Fascism in the USA: An Interview with Shane Burley

By Braden Riley

The following is an interview with Shane Burley, author of Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It (AK Press) , regarding the modern fascist movement in the United States.

Braden Riley: Alt Right outlets like AltRight.com, the National Policy Institute, American Renaissance, and others have been putting out a lot of statements about their plans for 2018. What are their plans for 2018, and how successful do you think they are going to be?

Shane Burley: This is really hard to say because their success and failures are less because of their choices and more because of the social tides. They got a massive boost in 2015, a score that many attributed to Trump, yet came before Trump's real entry into the cultural landscape. Their biggest boost came actually by their own work and tapped into the same mood that Trump tapped into as well. That victory was the hashtag #Cuckservative, which ended up trending on Twitter and brought the popular white nationalist podcast The Daily Shoah onto the public stage. The were calling out beltway conservatives who worked against their own racial "interests" on immigration issues. This became popular long before the term Alt Right did, and that only became a trending hashtag after Cuckserative and other Alt Right memes had set the stage for it. The term Alt Right was actually a throwback, major Alt Right figures like Richard Spencer had actually traded it in for Identitarian, a word used by cultural fascist movements in Europe like the Nordic Resistance movement. He thought that the Alt Right phase of their development was over by this point, but a circle developing online, and without the direct control of Spencer, began using it again to describe their views.

All this is to say that there was a cultural force happening that was not completely in their control, but they certainly influenced discourse and rode the nativist insurgency into the public spotlight. 2015 and 2016 were huge for them. They were able to ally with the "Alt Light," the slightly more moderate nativist Civic Nationalists like Breitbart and Rebel Media, allowing a more mainstream channel to popularize their message without committing fully to their open fascism. They were able to get multiple more memes into the culture, gain huge media attention for their major figures, and kept their ideas relevant to the larger conservative culture with the Trumpian populist movement.

2017, on the other hand, got away from them. At this point they wanted to move into the world of IRL (In Real Life) activism and politics. Their movement, unlike most of the radical left, was not built on struggle and organizing, but instead on message boards, conferences, and streaming media. They had not had the impetus to put their politics into action, but as their organizations coalesced, groups like Identity Europa began to step out into the political scene. Alt Right organizations like the Tradtionalist Workers Party had been doing this for a few years, but they were more than just Alt Right, they also pulled from the more conventional militia, neo-Nazi, and KKK groups , all of which had a history of "activism." The Alt Right , the new Middle Class and pseudo-intellectual white nationalist branding, did not have that history, so it was trying to build it. Unfortunately for them, they began doing it very poorly since they did not have a good concept of movement building.

At the same time, enough antifascist momentum had built up that they were seeing massive opposition anywhere they appeared. This had grown throughout 2015 and 2016, and was being effectively organized in those years, but the less political general public had caught on heavily by 2017 with Trump's victory, the Women's March, and the Alt Right violence starting in 2016 . So any appearance is a major battle in urban centers, with the Alt Right effectively becoming persona non grata for every previous ally.

Charlottesville on August 12th of 2017 was the most apparent of these, and they lost every final bit of crossover appeal they had. Their Alt Light allies have all but completely abandoned them, and their public appearances are flashpoints for antifascist confederations to descend. The organizations that have formed in response are numerous, growing, and their nationwide networks have swelled. Antifascism is at a scale that we have no precedent for in recent U.S. memory.

Within that frame, they have seen their publishing platforms eradicated. Social media, web hosting, podcast hosting, and just about every other outreach tool has been pulled from them. They had grown thought their access to easy hosting and social media, but now almost every Alt Right institutions has been pulled from their online and financial infastructures. Their tools have been deleted, their venues pulled, and their public turned hostile. It isn't looking good.

What they are planning to do also has not been clear. Richard Spencer has been pushing for massive fundraising, something made even more difficult as platforms like Patreon and PayPal pull away from them. Bitcoin has still be useful for them, but as it enters the unstable Wall Street market it is better as a high cost investment than a crypto-currency. The Right Stuff and AltRight.com are hoping that they will be able to pull in enough income through pay-walls to keep a few figures on a living wage, but this is unlikely and it is simply shrinking their reach. Spencer will keep pushing his way onto public universities , but, honestly, this is creating more enemies for him on campus than friends. Organizations like Identity Europa are in turmoil as their leadership resigns, and the Traditionalist Workers Party seems more likely to try and appeal to neo-Nazis than to recruit from normal folks.

There is also a great bit of dissention in the ranks. There are disagreements of which way to go. Richard Spencer was a leader in building what he referred to as "meta-politics": a cultural movement that came before politics. Building off of the "Gramcscians of the Right" philosophy of fascist academics in the European New Right , he wanted to build an Identitarian culture that changed conscousness in the hope that it would alter practical politics down the line. In doing so, he tried to resurrect fascist ideas by giving them an academic and artistic veneer, something he did for years at AlternativeRight.com and theRadix Journal. But with his new friends and the publication AltRight.com, he has turned his sights towards vulgar white supremacy, snarky Internet jargon, and publicity stunts. White nationalist venues like Counter-Currents and Arktos Media have maintained their focus on meta-politics, and decry Spencer for his buffoonish behavior. There are also splits on what to do with queer members, how central the " Jewish Question " is to racial issues, and whether or not they should support Trump.

All of this is to say that their ship has a hole in it, but that only means that there are opportunities for antifascists. This shouldn't be interpreted as a prediction of their failure because even their own incompetence could be overcome by reactionary movements inside the white working class. This is why organizing, in the long-term sense, is key at all stages, especially when moments of decline in fascist fronts provide windows of opportunity.

BR: We have seen dissension in the ranks from women that were a part of the Alt Right movement now feeling denigrated by their fellow nationalists. Do you think that they will eventually split from the larger movement, or reject this entirely? What is the role for women, or femme people, in the Alt Right?

SB: This is complicated, and it has changed dramatically over time. In the earlier days of the Alt Right, there seemed to be a larger opening to female contributors, though it was never a very large contingent. The Alt Right is defined by its inequality and essentialism, so women who were willing to offer a perspective that essentialized femininity to their "femaleness" were generally welcomed. In the earlier days of AlternativeRight.com there were some women contributing, and in the first print edition of the Radix Journal they even had a women of color contribute a chapter.

This definitely changed as we entered the Second Wave Alt Right, which was defined more by the subcultural trolling behavior on message boards and social media. The ideas never really changed, but the attitude and behavior did. Women were always ascribed a traditionalist role, but as we headed into 2015 they were seen increasingly as suspect. Again, this suspicion about women was always an integral part of the Alt Right. People like male tribalist Jack Donovan wrote about deeply felt mysogeny, his mysogeny, towards women. It wasn't until the Manosphere and Gamergate scenes merged, to a degree, with the open fascists in the Alt Right that the virulent anger towards women took center stage.

Now we are seeing the Alt Right essentially openly declare that women need to take a back-seat in the movement , a concept that stems from their belief that only men have the mental and spiritual capacity to lead revolutions. They have, for years, argued that women have lower IQs than men, citing the same pseudoscience that they use to denegrate people of African descent and to single out Jews. They go further and, in trying to ascribe personality types to broad groups of people, say that women lack the "faustian spirit" necessary for revolutions. They believe that women cannot be leaders in the movement because they are bio-spiritually unable, it must necessarily be run by men.

This perspective was even reflected by some women in the movement. Wife With a Purpose, for example, was a white nationalist pagan-turned-Mormon known for her videos, blogs, and Twitter feed. She would often say that her primary role was having babies, but still created a community around herself. Lana Lokeff, the co-host of Red Ice Media and the owner of the conspiracy-laden clothing company Lana's Lamas, also towed this line, while expecting that the Alt Right would respect her in a leadership role. As Alt Right 2.0 continues forward, and the mysogeny becomes more and more pronounced, they continue to be sidelined. As the #MeToo campaign came forward many leaders in the Alt Right, especially Richard Spencer, have turned on their female counterparts even more. This has created an unviable situation between them, and Alt Light figures like Lauren Southern are standing up against their inter-group treatment. This will likely not lead to internal reforms, their mysogeny is foundational and runs deep into their ideology. They believe that femininity is implicitly liberal and in the preservation of the status quo, and therefore they cannot be trusted unless they put extreme limits on female sexuality and self-expression. They believe that women lack key aspects of morality and critical thinking, basically ascribing them whatever negative qualities they can identify at any point and time with silly psuedo-science. The Alt Right's line is then to re-establish orthodox patriarchy rather than the vulgar woman hatred of the Manosphere, that way they can create systematic controls on women. Quite literally putting them in their place.

Their reaction to women in their movement and women across the board is with anger, and the Alt-Right Politics Podcast at AltRight.com even named women, broadly, as one of the "turncoats of the year." They seem to be doubling down on this hatred of women, and we can expect them to further marginalize themselves as they cut down their ability to create alliances.

Their treatment of trans people goes a step even further where they refuse to even accept their existence as legitimate. They repeatedly try to make the claim that trans people are the invention of a modern society in decadence, that it is the material excesses of the contemporary world that "invents" them. This actually draws on very traditional transphobia, where special hate is given to men that they feel gave up their "maleness" by becoming gender non-conforming.

BR: With that in mind, you also had a mistake in the book you wanted to mention.

SB: Yes. I have made a big error of my own, and it is one that I want to openly take responsibility for. At two points in the book I use the phrase "transgendered people" rather than the correct "transgender people." The first phrasing turns transgender into a verb, this is an incorrect way to phrase this and is both antiquated and offensive. It is my responsibility to ensure that I am not erasing trans experiences when discussing these issues, and I should have checked the work to make sure that the phrasing was correct and did not perpetuate harmful language. The instances will be corrected in the next printing of the book.

BR: We have seen the first year of the Trump's presidency pass and it has largely been a set of blunders. While he seems to have trouble getting legislation passed, he is still towing the line on racial issues. How will the Alt Right relate to him in 2018 and forward?

SB: They will be relating to him one day at a time. There were many instances in 2017 where they declared complete abandonment of Trump and where they were having deep disagreements. Trump's bombing campaign in Syria was a key moment in this, and they especially have an affinity for Bashar Al-Assad and reject "compassionate conversative" interventionist foreign policy. Trump's antagonism with Kim Jong-Un was another one of these, and people like the Traditionalist Worker's Party's Matthew Heimbach find this especially offensive since he maintains that North Korea is a national socialist state . More recently, they had a huge problem with Trump's tacit support of the protest movements in Iran, and they instead want to see a "hands off" approach that does not try to port Western liberalism to foreign countries.

There is also a certain amount of ambivalence about what Trump has spent a great deal of time on. The tax bill, which is a massive transfer of wealth from working people to the rich, did not make many of them happy, especially the more down-the-line Third Positionists who dislike empowerment of banks. The focus on healthcare also felt like a distraction to most of them, and people like Richard Spencer really would prefer a completely socialized "post-office style" healthcare system.

At the same time, Trump's ongoing racial antagonisms do make them happy. This travel ban is a watered-down version of what they want, and the increased deportations, the attack on DACA, and the continued promise to "build the wall" keeps them tied. They, of course, loved his "shithole" comment. The most important of these moves by Trump in 2017 was likely his comments in support of Charlottesville white nationalist protesters, saying there were "good people on both sides." This was a subtle statement of support, and when mixed with the rest of his comments creates a cultural sphere of normalization for white supremacy.

All that being said, Trump is bizarrely incompetent and will likely not leave a good stain on the country in the name of right populism. It is difficult for many of them to maintain a purist support for Trump as he continues on and rejects his previous promise to "drain the swamp." His idiocy will spell his downfall, and the Alt Right will instead want to regain their key revolutionary aims. This will likely come from modeling themselves on European groups like France's Generation Identity rather than party politics like the British National Party or Front National , so they may simply de-emphasize Trump rather than reject him fully. At the same time, they are continuing to focus on analyzing and re-analyzing politics, so their singular focus could come at their own downfall.

BR: It seems like we are dealing with a situation that is entirely new in some ways, and entirely familiar in others. As Trump heads into his second year in office, what should organizers keep in mind when confronting this insurgent white supremacist movement?

SB: One of the first things is to see a distinction between Trump and white nationalists, that is one that is often difficult given the open white supremacy Trump displays. Trump has been a massive boon to white nationalists, more than they ever could have dreamed, but he is not the same as them. He has different motivations, different practical politics, and his allegiances and strategies are just going to be fundamentally different than what we find in the Alt Right. The far-right has used Trump as a way into the culture since Trump changed the conversation and pushed the overton window on race, but he is little more than a tool for them to accomplish things. So resistance to the Trump agenda and organized antifascism confronting these movements on the streets are not always one in the same.

That being said, both fields of struggle need to be considered. The consequences of Trump's agenda need to be confronted on their own terms. Increased deportations, persecution of immigrants, attacks on trans people in government venues, targeting of women's healthcare, dismantling of labor unions, and foreign policy blunders. The landscape is also different as we saw with the Draconian charges against J20 protesters for things as mild as broken windows and hurt feelings. These charges are not just happening in a single instance in the boundaries of Washington D.C., but have been seen across the country as cities prepare for four years of massive protests and confrontations between the left and the far-right. Out in Portland, there was massive criminal overcharging, where kids ended up with felonies and prison time for little more than some broken glass. This can have a chilling effect on mass movements, but it also means that there is a material crackdown happening on the left. This is the standard set by Jeff Sessions and judicial appointments, and that can really destroy movements at a base level. This needs to be considered when doing mass organizing.

The realities of the far-right needs to also be seen through sober eyes. Certain Alt Right groups are rising, some are waning, and some are irrelevant. For a long time the Alt Right was seen as a sort of fascism-lite rather than what it is, a fully formed fascist movement. Like all far-right actors, they foster a culture of violence. This is leading to organized violence against the left, but also to more seemingly random acts of "lonewolf" violence like street attacks and spontaneous murders. There is no reason to believe that is on the decline, and so community preparedness, close organization, and self-defense are all important.

It is also critical to avoid simply abandoning the struggles that were taking place before we entered this nationalist revival. We are still teetering on the edge of disaster with climate change, massive wealth inequality is destroying the lives of working people, and housing is become scarcer and scarcer for those of limited means. All of this intersects, all components of a hierarchical society that peaks in moments of crisis. So the same tools we use to fight back the Alt Right can be used to re-establish a strong community that is able to reframe our tactical position, to strengthen workplace, housing, and environmental organizing. So doing antifascist and anti-oppression work should not be seen as a side-note, but as part of a larger matrix of struggle.

Shane Burley is an author and filmmaker based in the Pacific Northwest. He is the author of Fascism Today: What It Is and How to End It (AK Press) His work has appeared at Alternet, Jacobin, Al Jazeera, Raw Story, In These Times, Waging Nonviolence, Salvage Quarterly, ThinkProgress, Upping the Anti, Gods & Radicals, and Make/Shift, among others. He can be found at ShaneBurley.net or on Twitter @Shane_Burley1

Braden Riley is an antiracist organizer from the Northeastern U.S., and has published work in a number of radical publications.

Language, Truth, and Political Viability: Derek R. Ford and Paolo Virno in Conversation

By Richard Allen

Pundits and philosophers alike would have us believe that we now live in a "post-truth" era. As the political Right enjoys a period of relative control over "the discourse," dominating their respective electorate's concept of truth as a coy, destructive agenda intended to erase "traditional values", what must the Left do in order to not merely resist, but produce a viable political movement?

Derek R. Ford, an educator and activist, in a new piece for The Hampton Institute, suggests that in an age which (seemingly) finds itself resistant to "truth," the task is not to defend a preexisting truth, but the creation and actualization of new truth. It is a matter of subverting the discourse through invention. Language is the productive faculty of a new truth or set of truths which create a new world. "Political struggle isn't really about an existing truth but rather concerns the formulation of new truths and, more importantly, the materialization of those truths." The illusion is not the possibility of truth itself, but truth as preexisting, something static and ignorant of new contexts. Ford continues probing this illusion with a question: If this is a post-truth era, at what point in time was truth existent and viable for all? As an example, if our President and his ilk suggest that critical journalism is "fake news," thereby signifying the reality of a post-truth era, at what point in our collective history was commonplace, liberal politics not an exercise in propogating fiction as some form of truth? In other words, it is liberal bourgeois fancy to believe an era of "truth" existed prior to this new era of "post-truth," as the very concept of an age beholden to a preexistent, static and unquestionable truth could never be determined.

Ford, rightfully so, does not deny the possibility of truth nor the benefit of appealing to truth in political discourse. Rather, his claim is that political viability-whereby truth is fashioned, declared, and materialized through struggle-is a subjective response toward fiction as a commodity-of-truth, something preexistent to be offered within the "marketplace of ideas" that derives itself from the illusory idea of static truth. As Ford writes, "The truth is always framed and contextualized, and so we need to ask what certain truths are doing in certain moments, what their material effects will be." Truth is material, intimately connected with the world and the actions of actually-existing human beings. It behooves those of us concerned about the political strategy of the Right to counter their claims with new truth, truth that finds its being in substantive action. This is the central claim of Ford's piece: truth and political struggle depend upon invention, the creation of new truth as a subversion of existing discourse, not the defense of an illusory, static and preexistent truth.

The question now becomes whether it is possible to create or invent new truth, and if so, what significance does the act of invention have for political action? We must now turn to the Italian Marxist philosopher Paolo Virno for the answer.

In his book Déjà Vu and the End of History (Verso, 2015), Virno suggests the distance between potential and act is the foundation of history, of historicity as such, and yet within the capitalist era, the distance between the two is subsumed and distorted, creating a false and burdensome perception that potential has no inherent ability to invent, only to reproduce something that has already occurred. The experience and phenomenon of déjà vu is the historical being attempting to reconcile the possibility inherent to potential and the "remembered now" which seemingly dictates potentiality. "The excess of memory, which without doubt characterizes the contemporary situation, has a name: the memory of the present…What is excessive is not per se the split in every instant between a perceived 'now' and a remembered 'now', but rather the fact that this split has become fully visible." In the experience of déjà vu, one mischaracterizes the actual "now" for a remembered "now" which limits one's understanding of potential as always-already present to create the future in the act.

Virno suggests that our contemporary situation finds itself struggling to reconcile the (apparent) disconnection between potential and act, seeing as the past (within capitalism) dictates potential. "The hypertrophy of memory, from which the consumption and blockage of history derive, is made up of deja vu. People for whom the present seems wholly dependent upon the past, like an echo of the original sound, are no longer historical (they are now incapable, that is, of carrying out genuinely historical actions)." In other words, if potential is entirely dependent upon the past, then the act has, in some sense, already occurred. Nothing is original, therefore within the capitalist framework, the distinction between potential and act within time has become illusory. In relation to Ford's contention that the Left must create new truths, Virno's explication of the problem is helpful for the purposes of crafting a materially viable politics. If potential "exists" before the act, but is not exhausted by the act itself or any combination of actions, and if potential is not dependent upon the past for its own presence and viability, then the possibility of creating something new now becomes a radical reality. Virno goes on to forcefully clarify his thesis: "But no authentic past is of such considerable authority as to impose such a dependency. No sequence of events that has really happened deserves to be emblazoned with the title of an untouchable, binding archetype." The past as history does not dictate the present as potentiality. In the present moment, the "here-and-now", potential and act are joined yet never exhausted by the other, creating the future, not reproducing the past.

Much of Virno's academic work centers on the philosophy of language, whereby language is understood as comprising of both potential (the ability to speak) and the act (utterance as such, systems of signs, etc.), yet language is not wholly contained by one or the other. For our purposes here, language is the key element of producing a subversive new truth, one which finds its materialization in attainable actions. In the act of speaking, I utilize the potential of the capacity-to-speak, yet my speech does not exhaust the potential, but instead demonstrates its limitation once performed. The faculty as such remains impenetrably infinite, even while the act demonstrates its own limitation when using the productive capacity-to-speak. Virno writes, "The crucial point here is not to daydream about a potential without acts - far from it. Rather, it is to accept that acts do not fulfill potential, and do not offer a faithful or even only approximate version of it: they are not, in sum, realized potential." Upon speaking, the productive capacity-to-speak remains present, yet infinitely unconsumed. The act of speech actualizes the potential as such and simultaneously pushes the capacity into the recesses of infinite potentiality.

If the Left captures both Ford's and Virno's suggestion - namely, that political viability depends not on preexistent truth or past events, but the productive capacity-to-speak new truth into existence - a pathway now opens to achieving political victory over and against the Right. Only by realizing the inherent potential of language as productive without exhausting potential as such will the Left find a solution to its reliance upon past events to dictate present action. Capitalism and liberal bourgeois discourse would have us believe that politics is eternally dependent upon the past, the past as truth, in order for justice to materialize. However, not only is the past not truth, but truth depends upon the productive capacity of language to be made present here-and-now.

It is time we reclaimed our capacity-to-speak as the "capacity-to-invent" that which is necessary for liberation.

This was originally published at the author's blog.

Nike: Understanding How Wealth and Poverty are Created in the Global Capitalist System

Jeremy Cloward

"The dirty truth is that the rich are the great cause of poverty"

- Michael Parenti

Though news to some commentators and scholars, wealth and poverty are natural consequences of global capitalism functioning exactly as it is designed to do. The more the owners of the commanding heights of the economy take for themselves, the less there is for everyone else. Though poorly understood or even discussed throughout much of US society, this planetary-wide system generates two basic classes: the owning class and the working class. Either you own the productive forces of the economy or you work for someone that does. And, the relationship between the two classes is exploitative by nature as the owning class lives off the surplus value (or profit) created by the working class. Indeed, though almost never acknowledged in the media or even at the university the wealth of capitalist society is produced by working people. Yet, they do not enjoy the fruits of their labor. Instead, those who produce nothing (and often do nothing to add to the value of the commodity produced, i.e., the owning class) reap the lion's share of the wealth that is created by the workers. Just as the slave owner sat on his porch drinking tea while the slaves labored in the fields to make him wealthy, the capitalist sits in his office while the workers, often in distant lands, labor for mere dollars a day to create great wealth for him. That is how the system works. The wealth generated by workers for owners may vary but not the relationship between the two classes.

In just one example of a highly-respected economist and scholar who apparently does not understand the cause of wealth and poverty in the world we might consider the position of Hernando de Soto in his much noted book The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. de Soto argues that the poor are poor in Third World countries because they have not created a "legal structure of property and property rights" for gathering wealth. Yet, the reality of a capitalist economic system is that if you guarantee the right of property and property rights in your society to generate wealth then you are also guaranteeing that you will have poverty in your society, as well. To be sure, wealth is the cause of poverty and poverty is the cause of wealth. They go hand-in-hand and cannot be unlocked from one another. To use the classic example, if an individual takes 4/5ths of a pie all for himself, then no matter how you slice it, there is only 1/5th of the original pie left over for everyone else to split. That this point is missed again and again by one political scientist and economist after another (including de Soto) makes one wonder what is being taught in our centers of higher education in the social sciences. In fact, one of the most prominent proponents of liberalism and defenders of "private property" clearly recognized this basic truth about property. John Locke (1632-1704) the historically respected political philosopher maintained that, "where there is no property, there is no injustice." In other words, the only way not to have economic inequality (and the classes that coalesce around property) is to not have private property at all. Without private property, neither wealth can be amassed or gathered nor can poverty be created. Instead, the level of material comfort for everyone in society rises and falls together.

One of the best examples (among hundreds) to illustrate this truism about capitalism is that of the "American" transnational company, Nike Corporation. Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, is worth some $25 billion. To generate that kind of wealth, Knight would have needed to personally make 25 million pairs of shoes and then sell them for $100 each all by himself. Has this been the case? Of course not. Instead, he is similar to the slave-holder on the porch in the days before the Civil War (1861-1865). For certain, Knight and the titans of commerce like him in nearly every industry one can think of, add virtually no value at all to the commodity that their companies produce. On the contrary, just as was the case with the slave, it is the worker who produces the entire value of the commodity produced by the companies that Knight and others like him preside over. Just as the master extracted the whole of the surplus value from the commodity produced by the slaves, today's owners extract the whole of the surplus value produced by the working class. Clearly, there are differences in working and living conditions between these two modes of capital accumulation. However, financially, the only difference between slavery and capitalism is that the profits are extracted after a wage is paid. Yet, often times and for the great mass of humanity, the wage is exceedingly low.

For example, Knight pays his labor force in countries such as Indonesia just $4.33 a day (or $100 a month) to produce his shoes. This type of pay would be acceptable to some, provided the cost of living in Indonesia was proportionate to the day's wage. However, just a cursory glance at the cost of living in Indonesia illustrates how out-of-line Nike's wage is with what a Nike employee needs to survive. For instance, the average cost of a loaf of bread in Indonesia is roughly $1; a pair of Levi's blue jeans is about $50; a three-bedroom apartment runs somewhere in the neighborhood of $1,000 a month; and a pair of Nike shoes, made and sold in Jakarta, Indonesia, are priced at approximately $75. In other words, a Nike factory worker living in Indonesia would need to spend approximately three-fourths of his or her monthly Nike salary just to purchase one pair of Nike running shoes. A three-bedroom apartment is simply out of the question. But, it is worse than that. That poverty wage, when paid by multiple corporations and industries across multiple countries and continents translates into not only global poverty but into all kinds of problems for the world's poor. Making up some 80 percent of the world's population, the global poor, who are in actuality the world's poorest laborers, are confronted by needless yet ongoing hardships such as preventable deaths from a lack of basic food and medicine, unsanitary living conditions from shack-house and slum living, and a shortage of clean drinking water on a regular basis.

Today, global capitalism continues to move towards its logical conclusion of amassing all of the world's wealth into the hands of just one person. This could never take place in reality as the system would collapse before it did causing massive and worldwide social unrest along the way. Yet, the system nevertheless continues to move in this self-devouring direction-with capital accumulating at summits never before reached in history. Without a doubt, the system has produced such dizzying heights of capital accumulation that the numbers have become difficult to believe with global capitalism generating such extreme wealth for the few while creating a massive-sized "wretched of the earth" whose ever-expanding numbers are threatening to not only undermine, but possibly even destroy, the whole system itself. For instance, almost half of the worlds' population lives on just $2.50 a day and at least 80 percent of the world's population-or some 5.6 billion people-live on $10 or less a day amounting to a mere $3,650 per year. In fact, just eight people in the world possess more wealth than the bottom half of humanity combined-some 3.5 billion people. Make no mistake about it, though not intended by the "wealthiest among us," their greed may very well be digging their own class grave.

In the end, Nike, ExxonMobil, General Electric, Ford Motor Company, Bank of America or any other giant corporation whose operations span the globe exist for one purpose - to generate as large of profits as possible for the board of directors and major shareholders as they can. This is done, and always has been done, by the owning class exploiting the working class. If things are to improve for great mass of humanity and we are to take the next major step forward in history - which is ending the exploitation of man by man which is the guiding principle of the global capitalist economic system-then we need to wake up to this basic fact. When we do we will see that it is we, and not the rich, who are members of the most powerful class ever-known to man. Possibly then we will have the courage to begin to take control of the whole of the productive forces of the global economy for the betterment of all of humanity instead of the wealthy few.

Jeremy Cloward, Ph.D. is the author of three books and multiple articles. His college-level American Politics textbook, Class Power and the Political Economy of the American Political System has been endorsed by author Michael Parenti , the Director of Project Censored Mickey Huff, and professor and former Central Committee member of the Black Panther Party, Phyllis Jackson. It is currently being marketed to a national audience of political science professors throughout the country. In addition, Dr. Cloward has run for public office on three occasions (Congress 2009, 2010, and City Council 2012) and has appeared in a variety of media outlets, including FOX and the Pacifica Radio Network (KPFA). Today, Professor Cloward teaches political science in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Don't Bring the Truth to a Knife Fight: A New Year's Proposal for the Left

By Derek R. Ford

The following is an excerpt from the author's new book, Politics and pedagogy in the "post-truth" era.

Many are in shock that today that the truth doesn't seem to matter in politics. Every time U.S. president Donald Trump tweets out that a news article unfavorable to him is "FAKE NEWS!" they are aghast and disoriented. Every time he says something blatantly false, it adds a new bullet point to a list of lies and sets off a new circuit of outrage. The response is clear: we need to call out the lies and tell the truth! Educators have a crucial role to play here, for we are the ones who teach the truth to others, or who facilitate the collective realization of the truth. This analysis and proposal completely miss the mark: politics has never been about a correspondence with an existing truth. Indeed, when I hear people denounce our political scene as "post-truth," I have to wonder when exactly they think it was that politics was determined by the truth? The same goes for those who decry today's "fake news." Hasn't the media always been an arena of struggle? To claim that with Trump's election we've entered a post-truth era of fake news is to claim that the U.S. was built on truthful politics and media. Political struggle isn't really about an existing truth but rather concerns the formulation of new truths and, more importantly, the materialization of those truths. Our contemporary moment thus offers up an important opportunity for the Left to embrace political struggle, to stake out positions, and to fight to make those positions reality.

On the one hand, it seems reasonable to propose that we reject the "post-truth" designation altogether. After all, doesn't the repetition of that language serve to further entrench the liberal narrative of a democracy corrupted? I would answer this question affirmatively. But, on the other hand, we can't exhaustively determine the uses to which this language will be put and the effects that such usage will have, and maybe there's an opening here. Thus, I'd like to hang on to the "post-truth" for now, but I'd like to propose a particular conceptualization of it, one that I believe holds political and pedagogical promise as a frame for engaging in transformative praxis. To be post-truth, so I wish to suggest, is not to be "anti-truth" or even "without truth." Instead, I proffer that we understand the relationship between the "post-truth" and "the truth" in the same way that Jean-François Lyotard formulated the relationship between the modern and the postmodern.

For Lyotard, the postmodern is not a negation, annihilation, or supersession of the modern. There is no dialectic of or between either. The postmodern doesn't come after the modern, for such a progression would itself be decidedly modern. No, the postmodern "is undoubtedly part of the modern," Lyotard tells us. [1] Even Christianity has its own postmodern inflection (for who can really prove that Christ isn't a phony?)[2] The postmodern inhabits the modern, interrupting it: "The postmodern would be that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in presentation itself, that which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus of taste permitting a common experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and inquires into new presentations- not to take pleasure in them, but to better produce the feeling that there is something unpresentable ."[3] The modern is that which offers up a narrative of understanding, cohesion, and unity, and the postmodern is that which interrupts it.

The post-truth designation, on this reading, might be an occasion to refuse the liberal nostalgia for the democratic and civil public sphere based on truthful exchange at the marketplace of ideas. Like the postmodern shows how the modern covers over difference and the rules and methods by which difference is accommodated or obliterated, the post-truth can agitate the political nature of truth and, more importantly, the pedagogy of truth. The post-truth, in other words, opens up a political project as well as a pedagogical one. The political project involves the power relations that compose truths, and the pedagogical project involves how we engage ourselves, each other, and the world in transformative processes.

Force in the market-place of ideas

The right wing knows all of this. They don't make appeals to the truth. They make appeals to beliefs and convictions. If those beliefs and desires contradict some set of evidence, then that evidence is fake. That is what Donald Trump means when he tweets "FAKE NEWS!" It isn't an assertion of what the truth really is (as if the news had some innate relationship to truth and constituted "the real"). It isn't an objection based on an understanding of language as neutral and objective containers of ideas, nor is it based on an understanding of language as a weapon of persuasion. Rather, the "FAKE NEWS" tweet is intended as an anticipatory interpellation. It's an assertion of belief of what should be, a performative utterance meant to organize and intensify one side-his side-of the political. To reply that the news isn't fake, that the fake news designation only applies to news that he doesn't like, news that makes his side look bad, misses the point completely. Sure, the right wing preaches about the importance of "freedom of speech," but they clearly only mean their speech. They'll attack a left-wing academic for their tweets and try to get them fired while they protest against a campus banning a neo-Nazi speaker. Recently, Trump got backlash for sharing anti-Islamic propaganda videos from a neo-Nazi group in Britain. Their veracity was first called into question and then disproven. When confronted with this, Trump's press secretary totally disregarded the attack: "Whether it's a real video, the threat is real," she said. [4]

This is why the right wing is winning: they know they have enemies and they have allies, and together they want to defeat those enemies. To defeat those enemies, they mobilize, organize, intervene, and act collectively. They imagine the future they want. They talk to each other, they create their own ideological bubbles from which to act, resist, take swings. They capture the state and wield it toward their ends. They don't care about what the other side thinks. They aren't trying to win us over. They believe in themselves and their movement. They don't think their people need to be enlightened by public intellectuals.

This isn't an embrace of relativism. I'm not saying that what is true for some is false for others or that we should never make appeals to the truth. But we can't position politics outside of the truth or pretend that our politics is derived from the truth. The truth is always framed and contextualized, and so we need to ask what certain truths are doing in certain moments, what their material effects will be. Think about what's happening in Iran right now. There are anti-government protests. There are pro-government protests. It is "people" who are at each of the protests. I can share pictures of either sets of protests, and say "support the people!" Politics is much more helpful than the truth.

None of this is to say that appeals to the truth aren't important, for they surely are. It is important to call out the lies propagated by the right wing to promote oppression and exploitation. My point is that this is a failed political strategy because it rests on the idea that there is a truth that can bridge all divisions and erase all antagonisms, something we can all agree on that transcends our structural positions in society.

I'm also not arguing that "might makes right." If I was, then I would be affirming that what is should be. My position rather is that might makes; that it is ultimately force which makes our world, not abstract ideals or transcendent truths. In his study of public space and social justice, Don Mitchell shows how "the public" is never decided a priori but is always the result of concerted action on behalf of the excluded. Certain groups, that is, only become part of the public to the extent to which they force a new configuration of the public. One of the ways Mitchell demonstrates this is by looking at the history of speech regulations in the U.S. One common thread throughout Supreme Court rulings on protests and "free speech" is the idea that "a democratic polity requires dissenting ideas; these ideas, however, have to stand or fall on their own merits as they enter into competition with other ideas; the better ideas win, but only by being tested against less worthy ideas." [5]

This is where we get to the "marketplace of ideas," which only works if we accept the market for what it actually is. Bourgeois ideologues (on the Supreme Court and everywhere) want us to think of the marketplace of ideas like they want us to think about any marketplace: a space in which different groups hang commodities with price tags and descriptions for buyers to peruse at their leisure until they decide on the one or ones they'd like to purchase. Setting aside the characterization of ideas as commodities, this is liberal ideology at its purest in that it completely ignores power, ownership, subjectivity, and history. First there is the question of who has admittance to the marketplace to buy and sell, as marketplaces are always exclusionary. Even in so-called free societies there are a host of racialized, gendered, and classed rules (e.g., dress codes, age limits) and the construction of some as "window shoppers" and others as "loiterers." Second, even if everyone was allowed to participate in the marketplace, some clearly have more capital than others and therefore can purchase preferential locations with bigger lots, recruit and fund designers, advertisers, hawks, and so on, to sell their products. They can buy out their competitors, create legislative barriers to entry, establish monopolies.

There is an even more fundamental problem with the marketplace of ideas, which is the question of determining what constitutes the competitive order in the first place, and the rules of engagement in the second place. The excluded are by definition irrational, disorderly, and without access to the marketplace. And so, as a result of struggle, Mitchell says, "the seeming irrationality of violence… becomes a rational means for redressing the irrationality of injustice, for withdrawing consent from an order that does not deserve to be legitimated." [6] The marketplace is not a site of idyllic exchange but of coercion, power, and struggle, and the capitalist marketplace was founded on slavery, genocide, and the expropriation of many by law and individual acts of terror. If this order is to be transformed then there must be a forceful disorder. The direction of that disorder will determine the character of the political thrust, but regardless of its character, without force there is no transformation. As Marx put it, "force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with the new."[7]

Derek R. Ford is an academic, organizer, and member of the Hampton Institute. His most recent book is Education and the production of space: Political pedagogy, geography, and urban revolution (Routledge, 2017).

Notes

[1] Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982-1985, trans. D. Barry, B. Maher, J. Pefanis, V. Spate, and M. Thomas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988/1992), 12.

[2] Ibid., chapter 2. Here Lyotard clarifies his infamous report on knowledge and postmodernity, writing that he both oversimplified and overemphasized the category of the narrative.

[3] Ibid., 15, emphasis added.

[4] Christina Wilkie, (2017). "White House: It Doesn't Matter if Anti-Muslim Videos Are Real Because 'the Threat is Real." CNBC, 29 November. Available online: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/29/white-house-it-doesnt-matter-if-anti-muslim-videos-are-real-the-threat-is-real.html (accessed 30 November 2017).

[5] Don Mitchell, The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (New York: The Guilford Press, 2003), 47.

[6] Don Mitchell, The Right to the City, 53.

[7] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (vol. 1), trans. S. Moore (New York: International Publishers, 1867/1967), 703.

Commodifying Neo-Fascism: The NRA's Carry Guard in Trump's America

By James Richard Marra

Neo-liberal fascism reigns triumphant in Donald Trump's great America. This neo-fascism does so in part because over 62 million Americans agree with him concerning America's defense against heralded threats. These include Muslim terrorists, immigrant terrorists, Black terrorists, pro-choice feminist terrorists, eco-terrorists, and a terroristic federal government that intends to imprison law-abiding gun owners in FEMA concentration camps . Anti-gun activists and Black Lives Matter protestors imperil America's Anglo-Saxon culture. Together these "bad guys" offer manifest and pervasive risks, which may arrive unanticipated and perhaps be unavoidable.

In America, protecting oneself from threats is big business, and the modality of that protection for 55 million citizens is the personal firearm. Gun owners are prepared, owning approximately 265 million weapons of various types and lethality. The firearm and ammunition industries earn $15 billion annually , and are politically adroit and entrenched in Washington, thus ensuring a steady flow of profits.

As the gun industry's obsequious marketing and lobbying arm since 1977, the National Rifle Association (NRA) offers its extreme right wing political branding to entice Americans to buy guns, accessories, and training for self defense. It does this by launching a tsunami of fear bating, fallacy, and misinformation, propelled by a white Christian and paternalistic nationalism. This is the moral vision that invigorates Trump's political base. Its imperialist military-security consciousness celebrates hyper-masculine intimidation and violence, and elevates "security" to the moral level of "Moses and the Prophets" (to paraphrase Karl Marx). "Freedom's Safest Place" is a Trump Tower of Babel, where a muddle of hysterical jingoism, fake news, and industry "reports" (read "advertisements") are counted as gospel. Not surprisingly, the gun industry funnels massive funding to political candidates guided by the NRA's moral compass, to the tune of $50.2 million.

The use of guns in self-defense comes with, in insurance parlance, a "moral hazard." This is because people may successfully defend themselves, yet in error or through malfeasance. When an injury (physical or financial) occurs due to a firearm discharge, a tort may occur that exposes gun owners to substantial civil liability, or criminal prosecution. These risks are exacerbated by the maze of complex, ambiguous, mercurial, inconsistent, and even contradictory gun regulations and self-defense laws among states. This legal and administrative morass complicates the task of complying with applicable laws. As the Carry Guard web page announces, the threat of litigation looms large: "You can do everything right and still lose….[L]awful self-defense can cost a fortune." Thus, a tool intended to satisfy a need for physical self-defense engenders a new need and a new tool: legal self-defense and the insurance to pay for it.

Thus arises the NRA's Carry Guard membership plan. In addition to a general membership, the NRA joins with the Chubb Group to offer, through its subsidiary Lockton Affinity, insurance reimbursement coverage for legal defense costs, either criminal or civil, resulting from acts of self-defense with firearms; along with a package of related products and services. Carry Guard insurance is a personal liability commodity, combined with financial assistance benefits for criminal defense, which intends to fill a gap in most homeowners insurance that usually excludes potentially morally hazardous acts, like intentionally shooting in self-defense.

Chubb's new product has a potential market of approximately 400,000 gun owners. The $154.95 price of the Bronze-level Carry Guard premium (minus $40 for the NRA membership) covers policy administration and claims costs paid to Lockton, with the remainder going to Chubb. The potential gain for Chubb is considerable, given that the United States Concealed Carry Association's self-defense insurance has an estimated annual revenue range between $30 and $70 million .

Carry Guard embodies the ideological interdependence among the gun industry, the NRA, and Trump's neo-fascist regime. The gun industry exists to maximize profits from selling firearms, regardless of the enabling marketing. While gun manufacturers and the Chubb Group enjoy the profits offered by their partnership with the NRA, the Carry Guard suite of benefits also satisfies two fundamental needs of the NRA: increased membership and expanded political power. They do this by stoking fears that a greedy liability attorney will convince an Untermensch from some disliked group to file a civil suit; or that district attorneys from an overreaching "leftist" and anti-gun government will file criminal charges. Fears of the racial "other" and government "tyranny" are the marketing the NRA brings to Carry Guard.

This marketing finds it origin in the NRA's extreme right-wing Cincinnati Revolt of 1977 . The Revolt established the NRA's aim to make America great again by arming its citizenry to the teeth. By doing so, the nation can be ostensibly defended from threats to its Second-Amendment rights, capitalism, and its social Darwinist worldview. It is no wonder that the neo-liberal Ronald Reagan was the first president to endorse the NRA, or that the NRA's darling neo-fascist, Donald Trump, told the 2017 NRA Convention that he would, "come through" for them. Carry Guard membership affirms a commitment to the threat-filled worldview of Trumpism. That worldview, as the NRA website celebrates, is championed by a cabal of extremist gun-rights advocates, racists, militarists, and proto-fascist law enforcement, and the virulently anti-Muslim Trump supporter Rep. Clay Higgins, who was rendered notorious by his Auschwitz gas-chamber debacle .

As a commodity, Carry Guard satisfies the basic human need for security against threats unmasked at "Freedom's Safest Place," including supposed unjust litigation. It also satisfies a fundamental need for group membership, which is accomplished through an association with a right-wing political organization, along with the blessing of a neo-fascist national leader. Self-esteem comes with one's self-identification as a "responsible" gun owner, a defender of Constitutional rights, and a law-abiding citizen standing for law and order.

Carry Guard's insurance represents a controversial niche market product. However, its notoriety as so-called "murder insurance" should not obscure the fact that Carry Guard is a bundle of mutually supportive products and services. Its "use values" for the NRA, to use Marx's term, are to: 1) promote the purchase of firearms for self-defense, 2) help to increase NRA membership and funding, 3) and provide an additional venue for the indoctrination of NRA members and public advocacy; thereby increasing the political force of the organization. Viewing Carry Guard as a consolidated suite of products provides a basis an understanding the product as a neo-fascist political project which combines, as the Trump "administration" does, neo-liberal capitalist and extremist right-wing political agendas.

As Karl Marx explained, capitalists are adroit at discovering or fabricating new needs, and developing products or services that satisfy them. While some human needs and desires can potentially be satisfied, those that can do so through use values. A firearm is a use value that fulfills the need for self-defense, even if the perceived threats are largely imagined. While some people personally fabricate firearms, ammunition, and accessories, most purchase them on the firearm market; from which the gun industry acquires its profits. However, the employment of a firearm in self-defense, that moment when the gun owner realizes its use value, engenders a new litigation risk potentially requiring a new use value. This new use value might take the form of a personal financial reserve intended to pay for self-defense litigation. However, the cost of litigation is high and the risk of a large civil settlement substantial. The cost of self-funding a legal defense is prohibitive for most gun owners, and " peer-to-peer " funding looks much like the specter of communism. These consumer concerns provide Chubb with an opportunity to sell a new use value in the form of an insurance commodity. As such, it obtains an exchange value within the insurance market; and is for the gun owner the premium price of the insurance. Thus, capitalists double dip into the gun owner's pocketbook. They sell the use value of a firearm as a commodity within the firearm market in order to satisfy a need for personal self-defense. Then they sell the use value of an insurance commodity to satisfy a need for legal self-defense arising from the actual use of the firearm. Thus, Carry Guard members, wishing to enjoy the practice of "American rugged self-reliance," ironically become inextricably dependent upon a capitalist enterprise to insure their financial security and personal freedom.

This irony reflects a deeper alienation of human beings from what Marx views as their own human essence. According to Marx, what distinguishes human beings from other species that exploit natural recourses instinctively to satisfy needs (like birds constructing nests from twigs and human refuse), is that humans do so through purposeful and creative labor. When gun owners are not able to personally design and establish their legal defense, the Chubb Group offers their capital and the creativity of their workers (policy administrators and actuaries, for example) to market a suitable insurance commodity to meet the need. By doing so, gun owners become "alienated" from the means of producing their own protection. Thus, Chubb "rents" NRA gun owners, for the price of an insurance premium, a safe place that is manufactured, so to speak, and administered by the Chubb Group exclusively for profit. Viewing Carry Guard from a Marxian perspective dissolves the myth of the product as primarily an enabler of self-reliant defense. It exposes the function of Carry Guard as a vehicle to establish a dependency of policyholders on the Chubb Group and the NRA (through the needed self-defense training), and for the enrichment of the capitalist class.

This Marxian perspective illuminates the dynamics of the gun market not only in terms of the commodification of physical use values (firearms and their accessories), but also with reference to affective use values; those psychological needs that the physical use values satisfy. Affective utility plays a central marketing role. Most gun owners are middle-aged, white, high school educated, and politically conservative; for whom firearm ownership is exciting and patriotic. The adrenaline rush triggered by shooting firearms creates a sense of physical strength, heightened masculinity, and rugged independence, stirring to life the "badass" warrior within. Badasses don't feel insecure, powerless, fearful of strangers, dependent, or confused in an uncertain world. An obsession with design innovations and hi-tech accessories also proclaims who are the baddest asses; those who possess the baddest ass magazines or laser sights. Given that the shrinking civilian firearms market requires repeat sales to maintain profits, gun manufacturers and the NRA appeal to the super-hero fantasies of hyper-vigilant males to continually stir a toxic stew of affective needs to maximize sales.

In this sense, Carry Guard represents a commodification of "peace of mind" (as all personal liability insurance does) in the face of the looming threats prophesied by the NRA, as well as a social acceptance and self-esteem that comes participating in the defense of hearth, home, and country. When the satisfaction of these basic human needs is couched in the NRA's neo-fascist worldview, the commodity sold is not simply self-defense, but a comforting neo-fascist worldview as well.

Commodity marketing is remarkably successful and adaptable, in part, because it can effectively appeal to affective desires, while simultaneously wrapping them in a self-actualizing political worldview. The Virginia Slims' 1960s accolade "You've Come a Long Way, Baby" celebrated both the vanity of a Twiggy-like female body, and a self-actualization promised by second-wave feminism. Today, the post-sexist spokeswoman, Dana Loesch, has come a long way as well; roaring from the Carry Guard website as a confident and square-jawed gun owner, squeezed into a skin-tight Carry Guard tee shirt. Coca Cola underscored its iconic advertisement with the jingle "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony)," sung by a commune of sanitized and serenely spellbound hippies residing in the Nirvana of the 1960's "Counterculture." Now, Barneys is banking on their M65 anarchy jacket to appeal to Millenials who are confronting Trump's neo-fascism in streets across America, in a desperate struggle for a secure and compassionate world; one free from the exploitation and repression of "The System." Barneys hopes there will be value added from sales to those who choose to safely impersonate revolutionaries at a safe distance.

Altogether, Carry Guard's carefully designed and marketed package of commodified use values embodies the symbiosis between neo-liberal capitalism and right-wing extremist politics that forms the core of, and is a marketized metaphor for, Trump's neo-fascist regime.

Decolonizing Zwarte Piet

By Darryl Barthe

When I arrived in the Netherlands in March of 2016, I was forewarned by a number of colleagues and friends that the Dutch tradition of Zwarte Piet would challenge me. I'd seen the images of Dutchmen in blackface handing out candy while dressed as Harlequins, but I honestly had no idea how it would affect me until my daughter came home from school with a little "golliwog" figure that she had colored that day as a part of Sinterklaas festivities. I'd heard the arguments from Prime Minister Mark Rutte's people: this is a "normal" expression of Dutch culture. I'd also heard the arguments from Geert Wilder's people (who really didn't sound so different from Rutte's people, in this regard): anyone who has a problem with this part of Dutch culture should get out of the Netherlands. [1]

I like haring. I like being able to ride a bike everywhere. I like the fact that cannabis is decriminalized and that prostitutes are organized into labor unions. However, I do not like racist caricatures of African people that inspire my neighbor from Djibouti to keep her child home from school rather than allow him to be subjected to cartoonish representations of black people as brutish, goofy, slaves. This dilemma inspired me to look to the origins of Zwarte Piet to interrogate this narrative of golliwogs being integral to some Dutch people's sense of national identity.

The connections between the Germanic god of Magic, War and Rulership, known variously as "Woten," "Woden," and "Odin," and "St. Nicholas," "Father Christmas," "Sinterklaas," and "Santa Clause" are convincingly documented by a number of scholars. The figure of "Sleipnir," Odin's 8-legged horse, is re-imagined in the English poem "The Night Before Christmas," as "eight tiny reindeer," for example. The All-father's habit of visiting unsuspecting families and testing their hospitality is the reason that American children leave Santa milk and cookies ("koekjes," being the original Dutch word; what Americans call "cookies" are called "biscuits" in the UK) and why Dutch children leave hay or carrots for Sinterklaas' horse. It is ironic that this tradition, grounded in a belief in the transcendent, moral, value of hospitality, should be expressed in blackface, a mode of drama and comedy steeped in a history of racist dehumanization and exploitation.

In the case of the "naughty" children -those who do not show the All-father hospitality-there are a number of re-interpretations of the Old Norse myth which involved Odin, in some way, cursing the offenders. All involve some reinterpretation of the mythical "svartalfar," or "dark elves," who controlled all the minerals under the mountains. So, good children get gold while bad children get coal; good children get presents while bad children get abducted by the dark elves in a manner suggested by the German Christmas tradition of "Krampus," and the story of the Pied Piper of Hamlin. In the Santa Claus tradition, the svartalfar have been reimagined as "Santa's elves" who leave children lumps of coal in their stockings if they are naughty, as opposed to treats.

The present tradition of Zwarte Piet can be directly traced to the middle of the 19th-century, and a children's book written by Jan Schenkman,Sint Nikolaas en Zijn Knecht ( Saint Nicholas and his Servant). The myths of the svartalfar were submerged in a colonial narrative of servile (yet simultaneously violent and cruel) "Moors" (or, alternatively, "Spaniards") accompanying the aging (white) patriarch, Sinterklaas, to Holland. When Netherlanders don their blackface and pantaloons, the pre-Christian significance of that imagery -a significance that speaks to an older, pre-Romanized, sense of "Dutchness"-is, for the most part, lost on them. What is confounding, however, is the extent to which the racist, colonial, White Supremacist, significance of that imagery is also lost on many Netherlanders, as well.

Dutch identity, today, is only vaguely related to the Batavians, the ancient Germanic tribe that lived at the Rhine Delta during the 1 st Century CE. Even less so is contemporary Dutch identity related to the Chatti, an ancient Germanic tribe of Lower Saxony and Hesse, from whom the Batavians supposedly descended. Rather, contemporary Dutch identity is most often articulated as the collective social and cultural inheritance of 17th century merchant seamen, who traded mostly in spices and flowers.

There is a vague notion that the Dutch played some role in the slave trade, but only rarely is this fact seriously interrogated in the Netherlands where, according to University of Amsterdam Professor Gloria Wekker, "fear and avoidance of the axis of race/ethnicity are dominant" in academic discourses.[2] The Dutch embrace a view of themselves as a tolerant, anti-racist, people despite the glaring, obvious, historical silences surrounding the brutality of Dutch colonialism, the underlying ideology of racism and White Supremacy that fueled that colonial program, and the lingering effects that that history has had on the Dutch people (and, perhaps more to the point, Dutch people of African descent). My Dutch students often recoil in horror and righteous indignation when I relate the bloody, gory, history of racism and lynching in the US; this is in contrast to the looks of surprise and confusion that I get when I tell those same students that the first enslaved Africans brought to the English colonies in North America were brought there by Dutch sailors.

Every year the Dutch legacy of colonialism (and the attendant white Supremacy that justified the Dutch colonial program) is articulated through the "innocent tradition" of Dutch people donning costumes portraying buffoonish images of fat-lipped, Afro-wearing, golliwogs, prancing about goofily, handing out candy. To suggest that this display accomplishes the racist dehumanization of black people can often invite defensiveness from Dutch people who are genuinely horrified at the thought that anyone would ever call them racist. Many Netherlanders - fair-minded, reasonable people, committed to notions of equality and ideologically opposed to racism and prejudicial discrimination-will admit in candid moments that they honestly cannot understand what it is about Zwarte Piet that is so offensive to black people.

The best among the Dutch are willing to allow space for Black people in the Netherlands to explain it to them. Since 2013, there has been a growing movement to discontinue the portrayal of Zwarte Piet. In 2014, the city of Amsterdam decided to discontinue the blackface tradition. In 2015, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination urged the Netherlands to confront the problem of this national celebration of racist stereotypes, a suggestion the Dutch government took under advisement. Not all Netherlanders are so reasonable, however.

A few weeks ago, pro Zwarte Piet demonstrators blocked a highway, preventing antiracist activists from marching on the city of Dokkum where "traditional" Zwarte Piet celebrations were commencing. Mark Rutte's response to the (illegal blockade) protest was to suggest that children should not be forced to deal with angry Zwarte Piet demonstrators when they were simply out for a little Christmas fun: "Sinterklaas is een mooie traditie, een kinderfeest. Dus laten we met elkaar een beetje normaal doen" ("Sinterklaas is a beautiful tradition, a children's holiday party. So, let's all get together and be a little normal"). [3]

I am certain that Mark Rutte was unaware of the deep irony in his suggestion that racist theater represented Dutch "normality." For the most part, the sort of active, aggressive, racial hatred that exists in colonial contexts (like the US, for example,) does not exist in the Netherlands. At the same time, the racism of the Dutch colonial program was always buttressed by a principle of "white normativity" which posited only white people as people, and which recognized the humanity of non-white people only to the extent that those non-white people resembled (and internalized the value systems of) white people. That principle of white normativity -a passive, unaggressive, racism which even allows for individual kindness and intimacy, including the legendary "black friend," or even the occasional black spouse- defines the parameters of the discourse on race in the Netherlands and that will not change until the Dutch start honestly confronting their own history of racism and colonial violence, and not until the vantages of people of color in the Netherlands are properly integrated into Dutch notions of "normaal."

Notes

[1] See Mark Rutte, "Lees hier de brief van Mark," (VVD.nl, 22 January 2017) https://www.vvd.nl/nieuws/lees-hier-de-brief-van-mark/ (accessed December 23, 2017). See also Ben Winsor, "Wilders prepares law to protect 'Zwarte Piet' holiday blackface," ( SBS.com.au, February 16, 2017) https://www.sbs.com.au/news/wilders-prepares-law-to-protect-zwarte-piet-holiday-blackface (accessed December 23, 2017).

[2] Gloria Wekker, White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 52.

[3] "Zwarte Piet supporters close motorway to stop demo as Sinterklass arrives" (DutchNews.nl, November 18, 2017), http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2017/11/zwarte-piet-supporters-close-motorway-to-stop-demo-as-sinterklaas-arrives-in-dokkum/ (accessed December 23, 2017); "Premier Rutte over Zwarte Piet-discussie: 'Laten we een beetje normaal doen'" ( rtvnoord.nl, November 18, 2017), https://www.rtvnoord.nl/nieuws/186365/Premier-Rutte-over-Zwarte-Piet-discussie-Laten-we-een-beetje-normaal-doen (accessed December 23, 2017).

STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and Society: An Interview

By Brenan Daniels

Today we interview two members of the Socialist Party USA. Stephanie C. is a biochemist working in the university and Eric D. is a quality manager, though by trade is a civil engineer. In the interview we discuss STEM as it relates to them personally, through the lens of capitalism, and we end with asking what advice they would give to someone looking to go into the STEM field.

What got you into the STEM field? What part of STEM do you engage in?

Stephanie C.: As long as I can remember, I had an interest and knack for science. My father was a microbiologist for the FDA, and he used to take me to work. I always knew I wanted to work in a lab. My main interest was chemistry, but the biological sciences were where I had the most knowledge and skill. I got my degree in biochemistry; I currently work making proteins that are used for cancer research at a large public research university.

Eric D.: I have always had a love for math and science. As a child, I wanted to be a scientist of some kind. But because things came easily to me in school, I got really bored and distracted. It wasn't until I got married, years after high school, that I started taking classes at my local community college.

My initial plan was to get an associate's degree and then transfer to a four-year school for a degree in chemical engineering. But during the course of taking classes at the community college, I grew more interested in civil engineering and I ultimately ended up going down the path of a degree in Civil Engineering Technologies.

I ended up getting a job with a local mechanical contractor doing CAD drawings for them on second shift and moved my way up through that department. Now, I run the company's quality management system. It's my job to establish processes to ensure that the products that we deliver meet all applicable requirements.

Why do you think that there seems to be a battle between liberal arts and the STEM fields, with people denigrating the former?

Stephanie C.: I cannot say why it is STEM that is valued over the liberal arts. Perhaps the roles would be shifted if there were more STEM graduates than liberal arts graduates, but valuing one over the other when both are useful in different ways doesn't make a lot of sense to me. The working poor have always been shamed and blamed for the failings of capitalism, this is not a new thing, though the rhetoric changes to fit the times. Lack of education can no longer be used as an excuse for why so many hard working people live in poverty, as so many of those in poverty have an education now. So the narrative shifts: It must be that they don't have the right kind of education. Or they didn't get enough education. Or the education system itself is broken. It is all about turning working people against each other: rather than questioning the system that continues to fail them.

Eric D.: Honestly, I have no doubt that it comes down to capitalism. Our country goes out of its way to cater to businesses and is set up in a way to ensure maximum profits. As a result, our education system gets manipulated by legislators in order to push whatever agenda they think will lead to a profitable outcome, with no regard for the long-term effects of such action on the wider society.

Liberal arts feed the human spirit. We can construct highways that runs through mountains and over rivers, probe into the vastness of space, open up a chest and see a beating heart without killing someone, and develop a way to instantly communicate with people anywhere in the world - all because of STEM fields. The things that we have managed to accomplish on account of STEM fields are amazing. But to truly appreciate the depth of humanity, enjoy the beauty of the world around us, and enrich our lives beyond what technological marvels can accomplish, we need the arts and humanities. But there is more money in developing technology than there is in poetry. A ballet company will never be as profitable as a medical technology corporation. Of course capitalists want to drive investment towards STEM fields and away from the Liberal Arts.

And let's not forget one very important thing. STEM fields develop a system for thinking about issues and developing solutions. But they really don't drive someone to think critically about the world around them in a way which would challenge the status quo. The Liberal Arts helps make someone a better critical thinker about social issues. It's much easier to govern a people who don't ask hard questions about why things are the way they are than it is to have a society full of deep thinkers who challenge those in office. That's not to say that people in STEM fields aren't engaged in the political issues of the world. Only that a person who has studied history, philosophy, and other things of this nature tend to bring an entirely different perspective to things than people who have spent their entire lives approaching problems like engineers.

What would your response be when people act as if a STEM field is a ticket to fast money? Why is it that this idea persists even though there are people with such degrees who can't find jobs?

Stephanie C.: I do hear this a lot, and it bothers me. It is as if we're getting to the point where education is nothing more than job training, and the concept of pursuing an education for its own sake is considered frivolous or old-fashioned. While it is possible to make money in STEM, it is by no means guaranteed, and there are other ways to make money that don't involve taking on a lifetime of student loan debt. Also, it is difficult to succeed in any field that requires long hours covering subject matter that seems boring to most people. It can be done, but at the end of the day money isn't the greatest motivator. Personally, I'd rather live in a world where doctors and scientists are motivated by their love of the field and desire to help people than money. I think this idea persists for the reasons I mentioned in the second question. The myth that the poor are poor because they chose the wrong profession, an argument that falls apart as soon as you realize that ultimately, someone has to do the low-paid professions, no matter what they happen to be at that point in time.

Eric D.: Personally, I'd tell anyone not to pursue a career just because of the money. We all know people who are absolutely miserable with what they do for a living but who make a decent living. Who cares how big my TV is if I spend 40% of my day hating what I do?

That said, if you think that you have found a ticket to fast money which is being pushed by the government, you have to keep in mind that millions of other people will be thinking the same thing. Politicians and business leaders are perfectly happy to herd millions of people towards STEM fields in order to maximize profits - and if some slip through the cracks, that's a price they're willing to pay.

Talk about some of the internal problems in the STEM field that people may not know of. We all know of the racial/gender problems?

Stephanie C.: I cannot speak from personal experience when it comes to racism in STEM, as I am white, but it is a very real problem that deserves it's own discussion. I have seen women make in roads into STEM, especially in the life sciences, but I have not seen the same progress in racial equity. Like all fields, STEM has a gender wage gap. It may be smaller than other fields, but it remains, especially in the most highly paid fields. For example, one study showed that having a male name on the top of a resume meant $4,000 more in compensation than the same resume with a female name.

Many studies have shown bias against women : in addition to being paid less, they are less likely to be hired, less likely to be promoted, and are viewed as less competent than men doing the same work. Women's work is devalued simply by the nature of women's doing it, and there are many examples showing pay drops when women take over a field and rises when men take over, It isn't just women naturally picking lower paying jobs, women are simply valued less, despite working more. And although some effort has been made to counteract gender discrimination in STEM, it is still widely believed to be a myth, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Eric D.: Well, I can't speak for all STEM fields and I'm sure that they vary in certain areas. But, in my experience, the engineering field tends to be overwhelmingly men who are very conservative. It's not at all uncommon to catch part of a conversation in which people being racist, sexist, or homophobic.

Additionally, a career in a STEM field can be very demoralizing. There is a lot of stress, tight deadlines, and a sense that you can be replaced at any moment because there are million people who are ready to step into your place. It's like the giant wheel of our economy will crush anyone who falls behind.

In what ways does pushing STEM in K-12 aid in the further decline of the power of labor and the aid in the empowerment of the corporate state?

Stephanie C.: Corporations have been pushing kids into STEM for some time now. Whether it is because it is good PR, for tax write offs and free advertising, or because they are actively trying to drive down wages by flooding the market I cannot say, but I sincerely doubt their sole motivation is helping kids.

Eric D.: The entire push towards STEM is intended to benefit the corporate state. They are creating this sense that kids need to lock in what they want to do at a young age and push towards being the best that they can be in order to be successful. My kindergartener comes home with math homework every night. While I think it's good to be competent in math regardless of a person's career choice, I don't at all think that it is more important to do math homework than it is to play in the dirt and explore. This worries me because I can already see how the drive towards STEM is taking place for him in school. The pressure only increases as kids advance in their education.

My wife teaches 11th grade Language Arts and Cultural Literacy. She does a remarkable job helping motivate kids to think outside of STEM, better understand the world in which they live, and challenge the status quo. But things have changed. There is less of an emphasis placed on her courses and far more pressure on the students and teachers where STEM fields are involved.

I've heard numerous teachers talking about life after high school and the importance of jobs in the STEM field. I hate it. I wish that students were taught the material which would best develop them as humans instead of being taught the material which would make them most useful to businesses. Not only does this have a detrimental impact on students due to them placing less importance on obtaining a well-rounded education, but it also skews their worldview and places an elevated importance on making money above other things.

A person whose main motivation is the amount of money they can make will give no thought to the forms of oppression being faced by others. In short, it reinforces the problems that already exist in our society and creates a cycle by which those oppressions continue to get worse. But this suits legislators and businesses very well. A person who is looking out for themselves and the amount of money that they can make will not be organizing labor unions or engaging in behavior which might in any way risk the stability that they cling to.

By making people focus on their wages above all else, capitalists have taken another step in neutralizing any efforts made to regain power for the working class.

What would you say to a person thinking of majoring in the STEM field?

Stephanie C.: I would ask them why want to go into STEM, and what they expect from their degree. If they say that they want easy money but have no interest or skill in STEM, I would try to encourage them to check out other options as well before committing to a path. If they are legitimately interested in STEM I would do what I could to help them discover what would be a good fit for them. I'd definitely recommend taking all the credits they could at a community colleges to transfer to another school, as this can save a lot of money, and not to take out unsubsidized or private loans if possible.

Eric D.: If it's where your heart really is, go for it. But if you aren't sure or if you're just doing it because it's what others expect you to do or you think it will provide a good source of income, don't do it. The world needs more poets, artists, dancers, philosophers, etc.

I'm concerned that with the drive towards STEM, we are sacrificing part of our humanity at the altar of "progress."

Coups and History: An Interview on Zimbabwe

By Brenan Daniels

This is the transcript of a recent interview with Abayomi Azikiwe, of Pan African Newswire, and Netfa Freeman, an Analyst and Events Coordinator for the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a longtime organizer in the Pan-African and international human rights movement, and former Liaison for the Ujamma Youth Farming Project in Gweru, Zimbabwe. Netfa hosts and produces the radio show Voices With Vision on WPFW 89.3 F. The interview focuses on the recent coup in Zimbabwe, putting it in current and historical context.

The coup in Zimbabwe seemed to happen all of a sudden. What were the events leading up to it?

Abayomi Azikiwe: These factional dispute within the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) ruling party have been coming to a head for over three years. With the expulsion of the former Vice President Joice Mujuru and her supporters in Dec. 2014, the stage was set for an intensified struggle between those aligned with the now Interim President Emmerson D. Mnangagwa on the one side and the forces surrounding First Lady Grace Mugabe on the other.

The Generation 40 Group aligned with the First Lady appeared to be gaining the upper hand when the-then Vice President Mnangagwa was expelled during early Nov. Nonetheless, the Lacoste Group, the supporters of Mnangagwa, had strong backing within the military and this was the determining aspect of the struggle which shifted power toward the current leadership group. On the surface the conflict appeared to be an internal struggle within the ruling party itself although there have been suggestions and some documented proof that outside interests such as the United States and Britain may have played a role as well in forcing the resignation of President Robert Mugabe. It was quite interesting that the Voice of America reported on Nov. 21 that the State Department had already outlined the terms for the lifting of sanctions against Zimbabwe.

Whether the sanctions are actually lifted will remain to be seen. There have been western business-friendly statements made by some officials of the current leadership within the party such as a willingness to compensate the British settlers for land confiscated in 2000; the scaling down of government personnel including ministerial portfolios; the amendments already made to the indigenization policy; and the potential for Zimbabwe re-entering the Commonwealth.

Netfa Freeman: Some are disputing use of the term coup given that it doesn't fit other historical examples of coups in Africa. But getting into that would be too much and would deviate from the question.

First, nothing of this nature can happen all of a sudden. The context might be a little too complicated to explain in this interview but a synopsis seems to be that this was the culmination of power struggles within the ruling party ZANU PF that have been brewing since at least 2015 or 14. Contributing factors to their acuteness are the economic tensions largely due to imperialist sanctions imposed on the country and concerns over who would succeed the aging President Robert Mugabe now 93. It should be no wonder that tensions about succession would arise and intensify.

As they say politics abhors a power vacuum. Factions formed, one delineated as a younger strain of ZANU PF party members known as G40 or Generation 40, led by Grace Mugabe and the other being the old guard of members many of whom fought in the liberation struggle for independence led by one of two Vice-presidents, Emmerson Mnangagwa. Some very contentious politburo meetings ensued with accusations being leveled against one another of plots to force a government take over. The tensions led President Mugabe to depose Mnangagwa of his post. This seemed to set of what seemed to be a contingency plan already in place by Mnangagwe and Defense Commander Constantino Chiwenga to use the military to constrain the police forces and anyone under the influence of G40. Then assume control of the various levers of the government.

I can't pretend to know which of the factions (G40 or Team Lacoste, as the other is known) were motivated by the more altruistic concerns or revolutionary principles. The lessons for African and the struggling world are many. What we do know now is that after initially holding out, Mugabe has resigned.

Mugabe is generally shown as a dictator by mainstream American sources. Can you shed some light on who exactly Mugabe is?

Abayomi Azikiwe: President Mugabe's position in modern African history is secured as a liberation movement leader, progressive governmental head-of-state and an ideological contributor to the African revolutionary struggle for Pan-Africanism, Anti-imperialism and Socialist-orientation. Mugabe worked as an educator and youth leader during his younger years. In the 1960s he was imprisoned by the settler-colonial regime of Rhodesia for ten years. After being released in 1974 during an internal crisis within ZANU, he was able to steer the liberation movement to victory by 1979-1980.

After gaining independence in April 1980, he presided over a government of reconciliation and transition for five years as prime minister. The 1985 constitution made Mugabe president and by late 1987 he along with Joshua Nkomo, considered the "father of the movement", who headed the Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU), merged the two groups into ZANU-PF which ended the initial instability which occurred in Matebeleland in the early 1980s after independence where a rebellion was ruthlessly suppressed by the Zimbabwe Defense Forces (ZDF) Fifth Brigade. The reconciliation with Nkomo was historic and can serve as a model for African governance moving forward.

The 2000 Land Reclamation program was key in consolidating the genuine independence of the country. However, it drew the ire of western imperialism which imposed sanctions that hampered the capacity for economic growth and development. In addition, the advent of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) parallels the land redistribution program debates and enactment from 1998-2000. MDC has been funded by the West along with other groups in a failed effort to reverse the independence process. These methods have failed due to the incompetence of the opposition leaders largely stemming from their lack of support among the people and gross opportunism.

Netfa Freeman: I can't agree with that. Generally seen by whom as a dictator? I do know that the West consistently refers the leaders of countries that do not bow to them economically and politically as dictators.

But if a dictator is defined as a ruler with total power over a country then how can one be a dictator in a country with a parliamentary system constitutionally consisting of Executive, Judiciary and Legislative structures? This is what has been in Zimbabwe. And on top of that it's been a multi-party system? Even if accusations were true that the system has been manipulated to give disproportionate power to Mugabe, it can't be said that he held total power.

But to answer your question who is Mugabe; Robert Mugabe was the son of a carpenter and as a youth attended Roman Catholic mission schools. He won a scholarship to go to a Black University in South Africa where he achieved the first of his 6 degrees in one year and became an African nationalist. He returned home to what was then called Rhodesia to teach for 4 years before going to teach and study in Ghana and becoming influenced by Kwame Nkrumah. Once he returned to Zimbabwe he involved himself in African nationalist politics advocating revolution through non-violent direct action, propaganda, and civil disobedience. At that time he considered himself a Marxist and staunch anti-racist. In the early years of the struggle he was arrested several times by the white minority regime. In a 1965 government crack down on the African nationalist movement Mugabe was incarcerated for 10 years without trial. While in prison he taught and also earned 3 law degrees.

During this time was when he and his comrades determined that armed struggle was the only way to liberation. After his release he was given refuge by the new revolutionary government in Mozambique where he founded ZANLA, Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army with many of his former fellow political prisoners and entered into the fray. ZANU, the Zimbabwe African National Union was formed later as the political arm.

To make a long story short, in 1979 the Rhodes as they were referred to were forced to the negotiation table in Lancaster. After the Lancaster House Agreement established elections for a new president in 1980 in which Africans ran for office, Mugabe won in a landslide victory.

Talk about how the economic situation has changed and deteriorated over the past several years.

Abayomi Azikiwe: Zimbabwe has been hampered through the sanctions imposed by the United States, Britain and the European Union. There have been discussions held with Washington for a number of years around lifting the sanctions particularly after the acceptance of a Global Political Agreement and coalition government after the disputed 2008 national elections. Yet despite the bringing of opposition forces into the government between 2008-2013, the U.S., Britain and EU have maintained the sanctions.

This clearly reveals that the ultimate objectives of the sanctions were to either topple ZANU-PF or drastically shift the domestic and foreign policy of Zimbabwe. The impact of the sanctions have been compounded by the worst drought in recent history which exists throughout the entire Southern Africa region. Also there has been a precipitous decline in commodity prices over the last three years that was a direct result of U.S. economic policy under the administration of President Barack Obama. Prices are starting to rise again in the energy and strategic mineral industries.

Zimbabwe has large deposits of diamonds and platinum. Consequently, the imperialists are set on gaining favorable terms for any long term economic relationships with Zimbabwe and other states in the sub-continent.

Netfa Freeman: Yes there is hyper-inflation and high unemployment and the value of currency is very precarious. But what is often missing from the explanation are the effects of the EU, UK and US sanctions legislation explicitly designed to damage the economy. This is done by denying any extension of credit and loans to the government or any balance of payment assistance from international financial institutions. The sanctions also actively dissuade investments in, or trading with the country. All this has had devastating effects on the ordinary citizens of Zimbabwe in multitude of ways, a fact that Western media and liberal progressive pundits never fail to ignore.

I'm not denying that there is some mismanagement and corruption. The government officials in ZANU PF and Mugabe himself acknowledge it but this is not to blame for the magnitude of the economic problems. The economic warfare that had been being waged against Zimbabwe also included denying it access to foreign exchange which is needed to carry out diverse international business transactions.

There has been some talk of China possibly giving the green light to the coup plotters. What are your thoughts on this?

Abayomi Azikiwe: I have not seen any evidence that China was involved in the military intervention and the resignation of President Mugabe. Typically Beijing does not get involved in the internal affairs of African states. China is a large trading partner with Zimbabwe and its assistance along with the neighboring Republic of South Africa and Republic of Mozambique have been essential in maintaining stability in Harare. Relations between the People's Republic China, the ruling Communist Party of China, and ZANU-PF goes back to the era of the national liberation war. These ties have been maintained, strengthened and enhanced over the years since independence.

Netfa Freeman: This seems a mischaracterization. As we know China has a strong and long relationship with Zimbabwe in many economic areas. And it has been further strengthened by ZANU's "Look East Policy" in response to the belligerence of the West toward them. Mnangagwa and General Chiwenga were simply assuring that China would not feel compelled by a change of forces to interfere in Zimbabwe's internal affairs and that the diplomatic and economic relationship would remain.

It was reported recently by the Australian Broadcasting Company that Zimbabwe is looking to go back into the British Commonwealth. Why would they do that? What about giving the white farmers back land?

Abayomi Azikiwe: Zimbabwe under President Mugabe in 2002 did not leave the Commonwealth voluntarily. They were in effect expelled. London set terms for their return and these conditions were rejected by ZANU-PF. These are colonial institutions. ZANU-PF has developed a "Look East" policy. The objectives are to build economic relations with other African states, countries in Asia and Latin America. This is the future of the world. Britain is facing a tremendous crisis due to the vote by the electorate to withdraw from the EU in June 2016.

There maybe an attempt to re-enter the Commonwealth under Interim President Mnangagwa. Nevertheless, what will Zimbabwe have to sacrifice in order to re-enter this declining system? There are many other former British colonies in Africa who are Commonwealth members yet their people remain impoverished and uneducated. Zimbabwe has the largest literacy rate in Africa where over 95 percent of the people can read and write. This is a monumental achievement of the Revolution.

Netfa Freeman: First on the land question, no one could give back the land to the white farmers even if they wanted to. That process is past the point of no return. Besides doing that would be the easiest way to get the country to revolt against the new dispensation. The media is fond of showing images in the urban areas, particularly Harare the capital, of what are basically opposition forces to ZANU and Mugabe. But the majority of the population is in the rural areas, which are also the areas that benefitted most directly from the 2000 fast track land redistribution. What Emmerson Mnangagwa did say was that the land reform would remain untouched but that they would continue to compensate the white farmers for certain upgrades they made to farms. That part really wasn't anything new and had already been part of the 2000 fast track land reclamation process.

About the British Commonwealth, I don't know. I've been hearing that said but not yet from the leaders of the new dispensation themselves. Every time i read it is Europeans saying that they would welcome them back if they meet certain conditions. If they are looking into it, i would be careful that we not have a knee-jerk reaction to it, as if that in and of itself is a sellout move. Zimbabwe was suspended from the Commonweath in 2002 based on imperialist hegemonic demonization that claimed among other things that Zimbabwe elections weren't free and fair. But this is bull for two reasons. One is that those elections were certified by independent electoral observes, including a delegation of the NAACP that drafted a detailed report on how fair those elections were. The second reason is the West doesn't really care about democracy in other countries. They will invade and over throw democratic countries.

But many people, myself included, applauded Mugabe's response to them suspending Zimbabwe from the Commonwealth. He basically said Africans don't need the approval of Europeans and then left the body all together. But because Member states have no legal obligation to one another and there are some benefits to being a part of it, like in trade agreements and working together to cooperate on things like migration policies for instance, I don't think it should be seen as principled position to stay out of it. It has a different history than the OAS, Organization of American States but essentially serves the same purpose. Countries just need to make sure rejoining is not based on compromising its sovereignty and revolutionary or socialist principles.

This is actually is the area that I am concerned about in the new developments

What are your thoughts on the future of Zimbabwe?

Abayomi Azikiwe: This will depend on the policies coming out of the interim government between now and the elections slated for mid-2018. If the Party maintains its legacy it will do well in the elections. However, the imperialists now perceive an opening and will utilize the current situation in an attempt to influence domestic and foreign policy. As I have outlined in a previous report, there are four areas which are significant in assessing the direction of events in Zimbabwe.

The land question, indigenization, the country's commitments to regional institutions such as the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the African Union (AU), and the role of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM). The developments in Zimbabwe should be a lesson as well for the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa. There are factional problems within ANC and the imperialists along with their allies within the opposition parties inside the country are seeking to overthrow the ANC using similar methods.

Therefore, the situation in Southern Africa is at a critical stage and the next year will be important as it involves the region and the continent as a whole.

Netfa Freeman: It is still too early to determine what lies ahead and to know where the heads are of those who have assumed leadership of the country. I'm very concerned over some things we're seeing. All the imperialist countries that have had Zimbabwe in their crosshairs are now pledging to help with economic recovery and sending emissaries to the country etc. The new leadership seems to be working toward re-establishing dealings with institutions of neo-colonialism, like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. These institutions are notorious for imposing their "economic structural adjustment programs" (ESAPs) on underdeveloped countries. These programs obligate countries to surrender to foreign trade relations tilted to benefit multi-national corporate interests, like privatization of public goods and services, deregulations, wage caps, and all sorts of things not in the interest of the masses.

It is hard to pass judgment on the leaders for the decisions they make. I am not in the predicament they are in and don't know what decisions i would make if actually in their shoes. But history teaches us that Imperialism does not make such commitments unless they are certain that their economic interests are secured. So what is being worked out behind closed doors concerns me. I do think that peace and justice loving people outside of Zimbabwe should take the principled stand for the unconditional lifting of sanctions and for her people's right to national self-determination.

Hashtag Me Two: Reflections on Women's Solidarity

By Michelle Black Smith

When Hollywood actress Alyssa Milano tweeted #MeToo in solidarity with the all too many women who have been subjected to sexual assault and harassment, she started a firestorm, but not a movement. That distinction belongs to Tarana Burke, founder of the nonprofit Just Be Inc., an organization devoted to the "health, well being and wholeness of young women of color everywhere." Burke created the Me Too movement in 2006 after listening to young women speak of their experiences with sexual abuse. Burke, who has remained active in the fight for women's health and justice, raised the antennae of numerous women of color. Much to the chagrin of some, Burke was largely unacknowledged by many notable white feminists.

Burke's niche popularity and subsequent rise to prominence following research into the origins of the hashtag MeToo bring to the forefront a troubling but persistent state of being for white and black women in the struggle: how the former can be entirely committed to the equality of all women, and the latter become trustful of a group with members who have practiced betrayal in every movement central to the freedom of women, from the suffrage movement to women's rights to women's rights redux in 2016. This tension, existent since African girls and women arrived on American shores, shape shifts, becoming more or less easy to grasp with each decade but never abates. #MeToo is a powerful and galvanizing tool in the chest of women who wield it to assert voice while feeling support and safety in numbers. For her part, Burke has supported the hashtag with her own tweets. Yet, the movement Me Too, the #MeToo, and Burke's reaction to it leapfrog us backward in time to the mid-1800s when Sojourner Truth stood before a large conference of white women to assert her pain, her struggle, her femininity before a feminist gathering that recognized oppression through a narrow, exclusionary gaze. The "Ain't I a Woman" declaration by Truth has come under skepticism in recent years as histories of her direct quote and reaction to it at the 1851 Women's Convention in Akron, Ohio differ. What is certain: the "Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?" motto dates back to the British abolitionist movement of the 1820s, and the American abolitionist movement of the 1830s. Sojourner Truth, as her surname suggests, was in fact calling for a political landscape in which white men acknowledged the equality of black people and all women, and surrendered to the inevitability of power sharing. Fast forward to the present and Truth might be surprised to learn that the basic tenets of the struggle have not changed. White men and women are still fighting over power between themselves while black women are positioned in the middle, still having to determine who is an ally while carving out their own spheres of power and protecting their flanks.

The position of black women located between and behind white women and men is historical fact and contemporaneously significant. From the first wave of Africans landing on America's shores to the legal end of slavery in 1865, black girls and women were routinely caught between two brutal masters - the white men who owned and raped them, and the white women who commanded and resented them. There are documented examples of emotionally and spiritually mature white women who saw the enslaved woman's status as a moral dilemma if not a legal crime. Those legally free women sought to protect their sisters in bondage within their realms of power, their ability ranging from meager to substantial. That protection could take the form of bringing the enslaved woman from the fields to the big house, negotiating terms for the woman to grow special food or make extra clothes, or teaching her children - often the mistresses de facto step-children - how to read. More often, the enslaved girl or woman was seen as the "mistress," the adulterous female stealing affection and corrupting the slave master. Moreover, the enslaved woman was often a surrogate - the proxy sexual partner who relieved the slave master's spouse of her "wifely duties."

So, it is against this historical backdrop that I begin to examine my own unease with #MeToo, the hashtag and the movement. My black woman's cellular memory is wary, concerned that a repeat scenario of Sojourner Truth's experience in Akron is eminent. And it is. Witness the statistical majority of white women who voted for Donald Trump. While ninety-four per cent of black women voted for the over 60, flawed but unarguably qualified white woman, fifty-three per cent of white women voted to elect the over 70, sexually aggressive, "pussy-grabbing" unproven and underqualified man to the most powerful political office in the country. If white women cannot in a majority vote in their best interest, where does that place black women and other women of color in an ostensibly inclusive feminist struggle?

Simultaneously and increasingly, I am made uneasy by the number of complaints against prominent men concerning their sexually aggressive behaviors ranging from harassment to criminal assault. Are the accusations reported in the media indicative of actions by powerful men limited to certain professions, or are these pervasive behaviors that go largely unreported or unaddressed in spaces not commonly held in the public eye? Will the volume of complaints begin to desensitize a society to the grievances of wronged women? Will society become desensitized to the point of discouraging women from speaking out, thus victimizing the very population that deserves justice for the violence done to them? The feminist in me rejects any inclination to discount the legions of women who have come forward in the wake of the first Harvey Weinstein allegations, arguably the opening of the floodgate. My concern for humanity wants to place a protective arm around every niece, sister or girlfriend's daughter who might be a victim of the abhorrent and/or criminal behaviors named. The black activist in me struggles to understand how Bill Cosby is more dangerous and newsworthy than Bill O'Reilly and Roger Ailes. The womanist in me can't comprehend how so many of my white sisters could practice such an obvious act of self-hatred and sacrifice of self-interest that the result is a 21st century America that feels as perilous to me in my time as my grandmother must have felt in hers, as Sojourner Truth must have felt in hers. To be sure, Ms. Truth's life had none of the choices, freedoms or protections that I enjoy in mine. However, fear, like power, is both relative and real.

So, this January 20, 2018, I contemplate with apprehension whether to participate in the second national Women's March. Proximity is not an issue - I am an hour away from New York City. My late mother, a smart, progressive, self-loving and self-respecting black woman, was born on January 20th - I could march in honor of her. Or would she consider my marching honorable? A part of me thinks staying home will honor her as well. But, to stand in truth, and to stand with Truth is, for this black woman, the opportunity to wield my power, claim possession over my body, celebrate the black female aesthetic, and resist the simultaneous over-sexualizing and de-sexualizing of the black feminine form.

Let me be clear, I am not marching for the self-loathing, naval-gazing women who voted against their self-interests and mine. However, I will march for their offspring. If I march, I put foot to pavement to honor my mother and all the Sojourners of this world. I will march in support of the girls and young women and the vulnerable women who do not (yet) share my fully realized place in this world. I will march with the same pride I felt watching women of all colors, self-identifiers, cultural, ideological and faith backgrounds organize, lead and participate in the march of January 2017. I will not, however, accept the number two spot in a movement that only purports to empower and include all women. I will not proclaim "me too" at any white woman's latest ambivalent protest against a white male patriarchy where I am cast as the interloper in a marital spat. I can, however, walk alongside my white feminist sisters, as long as they are able and willing to walk alongside black womanist me.

Works Cited

Garcia, Sandra E. "The Woman Who Created #MeToo Long Before Hashtags." The New York Times 20 Oct. 2017 <https://mobile.nytimes.com>

Just Be Inc ., Tarana Burke <https://about.me>

Commentary on the Concept of Enlightenment

By Spenser Rapone

Despite years of supposed progress, both technological and social, we remain slaves to capital, subjected to a dull, daily routine within a prescribed division of labor. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment outlines how the desire to "enlighten" human beings merely reproduced domination and oppression, leading to our current alienated state. Contextualizing their work specifically, its dour tone of course reflects that of its publication in 1947; nonetheless, I insist that it remains relevant, given the political precipice we currently find ourselves. Regarding the first chapter, of which I examine in this piece, the authors aspire to turn enlightenment on its head, conceptualizing a critical enlightenment that rejects absolute power and domination. [1] Of course, enlightenment remains a rather nebulous concept. To be enlightened, at face value, seems to conjure up an image of self-actualized thought. The Enlightenment, as we know it from the eighteenth through nineteenth centuries, sought the progress of our collective human existence. Yet, at what cost do we seek progress? Herein lies Horkheimer's and Adorno's focus. While enlightenment sought to assert the human race as masters of our domain, by the 1940s, "the wholly enlightened earth [was] radiant with triumphant calamity." [2] Specifically, the 20th century had brought about two devastating world wars, the rise of fascism, and widespread destitution and alienation. How did the desire for an enlightened human race produce such barbarism?

Adorno and Horkheimer's work demonstrates how the likes of Hitler, Mussolini, et al. were in many ways the logical conclusion of enlightenment thought. They did not exist as an aberration, but were in the spirit of other oppressive enlightenment figures and regimes (when one takes into account the genocidal impulses of the British Empire in India, or the same of the United States with regards to indigenous peoples, this picture becomes much more clear). Francis Bacon's edict of "knowledge is power" is far more than a pithy musing; Horkheimer and Adorno insist that when it comes to knowledge and power, the two are synonymous, within the Baconian framework. [3] Thus, enlightenment did not seek out knowledge for the sake of knowledge; knowledge was only useful insofar as its utility in the pursuit of power. In other words, knowledge became the object of instrumental reason; that is, knowledge was used to achieve a certain end, in this case, power. [4] Resultantly, knowledge itself existed as a crude, empirical framework to arrange, observe, and dominate objects; inevitably, this process further entrenched the capitalist mode of production. [5] Yet, the enlightenment's regressive tendencies under the guise of human progress, did not appear out of thin air; it traces its lineage to and draws from the various mythologies of the western canon.

More than anything else, I seek to emphasize that both Horkheimer and Adorno wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment as a warning against the cult of "progress." In other words, we ought to see to it that in the process of liberating ourselves from the shackles of our miserable existence, we do not lose sight of what it means to truly carry out an emancipatory movement. Enlightenment merely perpetuated myth under a veneer of scientism and technocratic impulses, existing as manipulator of things as dictator exists as manipulator of human beings. [6] Enlightenment was not a movement in the spirit of liberty, but in the spirit of control, domination, and sovereignty. I claim that the most critical line of this opening chapter lies in the assertion that "a true praxis capable of overturning the status quo depends on theory's refusal to yield to the oblivion in which society allows thought to ossify." [7] An authentic emancipatory movement must not fall prey to instrumental reason; revolutionary thought must both liberate but also recognize the inherent value of thought itself.

Although Dialectic of Enlightenment was published nearly 70 years ago, many of its concepts, particularly the fetishization of technological advancement, can be examined in the current day. Let us take a brief foray into Silicon Valley, where progress narratives and TED Talk "solutions" serve as an idol to which lanyard dicks such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and many others, bow down. Horkheimer and Adorno contend that the maxim of western civilization lies with Spinoza's claim that virtue is ultimately motivated by self-preservation. [8] While self-preservation itself is not irrational, it becomes profoundly alienating when the capitalist mode of production and bourgeois division of labor organizes society. [9] Peter Thiel believes that he can achieve permanent self-preservation, essentially immortality, through the use of blood transfusions from the youth. [10] A terrifying prospect, his absurd proposal has its origin in the advancement of technology and empiricist, "scientific" thought.

The "massive rejuvenating effect" that Thiel desires at the expense of human beings also contains another implication: that the lives of the ruling class, especially those of the so-called "innovator" class, hold more value than those of the poor. [11] Is this not the ultimate "reification of human beings in factory and office?" [12] Thiel's dystopic, obscene vision carries with it the legacy of eugenicist, fascistic thought. Yet, in a world where Thiel vehemently endorsed the likes of Donald Trump, [13] further confirming the Republican Party's status as a white ethno-nationalist cabal, the Democratic Party, through propping up Hillary Clinton, doubled-down on neoliberalism in the face of neofascism. Thus, in keeping with the enlightenment traditions of the guiding star of trusting a lesser evil, [14] the American political system failed, and continues to fail, to produce an alternative. Progressivism, positivism, and technocracy rule the day in late stage capitalist society. Much like how the United States recruited Nazi scientists in the postwar period, valuing scientific "progress" over any sort of authentic political commitment to antifascism, so too do current establishment political figures and parties value technological efficiency over human empowerment.

The concept of intellectual thought, in capitalist society, exists as a mythological construct. Horkheimer and Adorno contend that we are subjected to an "autocratic intellect," one which has standardized what it means to be an intellectual itself. [15] Here, Gramsci's analysis of the intellectual subject must be consulted. Horkheimer and Adorno speak of how the aforementioned standardization produces a supposed cleavage between sensuous, lived experience, vis-à-vis more conceptual, abstract thought. [16] Yet, as Gramsci notes, "[a]ll men are intellectuals, one could therefore say; but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals." [17] Thus, capitalist society establishes tenured professors, technological innovators, and various other positions of authority of having sole access to the intellectual function. This, of course, is elitism at its finest.

A factory worker's labor requires just as much intellectual thought as physical exertion. Gramsci insists that "homo faber cannot be separated from homo sapiens," [18] meaning man-the-maker and man-the-thinker exists as one complete being. We can see then the ruling class's domination persists in large part due to the manufactured separation of intellectual thought from the wretched of the earth. The "new form of blindness" exhibited by the working class [19] manifests itself through widespread anti-intellectualism, racism driven by economic insecurity, et al. Of course, while many of the conservative punditry takes pride in such behavior, the liberal solution amounts to sanctimonious moralizing that only further entrenches widespread anxiety wrought by social immobility. Gramsci's proposition of the organic intellectual who arises through lived experience, organization, and critical pedagogy offers a compelling solution to the stagnation of mass movements which desire social change. [20] Indeed, as the existing society asserts its dominance further, workers resultantly become even more so powerless to overcome its regressive function. [21] However, there always remains even the slightest glimmer of hope to reverse the cycle of oppression, and one of the first steps can be found in redefining what constitutes an intellectual, through both thought and action, joined together as one.

Enlightenment, that notion of the progressive advancement of human thought, to this day bends to the whim of the ruling class. Yet, despite the underlying pessimism to their work, both Horkheimer and Adorno admit that all is not lost, even with the concept of enlightenment itself; its ideal of human emancipation can still be realized, only if we completely and unabashedly reject the principle of blind power. [22] In doing so, not only would we abolish enlightenment's empiricist cruelty and technocratic impulses, but we would then break away with its mythological tendencies, unlike the past 300 years, which has only served to replace one mythology with another. I believe that there is a meta-narrative present in this text, most readily accessible in one of the closing statements of the first chapter. Horkheimer and Adorno observe that the bourgeois economy has grown so powerful that ruling elites alone cannot maintain its function; in fact, "all human beings are needed" to ensure its continuation. [23] Indeed, the blindness wrought by late stage capitalism leads to some of the most downtrodden elements of our current society complicit in their own exploitation and oppression, sometimes enthusiastically so. Yet, herein lies the revolutionary subtext, exemplified by that simple line of thought, "all people are needed." The moment that the masses of people stir from their false consciousness and channel their desires towards a mass movement, the cycle of oppression can be broken. Yes, enlightenment has produced an "outright deception of the masses." [24] But, in requiring all people for its continuation, we once again affirm the quintessential adage of all emancipatory movements: power lies with the people. Horkheimer and Adorno provide us with hope, for while the attempt to enlighten human beings produced some of the darkest moments of our history, the people, collectively, still have within them the power to bring about a liberated world.

Notes

[1] Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xviii.

[2] Ibid., 1.

[3] Ibid., 2.

[4] Curtis Bowman, Odysseus and the Siren Call of Reason: The Frankfurt School Critique of Enlightenment . http://www.othervoices.org/1.1/cubowman/siren.php .

[5] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, 3.

[6] Ibid., 6.

[7] Ibid., 33.

[8] Ibid., 22.

[9] Ibid., 23.

[10] J.K. Trotter, "What Does Peter Thiel Want?" Gawker. http://gawker.com/what-does-peter-thiel-want-1784039918#_ga=1.142753974.240915375.1460756871 .

[11] Ibid.

[12] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, 23.

[13] Dan Primack, "Peter Thiel Gives Full-Throated Endorsement of Donald Trump," Fortune. http://fortune.com/2016/07/21/peter-thiel-gives-full-throated-endorsement-of-donald-trump/ .

[14] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, 24.

[15] Ibid., 28.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 9.

[18] Ibid., 9.

[19] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, 28.

[20] Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 10.

[21] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic, 29.

[22] Ibid., 33.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid., 34.