Palestinian-Chilean Solidarity: Transnational Meetings and Meals of Resistance

By Devin G. Atallah

I, Devin Atallah, Ph.D., a Palestinian-Chilean psychologist and social conflict and disaster researcher, recently participated in the "First Session of the Mapuche Constituent Assembly" (La Primera Sesión Asamblea Constituyente Mapuche) which took place on November 30, 2016. A "Constituent Assembly", according to Wikipedia , is a "body or assembly of representatives composed for the purpose of drafting or adopting a constitution". This first session of the Mapuche Constituent Assembly occurred on top of the Ñielol hill, just outside of the city of Temuco, in southern Chile.

The Mapuche are the largest first nation and the most populous indigenous group in Chile. According to the Chilean census of 2012, over 1.4 million people (approximately 8.7 percent of the total population of Chile) self-identify as Mapuche (Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas, 2012). Currently, most Mapuche reside either in the capital of Chile, Santiago, or in the Araucanía region, which is Chile's poorest region at the national level (Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas, 2012). Temuco, where this first session of the Mapuche Constituent Assembly occurred, is the capital of this Araucanía region.

I was invited to travel to Temuco and visit the top of the Ñielol hill to attend this historic initial meeting by several participants in one of my ongoing investigations on Indigenous resilience processes in Mapuche communities who are exposed to historical trauma, ongoing racism, and environmental challenges and disasters. I had met these research participants within my role as a consultant and psychology researcher with RUCADUNGUN - "El Centro de Documentacion e Investigacion Indigena" (English Translation: The Center for Indigenous Investigation and Documentation).

These research participants invited me to attend the Constituent Assembly only a few days ago, and explained details of the encounter as a historic and official nonviolent indigenous decolonization process, with the goal of moving towards developing a strong proposal for self-determination with real support from diverse Mapuche social bases, in a context of increased political strife embedded in the long-lasting Mapuche-Chile conflict.

The day I traveled south to participate in this Constituent Assembly, as an invited outsider, observer, and guest, happened to be on November 29th - the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People ( resolution 32/40 B ). As a multinational, multicultural Palestinian-Chilean United Statesian, the interwoven meanings and opportunities to act with solidarity for decolonization of Mapuche communities and for justice and social healing, overlapped in profound ways, beginning with my journey south.

10:15 p.m. November 29, 2016, International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Santiago, Chile

I met two colleagues of mine at the Santiago Central Bus Station who were also interested in showing solidarity and participating in the Mapuche Constituent Assembly: (1) Lorena Albornoz, a practicing human rights lawyer and graduate student in anthropology and also researcher with RUCADUNGUN; and (2) Elizabeth Pilquil, director and co-founder of the "La Casa de Salud Ancestral Mapuche KVME FELEN" (English Translation: The House of Traditional Mapuche Health and Healing).

Lorena, Elizabeth, and I took the evening bus, which departed at 10:30 p.m. from Santiago heading to Temuco. During the bus ride we discussed our participation in an event at the "Museo de la Memoria y Derechos Humanos" (English Translation: The Museum of Memory and Human Rights) for the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, and how intense it was to be going from one event focused on showing support and solidarity with Palestinians, to an event showing solidarity with Mapuche. We reflected how meaningful and interconnected our bonds and commitments were to each community in the active struggle for dignity and self-determination.

Elizabeth is a member of the Mapuche community herself, in many ways living in a diaspora-type condition in urban Santiago. Sitting side by side was me, a member of the Palestinian diaspora, and with Lorena, a Chilean lawyer identifying as Mestiza and as an ally to both struggles, yet in very unique ways. Sharing family stories of displacement and migration, healing with herbal secrets, and preserving sacred family recipes, we took advantage of our time together on the bus to plan the menu for a meal and cultural event at the The House of Traditional Mapuche Health and Healing-a meal of resistance which I will share more about at the end of this personal narrative.

Thus, after discussing how we would outreach to community members and share our beautiful tickets to invite members of the Palestinian-Chilean community and the Mapuche community to come together and feast. We settled on serving mansaf, a traditional a Palestinian dish of lamb, rice, almonds, and yogurt, alongside Mapuche treats such as fried dough with roasted and smoked red hot peppers.

Eventually, we fell asleep.

7:00 a.m, morning of November 30, 2016, day of the first session of the Mapuche Constituent Assembly, Temuco, Wallmapu, Chile

We arrived into Temuco with the sun emerging from the horizon, just rising over silhouettes of volcanos, so ancient, like messages in a dream. When Lorena, Elizabeth and I got off the bus, we headed straight to the open fruit and vegetable market where there were stands serving out quick breakfast. We enjoyed coffee, fresh eggs, and yerba mate, while meeting our contact there. Our guide showed us through the city streets of Temuco, then we made our way to the base of the Ñielol hill, hoping to reach the top by 8 a.m. when a Mapuche spiritual ceremony was scheduled to begin - a collective blessing and offering for the Mapuche Constituent Assembly to move forward with newen, a Mapuche word and spiritual concept that means "strength", yet also connotes meanings mapping onto ideas of harmony between the land, people, life, and all things in the universe.

We stopped just at the entrance of the trailhead leading up to the top of the Ñielol hill, because we noticed three large military vehicles fully armored and with a clear capacity to break up protests and to even hold numerous potential prisoners. We also passed various parked cars with undercover police stake-out operatives taking pictures of us as we walked by. As we hiked to the top of the hill, tired from lack of sleep on the bus all night, we tried to avoid feelings of intimidation by the presence of the Chilean military. Instead, we hiked upwards and nourished our excitement from the rise in altitude and our encounters with ancient trees and dense bamboo forest.

We made it to the top of Ñielol, just before the Mapuche spiritual ceremony began, which occurred below four statues representing the four generations of Mapuche society: an elder or grandparent, a parent or adult, a youth, and a child. These symbols of transgenerational resilience began our day, where we were invited to participate in the collective spiritual activity (without taking photographs).

10 a.m., Morning of the November 30, 2016, day of the first session of the Mapuche Constituent Assembly, Temuco, Wallmapu, Chile

After the ceremony, we drank more yerba mate, shared snacks and collectively set up a common space for the Mapuche Constituent Assembly to occur, organizing rows of chairs and putting up a large black cloth to shield the participants from the sun. Banners and flags waved in the wind. Finally, the event began, as the leader of the Consejo de Todas las Tierras (English Translation: Mapuche Council of All Lands), Aucán Huilcamán, welcomed all the participants, highlighting that in the spirit of the Coyan - the Mapuche traditional government gathering as a system of sovereignty, participants came voluntarily and of their own individual will yet collective convictions.

Aucán addressed the hundreds of Mapuche leaders who were present, young and old, women and men, altogether dedicated to moving forward in achieving the right to self-determination.Aucán addressed allies from other indigenous groups who were present, such as the Aymara from Northern Chile, and also, international observers from Argentina, and national allies fromChile.

In his address, Aucán highlighted the importance of recognizing the Mapuche right to self-determination, which is already formally guaranteed at the international level in the adoption of the United Nations Declaration on the rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted on September 13, 2007. Aucán also underscored the importance of recognizing the genocide and theft of Mapuche lives, lands, and livelihoods by the Chilean military in the conquest of the Araucanía at the end of the 19th century. Also, Aucán, and may other Mapuche leaders who stood and spoke, emphasized the importance of international recognition of Mapuche treaties (Coyan) with the Chilean government that dates back hundreds of years and supported in demands that lands are returned and Mapuche laws and traditions can be honored and practiced with dignity.

As one of the leaders said, this day is about being equal in dignity, but different in law ("Igual en dignidad, pero distincto en derecho …"). When elaborating, he explained: Mapuche society requires different tribal laws that protect unique ways of life and relationships with the land, in terms of health, education, conflict resolution, leadership, and even how we organize our leadership and sovereignty, as evidenced in the processes of collective dialogues today itself during this Constituent Assembly.

Elders stood up, took to the center of the circle, and expressed their vision for a free Mapuche identity and lands with respect and dignity. Throughout the dialogues, from the elders to the youth, and from the break-out conversations passing yerbe mate from hand to hand on the sidelines… drinking muday (a ceremonial Mapuche alcoholic drink) from fermented quinoa, I reflected with others on connections between Palestinian geographies of colonization, historical trauma, and collective resilience, and intersections with experiences of the Mapuche. In this very gathering protecting basic human rights, memory, and dignity, I reflected on the defenders of water and dignity of the Standing Rock Sioux , thousands of miles away in North America yet perhaps so near in moments of heart.

Throughout the day, hour upon hour, leaders, families, community members of different generations and genders gathered together and told their stories and shared commitments and their visions for a free and autonomous Mapuche society. An important social political structure in Mapuche communities has been historically, and continues to be today, organized around the Lof, which in Mapudungun (the main language of the Mapuche) means 'community' or 'extended family' and corresponds to a territorial unit inhabited by a group with kinship relations and lead by a Lonko, or the chief of the Lof.

It is important to highlight that from the 1600s to the 1900s, a long list of Coyan occurred, which were the government meetings of the Mapuche. Many of these Coyan were nation-to-nation agreements, negotiated between the Spanish crown and various Mapuche Lonkos, then later between the Chileans and the Mapuche. These Coyan recognized the independent sovereignty of the Mapuche and even set agreements for trade and are still have validity even today (Contreras, 2002).

Many of the Lofs that spoke in the circle during this Mapuche Constituent Assembly underscored the importance of past Coyan and the need to recognize them as applicable today. Representatives from Mapuche communities across Chile were together, sharing space and words, stories and sentiments, highlighting the need for the Chilean state to formally acknowledge the history of genocide and ethnic cleansing that rendered current Mapuche being as displaced at home, as a mere "ethnic group", or even worse, as foreigners in their own lands-marginalized in several domains including education, health care, and across Chilean state institutions. These histories of colonialism and ongoing racism creates disasters of everyday life for many Mapuche Lofs (Atallah, 2016).

After diverse members of Mapuche Lofs spoke, Chilean nationals and international observers were invited to share their perspectives.

I was moved and impressed with how many of the Chilean nationals expressed their allyship to the Mapuche with acknowledgment of their relative power and privilege and their hope to contribute to the manifestation of Mapuche self-determination, even if it meant giving up some of their own privileges. For example, some observers spoke out from positions as lawyers in elite Chilean universities, as willing to work toward legal pathways and legislative policies such as indigenous land reform, reconstituting Mapuche autonomy over historically colonized territories, and exploring further how past treaties could serve as guides in these type of processes.

Many observers also spoke of how they identified as both Chileans and as Mapuche, with mixed Indigenous and European family heritage as Mestizos, and that they often felt "in-between" worlds, yet wanted to ensure the dignity and rights of their indigenous brothers and sisters. Other observers spoke of the importance of increased solidarity with Palestinian-Chileans, who often keep themselves out of the dialogue, avoiding the topic, yet they could play an important allyship role noting that they are connected to Palestine as a land and as a people threatened by historical and ongoing settler colonization.

At this point in the day, now late into the afternoon, the two participants in my research project, the Mapuche community members who had reached out and invited Elizabeth Pilquil and me to the event, requested that I take to the circle and speak. So, I approached the microphone, building off what the previous observer had shared, and stated that, as a member of the Palestinian-Chilean community, and as a mental health professional and healer, I believed that we, as members of the Palestinian diaspora, could and should do more to support historically-colonized groups locally in Chile, and worldwide, perhaps most importantly - the Mapuche, especially seeing that so many Palestinians moved to southern territories and contributed, in the beginning of the 20th century, to the colonization of Mapuche lands. I shared that I was passionate about issues of the connections between health, wellness, and human rights, and decolonization in particular, as rooted in expressions of social healing.

I voiced my inspiration and deep honor at being invited and to bear witness to this First Session of the Mapuche Constituent Assembly, which was perhaps, one of the most powerful and meaningful collective manifestations of decolonization that I had witnessed. I pledged to share my experience and hope to further support Mapuche journeys for human rights, social health, with dignity equal to all peoples of the world, yet with laws tailored to their society, history, imaginations of a future free of unjust colonial rule - dreams as ancient as the rising sun, but fresh with nascent newen, spirit and strength.

A few weeks after returning to Santiago, central Chile, Elizabeth Pilquil and I finished organizing our "Meals of Resistance" event, which we finally celebrated this past weekend on Saturday, December 17, 2017 at the Casa de Salud Ancestral Mapuche KVME FELEN (the House of Mapuche Traditional Health and Healing) in Quinta Normal neighborhood of Santiago. In total, about 60-70 people arrived, and included members of the Mapuche indigenous group, Chilean allies, and members of the Palestinian-Chilean community, who all came together to share freedom foods and stories of resistance and resilience - showing support and solidarity. As I mentioned at the beginning of the narrative, the main dish was mansaf, which is a traditional Palestinian meal consisting of lamb with yogurt, rice, bread, nuts, etc…which I cooked for this event. The mansaf requires that the Lamb is cooked in laban jameed, Arabic for "dried yogurt". For this event, I used laban jameed made by the hands of the mother of a dear friend of mine in Palestine, which I had brought into Chile in my luggage when returning from a recent trip.

Alongside the mansaf, members of the House of Mapuche Traditional Health and Healing cooked Mapuche foods including sopaipias with merken (fried dough with smoked hot peppers) and many other dishes including mijokiñ, charkan, catutos, yiwiñ kofke, and a variety of salads.

Once the food was ready, the event began with a Mapuche spiritual ceremony, blessing the gathering and community members.

In front, Lawentuchefe ("Herbal Medicine Woman" in Mapuche) Giovanna Tafilu, and members of the House of Mapuche Traditional Health and Healing gathering to prepare for the spiritual ceremony to begin. Photos during ceremony were not taken out of respect for the sacred space

As soon as the sun went down we began the feasting together-Palestinian and Mapuche dishes, followed by slideshows which were projected onto a white sheet hung outside in front of the center's beautiful mural. Discussions about connections between the Palestinian and Mapuche struggles for self-determination unfolded.

Elders in the Mapuche community expressed deeply appreciating the opportunity to eat foods brought with love and care from Palestine, and asked many questions to the Palestinian-Chileans[.] [The group's] discussions focused on how Palestinian youth and families, in particular, living in the Israeli-occupied territories, face and respond with resilience, steadfastness and hope for returning to their lands and to dignity. [Palestinians resist] the devastating oppression and state-sponsored violence sanctioned by the government of Israel, and pathways toward raising children within such toxic manifestations of racism and settler colonialism.

[The] Palestinian-Chileans present often spoke from places of relative privilege. [W]ithin Chilean contexts, Palestinians in Chile often directly contribute to colonial projects impacting [the] Mapuche journeys for dignity, language and land rights, spiritual freedoms, and of course, self-determination. [This was] profoundly expressed just weeks before in the First Session of the Mapuche Constituent Assembly, where only one person from the Palestinian-Chilean community was represented, out of nearly one million Palestinian-Chileans in total nationwide.

Moved by these discussions, at the end of the meal, two members of the Palestinian-Chilean community spoke spontaneously expressing that they felt that this was a really meaningful action for them-breaking bread and showing support to the Mapuche who, like Palestinians, are members of a colonized group. They shared that they had lived in Chile all their lives, and yet had never expressed their solidarity to Mapuche in this way before-through meals of resistance-where though their struggles may be continents apart-they felt united in quests for justice and healing from colonial trauma and ongoing racist social structures. However, as Palestinian-Chileans, they felt their social positionally was turned upside down-transformed into members of a colonial group in their relation to the Mapuche. Therefore, as both the colonized and the colonizer, do Palestinian-Chileans have a unique opportunity and responsibility to be allies to the Mapuche? What are the ways this allyship can unfold?

The importance of responding to these questions are highlighted in December 2016 when this meal transpired while sharing foods and solidarity, a 17-year-old Mapuche youth, Brandon Hernández Huentecol, was shot in the back by Chilean military police while he intervened to try to protect his 13-year-old brother at a police patrol stop in southern Chile. Similar to Palestinian youth in protest of the Israeli military occupation, many Mapuche youths have been injured and detained over the years, even killed by Chilean military police.

What is the role of Palestinian-Chileans to speak out and mobilize against the racist militarization of Mapuche communities and targeting of youth such as Brandon this weekend?

What about contesting Chile's use of anti-terrorism laws to criminalize Mapuche activism? Many Palestinian-Chileans may in fact have ties to communities in struggle oceans away in occupied Palestine, perhaps cousins in Bethlehem throwing stones at Israeli soldiers and military police during the current building of the Israeli Wall through Beit Jala's Cremisan Valley? One thing that is for sure, whether such solidarity unfolds at future hilltop Constituent Assemblies for Mapuche Self-Determination, or during powerful and delicious cross-community meals of resistance in traditional Mapuche health centers, my hope is that these connections are only just beginning.

This article was originally published at Mondoweiss . Photos of the trip are viewable at the original link.

Works Cited

Atallah, D.G. (2016). Toward a decolonial turn in resilience thinking in multifaceted disasters: Example of the Mapuche from southern Chile on the frontlines and faultlines. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 19, pp. 92-100. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2016.08.027

Contreras, C.P. (Ed.) (2002). Actas del primer congreso internacional de historia mapuche. Siegen, Germany: Universitat Siegen Press.

Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas (2012). Resultados Censo 2012. Retrieved from:

http://www.censo.cl/

Young, Gifted, and Black: Art's Power for the People

By Corinna Lotz

Outside the door opening up to the Soul of a Nation exhibition at Tate Modern screens offer vintage news footage of Black leaders Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, James Baldwin, Malcolm X and Angela Davis.

These men and women - two of whom were assassinated - shaped the political landscape of the 1960s and 1970s. The echo of their voices lends resonance to Nina Simone's call for artists to reflect their times.

In the wake of white supremacist brutality in Ferguson and Charlottesville, revisiting the Black power movement in America has gained a new urgency.

Soul of a Nation shows how artists were swept up in the struggle against the oppression of the institutionally racist US state. Through determined resistance, self-organisation, self-education and study of revolutionary theory, the movement and its artists asserted the possibility of a non-racist and revolutionary culture.

Support for Black power arose out of frustration with the pacifist orientation of the Civil Rights movement led by Martin Luther King. Leaders like Malcolm X called for justice "by any means necessary".

Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the Black Panther Party in October 1966 to defend victims of police violence. The party championed Black self-determination. At the same time, its 10-point programme was distinctly anti-capitalist and socialist. It appealed to all oppressed and working class people to unite against the ruling classes and the state.

But the US state struck back. Under its chief, J Edgar Hoover, the FBI's counter intelligence programme (COINTELPRO) targeted Black Panther leaders. Police backed by FBI agents murdered Black Panther leaders around the country. Amongst the first to be killed in this way was the BPP's 21-year-old deputy chair, the talented and popular organiser, Fred Hampton. After being drugged by an FBI agent, Hampton was shot whilst asleep in his bed. It was an act of extreme brutality commemorated by artist Dana C Chandler in his reconstruction Fred Hampton's Door.

David Hammons' multi-media Injustice Case (1970) leaps out of the wall: shadowy body marks move around like ghostly x-rays on a white background, framed by the Stars and Stripes. Hammons used imprints of his own body on paper in this cry of anger against the treatment of Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale. Seale was bound and gagged by the trial judge when he was accused of conspiracy after anti-war demonstrations during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

Emory Douglas became the Panthers' Minister of Culture designing a remarkable series of propaganda posters and back covers for The Black Panther newspaper. Large-scale outdoor murals gave artists a chance to reach out to large numbers of people. The famous Wall of Respect, which 14 artists painted on a derelict building in Chicago's South Side in 1967, commemorated Black heroes and heroines including Muhammad Ali, Aretha Franklin and Martin Luther King. It was part of a nation-wide mural movement.

Black and Asian photographers made a special contribution. They celebrated the streets and inhabitants of Harlem as well as engaging in more abstract and lyrical subjects - musicians and singers in performance, still lives and nudes. Just waiting to be re-discovered is a 1955 photo book, The Sweet Flypaper of Life. It is a miniature gem of a story by Langston Hughes accompanied by Roy DeCarava's photographs.

Controversies arose about whether Black art had to be figurative or openly propagandist or whether the artist could work in an abstract idiom. Some like Jack Whitten used abstraction to pay homage to Malcolm X and African American history. British-Guyanese painter, Frank Bowling, took part in these debates. His magisterial Middle Passage features in the second to last space. A superb display of his work is currently at Munich's Haus der Kunst .

The last space at Tate Modern takes on a new spirit of joy in the inventiveness of Lorraine Grady who involved hundreds of people on a parade celebrating Harlem's African American Day Parade.

This is a knock-out show. Go and see it.

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power will be on display at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas at the beginning of 2018 and at the Brooklyn Museum in New York from September 18, 2018.

This article was originally published at the Real Democracy Movement

Stand Against Torture: Political Scientists Refuse to Legitimate Torture

By Paul A. Passavant and Jodi Dean

Since 2004, we have known that that the United States Government has been responsible for torture. We have known that the legal memoranda written by Berkeley law professor John Yoo during his tenure in the US Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel provided the legal arguments that enabled torture to become a matter of United States policy in the "global war on terror." (GWOT). Many have been shocked, outraged, or ashamed that the United States has banished itself from the most fundamental norm of the post-World War II international order and, some would argue, American constitutionalism and the rule of law itself. [1] Human rights organizations have struggled to discover how this system of torture has functioned, to remove victims from exposure to torture, and to hold key officials and private contractors (such as psychologists) responsible for their conduct. Despite support for these efforts, the success of organizations like Human Rights Watch (HRW), Amnesty International (AI), and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has only been limited. Both the Bush and Obama administrations frustrated and blocked their work. Others have moved on, out of cynicism, exhaustion, or preoccupation with other horrors. Nevertheless, the necessity of confronting and rejecting the US's institutionalized torture regime remains. We cannot and must not be a country that tortures.

Upon hearing that John Yoo was scheduled to appear at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA), held August 31 - September 3, 2017, a number of Political Scientists organized a response. The theme of the annual meeting was "The Quest for Legitimacy: Actors, Audiences and Aspirations." The goal of the organizers was to ensure that the APSA did not legitimate torture by providing institutional cover for Yoo. Our response included protests at the two panels on which Yoo was speaking, both organized by the Claremont Institute, an affiliated group that participates in the annual meeting. When Yoo got up to speak, we stood and turned our backs on him. We held signs, "Stand Up Against Torture." We remained silently standing until the end of the panels. Our response to Yoo's participation in our annual meeting also included getting measures passed at the APSA business meeting that would instruct and enable the ethics committee to bring the association's concern with abuses caused or experienced by political scientists together with its stated commitment to human rights.

In an article posted on the blog of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, Samantha Hill and Roger Berkowitz express "unease" about the APSA Yoo protests. Hill and Berkowitz seem to know that torture occurred. They recognize that Yoo's memos legally enabled the construction of a torture regime. They excerpt at length Corey Robin's summary of the public record. Yoo was not offering the idle speculations of an academic, Robin reminds us, he was issuing legal memoranda whose interpretations of law were binding on the executive branch unless overturned by the Attorney General himself. Yoo was bureaucratically central to the GWOT. According to Jane Mayer's sources, "it's incredible, but John Yoo and David Addington [legal counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney] were running the war on terror almost on their own." [2] Nevertheless, Hill and Berkowitz oppose those Political Scientists who stood in silent protest when Yoo rose to speak.

Hill and Berkowitz echo some of Yoo's supporters, arguing that he should be allowed to speak at APSA because he has not been convicted of the crime of torture. This objection goes to the heart of the problem of uncheckable executive power that Yoo enabled and the key point of the protest. No one can face criminal charges unless the executive branch prosecutes those who violate the law. Obviously, the Bush administration was committed to evading, rather than enforcing, US law criminalizing torture. Moreover, as Glenn Greenwald has reported , the Obama administration actively avoided prosecuting, or otherwise holding accountable, those responsible for the practice of torture. That the state failed to act, however, does not absolve its citizens for inaction. Citizens, too, can and must take action to prevent the normalization of torture. Hill and Berkowitz are disingenuous when they argue APSA should provide Yoo with a platform until he is convicted of war crimes. They can appear to oppose torture, without having to take a stand against torture, as they wait for Yoo's prosecution.

Hill and Berkowitz miss the point of the protest. Surely Hill and Berkowitz are familiar enough with the basics of law to know the difference between a profession's code of ethical conduct and the state's criminal law. The APSA protest was targeted less at Yoo than it was at APSA. Political scientists were insisting the ethical guidelines of our profession do not permit enabling torture. The American Psychological Association (APA) has amended its code of ethics to make this clear (if it wasn't before). The APSA protest announced that it is time for APSA to catch up to the APA. Hill and Berkowitz are playing a shell game by seeking to fool their readers insofar as they criticize the APSA protest because Yoo has not yet been found criminally liable.

Hill and Berkowitz may miss the point of protest period. They say that democracy requires the work of persuasion. Yet they appear not to grasp that protests are tools of persuasion. At APSA, the protests were accompanied by discussions at Council and business meetings about changing APSA policies. Throughout the meeting, not to mention on social media before and after the meeting, there were numerous discussions regarding the appropriateness of having an architect of the US torture regime speak at APSA. The protests were central to the debate over the professional ethics of political scientists.

Hill and Berkowitz are at their worst when they offer a comparison between Yoo and Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat who enabled horror at a mass scale. Any torture regime requires a bureaucracy. Eichmann and Yoo are the kind of bureaucrats who transform the worst of what is humanly imaginable into a mundane institutional practice. For Hill and Berkowitz, Eichmann is unlike Yoo and was rightly punished because he "set in motion the mass murder of innocents because of their religion." In contrast, Yoo "legally rationalized the torture of a small number of terrorists who may or may not have had information that might lead to the saving of thousands of American lives." Eichmann is evil because people were killed on account of their religion - because of their identity or imagined race. Yoo, they suggest, was rationalizing the torture of terrorists to discover information to save American lives. Hill and Berkowitz use religion, ethnicity, or an imagined race, to say nothing of nationalism, to rationalize torture.

Anyone familiar with Abu Ghraib - the key event in the discovery of the Bush torture regime - knows that 70-90 percent of those detained in that space dedicated to torture were ordinary civilians and not terrorists. [3] During the GWOT, 780 people were detained at the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Only three of those ever convicted by military commission are currently detained there, and there are plans to prosecute only fourteen of all those held at that detention camp. Here we see the double standard deployed by Hill and Berkowitz. We must listen to Yoo and treat him as part of the community - knowing his legal work enabled torture - because he has not been convicted for participating in a torture regime. Yet such generosity does not extend to the overwhelming majority of those Muslims and Arabs who have been victims of the torture regime. They are all (potential) terrorists and their torture is, apparently, permissible.

The Hill and Berkowitz comparison of Yoo to Eichmann is striking for its repetition of the torturers' lie: the terrorist might have information. While Hill and Berkowitz spare us the "ticking time bomb" in this scenario, the torturer can never be certain whether the victim does have "information" before inflicting torture. Afterwards, one does well to doubt that the anguished confessions provided anything reliable. [4]

Hill and Berkowitz mischaracterize Yoo's legal work as "opinion," although it was meant to be "binding" on other executive branch bureaucrats in the torture regime. They treat Yoo as rationalizing torture whereas Eichmann set it in motion. This is a lie. As Mayer makes clear, US torture policy came from the lawyers in the Justice Department. Hill and Berkowitz say, "Yoo is the kind of person we need to argue with head on." A debate over torture's merits violates the fundamental ethical and legal injunction against torture. It concedes that torture might sometimes be permissible. Hill and Berkowitz are thus open to the possibility that torture was acceptable in the GWOT. The political scientists protesting Yoo refuse this possibility.

Hill and Berkowitz inoculate Yoo from accountability. They even draft Hannah Arendt into the service of their sorry endeavor, situating Yoo in an Arendtian "space of appearance" where words and actions are recognized. This misappropriation ignores Arendt's own verdict on Eichmann: he should be banished from the world. The APSA protests did not call for Yoo's banishment or execution. They called on APSA to refuse to legitimate the author of US torture policy by providing him with institutional cover. They called on political scientists to stand against torture.

Originally published at Public Seminar .

Paul A. Passavant is Associate Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY.

Jodi Dean is the Harter Chair of Humanities and Social Sciences at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY.

Notes

[1] Jeremy Waldron, "Torture and Positive Law: Jurisprudence for the White House," Columbia Law Review 105 (October, 2005).

[2] Corey Robin, "When Political Scientists Legitimate Torturers," August 25, 2017 (Online: coreyrobin.com, accessed September 5, 2017), citing Jane Mayer, The Dark Side (New York: Doubleday, 2008).

[3] Mark Danner, "Torture and Truth," in Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review Books, 2004), 3.

[4] Darius Rejali, Torture and Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), chap. 21.

Internationalism Gone Local: The Ginger Jentzen Campaign Shows How Socialism Grows from the Bottom-Up

By Bryant William Sculos

When Socialist Alternative member Kshama Sawant successfully ran and was elected to the Seattle City Council in 2013 (assuming office in 2014), she proved for the first time in a very long time that socialist politics, embodied and presented aggressively, openly, and strategically, can be viable in the United States. Since entering office, Sawant, as the only socialist on the council, has spear-headed a number of successful policy campaigns, including raising the city's minimum wage over several years to $15 an hour and reforming housing and rental policies in Seattle. Sawant has since been reelected and risen in national prominence. Her successes, supported by local, national, and international activists and organizers-combined with the massively popular Democratic Party primary campaign of Bernie Sanders in 2016-have led to a resurgent popularity of socialist ideals throughout the country, with those on left increasingly believing in the importance of building a political party to the left of the corporate Democratic Party.

The enthusiasm quickly spread to Minneapolis where another Socialist Alternative candidate for City Council is driving towards a possible upset election victory against a well-entrenched Democratic Party establishment. Ginger Jentzen's path to becoming one of the top candidates for the Ward 3 seat on the Minneapolis City Council is a bit different than Sawant's. Jentzen, before even considering running for office, led a massively successful uphill battle to convince the corporate-centrist Democrats on the City Council to support raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour (something that the current mayor, who ran on a progressive platform, wrongly claimed they did not have the power to do, in a failed effort to quell the 15NOW! movement in Minneapolis, which Ginger was the director of).

The Democrats on the council colluded with Republican judges to keep a $15 minimum wage referendum off the ballot in Nov. 2016. Despite the machinations of the Democrats and Republican parties in Minneapolis, the continued pressure from the 15NOW! campaign pushed most Democrats on the City Council to pivot earlier this year in support of the $15 an hour minimum wage demand, but still only with some concessions to the powerful local business interests .

Ginger Jentzen's campaign is built on this foundation laid by the grassroots activists primarily from Minneapolis, as well as around the country, to win this raise for the working people of her city. Jentzen is striving to bring her experience, passion, and political savvy with her into an elected spot on the City Council.

Ginger is fighting, and gaining a lot of political ground, for her platform centered on: housing affordability, community oversight of the police, increasing taxes on the wealthy, support for the LGBTQA+ and immigrant communities, and expanding support for public transit and education. The Democrats want nothing to do with these extremely popular positions-or rather, they are only interested in them so far as they can appropriate them for electoral victories only to abandon them without a second thought as they continue to cash checks from their corporate backers.

Jentzen has refused all corporate and anti- $15 minimum wage interest donations to her campaign. She is fighting against the establishment Democratic Farmer-Labor Party (the Minnesota iteration of the Democratic Party) candidates who continue to benefit from outside money from corporations and DNC affiliated PACs, groups that care nothing for the working people of Minneapolis. Jentzen has recently become the most successful fundraiser in the history of the Minneapolis City Council-almost all of that money coming from very small individual donations (which is now over $140,000 - a new record for a Minneapolis City Council race).

Ginger Jentzen's campaign has been endorsed by the Minnesota Nurses' Association, CWA Minnesota State Council, United Transportation Union Minnesota Legislative Board, Our Revolution-Twin Cities, Socialist Alternative, the International Socialist Organization, the Democratic Socialists of America, and last but not least, the long-time civil rights activist, world-renowned scholar and public intellectual, Dr. Cornel West.

While Jentzen's victory would still represent a tremendous upset, it is far from unlikely. She has the support of the working people and students in her ward. She has the potential to benefit from the ranked-choice voting procedure in Minneapolis (though her Democratic opponents are laughingly attempting to convince voters that this should benefit them). By allowing voters to choose their real first choice and not be brow-beaten into the continually failed strategy of lesser-evilism, Jentzen has more than a fighting chance.

This is how democracy and socialism, inextricably linked, are supposed to work. Democracy and socialism must be internationalist in its outlook and goals, but building support for the cause of all humanity (especially those long-oppressed and exploited peoples) is a process of persuasion and movement/organization-building that must occur at the local level in order to be successful. Kshama Sawant and Ginger Jentzen (regardless of the eventual electoral results) show why this is so. Local successes, in addition to improving the lives of people, breed confidence. They serve as models for others who may share political and economic solidarity with the socialist project but wrongly fear that those politics cannot be successful electorally in the United States-or that whatever successes achieved would remain local.

Kshama Sawant is a household name in progressive circles in the US, and even beyond. She has continued to live up to her promise to fight for the working people of Seattle while also contributing to the building of a national and international movement. Ginger Jentzen's campaign offer the same promises for success for the working people of Minneapolis, as well as the broader aims of continuing to strengthen the organized Left in the US and around the world. For Kshama and Ginger, a small part of this includes only taking a salary equivalent to that of a skilled worker in their constituencies and donating the rest to build social movements.

Forget Hillary Clinton. These are the real women leading the movements that could eventually break the highest class ceiling of all: the glass ceiling of exploitative, white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, imperial capitalism.

For more information about how you can help or support Ginger's campaign before election day (November 7), check out her campaign website.

Maternal and Child Health in the Face of Natural Disasters

By Cherise Charleswell

Ironically, just three months after the unqualified, unethical, and unstable narcissist who occupies the White House, decided to pull out of the Climate Accords/Paris Climate Agreement , the United States has been struck by a number of natural disasters from the uncontrollable fires raging in Oregon and California, and other parts of the west coast, to hurricanes Harvey and Irma in the states of Texas and Florida, respectively. Irma first wreaked her damage on the Caribbean islands, leaving a trail of devastation, where in some places, such as the tiny island of B arbuda, where there was a reported 90% destruction of all structures. Both hurricanes have been recorded among the worse or most virulent in recorded history, in the past 150 years. There has also been hurricanes, flooding, and horrific mudslides in the countries of Nepal, Bangledash, and India, as well as Sierra Leone; where poverty and the lack of sustainable infrastructure has resulted in the deaths of thousands.

What is clear, and what has been long understood by scientists and those in public health, is that "climate change and environmental degradation is real". We have been sounding the horn for many decades now, and there has been many attempts to silence and discredit us. However, despite being climate change deniers, such as Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Florida Governor Rick Scott , have both called for federal aid, and declared a state of emergency. All while refusing to to truly address the root causes of this devastation. These climate change deniers and the internet trolls that they help to create through propaganda, misinformation, lies, and false promises of re-opening mines - which have likely already been stripped of all of its natural resources., continue to convince enough members of the public that climate change is a hoax. 45 (One seriously cannot refer to that man as President) even went as far as to claim that it was a hoax started by the Chinese to undermine US business interests.

Americans are now learning that they should be doing more than sending "thoughts and prayers" when a natural disaster occurs, and should instead do something to prevent or reduce the harmfulness of the next one, by voting into office legislators that would enact the necessary policies that address climate change and environmental degradation. Recognizing that climate change has become the most pressing public health issue impacting the lives of people globally, the American Public Health Association (APHA), as well as a number of its affiliates, such as the Southern California Public Health Association (SCPHA) have choose to make climate change the theme of their 2017 conferences. In fact, in January APHA has declared that 2017 is the Year of Climate Change and Health, APHA actually has an ongoing climate change initiative that has included monthly themes, webinars, and resources for advocacy. While SCPHA just established its Resolutions, with the first titled Resolution on Oil & Gas Development, Climate and Health . Again, the experts agree that "climate change is real".

Another issue that is not being openly discussed in these responses to natural disasters is the fact that, like most aspects of life, intersectionality is at play, and having an identity that encompasses any combination of the following factors, increases the degree of impact that a natural disaster has on one's health and wellbeing: being located in the global south, being a person of color, having a disability, being an immigrant or refugee, being a woman, being a mother, and being low income.

Further, the fact of the matter is that while Western nations, especially the US, utilize most of the natural resources and carry out activities that have increased pollution, environmental degradation, and have hasten climate change, nations in the Global South are disproportionately impacted by the effects of climate change, and suffer the greatest degree of destruction and burden. And again, what complicates matters is that these nations are among those without the wealth and resources to protect and provide services to its citizens, fortified their structures, and readily rebuild following the devastation; putting citizens at risk for disease and injury.

Whether abroad or within the US, due to those aforementioned intersections, those who are the most impacted by natural disasters are women and children ; particularly mothers. During the wake of Hurricane Harvey there were images of many mothers trying guide their children to safely. One could not helped to notice that many were single mothers, or simply had no men in sight who were able to assist. On a CNN interview there was an African American mother who lashed out at interviewers for their insensitivity in wanting to know all of the details about the trauma that she and her children went through trying to navigate the storm, and there was the tragic story of a three year old child being found alive, grasping to the body of her deceased mother . It is easy to talk about evacuation when there is available income to readily do that, as well infrastructure that can accommodate a mass exodus of people from major metropolitan areas; however it becomes far more difficult when

All of this points to a subset of maternal & child health that public health truly needs to consider more intently, and that is wellbeing during and after a natural disaster. This consideration needs to ask the questions:

• Are communities being effectively assisted in preparing for a natural disaster?

• Are special considerations being given to helping to evacuate and shelter single mothers and their children, knowing that they do not have any other support in the home?

• Are resources to withstand natural disasters being made available to those who may not be able to afford the, or have access to reliable transportation to gather them? The central argument is that more resources need to be invested in disaster preparation and not just focus all monies and other resources to disaster response.

• Are shelters being stocked with supplies that will be most needed by mothers of infants, toddlers, and small children: diapers, bottles, etc.?

• Are precautions being carried out to accept pregnant women into shelters, and assist if they go into labor?

Of course, we would want to ask where are the fathers, and the answer may be that they work a distance from their homes, particularly in the global south, have fell victim to the natural disaster, which was the case with the 2004 tsunami that pulled millions of people into the Indian Ocean, or that they were literally off saving themselves; leaving women to fulfill the traditional role of nurturer and protector of their children. One that they are showing that they are ready and willing to give their own lives to fulfill.

...And (Quality) Education For All: A Case Study on Race, Poverty, and Education in America

By Milo Levine

Four years ago, when senior Tre'chaun Berkley first came to Tamalpais High School (Mill Valley, CA) from Martin Luther King Jr. Academy, he was nervous. "I felt that I wasn't ready. Coming from a class with 11 students to a class with 20 is something I had to get used to," he said. "On top of that, [I worried about] not knowing how to speak with the people in my class, because I don't speak as proper [as them], so they wouldn't probably understand me or they would make fun [of] the way I say something," he said. Berkley is not alone. Many students of color that come to "Tam" from Marin City experience societal and systemic hardships that disrupt their educational experience.

"The Academic Achievement Gap"

We live in Marin County: the 17th wealthiest county in the country, and also one of the most segregated.

This segregation manifests itself in what teachers and administrators call "the academic achievement gap." According to the Glossary of Education Reform, an achievement gap is "any significant and persistent disparity in academic performance or educational attainment between different groups of students, such as white students and minorities, or students from higher-income and lower-income households."

This problem is very much alive in the Tam community. "The achievement gap correlates to socioeconomic status, and it is a countywide, statewide, and nationwide issue," Sausalito Marin City School District (SMCSD) Board of Trustees President Joshua Barrow said. "This is not something new. It's been around for decades."

Bayside Martin Luther King Jr. Academy (MLK) and charter school Willow Creek Academy (WCA) are both part of SMCSD. Mill Valley Middle School (MVMS) is part of the Mill Valley School District (MVSD). MLK and WCA teach students in grades K-8, while MVMS teaches students in grades 6-8. All three schools feed into Tam, and though they're within four miles of each other, they couldn't be more different.

The aforementioned schools differ significantly in statewide testing results. Student skill, knowledge, and achievement are largely measured by the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) scores. This test is given to students in grades 3-8 and 11. There is a large disparity in student performance when MLK and WCA are compared to MVMS. CAASPP determined that 77 percent of MVMS students are proficient in math, and 83 percent are proficient in English. In stark contrast, 25 percent of MLK students are proficient in math and 25 percent are proficient in English, well below the statewide average of 37 percent in math and 48 percent in English. WCA passed more students than the state's average in both math and English, at 43 percent and 50 percent, respectively.

CAASPP also reports that 82 percent of MLK students and 40 percent of WCA students are either African American or Hispanic. These two demographics perform the lowest in both math and English testing at Tamalpais High School. According to CAASPP, 31 percent of Hispanic students are proficient in math and 36 percent are proficient in English, while only 17 percent of black students are proficient in math and only 23 percent are proficient in English.

These results are heavily influenced by both race and poverty, given that white Tam students from low-income families also receive significantly lower test scores when compared to the general population, but higher test scores than students of color.

Only 3 percent of African American students attending WCA are proficient in math, and only 10 percent are proficient in English. Among low-income students, who make up 42 percent of WCA's population, 23 percent are proficient in math and 35 percent are proficient in English. At MLK, 17 percent of black students are proficient in math and 14 percent are proficient in English. While these statistics highlight SMCSD's shortcomings, they also show that there is a significant racial element to the achievement gap.

The principal of MLK, Dr. Chappelle Griffin, did not respond to multiple email requests for comment.

At Tam, multiple former MLK students said they felt under-served by the teachers at MLK. Freshman Tyrell Atkinson went to MLK from grades K-7, but transferred to WCA for the 8th grade. "I learned a lot in math and English [at MLK], but in all the other [subjects] I didn't," Atkinson said. "The bad teachers let us do whatever we wanted, and we had a sub every week. [I received] average grades, even though I didn't learn a lot from most teachers."

Atkinson said his school experience changed after he transferred. "At WCA they didn't give us much homework like they did at MLK. The teachers were nice and taught us a lot. It was an improvement over MLK," he said.

Unlike Atkinson, sophomore Daeshawn Burr attended MLK for the entirety of his pre-high school education. "MLK was academically bad for me," he said. "They weren't teaching us some stuff that we needed to learn. When I came to Tam I felt underprepared."

Burr elaborated on his rough transition. "I had an F in [Algebra 1-2], both semesters last year," he said. Although he admits that "I wasn't pushing myself to do well," he also added, "My [freshman math teacher] was kind of bad. She was all over the place. I went up to her to get help a few times, but she never helped me. I think she was probably busy." Burr is now in Algebra Foundations.

Tam Social Studies teacher Dr. Claire Ernst defended Tam, in response to Burr's claim that he was underserved by a school instructor. "Our job is to teach all students and to differentiate [instruction] so every student can learn and succeed," she said. "Math poses a lot of challenges in that regard, but our math department in general does a great job. A lot of support is available for kids that need it."

However, Ernst does notice a pattern among the students who require the most additional academic support. "Broadly speaking, students that have been through MLK come in with fewer skills," she said. If a student is struggling, Ernst said she will "meet [the student] at tutorial, restructure assignments, break things into smaller pieces, [and] individualize attention during class."

Berkley, who came to Tam from MLK, also spoke about a rocky transition to high school. "I wanted to go [to MLK], because it was close to my house and in my neighborhood, [but] I didn't feel prepared coming here from MLK," he said. Berkley had a particularly challenging time upon arrival at Tam. "It was a bigger school and I didn't know a lot of the students," he said.

Senior Jaiana Harris, who went to MLK and WCA, has also experienced a fair amount of alienation at Tam. "At MLK everyone's black, but [at Tam] you feel like an outsider," Harris said. Multiple African American students expressed outrage over how welcomed they were by the Tam athletic community, only to then be rejected come school time.

"We are only important during sports, but when it comes to academics, they don't care about us," Harris said, as several nearby African American students chimed in with their agreement. "[Black students] are used for sports… and during the classroom, [there's] no love for us," Berkley added.

Racial issues arise frequently at Tam, unbeknownst to many white members of the community.

"Students feel isolated, due to being black and alone in a class…You feel like you don't belong," Principal J.C. Farr said. At Tam, events such as Breakthrough Day, which took place on February 27 (2017), can help the community unite to mend issues of racial segregation. However, many minority students felt that Breakthrough Day didn't do enough. "I thought [Breakthrough Day] was a waste of time, because it was teachers running it instead of students, and all our teachers that ran it are white," junior Pedro Mira said.

Another issue, according to freshman Ta'Naejah Reed, was a widespread indifference expressed by white students during the day's activities. "I felt [Breakthrough Day] was good, but people couldn't really connect. If you weren't colored or weren't a different race you didn't really connect to it and it wasn't that important," she said.

Breakthrough Day may have catalyzed conversations about race at Tam, even though it evidently left plenty to be desired. Regardless, the Tam administration is actively exploring race and poverty, with regards to the achievement gap. "It's a very complex issue," Farr said. "Some of it is due to preparation and the quality of middle school education."

Chaotic Teacher Turnover

Farr went on to explain one problem in particular that MLK recently faced. "They went months without having a single math teacher for the 8th grade. Those who even receive instruction are greatly advantaged," he said.

Berkley has experienced firsthand MLK's chaotic teacher turnover. "There were so many teacher switches at MLK. There were always new teachers and subs. It was confusing," he said. Almost every former MLK student interviewed mentioned teacher turnover as a substantial difficulty.

SMCSD has had an ongoing problem with teacher turnover, especially as of late. "Sausalito Marin City is a revolving door district. Statistically, having good teachers is the most important thing, and there is definitely more turnover than you want to see," Barrow said.

Referring to MLK's math teaching vacancy, Barrow said they had had a teacher lined up to fill the position, but he quit unexpectedly after a week.

"I don't know the reasons why he left. It could have been culture shock. Maybe he had another job lined up. It takes a special kind of teacher to operate in this environment," Barrow said. "Money doesn't drive the turnover. People just like to be involved in something successful."

The Shanker Institute reported significantly higher turnover rates at schools with a large disadvantaged population, compared to schools with a smaller disadvantaged population. When 34 percent or less of the student body qualifies for free or reduced-price lunch, teacher turnover rates average 12.8 percent per year. At schools where upwards of 75 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, teacher turnover rates nearly double, to an average of 22 percent per year.

Acknowledging that "all teachers are special in their own right," Barrow listed some of the qualities that make a person a good fit for working at MLK. "[They need a] desire to work with low-income and minority students, cultural awareness and sensitivity, particularly with African American, Hispanic, and the many other ethnic groups we serve, [and the] ability to work in a small district which may not have the specialization, process maturity, systems, or support structures of a large district," he said.

In a research analysis report, the Center for Public Education corroborated Barrow's analysis, suggesting that a good teacher is integral to student success. "Research consistently shows that teacher quality-whether measured by content knowledge, experience, training and credentials, or general intellectual skills-is strongly related to student achievement: Simply, skilled teachers produce better student results," the organization reported.

Tam has recently taken on an active role in trying to stop MLK's teacher carousel. "[Math department teacher leader] David Wetzel was assigned to teach at MLK, part time, for the semester," Farr said.

"MLK, for over a year, did not have a math teacher, so I asked the school to let me go over there to teach math and they said yes. I have been teaching there [part time] since the start of the semester," Wetzel said.

This is not the first time Wetzel has sought to help the academically challenged school. "Ten years ago, students coming [to Tam] from MLK were underperforming, so we started the MLK Math Transition Program, and MLK student's performance went up," he said. "Then SMCSD canceled the program, after three years, and performance went down again." Wetzel and Barrow both said that they did not know why the program had been cancelled.

Regardless, things are now looking up for MLK 8th graders, according to Wetzel. "The students are very grateful and positive now that they have a math teacher again. They are working very hard to learn as much material as possible," he said. From SMCSD's point of view, Barrow said, "The Wetzel situation is kind of like a band-aid. It's a temporary fix."

Funding, Education, and Added Stressors

Teacher pay could be a factor in SMCSD's turnover problem, given that teachers at MVMS have a higher average salary than teachers MLK or WCA. However, it would appear that funding in general is not the main driving force behind the district's poor academic performance. "On dollars per student, SMCSD is far ahead of MVSD, even after all of Kiddo's contributions," said Barrow.

Kiddo, which Barrow is referring to, is a nonprofit founded in 1982 that funds all Mill Valley School District (MVSD) campuses, covering kids from kindergarten to 8th grade. In the 2015-2016 school year alone, Kiddo raised almost $3.5 million for the district. A vast majority of this money goes straight into the schools.

Barrow is convinced that there are many other causes at play, unrelated to finances. "It's not all about money. It's about leadership, structure, consistency, and many other factors," he said. "I wouldn't say that Kiddo is why MVSD is doing so great. It helps, but it's not primary, and I don't know what they're doing right, but I do know that they have [a greater] size and a [smaller] disadvantaged population."

Students who come from low-income families face many academic obstacles. In their book about improving school performance, William Parrett and Kathleen Budge, both of whom have Ph.Ds in the educational field, wrote that "[Students living in poverty] may have limited access to high-quality day care, limited access to before-or after-school care, and limited physical space in their homes to create private or quiet environments conducive to study." They also reported that economic privilege manifests itself early, and those who don't have it suffer from the start. "…Substandard housing, inadequate medical care, and poor nutrition can affect the rate of childhood disease, premature births, and low birth weights, all of which affect a child's physical and cognitive development," they wrote.

In addition to navigating potential stressors at home, many students reported struggling with an environment at MLK that they did not find conducive to learning. "It was so easy to get in trouble there. It's a small classroom, with all of your friends. A lot of students in there were messing around and stopping the class," Berkley said. When faculty tried to intervene with students' misbehavior, Berkley felt that it sometimes made things worse.

"[I had an] English teacher [who] was too busy punishing kids that she didn't teach us anything," he said.

Berkley was not the only MLK alum whose experience was marred significantly by feuds between the students and the adults. Many felt that the constant conflict hampered their ability to learn much at all.

On the other end of the spectrum, MVMS alumna and current Tam sophomore Alexis Detjen-Creson said, "The school [MVMS] made sure that you did well. If you were struggling, the teacher would talk to you in private about getting your performance back on track."

Compounding the inequities between the two districts is the contrast in their sizes. Because MVSD has a massive population of around 3,400 students, compared to the relatively tiny SMCSD population of 540 students, it has more resources and can operate more efficiently. "[SMCSD] is one of the smallest [districts] in Marin. There are nineteen school districts in the county. We need to fix that," Barrow said.

Barrow has started a committee to try to combine SMCSD and MVSD into one district. "To consolidate like this, you need to hold a vote on it. If it got through, the governing board and the voters would be invested in improving Sausalito Marin City student's performance. The community at large would be pushing for this betterment," Barrow said. The community, in this case, would be families from Sausalito, Marin City, and Mill Valley, all working together to accomplish the same goal: improving academic success. The issue has not yet been brought to a vote; however, for the measure to pass, two-thirds of voters would have to approve it, a tall order for any bill.

Politics and Education

SMCSD has been subject to a fair amount of controversy as of late, primarily due to the release of a Fiscal Crisis & Management Assistance Team (FCMAT) report, an organization that investigates the financial status of local educational agencies. Published on August 10, 2016, the report concluded that: "The district has not met the needs of students at Bayside MLK, and the result is that students are underachieving." More specifically, MLK students are scoring well below average in statewide testing, in addition to being outperformed by their own district counterpart: WCA.

The assessment has since been disputed by SMCSD, who stated on their website that "The report was called into question by the Sausalito Marin City School District Board of Trustees, as it contained several factual inaccuracies and unfounded allegations."

The political controversy surrounding SMCSD can distract from the most important issue: the well-being and success of the students. There are some external organizations that are actively helping out, such as Marin Promise, which aims to propel disadvantaged students through high school and into college. There has been an increased effort to improve student's 9th grade math readiness, and Wetzel is currently working with the group to find solutions.

Another group is Bridge the Gap College Prep, which is a "college preparatory and youth development organization that provides programming aimed at preparing Marin City students for college success," according to their mission statement.

The effectiveness of such programs cannot accurately be measured at this time, due to a lack of available information and statistics from said non-profits.

Barrow has made an effort to address the matter at an earlier grade level "By high school, it's too late to integrate low and high income students," he said.

Measure A of 2016, a bill that would have, among many other things, created low price or free preschool for underserved children in Marin County, failed. This was a great disappointment for Barrow, who was hoping to improve kid's readiness for kindergarten.

The Marin GOP was a staunch opponent of Measure A, due to a common conservative opposition to welfare expansion. This may have resulted in the failure of the bill, even in a predominantly liberal area.

Granted, it's best to confront the achievement gap with younger kids, but high schools still have to take responsibility for their role in the issue, according to Farr. "We are amping up transition programs over the summer, to build up student's skills," said Principal Farr. "[It has taken me] some time to try and develop an understanding of the situation." Farr wants the Tam community to know that "We're committed to addressing the achievement gap."

Despite facing many obstacles throughout his educational career, Senior Tre'chaun Berkley is now looking to move forward, via higher education. After looking into various options, he finally made his decision. "I'm going to go to a community college, then [I'll] transfer into a university after two years," Berkley said. Reflecting on his time in high school, he added, "For the future [minority] students [at Tam], I want to say look to be a leader, [not] a follower."

Milo Levine is a student-journalist who serves as a news editor and editorial board member for The Tam News, a school paper located in Mill Valley, CA. Milo has won a national Certificate of Merit from the Columbia Scholastic Press Association.

In Defense of the Hammer and Sickle: On Symbolism and Struggle

By Charles Wofford

According to Cultural Hegemony Theory, often attributed to Antonio Gramsci but also developed by Edward Said and Nicos Poulantzas among others, the ruling class maintains its power by deliberately shaping the cultural discourse to which the populace is exposed. The hegemony theorists recognized that no ruling class can survive by constant application of violence; it must obtain some degree of legitimacy among the oppressed populace. This means normalizing the oppressive status quo. Cultural hegemony is therefore the structure through which the ruling maintains the day-to-day domination, and may be seen as the complement to the deliberate application of violence, which is reserved for those moments when hegemony fails to marginalize the populace.

A major part of maintaining cultural hegemony is controlling language. In American political discourse, that movement whose policies may destroy the world is referred to as "conservatism;" the party openly sneering at democratic processes is the "Democratic" Party; those who advocate a total tyranny of private corporations call themselves "libertarians;" and advocating increasing the number of private bank owners ("break up the banks!"), rather than advocating socialized control of banking, is enough to earn you the title "socialist." This kind of distortion (or actual political correctness) is like the footprint of cultural hegemony.

A different aspect of the control of language is the control of symbols. Given the effort of the Left toward popular democracy (or as we might call it, "democracy"), what are the hegemonic distortions of the symbols of democracy? And does the pattern of turning terms into their opposites (as exemplified above) give us a clue into that distortion?

Obviously I think the answer to the second question is, "yes," and to answer the first question: the hegemonic distortion of the symbols of democracy is to turn those symbols into symbols of anti democracy. What is the word for the purest anti democracy in political theory? The word is totalitarianism. Which society is mostly widely and immediately regarded as totalitarian in the United States? Answer: the Soviet Union.

There are many theories of democracy. If we look at the etymology, we find the Greek "demos," (people) and "kratos" (power). A democracy, taken in perhaps its most literal and broad sense, is a state of affairs where power resides in the populace. Exactly how that state of affairs obtains may vary widely; plenty of arrangements may qualify as "democracies."

But pure democracy, democracy in its most terrifying and effective moment, is revolutionary practice. What is more democratic than a populace so agitated, so politically conscious, that they have decided en masse to forcefully dispose of their ruling class? What is more revolutionary than a class conscious populace that organizes its own communities independently of the dominant organizations, to such an extent that they replace them?

The demonization of the hammer and sickle is part of the demonization of genuine democratic, populist impulses in defense of capitalism. The hammer and sickle, as a symbol of the greatest revolution in history, is therefore a symbol of the purest ecstasy of democracy. We ought to embrace it, reclaim it, make it ours again on the left, and not be scared to be associated with it.

But there is another intersection here: as noted Marxist political scientist Michael Parenti has pointed out, democracy itself is an invention of the people of ancient history to guard against the abuses of wealth. A quick survey of the history of Ancient Greece confirms this: prior to Athenian democracy, Athens was ruled by wealthy aristocrats. Political scientist Cynthia Farrar writes in that "The beginnings of Athenian self-rule [i.e. democracy] coincided with Solon's liberation in the 6th century B.C. of those who had been 'enslaved' to the rich." Enslaved to the rich! Athens, the ancestral society whence we trace our democratic lineage as Americans, developed that early democratic structure in order to defend the People from being

! It was a weapon against the abuses of wealth; a fact that today is being thoroughly distorted; where capitalism, a system that emphasizes private concentration of wealth and which posits an ideology that justifies a wealth-accumulating politic, is thought of as synonymous with democracy.

Class struggle is the crucible which forged democracy. Democracy is most purely expressed in popular revolution. The most powerful popular revolution in history is the Russian revolution of 1917, and the emblem of that revolution is the hammer and sickle. The hammer and sickle is closely related to Marxism, a doctrine of class struggle.

To return to the opening point, the demonization of that symbol is immensely useful in the hegemonic battle over the legitimacy or de-marginalization of the Left. Due to a number of factors, the Left is no longer marginal in the United States. That is not to say the Left is portrayed positively in most media, but it is recognized and it is covered. We ought to recognize this battlefield and seize the imagery of our heritage as Leftists.

Capitalism and White Supremacy: The Two-Headed Dragon that Must Be Slain

By Matthew Dolezal

Four decades of neoliberal Reaganomics has decimated the American poor and working class. Median wages have remained stagnant since the late 1970s, despite a consistent increase in productivity. The top 1 percent owns 40 percent of the country's wealth, and top CEOs make more than 300 times that of the average worker (which is a 1,000 percent increase since 1978). There are 46 million Americans officially living in poverty, but, due to the arbitrary nature of the poverty line, another 100 million are "near poor" (i.e. cannot afford basic necessities). And keep in mind - this is happening in the richest country in the world. These third-world levels of economic inequality make the US look a lot like an oligarchy. The vast majority of new income goes to the top 1 percent, and one family -  the Waltons of the Walmart empire - has more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the population.

Wealth concentration and poverty under neoliberalism aren't abstract concepts; they have tangible consequenses. For example, half of all Americans don't even live paycheck to paycheck, student loan debt is diminishing the prospects of home ownership, climate change is beginning to devastate poor communities while helping the rich, and 45,000 people die every year due to a lack of health insurance. In Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s final speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967, he said :

"One day we must ask the question, 'Why are there forty million poor people in America?' When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy."

But this is a democracy, right? Who would vote for such a grim existence? Well, according to an academic study from Cambridge , there is literally no correlation between public opinion and government policy. Turns out the plutocrats are running the show (thanks, in part, to Citizens United ).

Generic, theoretical capitalism is inseparable from our current paradigm of advanced, hyper-consumerist, job-shipping, union-busting, soul-crushing neoliberalism. Prominent capitalists have fought desperately to achieve this sadistic system, which is the culmination of an evolutionary history of laissez-faire. One day, long ago, Adam Smith planted roses, and all that remain are the thorns. To quote King again, "today capitalism has out-lived its usefulness."

But capitalism is not an equal-opportunity destroyer. These social tragedies demonstrably and empirically affect folks of color at vastly disproportional rates. For instance, the average net worth of black households is $6,314, compared to $110,500 for the average white household. Blacks are more than twice as likely as whites to be poor, and a white male with a criminal record is more likely to get a job than an equally qualified person of color with a clean record. Median black household income is approximately $43,300, while median white household income is around $71,300. This discrepancy is roughly 40 percent greater today than it was in 1967. And these economic disparities are just the beginning. For instance, in the area of mass incarceration, more than 40 percent of US inmates are black men, while that demographic only makes up 6.5 percent of the general population. In the area of police violence, black teens age 15-19 are 21 times more likely to be shot and killed by the police than white teens of the same age group. These statistics could continue for pages. Profound systemic racism poisons every aspect of American society. These horrors are manifestations of the racial caste system that has always existed in the US, which is discussed at length by Michelle Alexander in her groundbreaking book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

We often forget that merely five decades ago, our country maintained a government-sactioned apartheid system. This included the intentional creation of black ghettos through redlining and other discriminatory policies. Political inertia, mixed with the racist War on Drugs, has preserved the vestiges of white supremacy. The reality on the ground looks a lot like the same ol' Jim Crow; that guy we swore we kicked out in 1964.

But racism isn't just institutional; it is often overt. The recent emergence of Trump made this crystal-clear . Not only did the Ku Klux Klan and white nationalists endorse him, but even for his voters, " fear of diversity " was a significant motivating factor.

The evils of racism are clearly apparent to any non-psychopath, but racial ideologies also serve to pit poor and working-class white folks against people of color and minorities, distracting them from their true nemesis; the ruling class. This is a classic example of "divide and conquer," and has benefited the elites immensely. Anti-racism activist and author Tim Wise elucidates this phenomenon in a concise Marxian manner:

"The history of America is the history of rich white men telling not rich white people that their enemies are black and brown."

Let's put an end to this madness. Let's build a movement to confront and destroy this dual evil of economic and racial injustice. Might I suggest…

Socialists have a rich tradition of fighting racism, from the Communist Party of Alabama , to Cuba's critical support of black South Africans during Apartheid, to early 20th century socialist politician Eugene Debs , to revolutionary Marxist Rosa Luxemburg , to the original Black Panthers Party . Socialists not only see racism as contrary to worker solidarity, but as a destructive and dehumanizing hierarchy, just like the class system itself. And indeed, capitalism and racism have a symbiotic relationship. Two modern organizations that are battling this double-headed beast are Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and Redneck Revolt .

Founded in 1982, DSA is the largest socialist organization in the US, with a total dues-paying membership of 25,000 (a four-fold increase since November of 2016). Members have been active in opposing the agenda of the Trump regime, as well as carrying the torch of the Bernie Sanders political revolution. DSA has been on the front lines fighting for a $15 minimum wage, universal healthcare, LGBTQ equality, climate justice, reproductive rights, and many other progressive causes. However, one thing that separates DSA from other left-leading organizations such as Our Revolution is their vehement anti-capitalism. DSA document Where We Stand: Building the Next Left explains:

"We are socialists because we reject an international economic order sustained by private profit, alienated labor, race and gender discrimination, environmental destruction, and brutality and violence in defense of the status quo.

We are socialists because we share a vision of a humane international social order based both on democratic planning and market mechanisms to achieve equitable distribution of resources, meaningful work, a healthy environment, sustainable growth, gender and racial equality, and non-oppressive relationships."

On the topic of anti-racist activism, DSA Honorary Chair and prominent intellectual Cornel West writes :

"A long and deep legacy of white supremacy has always arrested the development of US democracy… When the system is declining, it can bring despair. That's why Black Lives Matter   -   and all other young people of all colors who are mobilizing   -   is a beautiful thing. We are having a moral and spiritual awakening. It gives us democratic hope... It's time to move from being spectators, to being actors."

Members of Redneck Revolt are not liberals . They are pro-gun, pro-labor, anti-fascist, and anti-racist. The movement is rapidly expanding, with more than 30 chapters around the US. Developing around 2009 as an outgrowth of the John Brown Gun Club, this diverse group now focuses on recruiting rural, southern and Appalachian working-class folks to join the fight against white supremacy and capitalism, while protecting and supporting people of color and other marginalized communities. After all, many of these poor southern white folks have been voting against their own interests for decades after falling for the xenophobic rhetoric of prominent politicians. Dave Strano, a founding member of the organization, explains:

"The history of the white working class has been a history of being an exploited people. However, we've been an exploited people that further exploits other exploited people. While we've been living in tenements and slums for centuries, we've also been used by the rich to attack our neighbors, coworkers, and friends of different colors, religions and nationalities."

Member Max Neely summarized their strategy by saying simply:

"We use gun culture as a way to relate to people. No liberal elitism. Our basic message is: guns are fine, but racism is not."

Now, I know just mentioning the term "white privilege" can make people uncomfortable , but this sociological reality must be acknowledged and dismantled as an inherent aspect of entrenched white supremacy. White privilege is the flip-side of the oppression and marginalization faced by people of color. Simply being given an unconditional pass to avoid oppression, discrimination, profiling, and other forms of profound inequality is in itself a major manifestation of white privilege. But an understanding of intersectionality as it relates to privilege is also crucial, just as it is in understanding oppression and exploitation. If one has privileges based on other sociological aspects of their identity, this privilege may extend beyond merely avoiding the injustices uniquely faced by non-whites. In addition to race, these realms include class, sexual orientation, religion, gender identity, etc. The more dominant groups one belongs to, the more privileges that are usually afforded to that individual. Based on a rudimentary analysis of modern American society, the most privileged demographic would be wealthy, white, heterosexual, cisgendered, Christian men. Indeed, if you pay even peripheral attention to current events and history, you'll quickly realize that these are, more often than not, the people who own and control our society and have since its inception. One such man was "founding father" and forth president of the United States, James Madison, who was passionate about protecting "the minority of the opulent against the majority." Oh, and he also owned over a hundred slaves. There are still dudes like this, but now they're banksters and Koch -fiends. Let's break this trend. To those of us with various forms of privilege, let's use it to fight for a better future for everyone.

The genocide of the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas was our nation's original sin. White supremacy and capitalism were then built upon this rotten foundation. These parasitic abominations emerged simultaneously in American society; let's dismantle them simultaneously as well.

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.

Black Bolsheviks and White Lies: Reflections on the Black Radical Tradition

By Peta Lindsay

A lot of nonsense has been written about the role of Putin's Russia in subverting "our democracy." As though our democracy had been functioning perfectly (even reasonably) well, until these shadowy Russian forces purchased a few Facebook ads that sent us all into the streets. It's a laughable concept. I'm sorry, did Putin acquit George Zimmerman or Jason Stockley? Did Putin shoot 12-year-old Tamir Rice? Russia did not carry out the drug war against African Americans or implement policies of mass incarceration, or pass voter ID laws in the U.S. - all of which have contributed to disenfranchising millions of African Americans over the years. The U.S. has a lot to answer for with regard to systematically denying the democratic rights of African Americans and this is not the first time they've tried to deflect criticism for that by blaming Russia. As a student of history I've mostly just rolled my eyes this time around while the Democrats attempt to make red-scare tactics that are very old, new again. But a recent entry in this canon of "Black activists are pawns of Moscow" writing is so insulting and patently false, that, as we approach the hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, it seems very important to reply.

Last month an author named Terrell Jermaine Starr wrote a piece for The Root entitled, " Russia's Recent Facebook Ads Prove the Kremlin Never Loved Black People ."

I've enjoyed entries from The Root before, particularly in chronicling racist attacks against African Americans that are underreported in the mainstream media. But their willingness to toe the Democratic Party line, uncritically in most circumstances, has been noted.

Starr's piece is supposedly historical in scope but is premised upon a huge, glaring, historical fallacy: that of conflating the Russian Federation with the Soviet Union. In one sentence, Starr describes the two as essentially the same (showing you the level of material historical analysis he's interested in engaging in) and then for the rest of the article proceeds to whitewash the history of Black communism, using the favorite arguments deployed by racists - that Blacks who supported socialism did so because they were duped, and that the Soviet Union was only interested in Black liberation insofar as it meant spiting their enemies in the White House.

These assertions deny the agency of African Americans, many of whom were amongst the most prominent Black intellectuals of their time, who looked to the Soviet system as an alternative to American racism and exploitation. This interpretation also denies the real solidarity and support that the Soviet Union expressed in their assistance to liberation movements of many Black, brown and oppressed people all over the world. Since anti-communist propaganda is easily promulgated without evidence in this country, allow me to present some of the evidence that exposes these racist lies for what they are.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was birthed via a revolution in 1917 and overthrown via counter-revolution in 1991. While Russians were in the majority of the population, the USSR itself was actually an extremely diverse and vibrant society for all of its existence. The Soviet Union spanned 14 time zones and comprised many independent nationalities and ethnic groups, such as Tajiks, Kazakhs, Lithuanians, Tartars - all of whom spoke different languages, practiced different religions - and suffered terrible racist oppression under the Tsar. The triumph of the socialist revolution and the very existence of this unique political formation was the result of a revolution carried out by united oppressed peoples, who rose up as one and took control of society away from their Tsarist and capitalist exploiters. The Bolsheviks always took the task of uniting oppressed people and elevating their struggle very seriously. This was a key to their success and a guiding principle in their work. It was Lenin who pioneered communist opposition to imperialism and he who changed the Marxist formulation, "Workers of the World Unite" to "Workers and oppressed people of the world unite" as an expression of the priority they placed on the struggle of colonized people against imperialism.

Around the world, the 1919 triumph of Lenin and the Bolsheviks was greeted by the imperialists with great dismay and by oppressed/colonized peoples with great enthusiasm, inspiration and hope. In America, 1919 was an infamous year, known for its "Red Summer" of intense lynchings, race riots and gruesome violence against African Americans at the hands of white mobs. The Black American political movement had entered a new era of militancy, as veterans returning from WWI were less inclined to submit to Jim Crow and more inclined to fight for their dignity, wages and rights. A new wave of radical Black intellectuals all but took over the Black political scene, many from the Caribbean and mostly based in Harlem in the 1920s and 30s. These men and women were considered some of the premier thinkers and writers of their time and of the majority of these radical African American leaders-regardless of political orientation- held the Russian Revolution in very high esteem.

According to historian Winston James, in his work Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia, the appeal of the Russian Revolution to Black people in America at the time lay not in their having been "recruited" by Russia as the Root article asserts, but in their own independent evaluation of the Bolshevik government and where it stood with regard to equality for oppressed and colonized people.

James wrote about three major factors that attracted Black people to Bolshevism in the 1920s and 1930s. The first was the domestic policies promoting national minorities and oppressed groups that were put in place almost immediately after the triumph of the revolution. After the revolution the Bolshevik government undertook what can be described as the most far reaching and thorough affirmative action plan that any government has ever attempted, dedicating much in the way of their limited resources towards raising the standard of living for groups who had been historically oppressed and creating conditions that could facilitate greater equality for those groups.

To Black Americans, the most convincing example was the swiftness and seriousness with which the Soviets began redressing historical inequality suffered by the Jews, including immediately outlawing discrimination against them and putting an end to the violent pogroms that had plagued them under the Tsar. In 1923 Claude McKay, the young Black intellectual, writer and poet wrote: "For American Negroes the indisputable and outstanding fact of the Russian Revolution is that a mere handful of Jews, much less in ratio to the number of Negroes in the American population, have attained, through the Revolution, all the political and social rights that were denied to them under the regime of the Czar (166)."

The other two factors explored by James were the "uncompromising rhetoric of anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and the right of self-determination for oppressed nations (165)" espoused by the Bolshevik government and the creation of the Third Communist International, an international body that openly encouraged colonized (often Black or Brown) people to rise up against their (mostly European) exploiters all over the world.

At a point when the U.S. government had systematically ignored the pleas of Black people to pass even one federal law against lynching, when city and state governments all over the country were colluding in lynchings, race riots and allowing whites who attacked Blacks to go free, or even reap rewards - it doesn't take a genius to figure out why many Black thinkers were genuinely excited that such a different kind of government, one that spoke to them and had taken action to support and defend its own national minorities, had come into the world.

Black and white (film)

Langston Hughes was a Black intellectual of this generation, this being the same generation that we associate with the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro. Of all the insults buried in that heinous Root article, the disrespect to Langston Hughes, inarguably one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, is one of the most difficult to endure. Starr paints Hughes as a dupe, someone "recruited" to champion the Soviet Union, as if the man had not traveled all over the world, studied and written extensively and was not capable of genuinely supporting a government that he believed to be on the right track. We revere Hughes' poetry that celebrates Black beauty, he is the jazz poet laureate of Black America and we love to recite his words that affirm our deep history and continued struggle in the face of white American racism. But what about his poetry celebrating the Soviet Union? Here's a link to a poem that he wrote praising Lenin . Did they break that one out at your school's Black history month event? Probably not. But that doesn't change the fact that Langston Hughes was extremely sympathetic to the Soviet Union, as is abundantly evident in his autobiographical writing, including in the chapter of I Wonder As I Wander, "Moscow Movie."

The Root provides perhaps the most cynical and shallow reading of this chapter possible, though I hesitate to affirm that that author of that piece has even actually read it. "Moscow Movie" tells an important story about a time in 1932 when Langston Hughes was invited to the Soviet Union by the government, to work on a major film production. This film was called "Black and White" and it was supposed to highlight the struggle of Black workers in the South and give an international showcase to the racism and oppression experienced by Black people in America. According to Langston Hughes, it was "intended to be the first great Negro-white film ever made in the world (80)," though unfortunately it did not come to fruition.

Hughes accompanied a delegation of 22 young African Americans who were supposed to star in the film, though it was odd that most in that group were not actors or performers by trade. Starr erroneously attributes this casting to racism, saying that Hughes determined that the Soviets were so racist that they assumed that all Black people could sing and dance (and play sports?) and so didn't bother to check the backgrounds of the people they hired for the film.

In fact, Hughes said nothing of the sort. He addressed the peculiar composition of the delegation early in the chapter, stating, "That most of our group were not actors seems to have been due to the fact that very few professional theater people were willing to pay their own fares to travel all the way to Russia to sign contracts they had never seen. Only a band of eager, adventurous young students, teachers, writers and would-be-actors were willing to do that, looking forward to the fun and wonder of a foreign land as much as to film-making. There were a few among them who wanted to get away from American race prejudice forever, being filled up with Jim Crow (70)."

It's important that Hughes highlighted their motives as traveling to seek a reprieve from American racism. So high was the esteem for the Soviet Union in the group, that "When the train stopped beneath this banner for passports to be checked, a few of the young black men and women left the train to touch their hands to Soviet soil, lift the new earth in their palms, and kiss it (73)," according to Hughes.

In his accusations of racism what Starr may be referring to is where Hughes says at one point, "Europeans as well as Americans, seem to be victims of that old cliche that Negroes just naturally sing (80)." That is hardly an indictment of any particularly Russian racism and more of a complaint on how African Americans are represented on the world stage.

Lack of specific cultural knowledge about African Americans was a problem throughout the film's production and that is what Hughes believes ultimately damned the film. Hughes was given an early copy of the script and let them know that he did not think it was usable because there were so many errors with regard to what racism and working class struggle actually looked like in the American South. Hughes said that the author of the script was well intentioned but had never been to America. He also said that information from or by Black Americans was rarely translated into Russian in those days. Even with these critiques, it's nearly impossible to interpret Hughes as being at all bitter or resentful at the Soviets for their attempt at making this film. On the contrary, Hughes wrote with unmistakable good humour throughout the chapter and also repeatedly mentioned that they were all paid in full and well taken care of, even when it became clear the film wouldn't be made.

The reception that the students received in Moscow is really remarkable, especially considering the historical context - none of which The Root brings up, of course. The students were "wined and dined" in Hughes' own words, they were put up in the most lavish hotels and treated to free tickets to the theater, the opera, the ballet and dinners and parties with dignitaries and important people, almost every night. They were official guests of the state and treated with the highest honors. No Black delegation has ever been received in America with such grace. Hughes says that they were always introduced as "representatives of the great Negro people (82)" and after describing the incredible amenities at one of the elaborate resorts they were housed in, he adds "I had never stayed in such a hotel in my own country, since, as a rule, Negroes were not then permitted to do so (93)."

On their reception by ordinary Soviet citizens, Hughes writes:

"Of all the big cities in the world where I've been, the Muscovites seemed to me to be the politest of peoples to strangers. But perhaps that was because we were Negroes and, at that time, with the Scottsboro Case on world-wide trial in the papers everywhere, and especially in Russia, folks went out of their way there to show us courtesy. On a crowded bus, nine times out of ten, some Russian would say, "Negrochanski tovarish - Negro comrade - take my seat!' On the streets queueing up for newspapers or cigarettes, or soft drinks, often folks in line would say, "Let the Negro comrade go forward." (74)

This is in 1932! Nowhere in America were Black people treated like this in 1932. Hell, many of us could not get that treatment today, if our lives depended on it (and they sometimes do). This account echoes many others by African Americans who visited or moved to the Soviet Union. In William Mandel's Soviet but Not Russian, Muhammad Ali is quoted as saying of his 1978 visit to the Soviet Union:

"I saw a hundred nationalities. No such thing as a Black man, or a white man, or 'you nigger,' or get back. People say, 'Oh well, they just showed you the best.' You mean all of those white folks rehearsed, said: 'Muhammad Ali's coming!' .. 'All hundred nationalities, pretend you get along. Muhammad Ali's coming!'…'They just took you where they wanted to go.' I know that's a lie. I got in my car and told my driver where to go. Lying about the Russians.. I jogged in the mornings in strange places where they hardly ever saw a Black man. I ran past two little white Russian ladies who were walking to work. They didn't look around and ask what I was doing. I can't go jogging in some streets in America in the morning in a white neighborhood." (85)

The Root tries to paint a picture of a USSR where the same racism that existed in Jim Crow America infected everyone there, but there simply is not enough evidence to say that was the case. They cite the experiences of one Black American man (Robert Robinson), thoroughly. But what about the experiences of the estimated 400,000 African students who were educated for free in the Soviet Union between 1950-1990? These Black youth attended technical schools, Lumumba University and the special Lenin school for leadership, they lived and traveled all over the Soviet Union and upon graduation, they would return to their homelands with skills necessary to aid in the new independence governments. Mandel interviewed quite a few Black Soviets for his book, including other African Americans who moved to the Soviet Union- and the picture they paint is very different from the one in Robinson's account. Providing no evidence, Starr also asserts that interracial relationships would naturally be a problem in the Soviet Union, saying "both Russian and white American men weren't cool with their women messing with black men." Since he introduced the term "bullshit" just before that line, I'm going to call bullshit on that.

Langston Hughes' account features many stories of the men in his group dating Soviet women and not a word about anyone batting an eye at such pairings - which in 1932, would have gotten someone lynched in the United States. Please stop projecting American racism onto the Soviet Union, when you just don't have the evidence to back that up. As W.E.B. Dubois wrote on his third visit to the USSR in 1949, "of all countries, Russia alone has made race prejudice a crime; of all great imperialisms, Russia alone owns no colonies of dark serfs or white and what is more important has no investments in colonies and is lifting no blood-soaked profits from cheap labor in Asia and Africa." The material basis for widespread Jim Crow style racism just wasn't there.

Hughes was aware that the western press celebrated the failure of the movie and spread many rumours that they knew to be false concerning the Soviet government maneuvering against the Black students. He writes that Western journalists, who saw them spending money and carousing in Moscow nightclubs, filed stories in the U.S. about how they were going unpaid and neglected.

Hughes wrote that some in his group suspected that the movie was scrapped because the Soviets were sacrificing the Black struggle to appease the American government - but Hughes himself did not believe that. He was one of the only members of the group who saw the script and he was unequivocal in stating that more than anything else, it was the script that caused the project's failure. Hughes also repeatedly mentioned the context of the international campaign in defense of the Scottsboro Boys, a Black struggle that was most certainly not being dropped by the Soviets, as all this was going on.

The Root miscasts this excerpt from the life of Langston Hughes to support their conclusion that "the Soviets' attempts to curry favor with the black struggle" was "insincere and downright fraudulent." I would counter that this anti-communist propaganda is actually "insincere and downright fraudulent" but allow me to present further evidence on the genuine solidarity expressed by the Soviet Union. Sticking with the theme, let's keep talking about film.

Focus on Africa in film

In the book Focus on African Film, noted film scholar Josephine Woll describes "The Russian Connection" between the Soviet Union and African film, an invaluable alliance in making postcolonial African cinema a reality. As alluded to in the previous section, the Soviet Union expended a lot of resources on aid and development for African nations, who were in the process of throwing off their own colonial oppressors and beginning their independence after World War II. These countries were severely underdeveloped, as chronicled by Walter Rodney and the Soviet Union was a key ally in providing material support, education and technology to allow these countries to thrive without being beholden to their former colonial masters. It's worth noting that the greatest victory for Black liberation to occur in my lifetime, the fall of apartheid in South Africa, involved a great deal of material and political support from the Soviet Union, which was integral to the success of that movement.

Film was another area in which the Soviet Union provided Africans with crucial foundational support. Ousmane Sembene of Senegal, widely considered the "father of African film" was educated in the Soviet Union. This was also the case for other pioneering African filmmakers, like Souleymane Cissé of Mali and Abderrahmne Sissako of Mauritania/Mali and Sarah Maldoror, the French daughter of immigrants from Guadeloupe who made many films about African liberation. In addition to technical know-how, the Soviet Union also provided the essential film and production equipment, distribution and promotion, to bring African cinema onto the world stage.

Dr. Woll seems to believe that the motives of the Soviets were clearly political, but also genuine. Woll wrote: "The Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath, radically altered how, why, and for whom films were made. Financial profit still mattered but it competed with other goals: educational, political, promotional. The new regime in post-tsarist Russia, like the new leaders of post-colonial African nations, willingly allocated part of its budget to subsidizing cinema because it recognized how effective the medium could be as an instrument of propaganda; and most Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s, though they had individual and often compelling aesthetic agendas, readily supported the politics of revolution (225)." In the U.S. we tend to be very cynical of the word "propaganda" but in revolutionary times, propaganda is necessary and the Africans needed aid in producing theirs. Ousmane Sembene clearly agreed; he was adamant about telling compelling political stories through his films and he fully recognized the potential for his films to "help decolonize Africa (225)."

The Soviet Union trained and equipped these African directors, so that they could bring the beauty and the struggle of their people to the world stage. The work of these revolutionary African filmmakers can be seen as a happy ending to the saga that was begun with "Black and White." While we never got the Soviet sponsored film about Black struggle in the U.S. that they wanted to produce, we have since seen a variety of films out of different African countries that highlight their struggle in similar, but undoubtedly much more accurate, ways.

Conclusion

I realize that this was a lot to write in response to a small article that was probably not even this carefully considered by the author himself. But the legacy of the Soviet Union with regard to Black struggle is unique and inspiring and should be celebrated, not horrifically distorted and denied. In Paul Robeson Speaks, the great Black American actor says:

"Mankind has never witnessed the equal of the Constitution of the U.S.S.R. . . . Firstly, because of the significance it has for my people generally. Everywhere else, outside of the Soviet world, black men are an oppressed and inhumanely exploited people. Here, they come within the provisions of Article 123 of Chapter X of the Constitution, which reads: "The equality of the right of the citizens of the U.S.S.R. irrespective of their nationality or race, in all fields of economic, state, cultural, social, and political life, is an irrevocable law. Any direct or indirect restriction of these rights, or conversely the establishment of direct or indirect privileges for citizens on account of the race or nationality to which they belong, as well as the propagation of racial or national exceptionalism, or hatred and contempt, is punishable by law." (1978, 116)

While our current President appoints KKK members to the Department of Justice and calls Nazi murderers "very fine people," while his opponent Hillary Clinton called our children "super predators" and campaigned for them to be locked up en masse- we have to appreciate how significant it is that a national government - in 1919 - put laws on the books like the ones described above. They outlawed racism. They invested heavily in Black education and Black artistic expression. They gave guns to those fighting imperialists and fascists all over the world. What more could you want? Terrell Jermaine Starr and The Root may be confused about which government cares about Black people, but I can't say that I am. I'm proud to be a socialist and I'm proud of the legacy of friendship between my people and the USSR.

As I mentioned in the start of this article, calling Africans who fight for their liberation "Commies" or "dupes" is nothing new. John Hope Franklin referred to this in From Slavery to Freedom, saying that the response to Black self-defense against race riots in 1919 caused such speculation: "Many American whites freely suggested that foreign influences - especially … Bolshevik propaganda after the 1917 Russian Revolution - had caused blacks to fight back. Perhaps there is some truth to that… However, black Americans all along the political spectrum (from conservative, to moderate, to radical left) ridiculed the claim that their new assertiveness was the result of 'outside agitation.' American blacks needed no outsiders to awaken their sense of the tremendous contradiction between America's professed beliefs and its actual practices (362)".

That remains as true today as it was when written. Additionally, I'll close with one more statement from that time, which also remains true, for myself at least. The militant Black Harlem publication The Crusader, under the leadership of fiery Black Communist Cyril Briggs declared in 1919: "If to fight for one's rights is to be Bolshevists, then we are Bolshevists and let them make the most of it!"

This article originally appeared at Liberation School .

References

Hughes, Langston. (1984). I wonder as I wander: An autobiographical journey. New York: Hill and Wang.

Robeson, Paul. (1978). Paul Robeson speaks: Writings, speeches, interviews 1918-1974, ed. by P.S. Foner. New York: Citadel.