Late-Stage Capitalism and the Pedagogical Resurgence of Anti-Fascism

By Colin Jenkins

This essay originally appeared in Keywords in Radical Philosophy and Education: Common Concepts for Contemporary Movements (2019, BRILL)

Social unrest is a daily part of American life. Between the alarming regularity of mass killings and school shootings and the violent street clashes between right-wing fascists and left-wing anti-fascists, it seems as though America’s chickens are finally coming home to roost. Despite its uniqueness, the United States is heading down the same path as so many hegemonic empires of the past, quickly approaching its demise through a combination of exhaustive military campaigns abroad and chronic neglect of a majority of its citizenry at home. Mainstream American culture is inadvertently responding to its empire’s demise. Dystopian-based “entertainment” is on the rise again, millennials are abandoning the traditional American lifestyle en masse, virtual lives based in gaming culture and social media have seemingly grabbed a hold of many wishing to escape and withdraw from the drudgery of real life, and political poles are becoming more polarized as extremist centrism intensifies to protect the status quo.

While many recognize that something is wrong, most have difficulties pinpointing what it is, let alone what is causing it. The pronounced social unrest and emergence of mainstream nihilism have sparked a cavalcade of typical, cutesy, click-bait articles online, claiming “millennials are killing [insert here]” and pushing for “minimalist lifestyles” while hawking shipping-container homes, and superficial corporate news analysis which resembles more of tabloid “journalism” than anything approaching substance. Even so-called “progressive” movements that have formed within this climate, such as Black Lives Matter, the Poor People’s Campaign, and the Women’s March, have failed to reach a substantive level of resistance by ignoring the roots of the people’s problems while insisting on operating within the narrow confines of the mainstream political arena.

The good news is that these social phenomena are not mysterious forces rising out of thin air. They have roots. They have causes. And with multiple political forces coming to a head, many are starting to not only search for these causes, but are starting to identify them. The sudden resurgence of socialism in the United States – after laying dormant since the counterinsurgency of the US government during the 1960s, which resulted in violent state repression against radical resistance groups, the subsequent “Reagan revolution” and rise of the neoliberal era, and Francis Fukuyama’s infamous suggestion that “history had ended” — signifies a much-needed counter to capitalist culture. The wave of counter-hegemony that has come with it defies capitalism’s insistence that we are nothing but commodities — laborers and consumers born to serve as conduits to the rapid upward flow of profit — and has begun to construct a wall against the spread of fascism that is inevitable with late-stage capitalism, as well as a battering ram that seeks to bring this system to its knees once and for all.

Capitalism’s Destructive Path

Humanity has been on a collision course with the capitalist system since its inception. While Marx’s famous prediction that capitalists would eventually serve as their own gravediggers has been delayed by a multitude of unforeseen forces, most notably the overwhelming power and adaptability of the imperialist and capitalist state, it is nonetheless charging toward fruition. As the term “late-stage capitalism” has become widely used among the American Left, it is important to understand what it is referring to. This understanding may only come through systemic and historical analysis, and especially that of the basic mechanisms of capitalism, the social and economic conditions that birthed capitalism, and the subsequent stages of capitalism over the past few centuries.

Referring to capitalism as being in a “late stage” is based on the understanding that the system – with all of its internal contradictions, its tendency to concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a few, and its increased reliance on imperialism and domestic control – is nearing an inevitable implosion. However, the implication that capitalism naturally develops on a path toward fascism is both accurate and potentially misleading. On one hand, this idea suggests that capitalism, in its most basic state of operating, does not already possess inherent fascistic qualities. This is incorrect, and it’s important to understand this. Capitalism, in its orthodoxy, is a system that relies on authoritative, controlling, and exploitative relationships, most notably between that of capitalists and workers. The latter, in its need to survive, must submit itself to wage labor. The former, in its wanting to accumulate a constant flow of profit, uses wage labor as a way to steal productivity from the worker in a perpetual cycle that moves wealth upwards into a relatively tiny sector of the population, while simultaneously impoverishing the masses below. Scientific socialists have always known this to be true, and now that the trickery of “trickle-down economics” has been exposed, many others are beginning to realize it.

Capitalism’s authoritative tendencies are far-reaching throughout a society’s development. Because of this, the system has relied upon and reproduced social inequities that fortify its economic woes. Friedrich Engels touched on its effects for the family unit in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Silvia Federici brilliantly illustrated its reliance on patriarchy in Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, the emergence of social reproduction theory has provided insight on the layers of exploitation that effect women in the home, and many have written about the cozy relationship between capitalism and white supremacy, most importantly noting that the system’s birth in the Americas relied heavily upon the racialized chattel slave system. In fact, it is impossible to accurately discuss the inherent problems of capitalism without discussing its propensity to drive social oppression in a variety of forms. If oppression can be defined as “the absence of choices,” as bell hooks once said, then our default status as members of the proletariat is oppression. And when compounded with other social constructs such as patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, and able-bodiedness, this oppression becomes even more pronounced and marginalizing.

The inherent fascism built into capitalism is rooted in wage labor, which is maintained through coercive means. This coercion that drives capitalism comes from the dispossession of the masses of people from not only the means of production, but also from the means to sustenance and land. The Enclosure Acts tell us all we need to know about this foundation. The fact that feudal peasants had to be forced to participate in wage labor through a legislative destruction of the commons, which kicked them off the land and immediately transformed human needs from basic rights to commodities, says a lot about the requisite landscape of a capitalist system. As such, feudal peasants in Europe viewed capitalism as a downgrade. They were consequently prodded into factories and mills like cattle. In many other parts of the world, stripping entire populations of sustenance for the sake of private property was unheard of. Yet capitalism required this mass dispossession in order to proceed on its desired path. Thus, “between 1604 and 1914, over 5,200 individual enclosure acts were passed, covering 6.8 million acres of land,” all designed to systematically erase the idea of common land. (Parliament of UK)

Understanding that capitalism is a system built on a foundation of oppression, and that it operates on natural internal mechanisms of coercion and exploitation, allows us to also understand that its development has not created these qualities, but rather intensified them. Therefore, the idea of “late-stage capitalism” makes sense from an analytical point of view, as it simply refers to an evolutionary path that has brought its nature to the forefront and, most importantly, in doing so, has resulted in severe consequences for the majority of the global population. And whether we’re talking about late-stage capitalism, or monopoly capitalism, or corporate capitalism, or “crony capitalism,” it all refers to the same thing: capitalism’s natural conclusion. A natural conclusion that is a breeding ground for fascism.

Realizing Fascism

“When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto its privileges.” - Buenaventura Durruti

There are many definitions and aspects of and to fascism, but perhaps the best way to identify it is as an effect. In terms of capitalism, the development and strengthening of fascistic tendencies are tied directly to the sociopolitical structures that form in its defense. Or as Samir Amin puts it, “Fascism is a particular political response to the challenges with which the management of capitalist society may be confronted in specific circumstances.” (Amin, 2014) But this only describes one of the major aspects of fascism – that being the systemic and structural; or more specifically, the capitalist system and the capitalist state that naturally forms to protect and promote it. There is also a cultural aspect to fascism that forms from within the populace. It is shaped by structural operations, being the main force of culture, and it manifests as an emotional and defensive response from individuals within this system that naturally coerces, exploits, and dispossesses them from their ability to sustain. In other words, the mass insecurity that stems from capitalism naturally produces reactionary responses of misdirected angst from the people it serves, or rather disserves.  

During these late stages of capitalism, “fascism has returned to the West, East, and South; and this return is naturally connected with the spread of the systemic crisis of generalized, financialized, and globalized monopoly capitalism.” (Amin,2014) The reactionary, right-wing response to the capitalist degradation of society is to target the most vulnerable of that society, viewing them as “drains” on public resources without realizing that such resources have been depleted by the pursuit for profit from those above, and most intensely during the era of neoliberalism, which opened the door for rampant greed to extract nearly everything of value from society in the name of privatization. In this structural sense, fascism comes to its complete fruition through a blindness that develops under capitalist culture, whether intentional or subconscious; a blindness that seeks every type of remedy imaginable for the problems created by the system without ever questioning the system itself.

The fascist regimes that surface during these times of crisis “are willing to manage the government and society in such a way as not to call the fundamental principles of capitalism into question, specifically private capitalist property, including that of modern monopoly capitalism.” (Amin, 2014) And that is why fascism intensifies under this pretense of “managing capitalism” and not simply in “political forms that challenge the latter’s legitimacy, even if ‘capitalism’ or ‘plutocracies’ [are] subject to long diatribes in the rhetoric of fascist speeches.” (Amin, 2014) This shows how the fascist tide is fundamentally structural; and the cultural developments that parallel it do so as a byproduct of capitalism’s systemic failures. Because of this, analyses “must focus on these crises.” And any focus on these systemic crises must also focus on the fundamental coercion inherent in the system’s productive mechanisms — that which former slave and American abolitionist Frederick Douglass once referred to as “a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery,” and “a slavery of wages that must go down with the other.”

The notion of wage slavery has been all but lost over the course of the last century. Once understood among the masses as a common-sense recognition of capitalist coercion, it has given way to the insidious nature of capitalist propaganda, which intensified in a very deliberate way after the cultural revolution of the 1960s, culminating in a neoliberal wave that has dominated since. While the originators of anti-capitalist theory and scientific socialism had exposed this form of slavery inherent in the system – with Marx referring to workers as “mere appendages to machines,” and Bakunin illustrating its ever-shifting nomenclature, from “slavery” to “serfdom” to “wage earners” – there was a brief resurgence of this analysis in the 1960s and 70s, from a variety of leftist radicals. One of the most under-appreciated of these analyses was the one provided by the imprisoned Black Panther, George Jackson, who in his extensive works made reference to the condition of “neo-slavery” that plagued the working-class masses. In a rather lengthy excerpt from Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, Jackson uncovered the forgotten importance of this coercive element that drives capitalism:

“Slavery is an economic condition. Today’s neo-slavery must be defined in terms of economics… [in the days of chattel slavery], the slaveowner, in order to ‘keep it (the slave) and enjoy all of the benefits that property of this kind can render, he must feed it sometimes, he must clothe it against the elements, he must provide a modicum of shelter.’ The ‘new slavery (capitalism), the modern variety of chattel slavery updated to disguise itself, places the victim in a factory or in the case of most blacks in support roles inside and around the factory system (service trades), working for a wage. However (in contrast to chattel slavery), if work cannot be found in or around the factory complex, today’s neo-slavery does not allow even for a modicum of food and shelter. You are free – to starve.

…The sense and meaning of slavery comes through as a result of our ties to the wage. You must have it, without it you would starve or expose yourself to the elements. One’s entire day centers around the acquisition of the wage. The control of your eight or ten hours on the job is determined by others. You are left with fourteen to sixteen hours. But since you don’t live at the factory you have to subtract at least another hour for transportation. Then you are left with thirteen to fifteen hours to yourself. If you can afford three meals you are left with ten to twelve hours. Rest is also a factor in efficiency so we have to take eight hours away for sleeping, leaving two to four hours. But – one must bathe, comb, clean teeth, shave, dress – there is no point in protracting this. I think it should be generally accepted that if a man or woman works for a wage at a job that they don’t enjoy, and I am convinced that no one could enjoy any type of assembly-line work, or plumbing or hod carrying, or any job in the service trades, then they qualify for this definition of neo-slave.

…The man who owns the [business] runs your life; you are dependent on this owner. He organizes your work, the work upon which your whole life source and style depends. He indirectly determines your whole day, in organizing you for work. If you don’t make any more in wages than you need to live (or even enough to live for that matter), you are a neo-slave.” And most of us who find ourselves in this precarious position as a working-class person under capitalism have no mobility, whether in a literal or figurative sense. We are “held in one spot on this earth because of our economic status, it is just the same as being held in one spot because you are the owner’s property.” (Jackson, 1994)

The era of neoliberalism, with its insistence of re-imagining laissez-faire economics, has revved up the authoritarian and oppressive underpinnings of the capitalist system by loosening historical constraints stemming from the age-old social contract — the idea that bourgeois governments had a minimal degree of responsibility for the well-being of their citizenries. In the United States, this has amounted to private entities (individuals, corporations, conglomerates) accumulating unprecedented amounts of wealth and power over the course of a few decades, while the majority of people have been thrown to the wolves. During this process, the structural basis of fascism – the merger of corporate and governmental power – has been fully realized, buoyed by the internal coercion of the capitalist system.

The Pedagogical Resurgence of Anti-Fascism

As capitalism’s internal contradictions continue to drive us deeper into a fascist reality, counter-hegemonic movements have aptly pivoted into anti-fascist forces. The most visible of these forces has been the anarchist-led “antifa,” which cracked into the mainstream-US consciousness during its numerous street clashes with reactionary groups during and after Donald Trump’s electoral rise. By heeding to a strategic tactic known as “no-platforming,” these black-clad resistance fighters deploy offensive attacks against both fascist speakers/leaders and marches to prevent them from gaining a public platform and, thus, legitimacy and momentum.

In a 2017 piece for In These Times, Natasha Lennard explained the philosophy behind no-platforming, how it extends from an all-encompassing radical abolitionist movement, and how it differs from liberalism:

“While I don’t believe we can or should establish an unbendable set of rules, I submit that a best practice is to deny fascist, racist speech a platform. It should not be recognized as a legitimate strand of public discourse, to be heard, spread and gain traction. And we must recognize that when the far Right speaks, the stage becomes an organizing platform, where followers meet and multiply. For this, we should have no tolerance.

No-platforming is only useful if it is contextualized in a broader abolitionist struggle, which recognizes that white supremacy will not do away with itself by virtue of being ‘wrong.’ Surely by now liberals have realized the folly in assuming justice is delivered by ‘speaking truth to power’? Power knows the truth, and determines what gets to be the regime of truth. The ‘truth’ of racial justice will not be discovered, proved or argued into lived actuality, but fought for and established.” (Lennard, 2017)

The physical tactics carried out under “no-platforming” are only a small part of a broader movement. While anti-fascists continue to confront fascists in the streets, a pedagogical resurgence of anti-fascism must continue to guide the movement as a whole by providing an intellectual, philosophical, and strategic battle plan. This plan must include: (1) a deep understanding of systemic forces generating from capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy; (2) an understanding of power dynamics and the need to form and deploy power effectively; (3) an understanding of the two major fronts of the anti-fascist war, which include the systemic and upward-focused class war and the anti-reactionary, horizontally-focused culture war; (4)an understanding of anti-capitalist ideology, including but not limited to Marxism, socialism, and anarchism; and, most importantly, (5) a mass push for class consciousness.

Class Consciousness

Building class consciousness is the most crucial task of our time, being citizens within the capitalist and imperialist empire that is the United States, facing down the impending fascist tide, and attempting to confront and defeat this tide along with the capitalist and imperialist systems as a whole. Recalibrating a working class that has been deliberately detached from its role is imperative. Regardless of how one prefers carrying out this task, whether through the formation of a vanguard of trained cadre or a direct engagement toward mass consciousness, it must be carried out within the proletariat itself, where much of capitalist and reactionary culture has become blindingly influential. This must be done not by rejecting theory and deeming it “too elite and alien for the masses,” but rather by embracing the organic intellectualism that is inherent within the masses and serving as facilitators to awaken this abundance of untapped potential. This must be done by realizing the working class is more than capable of thinking, understanding, and comprehending our position in society, if only given the chance to do so, free from the capitalist propaganda that drowns and consumes us.

In creating a working-class culture that not only embraces its inherent intellectualism, but does so in a way that explicitly challenges the dominant intellectual orthodoxy that fortifies capitalist relations, we may look to Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who provided a clear and convincing relationship between counter-hegemony and working-class, or organic, intellectualism that is rooted in “spontaneous philosophy”:

“It is essential to destroy the widespread prejudice that philosophy is a strange and difficult thing just because it is the specific intellectual activity of a particular category of specialists or of professional and systematic philosophers. It must first be shown that all [people] are ‘philosophers,’ by defining the limits and characteristics of the ‘spontaneous philosophy’ which is proper to everybody. This philosophy is contained in:  (1) language itself, which is a totality of determined notions and concepts and not just of words grammatically devoid of content; (2) ‘common sense’ and ‘good sense’; and (3) popular religion and, therefore, also in the entire system of beliefs, superstitions, opinions, ways of seeing things and of acting, which are collectively bundled together under the name of ‘folklore.’” (Gramsci, 1971)

The formation of class consciousness, therefore, rests on this notion, sprouts from the lived experience of proletarian life in the capitalist system, and may essentially replace Gramsci’s already-existing third parameter of “popular religion,” by simply substituting “folklore” with a materialist perspective. This process reminds us of Fred Hampton’s insistence that we proceed in “plain, proletarian English,” which is not to say that revolutionaries must “dumb down” their message in order to appeal to the masses, but rather return revolutionary theory to where it belongs: within working-class culture. Prior to Gramsci and Hampton, Marx had already gone through this process of realizing the existence of organic intellectualism. This process, the subsequent views that developed within Marxist circles throughout the 20th century, and the sometimes-regressive ideology that formed from such is effectively illustrated by Raya Dunayevskaya’s critique of Jean-Paul Sartre in her book, Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre, and from Marx to Mao:

“Methodologically, Sartre’s organic petty-bourgeois inability to understand what it is that Marx meant by praxis has nothing whatever to do with the Ego, much less with not being able ‘to read’ Marx. It has everything to do with his isolation from the proletariat.

The very point at which Sartre thinks that Marx, because he had to turn to ‘clarifying’ practice, stopped developing theory is when Marx broke with the bourgeois concept of theory and created his most original concept of theory out of ‘history and its process,’ not only in the class struggles outside the factory but in it, at the very point of production, faced with the ‘automation’ which was dominating the worker transforming him into a mere ‘appendage.’ Marx’s whole point what that the worker was thinking his own thoughts, expressing his total opposition to the mode of labor instinctually and by creating new forms of struggle and new human relations with his fellow workers. Where, in Marx, history comes alive because the masses have been prepared by the daily struggle at the point of production to burst out spontaneously, ‘to storm the heavens’ creatively as they had done in the Paris Commune, in Sartre practice appears as inert practicality bereft of all historic sense and any consciousness of consequences. Where, in Marx, Individuality itself arises through history, in Sartre History means subordination of individual to group-in-fusion who alone know where the action is. Sartre the Existentialist rightly used to laugh at Communists for thinking man was born on his first payday; Sartre ‘the Marxist’ sees even as world-shaking an event as the Russian Revolution, not at its self-emancipatory moment of birth with its creation of totally new forms of workers’ rule – soviets – but rather at the moment when it was transformed into its opposite with Stalin’s victory, the totalitarian initiation of the Five-Year Plans with the Moscow Frame-Up Trials and forced-labor camps.” (Dunayevskaya, 2003)

Organic Intellectualism and Political Consciousness

The process of tapping organic intellectualism is perhaps best described by Paulo Freire in his crucial text, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. To Freire, revolutionary class consciousness can only be realized through an embrace of radicalism, or as Angela Davis once phrased it, “simply grasping things at the root.” Applying our intellectualism and relating it to our lived experiences is only a partial awakening on the revolutionary path. To complete the transition, understanding the roots, or systems, that represent the foundational causes of our problems is crucial, not only for identifying the magnitude of the ultimate solution, and thus avoiding spending time and energy on inconsequential activities, but also for understanding that there is a solution. “The more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it,” Freire tells us. “This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.” (Freire, 2014)

With this realization in mind, we can better understand the four levels of consciousness and identify the pedagogical route, or remedies, that can be applied to ourselves and others. From the “magical consciousness,” where political impotence is maintained by inconceivable forces like gods and mythology, through the “naive consciousness,” where the material world becomes realized, and our interactions with others, with nature, within society, begin to take on some semblance of control, to “critical consciousness,” which introduces four distinct qualities that may be applied to this material reality: power awareness, or knowing and recognizing the existence of power and who possesses power in society; critical literacy, which leads to the development of analysis, writing, thinking, reading, discussing, and understanding deeper meaning; de-socialization, which allows one to recognize and challenge forms of power; and self-organization/self-education, which amounts to taking initiative to overcome the anti-intellectualism and indoctrination of capitalist “education.” (Wheeler, 2016; Daily Struggles, 2018) And, finally, the realization of a “political consciousness,” or class consciousness, which brings us to the understanding of a shared reality with most others, as well as the need for collective struggle to break our interlocking chains of oppression.

Ultimately, the path through these levels of consciousness are about power; moving from an impotent position to a powerful position — a powerful position that can only be forged through the realization of collective struggle. Freire describes this transition as a break from the “banking concept of education” that is designed to perpetuate ignorance to a critical pedagogy that is designed to empower the oppressed; a pedagogical process that, again, can only be carried out in a proletarian environment:

“In their political activity, the dominant elites utilize the banking concept to encourage passivity in the oppressed, corresponding with the latter's ‘submerged’ state of consciousness, and take advantage of that passivity to ‘fill’ that consciousness with slogans which create even more fear of freedom. This practice is incompatible with a truly liberating course of action, which, by presenting the oppressors slogans as a problem, helps the oppressed to ‘eject’ those slogans from within themselves. After all, the task of the humanists is surely not that of pitting their slogans against the slogans of the oppressors, with the oppressed as the testing ground, ‘housing’ the slogans of first one group and then the other. On the contrary, the task of the humanists is to see that the oppressed become aware of the fact that as dual beings, ‘housing’ the oppressors within themselves, they cannot be truly human.

This task implies that revolutionary leaders do not go to the people in order to bring them a message of ‘salvation,’ but in order to come to know through dialogue with them both their objective situation and their awareness of that situation—the various levels of perception of themselves and of the world in which and with which they exist. One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding.” (Freire, 2014)

And this task must be done in a collective manner, with the clear intention of not only challenging power, but creating our own collective, working-class power that has the potential to destroy the existing power structure emanating from authoritative systems like capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. After all, “freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift,” and “nobody liberates themselves alone; human beings liberate themselves in communion.” (Freire, 2014)

Understanding Collective Power, Separating Radical from Liberal, and Exposing Centrist Extremism and Horseshoe Theory

“There is a whole apparatus that controls the presidency that is absolutely resistant to change. Which isn’t to excuse Obama from taking bolder steps. I think there are steps that he could have taken had he insisted. But if one looks at the history of struggles against racism in the US, no change has ever happened simply because the president chose to move in a more progressive direction. Every change that has happened has come as a result of mass movements – from the era of slavery, the Civil War, and the involvement of Black people in the Civil War, which really determined the outcome. Many people are under the impression that it was Abraham Lincoln who played the major role, and he did as a matter of fact help to accelerate the move toward abolition, but it was the decision on the part of slaves to emancipate themselves and to join the Union Army – both women and men – that was primarily responsible for the victory over slavery. It was the slaves themselves and of course the abolitionist movement that led to the dismantling of slavery. When one looks at the civil rights era, it was those mass movements – anchored by women, incidentally – that pushed the government to bring about change.” (Davis, 2016)

This excerpt is from an interview with Angela Davis, where she shares some knowledge on how to deal with power. Davis’s point is that people create and force change, collectively and from the bottom. This is an inherently radical perspective that comes from a development of political consciousness and the realization that representative democracy, in all of its supposed glory, is a reactionary system that has rarely if ever carried through on its “democratic” advertisement. It is a radical perspective that comes from a place of understanding why and how the founding fathers, in all of their land-owning, slave-owning elitism, chose this system of governing: “to protect,” as James Madison put it, “the opulent of the minority against the majority.” (Madison, 1787)

Davis’s point is reiterated by Noam Chomsky, in his peculiar declaration that Richard Nixon was “the last liberal President” of the United States — a statement that also comes from a radical perspective which realizes the systemic influence of capitalism and, more specifically, of the intensified capitalist period known as neoliberalism. And it comes from an understanding that Nixon the man, cantankerously racist and temperamentally conservative, did not create the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), set employment quotas on affirmative action programs, propose employer-funded healthcare, sign the Fair Labor Standards Act, and approve a series of regulations on big business because he personally championed these causes, or even believed in them. (Conetta, 2014; Fund, 2013) Rather, he was pressured from below, in the same way that Reagan, the Bushs, Clinton, and Obama have been pressured from above to enact and maintain the corporate stranglehold on politics ever since.

Systemic pressure always supplants personal philosophies, beliefs, ideologies, and preferences; and our systemic default, which is predetermined by the capitalist order, will always prevail over electoral and representative politics. Political consciousness exposes this fact, separating radical from liberal. The cases of Lincoln and Nixon, while signifying how pressure from below can force change, are outliers. They were chinks in the system. And since Nixon, these chinks have seemingly been fortified by the “whole apparatus that controls the presidency that is absolutely resistant to change.” The legislation passed by Nixon, as well as the legislation that came about through the New Deal era, the “Great Society,” and Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, have all been tamed by this apparatus. Our environmental crisis has intensified, white-supremacist terror remains prevalent in American streets, economic inequality has reached unprecedented levels, and our racialized prison industrial complex has grown by a rate of over 600 percent since the Civil Rights movement – all realities suggesting that “progressive” legislation is ultimately toothless. Thus, any reforms that develop through the electoral system, as a result of pressure from the bottom, are ultimately curtailed and circumvented by capitalism’s economic base, which always seeks to undermine a common good in the pursuit of never-ending growth and profit. The so-called “liberal reforms” that occurred during the Nixon years were largely rendered useless during the proceeding neoliberal era, which represents a deliberate plan to unleash the capitalist system.

This fact does not render grassroots power useless; it merely suggests that it needs to be redirected. Returning to Davis’s comments, the case of Abraham Lincoln is perhaps one of the best examples of the impotence built into the political system. Lincoln the individual had vacillated on his stance regarding slavery, expressing personal “dislike” for the institution and even displaying empathy for slaves (Lincoln, 1855) during a time when such empathy was often lost on many Americans. At the same time, Lincoln the president recognized his duty to protect the rights of slaveowners as the executive administrator of the United States and its constitution, and ultimately admitted that his institutional duty, which was to “save the Union” and maintain the power structures as created by the founders, even if it meant that slavery would stay intact, far outweighed any personal misgivings he may have had toward slavery. The same logic, when coming from cogs within the power structure, can be applied to capitalism and imperialism, and has been for centuries.

Both Nixon’s and Lincoln’s yield to external pressure illustrates two important points: (1) the personality, ideological leanings, and personal beliefs of a politician, even if the most powerful politician, have no real consequence within the US political system; and (2) the foundation of US politics and government, as arranged by the founders of the country, will never allow for genuine democratic elements to materialize. The first point often represents the most telling demarcation between radical and liberal, with the former realizing this fact, and the latter unable to realize and thus placing focus on individual identity. Because of the liberal’s inability to understand this systemic reality, damaging electoral strategies such as “lesser-evilism” have established a firm place in the American political arena, inevitably causing a gradual deterioration toward more reactionary political platforms designed to protect the decaying capitalist system, which in modern times translates to a very real fascistic slide. Hence, we now have modern Democratic Party politicians that resemble 1970s/80s conservatives, and Republicans that continue to push the envelope of fascism.

Since Nixon, the flock of modern presidents who have bent the knee to multinational corporate and banking power further illustrate the utter insignificance of identity; ironically, during a political era where “marketing personalities” is usually the only determinate for “success.” This contradiction cannot be understated, and it is an accurate barometer that can be used to measure class/political consciousness in the United States, or the lack thereof. Ironically, the fact that voter turnout throughout the country has maintained such low levels during the tail-end of the neoliberal era and late-stage capitalism is a sign that class and political consciousness are actually rising. For when the working class realizes en masse that there is no change coming through electoral politics, and thus have shed the capitalist elite’s “banking concept,” we know that revolutionary change is on the horizon. And any such period must include mass education and a mass movement toward political consciousness – an understanding once echoed by Lucy Parsons: “[radicals] know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals.” (Lewis, 2017) Self-thinking, in this case, simply means realizing our inherent political consciousness that is based in our material position in the socioeconomic system beyond the construction and obstruction of capitalist ideology and culture.

As we collectively separate ourselves from a mainstream political arena that has been established to ensure our continued demise as working-class people, we also must be wary of blowback from the system. The most common response to a delegitimizing of the power structure is an appeal to authority, safety, and stability. This defensive posture forms from within the power structure, with corporate-political unity between both major political parties, in an attempt to construct an extremist center. At this stage, the extremist center has one task at hand — to protect the status quo at all costs. In the US, this means keeping the white-supremacist capitalist/imperialist system intact, as well as the bourgeois class that both maintains these systems and benefits from them. To do so, this extremist center exploits the fear of instability in order to build mass support, labels both fascist and anti-fascist ground movements as enemies of the state (although does not necessarily respond to them in the same ways), indecipherable from one another in their mutual “extremism,” and proceeds with an all-out attack on civil liberties in order to suppress popular movements that may challenge the embedded systems.

We have seen this response materialize over the past decade. In the aftermath of 9/11, civil liberties have been systematically removed from members of both political parties. During the street clashes between white nationalists and anti-fascists, we witnessed politicians from both parties as well as media denounce “both sides” as extremists, creating a convenient false dichotomy that completely ignores the most common-sense discussion – what the two sides actually believe in or are trying to accomplish.  And we have seen “horseshoe theory” enter into the mainstream arena as “philosophical justification” for this false dichotomy.  “In the current state of things, the electoral successes of the extreme right stem from contemporary capitalism itself. These successes allow the media to throw together, with the same opprobrium, the ‘populists of the extreme right and those of the extreme left,’ obscuring the fact that the former are pro-capitalist (as the term ‘extreme right’ demonstrates) and thus possible allies for capital, while the latter are the only potentially dangerous opponents of capital’s system of power.” (Amin, 2014) The result of this has been a strengthening of the system as we know it, a virtual circling of the wagons around our reality of corporate politics, inequality, joblessness, homelessness, racism, misogyny, and all of the oppressive social phobias that accompany them.  Still, the resistance looms, it is radical in nature, and it is growing.

Conclusion

The current state of the world — socially, politically, economically, and environmentally — indicates that we have entered the late stages of the global capitalist system. In the heart of the capitalist empire, the United States, social unrest has become the norm. Capitalism’s systemic contradictions, as well as its coercive and authoritarian core, have become increasingly uncontrollable for the country’s capitalist political parties. Social inequities are becoming more pronounced, the political arena is showing irregularities like never before, and an overtly fascist tide is starting to rear its ugly head.

The American working class has responded in various ways. On one side, reactionary mentalities have intensified among hordes of newly-dispossessed whites, thus leading them into the arms of the state’s fascist slide. On another side, a mass awakening has developed among many who have decided instead to tap into our organic intellectualism, turn to radical analysis, and return to anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist class politics. In response to the fascist tide, a formidable wave of anti-fascist action has sprung to life. To bolster this, a pedagogical resurgence of anti-fascism has formed both organically and through the forging of this new collective political and class consciousness. Rosa Luxemburg’s 1916 ultimatum has suddenly reached the ears of many within the American working class – will we transition away from capitalism and toward socialism, or will we regress further into barbarism?

Capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy know where they stand. Politicians from both capitalist parties have regrouped to form and extreme center. Corporate executives, bankers, bosses, business owners, arms manufacturers, hedge-fund operators, landlords, military officials, police, and the prison industry have all placed their bets on barbarism. The ball is now in our court. The time is ripe for the people to seize power, but the process of a political awakening, anchored by a mass shaping of class consciousness, must gear up. And, most importantly, our army must be built from the ground-up, from within the proletariat, with the understanding that we are all leaders in this struggle.

A war for consciousness must continue, and must be won, while we proceed in building mass political power. And this must be done with an all-out rejection of capitalist culture and the conditioned mentality that comes with it, because the people’s struggle is doomed to fail if it does not develop “a consciousness of the insidious promotion of capitalist individualism.” In doing so, “it is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals in order for people today to recognize our potential agency as a part of an ever-expanding community of struggle.” (Barat, 2014) We are on the precipice. The world and its future literally rest on our collective shoulders.

All power to the people.

Bibliography

Amin, Samir (2014) The Return of Fascism in Contemporary Capitalism, Monthly Review, September 1, 2014. Accessed at https://monthlyreview.org/2014/09/01/the-return-of-fascism-in-contemporary-capitalism/

Barat, Frank (2014) Progressive Struggles against Insidious Capitalist Individualism: An Interview with Angela Davis, Hampton Institute. Accessed at http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/angela-davis-interview.html

Conetta, Christine (2014) Noam Chomsky: Richard Nixon Was Last Liberal President, Huffington Post, 2/21/14. Accessed at https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/21/noam-chomsky-richard-nixon_n_4832847.html

Daily Struggles Blog (2018) Paulo Freire and the Role of Critical Pedagogy. Accessed at http://daily-struggles.tumblr.com/post/18785753110/paulo-freire-and-the-role-of-critical-pedagogy

Davis, Angela (2016) Freedom is a Constant Struggle (Haymarket Books)

Dunayevskaya, Daya (2003) Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre, and from Marx to Mao (Lexington Books)

Freire, Paulo (2014) Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary edition (Bloomsbury)

Fund, John (2013) Nixon at 100: Was He America’s Last Liberal? (National Review online, January 11, 2013) Accessed at https://www.nationalreview.com/2013/01/nixon-100-was-he-americas-last-liberal-john-fund/

Gramsci, Antonio (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (International Publishers)

Hampton, Fred (1968) Speech at Northern Illinois Unversity. Accessed at http://www.lfks.net/en/content/fred-hampton-its-class-struggle-goddammit-november-1969

Jackson, George (1994) Soledad Brothers: The Prison Letters of George Jackson (Chicago Review Press)

Lennard, Natasha (2017) Don’t Give Fascism An Inch, In These Times, August 23, 2017. Accessed at http://inthesetimes.com/article/20449/no-platform-milo-free-speech-charlottesville-white-supremacy

Lewis, Jone Johnson (2017) Lucy Parsons: Labor Radical and Anarchist, IWW Founder (ThoughtCo. Online) Accessed at https://www.thoughtco.com/lucy-parsons-biography-3530417

Lincoln, Abraham (1855) Letter to Joshua Speed (Abraham Lincoln Online) Accessed at http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/speed.htm

Luxemburg, Rosa (1915) The Junius Pamphlet. Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/ch01.htm

Madison, James (1787) Federalist Papers, No. 10 (The Avalon Project) Accessed at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp

Parliament of UK. Managing and owning the landscape. https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/towncountry/landscape/overview/enclosingland/

Wheeler, Lauren (2016) Freire’s Three Levels of Consciousness, Participatory Performance Practices. Accessed at https://laurenppp.wordpress.com/2016/01/25/freires-3-levels-of-consciousness-25-1-16/

Revolution in the Twenty-First Century: A Reconsideration of Marxism

By Chris Wright

In the age of COVID-19, it’s even more obvious than it’s been for at least ten or twenty years that capitalism is entering a long, drawn-out period of unprecedented global crisis. The Great Depression and World War II will likely, in retrospect, seem rather minor—and temporally condensed—compared to the many decades of ecological, economic, social, and political crises humanity is embarking on now. In fact, it’s probable that we’re in the early stages of the protracted collapse of a civilization, which is to say of a particular set of economic relations underpinning certain social, political, and cultural relations. One can predict that the mass popular resistance, worldwide, engendered by cascading crises will gradually transform a decrepit ancien régime, although in what direction it is too early to tell. But left-wing resistance is already spreading and even gaining the glimmers of momentum in certain regions of the world, including—despite the ending of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign—the reactionary United States. Over decades, the international left will grow in strength, even as the right, in all likelihood, does as well.

Activism of various practical and ideological orientations is increasingly in a state of ferment—and yet, compared to the scale it will surely attain in a couple of decades, it is still in its infancy. In the U.S., for example, “democratic socialism” has many adherents, notably in the DSA and in the circles around Jacobin magazine. There are also organizations, and networks of organizations, that consciously repudiate the “reformism” of social democracy, such as the Marxist Center, which disavows the strategy of electing progressive Democratic politicians as abject “class collaboration.” Actually, many democratic socialists would agree that it’s necessary, sooner or later, to construct a workers’ party, that the Democratic Party is ineluctably and permanently fused with the capitalist class. But the Marxist Center rejects the very idea of prioritizing electoral work, emphasizing instead “base-building” and other modes of non-electoral activism.

Meanwhile, there are activists in the solidarity economy, who are convinced it’s necessary to plant the institutional seeds of the new world in the fertile soil of the old, as the old slowly decays and collapses. These activists take their inspiration from the recognition, as Rudolf Rocker put it in his classic Anarcho-Syndicalism, that “every new social structure makes organs for itself in the body of the old organism. 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.” The Libertarian Socialist Caucus of the DSA is one group that identifies with this type of thinking, but there are many others, including the Democracy Collaborative, the Democracy at Work Institute (also this one), Shareable, and more broadly the New Economy Coalition. Cooperation Jackson has had some success building a solidarity economy in Jackson, Mississippi.

The numbers and varieties of activists struggling to build a new society are uncountable, from Leninists to anarchists to left-liberals and organizers not committed to ideological labels. Amidst all this ferment, however, one thing seems lacking: a compelling theoretical framework to explain how corporate capitalism can possibly give way to an economically democratic, ecologically sustainable society. How, precisely, is that supposed to happen? Which strategies are better and which worse for achieving this end—an end that may well, indeed, seem utopian, given the miserable state of the world? What role, for instance, does the venerable tradition of Marxism play in understanding how we might realize our goals? Marx, after all, had a conception of revolution, which he bequeathed to subsequent generations. Should it be embraced, rejected, or modified?

Where, in short, can we look for some strategic and theoretical guidance?

In this article I’ll address these questions, drawing on some of the arguments in my book Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States (specifically chapters 4 and 6).[1] As I’ve argued elsewhere, historical materialism is an essential tool to understand society and how a transition to some sort of post-capitalism may occur. Social relations are grounded in production relations, and so to make a revolution it is production relations that have to be transformed. But the way to do so isn’t the way proposed by Marx in the Communist Manifesto, or by Engels and Lenin and innumerable other Marxists later: that, to quote Engels’ Anti-Dühring, “The proletariat seizes state power, and then transforms the means of production into state property.” Or, as the Manifesto states, “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class.”

Instead, the revolution has to be a gradual and partially “unconscious” process, as social contradictions are tortuously resolved “dialectically,” not through a unitary political will that seizes the state (every state!) and then consciously, semi-omnisciently reconstructs the economy from the top down, magically transforming authoritarian relations into democratic ones through the exercise of state bureaucracy. In retrospect, this idea that a “dictatorship of the proletariat” will plan and direct the social revolution, and that the latter will, in effect, happen after the political revolution, seems incredibly idealistic, unrealistic, and thus un-Marxist.

I can’t rehearse here all the arguments in my book, but I’ve sketched some of them in this article. In the following I’ll briefly restate a few of the main points, after which I’ll argue that on the basis of my revision of Marxism we can see there is value in all the varieties of activism leftists are currently pursuing. No school of thought has a monopoly on the truth, and all have limitations. Leftists must tolerate disagreements and work together—must even work with left-liberals—because a worldwide transition between modes of production takes an inordinately long time and takes place on many different levels.

I’ll also offer some criticisms of each of the three broad “schools of thought” I mentioned above, namely the Jacobin social democratic one, the more self-consciously far-left one that rejects every hint of “reformism,” and the anarchistic one that places its faith in things like cooperatives, community land trusts, mutual aid, “libertarian municipalism,” all sorts of decentralized participatory democracy. At the end I’ll briefly consider the overwhelming challenge of ecological collapse, which is so urgent it would seem to render absurd, or utterly defeatist, my insistence that “the revolution” will take at least a hundred years to wend its way across the globe and unseat all the old social relations.

Correcting Marx

Karl Marx was a genius, but even geniuses are products of their environment and are fallible. We can hardly expect Marx to have gotten absolutely everything right. He couldn’t foresee the welfare state or Keynesian stimulation of demand, which is to say he got the timeline for revolution wrong. One might even say he mistook the birth pangs of industrial capitalism for its death throes: a global transition to socialism never could have happened in the nineteenth century, nor even in the twentieth, which was the era of “monopoly capitalism,” state capitalism, entrenched imperialism, the mature capitalist nation-state. It wasn’t even until the last thirty years that capitalist relations of production fully conquered vast swathes of the world, including the so-called Communist bloc and much of the Global South. And Marx argued, at least in the Manifesto, that capitalist globalization was a prerequisite to socialism (or communism).

All of which is to say that only now are we finally entering the era when socialist revolution is possible. The earlier victories, in 1917, 1949, 1959, and so on, did not achieve socialism—workers’ democratic control of the economy—and, in the long run, could not have. They occurred in a predominantly capitalist world—capitalism was in the ascendancy—and were constrained by the limits of that world, the restricted range of possibilities. Which is doubtless why all those popular victories ended up in one or another form of oppressive statism (or else were soon crushed by imperialist powers).

If Marx was wrong about the timeline, he was also wrong about his abstract conceptualization of how the socialist revolution would transpire. As he put it in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, “At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production… From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.” The notion of fettering, despite its criticism by exponents of Analytical Marxism, is useful, but not in the form it’s presented here. For to say that relations of production fetter productive forces (or, more precisely, fetter their socially rational use and development) is not to say very much. How much fettering is required for a revolution to happen? Surely capitalism has placed substantial fetters on the productive forces for a long time—and yet here we all are, still stuck in this old, fettered world.

To salvage Marx’s intuition, and in fact to make it quite useful, it’s necessary to tweak his formulation. Rather than some sort of “absolute” fettering of productive forces by capitalist relations, there is a relative fettering—relative to an emergent mode of production, a more democratic and socialized mode, that is producing and distributing resources more equitably and rationally than the capitalist.

A parallel (albeit an imperfect one) is the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Feudal relations certainly obstructed economic growth, but it wasn’t until a “competing” economy—of commercial, financial, agrarian, and finally industrial capitalism—had made great progress in Western Europe that the classical epoch of revolution between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries burst onto the scene. Relative to capitalism, feudalism was hopelessly stagnant, and therefore, once capitalism had reached a certain level of development, doomed.

Crucially, the bourgeoisie’s conquest of political power wasn’t possible until capitalist economic relations had already, over centuries, spread across much of Europe. There had to be a material foundation for the capitalist class’s ultimate political victories: without economic power—the accumulation of material resources through institutions they controlled—capitalists could never have achieved political power. That is to say, much of the enormously protracted social revolution occurred before the final “seizure of the state.”

If historical materialism is right, as it surely is, the same paradigm must apply to the transition from capitalism to socialism. The working class can never complete its conquest of the state until it commands considerable economic power—not only the power to go on strike and shut down the economy but actual command over resources, resources sufficient to compete with the ruling class. The power to strike, while an important tool, is not enough. Nor are mere numbers, however many millions, enough, as history has shown. The working class needs its own institutional bases from which to wage a very prolonged struggle, and these institutions have to be directly involved in the production and accumulation of resources. Only after some such “alternative economy,” or socialized economy, has emerged throughout much of the world alongside the rotting capitalist economy will the popular classes be in a position to finally complete their takeover of states. For they will have the resources to politically defeat the—by then—weak, attenuated remnants of the capitalist class.

Marx, in short, was wrong to think there would be a radical disanalogy between the transition to capitalism and the transition to socialism. Doubtless the latter process (if it happens) will take far less time than the earlier did, and will be significantly different in many other respects. But social revolutions on the scale we’re discussing—between vastly different modes of production—are always very gradual, never a product of a single great moment (or several moments) of historical “rupture” but rather of many decades of continual ruptures.[2] Why? Simply because ruling classes are incredibly tenacious, they have incredible powers of repression, and it requires colossal material resources to defeat them—especially in the age of globalized capitalism.

Building a new mode of production

What we must do, then, is to laboriously construct new relations of production as the old capitalist relations fall victim to their contradictions. But how is this to be done? At this early date, it is, admittedly, hard to imagine how it can be accomplished. Famously, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

But two things are clear. First, a significant amount of grassroots initiative is necessary. The long transition will not take place only on one plane, the plane of the state; there will be a tumult of creative energy on sub-state levels, as there was during Europe’s transition into capitalism. (Of course, in the latter case it was typically to establish predatory and exploitative relations, not democratic or communal ones, but the point holds.) The many forms of such energy can hardly be anticipated, but they will certainly involve practices that have come to be called the “solidarity economy,” including the formation of cooperatives of all types, public banks, municipal enterprises, participatory budgeting, mutual aid networks, and so on. In a capitalist context it is inconceivable that states will respond to crisis by dramatically improving the circumstances of entire populations; as a result, large numbers of people will be compelled to build new institutions to survive and to share and accumulate resources. Again, this process, which will occur all over the world and to some degree will be organized and coordinated internationally, will play out over generations, not just two or three decades.

In the long run, moreover, this solidarity economy will not prove to be some sort of innocuous, apolitical, compatible-with-capitalism development; it will foster anti-capitalist ways of thinking and acting, anti-capitalist institutions, and anti-capitalist resistance. It will facilitate the accumulation of resources among organizations committed to cooperative, democratic, socialized production and distribution, a rebuilding of “the commons,” a democratization of the state. It will amount to an entire sphere of what has been called “dual power” opposed to a still-capitalist state, a working-class base of power to complement the power of workers and unions to strike.

The second point is that, contrary to anarchism, it will be necessary to use the state to help construct a new mode of production. Governments are instruments of massive social power and they cannot simply be ignored or overthrown in a general strike. However unpleasant or morally odious it may be to participate in hierarchical structures of political power, it has to be a part of any strategy to combat the ruling class.

Activists and organizations will pressure the state at all levels, from municipal to national, to increase funding for the solidarity economy. In fact, they already are, and have had success in many countries and municipalities, including in the U.S. The election of more socialists to office will encourage these trends and ensure greater successes. Pressure will also build to fund larger worker cooperatives, to convert corporations to worker-owned businesses, and to nationalize sectors of the economy. And sooner or later, many states will start to give in.

Why? One possible state response to crisis, after all, is fascism. And fascism of some form or other is indeed being pursued by many countries right now, from Brazil to Hungary to India to the U.S. But there’s a problem with fascism: by its murderous and ultra-nationalistic nature, it can be neither permanent nor continuously enforced worldwide. Even just in the United States, the governmental structure is too vast and federated, there are too many thousands of relatively independent political jurisdictions, for a fascist regime to be consolidated in every region of the country. Fascism is only a temporary and partial solution for the ruling class. It doesn’t last.

The other solution, which doubtless will always be accompanied by repression, is to grant concessions to the masses. Here, it’s necessary to observe that the state isn’t monolithically an instrument of capital. While capital dominates it, it is a terrain of struggle, “contestations,” “negotiations,” of different groups—classes, class subgroups, interest groups, even individual entities—advocating for their interests. Marxists from Engels, Kautsky, and Lenin to Miliband and Poulantzas to more recent writers have felled forests writing about the nature of the capitalist state, but for the purposes of revolutionary strategy all you need is some critical common sense (as Noam Chomsky, dismissive of self-indulgent “theorizing,” likes to point out). It is possible for popular movements to exert such pressure on the state that they slowly change its character, thereby helping to change the character of capitalist society.

In particular, popular organizations and activists can take advantage of splits within the ruling class to push agendas that benefit the populace. The political scientist Thomas Ferguson, among others, has shown how the New Deal, including the epoch-making Wagner Act and Social Security Act, was made possible by just such divisions in the ranks of business. On a grander scale, Western Europe’s long transition from feudalism to capitalism was accompanied by divisions within the ruling class, between more forward-thinking and more hidebound elements. (As is well known, a number of landed aristocrats and clergymen even supported the French Revolution, at least in its early phases.) Marx was therefore wrong to imply that it’s the working class vs. the capitalist class, monolithically. This totally Manichean thinking suggested that the only way to make a revolution is for the proletariat to overthrow the ruling class in one blow, so to speak, to smash a united reactionary opposition that, moreover, is in complete control of the state (so the state has to be seized all at once).

On the contrary, we can expect the past to repeat itself: as crises intensify and popular resistance escalates, liberal factions of the ruling class will split off from the more reactionary elements in order to grant concessions. In our epoch of growing social fragmentation, environmental crisis, and an increasingly dysfunctional nation-state, many of these concessions will have the character not of resurrecting the centralized welfare state but of encouraging phenomena that seem rather “interstitial” and less challenging to capitalist power than full-fledged social democracy is. But, however innocent it might seem to support new “decentralized” solutions to problems of unemployment, housing, consumption, and general economic dysfunction, in the long run, as I’ve said, these sorts of reforms will facilitate the rise of a more democratic and socialized political economy within the shell of the decadent capitalist one.

At the same time, to tackle the immense crises of ecological destruction and economic dysfunction, more dramatic and visible state interventions will be necessary. They may involve nationalizations of the fossil fuel industry, enforced changes to the polluting practices of many industries, partial reintroductions of social-democratic policies, pro-worker reforms of the sort that Bernie Sanders’ campaign categorized under “workplace democracy,” etc. Pure, unending repression will simply not be sustainable. These more “centralized,” “statist” reforms, just like the promotion of the solidarity economy, will in the long run only add to the momentum for continued change, because the political, economic, and ecological context will remain that of severe worldwide crisis.

Much of the ruling class will of course oppose and undermine progressive policies—especially of the more statist variety—every step of the way, thus deepening the crisis and doing its own part to accelerate the momentum for change. But by the time it becomes clear to even the liberal sectors of the business class that its reforms are undermining the long-term viability and hegemony of capitalism, it will be too late. They won’t be able to turn back the clock: there will be too many worker-owned businesses, too many public banks, too many state-subsidized networks of mutual aid, altogether too many reforms to the old type of neoliberal capitalism (reforms that will have been granted, as always, for the sake of maintaining social order). The slow-moving revolution will feed on itself and will prove unstoppable, however much the more reactionary states try to clamp down, murder dissidents, prohibit protests, and bust unions. Besides, as Marx predicted, the revolutionary project will be facilitated by the thinning of the ranks of the capitalist elite due to repeated economic collapses and the consequent destruction of wealth.

Just as the European absolutist state of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries was compelled to empower—for the sake of accumulating wealth—the capitalist classes that created the conditions of its demise, so the late-capitalist state will be compelled, for the purposes of internal order, to acquiesce in the construction of non-capitalist institutions that correct some of the “market failures” of the capitalist mode of production. The capitalist state will, of necessity, be a participant in its own demise. Its highly reluctant sponsorship of new practices of production, distribution, and social life as a whole—many of them “interstitial” at first—will be undertaken on the belief that it’s the lesser of two evils, the greater evil being the complete dissolution of capitalist power resulting from the dissolution of society.

It is impossible to predict this long process in detail, or to say how and when the working class’s gradual takeover of the state (through socialist representatives and the construction of new institutions on local and eventually national levels) will be consummated. Nor can we predict what the nation-state itself will look like then, what political forms it will have, how many of its powers will have devolved to municipal and regional levels and how many will have been lost to supra-national bodies of world governance. Needless to say, it is also hopeless to speculate on the future of the market, or whether various kinds of economic planning will, after generations, mostly take the place of the market.

As for “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” this entity, like the previous “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie,” won’t exist until the end of the long process of transformation. Marxists, victims of impatience as well as the statist precedents of twentieth-century “Communist” countries, have traditionally gotten the order wrong, forgetting the lesson of Marxism itself that the state is a function of existing social relations and can’t simply be taken over by workers in the context of a still-wholly-capitalist economy. Nor is it at all “dialectical” to think that a group of workers’ representatives can will a new economy into existence, overcoming the authoritarian, bureaucratic, inefficient, exploitative institutional legacies of capitalism by a few acts of statist will. Historical materialism makes clear the state isn’t so radically socially creative![3]

Instead, the contrast that will appear between the stagnant, “fettering” old forms of capitalism and the more rational and democratic forms of the emergent economy is what will guarantee, in the end, the victory of the latter.

An ecumenical activism

In a necessarily speculative and highly abstract way I’ve tried to sketch the logic of how a new economy might emerge from the wreckage of capitalism, and how activists with an eye toward the distant future might orient their thinking. It should be evident from what I’ve said that there isn’t only one way to make a revolution; rather, in a time of world-historic crisis, simply fighting to humanize society will generate anti-capitalist momentum. And there are many ways to make society more humane.

Consider the social democratic path, the path of electing socialists and pressuring government to expand “welfare state” measures. Far-leftists often deride this approach as merely reformist; in the U.S., it’s also common to dismiss the idea of electing progressive Democrats such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez because supposedly the Democratic Party is hopelessly capitalist and corrupt. It can’t be moved left, and it will certainly never be a socialist party.

According to Regeneration Magazine, for instance, a voice of the Marxist Center network, “Reformism accepts as a given the necessity of class collaboration, and attempts to spin class compromise as a necessary good. One of the more popular strategic proposals of the reformist camp is the promotion of candidates for elected office running in a capitalist party; a clear instance of encouraging class collaboration.”

There are a number of possible responses to such objections. One might observe that if the left insists on absolute purity and refuses to work with anyone who can be seen as somehow “compromised,” it’s doomed to irrelevance—or, worse, it ends up fracturing the forces of opposition and thus benefits the reactionaries. It is a commonplace of historiography on fascism that the refusal of Communist parties in the early 1930s to cooperate with socialists and social democrats only empowered the Nazis and other such elements—which is why the Stalinist line changed in 1934, when the period of the Popular Front began. Then, in the U.S., began Communist efforts to build the Democrat-supported CIO (among other instances of “collaboration” with Democrats), which was highly beneficial to the working class. Leftists, more than anyone else, should be willing and able to learn from history.

Or one might state the truism that social democracy helps people, and so if you care about helping people, you shouldn’t be opposed to social democracy. It may be true that the Democratic Party is irredeemably corrupt and capitalist, but the more left-wing policymakers we have, the better. Democrats have moved to the left in the past, e.g. during the New Deal and the Great Society, and they may be able to move to the left in the future. One of the goals of socialists should be to fracture the ruling class, to provoke splits that provide opportunities for socialist organizing and policymaking.

At the same time, the strategy of electing left-wing Democrats or “reformists” should be complemented by an effort to build a working-class party, not only for the sake of having such a party but also to put pressure on the mainstream “left.” Anyway, the broader point is just that the state is an essential terrain of struggle, and all ways of getting leftists elected have to be pursued.

Personally, I’m skeptical that full-fledged social democracy, including an expansion of it compared to its traditional form, is possible any longer, least of all on an international or global scale. Thus, I don’t have much hope for a realization of the Jacobin vision, that societies can pass straight into socialism by resurrecting and continuously broadening and deepening social democracy. Surely Marxism teaches us that we can’t resuscitate previous social formations after they have passed from the scene, particularly not institutional forms that have succumbed (or are in the process of succumbing) to the atomizing, disintegrating logic of capital. The expansive welfare state was appropriate to an age of industrial unionism and limited mobility of capital. Given the monumental crises that will afflict civilization in the near future, the social stability and coherence required to sustain genuine social democracy will not exist.

But that doesn’t mean limited social-democratic victories aren’t still possible. They certainly are. And in the long run, they may facilitate the emergence of new democratic, cooperative, ecologically viable modes of production, insofar as they empower the left. Even something like a Green New Deal, or at least a partial realization of it, isn’t out of the question.

On the other hand, while mass politics is necessary, that doesn’t mean we should completely reject non-electoral “movementism.” As I’ve argued, the project of building a new society doesn’t happen only on the level of the state; it also involves other types of popular organizing and mobilizing, including in the solidarity economy. The latter will likely, indeed, be a necessity for people’s survival in the coming era of state incapacity to deal with catastrophe.

Not all types of anarchist activism are fruitful or even truly leftist, but the anarchist intuition to organize at the grassroots and create horizontal networks of popular power is sound. Even in the ultra-left contempt for reformism there is the sound intuition that reforms are not enough, and we must always press forward towards greater radicalism and revolution.

An ecological apocalypse?

An obvious objection to the conception and timeframe of revolution I’ve proposed is that it disregards the distinct possibility that civilization will have disappeared a hundred years from now if we don’t take decisive action immediately. For one thing, nuclear war remains a dire threat. But even more ominously, capitalism is turbocharged to destroy the natural bases of human life.

There’s no need to run through the litany of crimes capitalism is committing against nature. Humanity is obviously teetering on the edge of a precipice, peering down into a black hole below. Our most urgent task is to, at the very least, take a few steps back from the precipice.

The unfortunate fact, however, is that global capitalism will not be overcome within the next few decades. It isn’t “defeatist” to say this; it’s realistic. The inveterate over-optimism of many leftists, even in the face of a dismal history, is quite remarkable. Transitions between modes of production aren’t accomplished in a couple of decades: they take generations, and involve many setbacks, then further victories, then more defeats, etc. The long march of reactionaries to their current power in the U.S. took fifty years, and they existed in a sympathetic political economy and had enormous resources. It’s hard to believe socialists will be able to revolutionize the West and even the entire world in less time.

Fortunately, it is possible to combat ecological collapse even in the framework of capitalism. One way to do so, which, sadly, is deeply unpopular on the left, is for governments to subsidize the massive expansion of nuclear power, a very clean and effective source of energy despite the conventional wisdom. The rollout of renewable energy is important too, despite its many costs. Meanwhile, it is far from hopeless to try to force governments to impose burdensome regulations and taxes on polluting industries or even, ideally, to shut down the fossil fuel industry altogether. Capitalism itself is indeed, ultimately, the culprit, but reforms can have a major effect, at the very least buying us some time.

Climate change and other environmental disasters may, nevertheless, prove to be the undoing of civilization, in which case the social logic of a post-capitalist revolution that I’ve outlined here won’t have time to unfold. Nothing certain can be said at this point—except that the left has to stop squabbling and get its act together. And it has to be prepared for things to get worse before they get better. As Marx understood, that’s how systemic change tends to work: the worse things get—the more unstable the system becomes—the more people organize to demand change, and in the end the likelier it is that such change will happen.

The old apothegm “socialism or barbarism” has to be updated: it’s now socialism or apocalypse.

But the strategic lesson of the “purifications” I’ve suggested of Marxist theory remains: the path to socialism is not doctrinaire, not sectarian, not wedded to a single narrow ideological strain; it is catholic, inclusive, open-ended—both “reformist” and non-reformist, statist and non-statist, Marxist and anarchist, Democrat-cooperating and -non-cooperating. Loath as we might be to admit it, it is even important that we support lesser-evil voting, for instance electing Biden rather than Trump. Not only does it change people’s lives to have a centrist instead of a fascist in power; it also gives the left more room to operate, to influence policy, to advocate “radical reforms” that help lay the groundwork for new economic relations.

It’s time for creative and flexible thinking. The urgency of our situation demands it.

Notes

[1] Being an outgrowth of my Master’s thesis, the book over-emphasizes worker cooperatives. It does, however, answer the usual Marxist objections to cooperatives as a component of social revolution.

[2] If someone will counterpose here the example of Russia, which didn’t require “many decades” to go from capitalism and late-feudalism to a “Stalinist mode of production,” I’d reply that the latter was in fact like a kind of state capitalism, and therefore wasn’t so very different after all from the authoritarian, exploitative, surplus-extracting, capital-accumulating economy that dominated in the West.

[3] This is why I claim in the above-linked book that my “revisions” of Marxism are really purifications of it, eliminations of mistakes that finally make the properly understood Marxist conception of revolution consistent with the premises of historical materialism.

Revisiting Kropotkin: Mutual Aid in the Time of Coronavirus

(Pictured: Volunteers in Washington help prepare food packages for people made suddenly unemployed by the pandemic. EPA/Erik S Lesser)

By Ruth Kinna and Thomas Swann

Republished from The Conversation.

Empty supermarket shelves and panicked government briefings have become the defining images of the coronavirus crisis. But the community response, however, may well be a more enduring feature. The virus and the enforcement of social isolation have sparked uncertainty and anxiety. But a range of local volunteer-run mutual aid networks have also emerged.

Many of the people involved in these groups know that the term “mutual aid” was made famous by the 19th-century anarchist Peter Kropotkin. He used it to attack Social Darwinists who described nature as a competitive fight between self-interested individuals. “Survival of the fittest” became their catch phrase and was used to describe antagonistic relationships between people, races and states. This way of thinking normalised aggression as a natural response to scarcity.

In the present context, the implication is that scrapping for the last bottle of hand sanitiser or roll of toilet paper is a programmed, inevitable response. If only the strongest survive, then others should be seen as rivals or even enemies and we are right to take all necessary measures to preserve ourselves against them.

Although Kropotkin accepted that competition was a factor determining biological fitness, his argument was that cooperation – or mutual aid – was as significant.

As an ethical idea, mutual aid describes the efforts people make to help others without seeking reward. It thrives in local, voluntary organisation. The Lifeboat Association, initiated in the UK by William Hillary to support the foundation of a national institution to save victims of shipwrecks, was an example of the ethical self-organising that Kropotkin had in mind.

Hillary appealed to the king in 1825 to support his project, explaining that his aim was to aid “people and vessels of every nation, whether in peace or in war”. His cause was at once “individual, national, and universal”. He imagined that the establishment of a British association would inspire the foundation of sister organisations across the world.

Kropotkin liked the Lifeboat Association because it relied on “cooperation … enthusiasm … local knowledge”. It rescued anyone in need and because it depended on local action, it could be replicated easily elsewhere. It was a template for global networking to build solidarity.

Working together in a time of crisis

This is the spirit we see in the support networks emerging as people confront the coronavirus pandemic. Neighbours helping neighbours. Those who are able to leave their homes are collecting prescriptions and essential supplies for the vulnerable. Groups networking across towns and cities are pooling resources so that no one is left without.

Community support has always been a core aspect of human social life. Research looking at the way people go about their different everyday tasks shows that far more time than we might imagine is spent on unpaid community support. Mutual aid and cooperation – such as neighbours looking after each other’s children or helping each other fix their cars – run through society. It is a mistake to think that the prospect of profit motivates our behaviour.

A statue of Peter Kropotkin in the Kropotkin House Museum, Dmitrov, Russia. Ruth Kenna, Author provided

Mutual aid is often seen in times of crisis or horrible catastrophe – for example, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in the US and the Grenfell fire in London. Its emergence now bears out Kropotkin’s observations about the capacity for everyday solidarity. The question he would ask is: how can we expand these practices to rethink our social organisation?

Kropotkin described the Lifeboat Association as “perfectly spontaneous”. This did not mean that he thought it was unplanned. It meant that it was not forced by law. Trust and practice were essential to Kropotkin’s vision of the world remade through cooperation and respect for local self-determination.

With resources stretched to their limits, governments all over the world are relying on mutual aid networks to help those most at risk by shopping for those in isolation or sending virtual messages of support to prevent demoralisation.

Perhaps, then, we can start to think about how to preserve community-based organisation in the post-coronavirus world.

There is a significant difference between the politics of mutual aid and neo-liberal projects intended to privatise government services. Kropotkin did not want to see responsibility for government services devolved to big corporations or cash strapped volunteers. His aim was to attack existing power structures. Mutual aid thrives in conditions of equality and it is a necessary part of an anarchist drive towards decentralised federation.

If business-as-usual austerity returns after the crisis, the fertile ground of mutual aid may well dry up. The maintenance and extension of basic income, in contrast, may help preserve and promote grassroots social change in the longer term.

Lessons of Rojava and Histories of Abolition

By Brendan McQuade

Originally published at Marxist sociology blog.

The Rojava Revolution is one of the most important revolutionary struggle of recent years. In the context of civil war and great power intrigue, the Kurdish movement evolved into a multi-ethnic and non-sectarian autonomous administration that governs approximately two million people in Northeastern Syria. These liberated areas have produced important experiments in direct democracy, cooperative and ecological development, and community self-defense and conflict resolution.

The Revolution is also the liberatory counterpoint to the Islamic State. In 2014 and 2015, Rojava’s militias received international attention for breaking the Islamic State’s siege of the city of Kobani and creating an evacuation corridor for some 50,000 Yazidis who were fleeing the Islamic State. Given the Syrian Civil War is also a climate conflict, the great political question of the 21st century may well be the socialism of Rojava or the barbarism of the Islamic State.

It’s no surprise the Rojava Revolution has been a point of inspiration for radicals across the world and, particularly, abolitionists and others on the libertarian-left. In their manifesto, Burn Down the American Plantation, the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement, an anarchist organization with chapters in Philadelphia, New York Chicago, New Haven, and California’s Inland Empire, considers Rojava to be a blueprint for organization elsewhere: “The Rojava Revolution, the anti-state revolution in northern Syria, provides us with a successful example of the strategies of organization and resistance we need to apply in the US today.”

It’s also no surprise that the Rojava Revolution may soon be over. The revolution developed in a power vacuum created when Assad government unilaterally withdrew from the Kurdish regions in Northeast Syria to focus on the developing civil war in Western Syria. The United States made a pragmatic alliance with Rojava during the campaign against the Islamic State but what that support meant going forward was never clear. Turkey, Syria’s neighbor to the north, is keen to both see Assad out and the Kurdish movement crushed. Between Turkey and the Trump administration, it was only a matter of time before the precarious balance of political forces shifted against Rojava. In October 2019, the US withdrew troops from Syria, clearing the way for Turkish invasion. This threat, in turn, forced Rojava to reconcile with Damascus for short term survival. What this means for the future of the Revolution is far from clear but it’s hard to feel encouraged.

What does this tragedy mean for our understanding of political struggle today? Does the seeming twilight of the Rojava Revolution mean that it is just another failed one? The Rojava Revolution could not defend itself against the state. It’s unclear how similar strategies could prevail in the United States, where the openings for the type of democratic autonomy seen Rojava are much smaller (or perhaps fundamentally different).

These questions, I contend, can only be answered if we confront them on the level of political strategy and opportunity, rather than political philosophy and identity. Abolitionists and anti-authoritarians are right to be inspired by example of Rojava but translating the lessons of the Revolution to a wildly different political context like the United States is no simple task. To better understand the Rojava Revolution, I return to the fundamentals of historical materialism. My recent article published Social Justice, “Histories of Abolition, Critiques of Security,” considers Rojava in relation to the debates abolition in the nascent US left: the rejection of abolition as fanciful and its defense as an area of non-reformist reformism in the struggle for 21st century socialism and strategy of insurrection. The impasse between a rejection of abolition and the tired revolution/reform binary can be resolved by returning to fundamentals of historical materialism, and particularly, W.E.B. Du Bois’ analysis of “abolition democracy” in his seminal work, Black Reconstruction.

Histories of Abolition

Abolition democracy refers to the social forces that led the “Reconstruction of Democracy” after the Civil War. It was revolutionary experiment made possible, first, by the direct action of black workers, a General Strike, and, later, advanced through continual mobilization (including armed self-defense) and the non-reformist reforms of Radical Reconstruction. While the antislavery struggle provided the political content of abolition democracy, this revolutionary project existed in precarious conditions, the temporary alignment of black workers, middle class abolitionists represented in Congress by the Radical Republicans, and, eventually, northern industrialists and poor southern whites. It was a revolutionary moment that was never fully consolidated and, as result, its gains were rolled back.

Despite this seeming failure, the moment held a deeper significance that middle class Abolitionists (and many subsequent scholars) largely missed. Abolition democracy challenged the fundamental class relations upon which historical capitalism stood: a racially stratified global division of labor, which, starting the in the sixteenth century, tied Europe, West Africa, and the Americas together in a capitalist world-economy. Black workers were the most devalued and exploited laborers, what Du Bois called “the foundation stone not only of Southern social structure but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-scale.”

By striking at the root of global capitalism, the American Civil War that produced the cataclysm and change that created the possibility for radical change. This possibility was lost because the Abolitionists never confronted capital and the labor movement never embraced abolition. When politics shifted, the temporary class alliances that enabled radical reconstruction gave way to what Du Bois called a “counter-revolution” or “dictatorship of property.”

On a more general level, Du Bois establishes the need to understand abolition in relation to the (1) social relations and (2) historical processes that define a particular historical moment, while also considering (3) social movement clusters that were contesting these relations of forces. In Black Reconstruction, then, Du Bois analyzes the abolition democracy in relation (1) the class composition of the antebellum United States, (2) the consolidation of an industrial economy, and (3) the interaction of the budding labor movement with the anti-slavery actions of black workers and Abolitionists.

In this way, Black Reconstruction offers a different understanding of abolition, beyond the tired revolution-reform binary. As an analytic and organizing concept, abolition democracy becomes the liberatory politics embedded within struggles of historically-specific mobilizations of popular forces. It is the struggle for freedom from violent regulation and subjectification. Du Bois shows that it is organically tied up with the related fights to secure conditions for social reproduction, distribute the social product, shape shared institutions, and set collective priorities. In other words, abolition—or socialism, for that matter—is not a political program we can define in the abstract and implement. It is a process of liberation tied to broader clusters of emancipatory movements as they emerge and exist within specific historical moments. The question, then, is not revolution or reform but who is fighting for abolition—or socialism—what does that even mean in the contemporary United States and what will it take to win.

Du Bois provides a historical materialist understanding of abolition as interplay of disruptive direct action and incremental change within a historically informed understanding of a particular social struggle. This holistic approach highlights the specific social relations that constitute the exploitative and oppressive social formations in which we live. In this way, Du Bois can provide the necessary perspective to ask what kind of interventions could be “non-reformist,” while also creating space to understand direct action and insurrection in terms of political strategy, rather than philosophy.

Abolition, Socialism and Political Strategy

This approach undermines some of the common slogans made about nature of structural violence today. Mass incarceration is not the New Jim Crow nor is it a direct a simple outgrowth of slavery. What Angela Davis terms “the prison of slavery and the slavery of prison” are different arrangements. Slavery, convict leasing, and Jim Crow were systems to marshal and mobilize labor. Mass incarceration is a system to warehouse surplus populations. These differences, moreover, speak to tremendous structural transformations in the world-economy and the American state. If we want to be politically effective, we, unlike abolitionists of the 1860s, must appreciate the specificities of our moment.

This means acknowledging that, as Julia Sudbury does, “the slavery-prison analogy tends to erase the presence of non-black prisoners.” It means recognizing that an exclusive focus on anti-black racism threatens to dismiss the experiences of Latinx and indigenous people with imprisonment, policing, and state violence. It means admitting that the incarceration rate for white people in the United States, while much lower than that of historically marginalized groups, is still grotesque in comparison with the rest of the world. In the words of Angela Davis, it means understanding that the prison “has become a receptacle for all those human beings who bear the inheritance of the failure to create abolition democracy in the aftermath of slavery,” while also recognizing that “this inheritance is not only born by black prisoners, but by poor Latino, Native American, Asian and white prisoners.” It means it thinking about revolutionary strategy in way that appreciates the historical forces that create our moment, without being unthinkingly tied to anachronistic ideas and strategies that today may be ineffective.

Most importantly, this perspective allows us to situate powerful moments of revolutionary breakthrough in their historical context and derive the appropriate conclusions from them. In this regard, we should not dismiss the way Burn Down the American Plantation highlights the experience of Rojava Revolution. Rather, we should understand the social processes and social relations that surround this important event, namely the collapse of the state during Syria Civil War and the trajectory of the Kurdish Movement.

Contextualizing the Rojava Revolution in this manner is not the same as dismissing its relevance. Instead, it allows us to usefully interpret its lessons from the vantage point of particular time and place. Recognizing that the Rojava Revolution took place amidst civil war and state collapse raises doubts about the applicability of the model in areas where the state is strong. Burn Down the American Plantation advocates “placing self-defense at the center of our revolutionary movement” and calls on existing anti-fascist groups and cop watches to model themselves on the self-defense forces of Rojava Revolution. Specifically, the manifesto calls on these organizations to “Develop…the capacity to begin launching offensive actions against fascists and the regime.” This advocacy for armed insurrection is misguided. It fails to appreciate the conditions that made Rojava possible, while also neglecting to mention the awesome coercive powers of the American state and the weakness of the nascent American left.

Moreover, contextualizing Rojava gives us the possibility of translating the lessons of the Revolution into our context. The continually high numbers of “police involved shootings” in the United States, the breakthrough of white supremacist movements, the escalating confrontations at protests, and mounting incidents of political violence all underscore the urgent need to community self-defense in this political moment. This is need is structural as evinced by the recent emergence of armed left formations in the United States like the Socialist Relief Association and the Red Guards of the Party for Socialism and Liberation that joined older groups like Red Neck Revolt.

More generally, there is a budding muncipalist movement in the United States that, in part, draws on some of the same intellectual currents that also inform Rojava. In this United States, this movement is best exemplified by Jackson-Kush Plan associated with Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and Cooperation Jackson. The plan has three pillars building cooperative economy, creating participatory structures at the city level, networking progressive political leaders. Moreover, this electoral road to libertarian socialism at the city level has already delivered some concrete results. In 2013, Jackson, Mississippi elected Mayor Chokwe Lumumba, who campaigned on the promises of to implement the Jackson Plan. Although Lumumba died less than year into office, his son, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, successfully won the mayoral race in June 2017. Already, the new administration pursuing an economic development strategy based around promoting cooperative businesses and putting in place a participatory process, empowering popular assemblies organized by to develop a budget proposal/

Notably, however, Chokwe Antar Lumumba’s young administration has been remarkably conventional when it comes to criminal justice. While the Mayor Lumumba has repeatedly drawn the link between crime and poverty, he’s also pledged to be “tough on crime.” Moreover, the new administration has maintained conventional police force and made no moves toward instituting community control of the police. Here, in a city where political power is held by radical administration, the self-defense experiments of the Rojava Revolution may make an instructive example, albeit not a simple blueprint. If grassroots alternatives to police existed in Jackson, could it pressure Lumumba to adopt more radical positions like community control of police or—better—disband the police department and replace it with community controlled self-defense forces and restorative justice bodies? The point here is not outline a political platform or provide a detailed analysis of contemporary attempts to create municipal socialism in Jackson but rather to demonstrate the way the holistic and historical conception of abolition advanced by Du Bois expands our expands our political parameters, allowing us to both make sense our current conditions and relate them to other powerful instances of abolitionist organizing.

Taken together, this approach to abolition allows us to both learn for the past and appreciate how previous struggles shaped the specificities of the present moment. If abolition can be usefully described as the liberatory politics immanent within the historically specific social struggles, one should be able to find abolitionist tendencies, abolitionist demands, abolitionist practices, and abolitionist institutions in most emancipatory movements. This approach can allow us to consider these moments relationally and learn the historical lessons of other moments of “abolition democracy.” This is how we learn what it takes to get free.

Brendan McQuade is an assistant professor at University of Southern Maine and author of Pacifying the Homeland. This commentary is adapted from a longer article published in Social Justice.

Between Infoshops and Insurrection: U.S. Anarchism, Movement Building, and the Racial Order

By Joel Olson

This now classic essay by the late Joel Olson (1967-2012) reflects on the state of US anarchist milieu from the 1990's through the 2000's. Olson was a long time anarchist writer, organizer, political theorist and veteran of both Love & Rage Anarchist Federation and the anarchist influenced Bring the Ruckus organization. A major focus of his writing and work was a focus on the central role of race and white supremacy in shaping the US political order (See Abolition Of White Democracy ).

Since the publishing of this piece in 2009 much of the left, anarchist movement included, and the political landscape on which they stand has been reshaped by events such as Occupy, the Ferguson uprising, the Bernie Sanders campaign and more recently by election of Trump. One important and positive development worth noting that relate to the arguments raised by Olson is the widespread adoption of abolitionist politics on the left, which often explicitly references the struggle against slavery and the period of reconstruction which followed.

Here are the key takeaways of the article that remain relevant lessons for the left and anarchism today:

Critiques of power that conflate all structures and oppression as equal on moral grounds lack an understanding of how particular structures and oppressions shape and function in each society.

Our approach to revolutionary change requires a strategy of how to get to revolution and this starts with understanding the conditions and history of the US - specifically the central roles of race, white supremacy and colonialism.

Two mistakes made by the anarchist movement of 2000's (and still by many in the present) are a focus on insular spaces and projects oriented towards other activists and the narrow focus on street rebellions and spontaneous upheaval without seeing these within a larger context of movements and building power.

"Social movements are central to radical change" and without a strategy to build them, revolutionary change is not possible.

Anarchism has always had a hard time dealing with race. In its classical era from the time of Proudhon in the 1840s to Goldman in the 1930s, it sought to inspire the working class to rise up against the church, the state, and capitalism. This focus on "god, government, and gold" was revolutionary, but it didn't quite know how to confront the racial order in the United States. Most U.S. anarchist organizations and activists opposed racism in principle, but they tended to assume that it was a byproduct of class exploitation. That is, they thought that racism was a tool the bosses used to divide the working class, a tool that would disappear once capitalism was abolished. They appealed for racial unity against the bosses but they never analyzed white supremacy as a relatively autonomous form of power in its own right.

Unfortunately, contemporary anarchism (which dates roughly from Bookchin to Zerzan) has not done much better. It has expanded the classical era's critique of class domination to a critique of hierarchy and all forms of oppression, including race. Yet with a few exceptions, the contemporary American anarchist scene still has not analyzed race as a form of power in its own right, or as a potential source of solidarity. As a consequence, anarchism remains a largely white ideology in the U.S.

Despite this troublesome tradition, I argue that anarchist theory has the intellectual resources to develop a powerful theory of racial oppression as well as strategies to fight it, but first it must confront two obstacles placed in front of it by the contemporary American anarchist scene. First, it must overcome an analysis of white supremacy that understands racism as but one "hierarchy" among others. Racial oppression is not simply one of many forms of domination; it has played a central role in the development of capitalism in the United States. As a result, struggles against racial oppression have a strategic centrality that other struggles lack.

Second, it must reject the current U.S. anarchist scene's "infoshops or insurrection" approach to politics and instead focus on movement building. Organizing working class movements, which was so central to the classical anarchist tradition, has given way to creating "autonomous zones" like infoshops, art spaces, affinity groups, and collectives on the one hand, and glorifying protests, riots, and sabotage on the other. But in the infoshops and insurrection approaches, the vital work of building movements falls through the middle.

In a class society, politics is fundamentally a struggle for hegemony, or a struggle to define what Antonio Gramsci calls the "common sense" of a society. In the United States, white supremacy has been the central means of maintaining capitalism as "common sense." Building mass movements against the racial order, then, is the way in which a new hegemony, an "anarchist common sense," can be created. But in building that common sense, I argue that contemporary American anarchism should look less toward Europe and more toward the struggles of peoples of color in their own back yard for historical lessons and inspiration.

Hierarchy, Hegemony, and White Supremacy

The intellectual framework of most of contemporary American anarchism rests on a critique of hierarchy. Murray Bookchin, perhaps the most important theorist of the concept, defines hierarchy as "a complex system of command and obedience in which elites enjoy varying degrees of control over their subordinates" ( Bookchin 1982, 4). Capitalism, organized religion, and the state are important forms of hierarchy, but the concept includes other relations of domination such as of "the young by the old, of women by men, of one ethnic group by another, of 'masses' by bureaucrats, … of countryside by town, and in a more subtle psychological sense, of body by mind, of spirit by a shallow instrumental rationality, and of nature by society and technology" (4). Hierarchy pervades our social relations and reaches into our psyche, thereby "percolating into virtually every realm of experience" (63). The critique of hierarchy, Bookchin argues, is more expansive and radical than the Marxist critique of capitalism or the classical anarchist critique of the state because it "poses the need to alter every thread of the social fabric, including the way we experience reality, before we can truly live in harmony with each other and with the natural world" (Bookchin 1986, 22-23).

This analysis of hierarchy broadened contemporary anarchism into a critique of all forms of oppression, including capitalism, the state, organized religion, patriarchy, heterosexism, anthropocentrism, racism, and more. The political task of contemporary anarchism, then, is to attack all forms of oppression, not just a "main" one like capitalism or the state, because without an attack on hierarchy itself, other forms of oppression will not necessarily wither away after the "main" one has been destroyed. [1]

This critique of what is sometimes called "class reductionism" is powerful, for while patriarchy is surely connected to capitalism, for example, it can hardly be reduced to it. Despite this advantage, however, the anarchist critique of all forms of oppression fails to distinguish among those forms of oppression that have been more significant than others to the structuring of U.S. society. In other words, the critique of hierarchy in general lacks the ability to explain how various forms of hierarchy are themselves hierarchically organized. It correctly insists that no one form of oppression is morally "worse" than another. But this does not mean that all forms of oppression play an equal role in shaping the social structure. The American state, for example, was not built on animal cruelty or child abuse, however pervasive and heinous these forms of domination are. Rather, as I will argue below, it was built on white supremacy, which has shaped nearly every other form of oppression in the United States, including class, gender, religion, and the state (and animal cruelty and child abuse). Understanding white supremacy should therefore be central to any American anarchist theory, and developing political programs to fight it should be a central component of anarchist strategy, even if racism is not morally "more evil" than another forms of oppression.

The critique of hierarchy, in other words, confuses a moral condemnation of all forms of oppression with a political and strategic analysis of how power functions in the United States. It resists the notion that in certain historical contexts, certain forms of hierarchy play a more central role in shaping society than do others. It assumes that because all forms of oppression are evil and interconnected that fighting any form of oppression will have the same revolutionary impact. For this reason, it assumes that there is no more need to fight racial discrimination than, say, vivisection, since both are equally evil and interconnected forms of domination.

But as the great theorist W.E.B. Du Bois shows in his classic Black Reconstruction , the primary reason for the failure of the development of a significant anti-capitalist movement in the United States is white supremacy. Rather than uniting with Black workers to overthrow the ruling class and build a new society, as classical anarchist and communist theory predicts, white workers throughout American history have chosen to side with capital. Through a tacit but nonetheless real agreement, the white working class ensures the continuous and relatively undisturbed accumulation of capital by policing the rest of the working class rather than uniting with it. In exchange, white workers receive racial privileges, largely paid for by capitalists and guaranteed by the democratic political system. Du Bois calls these privileges "the public and psychological wages" of whiteness:

"It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them." (Pp. 700-701)

At the time of the publication of Black Reconstruction in 1935, these "wages" included the right to vote, exclusive access to the best jobs, an expectation of higher wages and better benefits, the capacity to sit on juries, the right to enjoy public accommodations, and the right to consider oneself the equal of any other. Today they include, in part, the right to the lowest mortgage rates, the right to decent treatment by the police, the right to feel relatively immune from criminal prosecution, the right to assumes one's success is due entirely to one's own effort, the right to declare that institutionalized racial discrimination is over, and the right to be a full citizen in a liberal democratic state. These wages undermine class-consciousness among those who receive them because they create an interest in and expectation of favored treatment within the capitalist system rather than outside of it.

The racial order in the United States, then, is essentially a cross-class alliance between capital and one section of the working class. (I make this argument in detail in my book The Abolition of White Democracy). The group that makes up this alliance is defined as "white." It acts like a club: its members enjoy certain privileges, so that the poorest, most wretched members share, in certain respects, a status higher than that of the most esteemed persons excluded from it (Ignatiev and Garvey 1996). Membership in the white "club" is dynamic and determined by existing membership. Richard Wright once said, "Negroes are Negroes because they are treated like Negroes" (Wright 1957, 148). Similarly, whites are whites because they are treated like whites. The treatment one receives in a racial order defines one's race rather than the other way around: you are not privileged because you are white; you are white because you are privileged. Slaves and their descendants have typically been the antithesis of this club, but various other groups have occupied the subordinate position in the racial binary, including Native Americans, Latinos/as, Chinese Americans, and others. Some, such as Irish and Jewish immigrants, started out in the subordinate category but over time successfully became white (Ignatiev 1995, Brodkin 1999). Others, such as Mexican American elites in California in the nineteenth century, started out as white but lost their superior status and were thrown into the not-white group (Almaguer 1994).

This system of racial oppression has been central to the maintenance of capitalist hegemony in the United States. If, as Marx and Engels argue in The Communist Manifesto, capitalism tends to bring workers together by teaching them how to cooperate, and if this cooperation has revolutionary tendencies ("what the bourgeoisie produces, above all, are its own gravediggers"), then capitalists need to break up the very cooperation that their system of production creates. [2] Now, different societies have developed different ways of disrupting class solidarity, often by giving advantage to one set of workers over others. Perhaps in Turkey it's through the subordination of the Kurds, perhaps in Saudi Arabia it's through the subordination of women, perhaps in Bolivia it's through the subordination of the indigenous population, perhaps in Western Europe it's through social democracy. In the United States, it has been through the racial order. The wages of whiteness have undermined the solidarity that the working class otherwise develops daily in its activities. It has fundamentally shaped other hierarchies, such as gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and religion, refracting them through its prism. In so doing, it has contributed to making capitalism seem like "common sense," even to many workers (particularly white ones) who stumble under its burdens.

The racial order, then, is not merely one form of hierarchy among others. It is a form of hierarchy that shapes and organizes the others in order to ensure capitalist accumulation. Morally, it is not more evil than other forms of domination, but politically it has played a more central role in organizing American society. Strategically speaking, then, one would think that it would be a central target of American anarchist analysis and strategy. Curiously, though, this has not been the case.

Between Infoshops and Insurrection

It is surprising how little thought the contemporary American anarchist scene has given to strategy. Broadly speaking, it upholds two loose models that it presents as strategies and repeats over and over with little self-reflection or criticism. I call these models infoshops and insurrection.

An infoshop is a space where people can learn about radical ideas, where radicals can meet other radicals, and where political work (such as meetings, public forums, fundraisers, etc.) can get done. In the infoshop strategy, infoshops and other "autonomous zones" model the free society. Building "free spaces" inspires others to spontaneously create their own, spreading "counterinstitutions" throughout society to the point where they become so numerous that they overwhelm the powers that be. The very creation of anarchist free spaces has revolutionary implications, their proponents argue, because it can lead to the "organic" (i.e. spontaneous, undirected, nonhierarchical) spreading of such spaces throughout society in a way that eventually challenges the state.

An insurrection is the armed uprising of the people. According to the insurrection strategy, anarchists acting in affinity groups or other small informal organizations can engage in actions that encourage spontaneous uprisings in various sectors of society. As localized insurrections grow and spread, they combine into a full-scale revolution that overthrows the state and capital and makes possible the creation of a free society. [3]

Infoshops serve very important functions and any movement needs such spaces. Likewise, insurrection is a focal event in any revolution, for it turns the patient organizing of the movement and the boiling anger of the people into an explosive confrontation with the state. The problem is when infoshops and insurrection get taken as revolutionary strategies in themselves rather than as part of a broader revolutionary movement. In the infoshops model, autonomous spaces become the movement rather than serving it. In the insurrection model, spontaneous upheaval replaces the movement by equating insurrection with revolution rather than seeing it as but one part of the revolutionary process. The infoshops and insurrection models, in other words, both misunderstand the process of social transformation. Radical change may be initiated by spontaneous revolts that are supported by subterranean free spaces, but these revolts are almost always the product of movement building.

Social movements are central to radical change. The classical anarchists understood this, for they were very concerned to build working class movements, such as Bakunin's participation in the International Working Men's Association, Berkman and Goldman's support for striking workers, Lucy Parson's work in the International Working People's Association, and the Wobblies' call for "One Big Union." To be sure, they also built free spaces and engaged in "propaganda by the deed," but these were not their sole or even dominant activities. They did them in order to build the anarchist movement, not as a substitute for movement building.

Yet surprisingly much of the contemporary anarchist scene has abandoned movement building. In fact, the infoshops and insurrection models both seem to be designed, in part, to avoid the slow, difficult, but absolutely necessary work of building mass movements. Indeed, anarchist publications like Green Anarchy are explicit about this, deriding movement building as inherently authoritarian.

A revolution is not an infoshop, or an insurrection, or creating a temporary autonomous zone, or engaging in sabotage; it cannot be so easy, so "organic," so absent of political struggle. A revolution is an actual historical event whereby one class overthrows another and (in the anarchist ideal) thereby makes it possible to abolish all forms of oppression. Such revolutions are the product of mass movements: a large group of people organized in struggle against the state and/or other institutions of power to achieve their ends. When movements become powerful enough, when they sufficiently weaken elites, and when fortune is on their side, they lead to an insurrection, and then perhaps a revolution. Yet in much of the anarchist scene today, building free spaces and/or creating disorder are regarded as the movement itself rather than components of one. Neither the infoshops nor insurrection models build movements that can express the organized power of the working class. Thus, the necessary, difficult, slow, and inspiring process of building movements falls through the cracks between sabotage and the autonomous zone.

The strategy of building autonomous zones or engaging in direct action with small affinity groups that are divorced from social movements assumes that radicals can start the revolution. But revolutionaries don't make revolutions. Millions of ordinary and oppressed people do. Anarchist theory and practice today provides little sense of how these people are going to be part of the process, other than to create their own "free spaces" or to spontaneously join the festivals of upheaval. Ironically, then, the infoshops and insurrection approaches lead many anarchists to take an elitist approach to politics, one in which anarchists "show the way" for the people to follow, never realizing that throughout history, revolutionaries (including anarchists) have always been trying to catch up to the people, not the other way around.

Movement Building and the Racial Order

Which brings us back to the racial order. The abandonment of movement building by the bulk of the contemporary American anarchist scene has led it to ignore the most important and radical political tradition in the United States: the Black freedom movements against slavery, segregation, and other forms of racial oppression.

The intellectual tradition of American anarchism has always looked more toward Europe(and sometimes Mexico) than the United States. American anarchists know more about the Paris Commune, the Kronstadt rebellion, the Mexican Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, Paris 1968, the German Autonomen, and the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas than they do about the abolitionist movement, Reconstruction, the Sharecroppers Union, the civil rights movement, or the Black/Brown/Red power movements. It's not that American anarchists and history are ignored-Haymarket, Berkman, Parsons, de Cleyre, Goldman, Bookchin, and Zerzan all have their place in the anarchist pantheon-but these persons and events are curiously detached from an understanding of the social conditions that produced them, especially the racial order that has dominated U.S. history. (One consequence of this European focus, I suspect, is that it has contributed to the predominantly white demographic of the contemporary anarchist scene.)

The ignorance of Black freedom movements is so profound that even anarchistic tendencies within them get ignored. Nat Turner led a slave uprising in 1831 that killed over fifty whites and struck terror throughout the South; it should clearly count as one of the most important insurrections in American history. Historians often describe William Lloyd Garrison, a leader of the abolitionist movement, as a "Christian Anarchist" (e.g. Perry 1973), yet he is almost never included in anarchist-produced histories. The Black-led Reconstruction government in South Carolina from 1868-1874, which Du Bois dubbed the "South Carolina Commune," did far more toward building socialism than the Paris Commune in 1871 ever did. Ella Baker's anti-authoritarian critique of Martin Luther King Jr. encouraged young civil rights workers to create their own autonomous and directly democratic organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), arguably the most important direct action civil rights group. Further, the racial consciousness produced by these struggles has often been broader, radical, and international than the consciousness produced by other U.S. struggles, even if it describes itself as "nationalist" (See Robin Kelley's great book Freedom Dreams for more on this). Yet these persons and events curiously form no part of the anarchist scene's historical tradition. [4]

In sum, the Black freedom struggles have been the most revolutionary tradition in American history yet the anarchist scene is all but unaware of it. I suggest that there is more to learn about anarchism in the U.S. from Harriet Tubman, Abby Kelley, Nate Shaw, Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, James Forman, Angela Davis and Assata Shakur than from Proudhoun, Kropotkin, Bakunin, Berkman or Goldman. There is more to learn from abolitionism than Haymarket, more from Reconstruction than the Spanish Civil War, more from the current social conditions of Black America than the global South. To see this, however, requires modifying the critique of hierarchy so that it can explain how forms of domination are themselves organized. It requires abandoning the infoshops and insurrection models for a commitment to building movements. It requires looking to Mississippi and New Orleans more than Russia or Paris.

This is not to say that American anarchism has been completely silent on race. The anarchist critique of white supremacy began in the 1980s and '90s, with the work of Black anarchists such as Kuwasi Balagoon and Lorenzo Komboa Ervin, the journal Race Traitor (which was sympathetic to the anarchist scene and did much to develop it intellectually regarding race), and anarchist organizations such as Love and Rage, Black Autonomy, Anarchist People of Color, and the anarchist-influenced Bring the Ruckus. Not coincidentally, these organizations also tend or tended to emphasize movement building rather than infoshops or insurrection. It is this tradition that influences my analysis here. But it is hardly a dominant perspective in the anarchist scene today.

After the Berlin Wall

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many anarchists were confident that anarchism would fill the void left by state communism and once again become the dominant ideological challenge to liberalism like it was before the Russian Revolution. This confidence, even exuberance, was on display throughout the U.S. anarchist scene in publications such as Anarchy, Fifth Estate, and Profane Existence; in the creation of new organizations such as the Network of Anarchist Collectives; and in the burst of anarchist infoshops opening up in Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, D.C., New York, and elsewhere.

It was an exciting time. Yet anarchism never filled the void. It never captured the hearts and minds of ordinary people. A similar optimism followed the uprising in Seattle in 1999. Anarchists again confidently predicted the emergence of a new, powerful movement. Yet once again, it didn't happen. Today anarchism in the U.S. is in about the same place it was in 1989: a static ideology and a loose scene of largely white twenty-somethings, kept together by occasional gatherings, short-lived collectives, the underground music scene, and a handful of magazines and websites.

What went wrong in 1989 and 1999? Why hasn't anarchism filled the void left by the collapse of communism? Why hasn't anarchism grown as a movement and a philosophy? Most of the answer, no doubt, lies in the fact that anarchists grossly underestimated the power of capitalism and liberalism. All socialist ideologies lost popularity with the fall of the Soviet Union, since there no longer seemed to be a viable, "actually existing" alternative to capitalism. Capitalism and liberalism appeared invincible and the world system seemed to be at "the end of history." September 11, 2001, brought a new antagonist to global capital - religious fundamentalism - but it hardly represents a libertarian alternative. World events, in other words, smothered libertarian socialism between neoliberalism and fundamentalism.

But part of the problem, I have suggested, lies with anarchism itself. The failure to develop a theory of U.S. history that recognizes the centrality of racial oppression, combined with a related failure to concentrate on building mass movements, has contributed to anarchism's continued marginalization.

But what if this was to change? What if American anarchists went from building infoshops and plotting insurrections to building movements, particularly movements against the racial order? (They could still build free spaces and encourage insurrection, of course, but these efforts would be part of a broader strategy rather than strategies in themselves.) What if anarchists, instead of concentrating on creating "autonomous zones" on the U.S.-Mexico border, as some have tried to do, worked to build movements in resistance to anti-immigrant laws?

What if anarchists, instead of planning (largely ineffective) clandestine direct actions with small affinity groups, worked to build movements against the police, who are at the forefront of maintaining the color line? What if anarchists, in addition to supporting jailed comrades, worked with family members of incarcerated people to organize against prisons? What if anarchists stopped settling for autonomous zones and furtive direct actions and focused on undermining the cross-class alliance and on changing the "common sense" of this society?

The scene might just build a movement.

If you enjoyed this article we recommend these pieces discussing dual power and social movement strategy: " Active Revolution: Organizing, Base Building and Dual Power " and " Building Power and Advancing: For Reforms, Not Reformism "

This version of Olson's republished essay, including editor's notes and footnotes, is credited to Black Rose Anarchist Federation .

Works Cited

Almaguer, T. (1994) Racial Fault Lines: The historical origins of white supremacy in California, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bookchin, M. (1982) The Ecology of Freedom: The emergence and dissolution of hierarchy , Palo Alto: Cheshire.
--- (1986) The Modern Crisis, Philadelphia: New Society.

Brodkin, K. (1999) How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America, Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Du Bois, W.E.B. (1992) Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 , New York: Atheneum.

Forman, J. (1985) The Making of Black Revolutionaries, Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks , New York: International.

Ignatiev, N. (1995) How the Irish Became White, New York: Routledge.

Ignatiev, N. and J. Garvey (1996) Race Traitor, New York: Routledge. (online journal content here)

Lowndes, Joe (1995) ' The life of an anarchist labor organizer ,' Free Society, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1994.

Kelley, R. (2002) Freedom Dreams: the Black Radical Tradition , Boston: Beacon.

Olson, J. (2004) The Abolition of White Democracy , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Perry, L. (1973) Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the government of God in antislavery thought, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Roediger, D. (1986) 'Strange Legacies: The Black International and Black America,' in Roediger, D. and F. Rosemont (eds.), Haymarket Scrapbook, Chicago: Kerr.

Thomas, P. (1980) Karl Marx and the Anarchists , London: Routledge.

Wright, R. (1957) White Man, Listen! Garden City: Doubleday.

Footnotes

The footnotes for this article have been updated with current links where available -Ed.

1. The critique of hierarchy and "all forms of oppression" is so pervasive in North American anarchist thought that a supporting quote here hardly seems adequate. These two examples are representative: 1) "We actively struggle against all forms of oppression and domination, including patriarchy, racism, anthropocentrism and heterosexism. We recognize and actively work against these systems of oppression that co-exist with capitalism, as well as against the ecocide of the planet" from " Principles of the Anti-Capitalist Network of Montreal ," 2007; and 2) "We stand against all forms of oppression: imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, fascism, heterosexism/homophobia/transphobia and the domination of human over human & human over all living things including mother earth" from Mission Statement, Revolutionary Autonomous Communities , Los Angeles, 2007. This perspective is also evident in the definitions of anarchism provided in numerous Anarchist FAQ sites. For examples, see "An Anarchist FAQ Page, version 12.2," [Cited version no longer available, more current version available here . -Ed]; " Anarchist Communism: An Introduction ," Anarchist FAQ ," and "Anarchy" at the Green Anarchist Info Shop [Text no longer available. -Ed].

2. For those who believe that the Manifesto is not an appropriately "anarchist" source to cite here, I remind them that Bakunin translated the Manifesto into Russian and worked on a translation of Capital. For more on the complicated relationship between anarchism and Marx see Paul Thomas's interesting book, Karl Marx and the Anarchists .

3. For examples of insurrectionary anarchism, see the magazines Willful Disobedience and Killing King Abacus .

4. Lucy Parsons and the Black Panthers tend to be the main links between Black struggles and American anarchists' historical sense. Parsons, a militant anarchist organizer in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and possibly a former slave, is a problematic connection to the Black tradition because although she fought lynching and racial discrimination, she was not part of the Black community and often denied her Black identity. (She was married to a white man, Albert Parsons, so this denial may in part have been to evade anti-miscegenation laws. See Lowndes 1995 and Roediger 1986.)

Many anarchists fetishize the Panthers because they seem to fit both the infoshops and insurrection models (i.e. men and women with guns serving breakfast to Black children), but this position tends to idealize the Panthers rather than critically evaluate and integrate their experience into the anarchist tradition.

Peter Kropotkin's Anarchist Critique of Capitalism

By Jon Bekken

Peter Kropotkin devoted a major part of his prolific anarchist writings to two related themes: examining the actual workings of capitalist economies and developing the broad outlines of an anarchist-communist society. Kropotkin was not satisfied to merely assert that a free society was possible, he sought to show how such a society could be constructed from the materials at hand - realizing that a revolutionary movement that failed to consider the problems of production and distribution would quickly collapse. This installment outlines Kropotkin's critique of capitalist political economy.

Economic Doctrine

For Kropotkin, the purpose of political economy was to study society's needs and the means available (either currently in use, or which could be developed with present knowledge) to meet them.

"It should try to analyze how far the present means are expedient and satisfactory … [and] should concern itself with the discovery of means for the satisfaction of these needs with the smallest possible waste of labor and with the greatest benefit to mankind in general." [1]

It was this task that Kropotkin took on.

Rather than engage in the abstract theorizing that dominated, then as now, the field, he carried out detailed studies of the agricultural and industrial techniques practical in his day (whether they were in general use or not) and their capacity to meet human needs.

Unlike most economists, Kropotkin insisted on subjecting economic theories to the same rigorous inquiry he would apply to any "scientific" theory:

"When certain economists tell us that "in a perfectly free market the price of commodities is measured by the amount of labor socially necessary for their production," we do not take this assertion on faith …. We not only find most of these so-called laws grossly erroneous, but maintain also that those who believe in them will themselves become convinced of their error as soon as they come to see the necessity of verifying the[m] … by quantitative investigation."

While there certainly was a relationship between the price of commodities and the amount of labor necessary for their production, Kropotkin argued, they were by no means proportional to one another (as the Labor Theory of Value would imply). Nor had socialist economists troubled themselves to investigate whether or not the theory was true by actually gathering data to test the alleged relationship. Anyone who took the trouble to engage in such an investigation would quickly learn that the theory was false. We need only consider the price of oil or gold to realize that these prices are set not by the amount of labor power required to extract and process them, but rather by external market and social conditions. Most so-called economic laws, Kropotkin concluded, were mere suppositions. And although socialist economists "criticize some of these deductions … it has not yet been original enough to find a path of its own." [2]

Thus, when Marx argued against Proudhon that all products exchanged at (or, at least, fluctuated around) their labor value, he was implicitly arguing for what has been called the Iron Law of Wages (though Marx later refuted himself by conceding that union activity could decrease the level of exploitation). The Socialist Party of Great Britain and similar tendencies are wholly correct when they maintain that a Marxian analysis requires that all commodities- including labor power-are valued under capitalism at the cost of their reproduction, which in turn is determined by the most-productive available methods. (Thus a shirt that takes 60 minutes to make by hand or five minutes to make by machine sells for the same price on the world market.)

There is, of course, an element of truth to this-which is why the theory was widely accepted by the labor movement. But, as we shall see, it mistakes an association for a causal relationship. The commodity theory of labor would indicate that only by increasing productivity can workers make possible an improved standard of living, and only through socialist revolution can those possible improvements be actually realized. (Otherwise, the benefits merely accrue to the capitalists and their underlings.)

This doctrine leads inevitably to the conclusion that wage struggles are essentially a waste of time and energy (though workers, through hundreds of years of struggle, have proved the opposite), and that the only alternative to competing against each other into ever-greater immiseration is a state-managed, planned economy which can determine labor values and ensure their equitable distribution. But this doctrine is wholly false. I turn, below, to Kropotkin's proof that wage levels have nothing to do with the cost of reproduction. But the essential point is that wage levels, like the price of all commodities, are set not by their cost of production or the amount of labor they require, but by the relative economic, military and social power held by the respective parties. Monopolies, cartels, police clubs, prisons, labor organization, co-operative associations-these and other power relationships skew the relative "value" of commodities, or at least of the price that can be gotten for them. (And it really matters very little whether a canteloupe has a theoretical, labor-derived value of 25 cents if all the stores charge a dollar.)

Capitalism Not Productive

Like most socialists, Kropotkin initially assumed that an abundance of goods was being produced-and thus that the primary problem facing socialists was arranging their distribution. But when Malatesta suggested that this could not be true, Kropotkin investigated the matter, and found that (quoting Malatesta):

"this accumulation of products could not possibly exist, because the bosses normally only allow for the production of what they can sell at a profit … Some countries were continually threatened by shortages."

In fact, there was only enough food on hand in most major cities to sustain the population for a few days. Yet upon further investigation, Kropotkin established that the shortages, economic crises and general distress endemic to his age (and which continue to this day) did not result, as was widely believed, from overpopulation, poor soil, or other such material causes. Rather, they resulted from a failure to utilize the means already at hand to meet society's needs. [3]

Kropotkin presented his findings in Fields, Factories and Workshops- an anarchist classic that proved that people using then-existing technologies could meet all their needs with just a few months of labor per year. Space precludes anything more than the briefest summary of a volume with which every anarchist should have long since made themselves familiar.

He demonstrated that the technical means then existed to produce abundant and healthful food with relatively little effort or expense (a vision quite distinct from today's factory farms-the precursors of which already existed, but which, he noted, destroyed the soil for generations to come, as well as displacing people who might otherwise derive a comfortable living from the land). Contrary to many economists, Kropotkin argued for decentralizing agriculture and industry, noting that huge industrial establishments were both less common than generally believed, and established less to realize largely dubious economies of scale than to facilitate managerial control. The doctrine of national specialization or competitive advantage±then coming into prominence, and which has since been used as an excuse to ravish "third world" economies-was demonstrably harmful to the interests of the population. (As is well known to peasants compelled to grow coffee beans and sugar cane on land that could otherwise feed their families.) If the debilitating influences of capitalist control and ignorance could be ended, abundance for all was well within reach.

"All this has been proved … despite the innumerable obstacles always thrown in the way of every innovative mind …. For thousands of years … to grow one's own food was the burden, almost the curse, or mankind. But it need be so no longer … To grow the yearly food of a family, under rational conditions of culture, requires so little labor that it might almost be done as a mere change from other pursuits … And again, you will be struck to see with what facility and in how short a time your needs of dress and of thousands of articles of luxury can be satisfied, when production is carried on for satisfying real needs rather than for satisfying shareholders …" [4]

And yet, everywhere workers lived in misery. Contrary to the teachings of every economic school, Kropotkin argued that overproduction was far from a problem:

"Far from producing more than is needed to assure material riches, we do not produce enough …. If certain economists delight in writing treatises on over-production. and in explaining each industrial crisis by this cause, they would be much at a loss if called upon to name a single article produced by France in greater quantities than are necessary to satisfy the needs of the whole population …. What economists call over-production is but a production that is above the purchasing power of the worker, who is reduced to poverty by capital and State …" [5]

Only exploiters, he concluded, were in abundant supply. Today, 94 years later, there may well be overproduction of some goods (nuclear weapons, toxic chemicals, and products that must almost immediately be replaced)-but it is just as obscene today to talk of, for example, an overproduction crisis in agriculture when millions face immediate starvation.

Thus, rather than celebrating capitalism's development of society's productive capacity, as Marxists do, Kropotkin demonstrated that capitalism resulted in chronic underproduction and deprivation. Capitalists not only do not equitably distribute the fruits of our production, the entire development of technology is distorted by their short-term profit calculations. Employers faced with the possibility of new labor-saving technologies, for example, often move to drive down labor costs rather than invest in developing the means of production (their historic role, according to Marx). The Social Revolution, then, would not merely expropriate the means of production developed by the capitalists-it would be forced to rapidly develop those means in order to meet even the most basic social needs.

Fortunately, the means for doing so have long been in place, and workers are more than capable of meeting the challenge.

Wage Slavery

Like all socialists, Kropotkin recognized the self-evident truth that workers work for the employing class because they are forced to-without their weekly wages they and their families must starve.

"Whence come the fortunes of the rich[?] A little thought would suffice to show that these fortunes have their beginnings in the poverty of the poor. When there are no longer any destitute there will no longer be any rich to exploit them …" [7]

If people had the means to support themselves-if they were capable of meeting their daily needs without hiring out their labor-no one would consent to work for wages that must inevitably be (if the capitalist is to derive any profit) a mere fraction of the value of the goods they produce. Even an independent artisan, the labor aristocracy of Kropotkin's day, could not hope to do better than to support his family and put together an (almost certainly inadequate) pittance for his old age, should he rely on his own effort and diligence:

"Assuredly this is not how great fortunes are made. But suppose our shoemaker … takes an apprentice, the child of some poor wretch who will think himself lucky if in five years time his son has learned the trade and is able to earn his living. …

Meanwhile our shoemaker does not lose by him; and if trade is brisk he soon takes a second, and then a third … If he is keen enough and mean enough, his journeymen and apprentices will bring him in nearly a pound a day over and above the product of his own toil … He will gradually become rich … That is what people call "being economical and having frugal temperate habits."

At bottom it is nothing more nor less than grinding the face of the poor." [8]

Today, to be sure, workers have after a hundred years succeeded in improving their condition-and the apprentice system, already declining in Kropotkin's time, has all but disappeared. But saving one's earnings is no more the route to real wealth than it ever was-at best workers can hope to buy a house, afford some time off from the hated job, and put a little money aside for retirement or hard times. To become wealthy, in economic term, requires exploitation-either directly, from workers' labor, or indirectly, by exploiting workers' need for the necessities of life.

Under capitalism, "the harder a man works the less he is paid." But the solution to this manifest injustice could not be found in reversing this equation-in payment according to the service each renders to society. For who is to determine the value of another's service?

"We know what reply we shall get … The bourgeois economists-and Marx too-will be quoted … to prove that the scale of wages has its raison d'etre, since the "labor power" of the engineer will have cost society more than the "labor power" of the laborer …

[But] the employer who pays the engineer twenty times more than the laborer makes the following simple reckoning: if the engineer can save him a hundred thousand francs a year on his production costs, he will pay the. engineer twenty thousand. And when he sees a foreman, able to drive the workers and save ten thousand francs in wages, he loses no time in offering him two or three thousand .. He parts with a thousand francs where he counts on gaining ten thousand, and this in essence is the capitalist system.

So let no one come up with this talk about production costs of the labor force, and tell us that a student who has cheerfully spent his youth at a university has a "right" to a salary ten times that of a miner's son who has been wasting away down a mine from the age of eleven." [9]

Wage differentials, whether under capitalism or in some future "socialist" society, must be condemned as unjust. Nor is it possible to determine a "just wage" based on an individual's contribution (even if such a system could be tolerated on ethical grounds, which it cannot). [10]

Production is Social

Production is not carried out by isolated individuals whose economic contribution can be isolated from that of each other worker so that its value can be determined. To illustrate this, Kropotkin turned to coal mining. (At that time, miners worked either individually or in gangs at the coal face, and were paid piece rate. In today's coal mines, of course, the issue of individual production would never arise.)

"One man controls the lift, continually rushing the cage from level to level so that men and coal may be moved about. If he relaxes his concentration for an instant the apparatus will be destroyed, many men killed, and work brought to a standstill. If he loses as little as three seconds at each movement of the lever, production will be reduced by 20 tons a day or more.

Well, is it he who renders the greatest service in the mine? Or is it perhaps that boy who from below signals to him when it is time to raise the cage to the surface? Is it instead the miner who is risking his life at every moment of the day … Or again is it the engineer who would miss the coal seam and have the miners dig into stone if he made the smallest error in his calculations? …

All the workers engaged in the mine contribute within the limits of their powers, their knowledge … and their skill to mine coal. And all we can say is that everybody has the right to live, to satisfy their needs, and even their fantasies, once the most pressing needs of all have been satisfied. But how can one estimate their labors?" [ll]

Obviously you can't-no one but a Marxist would attempt such an absurdity. And yet we still have not identified everyone who contributes to the production of that coal.

What of the construction workers who built the railways to the pit head, without which the coal would sit useless. What of the farmers, who raise the food the coal miners eat? What of those who build the machines that will bum the coal-without which coal is merely a rather useless dirt.

There was a time, Kropotkin concedes, when a family could support itself by agricultural pursuits, supplemented with a few domestic trades, and consider the com they raised and the cloth they weaved as products of their own, and no one else's, labor.

Even then such a view was not quite correct:

"there were forests cleared and roads built by common efforts … But now, in the extremely interwoven state of industry of which each branch supports all others, such an individualistic view can be held no more.

If the iron trade and the cotton industry of this country have reached so high a degree of development, they have done so owing to the parallel growth of thousands of other industries, great and small; to the extension of the railway system; to an increase of knowledge … and, above all, to the world trade which has itself grown up …

The Italians who died from cholera in digging the Suez Canal … have contributed as much towards the enrichment of this country as the British girl who is prematurely growing old in serving a machine at Manchester… How can we pretend to estimate the exact part of each of them in the riches accumulated around us?" [12]

And if there is no individual production, then how can private ownership of property be justified? Just as it is impossible to argue that anyone person created a lump of coal or a bolt of cloth, so it is impossible to justify private ownership of buildings or land. Homes, after all, are not built by their owners. Their construction is a cooperative endeavor involving innumerable workers in forestry, timber yards, brickyards, etc.

Moreover-and it is here that the enormity of the whole proceeding becomes most glaring-the house owes its actual value to the profit which the owner can make out of it.

"Now, this profit results from the fact that his house is built in a town … which the work of twenty or thirty generations has gone to render habitable, healthy, and beautiful." [13]

Like the ground they stand upon, buildings are a common heritage.

"For instance, take the town of Paris-a creation of so many centuries, a product of the genius of a whole nation … How could one maintain to an inhabitant of that town who works every day to embellish it, to purify it, to nourish it, to make it a center of thought and art-how could one assert before one who produces this wealth that the palaces adorning the streets of Paris belong in all justice to those who are the legal proprietors today …. It is by spoliation that they hold these riches!" [14]

That this remains so can readily be seen by examining the value of today's office buildings and shopping complexes. Without even the slightest improvements their value rise so long as the local economy prospers. But no sum of money invested in maintenance or beautification is sufficient to maintain their value when the local economy fails. For their value is not derived from the money invested, or from the bricks and mortar (and plastic, steel and cement) of which they are constructed. Not even the labor of the workers who build and maintain these modem temples to capital determines their value. Their value, in the final analysis, depends almost entirely upon the wealth and prosperity of the greater society. The most luxurious hotel built in a dying city will soon fade with its surroundings, while the meanest hovel increases in value as surrounding properties are developed.

We enrich each other-not only spiritually, but materially as well-as we work, contemplate and play together; and without the efforts of society as a whole, no one prospers.

Private Ownership Absurd

Private ownership, then, is not merely unjust±it is absurd. As early as 1873, when he was only beginning to become active in revolutionary circles, Kropotkin recognized that true equality was impossible under capitalism.

"It is desirable that a person beginning to work not enslave himself, not yield part of his labor, his strength, his independence … to private individuals whose arbitrariness always will determine how great that part should be, then it is necessary that private persons control neither the instruments of labor … nor the … earth … nor the means of existence during work … Thus we arrive at the elimination, in that future society whose realization we desire, of any personal property …" [16]

All property, no matter how it was created, must become the property of all, available to all who contribute to society through their labor. This was, and remains, necessary not only on grounds of social justice, but because all production is necessarily social.

Production for Needs

Kropotkin refused to separate his analysis of what was from what could be. He insisted on asking not merely if the present economic order worked on its own terms but whether:

"the means now in use for satisfying human needs, under the present system of … production for profits, [was] really economical?

Do they really lead to economy in the expenditure of human forces. Or are they not mere wasteful survivals from a past that was plunged into darkness, ignorance and oppression, and never took into consideration the economical and social value of the human being?" [16]

The "economical and social value of the human being," for Kropotkin, was the key to anarchist economics-to the building of a free society.

This was republished from Anarcho-Syndicalist Review .

Notes

[1] "Modern Science and Anarchism," p. 180. In: R. Baldwin (ed.), Kropotkin's Revolutionary Pamphlets (Dover. 1970).

[2] "Modem Science and Anarchism," pp. 177-79.

[3] Errico Malatesta, "Peter Kropotkin-Recollections and Criticisms." In: V. Richards (ed.), Malatesta: Life & Ideas. Freedom Press, 1977, p. 266. Malatesta went on to argue that Kropotkin's revised view was also wildly optimistic in its assessment of what could be realized. History, however has confirmed that agriculture can indeed produce much greater yields than was generally believed at the time-yields that in fact exceed those Kropotkin discussed.

[4] Fields, Factories and Workshops Tomorrow edited by Colin Ward. Freedom Press, 1985, pp 194-97. (This is an abridged and annotated version of Kropotkin's second edition, eliminating whole chapters of statistical data eclipsed in the 91 years since this work first saw print.)

[5] "Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal," pp. 126-27. In: Baldwin.

[7] "Expropriation," p. 162. In: M. Miller (ed, Selected Writings on Anarchism and Revolution. (MIT Press, 1970)

[8] ibid. p. 166.

[9] "The Wage System," pp. 101, 99. In: V. Richards (ed.), Why Work? Arguments for the Leisure Society. (Freedom Press, 1983)

[10] Many Marxists, and even some who consider themselves anarcho-syndicalists, continue to argue for maintaining the wage system in such a guise. Their arguments will be presented, and refuted, in the next installment. '

[12] "Anarchist Communism: 'Its Basis and Principles," p. 57. In: Baldwin.

[13] "Expropriation," p. 197. In: Miller.

[14] "Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Ideal," p. 125.

[16] Fields, Factories and Workshops, p. 193.

[16]

Fields, Factories and Workshops, p. 193.

Anarchism and Catholicism: An Introduction

By Chase Padusniak

Pictured: "Dorothy Day with Homeless Christ" by artist Kelly Latimore

"Anarchy," a scary word to many, doesn't get much use in Catholic circles. It seems downright frightening, either theologically or personally-it seems to threaten longstanding traditions of justice, not to mention the personal comfort and status of the West's largely comfortable and assimilated Catholic population. Witness, for example, the Catholic Encyclopedia :

"The theory of anarchy is against all reason. Apart from the fact that it runs counter to some of the most cherished instincts of humanity, as, for instance,family life and love of country, it is evident thatsociety without authority could not stand for a moment. Men whose only purpose would be to satisfy all their inclinations are by the very fact on the level of the animal creation. The methods they already employ in the prosecution of their designs show how the animal instincts quickly assert themselves."

Harsh words. Although the Encyclopedia is a useful resource in many ways, it was published in 1907, and, in some spots, is rather clearly a product of its time. I can say this, because, in spite of this absolute dismissal, anarchism became popular with more than a few Catholic thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Fr. Thomas Hagerty, Peter Maurin, Dom Léonce Crenier , Dorothy Day, Emmanuel Mounier, Ammon Hennacy, (arguably) Simone Weil, Fr. Ivan Illich, and Fr. Dan Berrigan all come to mind, and that's not even to mention famous examples from Orthodoxy and Protestantism such as Nikolai Berdyaev (along with Leo Tolstoy) and Jacques Ellul. Yet, unsurprisingly, the word continues to frighten us-comfortable as we are. In the interest of clarification, really of de-mystification, I'd like to ask: what is anarchism? And why did it appeal to so many Catholics?

First things first then: "anarchism" refers to a good number of traditions with a variety of commitments. For my purposes here, the central distinction is between individualist forms of anarchism-à la Max Stirner, Benjamin Tucker, and, I would argue, Murray Rothbard (insofar as his ideas can be called by the "a word" at all)-and communitarian forms, often associated with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin.

The former looks something like an extreme form of what most Americans would call "libertarianism" (though often with a Left-wing inflection, that is, with a greater interest in the liberating force of anarchism, as opposed to a preservation or shrinking of existing institutions). Donald Rooum, an advocate of Stirnerian Anarchism, defines his views (and thus anarchism more generally) thus :

"Anarchists believe that the point of society is to widen the choices of individuals. This is the axiom upon which the anarchist case is founded […]
Anarchists strive for a society which is as efficient as possible, that is a society which provides individuals with the widest possible range of individual choices."

Any social relationship in which one party dominates another by the use of threats (explicit or tacit, real or delusory) restricts the choices of the dominated party. Occasional, temporary instances of coercion may be inevitable; but in the opinion of anarchists, established, institutionalised, coercive relationships are by no means inevitable. They are a social blight which everyone should try to eliminate.

Anarchism is opposed to states, armies, slavery, the wages system, the landlord system, prisons, monopoly capitalism, oligopoly capitalism, state capitalism, bureaucracy, meritocracy, theocracy, revolutionary governments, patriarchy, matriarchy, monarchy, oligarchy, protection rackets, intimidation by gangsters, and every other kind of coercive institution. In other words, anarchism opposes governing, in all its forms.

Note that this sounds not unlike a more radical form of American libertarianism, a fully liberated force for human decision-making with limited interest in sociality. Rooum's formulation obviously comes from the Left-wing of the tradition (as do almost all forms of anarchism, again, with the possible exception of Rothbard's Anarcho-Capitalism). The goal, in short, is the freedom of the individual from all forms of coercion: governmental, institutional, and socio-ideological.

The other tradition emphasizes mutual-aid, community-building, and social organization in the absence of the State (here understood in its particularly modern sense, something all-encompassing and subordinating, with, as a result of technological development, near global reach-especially when one factors in supra-state organizations like the EU and the UN). Proudhon, for example, had this to say about his thought :

"All my economic ideas as developed over twenty-five years can be summed up in the words: agricultural-industrial federation. All my political ideas boil down to a similar formula: political federation or decentralization."

In another work, he's a bit longer winded :

"Power, instrument of the collective force, created in society to serve as mediator between capital and labor, has become inescapably enchained to capital and directed against the proletariat. No political reform can resolve this contradiction, since, according to the avowal of politicians themselves, such a reform could only end by giving more energy and expansion to power, and until it had overthrown the hierarchy and dissolved society, power would not be able to attack the prerogatives of monopoly. The problem consists, then, for the working classes, not in capturing, but in defeating both power and monopoly, which would mean to make rise from the bowels of the people, from the depths of labor, a power greater, an action more powerful which would envelop capital and the State and subjugate them."

Wayne Price updates the notion for today:

"There was a vision, called 'communism,' which was held by Kropotkin and other anarchist-communists in the 19th and early 20th century. Marx and Engels shared essentially the same goal. In the stateless, classless, society of communism, the means of production would be held in common (by the community), work would be carried out due to social motives rather than for wages, and consumer goods would be available to all according to their needs."

This division is the major one, though there exist various stripes within these. Some people in the communitarian category do not necessarily think the end goal is the communism in the sense intended by Marx; these people are often called "Mutualists," but the point is clear enough: anarchism can have an individual or a communal inflection. The former seek the abolition of the modern State (and almost all, if not all, institutions) in the name of individual freedom, in the name of personal liberation. The others seek a stateless society, though one that itself would have mutually-beneficial and deeply-communal forms of social organization.

To drive the point home, how different these varieties are, here's Max Stirner (an individualist anarchist) on Proudhon :

"Proudhon, like the Communists, fights against egoism. Therefore they are continuations and consistent carryings-out of the Christian principle, the principle of love, of sacrifice for something general, something alien."

Americans, given our history and libertarian tendencies, are by-and-large more familiar with the first sort. And that is a shame, since it's had much less impact on Catholic thinkers.

But why has social or communitarian anarchism had such an influence on Catholicism? The first step in understanding this phenomenon is a recognition of the development of Christian Personalism in the twentieth century. Often associated with Jacques Maritain and even Pope St. John Paul II, personalism places particular emphasis on the richness of individual human consciousness, really individual human existence. It's a complex term, defined in many ways, but for our purposes here, it might best be defined by the Encyclopædia Britannica :

"Personalism, a school of philosophy, usually idealist, which asserts that the real is the personal, i.e., that the basic features of personality-consciousness, free self-determination, directedness toward ends, self-identity through time, and value retentiveness-make it the pattern of all reality. In the theistic form that it has often assumed, personalism has sometimes become specifically Christian, holding that not merely the person but the highest individual instance of personhood-Jesus Christ-is the pattern."

To be very reductive, personalism came to influence a variety of Catholic figures, including Maurin, Mounier, and Day. They sought to find a philosophy that rejected both the hyper-individualistic and atomistic accounts given by liberalism as well as the collectivizing tendencies of Marxist Communism (I would add here that, like many figures in the early- and mid-twentieth century, these figures often misunderstood all socialisms to be Marxist, that is Soviet. Many failed to recognize the diversity of Marxian thought, let alone socialist thought as a greater whole. I have written about the many branches of such traditions before ).

Related to this personalist impulse was anarchism, another way of bridging the gap between social obligation and pure, unadulterated individualism. Anarchism could command both personal responsibility and communal commitment. Unlike right-libertarianism it did not only pay lip service to communal organization (i.e. it actually levied critiques at capitalism, the ultimate generator of consumerism, commercialism, individualism, etc. in the eyes of these men and women, that is, the ultimate source of institutionalized and cultural injustice) but actually theorized mutual aid, sociality, and commitment to community. On the other hand, it (in their eyes) unlike Soviet Marxism did not degrade the individual. As B. Jay Miller has written:

"Mounier wrote the concluding essay of the issue. He began with the subject of the workers movement which had preoccupied Esprit during the past years. He argued that anarchism was the most important intellectual tradition for the movement in France. He praised Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin for their sensitive analyses of the ills of modern society and argued that they always proceeded from personal experience rather than "scientific" abstractions as did the Marxists. Mounier saw the anarchists as moralists, much in the same spirit as the personalists of Esprit. He praised anarchist federalism as a viable alternative to the tyranny of bourgeois and revolutionary statism. He argued that the anarchists cast a jaundiced eye on further centralization and specialization of industry; work had a personal meaning beyond its economic function. The anarchists preached a reign of abundance and spontaneous liberty, more a celebration of life than a rationalization."

But the link was not merely political. The anarchist belief in personal, but not private, property resonated with the Church Fathers, again signaling a path that respected both human dignity and human sociality. Again, Miller:

"At this point Mounier compared Proudhon to the Fathers of the Catholic Church. They all agreed, so Mounier thought, that one could speak of property as theft in describing the private appropriation of riches from the communally produced superfluity of goods. In short, all goods beyond those satisfying personal needs should be subject to communal distribution; justice and charity demanded it. Proudhon and the Church Fathers knew that the health of the person and the community rested on such distribution."

It was not, however, simply Mounier who came to this connection. Here is Peter Maurin drawing on the same spirit (here mostly of personalism, though it is clear that he also read Proudhon):

Patrick Henry said.
"Give me liberty,
or give me death!"
What makes man
a man
is the right use
of liberty.

The rugged individualists
of the Liberty League,
the strong-arm men
of the Fascist State
and the rugged collectivists
of the Communist Party
have not yet learned
the right use
of liberty.
Read Freedom in the Modern World,
by Jacques Maritain.

And then, of course, there's Dorothy Day:

"Well, we [Catholic Workers] are very much interested in anarchist thought, because a man named Peter Kropotkin wrote a book called Fields, Factories, and Workshops, and he believed that all reform should begin from the bottom up, rather than from the top down […] They, through their organization and through their dedication to bettering conditions begin right where they are. In France, they would call it a personalist position."

And here is Day sounding almost exactly like Mounier above :

"How many thousands, tens of thousands [of prisoners], are in for petty theft, while the 'robber barons' of our day get away with murder. Literally murder, accessories to murder. "Property is Theft." Proudhon wrote-The coat that hangs in your closet belongs to the poor. The early Fathers wrote-[t]he house you don't live in, your empty buildings (novitiates, seminaries) belong to the poor. Property is Theft."

Lastly, an example from Ammon Hennacy. Here we can very clearly see how, for these men and women, anarchism represents both an affirmation of individual responsibility (central to the Christian tradition) alongside the necessary injunction to assist and, above all, love the poor :

"A Christian Anarchist does not depend on bullets or ballots to achieve his ideal; he achieves that ideal daily by the One Man Revolution with which he faces a decadent, confused and dying world."

Anarchism thus appealed to them precisely because, in its communitarian or social instantiation, it represented a via media, a way to minimize complicity in what Dorothy Day once ( may have) called "this rotten, decadent, putrid industrial capitalist system which breeds such suffering in the whited sepulcher of New York," even as it refused to deny the individual human being responsibility and dignity. Anarchism became a way of politicizing the personal conversion required of those who follow Christ, a way of resisting the bourgeois status quo without signing up to serve "the Party." For them "property" was indeed theft, not because it was wrong to own anything per se, but, because, as Aquinas wrote , echoing the Fathers:

"[W]hatever certain people have in superabundance is due, by natural law, to the purpose of succoring the poor. For this reason Ambrose [Loc. cit., Article 2, Objection 3 ] says, and his words are embodied in the Decretals (Dist. xlvii, can. Sicut ii): 'It is the hungry man's bread that you withhold, the naked man's cloak that you store away, the money that you bury in the earth is the price of the poor man's ransom and freedom.'"

Perhaps unexpectedly, it also became a way of practicing pacifism. Although many anarchists committed violent acts, in the hands of these Christians, the anarchist emphasis on mutual aid and responsibility (as opposed to the class war they saw in Soviet thought) led unequivocally to a non-violent way of life. Again, Ammon Hennacy:

"Despite the popular idea of anarchists as violent men, Anarchism is the one non-violent social philosophy.… The function of the Anarchist is two-fold. By daily courage in non-cooperation with the tyrannical forces of the State and the Church, he helps to tear down present society; the Anarchist by daily cooperation with his fellows in overcoming evil with good-will and solidarity builds toward the anarchistic commonwealth which is formed by voluntary action with the right of secession."

In support, again Dorothy Day :

"What do you mean by anarchist-pacifist?" First, I would say that the two words should go together, especially … when more and more people, even priests, are turning to violence, and are finding their heroes in Camillo Torres among the priests, and Che Guevara among laymen. The attraction is strong, because both men literally laid down their lives for their brothers. "Greater love hath no man than this." "Let me say, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love." Che Guevara wrote this, and he is quoted by Chicano youth in El Grito Del Norte."

One final point: many may say that the hierarchy of the Church is a clear example of why anarchism cannot be compatible with Catholicism. This, however, confuses several things. First, the modern State does not equal all forms of personal and communal governance (coops, credit unions, voluntary mutual-aid associations, etc.). Second, resistance to the intrinsically unjust capitalist state is an exercise in revolt against a-by definition-unjust authority. The Church, in the eyes of these anarchists, is not an unjust authority (but rather perhaps the most just authority that can exist). Lastly, this makes individualist anarchists out of those who were and are communitarians. Their rebellion again corrupt power structures is a rebellion against something secular; spiritual authority is another matter entirely;. In short, they did not simply hate authority for its own sake. A final Dorothy Day quotation ought to drive this home:

"I had a conversation with John Spivak, the Communist writer, a few years ago, and he said to me, "How can you believe? How can you believe in the Immaculate Conception, in the Virgin birth, in the Resurrection?" I could only say that I believe in the Roman Catholic Church and all she teaches. I have accepted Her authority with my whole heart. At the same time I want to point out to you that we are taught to pray for final perseverance. We are taught that faith is a gift, and sometimes I wonder why some have it and some do not. I feel my own unworthiness and can never be grateful enough to God for His gift of faith. St. Paul tells us that if we do not correspond to the graces we receive, they will be withdrawn. So I believe also that we should walk in fear, 'work out our salvation in fear and trembling.'"

As for those two other tenets to which the Communists subscribe, I still believe that our social order must be changed, that it is not right for property to be concentrated in the hands of the few. But I believe now with St. Thomas Aquinas that a certain amount of property is necessary for a man to lead a good life. I believe that we should work to restore the communal aspects of Christianity as well as some measure of private property for all.

I still believe that revolution is inevitable, leaving out Divine Providence. But with the help of God and by resorting to His sacraments and accepting the leadership of Christ, I believe we can overcome revolution by a Christian revolution of our own, without the use of force.

Put briefly, then, these brave men and women did not cultivate a tradition wholly alien to the Church; rather, they developed a via media, a commitment to the necessary Christian work of personal responsibility, but always and everywhere in service to the neighbor, always and everywhere filled with love for the poor and downtrodden, those forgotten by the system, those too often ignored (and to this day!) by the be-suited who sit in church on Sunday, only to pass the beggar outside right on by.

This was originally published at Patheos.

Which Red Flag is Flying?: Communist and Anarchist Solidarity in Afrin

By Marcel Cartier

As aspiring Sultan Erdogan's assault on the radical democratic experiment in Afrin is repelled by Kurdish, Arab, Turkmen and other nationalities who comprise a diverse, multi-ethnic region, two red flags are now flying at the front lines. One of these is of course of the occupying, fascist Turkish Republic that is fighting alongside Salafist Free Syrian Army (FSA) units, as NATO's second largest army has made common cause with some of the most regressive figures imaginable. The other flag represents a diametrically opposed tendency, that of the international movement of the working-class. This blood-soaked banner of revolution and the sacrifice of the proletarian struggle is held up with pride by the communist internationalists fighting alongside the People's and Women's Protection Units (YPG and YPJ) to defend the sovereignty of Afrin, of Syria, and the revolutionary ideals of the Rojava Revolution.

The Left and Syria's Proxy War

The complexities of Syria's war - now entering into the eighth year of bloodshed and unrelenting agony for the people of this land so connected with the genesis of civilization - have often been extremely challenging to navigate for an outside observer. For those on the radical left, this has been a conflict that has often exposed key differences between tendencies in terms of how to assess not only the region, but the world situation and character of international actors in what has been far more than simply a civil war.

In the initial days of the so-called Syrian 'uprising' in the Spring of 2011, the western left largely assessed events through the lens of optimism in light of the mass protests that had already swept Tunisia and Egypt. The overthrow of Hosni Mubarak, who had seemed untouchable for three decades, galvanized revolutionary forces in the west who were often far too accustomed to the idea that 'doing the impossible' was precisely that - impossible. History seemed to now be proving differently, showing that sometimes decades can be captured in mere days or weeks.

While some Trotskyist groups in the west had initially thrown their weight behind the mainstream 'Syrian Arab' opposition that was grouped around what became the 'Free Syrian Army', communists from more 'orthodox' parties (those who supported or at least defended the Soviet Union and socialist bloc until its final demise in 1991) tended to support the Syrian government and leadership on the basis of the country being a target of regime change attempts by the western imperialist powers, particularly the United States. (An illuminating example of this enduring fixation by Washington on establishing a client regime in Damascus can be seen in aa 1986 article by conservative commentator Daniel Pipes, who referred to Syria as the 'Cuba of the Middle East' due to its support for national liberation movements such as the Palestinian struggle -- what the U.S. would argue was support for 'terrorism').

Although the often bitter arguments that engulfed the western left in light of Syria's descent into war - occurring almost simultaneously with the NATO bombing of Libya and overthrow of the nationalist government of Muammar Gaddafi - led to an even more pronounced fragmentation of an already divided radical movement, it would be inaccurate to say that the dividing line was simply between 'pro Assad' and 'anti-Assad' forces.

At the time, this is how I assessed the situation myself - I refused to see the possibility of any 'third way' that went beyond the limitations of a very narrow dichotomy. This was itself evidence of the western left often having such an obsession with losing that we refuse to see beyond the bounds of what appears to be possible at the present juncture, no matter how limited and oppressive it may be. Daring to imagine has become something so abstract and remote that we cannot even begin to take it seriously.

The possibility of a 'third way' in Syria only became visible to most forces in the western metropoles after the declaration of autonomy in the northern areas of the country by Kurdish revolutionary forces of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) in the Spring of 2012. Unlike the 'Arab opposition' that declared Assad the primary enemy of their cause and turned their guns toward Damascus, the so-called self-administration that was formed in the areas known by Kurds as 'Rojava' (for 'west' Kurdistan) declared that it wasn't interested in 'regime change', although it did seek the democratization of the country along federal lines that would give recognition to Syria's multi-ethnic and diverse character. This led to a degree of cooperation with the Syrian state in agreeing de-facto lines of demarcation, with Syrian Arab Army forces pulling back from the areas that fell under the control of the People's and Women's Protection Units (YPG and YPJ) in Aleppo, for instance. In other circumstances, Assad repositioned his forces away from Northern Syria to fight rebels preoccupied with overthrowing his Government. Upon this vacuum left by Assad forces, Kurds announced their own administration body, built on the principles of radical democracy, gender equality and multi-ethnic harmony. Even with the declaration of self-administration, however, it wasn't really until the battle of Kobane in late 2014 that the Kurdish question in Syria emerged on the world stage.

Communists and The Rojava Revolution

During this heroic resistance to the fascism of the so-called Islamic State, a considerably higher degree of attention began to be given to the Kurdish question in Syria by not only the mainstream media, but understandably so by the western left. After all, it was the forces of the YPG and YPJ who espoused the most progressive, leftist politics of all of the military formations operating in the theatre of Syria's war.

Due to the ideology of the Rojava Revolution being linked with the theoretical points espoused by Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan in his 'new paradigm' - among them that the Leninist conception of revolution was outdated and that a 'non-state' system showed the path to a free, dignified and socialist society in the 21st century - this movement was deemed by many Marxist critics to be 'anarchist'. A considerable amount of support began to be given to the Rojava project by western 'libertarian socialists', many hostile to 20 th century socialist revolutions, and even the PKK's original orientation as a Leninist national liberation movement. This often put revolutionary Marxists and Leninists in a knee-jerk position of opposing the Rojava experiment, and often refusing to look into it in any considerable degree of detail.

However, a substantial number of Turkish communist organisations didn't take such a simplistic approach to the 'democratic confederalism' being offered by the PYD as an alternative to capitalist modernity in Syria and the region. For many of these Turkey-based formations and parties, Rojava was part national liberation movement, part radical, feminist, democratic experiment. Perhaps they didn't see it as explicitly 'socialist', but it was important to engage with and to participate in.

From 2012, the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (MLKP), until then operating primarily within Turkey's borders, began sending cadres to Rojava to defend the revolution. Among the MLKP fighters who joined the ranks of the YPJ was Ivana Hoffmann, a 19-year old German woman who had joined the party abroad and joined the Kurdish movement's caravan of martyrs when she was killed in March 2015. Ivana's example would serve as the basis for other internationalists to join not only the MLKP, but for the Party to push for the creation of an internationalist organization that would aim to build on the legacy of communists who had flocked to Spain to defend the Republic against Franco's fascism in the late 1930s.

In the summer of 2015, the International Freedom Battalion (IFB) was officially declared at a ceremony in Serekaniye. The show of leftist unity at the announcement of the IFB's formation is an important lesson for revolutionaries across the globe. Groups that had previously been at odds with each other in Turkey now joined hands in struggle. The United Freedom Forces (BOG), itself a coalition of leftist fighters from Turkey that had been declared the previous year, now joined the IFB on the initiative of the MLKP. There wasn't time nor the luxury of ideological squabbles preventing the unity of forces in the face of barbarism. Other groups that joined the IFB included the Turkish Communist Party/Marxist-Leninist (TKP/ML) and its armed wing TiKKO (Workers' and Peasants' Army of Turkey). Beyond the region, communists from Spain played a key role in the IFB's consolidation, with the Reconstruction Comunista (RC) sending cadres to fight in the spirit of solidarity their ancestors in the Spanish Republic knew all too well. This historical link also inspired Marxists from Britain to join the IFB under the banner of the Bob Crow Brigade, paying homage to a major figure in their country's trade union movement.

The Hammer and Sickle on the Frontlines at Afrin

Of course, the level of solidarity expressed with the Rojava Revolution by communists across the world - both in terms of events organized at home, as well as in those actually coming to Syria to be willing to give the ultimate sacrifice - isn't comparable in scope to the tens of thousands who volunteered to fight Francoism. Syria has been a far more complex and divisive war to grasp, on the one hand. On the other, the intervention of major foreign powers into the conflict, especially Russia and the United States, shifted the dynamics of solidarity with the Kurdish-led forces who were spearheading a women's revolution rooted in direct democracy. For many Marxists, military cooperation with the U.S. - 'tactical' or not - meant that at least explicit solidarity with the Rojava experiment was off the table.

However, the Turkish communist groups operating in Rojava seem to have navigated this relationship with great nuance and a spirit of critical solidarity. For sure, the presence of the United States within the borders of Syria is a nuisance at best for the fighters of groups such as the MLKP and TKP/ML. Based on my experiences on the ground in northern Syria, it is fair to say that for many fighters of the YPG and YPJ, that relationship is perceived the same way. However, the communist groups generally take a more critical line toward this cooperation than the Apoists (supporters of Abdullah Ocalan in the PYD and PKK and their umbrella organization, the Union of Kurdish Communities [KCK]).

Almost two weeks into Erdogan's misadventure in Syria, the hollowness of U.S. 'support' for the YPG and YPJ has been made blatantly obvious. This hasn't surprised the Kurdish movement in the least bit, as the writing already appeared on the wall for the U.S. to 'drop' the Kurdish forces after the liberation of Raqqa. Although still cooperating in Deir ez-Zor with the YPG, the tacit approval of Washington for Erdogan's bloody, genocidal incursion into Afrin has spelled out that although the U.S. and YPG may have had mutual, overlapping interests in Syria for the short-term, there was no more of a potential long-term unity that existed as there had been between the Soviet Union and western imperialists who united against Hitler's fascist aggression during the Second World War.

This should reveal to communists around the world that the fight to defend Afrin is a struggle to safeguard the basic principles of the oppressed, and their efforts in establishing an ecological, grassroots, feminist democracy. Marxists should support such a fight and vision of society, even if having some ideological critiques of the model of 'democratic confederalism'.

Fighters from the International Freedom Battalion are now flying the deep crimson flag emblazoned with a hammer and sickle at the frontlines in Afrin. Daring to defy Erdogan's neo-Ottoman aspirations in Rojava as they defied his government's fascistic and assimilationist policies in Turkey and Bakur (northern Kurdistan), Turkey's red militants fight shoulder to shoulder with their YPG, YPG, Syriac Military Council, and other progressive anti-fascist forces.

In an interview with ETHA News Agency, MLKP commander Viyan İsyan described why his Party is taking part in the resistance in Afrin, saying "This revolution is an example to the peoples of the Middle East. Our fundamental duty is to defend the Rojava revolution by any means necessary. The defence of the revolution and its gains will also carry the revolution to the peoples of the Middle East…Defending Afrin is defending honour. Defending Afrin is defending the future. Defending Afrin opens the way for other revolutions…We want them to not surrender to Erdoğan's fascism, we want them to set the streets on fire. We call them to press against the borders of Rojava. Because these borders are unnatural. We call our peoples to action. The resistance of Afrin is a historical resistance. We call on our peoples to uphold this historical resistance…We want it to be known that we will not abandon Afrin. The YPG/YPJ and the people of Afrin will not abandon Afrin. As communists, we will not abandon it. We are here until the end, no matter the cost. Victory will be ours."

Echoing the sentiment expressed by the MLKP, the TKP/ML vowed to crush Turkey's occupation and attempted stifling of the revolution by calling all oppressed people to the ranks of the resistance. In a video message, the Party's military formation TiKKO declared its role in fight against Erdogan, saying "In its attempt to occupy Afrin, the fascist and genocidal Turkish state has shown itself to be the enemy of the oppressed Kurdish, Arab and Turkmen peoples, and the working people as a whole. After being subjected to occupation and massacres by the ISIS fascists, the peoples of Rojava are now undergoing occupation and massacres at hands of the fascist Turkish state with the invading Turkish troops bombing villages and murdering innocent children and civilian workers."

The Critical Need for Internationalist Solidarity

At this moment in which the imperialist powers have made clear that they have no genuine regard for 'democracy', in which their support for NATO's second largest army has trumped any possible semblance of half-hearted support for a Kurdish radical movement that aims to sweep aside capitalism, the left needs to reassess its relationship to the Rojava Revolution.

Communists are taking part in the heroic resistance in Afrin, aiming to protect a society being reshaped along egalitarian lines. The spirit of internationalism which is present in this struggle isn't necessarily one of full ideological unity - there is plenty of struggle taking place within the Rojava Revolution between Apoists, communists, anarchists, and other leftist forces. Where the revolution is headed is being fiercely debated, but in an atmosphere of mutual solidarity and respect, not the hostility and narrow-mindedness that often permeates the leftist environments and movements in Europe and North America. This revolution's vibrancy and richness of diversity is being defended at the frontlines. This result of this struggle will have major ramifications for the future of the international communist movement, and for humanity more generally.

This was originally published at The Region .

What Is the Working Class?

By Kevin Van Meter

"The working class struggles against capitalism because its objective conditions of life force it to, not because it is educated to some "higher" consciousness by some outside force such as a political party. It would seem, also, that the struggle against capitalism includes all forms and levels of struggle, from individual to collective, from local to national (or international), from economic to political. In fact, it would be hard to conceive how the more general or radical forms of struggle, such as general strikes, factory occupations, or workers' councils, could occur without the preexistence of more limited forms of struggle: sabotage, local strikes, the organization of unions, and the like." [1]

-Martin Glaberman and Seymour Faber, Working for Wages: The Roots of Insurgency

Drawing on Autonomist Marxism, both in its American and European guises, the following excerpt from Guerrillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible (AK Press, 2017) offers a conception of the working class that seeks to augment vague definitions of class and reinvigorate class politics in contemporary US revolutionary movements. However, a substantive, broad, and grounded definition is insufficient in-itself. Rather, an expanded and enhanced conception of class will require a process of workers' inquiry and radical organizing to result in a strengthening of working class power vis-à-vis capitalism and the state-apparatus, or what autonomists call class recomposition. For the working class, as Glaberman and Faber's note, is already struggling and it is the role of the organizer, the revolutionary, the militant to encounter, record, amplify, and circulate these struggles.

[…] Autonomists define the working class as such: autonomous from both capitalism and the official organization of the Left [political parties, nonprofit organizations, progressive religious groups, foundations, etc.], broadly including all those who work under capitalism, based in relationships between workers rather than as a structural component of the economy or sociological category. Autonomists focus on the refusal of work and how the class is composed. Let us review each element in kind.

Workers' autonomy

"The working class," Glaberman and Faber suggest, "struggles against capitalism because its objective conditions of life force it to." [2] Since capitalism requires that individuals work for wages or access income through state or familial sources (partners and children access income indirectly through the wage earner), the working class must struggle against capitalism to obtain resources beyond its initial, meager wage. Class struggle emerges directly from the point of production of commodities, be it widgets or labor power, and in the battles around the length and intensity of the workday. But what does the working class confront?

Capitalists by definition control capital. Capital includes the means of production (tools, factories, raw materials, energy, etc.) and financial resources (money) that are part of the production cycle, which is set in motion in order to produce commodities. "The individual commodity," in Marx's assessment, "appears [as capitalism's] elementary form." [3] [Autonomist Harry Cleaver…] believes that "the generalized imposition of the commodity-form has meant that forced work has become the fundamental means of organizing society-of social control." [4] Since capitalists cannot create value with the means of production alone, even with automation and machinery, labor power must be employed in the production process. Labor power and means of production are brought together to act upon raw materials to produce commodities that contain both use-value (practical utility) and exchange-value (quantity of commodities that can be exchange for said commodity). Commodities are improved as labor power acts upon them, adding value to them in the process (which becomes surplus value). Then capitalists sell commodities in the sphere of circulation. The surplus value they obtain is the value produced by workers over and above the cost of production. And each commodity contains residue from deposited labor power, as if the commodity has captured bits of a worker's life force and energy in the production process. [5]

Marx's tenth chapter in Capital, volume 1, "The Working Day," provides the impetus for the focus on labor power: "Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labor-power he has bought from him. If the worker consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist."[6] In effect, without the deployment of labor power as living labor in the production process capitalism cannot produce commodities. To cite biblical scripture, "the blood is the life." [7] Thus, living labor is the principal, necessary force in the production process; it is the host that capital, as dead labor, must have in order to live. The working class can rob capitalists, become Sabbatarians, or living labor can escape capitalist command and expend itself in cooperative, common endeavors. In this sense, at the point of production, at the very moment that the commodity is being produced through the expenditure of human labor power, the working class as living labor is an independent force, in operation autonomous from capitalism. And there are other moments during which it breaks free of capitalist discipline and the imposition of work entirely.

Capitalism attempts to maintain control over labor power at the same time as it efficiently exploits workers' ability to work. [8] To extract surplus value and hence profit, capitalism must organize the means of production and raw materials (what Marx called constant capital) and labor power (variable capital) in appropriate ratios. Since constant capital is used up at a relatively consistent rate, capitalists must pay workers less than the value they transfer to commodities in the course of the workday. It is in capitalists' interest to deploy labor power efficiently, periodically using labor-saving technologies such as automation to decrease the number of workers needed or replacing skilled workers with machines and unskilled ones.

Marx argued that the workday could only "vary within certain limits" and that hence the struggle around the workday was grounded in working hours, a "normal working day," and wages due for the rent of labor-power. Capital's interest "is purely and simply the maximum of labor-power that can be set in motion in a working day. It attains this objective by shortening the life of labour-power" as part of its "unmeasured drive" to accumulate capital.[9] A conflict emerges over the length and intensity of the workday, what Marx called absolute and relative strategies for creating surplus value. Relative surplus value strategy covers both the efficient exploitation of labor power and the use of machinery and ways of reorganizing production to increase the intensity of the exploitation of labor power. At times the working class has been successful in limiting capitalism's absolute surplus value strategy (winning the eight-hour day and weekend) and addressing relative surplus value (preventing automation and the replacing of skilled workers with machines and unskilled ones). Additional conflicts erupt between the amount of time needed for workers to gain enough wages to ready themselves to work another day, in addition to how that time is spent, and the time capitalism rents the worker to produce surplus value. [10] At these points of conflict the working class is struggling against capitalist authority. But Marx is only speaking about commodities as products here. He does not adequately address a particularly important commodity for capitalism: that of labor power itself.

"In Marx's account," Federici argues, "No other work intervenes to prepare the goods the workers consume or to restore physically or emotionally their capacity to work. No difference is made between commodity production and the production of the workforce. One assembly line produces both. Accordingly, the value of labor power is measured by the value of the commodities (food, clothing, housing) that have to be supplied to the worker, to 'the man, so that he can renew his life process.'" [11]

In orthodox Marxist (and adjacent workerist traditions) the emphasis on the production cycle ignores the cycle of reproduction of labor power, which arguably is the most important commodity in the capitalist system. Autonomists since Wages for Housework focus not just on the production of widgets but on the commodity of labor power. While the reproduction of labor power might appear to be a realm of relative freedom in the privacy of the home, especially with the feminist initiatives that have sought to reorganize social reproduction along more cooperative lines, capitalism and the state apparatus have launched countless counterattacks (wage freezes and reductions, welfare cuts, etc.) to exert control over this sector.

For capitalism the working class is simply labor power. Cleaver argues in Reading Capital Politically that the "working class as working class-defined politically-exists only when it asserts its autonomy as a class through its unity in struggle against its role as labour-power. Paradoxically, then, on the basis of this distinction, the working class is truly working class only when it struggles against its existence as a class. The outcome … is not the creation of a pure working class after the revolutionary overthrow of capital but rather the dissolution of the working class as such. "[12]

Broadly defined working class

[There are three] ways that autonomists define the working class. First, the class can "craft new ways of being and new forms of social relations." [13] In this it can force capitalism and the state to develop along new lines in addition to causing crises in these systems. Second, the working class is the primary antagonist in class struggle rather than simply being reactive to capitalism, and it is autonomous from capital, the state, and the official organizations of the Left. There is also a third general attribute that requires attention.

Autonomists define the working class broadly to include not only those working for wages (waged workers) but also those who obtain income through state benefits (welfare recipients) or are striving to obtain wages or income (the unemployed, disenrolled welfare beneficiaries), those whose work is unwaged (including students and housewives), and those who work to directly obtain basic needs for subsistence (such as slaves and peasants). It is important to acknowledge that while slaves are included in the expanded definition of the working class, African slaves in the Americas, as black proletarians, to use W.E.B. Du Bois's apt phrase, had a fundamentally different relationship with capitalism due to their bondage. [14] And in the same sense, peasants and landowners comprise classes, as "peasants are exploited by capital in the sphere of production." [15] While slaves and peasants are not generally understood to be part of formal, normal class relations, at least to Americans, they have been incorporated into contemporary strategies for accumulating capital.

In effect, as Glaberman and Faber contend, "workers work for others, who control the means of production," which is a social relation, and, as the Zerowork collective clarified, the working class is " defined by its struggle against capitalism and not by its productive function."[16] That is, "from capital's perspective" the working class is only a "factor of production" but from a working-class perspective it is a dynamic and complex agent, capable of its own liberation.

To summarize: in addition to what is considered the traditional manufacturing base, the industrial proletariat, this expanded notion of the working class includes students, housewives, slaves, peasants, the unemployed, welfare recipients, and workers in the technical and service industries. Hence the working class is defined in relation to work -be it waged or unwaged, productive or reproductive, material, immaterial, or affective-and to one another. But of course the owners of the means of production, as the owners of capital (i.e., capitalists), and their representatives-overseers, supervisors, bosses, managers-are directly defined by their relation to work, whereas bureaucrats, tax collectors, police, and security guards play key roles in disciplining the workforce and hence impose work indirectly upon the class as a whole. To differentiate between social classes, the specific relation to work needs to be identified. And a few issues need to be resolved: How is the working class composed? How and in what way is the working class "defined by its struggle against capitalism"?

Is the working class a structure or category?

What Autonomous Marxists and others are trying to accomplish with the concept of the working class is to explain the complexities of a set of human behaviors using a social classification. The time, energy, and very lives of the majority of the human species over the past five hundred years have been converted into labor power. Some individuals purchase this labor power, others manage and discipline it, and still more reproduce it. In a recent attempt at a definition of "class," Joanna Brenner offered, "Although the concept of class has not dropped from use, its contemporary meaning has become restricted to describing social stratification. Even in this sense, in which 'class' denoted a hierarchy of 'differences' (e.g., of income, education, culture), there is no agreed-upon meaning of class categories."[17] To delineate social stratification-working, middle, and upper class, with sub-demarcations such as lower-middle class-produces definitional and empirical problems. In this sense, class becomes an unchanging, fixed structural element in the economy or a sociological category applied universally to complex relations. Conceptions of class can be applied too rigidly or too vaguely as a form of individual prejudice.

Notions of class privilege and classism can make class seem just another item on the list of constraints imposed upon individuals. Class, Brenner writes, "risks being enveloped in a liberal discourse that focuses on individual transformation (e.g., 'recognizing one's privilege') while advancing moral imperatives (e.g., achieving more equal relations among people)."[18] Hence a contingent concept of class that considers the working class's level of integration into the production process must account for "historical specificity and try to account for the struggles over class." [19]

To address these problems anarchists and Marxists have argued that class is about power. In a similar fashion, Kathi Weeks postulates in The Problem with Work that class "is not a sociological category but a political one, and its boundaries depend on its particular composition at specific times and places." [20]

Refusal of work

The image of the working class comprising manual factory workers, usually white and male, disappears upon recognizing the refusals of slaves, peasants, prisoners, housewives, students, and office and service workers. The stereotype has always been a fiction, a narrow misrepresentation that has historically limited the potential of class struggle. According to autonomists, the dynamic, broadly defined working class becomes a class, a social actor, in relation to work only insofar as it is refused. The class makes itself through refusal and self-activity, against and beyond capitalism's attempt to make workers into commodities, nothing but labor power and potential labor power. Hence autonomists are interested in how the working class is composed vis-à-vis its struggles. That is, through the refusal of work, the working class becomes autonomous from capitalist command, the state apparatus, the party, and the union. At times these refusals force capitalism to develop new technologies and strategies to attack working-class power. Crises erupt within capitalism, or a "new era of social relations" is instituted as capitalism is restructured (as happened after the US Civil War, during the Green Revolution, and with the onslaught of "neoliberalism"). [21]

Refusal specifically refers to acts of ignoring, disobeying, circumventing, countering, rejecting, or pilfering by employed and unemployed, waged and unwaged, and productive and reproductive workers, as well as those whose work is affective and immaterial. These workers neither control their work nor choose the what, when, where, and how of their work until they refuse it or decide to reorganize capitalist relations entirely.

However, questions arise: What about those who accept the regime of work or even relish it? Aren't there some workers who don't resist? What about structural unemployment? How can you refuse work when there isn't any? The concept of the refusal of work draws our attention to phenomena and is not a claim about all workers or all people everywhere. Within the social aggregate of the working class, as with any population, there is a diversity of opinions, experiences, and desires. The working class becomes more than labor power for capitalism when it refuses the imposition of work. Moreover, work is imposed on two scales: by the boss on the individual worker, as well as on the sector of the population that must access work to obtain income in a capitalist society. The individual worker must perform tasks in the course of the workday under the direction of the boss, but work is also imposed upon employed, unemployed, and those of piecemeal or precarious employment due to the need to obtain money to survive. The inability to access work and hence a wage is part of the imposition of a regime of work that requires an "unemployed reserve army of workers" or "relative surplus population." [22] To refuse work as an unemployed person is to refuse the imposition that requires one to receive a wage to obtain the necessities of life. Moreover, the refusal of work is not necessarily a conscious activity. Employees routinely work to rule (follow rules in minute detail) in order to slow down productivity, take longer than allowed lunch breaks, and ignore instructions from a supervisor in order to accomplish a work task. Each of these is an act of resistance.

If the working class is defined in part by its refusal of the imposition of work, then what can be said of those bosses and bureaucrats who impose work in one instance and refuse it in the next? Are these too part of the working class? The IWW adage that "the working class and employing class have nothing in common" is apropos here, and Wobblies exclude from membership those who have the power over wages and hiring or firing. In this definition an individual boss clearly imposes work upon individual workers, but bosses also impose work upon the general population as part of the aggregate capitalist class. Members of the working class, due to their position, have work imposed upon them that they cannot redistribute in the realm of production. (Historically, however, male workers were accustomed to redistributing work to wives, children, and unwaged workers performing the work of social reproduction. If working husbands' wages were cut, often wives were forced to do the same with less. Due to the struggles of women, gender-nonconforming people, and others against the patriarchal, nuclear family, this redistribution of household work has become less common.)

The working class becomes an active, possibly revolutionary subject, rather than simply an economic category or an inactive structural element in production, when it creates counter-communities and refuses work though everyday resistance, overt rebellions, and aboveground organizing. The working class as structure or category is made by capitalism, whereas the working class, in its own making, is a dynamic, active, and autonomous force.[23] But a worker's having relationships with other workers does not automatically include one in the class. If a worker is part of the structural imposition of work-not in the modest sense of setting schedules, taking breaks, or making minor production decisions but in the sense of imposing work and ensuring the effective exploitation of labor power-then they are not part of this autonomous class, regardless of relationships with other workers. Further, the relationships of the autonomous class are determined in situ: in relation to particular regimes of work, specific forms of resistance, and precise relationships between members of the class. The composition of the working class, where battle lines are drawn and positions are taken, is ascertained in the context of working-class struggle in particular times and spaces. Therefore, determining working class composition, its boundaries and limitations, in autonomist parlance begins with "reading the struggles" of the refusal of work and the kinds of relationships taking place therein, with due consideration to the divisions and forms of oppression.[24] In these contexts, the new society is established and recorded with the possibility of other arrangements of productive, reproductive, cooperative, and creative activities, ones that address real human needs and desires, can be forged.

Class composition

One of the larger questions before us, and which encompasses this definition of class, is how to understand everyday resistance under different regimes of power (potestas). Periodically systems are replaced with new forms and capitalism is reorganized, partly in attempts to attack working-class power (potentia). It is important to understand the relations of power, production, and social reproduction as capitalism and the state apparatus seek to coordinate, capture, and impose. To produce and expand upon an analysis of workers' activities, an approach has been developed from the perspective of the working class in struggle, that of class composition. "By political recomposition," the Zerowork collective states, "we mean the level of unity and homogeneity that the working class reaches during a cycle of struggle in the process of going from one political composition to another. Essentially, it involves the overthrow of capitalist divisions, the creation of new unities between different sectors of the class, and an expansion of the boundaries of what the 'working class' comes to include." [25]

In an article titled "Marxian Categories, the Crisis of Capital and the Constitution of Social Subjectivity Today," Cleaver grounds the concept of class in concrete social relations, and brings us closer to the contemporary period. Class composition, he writes, is "explicitly designed [by autonomists] to grasp, without reduction, the divisions and power relationships within and amongst the diverse populations on which capital seeks to maintain its domination of work throughout the social factory-understood as including not only the traditional factory but also life outside of it which capital has sought to shape for the reproduction of labor power."[26]

Autonomists begin with a workers' inquiry by "reading the struggles," recording everyday resistance and overt rebellions, as the working class creates new relationships and new subjectivities, escapes capitalist command (even temporarily), and is recomposed (and often decomposed) vis-à-vis its struggle with capitalism and the state apparatus. The working class politically recomposes itself through the refusal of work and the "craft[ing of] new ways of being and new forms of social relations." As the working class acts in its own interests it goes through a process of political recomposition. Then, as capitalism and the state attack working-class power, they seek to decompose the class through cutting wages, undermining union organizing efforts and worker legal protections, instituting technological developments, imposing "austerity," raising the costs of reproduction, and fomenting divisions along lines of race, gender, sexuality, national origin, age, and ability, among others.

As Nick Dyer-Witheford notes, "The process of composition / decomposition / recomposition constitutes a cycle of struggle." [27] These cycles of struggle accumulate, furthering the contradictions and crises of capitalism. In this sense, according to Antonio Negri, the working class is a "dynamic subject, an antagonistic force, tending toward its own independent identity."[28] In this way, the working class is "defined by its struggle against capitalism." While it has thus far been implied, autonomists do not view the working class as a structure or category of social stratification. In the The Making of the English Working Class E. P. Thompson argued,

By class I understand a historical phenomena, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness. I do not see class as a "structure," nor even as a "category," but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships. More than this, the notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. Like any other relationship, it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomize its structure.… A relationship must always be embodied in real people and in a real context.… If we stop history at a given point, then there are no classes but simply a multitude of individuals with a multitude of experiences. But if we watch these men [sic] over an adequate period of social change, we observe patterns in their relationships, their ideas, and their institutions. Class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition. [29]

Accordingly, class is neither a structural component of the economy nor a sociological category. Seeing class as structure limits the working class to a mere position within the economy rather than a dynamic force. Class as a category relegates it to income or education level, waged industrial work, or sector of the population defined by party apparatchiks, union bureaucrats, wonky academics, or nonprofit do-gooders. Perennially someone will yell out at a radical meeting or gathering, "We have to get workers involved!" While ignoring the simple fact that all those assembled are workers, this is using class as an a priori sociological category. To define the working class relationally requires a rigorous inquiry and analysis of the contingency, subjectivity, and internal dynamics of a social aggregate of individuals ("sectors of the class") that must obtain wages, income, or subsistence directly (waged work, welfare, payment in goods and services) or indirectly (children, partner's wage). Hence the working class can be seen as the sector of the population that experiences the imposition of conditions that make work necessary. Through the refusal of this imposition, internal class relations are furthered, the class politically recomposes itself, and the possibility of a new society beyond capitalism is fostered. Then, of course, the working class comes into conflict with forces that control the means of production (capitalists), manage these means (overseers, landowners, supervisors, bosses, and managers), and maintain larger social relations that enforce the mode of production in the society in which capitalism and the state are functioning (relations with the likes of bureaucrats, tax collectors, police, and security guards). All must work, even capitalists. As Henry Ford boldly declared, "I don't expect to retire. Every man must work, that's his natural destiny." [30] For the bourgeoisie, what was once referred to as the "professional-managerial class," escaping the worst violence of these relations is possible through the coordination and imposition of work on others, even as it is imposed upon their own bodies.[31] In order to better control the working class, police and security guards are drawn from among the working class. As police and rental cops, members of the working class gain authority and a small degree of escape from their own powerlessness. Through their management and control of the working class outside of the factory, work is imposed upon the population in addition to the on-the-job impositions. Each social class has a complex set of internal and external relations such as these.

To suggest that the working class is defined by its relationships requires three things: "reading the struggles," determining the divisions that exist within the class, and ensuring that sectors of the working class aren't omitted from our conceptions and organizing. Agricultural and domestic workers were excluded from the Wagner Act, which passed in 1935 and serves as the foundation for labor law in the US. The exclusion of agricultural workers was tacitly accepted by sectors of the union movement until the rise of the United Farm Workers, which eventually led to the passage of the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act in 1983. Domestic workers would have to wait until the development of a workers' center campaign that pushed for the 2010 Domestic Workers' Bill of Rights in New York State, with a few other states following. Housewives who did not earn a wage were also not considered working class. Autonomists sought to overcome these exclusions conceptually since the working class itself had endeavored to overcome these organizationally and politically. In this way, the concept of the working class can be carefully extended further to address other forms of exploitation and oppression, domination and control as it pairs with other conceptions in revolutionary theory.

An autonomist theory of class requires broad definitions of workers' autonomy and work refusal and an inquiry into the composition of the working class vis-à-vis capitalism. By beginning with a wide-ranging description and striving to understand class dynamics and struggles in particular contexts, revolutionaries can approach the working class as it is rather than as they imagine it or wish it to be.

Autonomists view the working class as all those who are refusing the imposition of work-employed and unemployed, waged and unwaged, productive and reproductive, material, immaterial, and affective. Not just those toiling in fields, factories, and workshops but those working in offices and coffee shops, kitchens, bedrooms, and classrooms. To review, work is simultaneously imposed on the population and upon individual workers. These workers face specific hours, wages or lack of wages, and pace on the job, and if they quit or are fired the need to work to obtain income is ever present. The "guerrillas of desire," as I see them, are those refusing the imposition of work on the terrain of everyday life both as individual workers and members of the working class. Theft of time and materials, feigned illness, sabotage, arson, murder, exodus, and the myriad of other forms this refusal takes-as well as the process of creating counter-communities-can be found in everyday life. In his classic Workers' Councils, Dutch Marxist Anton Pannekoek states that "every shop, every enterprise, even outside of times of sharp conflict, of strikes and wage reductions, is the scene of a constant silent war, of a perpetual struggle, of pressure and counter-pressure." [32]68 It is through Pannekoek's lens that we begin to see the guerrillas of desire not only as a historical subset of slaves, peasants, and workers in the industrial and social factory but as a subset of the working class today struggling against the general imposition of work. By subset I mean that these guerrillas do not represent all of the struggles of the working class or the entirety of the struggle against the imposition of work but resist outside the gaze or comprehension of capitalism and the state apparatus. It is from the concepts of the working class and everyday resistance that the metaphor of the guerrillas of desire is derived.

Kevin Van Meter is an activist-scholar based in the Pacific Northwest. He is coeditor of Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States (AK Press, 2010) and author of the recently released monograph Guerrillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible (AK Press, 2017).

Notes

[1] Martin Glaberman and Seymour Faber, Working for Wages: The Roots of Insurgency (New York: General Hall, 1998), 8.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990), 125.

[4] Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (Leeds: Anti/Theses; San Francisco: AK Press, 2000), 82.

[5] It should be noted that I am speaking about capitalist production in an abstract, ideal way. Furthermore, this immediate process of production does not address financial commodities or financialization.

[6] Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 342.

[7] Deuteronomy 12:23.

[8] For Mario Tronti, exploitation is necessary since "the conditions of capital are in the hands of the workers" as "there is no active life in capital without the living activity of labor power," hence "the capitalist class … is in fact subordinate to the working class." Mario Tronti, "The Strategy of Refusal," in Autonomia: Post-Political Politics (Los Angles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 31.

[9] Marx, Capital, vol. 1 1, 376-77.

[10] Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse (Brooklyn: Autonomedia; London: Pluto, 1991), 72; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 341. Negri is also referring to Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 282-89.

[11] Silvia Federici, "The Reproduction of Labor Power in the Global Economy and the Unfinished Feminist Revolution," in evolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2012) , 93. Federici is referring to Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 376-77.

[12] Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically, 83-84. Emphasis in original.

[13] Harry Cleaver, "Kropotkin, Self-Valorization, and the Crisis of Marxism," Anarchist Studies 2, no. 2 (1994): 119

[14] The phrase "black proletariat" is from W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935. For an autonomist take on the matter, see Ferruccio Gambino's "W. E. B. Du Bois and the Proletariat in Black Reconstruction," Libcom.org, https://libcom.org/library/w-e-b-du-bois-proletariat-black-reconstruction-ferruccio-gambino. Historian of slavery and capitalism John Ashworth suggests, "We may define class relationally in terms of the relationship between two groups at the point of production, where one group is seeking to appropriate to itself some or all of the labor of the other. On this definition slaves and slaveholders comprise classes." John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic , vol. 1, Commerce and Comprise, 1820-1850 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 13.

[15] Ann Lucas de Rouffignac, The Contemporary Peasantry in Mexico (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1985), 55.

[16] Glaberman and Faber, Working for Wages, 13; Zerowork Collective, "Introduction to Zerowork 1," in Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War 1973-1992, ed. Midnight Notes Collective (New York: Autonomedia, 1992), 111-12. Emphasis in original.

[17] Joanna Brenner, "Class," in Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle , eds. Kelly Fritsch, Clare O'Connor, and AK Thompson, (Chico: CA: AK Press, 2016), 80.

[18] Ibid., 85.

[19] Stanley Aronowitz, How Class Works: Power and Social Movement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 62.

[20] Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 94.

[21] Antonio Negri, "Potentialities of a Constituent Power," in Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 273.

[22] Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, trans. David McLellan, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 96; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 794.

[23] As Cleaver offered, "The struggle against the imposition of work has been central to the history of the making of the working class, from the initial resistance to the original imposition of work in the period of primitive accumulation through the long centuries of resisting and avoiding the expansion of work time (longer, harder hours) to the more recent aggressive struggles to reduce work time and liberate more open-ended time for self-determined activity." Harry Cleaver, "Theses on Secular Crisis in Capitalism: The Insurpassability of Class Antagonisms," paper presented at Rethinking Marxism Conference, Amherst, Massachusetts, November 13, 1992; https://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/secularcrisis.html.

[24] George Caffentzis has used the phrase "reading the struggles" in numerous public presentations over the past two decades (I can attest to this). See also Caffentzis, In Letters of Blood and Fire: Work, Machines, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland: PM Press, 2013).

[25] Zerowork Collective, "Introduction to Zerowork 1."

[26] Harry Cleaver, "Marxian Categories, the Crisis of Capital and the Constitution of Social Subjectivity Today," in Revolutionary Writing: Common Sense Essays in Post-Political Politics , ed. Werner Bonefeld (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2003), 43. Originally published in Common Sense ("Journal of the Edinburgh Conference of Socialist Economists"), no. 14 (1993): 32-55.

[27] Nick Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 66. Emphasis in original.

[28] Toni Negri, "Archeology and Project: The Mass Worker and The Social Worker," in Revolution Retrieved: Selected Writings of Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis and New Social Subjects, 1967-83 (London: Red Notes, 1988), 209.

[29] E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 9-11.

[30] Henry Ford, quoted by Willis Thornton, New York World-Telegram, July 24, 1933.

[31] Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich, "The Professional-Managerial Class," in Between Labor and Capital, ed. Pat Walker (Boston: South End Press, 1979).

[32] Anton Pannekoek, Workers Councils (Oakland: AK Press, 2002), 8.

Building Working-Class Defense Organizations: An Interview with the Twin Cities IWW General Defense Committee

By First of May Anarchist Alliance

The General Defense Committee of the Industrial Workers World (IWW) has become an important pole of struggle for pro-working-class revolutionaries in the Twin Cities. While active on a number of different fronts it is the participation of the General Defense Committee (GDC) in the year-long struggle against police killings and brutality in the Twin Cities that has largely led to the significant growth of the organization. The GDC has grown to approximately 90 dues-paying members in Minnesota, and has several active working-groups. In the wake of Trump's election victory, Wobblies (1) and others across the country have begun establishing their own GDC locals - strongly influenced by the Twin Cities' model.

First of May Anarchist Alliance spoke to Erik D. secretary of the Twin Cities GDC Local 14 about the history and work of the General Defense Committee there. Erik is a father, husband, education worker, and wobbly who's also been involved in the youth-focused intergenerational group, the Junior Wobblies.

This interview originally appeared on First of May Anarchist Alliance's website .

Fellow Worker Erik, can you tell us about the origins and history of the General Defense Committee, its relationship to the IWW, and how the militants who founded the current Local conceived of it?

As I understand it, the General Defense Committee (GDC) was first founded by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1917, in response to the repression of wobblies and anti-WWI draft protests. I haven't learned enough about the historic GDC to really speak much about it. I joined the IWW in 2006, and we didn't formally charter the current local as a GDC until 2011. In 2011, the committee was 13 wobblies. But we had actually started organizing ourselves prior to 2011, calling ourselves the Local Defense Committee.

Are there historical or modern examples or inspirations that influence the way GDC sees itself, its activity and organization?

One of the things I've appreciated about the Twin Cities GDC is the very practical intention to learn, with a specific focus on learning in order to act. From the very beginning we engaged in mutual education. Since one of our early orientations was to anti-fascist and anti-racist work, we did a fair bit of reading on the topic of fascism and anti-fascism (Sunday mornings with coffee).

I mention this period of mutual education because we have a lot of inspirations, but none of them have been role models, per se. We have looked to previous movements largely in order to inform our own work and to learn from our elders and the experience of previous generations, but not as Role Models To Be Emulated. That's been important.

With that caveat, we have a lot of inspiration. I get new inspiration every time I read a book, it seems. Some of the inspiration is local: here, I'd specifically highlight Anti-Racist Action and Teamsters Local 544. Anti-Racist Action (ARA) came out of a Minneapolis-based group of anti-racist skinheads who decided they needed to find a way to kick racist skins and organized fascists out of the Twin Cities. Teamsters Local 544 was the local that organized the 1934 strike that made Minneapolis a union town, innovated new forms of the picket (specifically, the 'flying picket'), and engaged for a short time in open physical confrontation on the streets.

Beyond the Twin Cities, I think our members have a lot of very different inspirations. One of mine has always been John Brown, but I grew up partly in Kansas. I guess the Black Panther Party would be the most common source of inspiration among early members; our advocacy of Community Self Defense certainly owes a lot to the Panthers, including their Survival Programs. The most recent addition to my 'Hall of Inspiration' is Rudy Shields, whom I learned about from Akinyele Omowale Umoja's We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement.

One of the first projects of the Twin Cities GDC was organizing a "Picket Training", which seems like a kind of simple project, but you all attached some importance to it. How come?

I think the history of the Picket Training is actually the beginning of the history of the local GDC, so forgive me for a longer answer. The IWW was always heavily involved in local May Day events, naturally. In both 2007 and 2008 we had dispiriting and potentially dangerous experiences in marches that were organized by other groups. These happened when we were 'out-marshaled' and 'peace-policed.' Folks might remember the 2006 "Day Without An Immigrant." In 2007 immigrant protection and rights continued to be major issues, and the march was partly centered around pro-immigrant demands.

So it was worrying when wobblies who had been active in local anti-fascist actions saw someone they thought they knew from a fascist rally elsewhere in the state videotaping the crowd (we were never able to confirm the identity because of what happened next). Fascists videotaping an immigrants rights march is extremely concerning; they were likely videotaping either to research immigrants rights' groups (including antifa groups), or to identify potentially undocumented people.

A few wobblies went to talk to the videotaper and get in the way of the camera. Shouting commenced, and the self-appointed organizers of the march successfully pushed the wobblies back into the crowd, allowing the videotaping to continue.

The May Day parade the next year found wobblies promoting militant chants shut down by the same sort of marshals.

At roughly the same time, the local IWW was doing a lot of organizing. While some of us had prior experience in organizing pickets and direct actions, the Starbucks Workers campaign, the Jimmy John's campaign, the Sisters Camelot Canvas Union, and the Chicago-Lake Liquors campaigns all provided early experience and training in planning and executing pickets and direct actions, in a context where we were already committed to IWW ideas and practices. Some of these were particularly challenging, such as doing intelligence and the occasional flying picket of scab canvassers in the Sisters Camelot campaign. Since they never stayed put, it felt like a throwback to the 1934 strikes and the flying pickets. It was cold both Winters.

There was one particular occasion at the University of Minnesota AFSCME strike in 2007 where the IWW promoted, and executed, a hard picket line in the early morning hours at a delivery dock. This was going extremely well until a UMN delivery truck driver rammed the picket line. I was in the wrong place at the moment, and ended up on his hood. I found out later I'd crushed three neck vertebrae; it took two surgeries and a lot of physical therapy to get past it. It also gave me a serious motivation for doing pickets and direct actions better. Just a week after a truck hit me, a delivery truck hit another picketer at an IWW picket of D'Amico's restaurant, thankfully without serious consequences.

Finally, 2008 was the end of an intense two-year process organized at disrupting the Republican National Convention. Most of us already had a critique of 'summit hopping' styles of disruption, few of which have been effective since before the FTAA in Miami 2003. But a number of wobblies were serious and on occasion influential participants in (at least the early period of) the two years of planning that ended up calling itself the "Welcoming Committee." The Welcoming Committee meetings (which were held in the same community space as the early IWW at the time, the Jack Pine Community Center) hammered out some early agreements and principles, including, along with other interested groups, the well-known Saint Paul Principles. This process also gave local wobblies experience in critically thinking through on-the-street tactics and what it would take to actually win goals and actions on those streets, whether in labor pickets or direct actions(2).

All these motivations and experiences were in the forefront of our minds when we thought up the picket training. We knew we had to get better at this, and though we all had some experience, that's not the same thing as having teachable knowledge. So we researched, wrote, debated, and practiced. We adopted a principle of teaching the tactics quickly rather than perfecting the training first, and encouraged people to think about themselves as the next trainers. In order to keep track of our curriculum and to make it portable, we created a trainer's manual, a trainee manual, and a setup manual, which we update frequently.

We offer the trainings to non-wobblies, and while we avoid being an on-call security group, we are trusted locally as providing quality security and planning successful actions. With the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and on-the-streets protest since Ferguson, I think the GDC has earned a bit of respect from other local organizations as a result.

Anti-fascism seems to have been a key concern for the Twin Cities GDC from the start. Can you explain a bit about why this was the case and how the GDC intended to "do" anti-fascism a bit differently than other antifa groups?

Partly that was organic, because of the people involved. One of our members was a member of the Baldies, and later Anti-Racist Action, and brought a lot of experience on that front to the table(3) .Others also had anti-fascist experience. Given that density of experience and expertise, it was fairly natural that we were interested in anti-fascism from the beginning.

Our first major action was the disruption of a David Irving event (4). Like most of his events in recent years, promotion and entrance to these is secretive and even paranoid. We created fake identities and profiles, acquired tickets and location information, and mobilized over 80 locals who hated the idea of fascists meeting in our city. This put our early group's planning abilities to the test, since the meeting was on an upper floor of a downtown hotel with a front desk by which everyone would have to walk.

As we went along, and based in part on discussions and debates both internal to the GDC and to the local IWW, we formulated a clearer understanding of the relationship we think should exist between anti-fascist work (I think these days, I'd say "Community Self Defense," which would include antifa work) and unionism(5).

Part of the clearer rationale was to establish faith and credit with groups that may have bad impressions of unions, or prioritize other forms of work, and to bring a more diverse group of fellow workers into the IWW. Another part was the understanding that if the IWW ever gets close to its goal of genuinely challenging the foundations of capitalism, we will have to have a group and an orientation capable of defending the union and its workers. We didn't feel that we should wait until the attack came to organize to fight it.

I think the most significant difference of our anti-fascism from other anti-fascist groups is our relatively public, or mass, orientation. Many anti-fascist groups operate largely as affinity groups, stressing secrecy and small numbers, for good reasons. But the types of pressure we can place on the fascists with these sorts of organizations is limited, and the risks to members enormous. Our anti-fascism has taken a mass orientation: we aim for the largest, most public, and most militant forms of engagement possible, consistently pushing for more radical analysis and actions. While some groups consider mass organizations fundamentally reactive and apolitical, the GDC has made its own anti-capitalist and revolutionary politics clear, in order to avoid being captured by liberals.

It seems apparent that the GDC really "took off" during the recent upsurge against police killings in the Twin Cities (Jamar Clark, Philando Castile, Phil Quinn, Michael Kirvelay & others) - could you say a little bit about why this was the case, how the GDC oriented itself and what allowed it to be a place for militants to come and to grow?

Right. The GDC began to grow very rapidly with the engagement at the Fourth Precinct. I want to talk for a minute about the types of engagement that we practiced there, but first I would like to point out the time difference: we'd been meeting irregularly since 2009, were chartered in 2011, and began to 'take off' in 2015. We didn't develop in a rush, despite our feeling of urgency. In retrospect, we should have done more, earlier, and more seriously. You can only prepare to be ready for crisis and then wait to respond in an organized fashion. By the time the police murdered Jamar Clark, after Ferguson and other places had already seen massive protests, we were ready to respond in public, I think.

About two months previously, we'd tested our ability to organize a disciplined mass march and directly confront racists. A group of racists organized a Confederate Flag display on the state capitol grounds. The state sold them a permit. We weren't going to tolerate that. We had meetings ahead of time to organize a counter-protest. We had decided to explicitly make clear that this was a GDC action, and to use our own marshaling teams, and worked with a large variety of other groups. One especially important person in that entire process person is the aunt of Marcus Golden, who murdered by the Saint Paul Police Department in January 2015. She joined the IWW and the GDC shortly afterwards, and seems to be everywhere at all times, moving the work along.

The march began where Marcus was murdered, and ended at the Christopher Columbus statue on the capitol grounds, after ensuring that the Confederate Flag wavers were no-shows. The sheer numbers of people and organizations pledging to come, along with our clearly demonstrated militance, scared them off.

When Jamar was killed, GDC members mobilized quickly. Young Black activists began an occupation of the Police Fourth Precinct. The Fourth Precinct is in North Minneapolis, which is a heavily policed Black neighborhood. In the 1960s, the building of the Fourth Precinct was constructed as a community center called "The Way," in response to two Summers' of uprisings demanding racial justice in the USA. As a metaphor of how unfulfilled the promises made to the civil rights movement have been, I can't think of a starker local one than the transformation of a Black-oriented Community Center into a fortress of blue terror.

Once the occupation was established, which took a matter of minutes to hours, activists began setting up the infrastructure for a long haul. It was already cold, but it got arctic during the eighteen days of the occupation. GDC members were heavily involved in the direct confrontations with police, to be sure, but far more importantly, we created direct relationships with local militants and young people from the neighborhood, whose politics and responses were often directly at odds with the activists who had started the occupation.

Local youth tended to a far greater degree of militancy, and simply understood more clearly what was necessary to protect the encampment, regardless of whether the self-appointed official protest leaders thought. We often provided security at night, when cars would drive at us menacingly, or shots would be fired in nearby alleyways. We were not present in an organized fashion at the moment when White Supremacists showed up and shot people at the occupation, and so I can't say how well we would have responded that night.

An important point about the rise in our local appeal during the struggle for the Fourth Precinct was that we were a largely disciplined group that could reliably be counted on to do what we promised. Equally important is that while we showed up consistently and stayed in solidarity with the protest, we never relaxed our principled criticism of other groups' tactics. Critiques weren't made on social media or publicly, but we were consistent in pushing in person for more radical and militant approaches.

At one point, the self-appointed protest leaders had had enough of being challenged by local youth and militants like ourselves. Pissed that they were losing the obedience of the crowd, which was largely demanding increased militance, one of them grabbed a mic during a tense moment during the encampment and id'd one of our white members as an undercover cop. Frankly, we were fortunate that the person she accused has been active in anti-racist circles for decades and is locally well-known as a result. If the accusation had been made against one of our younger members, the outcome might have been less peaceful.

As a consequence of that event, and a lot of others similar to it, the GDC wrote and released a public statement explaining 'badjacketing' and demanding that no one involved in seeking justice should engage in it (6). We pushed that line hard for what felt like months, but was really just about a week during the occupation. Then the tide started turning and a large number of groups and individuals began to consider the downsides of that sort of action, and condemn it. I think the outcome of our stance against badjacketing actually was greater over time and after the occupation.

For those that aren't so familiar with the last year of activity in the Twin Cities, what have been some high points and challenges of this struggle against the police- and how has the GDC concretely participated in and contributed to this struggle?

With specific reference to our anti-police work, a few things have come together. Those of us who'd been involved in previous actions had some knowledge of police personnel and leadership already; like most municipalities, our local cop leadership would be laughably incompetent if they weren't so oppressive and largely untouchable. A few particular people had started to catch our attention over the years, among them especially Bob Kroll, who was elected President of the local cop union in 2015.

Kroll has a long and documented history of brutality on the job and off, and has been accused of wearing a "White Power" badge on a jacket, and being involved in a process where the then-chief presided over the demotion, retirement, or firing of every single Black officer in the MPD. He also called the first Muslim to serve in the US Congress a "terrorist."

We had already written up a report on Bob Kroll, summarizing his history with documentation, but hadn't really distributed it(7). When Kroll started lying in public about the details of Jamar Clark's murder by two MPD officers, we released the report along with a demand that local reports stop allowing him to comment on subjects related to race and policing, without mentioning his background. We had a big effect in publicizing Kroll's history, to the point that he's been complaining about how frequently people refer to his background, calling him a White Supremacist, etc. We've had little to no effect on local reporters, unfortunately.

While the Fourth Precinct occupation was ongoing, we caught wind of a fundraiser being held by Sheriff Stanek (heavily involved in the crackdown on the protesters at the RNC Convention in 2008) for his reelection at a bar and bowling alley in Northeast Minneapolis. The site was about ten blocks from the Minneapolis cop union's headquarters. We planned and announced a march to the cop union headquarters at night from a local park.

The very same day, however, the police forced the Fourth Precinct occupation out. There was a great deal of anger and disappointment over the course of the day, and people weren't ready to give up just yet. We went ahead with our planned protest, starting with about 20 protesters at our rally site.

We began to march not to the cop union headquarters, but to the bar and bowling alley where the fundraiser was being held. The vast majority of Black Lives Matter protesters were across the river in downtown Minneapolis, inside City Hall. When they left City Hall, a large contingent came and joined us outside the bar. By the time they arrived, many of the fundraiser guests had fled, and the rest had locked themselves inside. We held an impromptu rally outside the bar, and then marched to the cop union headquarters. It was an energetic, militant march. We'd made the cops so nervous that they'd installed security fencing around the property, and had placed snipers in the upper floors of the building across the street.

A few GDC members continued to help hold down the Justice4Jamar movement locally after the eviction from the precinct. They joined a new coalition called the Twin Cities Coalition for Justice 4 Jamar, and showed up outside the Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman's office every Friday for "Freeman Fridays," keeping Jamar's name in the news and the demand fresh. I was out of the country at the time, but on one of the coldest days of the year, the GDC played a large part in a mass march. The cold caused some innovations: entering local Cub Foods for a while looked like fun!

Of course, the local police haven't stopped murdering people since Marcus Golden and Jamar Clark. This year we had a number of people murdered by the police: Michael Kirvelay, whose sisters called the police for help while he was in a mental crisis, and who was murdered by them; Phil Quinn, a Native man also experiencing a mental health crisis, was murdered in 2015. Map Kong, a Cambodian-American murdered in his car while having a bad reaction to drugs, Geno Smith, and Philando Castile. The last is a bit closer to me than the others, since Philando worked at the school where my son went for 7 years, and my daughter had been there for 6 years already. They both knew and loved Philando ("Mr. Phil," they called him), like all the students did. Personally, I'm grateful I started fighting against police murder when I did; I think if I hadn't had some actual experience I would have been far more shaken when it came that close to home.

We're still fighting for justice for Philando and all those murdered by the cops. After Philando was murdered, a group of mostly younger activists marched to Minnesota Governor's Mansion, not far from the school where Philando worked. That occupation remained in place for some time, but never reached the militancy or organization that we saw at the Fourth Precinct, for a bunch of different reasons. After the occupation was cleared out, the GDC organized and called for a rally and march to shutdown the two municipally owned liquor stores, which help to directly fund the police department whose officer, Jeronimo Yanez, murdered Philando.

We organized this as a GDC-led action, and as such we organized it in our fashion. We did a lot of turnout work, education about the connection between the stores and the police department, and publicly promised that we would picket the stores with the intention of denying them important Saturday evening business.

This action drew the attention of more racists who tried to troll us. This was average and expected. We also drew explicit threats from Wisconsin National Guard veterans who claimed they would show up armed, and posted images of personally owned military weaponry on our pages to scare us off. We took these very seriously and began research and documentation. Shortly after, we released our security report on the situation, along with a public statement that we were unafraid, provide for our own security and don't rely on police, and we were going ahead. We did create a few new security tactics appropriate to the situation, which were useful in keeping us all safe.

Despite the threats, the protest was large and well-attended. We rallied at a point midway between the two stores, not letting on which store we were heading to. Before we even began marching, the both stores closed, which represented significantly more economic damage than we'd even hoped to inflict by picketing one of the stores.

What kind of folks began to join and participate in the GDC? How was its composition similar or different from the IWW or the anti-police movement in general? So far, the GDC seems to have "succeeded" as a multi-racial organization - how is this?

Most significantly were newer Black members and other members of color. Some had joined prior to the precinct, but it's my impression that anti-confederate flag action, and the precinct occupation, were important moments in attracting Black members. The African People's Caucus of the IWW was active prior to both of these events, and I think that their work, which was often behind the scenes, was often the most important work done, communicating revolutionary and antifascist politics to people who may not have encountered them in this way previously.

Probably the best way to describe the membership of the GDC in general is that members often have direct experience with forms of oppression that are not based solely in the workplace, and a desire to confront those challenges from a revolutionary and consistent place. All of our working groups arose either from skills members already had or had developed and were willing to share, or from needs we had. In addition to Anti-racism and anti-fascism, and training people to do more effective pickets and direct actions, we struck working groups like cop watch, harm reduction, and survivor support.

New working groups seem to have a period of incubation after being struck, during which the people involved start to think out, collectively and carefully, what a GDC and community self defense oriented approach would look like, and then get started. Once disciplined action is taken, especially if it's successful, we seem to have an influx of new members who are also affected by or concerned with those forms of oppression. I'm happy with the way that this approach has found knowledgeable and skilled members and connected them with others.

The Twin Cities IWW has been a fairly sizable and active Branch for years - this no doubt provided a good basis to build from, but there has also been some informal controversy and debate within the Branch over some Wobblies' orientation towards the GDC. What were the concerns and how has that played out?

Yes. The local GDC wouldn't exist without the local IWW, and I strongly feel that GDC locals should encourage all eligible members to join the IWW and begin workplace organizing. In terms of controversy, it's my impression that there were criticisms; I was definitely aware from the beginning that a few members opposed the formation of a GDC, but there wasn't ever a clear debate or discussion. GDC members solicited critique and engagement from wobblies, but nothing much really came of it, unfortunately.

Some concern was definitely based in the notion that organizing against fascists would put IWW members as a whole at risk of fascist attack. A few other objections seem possibly to have been that this was macho adventurism, and a distraction from the work of organizing at the workplace. All of these deserve a serious response. In some ways, however, the GDC's more controversial ideas have become common sense. The idea that anti-fascism is optional for unionists, for instance, seems to be moot at the moment. This isn't as much because of our work, necessarily, as because of recent history: it's hard to retain any illusion about the role of the police, or the threat of fascism to workers, after Ferguson, or after Trump's election.

How has the GDC maintained a democratic culture in the context of constant action and growth? What are the main ways for Defenders to communicate, raise ideas, and debate issues? How does political development work within the GDC - what would you like to see in terms of political and educational culture within the GDC?

The people involved at the beginning were all wobblies with a fair bit of experience in the organization and a dedication to democratic practice. So in that sense there was already a basic common culture and attitude. I'm not certain we've always done this as well as we could, though we usually self-correct fairly quickly. I think over the last year the most important nuts-and-bolts contribution to a democratic practice and culture has been found in improving our paperwork and bureaucracy, actually. With regular minutes and agendas, asking people to write motions ahead of time, and being as organized as possible, our organization has grown in transparency.

I'm not certain that we currently have the practices and culture in place to maintain this without serious new effort. The rapid growth in membership proposes a challenge to this: it means that the serious and lengthy process of mutual education, which was the basis of our common understandings and analysis, and made our planning and actions easier and more coherent, will now have to be sped up and transformed into a process that can handle large numbers of new members.

There is a very serious need for lots of educational initiatives, as well as finding ways to encourage people to take part in them. We need lots of writing, lots of one-on-ones, lots of explanations, and lots of patience. If you've been around for awhile, get used to hearing the same explanations of ideas, acronyms, etc. That's a sign that we're growing. If it's irritating, please get involved in making the explanations better. Along with speedily connecting new members to working groups, I think continuing the practice of mutual education is our greatest current challenge.

What initiatives of the GDC are you excited about and what do you see as the biggest challenges and weaknesses to overcome as we move into the Trump era?

The GDC has experienced solid growth as an institution for the last few years. Here in the Twin Cities, we helped folks in St Cloud organize and apply for charters for a new IWW and a new GDC local, both of which I believe were just approved.

The projects we take on in the GDC are organized by working groups. As we've grown in numbers and capacity, the number of working groups has grown. Every new working group makes me excited.

The Survivor Support working group is our newest working group, and has already taken numerous successful direct actions. I'm really excited about this project. It remains the case that many more people of color are murdered by police than fascists, and many more women experience rape and violence at the hands of partners, friends, and acquaintances than they do from the faces of the Men's Rights groups. We must address everyday violence and oppression in our attempt to build Community Self Defense.

The post-election moment feels very new, at least at the moment. In the days immediately following, a very large swell of interest in both the GDC and the IWW happened, and a lot of my personal energy recently has gone into helping other groups charter by giving as much practical advice and history as possible. Because I am convinced that the GDC and the IWW have immense potential for the next few years, this growth is thrilling and exhausting at once.

It's thrilling partly because of the new energy, and the sudden appearance of people who are, perhaps for the first time, to fight. It's exhausting because the task ahead of us is immense, and will require a nearly constant process of mutual education.

Thankfully, creating trainings is something we've been doing well in the Twin Cities, and with the new energy, I'm hopeful we can continue to both grow and consolidate our growing power. We've started thinking about what the process of doing mass, mutual education would look like, and thinking of how to implement it. The point of all of our trainings, beyond the specific skills taught, is to spread the skills and analysis we have as widely as possible among the working class, in order to increase our confidence, competence, and militancy. The next year is going to lit, if we do it right.

Finally, we've been debating and developing a long-term strategy for GDC growth in the Twin Cities. Without going into details, I'll just say that the long term strategic and nut-and-bolts planning of our group is inspiring, and gives me hope.

The Twin Cities IWW General Defense Committee Local 14 contact info:

Web: https://twincitiesgdc.org

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TC.GDC/

Twitter: @TCGDC

Contribute $: https://fundly.com/support-revolutionary-community-organizers-in-minneapolis

Address: c/o Twin Cities IWW 2 E Franklin Ave Suite 1, Minneapolis, MN 55404

Members of the First of May Anarchist Alliance are among those active in the Twin Cities IWW General Defense Committee. For more information on First of May: m1aa.org

Notes

1 A nickname for members of the Industrial Workers of the World union (I.W.W.)

2 For a discussion of the "St. Paul Principles": http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/2/16/1065414/-A-Principled-Stand-on-Diversity-of-Tactic-Avoiding-Uniformity-of-Failure; For more on IWW activity during the 2008 RNC: http://www.iww.org/nl/node/4384

3 The Baldies were among the first anti-racist skinhead crews in the U.S. Anti-Racist Action, is a radical direct action anti-fascist network that was a key to fighting KKK and neo-nazi organizing from the late 80's until recent times.

4 David Irving is probably the most famous Holocaust-denier "historian" in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Irving

5 "Unionism and Anti-Fascism" (2013) https://twincitiesgdc.org/antifascism/

6 "No To Badjacketing: the State Wants To Kill Us; Let's Not Cooperate" (2015) https:// twincitiesgdc.org/badjacketing/

7 "Robert Kroll: Not Credible on Race or Policing" (2015) https://twincitiesgdc.org/2015/11/29/ kroll-report/