For the last few days, armed men in New Orleans have been protesting the removal of monuments to a failed, White-Supremacist republic. The workers tasked with carrying out the removal of Confederate monuments in New Orleans are working in flak jackets and with masks to obscure their identities since threats of violence have surrounded the plan to dismantle statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, and Generals Robert E. Lee and Pierre Beauregard. Many of the "protestors" at these monuments are not from New Orleans but have traveled from elsewhere in the South in order to express their disapproval of the City Council of New Orleans' decision to remove monuments to men who raised armies against their own country in order to defend slavery.

It would be easy to attribute this latest episode of white racial outrage to the rising tide of "populism" surrounding the ascent of Donald Trump to the Presidency. Yet, the monument to the Battle of Liberty Place, in particular, had been the cause of controversy in 1989, 1993, and 2004. White Supremacy and racism wrapped in a veil of "heritage" is not new for Louisiana.

It would be even easier to connect the liberal insistence on removing these monuments to the Charleston Church Massacre. In June of 2015, Dylann Roof murdered nine African Americans at a prayer meeting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church because he believed black people "rape (white) women and are taking over our country." Roof wrapped himself in symbols of White Nationalism for pictures he posted of himself online before he went on his rampage and so, of course, liberals concluded that these symbols were problematic and, to be fair, these symbols are problematic. However, what is more problematic is that the United States has existed as a White Nationalist Republic for much longer than it has existed as a, nominally, representative democracy where all citizens enjoy equal protection under the law.

The American South, and specifically the Confederate States, lost a war that they fought in order to preserve slavery. That same war that the Northern States won was a war to preserve the Union, not to abolish slavery in the South. After the Civil War, there was a mad rush to reconciliation that resulted in the reinstitution of "White Rule" in the Southern States through a regime of racial terror. The Battle of Liberty Place was one episode of racial terror and violence, inflicted on New Orleans by White Supremacist terrorists, and was fought between the Metropolitan Police Force and the White League, a White Supremacist paramilitary organization comprised mostly of Confederate veterans that served as a street army for white conservative politicians in New Orleans.

The Monument to the Battle of Liberty Place is a monument to Louisiana's "redemption" and the reinstitution of the old, antebellum caste order following the period of Reconstruction, when people of color in the South enjoyed the briefest semblance of the rights of citizenship guaranteed by the Constitution. Redemption of the South for White Rule meant the dispossession and disenfranchisement of non-white people. It also entailed a rearticulation of slavery through the criminalization of black life. Indeed, the legacy of that political program persists today in the form of a mass incarceration state that has extended the life of that "peculiar institution" of American slavery into the 21st century. And Louisiana, in particular, stands out as the state with the highest rates of incarceration in a country that incarcerates more people than any other in history. [1]

To be certain, that is the "history" and the "heritage" that is currently being reified and dignified through the demonstrations of armed men flying the Confederate battle flag ("the Stars and Bars"), in New Orleans tonight. They hide their threats behind a fig leaf of free speech, but the very history they are celebrating is a history of treason and lawlessness. They are a modern day White League (replete with token people of color, desperate for white approval) hinting at a willingness to resort to violence should anyone -even the elected government of the city of New Orleans-dare to abandon the trappings of a failed rebellion perpetrated by their ancestors, men who were wicked and ignoble, who betrayed their country and who fought and killed and died to preserve their right to buy, sell, rape and murder black people.

Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Pierre Beauregard were all men willing to throw in their lot with a slave regime and do not deserve to be commemorated for that decision. To pretend as if these men deserve to be lauded for leading men into the jaws of oblivion, in defense of an evil regime ruled by men whose position was "thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery" is absurd, and it is long past the time that the people of New Orleans recognized the absurdity of it and put an end to it. [2] None of these men deserves to be elevated on a pedestal, and the question of celebrating the history of the Civil War is moot: the South remembers the heroes of the Civil War every 4th of July when they celebrate the birth of the Union.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu will face waves of criticism for his decision to remove these monuments. Those criticisms don't matter though, and Landrieu should not waste time arguing with his detractors in this matter. The fact that the men tasked with dismantling these memorials must hide their identities and conduct their work wearing Kevlar vests is a testament to the character of the people who oppose Landrieu's efforts in this. Those people deserve no reasoned consideration at all. Mitch Landrieu, the first white mayor of New Orleans since the Civil Rights era came to an end (the last white mayor was his father), was the person who had to get this done, and he did.

Notes

[1] "The peculiar institution" was the way that Kenneth Stampp described the American slave system in his book The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South (New York: A.P. Knopf, 1969).

[2] See Civil War Trust "A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union," civilwar.org https://www.civilwar.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-causes-seceding-states#Mississippi (accessed May 5, 2017)

Marxism, Psychiatry, and Capitalism: An Interview with Dr. Bruce M. Z. Cohen

By Brenan Daniels

This is the transcript of a recent email interview I did with Dr. Bruce M. Z. Cohen, senior lecturer at the University of Auckland and author of "Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), where we discuss capitalism and psychiatry, and view psychiatry under a Marxist lens.

What made you want to apply a specifically Marxist view to psychiatry and psychology?​ Are you personally a Marxist and how did you come to be one?

That's a good question. I didn't expect to ever be writing such a book, but thanks to my students I realised that someone had to take responsibility for filling a current gap in the literature. I run a postgraduate course on the Sociology of Mental Health, in which my students complete project essays on topics of their own choosing. As it is a sociology course, they are obviously required to apply different theoretical approaches to their chosen issue. I always encourage the students to consider the wide range of theoretical approaches available to them including structural functionalism, labeling, social constructionism, Foucauldian, critical feminist and race theory, as well as Marxist scholarship. Regarding the later, my students complained that they couldn't find anything much out there. As a lecturer, I am always a little skeptical of such claims, but -hats off to my students!- they were correct on this occasion. With all the literature on mental health and illness currently in circulation, I found it astounding that there was no standard Marxist account available. Hence, the main reason for writing Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness.

To answer the second part of your question, yes I am a Marxist! Though I grew up in a very conservative -large as well as small 'c'- part of England in the 1980s, my parents were members of the CPGB (Communist Party of Great Britain). (In fact, my mother became the first communist parish councilor in the area, kicking out a Tory in the process). So I was politically conscious and politically active from a young age thanks to my family, imbued with a strong sense of social justice, and particularly incensed by Thatcher's attacks on the trade unions and the working classes at the time (which most people in my area thought was just fantastic!). But I think being a sociologist has really made me a fully committed Marxist; whichever area you are studying or working in, be it religion, education, health, crime, the family, or whatever, it doesn't take long to uncover evidence that the needs of capital determine the priorities of these institutions- they reproduce inequalities, oppress the majority of the population, and produce surplus value for a privileged minority. Is this a kind of society that, in good conscience, I or any sociologist can accept or support? Of course not! That's why I'm a Marxist. Human beings can do better.

Please discuss the connection between psychiatry, psychology, education, and capitalism and how the former institutions have been influenced by the latter, historically speaking.

Following my point above, the mental health system (I use this as an umbrella term here to bring together psychiatry, psychology, and the various support professions and agencies working in the area of mental health including therapists, counselors, psychiatric nurses, and social workers) and the education system in their contemporary forms are both products of industrial capitalism. Briefly, compulsory schooling developed across western societies in the nineteenth century due to the needs of capital for higher skilled workers as well as to socially control working class youth (through, for example, socializing them into the norms and values of capitalism as the only "correct" way to think and understand the world). As I discuss in my book, the mental health system develops during the same period as another institution of social control: the asylums separate the able from the non-able bodied, it pathologises and confines problematic populations (primarily working class groups).

In neoliberal society, I argue that the connections between the mental health system and the education system (as well as many other areas of public and private life) have become much stronger and more explicit. For example, my socio-historical case study of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in the book demonstrates that the origins of the diagnosis began with psychologists' concern for deviant working class youth who failed to "adapt" to the demands of compulsory schooling. A hundred years later, we can still see in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) that the symptoms of ADHD have nothing to do with having a mental illness but rather denote the requirements for more productive and efficient students and workers (for instance, forgetting or losing homework, failing to complete assigned tasks, poor time-management, and so on). As the demands on young people to stay on at school and go further in education have increased, so we have seen an increase in mental health experts in this area, and thus the increasing medicalization of "at risk" (I would argue, non-conforming) children. The expansion in the use of diagnoses such as autism and "oppositional defiant disorder" by psychiatry can also be theorized as serving a similar purpose here.

In what way does capitalism utilize psychiatry and psychology to demonize and ridicule those who have politics that don't fit with the status quo? (This has been talked about somewhat before and I would be interested in hearing you expand upon it.)

I devote a chapter to this issue in my book, but to be honest I think a whole monograph is required on the subject. It's a fascinating (and, as you do the research, shocking) issue. I can follow many other scholars by reiterating that the mental health system is highly effective in neutralizing threats through pathologising political and social dissent. I think it's more effective than say the criminal justice system because the courts are usually questioning the legality of the person's actions alone, rather than the rationality or sanity on those actions. Imprisonment of a protester, for instance, does not fundamentally undermine his or her actions or beliefs in the same way as being labeled as mentally sick does.

There are many examples of this process in operation. In the late nineteenth century, the suffragette movement was a frequent target for the "hysteria" label. During the civil rights movement in the US, there was a significant increase in the labeling of young Black men with "schizophrenia" (psychiatrists sometimes referred to this as "the protest psychosis"). Similarly, young African-Caribbean protesters in the deprived inner cities of 1980s Britain were theorized by psychiatrists as prone to "cannabis psychosis." As I mention in the book, I think an increasingly popular diagnosis which the mental health system is utilizing to pathologize those involved in civil disobedience or political violence today is antisocial personality disorder (APD): post-9/11, you can see that psychiatry is taking a much greater interest in medicalising any behavior which breaks the legal or moral status quo within capitalist society, particularly acts which involve perceived or actual violence.

How is psychiatry not an actual science in some ways? May people assume it is just by virtue of its utilization of 'experts' and 'quantitative studies'?

This is really at the heart of the matter. To be considered as a valid branch of medicine, psychiatry has to reach the medical "gold standard," which is to observe and identify real pathology on the body. And, though they're tried repeatedly to do this, so far psychiatry has failed in this fundamental goal. Most recently, for example, the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) DSM committee (which was responsible for producing the DSM-5) came to the following conclusion: the causation of mental disease remains unknown (for example, there is no useful biological marker or genetic test that has been identified) and psychiatrists still cannot distinguish between mentally healthy and mentally sick people. And of course without accurate identification of disease, a medical discipline cannot claim proof of causation or evidence of successful treatment, and they certainly cannot predict future cases of that disease.

So, to answer your question, no psychiatry is not a valid medical science. However, I argue in the book that progressing knowledge on madness (if such a thing is even possible) was not the reason for the establishment of the psychiatric profession or the continuation and expansion of the mental health system today. Rather, it's a discipline that has supported capitalism, both in the pursuit of surplus value as well as being an institution of ideological control, responsible for reinforcing the norms and values of this society and punishing deviations from them.

In what ways does this massive increase in the labeling of people having psychological disorders affect us on a personal, familial, and community level? How does this increase the alienation from ourselves and our larger communities that has been going on for some time now?

The biggest issue is that it individualizes what are fundamentally social and political issues in this society. This obviously suits capitalism, it follows a neoliberal ideology that you need to work on yourself and look nowhere else for solutions to your problems. As I argue in the book, this is why the psychiatric discourse has been allowed to become all-encompassing (effectively "hegemonic") over the last few decades; it has become highly useful in de-politicizing the oppressive reality of our lives. The involvement of the mental health system here is only one factor in the bigger issue though, which is of course the way the neoliberal project has attempted to destroy the social and the collective.

What are the negative aspects of self-diagnosing and how does that reinforce the status quo?

As with Marx's famous comments on religion as the opium of the people, I think we can understand self-labeling and people desiring to have such a label as a way of coping with the alienating tendencies of capitalism. It's no solution to the fundamental issues they have, but it can be a means of survival and maybe a limited form of "emancipation" at times. For example, the parents of a child who is underperforming in school may desire a mental illness diagnosis so that they can claim extra funding for study assistance, or someone who doesn't enjoy socializing in large groups may seek a psychiatric diagnosis so that they can legitimately take antidepressants which dull their inhibitions.

There are a number of significant problems with self-labeling: most obviously, you cannot solve the social and political problems of capitalism with a mental illness label or by being subjected to talk therapy, drugs, or electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). It can obviously be dangerous to your health (for example, long-term users of antidepressants tend to die at a considerably younger age than non-users), and it can be stigmatizing. Further, it falsely legitimates the mental health system as a valid medical enterprise.

How do you see the working class overcoming this system?

Ultimately it's a case of abolishing the mental health system and all its supporting apparatus. As with the criminal justice system, this is not an institution that has ever functioned in the interests of the working classes. At the end of my book I suggest a few practical things that can be done immediately to challenge and weaken the power of the mental health experts, these include: campaigning to remove psychiatry's compulsory powers to confine and drug people against their will, withdrawing their prescription rights, and outlawing ECT. I also think it is crucial to form closer alliances between academics, left wing activists, community groups, and progressive psychiatric survivor organizations to build a strong abolitionist alliance against the psychiatric system.

Tell us about your upcoming book and where you and others argue that "the best form of treatment for mental disorder is no treatment at all, and the causation of mental illness itself has yet to be established." It would be great to hear about those last two parts in-depth.

Well, I've hopefully addressed those two specific issues previously in this interview - what passes for "treatment" at the hands of the mental health system is, ironically, very bad for your physical and emotional health. Perhaps that is unsurprising given that mental disorders are fabrications produced by psychiatry without real evidence for their existence.

The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Mental Health (due out later this year) is an edited collection of original contributions from colleagues in the US, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, which systematically problematizes the practices, priorities, and knowledge base of the western system of mental health. Basically, I have constructed a comprehensive resource manual which offers a variety of ways in which to theorize the business of mental health as a social, economic, political, and cultural project. So, for instance, the book provides updates on critical theories of mental health such as labeling, social constructionism, antipsychiatry, Foucauldian, Marxist, critical feminist, race and queer theory, critical realism, critical cultural theory, and mad studies. But it also demonstrates the application of such theoretical ideas and scholarship to key topics such as medicalization and pharmaceuticalisation, the DSM, global psychiatry, critical histories of mental health, and talk therapy. I'm very pleased at how it has turned out.

Is there a way to bring back a form of alternative psychiatry or psychology at all?

Some scholars are positive about the development of a post-revolutionary "Marxist psychology" or similar. I don't think that's possible, and I worry about giving these professions any sort of way out. My analysis points to these professions as agents of social control; they have always been responsible for policing the population not for emancipating them. So my answer to that question is an emphatic "no!"

Bruce M.Z. Cohen is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His other books include Mental Health User Narratives: New Perspectives on Illness and Recovery (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and Being Cultural(Pearson, 2012).

Striking While the Iron Is Hot: Trump and the Antifa Resistance

By Brenan Daniels

This is a transcript of a recent email interview I had with JA, an administrator of the Facebook page Anarchist Memes where we discuss Trump's rise to the presidency and how people can more actively resist the fascist-esque politics that are currently being put in the mainstream.

Regarding Trump's ascendance to the Presidency, many argued that he would never make it. Seeing his rhetoric and proposed policies at the very beginning, what were your initial thoughts? Do you think that his tapping into social and economic unrest was purposeful on some level?

I thought that Trump was too unpolished and goofy to beat a career politician of Clinton's caliber. It seemed to me at the time that his ascendency to RNC nominee was the result of in-fighting and disarray within the GOP. I never imagined he'd win the presidential election.

I don't think that anything Trump does is particularly strategic on his part. Even when it is apparent he's trying to stick to a narrative, he still seems to go off-script, and delve in to bizarre and perverse tangents. I think the man is totally untethered to objective reality.

There are those who would argue that in some ways a Trump win is impressive seeing as how the media and a large amount of The Establishment was against him. What are your thoughts on this?

I think he is popular for the same reasons right-wing, racist, proto-fascist demagogues are ever popular. Namely, the combination of socio-economic despair and a chauvinistic dominant culture. My intuition is that, those who are deeply invested in the narratives and affirmations of the dominant culture, resolve the emotional and cognitive dissonance of their socioeconomic predicament within the culture as well as dissent against it...by going deeper in to their nationalist fairytales and faulting scapegoats and/or lack-of-purity/faith as to explain the present conditions.

Trump's utter stupidity, incredulity and narcissism allowed him to say and declare things that a more strategic and refined politician would-not. I think this allowed him to out-flank his opponents in the GOP and DNC alike. Likewise, the media seemed either unaware or unconcerned that its tittering responses to Trump, amplified his popularity.

Currently it seems that Trump is hitting the ground running by doing a number of things such as the recent Muslim ban, proposing that the US leave the United Nations, and reinstating a ban on US funding overseas, to the glee of many of his supporters. However, there are those who are expressing dismay over other policies such as a freeze on government employee hiring and salaries. What do you think will happen if/when people realize that many of Trump's policies are going to hurt them? Will we see an increase in violence against marginalized communities?

I think it's decidedly possible that the white-reactionary milieu will react violently if/when their economic conditions are negatively impacted by Trumps policies. Some certainly will. But the flip-side of that, the only possible silver-lining to any of this depravity and cruelty, is that the shock of trumps failures on the reactionary white working class, may bump them out of their racist, right-wing stupor. I think it's incumbent on radicals to strike while things are amorphous and strange, and try to capitalize on the shocks that do come.

What would you make of the liberal's reaction to Trump? There are some who argue that this is an opportunity to push them further to the left, but on a personal level, I have some doubts about that seeing as how they supported Clinton, who seemingly wanted to push us into a war with Russia.

I think it's a mixed-bag. I think some liberals have been bumped ever-so-slightly to the left, become disillusioned with the DNC, with their patriotism, with capitalism etc. I think there are also liberals who are looking for an excuse, a scapegoat, someone or something to blame for the ascension of Trump. I've interacted with both types. Some who have shown an interest in radical philosophy and explanations where before there was a lack of interest...and I've also met some who have tried to blame Sanders or everyone to the left of Clinton for the outcome of the election.

Seeing the rise of the far right in Europe and finally it coming to the US, how would you say that Trump fits into a larger global context of elements of the Western world embracing far right fascistic (and actual fascist) politics?

I think what is happening in the US is a similar phenomenon to what we've seen and is happening in Europe. Where economic stagnation or depression generate a resultant lashing out by those enamored with the dominant culture's narratives and mythology...as well as anyone else critical of that mythology.

Given the recent J20 protests and the black bloc actions, what should anarchists do now that we are in a Trump presidency, someone who many would argue is close to, if not entirely, a fascist?

I think the most useful and necessary and impactful thing radicals can do is join an organization - and start organizing. As well, I think radicals needs to make a concerted effort to try and organize, radicalize, and bring-in working class and rural white people - as tempting as it is to just write-off anyone who is even the slightest bit reactionary (and I wouldn't blame anyone who does), I think work needs to be done to change these people's minds - to help them find another path materially and ideologically.

Seeing as how I have used the term fascism and fascist in the last two questions, where can people go to get a solid understanding of fascism, both historically and modern day as it seems that it is a word that can be misapplied.

There's a ton of literature out there, people just need to reach out and grab it. They can go to the source, like Mussolini or Jose Antonio to even out their understanding of Nazism - or to any number of books comparing and contrasting the various strains in fascism. As well, there is anti-fascist literature which also gives great insight in to what fascism is and how fascists behave (AK press just released Confronting Fascism for free in ebook form, and I know M. Testa's Militant Fascism is available in pdf form for free on the internet).

That said, I think people's impulse to use the label is usually generally correct - in that the people they're assigning the label to exhibit (generally) the basic features of fascism...even if not in an explicitly ideological or intentional way.

In what way(s) can people be organized today to support antifascism and push for change beyond the ballot box, including those who lack time/funds due to personal situations?

Join an organization(s) and just do something - anything one can - for that organization(s)...and try not to fall in to complacency after an absence from involvement. Being broke, having kids, work, social life, health issues etc all invariably inhibit our ability to maintain commitments to organizations we'd like to be involved in and the tendency to stay-away after an absence is common. Try to remember, that our participation is needed, and wanted, and beneficial.

[JA]

Resistance, Anarchism, and the Black Bloc: An Interview with Lacy MacAuley

By Peter Schmidt

The University of California at Berkeley probably will not be the last American college to experience mayhem at the hands of "black bloc" militants.

In the weeks since President Trump took office, such activists have mounted destructive protests not just on Berkeley's campus but in the streets of Portland, Ore., and Washington D.C. Although the target of their Berkeley action, the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, has been sidelined as a result of controversy over his remarks about pederasty, other similarly incendiary "alt-right" leaders, such as the white supremacist Richard B. Spencer, remain on the college speaking circuit.

The "black bloc" label, attached to those who broke windows and set fires at Berkeley, refers not to a specific organization but to a specific tactic that involves wearing black clothing to blend in with other activists, shielding one's identity behind bandannas or masks, and causing disruption to get a point across.

Lacy MacAuley, a member of the D.C. Antifascist Coalition, has been a public face for such militants. In January, for example, she was a spokeswoman for DisruptJ20, the group that organized Inauguration Day protests, without permits, at which black-bloc activist destroyed property in downtown Washington and skirmished with the police. On a national level, she has provided media representation for anarchist and leftist activists for about 12 years.

In February, The Chronicle asked Ms. MacAuley about this month's chaos at Berkeley and the likelihood that other campuses will see similar activity. Following is an edited and condensed transcript of that interview.

Q. When protesters this month smashed windows and started fires at Berkeley, the university blamed such actions on "black bloc" members who had "invaded" the campus. Do you have any reason to believe that students were among the people who caused destruction there? If not, how would they have been drawn there?

A. The black-clad anarchists who were present at UC-Berkeley were a blend of students and nonstudents. The group was there in response to someone who was a vitriolic fascist, Milo Yiannopoulos. There didn't have to be a huge system of organization under that action. There was some organization, but I really think that most people were responding to the obvious signs, in front of everyone right now, that the fascists are starting to really gain a foothold and that represents a danger to all of us. That is why we responded in force.

Q. Tell me about the black bloc. Does it have any sort of leadership structure?

A. The black bloc is certainly not under some sort of hierarchy or leadership structure, as a rule. Most black blocs are really just people who are temporarily masking themselves because they fear retribution - either now or at some point in the future - due to their fighting injustices.

The political philosophy of many, but not all, of the people who participate in the black bloc is the political philosophy of anarchism. That is why people associate anarchism with disorder or violence. That is really far from the truth of what an everyday anarchist actually practices and believes.

Anarchism is based on mutual consent, and the so-called violent aspect of black blocs and anarchism really needs to be understood. I mean, can you really commit an act of so-called violence against a window, or is an act of violence something that you commit against a person? What most people in the black bloc would say is that it is not violence to break a window.

Q. How much of a presence are militant anarchists on or near college campuses? Are there specific places where we are likely to see them become active in the coming years?

A. The level of militancy will go up while we see our government, at this moment, actively impinging upon the rights of everyday people. We have already seen the U.S. government make reality policies like the Muslim ban, a "military operation" that enforces immigration law, and violation of trans youths' rights. To a lot of people, the only logical response is to make a strong stand against that.

When the only thing that you can do is flood into the street and demand that your right to exist be protected, that is what you are going to do. On college campuses, where there are a large number of people whose rights are being violated, I suspect you are going to see many more people who are going to be rising up.

Q. Back in the Vietnam War era, colleges themselves became the targets of militants. Are there specific actions by colleges that are likely to prompt actions against them?

A. Colleges that really protect platforms for individuals who are already rich, white males - who already have their voices amplified and valued much more than other people's voices - are going to see, probably, much more resistance.

We are not protesting because we don't respect free speech. We're protesting precisely because we have already heard these people. We have already listened, and we believe them, and we believe that they pose a threat to our right to exist. That is why we don't view what they are doing as a simple act of free speech. We view it as mobilizing for further violating our rights, and therefore we have to resist.

Q. A Tennessee lawmaker has cited the recent unrest at Berkeley in proposing legislation that would require public universities to discipline any student who tries to shout down a speaker. Do you see such measures as likely to be much of a deterrent?

A. It likely would have a chilling effect on protest at a time when we in our country absolutely need to be protesting. At a time that is so crucial to rising up, that would be the wrong action. It is valuable to consider that all of our systems, even in academia, absolutely privilege the speech of rich, white males and others who are somewhere on that ladder of privilege.

What we don't need to do is create more protections for people who already have a platform. We need to create a horizontal structure where everyone's speech is actually equal.

Q. If you are unhappy with the Trump administration or the current Congress, why not join, say, the College Democrats, and try to put new people in office?

A. The perspective of most of us who are anarchists, and who are participants in the black bloc, is that we don't see the two-party system as a viable way to conduct society. We don't see it as just and fair and valuing and respecting people's lives. So the best way is to actually inspire people to rise up, to resist, and to change the way that our system is actually structured.

Q. You have tweeted about being barraged with anonymous harassment and threats as a result of your political activities. Are college students who publicly espouse views and tactics similar to yours going to be safe?

A. We need to realize that, right now, that is going to happen to people who have the hope and the will to stand up and resist. Should you let it dissuade you from taking actions you need to take to protect what you love? No. Absolutely not.

Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.

This interview originally appeared online at The Chronicle and in the The Chronicle of Higher Education's March 10, 2017 issue .

Gun Control in Capitalist America

By @leftistcritic

With the beginning of the "Trump era," the calls for gun control have been partially (but not fully) muted. This article will go beyond the critical history of gun control and armed resistance by discussing my justification for rejecting gun control and, instead, an embrace of armed self-defense and armed resistance, terms which I will explore later in this post.

The Battle Between Gun Control, Gun Rights, and Armed Resistance

Gun control and armed resistance, with the latter used to defend against acts of oppression, have been often at odds. When the White European settlers came to the Western Hemisphere, indigenous peoples "offered heroic resistance" but they were ultimately suppressed because "Europeans possessed a huge superiority in weapons." [1] At the same time, armed resistance has been an effective form of self-defense. During the Reconstruction period, Black militias were formed to defend the Black population against racist Whites, sometimes even unifying with poor whites to achieve this goal. [2] Examples of such self-defense later on includes Robert F. Williams and his gun club, called the Black Armed Guard, as noted in a previous post, meaning that "becoming a threat to the capitalist order and defending the gains of the workers movement and democratic rights through force if necessary" is important. The long history of racial domination in the United States (1510-2017), with "systematic transportation of African slaves to the New World" beginning on January 22, 1510 , shows that the right and ability to own guns is an essential tool to "stand up to white terrorists and overt racist ideologues." [3] This has been flaunted by the fact that, as also noted in the previous post of this series, some of the first gun control laws were aimed at Blacks, which is why many view the debate over such control with caution, and the fact that the KKK was first a "gun-control organization," and that policies like "stop and frisk" were driven by gun control desires, feeding an "exploding prison population." [4] Such history allows gun rights supporters on the "Right" to claim that gun control has racist roots, even though some liberals say that this claim does not negate the possibility of adopting any gun regulations in the present. [5]

The history of guns and gun rights have become politicized. Some claim that the assertion that gun control is racist and that the civil rights movement succeeded because blacks "were willing to take up arms against their oppressors" came from libertarian and "obscure right-wing" websites. [6] Some of these people have also used the example of gun control laws enacted after the Civil War and that Martin Luther King, Jr. was "blocked by segregationists when he tried to get his concealed carry permit" to argue against current gun control efforts, criticizing "Obama or his gun-grabbing cohorts," saying that gun control is racially motivated. [7] This claim reportedly was tied with the claim that "slavery might not have lasted so long in America if black people had been granted the right to bear arms at the outset of their arrival in the new world." [8] To digress a bit here, not only is the claim that armed enslaved Blacks could have resisted their bondage with guns ahistorical (because why would the white overlords give enslaved Blacks guns at all? wouldn't that undermine their whole system of control?) but it implies that enslaved Blacks did not resist their chains of human bondage. Any analysis of history shows this to be completely false. Yet again, gun rights supporters will do anything they can to promote the use of guns. Saying that, the liberal arguments for gun control are at times so deluded as to be a joke.

Ladd Everitt, the former communications director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV), a gun reform organization, is one of theses people. In his article on Waging Nonviolence, one of those progressive publications, he scoffs at the idea of gun control being racist, asking "if gun control laws had targeted blacks for disarmament, how would they have been able to successfully engage in armed resistance against White terrorists during Reconstruction and the civil rights movement?" [9] This ignorant argument doesn't even make sense, because it disregards the fact that enslaved Blacks gained guns during the Civil War and due to evasion of gun control laws, allowing them to engage in armed resistance. Apart from Everitt's silly argument, he then claims that calling gun control racist doesn't make sense because "for most of our 234 years, the entire U.S. legal system has been arrayed against blacks" and that history is "replete with examples of African-American communities being severely punished and repressed after they did take up arms against white terrorists." [10] Now, he is correct that the entire US legal system has been arrayed against Blacks and that some Black communities did suffer backlash from armed resistance, but he dismisses the obvious reality that such resistance allowed Blacks to survive through years upon years of bondage, discrimination, and bigotry.

As the years have gone by, the " political forms of the left-right axis " have begun to change. In 1976, cities like DC led the way in gun control, with the majority black city council banning "residents from owning or carrying handguns (excluding guards, police, and those with already registered handguns)." [11] By 1989, the NAACP voted to support gun control measures, and four years later, during "the peak of gun homicides among African-Americans," 74% supported gun control." [12] Still, a number of groups have historically engaged in armed self-defense, including the Deacons for Defense and Justice , the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Brown Berets (which has a modern version formedin 1993) the Young Lords, the Young Patriots , and the still-existing American Indian Movement. Currently there is the Fruit of Islam, Muslim Girls Training , the Red Guard Party (Maoists in Texas), Brothas Against Racist Cops , Redneck Revolt, Black Guns Matter, the John Brown Gun Club/ John Brown Militia , the Huey P. Newton Gun Club , and the Indigenous People's Liberation Front , among many others, showing that "marginalized communities and their supporters [can use]…firearms for self-defense and the defense of others against hate crimes, protection against the police, and as a means of challenging oppression from across the political spectrum." [13]

There have been a number of current developments when it comes to gun rights. In 2008, the Supreme Court, in District of Columbia v. Heller , held that the Second Amendment "guarantees an individual's right to possess a gun" rejecting the existing D.C. law that someone could own a shotgun but could not use in self-defense apparently, but Antonin Scalia had a whole set of exceptions to this declaration of gun rights including allowing "laws banning guns in sensitive places…laws prohibiting the mentally ill from possessing guns, [and] laws requiring commercial gun dealers to be licensed." [14] This decision was also one of the first fortes into "gay rights activism for the Second Amendment rights of sexual minorities and of all other Americans." [15]

In 2010, the Supreme Court hit another nail in the coffin of gun control in the United States. In a 5-4 decision in McDonald v. Chicago , the longstanding ban in Chicago of handguns was overturned, with the declaration that the Second Amendment applies to states. Justice Alito, writing for the majority, noted Black Americans who used guns throughout US history, noting that "Reconstruction-era efforts designed to grant equal citizenship to black Americans were equally as much about gun rights as they were about civil rights." [16] The amicus brief for the Pink Pistols group declared "Recognition Of An Individual Right To Keep And Bear Arms Is Literally A Matter Of Life Or Death For Members Of The LGBT Community," which was cited by Justice Scalia , contending that gun rights are "especially important for women and members of other groups that may be especially vulnerable to violent crime." [17] Scalia further argued that even the Fourteenth Amendment contemplated guns rights because it was based on the Civil Rights Act of 1866 , which is not likely referring to the law itself, since it NEVER mentions the words "gun" or "arms," but rather to the fact that "advocates of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 cited the disarmament of freed blacks as a reason the law was necessary" as the arch-conservative National Review claims . While these claims may seem erroneous, a number of books seem to back up this assessment as a correct one. [18] There is no doubt that gun rights were on the minds of Radical Republicans in Congress since the State of Mississippi had enacted a law in November 1865, part of the " Black Code " in the state, saying

"…it shall be the duty of every civil and military officer to arrest any freedman, free negro, or mulatto found with any such arms or ammunition, and cause him or her to be committed for trial in default of bail…That if any white person shall sell, lend, or give to any freedman, free negro, or mulatto any fire-arms, dirk or bowie-knife, or ammunition, or any spirituous or intoxicating liquors, such person or persons so offending, upon conviction thereof in the county court of his or her county, shall be fined not exceeding fifty dollars, and may be imprisoned."

Furthermore, the Second Freedman's Bill the following month declared in Section 7 that

"…whenever in any State or district in which the ordinary course of judicial proceedings has been interrupted by the rebellion, and wherein, in consequence of any State or local law, ordinance, police or other regulation, custom, or prejudice, any of the civil rights or immunities belonging to white persons, including the right to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold and convey real and personal property, and to have full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and estate, including the constitutional right of bearing arms, are refused or denied to negroes, mulattoes, freedmen, refugees, or any other persons, on account of race, color , or any previous condition of slavery or involuntary servitude, or wherein they or any of them are subjected to any other or different punishment, pains, or penalties, for the commission of any act or offence, than are prescribed for white persons committing like acts or offences, it shall be the duty of the President of the United States, through the Commissioner, to extend military protection and jurisdiction over all cases affecting such persons so discriminated against."

White racist attacks on Southern Blacks and efforts to take guns away from them by the KKK and other terrorist groups likely influenced the provision in the 1868 Mississippi Constitution saying "All persons shall have a right to keep and bear arms for their defense."

Back to the McDonald case, Clarence Thomas had a concurring opinion which was evidently different than Alito's . He noted how "blacks were disarmed by state legislatures and denied protection from white mobs" and after this, and the decision itself, articles appeared in numerous conservative publications saying that gun control was racist. [19]

Fast forward to 2013. That year, the Washington Post came out with an article about Black gun clubs in Maryland such as the Metro Gun Club, Big Foot Hunt Club, and elsewhere. The members of the club who were interviewed said that they loved "their guns and recalled growing up in black farming communities where every family had guns for hunting - and protection" noting that such love for guns "spanned generations in their families." [20] Members had a variety of opinions, with some believing that "guns should be in the hands of decent, honest people" but that assault rifles should be "restricted to military and law-enforcement personnel," some saying that guns could protect women from rapists, others saying there are new challenges being in favor of guns "in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December and talk of tighter gun control laws," and one long-time gun owner saying "I'm torn. I don't want guns to shoot people, but I don't want you to take away my guns either."

As the years past, more began to question peaceful protest and thought that violence could be the answer. One writer put it in 2014 that "weeks of peaceful protests and outright riots in Missouri have accomplished nothing" and said that people should act to "preserve their own life" from an out-of-control police state, and then posing the question "is it time to start resisting police with violence?" [21] This question is nothing new, as resistance to police has taken a more combative tone in the past, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, during the main thrust of the Black Power movement.

In 2015, the tension between gun control and gun rights continued. That year, 60 percent of Black Americans believed firmly in gun control, while White Americans believed the opposite. However, the racist history of gun control is present for some in the Black community, with the right to bear arms seen as civil rights issue, support for gun control in this community decreasing in the last 20 years, and support for gun ownership by black Americans has grown, especially since the massacre at the Charleston Emanuel AME Church when gun control was pushed as a solution by President Obama. [22] Taking this into account, it worth remembering that "gun control and race…are inextricably linked." The idea of gun ownership as a form of civil rights may result in some balking from liberal gun control supporters. One point they can dispute is the idea that guns are used in self-defense. From first glance, it may seem that firearms are not used in self-defense, with gun rights supporters countering that "in most cases shots are never fired, because simply displaying a weapon can deter a criminal." [23] The idea of guns being used for self-defense is supported by many Americans, even if evidence may not be as clear, especially when it comes to armed civilians ending acts of mass killing, with date from places such as the Violence Policy Center. However, it is worth noting that even the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, cited by gun control advocates, says that "firearms are used far more often to intimidate than in self-defense." [24] While they say that this isn't a use of self-defense, this is actually the idea entirely. It is worth quoting this Center in full:

"We found that firearms are used far more often to frighten and intimidate than they are used in self-defense…We found that guns in the home are used more often to frighten intimates than to thwart crime; other weapons are far more commonly used against intruders than are guns…We found that these young people were far more likely to be threatened with a gun than to use a gun in self-defense, and most of the reported self-defense gun uses were hostile interactions between armed adolescents…Compared to other protective actions, the National Crime Victimization Surveys provide little evidence that self-defense gun use is uniquely beneficial in reducing the likelihood of injury or property loss." [25]

You could say that this disproves the idea of armed self-defense, but actually I would say that in a sense, it actually proves the idea by saying that guns can frighten and intimidate. And isn't that part of self-defense?

In 2015, the Pink Pistols filed an amicus brief in the case of Fyock v. Sunnyvale . They argues against a ban on standard magazines for common defensive arms, such as popular handguns from Smith & Wesson, Ruger, Springfield or Glocks, making clear the idea of a "relationship between gay rights and gun rights." [26] That same year, there was a powerful argument against gun control. The writer said that the idea to do something after a tragedy is nothing new, but new gun laws have consequences for Black people. He argued that any new criminal laws should be "carefully considered" saying that gun laws, like many criminal laws have "contributed to sky-high rates of incarceration for minorities," citing the story of Marissa Alexander, and saying that "strict gun laws with harsh penalties aimed at punishing violent criminals can also ensnare law-abiding people who make mistakes." [27] He goes on to say that gun control, historically has "been directly or indirectly tied to race," citing bills such as the Gun Control Act in 1968 and the Mulford Act in 1967, noting that these laws, among others in the years to come , "opened the floodgate to further federalization of criminal laws and the "tough on crime" mindset that dominated late 20th century American politics." He ends by saying that while "every gun death is a tragedy," with loss of life being horrendous, gun laws, even if well-intentioned, disproportionately burden the black community, arguing that "as calls grow for more gun laws, let's not compound a tragedy by continuing the same mistakes of the past."

From 2015 to the present, Black Lives Matter fits into this equation. They didn't focus on gun control as a priority possibly because of the "racist history of gun control" and the fact that such gun laws are "are more likely to be used against African-Americans than whites." [28]

There have been a number of developments in the fight between gun rights and gun control. The NRA, which declared that women with guns can stop abusers and rapists, called for armed guards in schools after Sandy Hook), was mum when unarmed Blacks (incl. Michael Brown, Alton Sterling, and Tamir Rice) were killed, even when a black man with a concealed permit, Philando Castile, was killed. [29] They weren't the only game in town. In Dallas, Texas, a Black man named Mark Hughes was marching with an AR-15 rifle across his chest in a solidarity rally to protest the deaths of Castile and Sterling, shooting began and he was referred as the "suspect" in the shooting on Dallas police officers by Micah Xavier Johnson, leading Black gun owners to feel, rightly, that "they're discriminated against for exercising their constitutional right to bear arms." [30] Clearly, the NRA is "a bunch of old white guys, and honestly, I don't think they have the tools and minorities in the organization to address these types of issues" as Michael Cargill, the owner of Central Texas Gun Works, put it, even as he said that they were "afraid to make the wrong statement," which just seems like a convenient excuse. [31]

In the Black community in the United States, there have been strong calls for Black gun ownership and establishment of a Black nation within the US. [32] As General Babu Omowale, national minister of defense for the New Black Panther Party and co-founder of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club argued, "we [Black Americans] are a defenseless people and surrounded by a hostile society here in America…Blacks and African people need to be armed, We look at our history in this country…Being surrounded by white supremacy like we are, we are in the most volatile position of any race in the world." [33] Such feelings means that as Victoria Bynum, author of The Free State of Jones: Mississippi's Longest Civil War, a book on Newton Knight, a white Mississippi farmer, soldier and Union sympathizer who united with Confederate deserters and escaped slaves to secede from the Confederacy, puts it, "we're at a critical juncture of history in terms of race relations, reminiscent of the post-Civil War era" with independence and separatism viewed as the only recourse. Christian Davenport, author of How Social Movements Die: Repression and Demobilization of the Republic of New Africa , adds that "it is fairly easily for African-Americans to form a Black nation within the United States" including organizations like the Nation of Islam occupying "decent size areas in American cities." [34] Apart from this, other groups have been formed. In February 2015, Philip Smith started a group, the National African American Gun Association (NAAG), for "law-abiding, license-carrying gun owners who happen to be African-American" which had grown to over 11,000 members in all 50 states, a sign of more interest by Black Americans in gun ownership, especially from Black women. [35] This has also manifested itself on protests by armed members of the New Black Panther Party (with questionable beliefs) and the Huey P. Newton gun club against the anti-Muslim hate group named the Bureau of American Islamic Relations (BAIR), with the horrid group declaring that, in typical fashion, "we cannot stand by while all these different anti-American, Arab radical Islamists team up with Nation of Islam/Black Panthers and White anti-American anarchist groups, joining together in the goal of destroying our country and killing innocent people to gain dominance through fear! We will be going in full gear for self defense only. This is a full gear situation." [36]

Since Trump's election, there have been a rise in memberships in gun clubs and gun ownership because they are worried about their safety, especially threatened by white racists, bigots, and neo-Nazis emboldened by the Trumpster. This includes more members in the Liberal Gun Club, which will be described later, Black Guns Matter, and the NAAG among "non-traditional" people such as self-described liberals, non-binary folks, Black Americans, and Latino Americans. [37] This included people, like Yolanda Scott, who said "I'm not the type of person who is afraid of my own shadow. I'm going to protect myself, whatever that means."

In 2016, there were a number of other developments. After the shooting at the Orlando LGBTQ nightclub, Democrats in the US Senate pushed forward a "gun control" measure to demonize Muslims by pushing to exclude those in on "watchlist" that the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center maintains. [38] Bursting to the forefront was the Pink Pistols, a decentralized "LGBT self-defense" group founded in 2000, headed by a disabled woman in Philadelphia named Gwendolyn Patton, with 45 chapters nationwide and 1,500 to 25,000 members, declaring "armed queers don't get bashed." [39] The group also files court cases on their behalf. They describe themselves as people dedicated "to the legal, safe, and responsible use of firearms for self-defense of the sexual-minority community…We change the public perception of the sexual minorities, such that those who have in the past perceived them as safe targets" and sometimes work with the NRA on certain cases, but not always. [40] At the present, there is another gun group, called the Liberal Gun Club. This group aims to "provide a voice for gun-owning liberals and moderates in the national conversation on gun rights, gun legislation, firearms safety, and shooting sports." [41] They also describe themselves as an "education and outreach non-profit" Beyond this, they declare they provide a place for gun owners who do not agree with "right-wing rhetoric surrounding firearm ownership" a voice. [42] With a range of opinions, the long-time contributors and annual meeting attendees (not all members), who they call "elders," believe in stronger mental healthcare, addressing homeless and unemployment, along with poverty, enforcement of existing laws instead of new laws such as the Assault Weapons Ban, uniformity in permits for guns if they are the law of the land, licenses for carrying a concealed weapon. [43]

There are a number of aspects worth keeping in mind. For one, at the present, as Democrats push forward gun control measures, including a number of Black politicians, White politicians oppose the measures, along with the NRA, which wants gun use to be deregulated without a doubt, and "conservative entertainment complex." [44] Perhaps those who call for Communist Gun Clubs to "learn basic skills of using weapons and armed self-defense, could become a basis for future workers militias that will fight all forms of reactionaries," recognizing that the principle of self-defense is universal, that views of guns are racialized, and that "opposition movements [to bigots] cannot function without simultaneously building communities." [45] Once we realize that, we should not reject those in the heartland of the United States who may oppose fracking but also strongly believe in their right to have firearms, with " liberals " possibly a section of the citizenry which is "less well informed than it believes it is, more driven by emotion and prejudice than it realizes," leading it to harboring "dangerous biases," as shown in the recent presidential election. [46]

Where we Stand Now

With the beginning of Trump's presidency, a grueling four years (or horrifyingly eight) is ahead. While there are some who say that gun control laws are classist, some say that gun control efforts are not racist, others who demand the removal of all gun laws, there is no need to delve in such areas [47] There is no doubt that there are people in the United States who feel that guns make them safe, whether they are part of the largely White NRA or not. [48] As it stands now in the US, gun laws will contribute to the white supremacist order. [49] More specifically, such laws are related to the fact that class rule in all states and in the US at large, reply on "bodies of armed men," such as police, prisons, a standing army, and other "instruments of coercion" to maintain order, manifesting itself in the Klan disarming Blacks, the "stop and frisk" laws in New York City, and creating "ore reasons for police to suspect people of crimes," bringing with it more justifications for a militarized police force. [50] Already, over 7 million Americans are subject to a form of correctional control, with gun control efforts as a major factor, coupled with Supreme Court decisions that authorized exceptions to the Fourth Amendment since policing guns, with unequal and unfair enforcement, can said to be like policing drugs.

While practical measures, such as increasing funding for mental health programs should occur, we have to turn to "mutual help and self-defense" to strengthen the solidarity between all of those never meant to survive under the unjust system of capitalism. [51] Additionally, a "reasonable gun control regime" is not possible in the US currently, with the need for racial justice ignored, even as some claim that "permissive gun laws [in the US] are a manifestation of racism," and claiming that gun control are anti-racist measures, which doesn't even make sense. [52] Some who are in favor of gun control have proposed all sorts of "technological fixes." This includes support of (1) "smart guns" that can only be fired by "authorized users" and connected to cell phones perhaps; (2)"gunfire detectors" or make a school a "fortress" with lockable doors and a computer terminal at a local police department allowing police to control the school; (3) using robots to detect those who "don't belong" in an effort and ultimately having "lethal robots" to kill suspected shooters. [53] In all, each of these ideas is horrible and should not even be considered as a "solution" as they would increase police power and reinforce the problems with the (in)justice system. Others are vehemently opposed to guns, like one person who was incensed with "gun ads" on TV, the rhetoric of the NRA, and romanticizing gun efforts. [54] One piece specifically, mocking those on the "Left" who "active oppose gun control," says that it doesn't make sense that people need "guns to wage an eventual revolution and liberate themselves from the shackles of the state and corporate America," saying that such "leftist dreams" would not occur because of a "toxic gun culture….with a lethal cocktail of supercharged masculinity, racism, and provincialism" and that "disarming the Right" would do more, even saying that "guns hardly keep away the police or help communities fight back against the cops" and implying that such laws are "against patriarchy and other forms of oppression." [55] While the piece may have some good points, it misses the bigger picture. Gun control laws are not the the "only ways to reduce gun violence and save lives" and such laws don't help protect marginalized communities, arguably disarming them at most, or weakening their protection at minimum. [56]

As the Trumpster continues to sit in office with his cronies and state violence increases across the country by police, immigration enforcers, and bigots, we should listen to Lorenzo Raymond . He said that in this "historical moment," hate crimes and racist terror is growing and the "Left" needs to recognize the right of "necessary self-defense against oppressive force." Raymond goes on to say that there is a growing "black gun movement" in the US based on past history, remembers that there has been a "virgorous Black gun culture" in the South when the Black freedom movement was working to overturn segregation, and that gun control for most of the establishment isn't about peace but has to do with "an orderly and centralized capitalist empire." He adds that while guns kill 33,000 a year, alcohol (80,000 a year) and prescription drugs (120,000 a year) kill more, with more lobbying by these interests than the NRA since as the New York Times put it once, guns are a small business in the US at large. He goes on to say that gun control won't bring us to a humane society, noting that Australia has such control and their society isn't humane, while saying that the "open-carry state of Vermont" has elected imperialist "progressive" Bernie Sanders, and citing the "autonomist Kurds of Northern Syria," who are not as radical as he portrays them but are actually serving the interests of imperialism in helping to split up the Syrian Arab Republic, as examples. Raymond has more. He says that "unilateral disarmament of the American Left" is new, with Eugene Debs calling for guns after the Ludlow Massacre to protect from Rockefeller's assassins (and goons), armed miners in Harlan Country in the 193os, and armed protection by urban labor unions. He ends by saying that armed resistance by the Right-wing is likely in the coming year, such as by right-wing militias and white terrorists, that there is a need to recognize the right to bear arms like conservatives, joining groups like the Liberal Gun Club and Phoenix John Brown Gun Club, since it is the only hope of making the country safer, defending from bigots and others by any means necessary, even as the "right-wing's fetishization of brute force" should be refuted most definitely.

While Raymond is right, he is only putting forward part of the puzzle. A month ago, in an article where I attempted to predict the likely agenda of Trump's administration, I declared at the following:

"…Considering that US society is racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and otherwise bigoted, it is criminal and irresponsible to fight for gun control. Anyone who is a person of color, whether female, transgender, bisexual, homosexual, intersex, or is otherwise considered a "minority" in current society, should have the right to defend themselves with arms as necessary. That right is already claimed by white, straight men, so why can't others in society arm themselves to fight off bigots? You can't fight a revolution with flowers and sayings, but political power, as Mao Zedong put it, "grows out of the barrel of a gun." Gun control, if decided as necessary, should happen after a socialist revolution, not before it."

Now, in saying this, I am simply saying that any "minority" should have the right to self-defense by arms as necessary. Also, in saying that revolution can't be fought with "flowers and sayings" but that political power grows out of a gun barrel, I was trying to say that there should be a diversity of tactics. When I pointed out that gun control should happen after a socialist revolution, not before, I was arguing out that such self-defense cannot occur as effectively with gun control measures in place. Also, I was trying to say that the focus on gun control should be removed from the equation, with other approaches instead, which are more effective.

Guns have been seen as necessary by those advocating for socialist revolution. Karl Marx, in his 1850 Address to the Communist League, declared that

"…it is necessary to organize and arm the proletariat. The arming of the whole proletariat with rifles, guns, and ammunition must be carried out at once; we must prevent the revival of the old bourgeois militia, which has always been directed against the workers. Where the latter measure cannot be carried out, the workers must try to organize themselves into an independent guard, with their own chiefs and general staff…under no pretext must they give up their arms and equipment, and any attempt at disarmament must be forcibly resisted." [57]

Marx was not the only one to make such a declaration. Vladimir Lenin, one of the leaders of the Great October Socialist Revolution , supported "special bodies of armed men" as part of a socialist revolution and believed that armed people can make communism a possibility. [58]

He even went as far as saying, in earlier years that workers should be immediately armed and said something that should make liberals tremble:

"…only an armed people can be a real stronghold of national freedom. And the sooner the proletariat succeeds in arming itself, and the longer it maintain its position of striker and revolutionary, the sooner the soldiers will at last begun to understand what they are doing, they will go over to the side of the people against the monsters, against the tyrants, against the murderers of defenceless workers and of their wives and children" [59]

There is no doubt that guns can be a tool to allow socialist revolution to succeed. Why should the "Left" focus on limiting such a tool? Sure, guns can be used for malevolent ends and have often been used in such a way as gun violence on the streets of cities across the US, in the slums and ghettos of the oppressed, demonstrates. However, they can also be used to allow socialist revolution to succeed in countries such as China (1949), Russia (1917), Cuba (1959), and the DPRK (1948-1950), among many more.

Finding the way forward requires looking at the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. I am aware that the document in its entirety is classist and bourgeois in character. However, I think it is worth reprinting here:

"A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Apart from the fact that this Amendment reads like an unfinished sentence, one can still have an interpretation. I think it is fair to say that the amendment says that militia units in states should be well-regulated for the purposes of securing the State from "undesirables" (whoever the elites and society think they are) but also declares that "the people" which means the whole population of the US, over 324 million people, have the right to "keep and bear Arms," a right which shouldn't be infringed.

Now, while the Second Amendment is mainly said to be about gun rights, I would argue that is too narrow. The word "arm," which has been associated with weapons since its origin in Indo-European languages is defined by "any instrument used in fighting" or a "weapon," with a weapon defined as either an organ used for defense or an "instrument of any kind used to injure or kill, as in fighting or hunting" as noted by Webster's New World College Dictionary and numerous thesauruses. This means that "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms" applies to ALL weapons, not just guns. Hence, people, as noted by Akinyele Omowale Umoja in We Will Shoot Back, on pages 7 and 8, have the right to defend themselves with "fists, feet, stones, bricks, blades, and gasoline firebombs," along with guns of course.

Keeping this in mind, it worth defining a number of terms. Umoja, in We Will Shoot Back, on page 7, defines armed resistance was the "individual and collective use of force for protection, protest, or other goals of insurgent political action and in defense of human rights," while also including armed struggle, armed vigilance, guerilla warfare, spontaneous rebellion, retaliatory violence, and armed self-defense. He also defines armed defense, on the same page, as the "protection of life, persons, and property from aggressive assault through the application of force necessary to thwart or neutralize attack." Adding to this, Black's Law Dictionary (Third Pocket Edition), defines force (which they break down into eight types), on page 294, as "power, violence, or pressure directed against a person or thing," meaning that one does not have to kill or maim someone to apply force. These definitions are suitable for describing tactics used in the current political climate of the United States.

As we watch the Trump Administration from our TVs, computer screens, phones, or read it in the papers, we must recognize the need for resistance and act on such feelings. Still, we cannot be roped into the bourgeois milquetoast resistance by the Democratic Party and their lackeys and instead engage in solidarity, at minimum, with those under attack by the capitalist system within the US and across the world as a whole. It is not worth "waiting" for revolution. Rather, it is best to act in the present against the threats that face this planet and its people, even when one should do so without illusion, whatever form that takes offline or online.

This was originally published one the author's personal blog.

Notes

[1] LeftistCritic, " Annotating a Section of The Great Soviet Encyclopedia ," Soviet History, Vol. 1, no. 1, p. 6.

[2] Donald Parkinson, " Armed self-defense: the socialist way of fighting the far-right ," Communist League of Tampa, November 13, 2016; accessed January 17, 2016.

[3] Malik Miah, "African-American Self-Defense," Against the Current, January/February 2015; accessed January 16, 2017.

[4] Ibid; Joe Catron, " Gun control and bigotry ," Worker's World, ; David Babat, " The discriminatory history of gun control ," Senior Honors Projects, Paper 140; accessed January 16, 2017.

[5] David B. Kopel, "The Klan's Favorite Law: Gun control in the postwar South," Reason, February 15, 2005; accessed January 16, 2017; Adam Winkler, "Gun Control is "racist"?, The New Republic, February 4, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017. The latter piece Ends up advocating for gun control.

[6] Ladd Everitt, "Debunking the 'gun control is racist' smear, Waging Nonviolence, September 26, 2010; accessed January 16, 2017. Everitt heads the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV). He goes on to talk about Nat Turner's rebellion, the Colfax Massacre, and numerous other instances to disprove the gun control is racist idea.

[7] Newsmax, "Top Firearms Group: Gun Control Has Roots in Racism," February 25, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017.

[8] Bill Blum, "There's Nothing Racist About Gun Control … Anymore," Truthdig, January 29, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017.

[9] Ladd Everitt, "Debunking the 'gun control is racist' smear, Waging Nonviolence, September 26, 2010; accessed January 16, 2017.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Jane Costen, "The (Really, Really) Racist History of Gun Control," MTV News, June 30, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Logan Marie Glitterbomb , "Combating Hate: A Radical Leftist Guide to Gun Control," Augusta Free Press, January 11, 2017; accessed January 16, 2017. Reposted from the website of the Center for a Stateless Society which states that this article is only "Part 1." They also note the Sylvia Rivera Gun Club for Self-Defense as an example but this group could not be found despite internet searchings. It is possible the group exists but may be a small group with little publicity or its name has changed from the past.

[14] Adam Winkler, "The Secret History of Gun Control," The Atlantic, September 2011; accessed January 16, 2017.

[15] David Kopel, "The history of LGBT gun-rights litigation," Washington Post, June 17, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[16] Ladd Everitt, "Debunking the 'gun control is racist' smear, Waging Nonviolence, September 26, 2010; accessed January 16, 2017. Everitt heads the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (CSGV).

[17] David Kopel, "The history of LGBT gun-rights litigation," Washington Post, June 17, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[18] Guns in American Society: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture, and the Law , Vol. 1 (ed. Gregg Lee Carter, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2012), 9; John Massaro, No Guarantee of a Gun: How and Why the Second Amendment Means Exactly What It Says (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2009), 652; Markus Dirk Dubber, Victims in the War on Crime: The Use and Abuse of Victims' Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 93; Deborah Homsher, Women and Guns: Politics and the Culture of Firearms in America: Politics of Firearms in America (Expanded Edition, New York: Routledge, 2015), 292; Christopher B. Strain, Pure Fire: Self-defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 19, 197; Charles E. Cobb, Jr., This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 45; Philip Wolny, Gun Rights: Interpreting the Constitution (New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, 2015), 26.

[19] Ladd Everitt, "Debunking the 'gun control is racist' smear, Waging Nonviolence, September 26, 2010; accessed January 16, 2017.

[20] Sonsyrea Tate Montgomery, "Black gun clubs and the right to bear arms," Washington Post, February 19, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017.

[21] Rob Los Ricos, " The US police state is out of control - is armed self-defense a necessary option? ," rob's revolting, November 15, 2014; accessed January 16, 2017; Justin King, " When Should We Start Forcibly Resisting Police Tyranny? ," September 19, 2014, TheAntiMedia; accessed January 16, 2017.

[22] Jane Costen, "The (Really, Really) Racist History of Gun Control," MTV News, June 30, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Gun control's racist reality: The liberal argument against giving police more power," Salon, June 24, 2015; accessed January 16, 2017.

[23] The Week Staff, "The truth about guns and self-defense," November 1, 2015; accessed January 16, 2017.

[24] Michael McLaughlin, "Using Guns In Self-Defense Is Rare, Study Finds," Huffington Post, June 17, 2015; accessed January 16, 2017.

[25] Harvard Injury Control Research Center, " Gun Threats and Self-Defense Gun Use ," accessed January 16, 2017.

[26] David Kopel, "The history of LGBT gun-rights litigation," Washington Post, June 17, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[27] Jonathan Banks, "Gun Control Will Not Save America from Racism,"Vice, June 22, 2015; accessed January 16, 2017. I know its horrid Vice, but so what.

[28] Jane Costen, "The (Really, Really) Racist History of Gun Control," MTV News, June 30, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[29] Claire Landsbaum, "NRA Ad Claims 'Real Women's Empowerment' Is Owning a Gun," New York Magazine, July 13, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Max Plenke, "When Black Men Are Shot and Killed, the NRA Is Silent," Mic, July 7, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[30] Tessa Stuart, "Black Gun Owners Speak Out About Facing a Racist Double Standard," Rolling Stone, July 14, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Korri Atkinson, "Black Gun Owners in Texas Decry Racial Bias," Texas Tribune, July 9, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[31] Hannah Allam, "For black gun owners, bearing arms is a civil rights issue," McClatchy DC, July 15, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Korri Atkinson, "Black Gun Owners in Texas Decry Racial Bias," Texas Tribune, July 9, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[32] David Love, "Is it Time for Black People to Reconsider a Black Nation Within a Nation and Armed Self-Defense?," Atlanta Black Star, July 17, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Hannah Allam, "For black gun owners, bearing arms is a civil rights issue," McClatchy DC, July 15, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[36] RT (Russia Today), "New Black Panthers in armed showdown with anti-Muslim militia in Texas," April 6, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[37] Charmaine Lomabao, "Liberal Gun Club Experiences Increasing Membership Since Trump Victory," Newsline, December 27, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Shantella Y. Sherman, "Black Gun Purchases Reportedly Skyrocket Since Trump Election," Afro, January 4, 2017; accessed January 16, 2017; The Grio, "Gun sales to blacks, minorities surge after Trump win," Aol News, November 28, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; , "Firearm sales rise among minorities," WBCD (NBC Affiliate), December 28, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Ben Popken, "Trump's Victory Has Fearful Minorities Buying Up Guns," NBC News, November 27, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Teryn Payne, "Gun Sales Among Blacks See Increase," Ebony magazine, November 29, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017. Reprinted from Jet magazine; Brian Wheeler, "Why US liberals are now buying guns too," BBC News, December 20, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Joe Schoenmann, "Fearing Trump Supporters, Now Liberals Are Buying Guns," KNPR, January 10, 2017; accessed January 16, 2017; Teresa Walsh, "Now it's the liberals who are arming up," McClatchy DC, December 23, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Brandon Ellington Patterson, "African American Gun Ownership Is Up, and So Is Wariness," Mother Jones, July 12, 2016; Brandon Ellington Patterson, "African American Gun Ownership Is Up, and So Is Wariness," Mother Jones, July 12, 2016.

[38] Minnie Bruce Pratt, " Gun control or self-defense? ," Worker's World, Joe Catron, " Gun control and bigotry ," Worker's World,

[39] John Burnett, "LGBT Self-Defense Site 'Pink Pistols' Gains Followers After Orlando Massacre," NPR, June 23, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; Julia Ioffe, "The Group that Wants to Arm Gay America," Politico, June 13, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017; David Kopel, "The history of LGBT gun-rights litigation," Washington Post, June 17, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[40] Pink Pistols, " About the Pink Pistols ," accessed January 16, 2017.

[41] The Liberal Gun Club, " Who We Are," accessed January 16, 2017.

[42] The Liberal Gun Club, " What We Do," accessed January 16, 2017.

[43] The Liberal Gun Club, " Talking Points Regarding Regulation ," accessed January 16, 2017.

[44] Adam Winkler, "Is Gun Control Racist?," The Daily Beast, October 19, 2011; accessed January 16, 2017; Niger Innis, "The Long, Racist History of Gun Control," The Blaze, May 2, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017; Edward Wyckoff Williams, "Fear of a Black Gun Owner," The Root, January 23, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017.

[45] Donald Parkinson, " Armed self-defense: the socialist way of fighting the far-right ," Communist League of Tampa, November 13, 2016; accessed January 17, 2016; Nicholas Johnson, "Negroes and the Gun: The early NAACP championed armed self-defense," Washington Post, January 30, 2014; accessed January 16, 2017; Malik Miah, "African-American Self-Defense," Against the Current, January/February 2015; accessed January 16, 2017; Alexander Reid Ross, " "Death to the Klan" and Armed Antifascist Community Defense in the US ," It's Going Down, July 26, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[46] Barbara Nimiri Aziz, " Profile of a Progressive Gun Enthusiast ," CounterPunch, Accessed January 16, 2017.

[47] David Babat, " The discriminatory history of gun control ," Senior Honors Projects, Paper 140; accessed January 16, 2017; Ladd Everitt, "Debunking the 'gun control is racist' smear, Waging Nonviolence, September 26, 2010; accessed January 16, 2017; Adam Winkler, "The Secret History of Gun Control," The Atlantic, September 2011; accessed January 16, 2017.

[48] Ehab Zahriyeh, "For some blacks, gun control raises echoes of segregated past," Al Jazeera America, September 1, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017; Bill Blum, "There's Nothing Racist About Gun Control … Anymore," Truthdig, January 29, 2013; accessed January 16, 2017; Stephen A. Nuňo, "Gun control is people control, with racist implications," NBC Latino, July 24, 2012; accessed January 16, 2017.

[49] Donald Parkinson, " Armed self-defense: the socialist way of fighting the far-right ," Communist League of Tampa, November 13, 2016; accessed January 17, 2016.

[50] Gun control's racist reality: The liberal argument against giving police more power," Salon, June 24, 2015; accessed January 16, 2017; Minnie Bruce Pratt, " Gun control or self-defense? ," Worker's World,

[51] Ibid.

[52] Gun control's racist reality: The liberal argument against giving police more power," Salon, June 24, 2015; accessed January 16, 2017; Gary Gutting, "Guns and Racism," The New York Times, December 28, 2015; accessed January 16, 2017.

[53] William Brennan, "Bulletproofing," The Atlantic, January/February 2017.

[54] Bruce Mastron, " My Latest Reason to Boycott the NFL: Guns ," CounterPunch, January 16, 2017; accessed January 16, 2017; Ken Levy, " If You Don't Support Gun Control, Then You Don't Support the Police ," CounterPunch, July 16, 2016; accessed January 16, 2017.

[55] Andrew Culp and Darwin BondGraham, " Left Gun Nuts ," CounterPunch, May 29, 2014; accessed January 16, 2017.

[56] Logan Marie Glitterbomb , "Combating Hate: A Radical Leftist Guide to Gun Control," Augusta Free Press, January 11, 2017; accessed January 16, 2017. Reposted from the website of the Center for a Stateless Society which states that this article is only "Part 1."

[57] Karl Marx, "Address to the Communist League," The Marxist Reader: The Most Significant and Enduring Works of Marxism (Illustrated, New York: Avenel Books, 1982), 67.

[58] V.I. Lenin, "The State and Revolution" (1918), The Marxist Reader: The Most Significant and Enduring Works of Marxism (Illustrated, New York: Avenel Books, 1982), 572, 591.

[59] V.I. Lenin, "The revolution in 1905: The beginning of the revolution in 1905" (January 25, 1905), The Marxist Reader: The Most Significant and Enduring Works of Marxism (Illustrated, New York: Avenel Books, 1982), 508-509.

Wrenching: On Building Coalitions

By David I. Backer

In the movie Independence Day, terrifying aliens show up to take over the earth, but something amazing happens: all the peoples of the planet join together--despite their differences--and successfully fend off the threat. We don't get a good look at this coalition, or how it forms, but it appears to encompass a vast swath of the spectrum of difference: race, gender, class, nation, religion, language...

It was a rainbow coalition, right out of Fred Hampton's playbook--except the enemies were colonizing aliens rather than colonizing capitalists. (The metaphor is pretty good, however.) Other examples of such coalitions include the Communist Party's organizing in the Black Belt in the 1930s, as well as the Young Lords' work in Chicago in the 1970s.

What do these coalitions show us about emerging forms of solidarity as we build the Left now? Specifically, what gets in the way of rainbow coalitions?

One answer is that folks belonging to various social categories are wrenched apart by the categories themselves. The best-known case is race and class. When it comes to race and class in the US, as Adolph Reed has long argued, the ruling class wins when race wrenches workers apart.

Racism is thus a tool the ruling class uses to make sure workers don't get together and get rid of them. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has articulated the same insight in reference to the Black Lives Matter movement and the recent Women's Marches.

But that phenomenon--wrenching--can and does happen in many struggles, both between and within many social categories. Wrenching is one of the things that can keep the Left from getting together and warding off threats to the planet.

How Wrenching Works

Wrenching works like this. There is a ruling set with certain nefarious structural interests. The ruling set could be the ruling class (capitalism), white supremacists (racism), cis-male patriarchy (gender oppression), heterosexual norms (sexual oppression), able-bodies (ableism)...and others.

Adolph Reed, building on a long tradition of thinking, has pointed out that racism divides the working classes and helps capitalists maintain power. Yet we know this same thing happens in other social categories. Racism divides women in their struggle against patriarchy. It divides queer communities in their struggle against normativity.

But racism isn't the only wrench dividing subordinated sets when making gains against the ruling sets. Class divisions wrench African Americans apart in their struggle against white supremacy. Gender divisions wrench queer folks apart in their struggle against heternormativity.

In each case, wrenching has the same form but different contents: in the struggle of a subordinated set against a ruling set within one social category, another social category--adjacent to their struggle--divides the subordinated set.

That's wrenching: when a subordinated set is struggling against a ruling set in one social category and the subordinated set is divided by another social category orthogonal to their struggle.

Workers fight capitalists, but racism divides them, and capitalists keep exploiting. Women fight patriarchy, classism divides them, and the patriarchy stays strong. In each case there's a wrench: racism is the wrench in the first and classism is the wrench in the second.

But the thing is, there's never just one wrench. There are always wrenches. In any given struggle there will be multiple wrenches with different salience, as intersectional sociologists like Patricia Hill Collins point out. You might work through the race problems in your union, but next up is the patriarchy and then the heteronormativity and then the ableism and transphobia...

Wrenching is gut-wrenchingly powerful and complex. But if you've ever quit something difficult to quit, you know that the first step to getting rid of the problem is knowing that you have one. Then hopefully you can do something about it. Same goes for wrenching (hopefully).

Taking Out the Wrenches

The concept helps. 'Wrenching' names a key barrier to coalition and accomplicing: wrenching wrenches us apart as we fight against the ruling sets. But a wrench is also a human made object, a tool, and tools can be used or not used for various purposes. They can be manipulated and moved around. So what do we do about the wrenches?

First, we have to find the wrenches, be clear that they are tools the ruling sets use to divide us. This isn't easy to do. Most organizations are only sort of aware that there are a number of wrenches dividing them from one another and other groups. If they do know about the wrenches, it probably hasn't been made crystal clear that these wrenches were put in the works by the the ruling sets in order to divide them (or at least have that effect).

After finding the wrenches, we have to pick the most salient one and take it out, which can be a painful process full of friction. It must be slow, careful, intentional. Workshops, discussions, debriefs. There will be mistakes. False starts. Hurt feelings. Time "wasted." It won't happen immediately, and if you try to take the wrench out quickly without the right plan the machine could fall apart, particularly if it's been in there for a long time.

After that we have to find the other wrenches and take them out too. After the first time, it should be easier--but each wrench is different and might require starting all over again.

Finally, we put the wrenches into our tool box and save them if we need them in our work. We probably don't want to use them against our enemies since they're the master's tools, as Audre Lorde said.

Maybe, at the very least, we should keep the wrenches to remember how they were used against us so as not to let it happen again, and also remember the process for removing them in case another one gets lodged in the works.

Wrenching need not divide us. The time for removing these tools of the ruling classes is now. Somehow the people in Independence Day did it. Like them, our world can't wait.

The Question of Hierarchy: An Interview with Colin Jenkins

By Brenan Daniels

This is a recent email interview I did with Hampton Institute founder and Social Economics Dept. Chair, Colin Jenkins, on the nature and problems with hierarchical structures, which he discusses in his article entitled Deconstructing Workplace Hierarchies: On Contrived Leadership and Arbitrary Positions of Power .

Some people would argue that hierarchies are needed as people aren't really capable of leading themselves or that if they did, we wouldn't have a stable modern society. What is your response to that?

First, I would ask where this "stable modern society" is? For a majority of the world's population, life is incredibly unstable. For many, life is dire. Even in a so-called "advanced" society like the US, tens of millions of people suffer from homelessness, food insecurity, joblessness, a lack of reliable and affordable healthcare, and with no means to feed and clothe their children. Tens of millions must rely on government assistance. Tens of millions do not receive adequate education. Tens of millions live paycheck-to-paycheck and can't pay their bills. And millions are terrorized by police forces and government agents in their own neighborhoods. Most Americans have less than $1,000 in savings , if any, and studies have estimated that more than half of all working Americans are one paycheck away from being homeless . And even those who appear to be getting by just fine are actually buried in debt, with credit card debt averaging $16,000 per household , mortgage and car payments that are barely doable, and student loan debt averaging at $49,000 per borrower, many of whom are in no position to ever pay that back. Our collective existence, despite a general appearance of comfort, is extremely fragile. And this economic reality doesn't even begin to touch on the compounded social realities lived by historically marginalized sections of the working class - people of color, women, immigrants, etc… The US is a ticking time bomb on the verge of exploding at any moment. Stability is a mirage.

Second, the idea that "people aren't capable of leading themselves" stems from a need to maintain fundamentally unequal societies where a very small percentage of the population controls most of the wealth and power. This has become part of the dominant ideology of most of the modern world. Because, quite simply, when a very small percentage of a particular population controls everything, there must be various ways to justify and enforce this control.

One way is through brute force or the threat of such force, which the modern nation-state holds a monopoly on. This is accomplished through the mere construction of a criminal justice system that has laws and ways of enforcing those laws. Over time, these laws become equated with some vague form of morality that is not questioned by most. You see the effects of this everywhere. For instance, when people try to condemn political struggles for doing things that are "illegal," they have subconsciously bought into the idea that written laws which have been drawn up by millionaire politicians , who are directly influenced by billionaires, should be revered as some sort of moral code. In reality, many of these laws are constructed to keep our extremely unequal society intact, and are directly tied to protecting those who own this illegitimate wealth and power . They are designed to keep most of us powerless and stuck in our increasingly precarious lives. Under such a society, a person who does not have access to food for themselves or their family is punished for taking food. A person who is homeless is punished for squatting in an abandoned building. A person who does not have medical care is punished (financially, if not criminally) for seeking medical attention. So on and so on… and all of this takes place in a very strict hierarchical arrangement where the appearance of "stability" remains at the forefront. It's an inherently unjust arrangement for so many, and the threat of force is constantly held over our heads to maintain this façade of stability.

Another way to justify and enforce this control is through what Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci referred to as "cultural hegemony," or dominant culture. Ruling classes throughout history have relied on both formal and informal channels to mold a dominant culture (ideology) that supports their rule. This can be established through a formal education system, through media sources, through organized religion and churches, etc… Under capitalism, this doesn't have to be done in a conspiratorial kind of way because the basic inequities stemming from the economic system create a sociopolitical structure that mimics and protects these inequities through social, cultural, political, and "legal" avenues. One of the results of this is a widespread, conditioned belief that we are not capable of caring for ourselves, our families, and our communities; and thus need so-called "extraordinary" people (politicians) to do this for us. It is a lie.

In a social sense, why do you think that social hierarchies and larger societal norms still reign when we don't seem to need them anymore? (Social norms were important in the early days of humanity as if one wasn't part of the group, they often wouldn't survive, but now it is rather easy to flourish alone or find people who you link with.)

Social hierarchies still exist because they are a natural extension from the more tangible/structural economic hierarchy. The dominant culture in this type of society needs such social norms. The Marxist theory of base and superstructure is useful in this regard. A materialist conception of history tells us that society is constructed on an economic base, or is based on the modes of production, because it is this fundamental arrangement that ultimately determines how people fulfill their basic needs. Everything else builds off of that arrangement. In a capitalist system, a large majority of the population is forced to rely on wage labor. This is an incredibly fragile and unstable existence because we are completely dependant on a privileged minority to provide us with jobs and living wages, things that capitalism inherently cannot provide to all. So, most of us are set up for failure from birth. This is why Frederick Douglass recognized that a "slavery of wages [is] only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery." Hence, Marx's focus on exploitation and alienation. This structural oppression created by capitalism explains the need for a Welfare State, because societal unrest would be inevitable without the state supplementing these inherent and widespread inequities.

So, according to this analysis, there is a superstructure that builds from this unequal base, and this includes social, cultural, and political realities. Naturally, the superstructure mimics the base, while it also helps to maintain it. In doing so, these corollary developments tend to take on the same characteristics as the base, which, as already noted, consists of a high degree of alienation and exploitation. This basically means that social systems stemming from an inherently exploitative base tend to become exploitative themselves. One of the best examples of this is white supremacy, which is an artificial system of valuing human worth based on skin color. White supremacy is a modern cultural phenomenon that extends throughout the superstructure in both overt and undetected or insidious ways. And it is a valuable tool used by the capitalist/ruling class to create division within the working-class majority. This is why Malcolm X once proclaimed that "you can't have capitalism without racism."

Other cultural phenomena like patriarchy and homophobia work the same way. These things easily catch on within the working class because they are a source of empowerment for an otherwise powerless group. We're all economically disenfranchised, but poor and working-class white men can still grasp on to whiteness, "manliness," misogyny, and homophobia as sources of power and social dominance. You see this psyche develop not only in white people, but also throughout the working class. Some black men, despite their own intense structural oppression, will become misogynistic or homophobic as a source of empowerment. A particular immigrant community will dehumanize another immigrant community as a source of empowerment. American workers across the board will target and dehumanize immigrants. So on and so on. What we're seeing here is the formation of social hierarchies within the working class, all of which mimic the hierarchy created by the economic base. Tragically, this perceived power over others within the working class is easily accessible, and it's a cheap and toxic source of empowerment. But it is a good thing for the capitalist class, as it keeps working-class angst directed within its own ranks and away from the real culprits - the rich. It's the ultimate distraction.

On a related note, these social hierarchies are worthy of examination to all of us who oppose the capitalist system. When we look at developments within the superstructure, we can strategize and build liberation movements that will ultimately break them down, which will in turn allow us to build a formidable resistance against the economic base. This is why intersectionality is crucial. But intersectionality only works if it is based in a fundamentally anti-capitalist orientation. Because if we don't approach this with the ultimate goal of attacking and destroying the economic base, it won't matter in the end. We'll find ourselves in the same position, only under a multi-cultural, multi-sex, non-gender-descript boot, as opposed to a "white, cisgender, male" boot. And this is the pitfall that identity politics fall into. Capitalism has the ability to accommodate these types of political movements by simply allowing individuals from hyper-marginalized sections of the working class to assume positions of power within these hierarchies. This approach is only about assimilation; and because of this, it only demands that that the power structure become more inclusive, not that the power structure be eliminated. Capitalism can and will seek to appease this kind of tokenism without changing its inherently authoritative and exploitative structure.

People seem to be (at least somewhat) against hierarchy, from having an intense dislike of their bosses to wanting a level playing field. Why do we not see more people moving away or speaking out against hierarchy? So many times, it seems that the very people at the bottom are the ones who argue in favor of it.

Yes, definitely. This is a form of cognitive dissonance that we all experience from time to time, and I reflect on it briefly in the piece: "…organizations are often able to stoke a cognitive dissonance among its workforce, which simultaneously puts forth a healthy dose of faith in the 'team approach' by day while complaining about the incompetent and overbearing bosses by night."

This particular line refers to the contradictions we feel in the workplace. The daytime mentality is one that is a product of constant conditioning, which tells us that hierarchies are needed, that we are naturally dependent on bosses, and that we would be lost without them. The nighttime mentality is more natural and will creep into our heads at times, causing us to question everything we're conditioned to believe during the day. Daily interactions with bosses plant the seed for these realizations, as we recognize their incompetence or at the very least their lack of exceptionalism. This will inevitably bring us to consider that maybe we don't need them, maybe we are just as (if not more) competent, that there really is no meritocracy, and that if they happened to suddenly disappear one day they probably wouldn't be missed.

This is, of course, true. We don't need them. But the conditioning that we are subjected to in most aspects of our lives tells us otherwise, and this makes it difficult for many to realize that truth. To consider the very notion of "supervision" and "management" as anything but insulting is truly amazing, when you think about it, yet most struggle with this dissonance. And understandably so, since the conditioning is intense and begins at such a young age. This reminds me of the notion of " bullshit jobs " that David Graeber has talked about in length, and is in the process of writing a book about. His angle is more focused on working-class jobs throughout the system, but I think this same line of thinking can be applied to jobs that fill the hierarchy just for the sake of filling the hierarchy.

In addition to this conditioning, there is also a mentality that becomes fairly prevalent among those who exist on the lower end of the hierarchy, and it speaks to the old adage, "if you can't beat em, join em." It is the mentality that creates the toadies for bullies, that creates house slaves for the master, etc… it forms whenever someone has been psychologically beaten into submission. These are the folks who have given themselves completely to the system, to the powers, to their bosses and overseers because, quite frankly, they simply have no fight in them, no self-esteem, and no dignity left. They are the first to dish the dirt to the bosses, the first to scab during a strike, the first to call the police on their neighbor, the first to serve the powerful with whatever is needed, and always at the sake of their class peers on the lower end of the hierarchy. These folks will always argue in favor of hierarchy, despite their lowly position in it, because they've decided that it's easier to accept it, support it, and invest in it, rather than fight it. And, in many respects, they're right. Fighting power isn't easy. It often has disastrous personal consequences for those who partake in it. As the Russian anarchist Sergey Nechayez wrote in the opening of his famous Catechism of a Revolutionary, "The revolutionary is a doomed man." There is a lot of truth to this.

How do people reinforce hierarchy in their everyday lives and how can they fight back against it?

I think basic daily human interactions reinforce these cultural hierarchies that the base relies on. There is an ongoing debate within the Left about the power and usefulness of language. This debate is intimately connected with things like "privilege discourse," "political correctness," "call-out culture," and identity politics. Many leftists who are loyal to materialist analysis, and who spend a lot of time railing against post-new left discourse, minimize the importance of language. Many younger leftists, who are more inclined to intersectionality or who enter the Left through a lens of identity politics, place a premium on policing language. While I realize the dangers that are associated with this type of " post-new left discourse " (primarily when it is not based in anti-capitalism), I also agree that there is something to language and how it reinforces the hierarchies that we are ultimately seeking to bring down.

Dominant vernacular is rooted in dominant culture, no? If we are to believe in historical materialism and the reciprocal relationship between the base and superstructure, then it seems consistent to also believe that all of the societal norms that development within this cultural hegemony stem from this same base. Because of this, language tends to be misogynistic, homophobic, white supremacist, and classist. This is reflected in media, Hollywood, advertisement, talk radio, and sports, and as well as in our daily interactions with one another.

It can be very subtle. Using the n-word reinforces white supremacy. Using the f-word reinforces homophobia. Claiming that someone has "no class" reinforces bourgeois culture. Using the term "white trash" reinforces white supremacy by implying that "trash" is defaulted as being non-white. Calling women "hoes" and "whores," while at the same time basing their human value in attractiveness or sexuality, reinforces patriarchy. Praising someone as being "like a boss" reinforces capitalist hierarchy. Worshipping celebrities reinforces a capitalist culture that determines human value based in wealth, or the lack thereof. Being absorbed in consumerism reinforces a culture that determines human value on the brand of clothing or shoes one is wearing, or the kind of car they drive, or the house they live in. These types of things quite literally place varying degrees of value on human lives, thus reinforcing various forms of social hierarchy. And something as simple as language, or the ways in which we interact with one another, emboldens the power structure(s) that we as leftists seek to destroy.

In what ways do you see hierarchy expanding or intensifying now that the US has moved to a 'service economy,' apparently in which there will be an increase in hierarchical authority, compared to when the US was a manufacturing nation? How has the dismantling of unions aided (as of current) or helped to dissuade (in the past) workplace hierarchy?

I am not sure the service economy will necessarily expand or intensify hierarchical arrangements in any structural sense. But you're right in suggesting that a move away from an industrial/manufacturing economy has made workers more vulnerable and powerless within these hierarchies. Service-sector work is much more precarious, is typically low-wage with very few benefits, and often does not include any kind of healthcare coverage or retirement plan. And the service-sector environment leaves workers on a virtual island, in that it doesn't offer the same potential for collectivization as the traditional shop floor once did. Without collectivization, workers are basically powerless.

The dismantling of unions went hand in hand with the offshoring of manufacturing jobs. Since the neoliberal revolution that was ushered in by Reagan, the share of workers who belong to unions in the private sector has fallen from 34 percent to 7 percent. I believe 1 in 3 public sector workers are still in unions. Overall though, union membership has plummeted in the US, which is a very bad thing for the working class. Under capitalism, our only leverage against capital is either (1) the government, or (2) labor unions. The government is now owned by capital, and thus acts solely in its interest. So that's effectively out of the equation. And unions have not only eroded, but many that have endured have taken on a corporate hierarchical structure themselves, where union executives are often completely out of touch with membership. Union leaders tend to be in bed with corporate politicians, an arrangement that is contradictory to the purpose of unions.

We see this contradictory nature when unions routinely endorse corporate Democrats who represent capital. We see it when unions agree to no-strike clauses. We see it when so-called leadership gives concession after concession, year after year, until there's virtually nothing left to bargain for. And we see it in this bureaucratic, corporatized union culture of today, where demands have been replaced by requests. Unions will often take reactionary stands that defy international and universal solidarity. We saw this recently with the AFL-CIO endorsing the Dakota Access Pipeline. You see it with police unions or prison employee unions, all of which side with capital and the social hierarchies that extend from capital, ultimately oppressing large sectors of the working class.

With the erosion of authentic labor unions, we've become much more vulnerable to these extreme hierarchies as a whole. And without these types of unions, workers simply have no chance against the powerful interests of capital. So, yes, the degrees to which we are smothered by these hierarchies will only intensify in this environment, especially if we continue to place our hopes in the government, politicians, and corporatized labor unions. This is exactly why I'm a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, which is "one big union" that is rooted in revolutionary industrial unionism.

How does your argument regarding hierarchy creating a lack of trust square with this modern idea that work places need to be 'open areas' so that people can 'bond?'

That's a good question. We read a lot about this new-age sort of workplace organization stemming from Silicon Valley, Google, Apple, etc… This idea that workplaces should be more carefree, less constrained. I've read about such experiments where workers can take naps, bring their pets to work, have access to fun activities directly in the workplace. And when you look at workplace organization in some European countries, you see that many companies have attempted to do away with traditional hierarchical structures to make workers feel more "at home" in a relaxed environment.

The fact that companies are experimenting with these 'open areas' confirms, at the very least, that they are aware of the archaic and inhumane nature of traditional hierarchical workplaces. This move also reflects some studies that have been done regarding productivity, which have suggested that workers are more productive in environments that are less constrictive, and that workers typically are only productive for a few hours a day. So, if anything, it's an attempt by companies to adjust with the times and do away with old forms of organization.

Unfortunately, attempts like these only tend to create more internal contradictions to capitalism. Attempting to mask the inherent nature of capitalism only goes so far. And the "open-office model" that Google became known for is not really an effort to make hierarchical structures more horizontal. It is concerned only with literal workspace, not with the ways in which the hierarchy operates on a structural level. And while it may appear to be benevolent on the surface, it often has more insidious motives. A 2014 article by Lindsey Kaufman touched on some of these issues, pointing out that "these new floor plans are ideal for maximizing a company's space while minimizing costs," and that "bosses love the ability to keep a closer eye on employees," with less physical barriers obstructing them. Studies cited in the article suggested that these open-office experiments were not beneficial to workers, at least from the workers' point of view. A study found that many workers are "frustrated by distractions" and lack of privacy, both sound and visual. And workers reported that these new floor plans did not ease interactions with colleagues, as intended, because this was never viewed as a problem to begin with.

With these results in mind, it seems such attempts have been a failure. And it makes you wonder why they were attempted in the first place. Was it really to create a "friendlier" atmosphere, or was it rooted in something more sinister? Understanding the way capitalism operates, it's safe to assume the latter. Either way, despite the motivations, the capitalist structure still remains - which means that most workers are creating massive amounts of wealth for executives and shareholders in exchange for wages and salaries that do not equal their contribution. If they make enough to lead comfortable lives, they may be more willing to overlook this structural exploitation. But it still exists. Bosses still remain, and workers are still treated as commodities, no matter how glossed over the physical workplace appears. There are still those who make more, in many cases a whole lot more, for doing much less (the pursuit of "money and idleness" that I referenced in the piece). And some who rake in large amounts of money for doing absolutely nothing, and without even stepping foot in the workplace. That is the fundamental nature of both capitalism and hierarchies. No amount of makeup can change this.

What is your take on the literature and ideas surrounding employee relationship management? What do you think is the actual idea around it on a structural level?

This type of literature is designed to address the inequities by essentially covering them up as best as possible. Their purpose is two-fold: to teach bosses how to get the most from their workers; and to get workers to buy into a "team approach" that convinces them they're vested in the mission in some way. This is accomplished basically through propaganda, or a conscious effort to downplay the coercive nature of this relationship. On the one end it provides bosses, supervisors, and managers with tools and tactics rooted in persuasion, to get workers to think, behave, and perceive themselves in a way that is detached as far from reality as possible. Since human beings don't typically react well to being treated and used as tools, to be manipulated, prodded, directed, etc, employers find its useful to mask this reality as best as possible.

So this type of literature is designed to give bosses ways to obstruct this reality. To interact with their workers in ways that mask the coercive power they wield over them. And they tend to be very successful in doing this… so much so that many workers truly believe they are vested in the businesses they work for, or at the very least will rep that business in a positive way to friends and family, if only to mask their shitty realities to themselves. A shitty reality that basically amounts to us spending most of our waking hours in a place we do not want to be in, doing something we would rather not be doing, so we can get a paycheck every few weeks, so we can pay our bills, so we can scrape out a living for another few weeks. For most of us, it's a never-ending cycle that we'll never escape. It's a miserable, inhumane existence where life is lived a week at a time, or two weeks at a time, essentially from one paycheck to the next. And the best we can hope for is to stay afloat until the next paycheck, so we can start over again. And to add insult to injury, we're told that we "should feel lucky to even have a job." That's the world capitalism brings us.

So this workplace literature, and the management tactics that come from it, plays into the cognitive dissonance that I mentioned earlier. On a structural level, the idea is merely to keep things churning by creating alternative realities that workers can be proud of. To use the plantation analogy, it really is a way to instill the house-slave mentality in each and every one of us. It won't work for some, but it works well enough for most. Even those struck with this cognitive dissonance will often lean toward that which makes them feel vested, secure, proud, respected, appreciated, etc… even though these feeling are not consistent with reality. It is a form of coping for many, and corporate literature will certainly exploit that and drill it home. And we as workers, stuck in our miserable realities, will often accept it if it helps us cope. Because we need that paycheck.