Why We Need To Share Millennial Stories Through Independent Platforms

By Zhivko Illeieff

I owe my introduction to American culture to the stand-up comedy of Bill Hicks and George Carlin. This culture hack, fortunate for me and perhaps terrifying for any ruling class, was possible because I was born and raised in Bulgaria where BitTorrent technology in the 2000's gave me access to counter-culture content that wasn't available on traditional media, as opposed to Baywatch, Friends, and every Bulgarian grandparents' favorite, The Bold And The Beautiful.

Once you resonate with higher truth in one medium, it tends to lead you to similar expressions in other places. Hicks and Carlin lead me to the art of Alex Grey and Robert Crumb, the music of Frank Zappa and Tool, the writings of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, the philosophy of Cornel West, and other artists and truth-tellers whose dissenting ideas had found ways to escape the filtration devices of the information industry.

In the meantime, I witnessed how the Bulgarian oligarchy fought for control of the country's drug trade, information channels, industries, and ultimately power over the Bulgarian population.

Much like the U.S., different messiahs and economic "experts" from important places like Wall Street and The World Bank often descend into the Bulgarian political stage with empty promises of progress and equality, only to push the country further into corporate control . The events after 1989, when "communists" became "democrats" overnight, were characterized by mass privatization, increased inequality through the gospel of austerity, high levels of corruption, radicalization of right-wing parties, and widespread demoralization of young people who became apathetic to political issues. Most "well-intentioned" politicians, pundits, and experts who revolved around marketing campaigns to "fix Bulgaria" turned out to be frauds who bamboozled the Bulgarian population through their narratives.

Today, about 2.5 million Bulgarians, or nearly 35% of the country's population, live in severe material deprivation , meaning they can't afford to pay for rent or other basic necessities.

Those responsible for Bulgaria's downward spiral are not unlike their American counterparts. They use the same techniques (mass media control, extreme censorship, cuts in social programs, market monopolization, and other neoliberal tactics), and achieve the same results-increased income inequality, low living standards, mass demoralization, ineffective health care, political polarization, and so on.

Not much is needed to connect the dots. In the end of the day, the mechanism which turns public wealth into private gains boils down to how the ruling elite uses different narratives to manipulate the opinions and behaviors of millions of people . What the work of artists, musicians, comedians, and activists teaches us is how to spot this mechanism. Simply put, truth-tellers point out what oligarchs around the world work hard to conceal-the truth about poverty , war , and capitalism , the power of language , the mechanism of propaganda , and other "cracks in the Matrix."

After I moved to the U.S., I quickly understood why the counter-culture icons I discovered oversees are not embraced by " official culture " in the U.S.-what they say is viewed as a threat to the ruling class. Individuals and platforms that elevate independent thinking are bound to be recuperated, whitewashed, censored, silenced, and ridiculed by the economic and political elite, and replaced by less-threatening ideologies, often by those who hide behind their allegiance to democracy. This is why talking about last night's football game or Hollywood's latest ode to the U.S. military makes you a "productive member of society," while questioning the Democrat-Republican duopoly and other manifestations of the corporate state makes you a "conspiracy theorist" or, more recently, a "Russian spy."

Yet, tricksters tend to find their way around culture engineers. And once their truth resonates with your beliefs, it is hard to go back to corporate-funded, commercially interrupted daily news and propaganda.

The lessons that Hicks and Carlin taught me early on in my life were more useful than any official education I received, as their comedy not only analyzed the fabric of American greed, but also provided a framework for deconstructing the propaganda that enables such greed to take place on a massive scale . Who can watch Hicks's bit on the first Iraq war and not describe his critique of the military industrial complex as prophetic? This is especially true in 2017, when 89% of U.S. Democrats voted in favor of a $700 billion defense policy bill.

It is such signs of "bipartisanship" that reveal the one essential counter-culture lesson-question everything. Question the Democrats. Question the Republicans. Question the news. Question even those who tell you to question and especially those who tell you not to. This is the legacy of those who stood up and "lifted the veil" to expose, in Zappa's famous words, "the brick wall at the back of the theater." There are many who continue this work today. It is a fight worth having.

One vital part of this fight is about the right to shape our stories-not by being passive, obedient consumers, but by talking with each other, working through our differences, and living in a society where people's voices matter. To do so, we have to expose and counter top-down efforts that box us into categories and divide us through elaborate fairy tales.

Perhaps this is why I pursued projects that allowed me to document first-person narratives. In college, I lead a team that documented diverse perspectives about the totalitarian regime in Bulgaria. After that, I worked at Appalshop, short for "Appalachian Workshop," where I produced work that voiced the concerns of Appalachians and rural America. Both places have a lot in common-their people, history, traditions, and natural beauty represent a treasure for humanity. Yet, they are plagued by the results of political and corporate greed, as well as propaganda that vilifies and blames the poor for their problems, while pushing the neoliberal agenda of "corporations first."

Popular culture often neglects the rich history and traditions of those places and focuses on diminishing them and their people. Bulgarians are portrayed as hordes of immigrants and unskilled workers bent on storming the shores of Britain and other "civilized" countries. Similarly, Appalachians have a long history of being a target for journalists, photographers, and pundits who exploit and sensationalize people's addictions and financial struggles.

Even worse-a selected few who come from such places often use their heritage to add credibility to negative stereotypes portrayed in the mainstream media. I see this in Bulgarian politicians who diminish their own country's heritage for private gains. I see it in J.D. Vance's "Hillbilly Elegy," which continues to be heavily criticized for its disingenuous accounts of the causes of Appalachian struggles.

Such commentators are entitled to their opinions. However, their efforts to speak on behalf of millions of people, while ignoring the institutional and corporate causes of inequality and structural violence , need to be examined and countered. This is especially true in cases where "official culture" coronates such individuals as spokespersons for millions of people.

A case in point was the 2016 presidential election in which the U.S. mainstream media provided a tribune to a real estate magnate and a hustler, and thus legitimized him as a viable candidate. Today, those same corporate pundits, owned by the Comcasts and Walt Disney's of the world, cast themselves as leaders of "the Resistance."

Similarly, evoking the "millennial generation" often becomes a way for corporate media to control the narrative of tens of millions of people. By letting corporate forces frame the issues of young Americans, we also let them set the limits of the range of opinions that are allowed to pass through mainstream media. Chomsky advises that we view agenda-setting media as what they truly are-corporations owned by even bigger conglomerates Therefore, corporate media's content on the "millennial generation" can be viewed as a product that utilizes the millennial label for its own profit.

Do you ever wonder why the origin of the millennial label is not well known? As it turns out, the label originated from the books of Neil Howe and William Strauss-two amateur historians with connections to the ruling class . Essentially, they transformed the idea of generations into a capitalist-friendly, reductive narrative that provides a story for anyone willing to ignore its lack of scientific credibility .

While there's certainly a case to be made for using generational labels as a shorthand to investigating complex societal issues (as this blog post hopefully illustrates), there's a difference between genuine inquiries into generational dynamics, and using such labels to sensationalize or obfuscate the issues of tens of millions of people for private benefit.

I regard the millennial label as an instrument for corporate and government propaganda that is so deeply entrenched in our society that many of us don't even know where it came from . I believe this is by design-the myth is sustained by obfuscating its origins. And its origins lead to, you guessed it, attempts to manipulate and profit from us.

If you are skeptical, consider this:

Does it matter that Strauss and Howe, who coined the millennial label in 1987, before many millennials were even born, have connections to "deficit hawk" billionaires like Pete Peterson (known for his attempts to spread the gospel of austerity through " engaging the next generation "?

Does it matter that neoliberals like Newt Gingrich called Strauss and Howe's first book an "intellectual tour de force," and have since been invited by self-appointed "millennial" organizations to preach about generational struggles?

Does it matter that Steve Bannon was inspired by their theories , and has worked with Howe on "several film projects?"

Does it matter that Strauss and Howe created a business out of their generational forecasts?

Does it matter that dozens of "millennial-lead" organizations are using the millennial label to peddle the same economic policies that have annihilated democracy in America and the rest of the world?

Does it matter that books about millennials, and written by millennials, use Koch-sponsored propaganda to argue that young Americans don't approve of welfare programs and would put them " on the chopping block " if given the chance?

To me, it does. In fact, I consider this "chopping and screwing" of the American population to be one of the greatest frauds of our time. Not because there's no value in thinking in terms of generations, or because generations don't exist. It is the perversion of the concept into a product-selling operation that exposes its use as an instrument for propaganda.

While previous works on the subject, such as Karl Mannheim's The Problem of Generations , read as an invitation to deepen our understanding of the concept of generations, Strauss and Howe took a more controversial approach-they combined the concept of generational analysis with historical prophecy; a move that, by their own admission, didn't fare well with traditional historians and scholars.

"What we think that politicians or marketers, in particular product salesmen who are concerned about how to reach generations , should think about as they read our book and try to decide how to get elected or launch a new product line," says Strauss in a 1991 CSPAN interview , "…is look real hard at the section of our book that will certainly be most controversial with historians. That is, we have a 50 page chapter on what the future of the cycle will be…we call it 'Completing the Millennial Cycle.'"

A closer examination of the label's use exposes its role as a "hook" used by a vast network of nonprofits, businesses, and marketing agencies that aim not to understand the people behind the millennial label, but to influence society's opinion of them, and ultimately influence their opinion of themselves.

The justification that is usually used by those who employ the millennial label echoes the words of Edward Bernays, the father of Propaganda :

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind."

The trick worked. Today, most mainstream news platforms and "authoritative" magazines talk about millennials (some 80 million people) like they are a monolithic entity, when in fact they exhibit the same differences that are present in the rest of our society. Yet, most news outlets gloss over the origins of the label, its use, and monetization.

More importantly, it is not your opinions that are being elevated in the media and regarded as "millennial insights." It is the opinions of people who are allowed to pass through the gates of corporate-lead news platforms. A prime example is Jason Dorsey, a rather older millennial, who is often quoted as an "expert on millennial issues," when in fact he is simply promoting his business of selling "insights" about millennials and the upcoming generational brand of people, Generation Z.

Where are the activist millennials? The poor millennials? The millennials who didn't graduate from college? Where are the millennials who would rather talk about substantive issues, instead of selling their own generation in the form of "insights" to the ruling class?

While we intrinsically know that addressing millions of people with a single word is a laughable proposition, cultural engineers have justified, and profited from, these divisions in our society. This is how we have exposed our minds to the brainwashing that usually follows efforts that use biology and marketing to draw conclusions about people's "collective identity."

My research into the topic exposed a new world of possibilities in the same way Hicks and Carlin's comedy opened my eyes to a deeper understanding of reality. What would happen if, instead of selling insights about millennials, there was a way for anyone to add their story to the collective millennial narrative, without being an "expert" on millennial issues? In other words, what would a true bottom-up platform for millennial stories look like?

These questions lead me to create postmillennial.org , a story-sharing platform that makes it easy for millennials and their allies to create and share content about their experiences without the spin that usually follows such accounts.

The platform addresses a major obstacle in publishing content about millennials - it makes it easy for those who fall into the millennial age cohort and their allies to share their perspectives on various issues. The idea is to generate content that is intellectually stimulating, instead of the usual "millennials, those who are x-to-x years old" articles that, willingly or not, mistake birth cohorts with generations.

Most importantly, postmillennial does not owe allegiance or give editorial control to any Party or corporation.

Unlike The Lily, a Washington Post "visually driven product designed for millennial women," postmillennial is not sponsored by JP Morgan .

Unlike Goldman Sachs-sponsored articles in The Atlantic, postmillennial does not compare generations in sensationalist terms .

Unlike "millennial" advocacy organizations , it does not peddle trickle-down economics on behalf of millions of people.

Sure, news platforms need money to survive. However, if we continue to let billionaires decide the faith of our platforms of information, like they do with our political process, we might as well throw in the towel now.

I believe that a millennial-focused platform that is open to diverse perspectives and thoughts has the power to reclaim the millennial narrative, even in the presence of industries that actively work in the opposite direction. We can use the privately engineered label to our advantage, and work to change the millennial label from an expression of the capitalist system and its media culture, to an evolving dialogue where all voices matter.

This originally appeared at postmillennial.org

Zhivko Illeieff is a writer & media producer. He is also the founder of postmillennial, a story-sharing platform that lets millennials and their allies create and share content about their experiences without the corporate spin. He may be contacted at hello@postmillennial.org

Don’t Tell Me Anything About Diversity When All Of Your Leadership Looks the Same

By Cherise Charleswell

As one of the founding Chairs of the Hampton Institute, a working-class think tank , I can say that one of the things that excited me about launching this project - a project that has grown into a respected resource and is accessed from those in Academia, filmmakers, and a wide variety of media sources - is that we were truly a diverse group, in every sense of the word, from day one.

Although a majority of us are based in the United States, we are a collective that includes men, women, various races/ethnicities, and religious views. We even have diversity in terms of age. Younger people have never been told that they could not voice their concerns or share their insights. Our collective includes immigrants/first generation immigrants, those who identify as LGBTQ, and all recognizing that we are equal members of the working class, and thus should all have a "seat at the table."

Now, contrast all of this to what is often seen in other organizations, particularly those in the public and non-profit sectors that flaunt their commitment to diversity, inclusion, and progressive missions. Those organizations are essentially only diverse in name, or only at the entry-perhaps-mid-level of staff, but rarely when it comes to those in position of leadership. And this is unfortunately also true for women's or feminist organizations. And, yes, this means that more often than not those who lead these organizations are White, middle-class, cis, heterosexual women. Basically the face of white feminism, and everything that makes it so problematic.

I was reminded of this when I heard the initial excitement about comments made by Cecile Richards, President of Planned Parenthood, during her participation in the Women's March #PowerToThePolls rally in Las Vegas. During the event she called on white women to do more to "save this country from itself." She went on to state that it is not up to women of color to "save the country from itself" (BTW: You're welcome!) And her comments come on the heels of much of the accolades, thank-yous, etc. being thrown at Black women for attempting to save the United States from Trump, while 53% of white women voted for him; and for saving Alabama (and again the US) from pedophile and racist, Roy Moore, while 63% of white women voted for him. More about all that saving here , here , and here .

Cecile Richards actually announced her plans to resign from her role as President of Parenthood on January 26th, and after thinking about her statements for "white women to do better, because clearly they have been failing," and all of these statements of gratitude being directed at Black women and other women of color for their efforts, I can't help but ask whether we will actually see a Black woman or other women of color step into this soon-to-be-vacant position?

One has to ask this, when considering once again what leadership in public and non-profit organizations currently look like, even those that claim to have missions and areas of focus that directly impact communities of color. For instance, consider the leadership of other well-established women's organizations. The Feminist Majority Foundation (Eleanor Smeal), National Organization of Women (Terry O' Neil), and other organizations such as the Women's Foundation of California (Judy Patrick), are all lead by white women. My knowledge of these realities helped to ensure that I was not surprised by finding out that the Los Angele's County's Women & Girls Initiative's Executive Director is a white woman. I expected it. I recently attended their kick-off discussion meetings with community thought leaders, whose feedback is supposed to help drive the initiative, and as they shared statistics that I was familiar with, such as the fact that since 2015 there has been a 51% increase of homeless women in Los Angeles County and one-quarter of Latinas and African American women in the county live below the poverty line, my mind couldn't help drift to the fact that I was again in a position where I was witnessing another gatekeeper share narratives about people who look like me, and communities that I come from, instead of having a representative from those very communities be the person sharing this information and driving the initiative.

If the goal was truly to make a change (and as great as it is having members of the community provide their input), the person delivering the message and pushing the initiative should have an intimate understanding, including personal lived experiences, of the issues that have caused the disparities that were being discussed.

And no, having a diverse staff is not enough, and the reason why is Power Dynamics, but I will get more into that later.

Again, feminist organizations are not the only ones who have this problem. Diversity is a buzzword to many, but it is truly a falsehood when you begin to look at leadership. For example, simply attend a conference or professional networking event and you will find the same dynamic. The vast majority of people being introduced to you as Directors, Department heads, Senior Researchers, tenured professors, etc. are not women or people of color, or other marginalized groups. These people are often excited to share information about a diversity program, community outreach, or participatory research project that they are leading, and they want to share their best practices of reaching out to a specific community, you know "those people," and all of this can be really astonishing. Including the fact that they themselves do not see the irony or the problem. Literally blinded by privilege.

They view themselves as allies, as social justice warriors, as good Samaritans committed to change, but they are unwilling to take a look around, and look at who is in the room, and how much space they are able to take up, and how much authority and prestige (decision-making power) they possess. They do not take enough time to reflect on the fact that the chosen leaders who work primarily within marginalized communities and groups do not look like them. In short, not much has really changed, and there are statistics to prove that.

Consider this:

• A 2014 study found that women of color only occupied 3% of all board seats among Fortune 500 companies.

• Women are overrepresented in the public and nonprofit sectors, and this overrepresentation is linked to (1) greater offerings of family-friendly practices, (2) the higher wage advantage obtained by women compared with men working in the public sector rather that in the for-profit sector, (3) greater access to part time jobs and shorter workweeks (which again ties into women's traditional care-giver role or burden of non-paid work). (Lanfranchi & Narcy, 2013). Thus, 69% of nonprofit executive leadership are women ((Bell, Moyers, and Wolfred, 2006).

• Women are CEOs of only 21% of large non-profits, and they only make 66% of what their white counterparts make (Dubose, 2014).

• While women in academia (including public institutions) win roughly 56% of academia's most prestigious awards, only 29% of women have tenure. (Foxworth, 2016)

• 94 percent of foundation presidents are white (Thurman, 2007)

• Only 7% of non-profit chief executives are people of color (Dubose, 2014)

• Only 8% of non-profit Board Members are people of color (Dubose, 2014)

• 18% of non-profit employees are people of color (Dubose, 2014).

But What about Affirmative Action?

The group that has been the biggest beneficiary of Affirmative Action has been white women, and this has been no secret. More about how White women have been benefitted disproportionately can be read here .

How this disproportional benefit happened is easy to follow. White women are simply in closest proximity to white men, who have always held positions of prestige and leadership. They have been their fathers, uncles, cousins, and husbands - and their resources (especially financial) and connections (the "good old boys network") has benefitted them. All of this has bolstered their educational and professional pursuits. In fact, allowing white women to actively enter the workplace, assume positions of leadership, and earn higher wages, helps contribute to the fact that the median wealth of white households continues to be 20 times that of black households.

What is ironic about this is that the category "women" wasn't originally included in the first affirmative-action measure, which was an executive order signed by President Kennedy in 1961. It required federal contractors to "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin." In 1967, President Johnson amended this, and a subsequent measure included sex, recognizing that women also faced many discriminatory barriers and hurdles to equal opportunity. Thus, this minor modification helped to ensure that Affirmative Action will continue a racial hierarchy - where white women remain at the pinnacle.

Yet, blinded to this reality (and privilege), many white women may not recognize just how much more they have benefited from Affirmative Action, which would explain the results of a 2014 study , where 70% of White women (ironically) "somewhat" or "strongly" opposed Affirmative Action.

According to a 2016 report from the American Enterprise Institute, "In surveys that ask about affirmative action for different groups, support is consistently higher for affirmative action programs for women than for affirmative action programs for minorities." The willingness to pay for only women, and not minorities, completely erases women of color; and makes it clear that these programs will not include intersectional frameworks that will address the multitude of issues that impact the lives of women of color.

This is why it is truly time to be intentional when it comes to Affirmative Action, and this is particularly true for women's groups, giving circles, feminist organizations, etc. Be intentional. Instead of creating agendas about women's empowerment, focus those agendas on the group of women who remain marginalized, create funding and garner resources that will help to empower women of color who have been left behind, and yes-let them Lead!

What is So Problematic about All-White-Women Leadership?

The following excerpt from the article, Don't Just Thank Black Women. Follow Us , does a great job of explaining why this current structure of white-women leadership is problematic and ineffective. It simply helps to show why real diversity is so critical:

"When I joined the 470,000 other women who walked down Constitution Avenue toward the National Mall on Jan. 21, the day after Donald Trump's inauguration, I carried a sign saying, "Don't Forget, White Women Voted for Trump."

My messages stood in stark contrast to the theme of togetherness that dominated the Women's March - the pink "pussy hats" and "girl power" placards, the chants about how women would lead the resistance. This was exactly the point. I made the sign to communicate that in a world where 53 percent of white women voters chose a racist, elitist sexual predator for president, the idea that we all want the same things is a myth .

The point wasn't to antagonize the Women's March participants, who were mostly white. Rather, I wanted to highlight that on a national level, white women are not unified in opposition to Trumpism and can't be counted on to fight it ."(Peoples, 2017).

When one considers "closed-door decision-making," there is no greater example of this than the voting booth. When one casts their votes, it is a reflection of their values, of the issues that they think are important, and it is an exercise in judgment. The fact that so many white women could vote in-line with Trumpism, choosing to ignore or were unable to recognize his racism, xenophobia, sexism, and so on, is evidence enough that they are not exactly the best at having good judgment, and at worse, it means that they, too, hold Trump's views.

Connecting those dots should help you understand why having white-women-led organizations, particularly those that should focus on intersectional issues (the one's they deny or ignore) that primarily impact communities of color and other marginalized communities, is not only flawed, but dangerous.

Again, not much has changed.

Working Toward Diversity

Your organization, collective, collaborative, agency, or group should not even dare to call itself diverse if it is not ready to ensure that those in leadership, strategic planning, and decision-making are a diverse group, in terms of race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, sex/gender, and so on. In other words - prove it!

Here are some ways that you can work toward diversity:

· Track and be mindful of the changes in racial demographics in the country, state, city, and assess your organization to see if it has kept pace with these changes. Determine whether the leadership of your organization reflects these varying demographics.

· Create opportunities for entry and mid-level staff to provide input that reflect perspectives from their various communities, and reward them for this sharing of expertise, particularly during considerations employee reviews, and salary negotiations/ re-negotiations. They should be considered subject matter experts.

· Ensure that you take the time to educate funders - whether they are foundations or politicians, who have to approve legislation for discretionary spending. This education should include discussions on systematic racism, xenophobia, homophobia, sexism, and how they impact the communities that they serve, particularly in terms of intersectionality. Take the time to go over the social determinants of health and how they have negatively impacted the wellbeing and many marginalized groups; and use these examples to justify the need for more intentional and directed funding mechanisms, and opportunities that are specific to these groups. Do not speak about programs for women's empowerment; instead begin conversations about the fact that Hispanic/Latina are paid only 59 cents on the white male dollar. So, this is why it is imperative to focus on programs for economic empowerment and development for Hispanic/Latina women.

· If your organization doesn't have an internal Affirmative Action program, implement one.

· Make cultural humility training a requirement for staff and Board members, and realize that the basis of cultural humility, which differs from cultural competency, means that there is no "end point" when it comes to learning, and that one will never be an "expert" about any group of people. Cultural humility is a process that involves ongoing self reflection, where one has to actively address Isms, work to end power balances, and be willing to take a step back to allow those from the impacted communities to serve as the "experts" on how best to move forward.

· Form Advisory Boards made up of members from the community, and do not make academic achievement the main criteria for joining the boards. Other factors should be considered.

· Be intentional when recruiting candidates. Make an effort to reach out to minority candidates, whether through head-hunters, job fairs, and working with workforce development organizations. Select executive search firms that have a proven track record of delivering a diverse pool of candidates. Dismantle the recruitment model that involves only referring from the personal circle of leadership, because everyone in those circles "look alike."

· Make diversity a central part of your organization's succession planning and managing executive transitions.

· Ensure that your human resources department and other members of leadership maintain an open door policy for complaints related to bias and workplace racism, as well as micro-aggressions.

· Look at your marketing materials and ensure that your staff and LEADERSHIP reflect the people in those images. Do not put out false images of diversity without working to maintain a diverse organization.

· When looking at candidates, consider privilege. Candidates from minority communities and marginalized groups may not have had the access (financially or through the established good boy network) to have attended an Ivy league university, or taken on many non-paid internships (because they had to work and earn an income, while pursuing their education), and realize that they may have far more to offer in terms of skills, perspective, or work ethic than someone who simply has credential degrees and no actual experience. Selecting these inexperienced, privileged, un-connected candidates only helps to continue the problem of having non-diverse leadership.

· Invest in diverse candidates upstream, by championing, funding, and/or creating programs for children, youth, and others from underrepresented groups, to ensure that they have the necessary skillets to compete. The United States Office of Minority Health actually hosts webinars for funding agencies, to teach them how to build health equity and diversity into their funding models.

For the Public:

· Demand that nonprofit agencies that you support be transparent when it comes to their leadership. Ask them about their commitment to diversity before you choose to support them.

· Be bold when visiting a public agency (that is supported by your tax dollars) and speak candidly about the issues that you see to all levels of staff. Ask to speak with a member of the leadership team, about the lack of diversity that you see. Be willing to make people uncomfortable.

· Consider volunteering your time and serving on a Foundation Board or Nonprofit Board. Many have a need for Board Members, but do a poor job of outreach to various communities and groups. As a member of these Boards you will help decide the direction of programming, messaging, which communities and topics to engage in, and you can help to facilitate the hiring of more diverse members of leadership and staff. Your vote can greatly help shift the dynamics of underrepresentation.

The for-profit, non-profit, and public sectors all equally have a diversity problem, particularly when it comes to leadership; but this issue is even more problematic in the public/non-profit sector, due to their missions, which are often one of service and addressing social inequities and health disparities. They will continue to fail in carrying out their missions, due to their failure in promoting leaders who are of diverse backgrounds, and have an intimate understanding of the various communities that are often negatively impacted and marginalized. Having board members, executive leadership, and staff from a wide array of backgrounds are truly a benefit to the organization, in that they bring unique perspectives that may be overlooked by "all white traditional leadership", and these differences in perspectives will help foster more meaningful relationships, and more importantly more effective solutions.

This includes feminist/women's organizations who claim to have a progressive agenda. There is nothing progressive about upholding the status quo of white supremacy. Organizations that claim to be committed to social justice need to have leaders that look like the members of those movements, and the communities served.

Ultimately, if you are committed to social transformation, restorative justice, resisting Trumpism, and truly serving the public in a manner that addresses social inequities, then you cannot continue to simply surround yourself with white people. Truly think about the hypocrisy of your actions.

Works Cited

Angela Peoples. Don't just thank Black women. Follow Us. New York Times. December 16, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/opinion/sunday/black-women-leadership.html

Bell, J., Moyers, R., and Wolfred, T. Daring to Lead 2006: A National Study of Nonprofit Executive Leadership. 2006. Retrieved Sept. 15, 2008, from http://www.compasspoint.org/assets/194_daringtolead06final.pdf .

Derwin Dubose. The nonprofit sector has a Ferguson problem. Nonprofit Quarterly. December 5, 2014. http://nonprofitquarterly.org/2014/12/05/the-nonprofit-sector-has-a-ferguson-problem/

Joseph Lanfranchi and Mathieu Narcy. Female Overrepresentation in Public and Nonprofit Sector Jobs: Evidence From a French National Survey. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. 2013; 44(1):47-74. https://doi.org/10.1177/0899764013502579

Raymond Foxworth. Native American Women, Leadership and the Native Nonprofit Sector. First Nations Development Institute. 2016. https://firstnations.org/sites/default/files/%2A/Native_American_Women_in_Nonprofit_Leadership_FINAL2.pdf

Rosetta Thurman. Philanthropy Doesn't Care About Black People.

Standford Social Innovation Review

. October 2007.

https://ssir.org/articles/entry/philanthropy_doesnt_care_about_black_people

The Reds in the Hills: An Anarcho-Syndicalist Interpretation of the Contemporary West Virginia Teachers' Strike

By Michael Mochaidean

Historical Overview

In 1990, the average annual salary for West Virginia public teachers was $21,904, making it the 49th worst state for educator pay; only Mississippi's was worse. The state's Public Employee Insurance Agency (PEIA) was backlogged, with medical expenses taking almost half a year to be addressed. The teacher retirement fund had a $2 billion hole that grew larger each fiscal year, impacting retirees' insurance and state pension.

Today, in 2018, the average annual salary for West Virginia public teachers is $45,000, making it the 48th worst state for educator pay in the nation. By fiscal year 2020, premiums are set to increase for PEIA recipients by 15.2%, 14.3% (2021), and then another 10% (2022). For retirees, it is even worse. PEIA recipients on Medicare are expected to see an increase in their premiums by 38.9% (2020, 29% (2021), and then another (32.8%).

It is no wonder, then, that in both 1990 and 2018, educators across the state utilized direct action tactics to demand greater action be done to fund the state's public programs. Parallels have been drawn between both strikes in the recent past. In a Sunday editorial in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, for example, a poster reflected in "Not Your Mom's Teacher Strike?" that the 1990 strike and the current strike in 2018 suffered from a recurring theme of long-term underfunding of public health care programs, poor teacher pay, and few incentives built in to retain high-quality educators in the state.

The similarities don't stop there. The rhetorical strategy of positioning educators as hotheaded firebrands, whose only concerns are for themselves, have not changed in the almost three decades since the first statewide walkout. In 1990, soon after the strike was announced, Governor Caperton (D) declared that he would not meet with teachers or their union representatives until "calm and reason are restored and the teaching force returns to the classroom." In 2018, Governor Justice (R) recently declared that he would work towards a resolution to this issue when "cooler heads prevail," signaling that Republican legislators were acting calmer and more collected than the educators themselves. Similarly, the state's primary law enforcement agency, the Attorney General's Office, has made quick use of its power of injunction in an attempt to first break public sector unions, and then to establish precedent in future cases. In 1990, Attorney General Roger Tompkins declared the strike illegal in a formal memo that would later be used in Jefferson County Board of Education v. Jefferson County Education Association (1990). The Jefferson County BOE case would go on to state that, "Public employees have no right to strike in the absence of express legislation or, at the very least, appropriate statutory provisions for collective bargaining, mediation and arbitration." As West Virginia has none of the latter, any formal walkout would therefore be deemed illegal in the eyes of the court. In 2018, Attorney General Patrick Morrissey (R) released his own memo on the teacher walkout utilizing the precedent of Tompkins' 1990 memo and the subsequent Jefferson County BOE case to state that "the impending work stoppage is unlawful. State law and court rulings give specific parties avenues to remedy such illegal conduct, including the option to seek an injunction to end an unlawful strike."

Perhaps the only difference between these two events in the color of the state's legislature and governor's mansion. West Virginia, once proudly staunch Democrats, is now a hotbed of conservative Republican lawmakers. Republicans went from having a 18-16 majority in the state senator to a 22-12 majority in 2016. Governor Justice, who ran and won as a Democrat, switched his political party to Republican over the summer in an attempt to court President Trump's influence and, potentially, a cabinet position.

Such changes matter little in a state where both parties have played on the contemporary cultural fears or economic anxieties of their citizens. From the painful ramifications of trickle-down economics in 1990 to the neo-liberal drive to privatize public services in 2018, Democrats and Republicans have used whichever economic theory happens to be in vogue at their time to harm state workers, bringing them to the brink of death only to resuscitate them with a glimmer of social democracy. In the aftermath of the 1990 strike, for example, annual salary for public teachers increased by $5,000, to be distributed over a three-year period from 1991 to 1993, while the $2 billion pension gap was addressed over the course of the decade. More recently, the state's legislature has proposed meager percentage-based raises to be distributed over the next several years. Proposals vary, but range from a 5% increase spread over 4 years to a 4% increase spread over 3 years; each percentage raise would be $404 per educator. Governor Justice announced only a few weeks ago, when pressure began mounting on the legislature, that there would be no change in premiums or deductibles for state employees using PEIA. Such changes reflect a recognition of the power of grassroots democracy when coupled with direct action and statewide solidarity efforts, yet fall short of any substantive change in the fundamental workings of the state's social or economic trajectory. State Senator Richard Ojeda (D), now famous across the state as a "working-class Democrat" and somewhat of a celebrity (who, coincidentally, is also running for West Virginia's 3rd Congressional District this year) has proposed a series of severance taxes aimed against the natural gas industry to help fill gaps in PEIA funding. For every 1% raise in the state's severance tax on natural gas extraction, the state estimates that it will have around $40 million in new revenue. Much like the coal and timber industries before it, such a severance tax would plug metaphorical holes in the state's public services budget, but would do little to provide meaningful change to the operative conditions of workers. Recent statistics put the death toll for West Virginia miners from 1883 to 2018 at 21,000, while statistics for those that have died in the timber industry are inconsistent. In both instances, corporate profits have trended upward over the course of their history.

As the famed robber baron J.P. Morgan once said, "We are not in business for our health."

Theoretical Interpretation

Sol-i-dar-i-ty (noun): 1) unity or agreement of feeling or action, especially among individuals with a common interest; 2) mutual support within a group.

The renowned union song Solidarity Forever is over a century old and has been sung at labor gatherings and trade halls since Ralph Chaplin first penned it in 1915. The chorus extols the listener to remember that through unity in action, with a shared purpose, strength can overcome the greatest odds. "For the union makes us strong."

Chaplin's inspiration for the lyrics came about during his time covering the Kanawha coal miners' strike in Huntington, West Virginia. Over the course of his lifetime, Solidarity Forever would become a mainstay among business and industrial unions. Its lack of sectarianism provided all sympathetic union members the opportunity to sing together, regardless of labor orientation.

Chaplin, however, grew dissatisfied with its popularity and would go on to pen, "Why I wrote Solidarity Forever," wherein he states that, "I didn't write Solidarity Forever for ambitious politicians or for job-hungry labor fakirs seeking a ride on the gravy train." Solidarity, for Chaplin, was a process, a verb. It had to be reshaped in each new movement by a brand of committed industrial unions with a tendency towards dismantling capitalism and abolishing wage slavery. Unlike the more widespread AFL, the IWW, to which Chaplin belonged, took the struggle of workers' rights throughout the first two decades of the 20th century to include direct action politics - ranging from work slowdowns and work stoppages to lock outs and sabotage efforts. Solidarity through unified action, and unified action towards the "birth [of] a new world from the ashes of the old," could be the only end-goal for union efforts.

Peruse the secret Facebook group "West Virginia Public Employees UNITED" and you'll find post after post referencing Chaplin's most famous song. To the passerby, it may seem that the affinity for this song is first and foremost its tune familiarity - sung to the Battle Hymn of the Republic - while secondly, the song provides inspiration for trying times to the everyday worker seeking that reprieve from the capitalist system Chaplin describes. Educators on this page have posted signs detailing their "solidarity forever" with fellow unions, such as the UMWA, UE, and IBEW, and vice versa. The highly-paid staff for these business unions, not to mention their traditional lobbying tactics, would be enough to churn the stomach of any good Wobbly, and it appears at first that the teachers are being led by the same sort of social democracy that they have fallen for in the past.

Leninists, too, have begun critiquing the teachers' strike, yet from an angle that argues, in essence, that the class struggle cannot operate within the single-dimensional framework of public employees. Quoting Lenin in Our Immediate Tasks, they argue, "When the workers of a single factory or of a single branch of industry engage in struggle against their employer or employers, is this class struggle? No, this is only a weak embryo of it. The struggle of the workers becomes a class struggle only when all the foremost representatives of the entire working class of the whole country are conscious of themselves as a single working class and launch a struggle that is directed, not against individual employers, but against the entire class of capitalists and against the government that supports that class." Utilizing the age-old Leninist argument that a revolutionary vanguard party is the sine qua non of all worker struggles, Leninists have challenged the belief that the teachers' strike can have significant impacts on their own, as they are by and large directed, or funded by, business unions, and that the "trade-union consciousness" which Lenin speaks of in What is To Be Done? inherently casts a shadow of doubt over the efficacy of any worker struggle outside of the vanguard.

The theoretical sectarian struggles to this point have been ones that center the discourse on this struggle as one that de-historicizes the larger framework of this narrative, provides a monolithic overview of individual and independent associations into one larger struggle, and relies on standard tropes to paint broadly the teachers-as-union-slaves narrative. In this sense, I hope to set the record straight on the contemporary West Virginia teachers' strike that is currently unfolding while providing my own interpretations of its theoretical foundations.

What Is Our Struggle?

Last year, I was fortunate enough to attend my association's state Delegate Assembly. Every year, the West Virginia Education Association (WVEA) hosts an assembly to elect new officers, provides a framework for future legislative efforts, and meets to discuss relevant issues with educators from across the state. It was at this assembly that I began to grow frustrated with the efforts of President Dale Lee and Executive Director David Haney - both of whom used portions of their assembly speeches to denounce educators who had voted for Republicans and "against their own interests" the previous November. In light of this treatment, I wrote a scathing article about these events in The Socialist Worker in July, hoping to simply vent my frustrations with a wider audience of like-minded thinkers, but assuming little would come of it; I was wrong.

A few weeks after the article was published, a now-comrade of mine - who for the sake of anonymity will be referred to as "Fred" - contacted me with a simple request: "We need to talk about your article." Fred had been at the Delegate Assembly, too, and felt as frustrated as I by the inability of union leadership to effectively mount a serious opposition to reactionary legislation. Over the summer, Fred and I began discussing dates for a grassroots "day at the capitol" lobbying day. We settled on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day because we knew the legislators would be in session and educators would also have the day off, so it would be both convenient and time sensitive. Throughout the next several months, Fred began working on a Facebook group that was then called "West Virginia Public Teachers UNITED." Our goal was to agitate and educate sympathetic teachers across the state into one large group. Each educator was expected to add at least 10 new members that they knew would support our efforts. Over time, we saw the page grow from a few dozen members to several hundred.

By November, we began to worry. Someone had added a member of the executive committee to the group and union leadership was not happy at the efforts we had made. Nonetheless, they realized that if they attempted to halt what progress we had made, they would be halting a real attempt at substantive change, something that hadn't been seen in decades; they took control of the lobby day and began coordinating with local leadership for the next few months. During that time, however, educators continued to post about possible legislation that would arise during the 2018 legislative session. Fears turned into anger as posters began to demand action, and it was at this time that serious talks of a statewide strike were seen. Posters who had been present during the 1990 strike or who had a family member who was on the picket lines then began drawing parallels between the two events organically, recognizing the underlying themes of decades of economic exploitation and the inherent failures of the American democratic experience. The posters were being educated daily, and this education led to their agitation at the state of affairs.

As the Martin Luther King, Jr. Lobby Day rolled around, posters began making concerted efforts to find carpools to the capitol. It looked online as if there would be a mass of teachers waiting in the rotunda to hear what could be done to fix public education for the foreseeable future; in reality, only a little over a hundred educators and supporters showed up. They were greeted by President Dale Lee, who in a surprise move, mentioned the upsurge in revolutionary talk. "I've heard a lot of people talk about 'It's time for a walkout or time for a strike,'" Lee said at the time. "But those are not the first steps in that decision. It's not the first step in what we should do to achieve our goals. If we were to get back to that, there's a lot of groundwork that needs to be laid beforehand." In essence, Lee had given the go-ahead to local leadership to begin efforts at rallying people to join in direct action politics. Mobilization efforts began almost instantaneously. Stories of legislators accosting teachers, refusing to meet with some groups, and outright rejecting basic facts and data from others showed the educators who did arrive that there could be no compromise with the reactionary forces they were fighting - it had to be all or nothing.

The next major rally was scheduled for February 17th. In between the rallies, local counties held a vote of authorization. This would allow state leadership to act on behalf of counties and locals at large. Once the vote had taken place, country presidents would meet at Flatwoods, WV to certify the vote in their county and provide leadership with a firm number of who would support direct action and who would not. The total percentage in support of authorizing statewide action was above 85% - well beyond the expectation of 70% that had been floated as an ideal percentage. The numbers in check and the votes certified, leadership decided to prepare for an eventual statewide walkout that would occur on Thursday, February 22 nd.

On that fateful day, estimates of 5,000 individuals met at the capitol to protest the lack of reforms the state has pushed and demanding long-term funding for PEIA, greater percentage raises for teachers, and a halt to reactionary legislation across the board. At one point, the state's Attorney General became so frightened by the protests outside his office that he barricaded his door with a large, taxidermied black bear. Walkouts continued the following day, even though numbers had dwindled significantly from Thursday to Friday at the capitol.

Meanwhile, online organizing had continued unabated. Several months prior, Fred had decided to change the name of the page from "West Virginia Teachers UNITED" to "West Virginia Public Employees UNITED." Fred realized the stagnant numbers we were drawing would not be able to sustain a mass movement, but even more so, Fred realized that the struggle our group faced was one that transcended our profession, yet was inherently wrapped up in the politics of it. West Virginia teachers could not succeed, he argued, without the widespread outpouring of support from all public employees, who have also been at the forefront of this onslaught against the public sector. Moreover, cross-labor solidarity efforts could show the public that a teachers' strike was not intended simply to alleviate the ills of an under-funded education system; rather, they were an attempt to save all public employees from the state itself. It was at this point that the Facebook page had reached critical mass - over 20,000 active posters. Posters began to talk frequently in person about the lessons they learned from the page, the information being disseminated taught them the limits of electoral politics and the need for greater direct action politics to effect any change. Organization began on the site as well during this time, with some counties splitting off to decide how best to coordinate local efforts for picketing, leafleting, walk-ins, walk-outs, and public relations campaigns.

Posters listened carefully for word on Friday afternoon of an impending rolling walkout to circumvent the Attorney General's upcoming injunction against the unions. Local leadership had told members that week to prepare for this action, listing the benefits of it and how to best organize in defense should educators be required to go to work those days under penalty of suspension or firing. During this week, too, posters complained vociferously that such an action would not have the intended consequences for the legislature. If the legislature knew when we would strike and how long to prepare for, then they would have no need to make a compromise, the argument went. Once again, to everyone's surprise, Lee stated that the walkouts would continue into Monday. It appeared that the grassroots push to have leadership take an active role in listening to its members had its desired effect. Even under threat of injunction, union leadership was keen on the idea of pushing for statewide action, almost indefinitely, until the principal demands had been met.

Theoretical Connections to Anarcho-Syndicalism

At the heart of anarcho-syndicalism is a two-fold attack against the ills of capitalism: 1) a decentralized, horizontal model of leadership that treats all members as first amongst equals, and 2) an abolition of the state through workers' self-management. The quintessential anarcho-syndicalist union of the early 20th century - the Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) - initially organized around these sets of principals as well. Based in Barcelona, the CNT was an anarcho-syndicalist union organized across all sectors of employment. CNT capitalized on the worsening economic and political conditions of Spain in the lead up to global war to form autonomous collectives in the major urban centers throughout the peninsula. Though still mostly a rural nation, Barcelona became a central hub for modern industry in their singular productive industry textile mills. The Spanish losses of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines during the Spanish-American War over a decade prior had damaged Spain's already fractured economy by forcing it to rely less and less on its sugar production and more on national industries based in the peninsula. Catalonia in the north, for example, was the only region in Spain where industrial output was greater than agricultural production.

Beginning with only 26,000 members in 1911, the CNT initiated a general strike which would later be deemed illegal by local authorities for several years. The illegality of this action, however, provided new in-roads upon which the CNT would build. In the interwar period, the CNT had a central role to play in the organizing of the 1919 La Canadiense general strike. This forty-four day general strike forced the Spanish government to agree to the world's first eight-hour work day. 70% of Catalonia's industry was halted during the La Canadiense general strike, and the CNT reached a membership of 755,000 as a result of their successes. According to libcom, "about 10% of the active Spanish adult population was a member of the CNT in 1919."

Declines among the CNT would slowly matriculate as businesses began hiring thugs - similar to the Pinkerton agents of American lore - who would murder union members and leaders with ruthless efficiency, though over the course of the Spanish Civil War, membership would balloon up to 1.58 million by the end of the war. The culminating blow to the CNT would ultimately come with the ascension of Francisco Franco and his Fascist forces, who outlawed the union and forced it to go underground. Much of the history of the CNT is paralleled across reactionary Europe and the United States, to groups such as the IWW and the IWA, which have recently seen an increase in membership.

The theoretical tendencies and historical parallels between the CNT and the contemporary West Virginia teachers' strike can show the deep-seated roots of anarcho-syndicalist tendencies underneath the surface of otherwise conservative states. In theory, anarcho-syndicalists view local autonomy and organizing around shared interests at a directly democratic level will provide the greatest change in society. Noam Chomsky, in his Anarcho-syndicalism: Theory and Practice, relays his views of anarcho-syndicalism to be, "a federated, decentralized system of free associations, incorporating economic as well as other social institutions…" The CNT's model of this association model contrasts with Marxist-Leninist tendencies which seek to form a revolutionary party model upon which a vanguard will appear and act as democratic leaders to herald in the revolution.

Similarly, the contemporary West Virginia teachers' strike has both the material and organizing conditions that make an anarcho-syndicalist system possible. First, West Virginia's economic devastation is a result of what has been called the "resource curse" or the "paradox of plenty" - wherein regions have an abundance of natural resources that can spur larger economic growth in various sectors, yet tend to become stagnant economically - and what Immanuel Wallerstein would deem the "Periphery status" within world-systems theory. According to Wallerstein, periphery states lack economic diversity, are semi-industrialized but only insofar as they provide products to core states, become targets for multinational corporate investment in extracting surplus labor or resources, and have high a pool of labor that is disproportionately poor and lacking in education. Wallerstein tended to view nation-states as at least somewhat monolithic in this regard - treating the United States as a collective core nation and China as a collective core periphery state, for example - without a recognition of the complexities of capital within the communities of those states themselves. If we expand Wallerstein's notion of periperhy status to West Virginia as a whole, a more uniform pattern of shared economic destiny can be understood:

In the case of West Virginia:

1. Ranked fourth highest in the nation for obesity and the highest prevalence of adults reporting fair or poor health in the country.

2. Over 30% of the state does not hold a high school diploma

3. The median household income is $36,864, while the median household income for the country at large is $59,039.

What differentiates the conclusions between a Marxist-Leninist trajectory of these material conditions is that a vanguard party is largely disregarded in the state or is too small and fractured to have any larger sense of statewide support. Furthermore, the support from Marxist-Leninist parties has been largely, though perhaps regrettably, superficial. Workers World and PSL have written articles supporting the teachers, to be sure, and have created a diverse range of graphics to show their solidarity with the collective struggle against capital. Yet, these gestures tend to attract only minor attention on an online space with educators.

On the other hand, collective struggles that decentralize power and return the dynamic to a community-oriented and labor-oriented structure has seen greater advances throughout the course of the strike. Over the past weekend when Dale Lee stated that a statewide walkout would commence on Thursday, February 22nd, local communities began their own decentralized organizing for food distribution centers. In Morgantown, for example, the local Monongalia County Education Association independently took on the task of setting up collection sites for food and other resources that could then be distributed to schools with the highest rates of students on free and reduced lunches. The outpouring of support led to this single organization collecting over 400 bags for lunches, 400 bags for breakfasts, and three-dozen snack bags - all with collections for only four schools total. This is without an even deeper analysis of the various food centers that have begun providing resources to local non-profits and managing distribution centers to students living in rural parts of the state where accessibility to resources is limited. In both senses, it has not been a vanguard party structure nor as movement towards social democracy that has funneled this energy into collective action, but rather, one that has a distributive model of community governance.

It remains to be seen what the result of such actions will be: union leadership could allow electoral strategies to win out and a compromise may be reached before any further action takes place; the Republican-dominated legislature could continue to stall on the issue of funding, providing for a special session to take place, costing the state even more money in the process; or, the state could begin a significant crackdown on educators and other potential dissidents in the process of maintaining "law and order." The last scenario is not unfounded, given the fact that the House of Delegates updated a 1933 law to give capitol police the ability to break up "riots and unlawful assemblages" while providing legal cover "for the death of persons in riots and unlawful assemblages." Thus, the state could effectively begin mass arrests against educators and union leadership, similar to what occurred to the IWW, CNT, and IWA, though driving them underground is unlikely. The difference is that such a direct assault would provide educators the necessary public relations to cover themselves and galvanize greater support in opposition to both capital and the defenders of capital. Thus, a direct assault by the state could essentially be the death knell to a dying institution.

Race Traitors Wanted: Apply Within (A Review of David Gilbert's "Looking at the U.S. White Working Class Historically")

By Colin Jenkins

The term "white working class" captured much of the media analysis which sought to explain Trump's meteoric rise and subsequent victory to the highest office in the United States. The obsession with polling and voting trends based in demographics is certainly nothing new. Mainstream political analysts exist for the purpose of figuring out why Republicans dominate the South, or why Democrats maintain strongholds on the coasts, or why so-called swing states go one way or the other in any given year. But this time around seemed especially interesting, considering that a wealthy businessman (and political outsider) received 63 million votes from a populace that is facing historic economic woes due to the constant greed and manipulation of and by wealthy businessmen.

For the past forty years, some voting trends have remained incredibly consistent. In terms of race, Blacks highly favor Democratic candidates by an overwhelming margin that rests between 74 and 88 points. In contrast, whites consistently favor Republican candidates by margins of up to 25 points. This trend stayed true for Trump, with whites preferring him by a 21-point margin and Blacks favoring Clinton by an 80-point margin.

The intersection of race and class presents a more complex picture, with more fluidity. Both capitalist parties know this. And they also know that, while they ultimately represent the elite/special interests that fund their campaigns and lobby their legislation, they need votes from the "common people." This is the game of bourgeois/liberal democracy in the US: the two parties participate in a political tug of war, we watch and are even allowed to passively participate with a vote, and many of us choose to participate with the faith that our vote actually matters. Regardless of their worth to us, votes do determine which party takes power. And, because of this, the parties deploy ample amounts of resources to capture these votes.

The parties develop strategies to attract not only individual voters, but specific demographics: women, men, "Hispanic," Black, white, "educated," Christian, etc. Each party uses complex marketing and advertising schemes to push agendas and play with psyches, in the hopes of securing large swaths of votes come election time. Patterns and trends develop, and analyses follow in an attempt to explain why certain voters vote the way they do. One conclusion from liberal analysts that has persisted for nearly a half-century is that the "white working class" votes against its own economic interests by siding with Republicans.

A common question, like this one posed in a December-2017 Politico article , asks, "Are working-class white voters shooting themselves in the foot by making common cause with a political movement [Republicans] that is fundamentally inimical to their economic self-interest?" This, of course, is based on the premise that whenever in power, the alternate choice (Democrats) has shown the propensity and capacity to improve or sustain the economic realities of working-class people: a premise that, by any historical measure, appears weak. Nonetheless, the question persists within liberal circles: why do poor and working-class whites vote for the party of Jim Crow, the Southern Strategy, personal responsibility, and ultra-capitalism.

The Radical Dilemma Posed by the White Working Class

While the capitalist parties formulate strategies for votes, revolutionaries continue to operate within the margins of society. In many ways, the same issues and questions that influence mainstream political parties also must be confronted by radicals. Among the Left (anti-capitalist/not Democrats or liberals!) in the US, the issue of the "white working class" takes on an even deeper meaning, presenting an age-old challenge of how to convince poor and working-class whites to let go of their whiteness for the sake of anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-racist, working-class unity.

To many leftists, the challenge is a constant frustration that sparks many internal debates. Some take an optimistic approach in their analysis by claiming that the Trump vote was more middle class than working class; that proto-fascist groups like the Tea Party were predominantly middle class, and not working class; that fascist groups which have surfaced in the age of Trump are more middle class than working class. This optimism also drifts into semantics, where the term "working-class whites" is deemed more suitable than "white working class," which seems totalizing and monolithic to a fault. While, admittedly, the final Trump vote represented a mix of class dynamics, including a strong turnout from middle-class and small-business-owning whites, one statistic can't be ignored: Among all white voters making less than $30,000 a year, 58% chose Trump.

Enter David Gilbert. Or rather, re-enter David Gilbert. During a time of white allies checking their privilege and seeking gold stars through self-flagellation and virtue signaling, Gilbert is a white accomplice who is nearing his fifth decade of a 75-years-to-life prison sentence. A former member of Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground, Gilbert spent the late 70s and early 80s in the Revolutionary Armed Task Force (RATF), an alliance of white revolutionaries that served under the leadership of the Black Liberation Army (BLA). On October 20, 1981, after an attempted robbery of a Brinks armored car which resulted in the deaths of two police officers, members of the BLA and RATF, including Gilbert, were arrested and subsequently found guilty on charges stemming from the incident. Gilbert has been incarcerated in the NY State prison system ever since.

In 1984, Gilbert penned a short book from his prison cell, titled, " Looking at the White Working Class Historically ." The book was an attempt to analyze the white working class in the US in order to gauge historical obstructions to, and potential for, its participation in revolutionary struggle. In 2017, on the heels of Trump's rise, which signifies in part, "racist mass mobilizations" in response to "an imperialism in crisis," and a precursor to "fascism," according to Gilbert, a second edition of "Looking…" was rolled out by Kersplebedeb Publishing. The new edition includes Gilbert's original analysis of three texts - White Supremacy in the US: Slavery and the Origins of Racism (Ted Allen); Black Reconstruction 1860-1880 (W.E.B. Du Bois); and Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat (J. Sakai) - a section on Lessons from the Sixties (1991), and new sections onThe Context of the Trump Phenomenon (2017) and After the Sixties: Reaction and Restructuring (2017).

The original preface remains, both in print and in relevance, as Gilbert opens the book by pinpointing the historical dilemma at hand:

"One of the supreme issues for our movement is summed-up in the contradictions of the term 'white working class.' On one hand there is the class designation that should imply, along with all other workers of the world, a fundamental role in the overthrow of capitalism. On the other hand, there is the identification of being part of a ('white') oppressor nation. Historically, we must admit that the identity with the oppressor nation has been primary." (1)

Leading up to the analysis of the texts by Allen, Du Bois, and Sakai, Gilbert hits "white radicals, to whom this book is primarily addressed," (8) with a hard-hitting historical critique of the white working class as a tool of capitalism, white supremacy, and imperialism - a critique that is ripe for the seemingly rising number of class reductionists occupying the current Left. "White labor has been either a legal opposition within or an active component of the US imperial system," (1) Gilbert tells us, while concluding with a warning: "Blaming the working class is a misdirection; but so too is denialism about the depth and penetration of white supremacy, which has been the basis for the white Left's failures over the past 150 years." (10)

The Trump Phenomenon

In one of two sections exclusive to the 2017 edition, The Context for the Trump Phenomenon, Gilbert is especially penetrating with a systemic analysis regarding the factors leading to our current situation. Identifying the very foundation of the US as "white supremacy," Gilbert correctly views Trump as Americanism Personified ; the inevitable result of a country that is, "at its core, imperialist, patriarchal, and based in a range of ways human beings are delimited and demeaned." (11) As both a historical norm for the country and a predictable systemic response, Gilbert points to "racial scapegoating" as Trump's engine:

"A stable imperialism prefers to rule by keeping the population passive, with large sectors at home placated by relative prosperity. But when the system is in crisis, those running the economy often resort to diverting anger by scapegoating the racial 'other.' The sectors of the population who buy into that get the 'satisfaction' of stomping on their 'inferiors,' which is a lot easier than confronting the mega-powerful ruling class." (11)

Echoing Buenaventura Durruti's assessment at the birth of the Spanish Civil War - "No government fights fascism to destroy it; when the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto its privileges" - Gilbert captures the essence of fascism as capitalism in decay. But Gilbert's most important contribution in "Looking…" comes in his exposing of the modern Democratic Party as not only enablers of the Trump phenomenon, but also as standard-bearers of this very system. In doing so, he indirectly answers the question so often posed within liberal circles. Gilbert sums up the Democrats' role:

"The Democrats, in blaming 'those damn Russkies,' are deflecting attention away from the real reason they lost: they represented the prevailing global capitalism and all the associated frustrations of the decline of US manufacturing and erosion of job security. Trump spoke to those anxieties - in a totally demagogic and dishonest way. For example, during the campaign he railed against Goldman Sachs as the prime example of how Wall Street banks screw the working man; then, as president he selected seven of his top economic appointments from the ranks of Goldman Sachs. The Democrats could not provide a compelling alternative to this racist scam artist because they too are deeply rooted in the long bipartisan history of white supremacy, capitalism, and wars of aggression." (12)

In comparing Trump's "more blatant racism and misogyny" to Obama's "kinder and more inclusive rhetoric," Gilbert concludes that Obama, the face of the Democratic Party and confidant of Hillary Clinton, "provided trillions of dollars to bail out Wall Street at the expense of Main Street… presided over seven wars (drone strikes have killed hundreds of civilians and are acts of war under international law)… deported a record number of immigrants… kept 6,000 people behind bars by opposing retroactive application of legislation that reduced harsh sentences for crack cocaine… and played a key role in sabotaging the 2009 Copenhagen Conference of Parties." (13)

Despite pointing out that "lesser evils" are becoming more and more difficult to identify, Gilbert concludes with a responsible assessment of the Trump phenomenon as "something new and particularly threatening… the way he has enlarged, energized, and emboldened an active and aggressive base for white supremacy" while making "immigrants, Muslims, Native-American water-protectors, Black Lives Matter activists, women who've faced sexual assault, LGBTQ folks, those who can't afford health insurance, and more feel under the gun." (13)

Lessons for White Radicals

While Gilbert's book serves as a concise and insightful baseline analysis of systemic problems, something that is surely needed on the modern Left, its ultimate goal is really to help steer white radicals in the right direction. In this effort, Gilbert passes on his wisdom as a lifelong, revolutionary, white accomplice, seemingly pleading with us to avoid pitfalls of the past.

Gilbert's lesson essentially comes in three parts: Identifying the historical developments that have shaped the white working class in the US; recognizing the uniquely harsh struggles that exist within the non-white working class; and moving forward in a way that seeks to unite the US working class without reducing everything to class. Tricky proposals, indeed; but Gilbert lays the groundwork for tackling them.

In identifying the historical role of the white working class, Du Bois's assessment of the class and racial dynamics that played out in post-Civil War America (Black Reconstruction 1860-1880) is invaluable. For this reason, Gilbert spends an ample amount of time on it. The primary question posed by Du Bois was this: If only 7% of the white Southern population owned three quarters of the slaves, and 70% of Southern whites owned no slaves at all, why did the poor whites agree to police the slaves? Or more to the point, why did poor Southern whites agree to sign on as "shock troops for the mass terror that destroyed the gains of Black Reconstruction?" (31)

Du Bois provides many insights in his classic text, some of which leave Gilbert frustrated as "not being sufficiently materialist." (31) However, in the end, the value of Du Bois' work is that it illustrates the divisions that occurred between the white working class and the newly freed Black slaves - divisions that were rooted in an embrace of whiteness as a means of intra-working-class privileges: "(1) Poor whites were determined to keep Blacks from access to the better land… (2) Poor whites were afraid that the planters would use the Black vote to trample on their class aspirations… (3) Petty bourgeois whites still wanted to have cheap Black labor to exploit… (4) White labor was determined to keep Blacks from work that competed with them…, and (5) White labor, while given low wages, were compensated with social status, such as access to public parks, schools, etc." (29)

In recognizing the uniquely harsh struggles that exist within the non-white working class, Sakai's Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat gives us perspective by "examining the relationship of the white proletariat to Native Americans, Mexicanos, and Asians, as well as the Black nation." (33) To a white radical like Gilbert, Sakai's book is especially striking… "Even for those of us who think we understand the white supremacist core of US history, reading Settlers is still quite an education." (33) By highlighting the US progression as being intimately tied to Native American genocide, the Atlantic Slave Trade, and imperialistic endeavors, Sakai shows that "integral to most advances of 'democratic' reform for white workers was an active consolidation of privileges at the expense of colonized Third World peoples." (33-34)

Sakai's overall thesis may be pessimistic, but it remains crucial for white radicals to consider. This may explain why Gilbert chose it as part of his examination. Ultimately, to Sakai, the US is quite simply "an oppressor nation that does not have a working class, in any politically meaningful sense of the term." (36) Rather, the "oppressor working class" (white working class) has merely secured gains through not only class collaboration, but also through white-supremacist and imperialist collaboration. Sakai hammers this notion home by pointing to specific tactics deployed by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) during the 1930s, which consciously "reinforced white monopolies on preferred jobs and was a loyal component of US imperial policy abroad" (36):

"The CIO's policy, then, became to promote integration under settler leadership where Afrikan labor was numerous and strong (such as the foundries, the meat packing plants, etc.) and to maintain segregation and Jim Crow in situations where Afrikan labor was numerically lesser and weak. Integration and segregation were but two aspects of the same settler hegemony." (35)

By combining historical developments, structural analyses, the works of Allen, Du Bois and Sakai, and specific lessons from the sixties, Gilbert offers somewhat of a blueprint for the anti-capitalist struggle ahead. Allen's contribution on White Supremacy in the US offers hope in the form of early plantation labor, which showed that "when Black and white labor were in the same conditions of servitude, there was a good deal of solidarity," so much so that "a system of white supremacy was consciously constructed" by the owning class:

"It was the bourgeoisie's deliberately contrived policy of differentiation between white and Black labor through the system of white skin privileges for white labor that allowed the bourgeoisie to use the poor whites as an instrument of social control over the Black workers." (21)

In slight contrast to both Du Bois and Sakai, Allen packages white supremacy as a conscious and deliberate construction used by elites to create artificial divisions within the working class. Thus suggesting that if it is in fact a conspiracy from above, it can be dismantled from below; or, as Gilbert puts it: "A system of white supremacy that was historically constructed can be historically deconstructed." (49)

A Window of Revolutionary Potential

Piggy-backing on Allen's optimism, Gilbert suggests that we have entered a window of revolutionary potential in the US, providing examples of cross-racial solidarity among the working class: "organizing efforts of home healthcare workers, campaigns for farm workers, Justice for Janitors, and the fight for a $15/hour minimum wage" (72); the solidarity that was shown in Standing Rock, where white military veterans joined the fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline; the recent display of international solidarity between Black Lives Matter and the Palestinian people; (75) and the mass mobilization that has occurred to combat Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) assaults on immigrant communities since Trump took office.

This window of revolutionary potential has been opened by a historical crisis of the capitalist system, which is now starting to fail significant portions of the white working class in the US; therefore rendering past class collaborations null and void. As this window also opens the possibility of a fascist tide, some of which we have begun to see in the wake of the Trump phenomenon, Gilbert desperately calls on white radicals to seize the moment:

"We white radicals have a particular responsibility and crying need to organize as many white people as possible to break from imperialism and to see that their long-term interests, as human beings and for a livable future for their children, lie in allying with the rest of humanity." (70)

This effort, according to Gilbert, must rely less on abstract theories and more on concrete points of intersection that fall outside the narrow scope of the white working class. Focusing on protecting water, increasing wages, acquiring healthcare, improving education, fighting debt schemes, opposing constant wars, opposing police brutality, and battling environmental degradation are a few examples of possible intersections.

Ultimately, the challenge is to "find a way to get across to white working-class people the most fundamental issues: the only way to achieve a humane and sustainable society is by allying with the Global South and people of color." (70) And this must be done by actually interacting with the white working class, thus shedding "the elitist or perhaps defeatist view that dismisses the possibility of organizing significant numbers of white people, particularly working-class whites" (2), something that organizations like RedNeck Revolt and John Brown Gun Club have already begun to do.

Class consciousness is sorely needed in the US, in order to recognize the bipartisan nature of capitalist politics and mount a formidable counter-attack in a class war that up until now has been a one-sided massacre. But, as Gilbert so wisely tells us,

"Class consciousness cannot be defined solely by economic demands. At its heart, it is a movement toward the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. 'Proletarian internationalism' - solidarity with all other peoples oppressed and exploited by imperialism - is a necessary and essential feature of revolutionary class consciousness." For white radicals, "this requires up front support for, and alliance with, the oppressed nations, particularly those within the US (Black, Mexicano, Native). Thus white supremacy and class consciousness cannot peacefully co-exist with each other. One chokes off the other. An honest view of the 350-year history clearly shows that the alignment with white supremacy has predominated over revolutionary class consciousness." (38)

Defaulting to class struggle as a one-size-fits-all strategy will not suffice. A neutral approach to white supremacy and imperialism, even if under the guise of revolutionary class politics, is siding with white supremacy and imperialism. White radicals must do this housework and then proceed to the white working class, which has largely been forsaken. In closing, Gilbert leaves us with a sober assessment: "In my view, there definitely is a white working class. It is closely tied to imperialism; the labor aristocracy is the dominant sector, the class as a whole has been corrupted by white supremacy; but, the class within the oppressor nation that lives by the sale of their labor power has not disappeared." (39)

There is revolutionary potential there. As white radicals, it is our duty to find a way to tap it.

Looking at the US White Working Class Historically (2017) may be purchased at Left-Wing Books .

As of the printing of this book (October 2017), you can write David at:

David Gilbert #83A6158

Wende Correctional Facility

3040 Wende Road

Alden, NY 14004-1187

Building a Socialist Alternative: An Interview with Eljeer Hawkins

By Bryant William Sculos

(A shorter, edited-down version of this interview was first published with Truthout under the title "Inspiring a Socialist Alternative: An Interview with Eljeer Hawkins," published Feb. 24, 2018. The full version of the interview is reprinted here with permission.)

(The following is an interview conducted via email between Nov. 30, 2017 and Dec. 30, 2017, slightly edited for style)

Bryant Sculos: Can you say a bit about how you became an activist and what your early experiences were like?

Eljeer Hawkins: I was born and raised in East Harlem, New York City. It began for me at the age of 18 years old. I discovered the speeches of Malcolm X to the chagrin of my mother who was a child of the 1950s and 60s. My mom was 14 years old when Malcolm X was murdered; she wasn't very enthused to find her oldest listening to old Nation of Islam tapes with brother minister Malcolm X calling the "white man the devil." (laugh)

I never had a black history course until college. I was accepted to Howard University, but didn't have the resources to attend early classes that were in 1992. My dream was to attend Howard; I went to John Jay College for Criminal Justice, I wanted to be a defense attorney. My uncle, Wayne, my mom's brother, became instrumental in my early development as he helped me navigate US history, black history, art, and music particularly the black aesthetic. I will always be indebted to him and what he taught me.

So Brother Malcolm X was a natural starting point. My father wasn't in my life, so Malcolm X and Uncle Wayne were the men and examples I looked to growing up politically and culturally. The first bookstore I visited was Liberation bookstore in Harlem and bought my early black nationalist, cultural nationalist, and socialist books. In college, I joined the Organization of Black Students-became very active on campus-to the determent of my school work. My life changed forever when my mother died at the age of 43 from a massive heart attack. At this time I was engaged in solidarity work with a group in the Congo-formerly called Zaire under the brutal dictatorship of Mobutu. I also was on the periphery of the Workers World organization but never joined.

My mother's death destroyed me; I lost focus and left school after two years. I wanted to dedicate my life to the project of revolutionary ideas and action.

BS: Did you consider yourself a socialist from the beginning or did that develop later?

EH: I was a black revolutionary nationalist until one winter night after a protest in 1995. A sister activist asked me what society after the revolution was I aiming to build. I had ignorantly dismissed revolutionary Marxism as a white man's ideology. February of 1995 I attended a gathering of dissent Congolese organizations with various political and economic leanings. I worked with Serge Mukendi and the Workers and Peasants Movement of the Congo (POP). Brother Serge and the POP declared themselves to be Marxists; he played a foundational role in my political development and hunger to understand the world. Well we attended this meeting of the minds, and we stayed with a member of Labor Militant in Boston, Massachusetts (now Socialist Alternative). I began to look at the brother's bookshelf and was spellbound. I wasn't a member of any socialist organization at the time. So the comrade gave me the contact information of Labor Militant members in New York City. From February to about the early summer of 1995, I attended meetings and discussions. The organization was tiny at the time. After genuinely studying and reading the program, I decided to join and commit my life to the project of building socialism and workers' democracy internationally. I joined at a time following the fall of Stalinism, the triumphalism of capitalism, and decline of the workers' movement. So I participated in a dark moment for socialist ideas, and frankly, it steeled me in every way to march forward armed with a program, analysis, and history. So all the things I've learned and continue to learn have guided me, 23 years later in the international class struggle for socialism. Today, we are witnessing a resurgence of socialist thought and action. I'm humbled to be here for this moment.

BS: What is your take on the current state of the US left-as well as the left globally?

EH: We are at an embryonic stage of socialist ideas. The crisis of capitalism and decline of the institutions of capitalism like their two parties (Democratic and Republican) has led a whole generation to question what the hell is going on and what I can do to change things. Occupy Wall Street was the first shot across the bow, followed by vital social and political explosions and banners like Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, #MeToo, and Arab Spring revolutions, etc. This is also a time for debate and discussion on how the socialist left globally can make gains and what is the best strategy and tactics to take the struggle forward. We need a level of patience, because this is a new and young milieu of activists and organizers who are feeling their way through this period of reform or revolution-battles for self-determination like in Catalonia, an environmental crisis like in California, Puerto Rico, and the Caribbean, and increased racial and sexual oppression. I think as this new left continues to engage in the struggle they will be forced to draw conclusions and rethink what they thought initially. We are truly living in a period of revolution and counter-revolution. We must prepare ourselves through an intense engagement in history, social struggle, and political analysis because of this uncharted territory moment.

BS: Given the unique path you've taken to become a socialist, now with decades of activist experience, I think people would be interested in hearing what your worst experience as a socialist activist has been? Best?

EH: The worst has always been debates to the point of losing sight of the centrality of the working class and their potential revolutionary agency to change the world. Now, please do not get me wrong, a debate organized and focused can provide clarity and a general roadmap on how to proceed in the struggle. The Bolshevik Party is a brilliant example of debate and discussion in the workers' movement-interconnected with political perspectives, action, and the program always centering the international working class and peasantry in the worldwide socialist revolution.

The best experience is winning a debate (laugh), just kidding. I would say witnessing how consciousness is transformed by events and interconnected developments that lead people to draw various conclusions. Consciousness can leap forward or backward based on events, how a situation is given a contextual explanation like an electoral win or defeat, and importantly who and what explains this process like an individual or organization in the struggle. I think of Erica Garner, the daughter of Eric Garner and her political awakening. After the death of her father, she immersed herself in telling the truth and keeping his spirit alive in organizing daily for a full year to decry law enforcement violence. That is powerful to me as an activist and grassroots historian. Mamie Till, the mother of Emmitt Till, said it best when events shape one's consciousness, "Two months ago I had a nice apartment in Chicago. I had a good job. I had a son. When something happened to the Negroes in the South, I said, `That's their business, not mine.' Now I know how wrong. I was. The murder of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of us all."

Socialism is longer a dirty word, the gains like the fifteen dollar minimum wage spearheaded by low-wage workers, electoral victories and organizing of Socialist Alternative and socialist city councilor Kshama Sawant in Seattle, Washington, and a strong showing of Ginger Jentzen in the city council race in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The growth of independent working-class politics is on the agenda. The best moments are witnessing or participating in grassroots struggles that win, raising the morale, confidence, and fighting capacity of working people, the poor, and the most oppressed to change their conditions.

BS: In early November 2017 when you came to speak at a Socialist Alternative event in Worcester, MA, you said that you were a perpetual optimist. Given the state of the world today, the increasingly frequent and devastating crises of capitalism, structural racism, rampant unrepentant sexism and misogyny, and continued ecological degradation, how you can maintain your optimism?

EH: James Baldwin stated, "I cannot be a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist means you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I am forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive."

That optimism comes from a study of history and examples of people fighting back to form a union, stopping an abusive boss, people organizing together for a common goal. Now, we need as Dr. King correctly stated, an urgency of NOW! And we need some action to go along with that urgency. Yes, we have dark days and nights ahead of us, particularly in this era of Trumpism and the economic terrorism of capitalism. That's why we must engage in struggle and critical political study to fortify our resolve. History teaches us when people become fed-up and can't take it anymore, people begin to move. What is crucial for the radical socialist left globally is to be prepared for that moment building organization, program, and leadership in these battles are essential as victory or defeat hangs in the balance.

BS: Building on that question, do you think there is possibly a strategic role for a kind of hopeful pessimism -a kind of expectation, given the forces rallied against the left (as well as the left's self-inflicted failures) that, at least in the short-term, things probably aren't going to turn out well, but that is precisely why we need to struggle and remain hopeful that they can, in the future, turn out well? The strategic idea being that if left activists (especially those who are new to socialism or activism in general) become too optimistic about the possibilities of short-term victories, they will become disillusioned and demobilized when faced with failure. Do you think there is anything to this perspective?

EH: You can't have a blind optimism or a cheerleader's mentality that is not rooted in the reality of class struggle-its ups and downs. The 90s were difficult, but I would not trade it in because I learned during a period of defeat. I was politically developed as a member of the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI) that has a sober approach that follows in the best traditions of genuine Bolshevism. The CWI draws out global political perspectives to explain the events and developments we are living through, even more, critically elaborating on an action program to present to workers and youth in the class struggle rooted in their lived experience under this system.

It is true the left has made mistakes, and there is an uneven history when it comes analysis, strategy, and tactics. With that said, we can't throw out the baby with the bathwater either. The building of the left or revolutionary party, even more so, Socialism, is a project that will demand the full participation and activity of the working class, youth, poor, and oppressed on a daily basis. I firmly believe we need more than smart prose, intellectual verbiage that a tiny minority in the activist world can understand, and commentary that is divorced from the concrete struggle and lives of working people. I wonder what that term "hopeful pessimism" means to someone who has been on the left for years, who carries scares and tears, or a new person discovering these ideas and their voice in the struggle. That "hopeful pessimism" seems abstract and divorces oneself to standing on the sidelines and waiting. I would prefer to engage and test out my ideas in the living breathing struggle and allow the movement to judge me if I am right or wrong.

BS: Given that, and the importance that you (and Marxists in general) place on history, what historical models, regarding movements and organizations, do you think offer the best inspiration (both regarding principles and strategy/tactics) for the contemporary left?

EH: The debate and discussion that is in the air is reform or revolution. This past November marked the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, and many are questioning the Bolshevik Revolution and party itself. I would say the Bolshevik Revolution would be instructive to study, but I would recommend all activists especially the new generation of activists to explore all the significant revolutionary movements of the past. Particularly after the Russian Revolution in 1917, like the German Revolution of 1918, Chinese Revolution (1925-27), Spain between 1931 and1937, etc. And counterpose it to the revolutions after WWII in the aftermath of the strengthening of Stalinism and Social Democracy, like China in 1949, Cuba in 1959, and anti-colonial revolutions in the so-called "third world." In my mind, this is vital because I think this generation needs a sense of historical memory and clarity of what a revolution is and how it comes to life under particular conditions and social forces. As you engage in this study, I think the Bolsheviks will stand out as a unique force that made a successful socialist revolution and fought to keep the flame alive in the face of imperial attack, third world social conditions, civil war, and isolation.

BS: You and I are both members of Socialist Alternative (SA), so obviously we have a shared vision of principles and strategy, but what is your perspective on the uptick in popularity and paper membership of the Democratic Socialist of America (DSA)? How should SA orient itself toward DSA, both locally and nationally? What are your experiences in working with DSA?

EH: This version of DSA is not your momma or daddy's DSA. DSA is a different organization from its original foundations in the 1960s under the leadership of Michael Harrington; I think this past summer's convention proved that to be true. I am interested to see how it will continue to develop with 30,000 members and several DSA members taking office on a city and statewide basis nationally. The Occupy banner, Bernie Sanders phenomenon, and the capitalist crisis have led us to this moment where socialism is being examined seriously for the first time in a generation or two. This generation will be worse off than their parents; they are living through a new gilded age of the super-rich reaping profits beyond imagination, and their lives are precarious in every way from income inequality to the climate crisis.

SA has worked with DSA members and chapters nationwide and would love to do so moving forward around the critical issues facing working people, poor, and the most oppressed around issues such as healthcare, jobs, education, housing, and ending law enforcement violence. We also want to engage in comradely discussion and debate around strategy and tactics for the left and related movements. We are aware of the meaningful conversations taking place inside DSA around the role of Democratic Party, building a sustainable fight back against corporate power, and countless other issues. SA wants to build a multi-racial mass movement of the working class with socialist forces as its backbone. I think the 40,000 strong rally and march against the forces of hate and reaction in Boston, MA (Aug. 2017) was a brilliant example of genuine united front work. And campaigning to show the potential power and organizing capacity of the working class and left that overshadowed and dwarfed the racist and neo-Nazi forces made the national and international news. This will be a period of clarification around ideas, history, and movement building strategy. SA is looking forward to engaging this new generation of activists and organizers because we are on the clock with no time to waste.

BS: Lastly, what do you see as the greatest obstacle to achieving progress towards socialism over the next, say, 5-10 years?

EH: We are up against an empire and global capitalism. There is no final blow against this system of oppression, war, hate, and environmental destruction. It has weapons of mass distraction and destruction at its disposal. We must be clear about what we are up against. As the Russian Revolution of 1917 and many other social movements against tyranny and corporate power have shown us, as the great Fannie Lou Hamer taught us, when people become sick and tired-the winds of change begin to swirl-what seemed impossible becomes possible. We have to prepare, which means we have to rebuild the fighting capacity of the working class, poor, and most oppressed, organizing in our workplaces, schools, and communities in a systematic and daily manner that encompasses defensive struggle to maintain what we have won and offensive battles to fight for what we want and need right now. One of the immediate tasks in front of us is reigniting the early stages of the resistance against Trump and the Republican Party as they advance the corporate agenda just like at this tax bill its naked class warfare. We must forge a mass movement that is not episodic but is sustaining and always pushing forward. Living that famous civil rights anthem to the fullest "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around."

Trump can be defeated, but we must have the will, strategy, analysis, approach, and program that centers the lives of working people and seeks to unite the working class in a common struggle against the ruling 0.1%. That's why I am incredibly excited and interested in the Poor People's Campaign this year and its possibilities in forging that movement. I may not see socialism in my lifetime, but I have been proud to be part of the struggle for socialism. To stand with the millions around the world as we say enough is enough! We will build a new world with our bare hands rooted in love for humanity, a socialist society is possible.

--

Eljeer Hawkins is a community, labor and anti-war activist, born and raised in Harlem, New York, and member of Socialist Alternative/CWI for 23 years. Eljeer is a former shop steward with Teamsters local 851 and former member of SEIU 1199, currently is a non-union healthcare worker in New York City. He contributes regularly to Socialist Alternative Newspaper, socialistworld.net , and The Hampton Institute on race, criminal justice, Black Lives Matter, and the historic black freedom movement. Eljeer is a member of the editorial board of Socialist Alternative newspaper. He has also lectured at countless venues including Harvard University, Hunter College, Oberlin College, and University of Toronto.

Bryant William Sculos, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral fellow at The Amherst Program in Critical Theory, adjunct professor at Florida International University, contributing writer for The Hampton Institute, and Politics of Culture section editor for Class, Race and Corporate Power . His recent work has been published with Constellations , New Political Science , Class, Race and Corporate Power , Public Seminar , New Politics , and in the edited volumes The Political Economy of Robots (Palgrave, 2017) and Marcuse in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, December 2017). He is also a member of Socialist Alternative/CWI.

The Endless American Horror: Lynching and Police

By Devon Bowers

This article was originally published on AHTribune.com.

Please note that this article contains graphic descriptions of lynchings. Discretion is advised.

In 1918 Brook County, Georgia, a local plantation owner was killed by Sidney Johnson, a black man who had been leased out to the plantation via the convict lease system, in a dispute over unpaid wages. Upon hearing this, the white community went on a rampage and lynched not only Johnson, but anyone they thought to even be remotely involved in Johnson's decision. One of these men was Hayes Turner. Not only was he lynched, but also castrated.

Turner's wife, Mary, who was eight months pregnant at the time, began to speak out against her husband's lynching; unfortunately, she too, became a victim. A white mob "hanged her by her feet, set her on fire, sliced her stomach open, and pulled out her baby, which was still alive." They stomped on the child's head, killing it. Then the mob "[took] the time to sew two cats in Mrs. Turner's stomach and making bets as to which one would climb out first."[1]

This can be described as nothing short of demonic. In many ways, even that fails to fully encompass the horror and pure wickedness of this event. Though, the only thing more horrid is that in a way, lynchings continue in the form of police murder.

Before delving into the connections between the aforementioned violence, it is imperative to first understand lynching. The origins of lynching truly lie in slavery where "there were numerous public punishments of slaves, none of which were preceded by trials or any other semblance of civil or judicial processes. Justice depended solely upon the slaveholder." [2] Punishment ranged from lashings to family separation to mutilation and branding. The overall idea behind these actions were that black people were not human beings, in a way, they weren't even property, they were just things, lesser than both humans and animals. This mindset continued in the post chattel slavery era, where slavery took on the form of both the convict leasing and sharecropping systems respectively. Yet, it also took place in the form of mob violence against blacks.

There have been many explorations as to the reasoning behind lynching. E.M. Beck, a professor of sociology at the University of Georgia, posited the argument that lynching was linked to the cotton markets. He argued that lynchings "[increased] during times of sparse cotton revenues, and declining with increasing cotton profits." The lack of profit from cotton led unemployed whites to want to replace black workers and that "Mob violence was a form of intimidation to facilitate this labor substitution." [3] While further studies have shown that fluctuations in cotton pricing don't explain lynching [4], it should be noted that white elites would have an interest in fueling white angst into hatred against blacks, effectively utilizing poor whites as foot soldiers in their mission to maintain the current racial and economic hierarchy.

The cause of lynching was first and foremost the culture of white supremacy that had existed for the past two centuries or so. Blacks became scapegoats for many of the problems that were going on and thus a subculture of violence that had arguably already taken root in the days of slavery, took on new form. "The existence of a subculture presupposes a complex pattern of norms, attitudes and actions" which "reflects 'a potent theme of violence current in the cluster of values that make up the life-style, the socialization process, [and] the interpersonal relationships of individuals living in similar conditions." [5] Effectively, violence becomes normalized and is used as a tool of to socialize and condition people as to how the society operates.

This normalization and conditioning can be seen in the form of the lynching. Lynchings were very much a community affair in which legal authorities seldom if ever got involved as "the judge, prosecutor, jurors and witnesses-all white-were usually in sympathy with the lynchers" and "local police and sheriffs rarely did anything to defend Negro citizens and often supported lynchings." [6] Newspapers as well were extremely biased in covering lynchings. "Southern editors often used sympathetic language in describing lynch mobs while reserving callous damnation for lynch victims. The southern press was extremely creative when it came to providing moral, if not legal, justification for the action of lynch mobs."[7]

We can see the affect that journalists had on the public's view of lynching in the case of the murder of the Hodges family in Statesboro, Georgia.

Henry and Claudia Hodges lived on a remote farm, near a black community, some of whom were the employees of the Hodges. Late on the night of July 28, 1904, two men saw the Hodges home aflame. They went to investigate and found the mutilated, charred remains of the entire family. The suspected motive was robbery as it was known that Hodges was better off than most farmers and it was even rumored that he possibly had several hundred dollars stashed away on his property.

The following morning, Bulloch County sheriff John Kendrick formed a group to hunt down the killers. After discovering strands of hair, a knife, a shoe, and tracks of mud, they were led to a small shack occupied by Paul Reed, a black laborer. While Paul denied involvement, he, along with his wife Harriet, were arrested and taken to jail. When being interrogated, Harriet broke down and revealed that her husband and another black man, Paul Cato, had planned to rob the Hodges. The shoe matched the one found on the Hodges farm and blood stains on his clothing seemed to seal the deal with regards to Paul Reed's guilt, however, no money was found. The sheriff also arrested thirteen other blacks who lived in the general vicinity.

Despite the lack of hard evidence in the form of money, newspapers assumed Reed's guilt. The Macon Telegraph wrote "The wholesale butchery . . . of the Hodges family near Statesboro by dehumanized brutes adds another to the long list of horrors perpetrated in this state since the emancipation of the African slaves in 1865" and noted that "the people of [Statesboro] ... displayed great moral courage and forbearance in permitting the perpetrators to escape summary punishment without the forms of law,"[8] a statement clearly hinting that lynching was on the table as an option. Others went even further in their demonization of the alleged perpetrators, such as the editor of Statesboro News who penned "Good farmers awoke to the fact that they are living in constant danger, and that human vampires live in their midst, only awaiting the opportunity to blot out their lives." [9] Language such as this only served to heighten white anxiety and fears that a black uprising had occurred in response to white mistreatment, something that had been the in the backs of their minds since the institution of slavery began.

The media actively went and pushed erroneous and misleading evidence, such as was with Morning News which stated that Reed had made a 'partial confession' to the murders, despite there being a lack of legal evidence to support the assertion. The Statesboro News continued to utilize inflammatory language, publishing an article which said in part "Their guilt has been established beyond a doubt - every chain has been traced and all lead to their door." [10] Additional stories argued that the rape of both Mrs. Hodges and their daughter Katy, where the real motives for the motive for the murders, again without the slightest shred of evidence.

Newspapers also noted that Reeds and Cato belonged to a distinct subset of blacks who were lazy and shiftless. This contrasts with the blacks who 'know their place' in society and often work on white farms. The only reason this was even discussed was because there were rumors floating around that the Hodges family may have been killed due to Mr. Hodges being too friendly with blacks, something that only aided to reinforce the region's racial caste system and conjure images of murderous black people who would attack whites were they to let their guard down.

An Atlanta News editorial minced few words in its character analysis: "It is true that the negroes in the turpentine campus of south Georgia are in the main a lot of irresponsible and half-savage vagabonds, apparently hopeless to the redeeming efforts of civilization, and that their presence makes a continual menace and threat to the peace and safety of the people."[11]

On August 15, the court case finally got underway. Superior Court Judge Alexander Daley was forbidden by Georgia law to request a change in court venue, despite his wanting to as to possibly give people time to 'cool off.' This was actually dangerous in some ways as such changes were often used by mobs as an excuse to lynch blacks on the grounds that they may have a chance to 'escape justice.'

When the trial began, the press continued to present rumor as fact. The Statesboro News reported that Reed had admitted to being part of a gang of blacks who were roaming the Bulloch County countryside, robbing, raping, and killing whites. Once again this increased the amount of fear in whites and put them more dead-set on lynching. It didn't help that throngs of whites were milling about outside the courthouse.

The actual trial was incredibly brief, lasting less than a day and a half, with Reed's and Cato's respective defenses lasting barely eight minutes, both men plead innocent. Still, the court sentenced them to hanging. As soon as this was done, the white mobs that had been surrounding the courthouse burst in and took both men, making no effort to hide their identities, despite the fact that soldiers (without any ammunition) had been dispatched to protect the men. Both men were beaten and eventually doused in kerosene and set ablaze and dead by 3:30 pm.

Many newspapers actively defended the lynching. The Forest Blade published an editorial which argued "While we will not say we are in favor of lynching principles, there are crimes - and this is one of them - that fully justified the act," similarly another editorial in the Sparta Ishmelite wrote "What society does not do for them [Georgia's whites], efficiently, they do for themselves." [12] The press played a major role in increasing tensions and outright encouraging lynchings, a serious act which helped to normalize the very act itself.

The normalization of lynching was rampant in Southern society. In 1893 in Paris, Texas, a black man by the name of Henry Smith was lynched for allegedly killing and raping the sheriff's daughter. Smith's lynching was in that a spectacle was made of it. It was the first "blatantly public, actively promoted lynching of a southern Black by a large crowd of southern whites with features such as 'the specially chartered excursion train, the publicly sold photographs, and the wide circulated, unabashed retelling of the event by one of the lynchers.'" [13] It should be examined in detail that there were a number of "event-like themes, such as a float, carnival, and parade" all of which indicates "that within the act of justice, the structures of entertainment were organized. […] In addition, the souvenir scrambling for burnt remains as well as promotional materials for acquisition or purchase provides a similar semblance to paraphernalia purchased at modern-day sporting events." [14]

Thus, what we see is within the context of lynching, there was also an aspect of entertainment and even revelry, as if it was something to be celebrated and loved. The squabbling over Smith's remains reinforces the unbroken idea from slavery that black people aren't human beings, but rather just things, in this case a trophy.

The situation went even further in the case of Jesse Washington, a 17 year old mentally disabled boy who was accused of murdering a white woman and subject to a kangaroo court. Children were even bought to view his horrific lynching:

Fifteen thousand men, women and children packed the square. They climbed up poles and onto the tops of cars. . . . Children were lifted up by their parents in the air. Washington was castrated, and his ears were cut off. A tree supported the iron chain that lifted him above the fire of boxes and sticks. Wailing, the boy attempted to climb the skillet hot chain. For this the men cut off his fingers. The executioners repeatedly lowered the boy into the flames and hoisted him out again. With each repetition, a mighty shout [from the crowd] was raised. [15]

It is in acts such as this, with the involvement of children and, as with Smith's lynching, the selling of Washington's remains as if they were memorabilia, that the murder of black people becomes normalized and something beyond a source of maintaining racial hierarchy, something akin to a form of entertainment. Among this murderfest, though, there were those who fought back such as Ida B. Wells.

Wells was a black woman who was mainly focused on battling racial discrimination and penning articles. This changed in 1892, "when a close childhood friend of hers, Thomas Moss, was lynched" in Memphis [16] Wells was of the mindset that lynching was an overreaction by whites against rapists, however, her views quickly changed given the fact that Moss was lynched for defending his grocery store from armed whites and being lynched for the simple act of self-defense. On top of this, Memphis law enforcement didn't even bother to lift a finger to arrest the lynchers, who were publicly known.

Wells took a bit of an academic-esque approach to the situation, thinking that if lynching were exposed as the incarnation of racial hatred it was, it would no longer be socially acceptable. For three months, she traveled around the South investigating lynchings and interviewing witnesses. She found that not only were Black men lynched for having consensual relationships with white women, but also virtually all lynchings became about rape after the lynching went public. She took her information and published a pamphlet entitled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. Eventually due to threats on her life, she fled Memphis and moved to Chicago, where she continued to write and speak out against lynching. Still, there were others who took a more hands on, self-defense approach to lynching as took place in Decatur, IL.

On June 3, 1893, in Decatur, IL, a black day labor by the name of Samuel L. Bush who had been accused of rape, was taken from the Macon County jail and lynched by a white mob after they had went on a rampage searching for him from March 31 to June 2. During this time, rather than meet with members of the black community to discuss Bush's situation, "State's Attorney Isaac R. Mills, Decatur Mayor David Moffett, Deputy Sheriff Harry Midkiff, and Decatur Marshal William Mason were meeting with Charles B. Britton and Charles M. Fletcher, the leaders of the vigilantes." They attempted to appease the leaders, with Mills stating that if Bush wasn't sentenced to death, "it would then be time to resort to extreme measures." [17]

Despite days of lynching rumors floating around, the authorities allowed for nearly one thousand people to gather across from the jail where Bush was being held and made no effort to move or in any way ensure Bush's safety. Just before 2 AM, "a mob composed of some of the county's leading citizens broke Sam Bush out of jail and lynched him." [18]

In response to the lynching, Wilson B. Woodford, the only black lawyer in town that Bush had hired, published an open letter to blacks living in Decatur, urging them to attend a mass meeting where a strategy for dealing with the lynching would be formed. At the meeting, Woodford advocated taking the legal route, pushing the state attorney, the same one who had been complicit in Bush's lynching, to take action. Some, such as Edward Jacobs, rejected it and pushed for armed blacks to go themselves and arrest Bush's murderers. The resolutions committee backed Woodford's strategy and messages were sent to both the governor and state attorney.

Woodford and Jacobs were coming from two separate worlds. Woodford, having a legal background, "was predisposed to distinguish between the law and enforcers of the law. Woodford, like other liberal race men and women, believed that racial prejudice and contempt for law and order were the twin causes of lynching" whereas Jacobs questioned this method of thinking. Jacobs acknowledged the cozy relationship between lynchers and the police and knew that "knew the authorities had mobilized the vigilantes to help them in capturing Bush but had rejected African-American support either to protect Bush or to arrest his murderers." [19]

Interestingly enough, the two strategies would merge as both Woodford and Jacobs were members of the National Afro-American League, an organization that push for black development and fight against white responses to said development. NAAL "combined the pre-eminent philosophy of self-help and racial solidarity with the protest tactics of legalism, direct action, and violent self-help."[20]

A year later, James Jackson, a black male porter, was accused of raping a white woman under questionable circumstances. The father of the woman was pushing for Jackson's lynching and stated that help was coming from Mt. Zion. This situation would turn out rather differently than Bush's.

Blacks controlled the streets surrounding the jail. They could be seen in doorways, under stair wells and behind wagons, armed and ready for action. Other African-Americans patrolled the streets scrutinizing whites who happened to be out at that late hour. And unlike at the protest meeting, at least two black women participated. [21]

They continued to patrol the streets around the courthouse, the police didn't attempt to intervene, and there were no attempts to lynch Jackson.

As the case with Bush shows, the police themselves were many times the very ones who were, at best, complicit (not that that truly matters), and at worst, active participants in lynchings. This shouldn't be surprising as not only were the police entrenched in the same racial mindset as the lynchers, but also the purpose of the police was (and is) a tool of social control, especially against black people.

The police themselves came out of slavery as "slave patrols and night watches, which later became modern police departments, were both designed to control the behaviors of minorities." [22] In fact, in 1871 Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act, "which prohibited state actors from violating the Civil Rights of all citizens in part because of law enforcements' involvement with the infamous group. "[23] (emphasis added) The police themselves oftentimes were directly involved in lynchings such as with the case of Austin Callaway, a sixteen year old boy.

Callaway was shot and killed in LaGrange, Georgia on September 8, 1940, having just a day earlier been accused of assaulting a white woman. He was arrested and taken to the local jail. Later that night, six men, one of them armed, went into the jail, forced the jailer to open the door, and murdered Callaway.[24] Though the killers were never found, it is known that the police were personally involved. It was noted in 2017 by LaGrange's police chief, Louis M. Dekmar, in an apology regarding Callaway's murder. Specifically, Dekmar said "I sincerely regret and denounce the role our Police Department played in Austin's lynching, both through our action and our inaction." [25] Callaway's story is just one in many[26] where police were directly or indirectly involved in lynchings. It is this historical backdrop in which police actively murder black people that today's police murders continue.

With lynchings, the body would hang for days as both a reminder to other blacks to 'stay in their place' but also a part of the aforementioned spectacle. This spectacle continues as can be seen with "the fact that Michael Brown's body was left on the street for hours after he was killed by police officer Darren Wilson," something "that points to just how little has changed in American race relations since the days of Jim Crow." [27] Leaving Brown's body out to languish was an illustration of the lack of concern and decency the Ferguson police department had for him and is reminiscent of leaving a lynch victim's body out for all to see, to remind everyone where black people stood on the racial hierarchy: the bottom.

The media, too, plays a role in police killings as they did during lynchings. Once again, the Michael Brown case puts this in stark view. Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Brown, described him in disproportionate and even inhuman terms.

"When I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan," Wilson, who is 6′ 4″ and 210 lbs., said of Brown, who was 6′ 4″ and 292 lbs. at the time of his death. […]He said Brown tried to get his fingers inside the trigger. "And then after he did that, he looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that's how angry he looked." [28]

Not only are black people described in nonhuman terms, but there is a constant implication that
they deserve to be shot due to past transgressions. In the case of Akai Gurley, "The New York Daily News ran a headline, Akai Gurley had criminal record, innocent when shot by cop, which they later switched out for ' Protesters call for arrest of rookie cop who shot Akai Gurley as victim's sister says he didn't deserve to die . '"[29] There is also guilt by association. When twelve year old Tamir Rice was killed by the police, the media bought up the fact that the family's lawyer had "also defended the boy's mother in a drug trafficking case" [30] and that Rice's father had a history of domestic violence. [31] Regularly, the media brings up information that has nothing to do with the actual incident in question, but actively works to defame and sully the victim's name.

Where there once were slave owners and slave catchers, the KKK, and lynch mobs, they have all now "become largely replaced by state agencies such as the criminal justice system, and local and federal police." [32] In August 2016, the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent went on a mission to the United States. In their conclusion on their findings, they wrote: "Contemporary police killings and the trauma that they create are reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching. Impunity for State violence has resulted in the current human rights crisis and must be addressed as a matter of urgency." [33]

This assessment is quite correct, especially within the ideas of the spectacle and normalization. While there may not be a sports theme to current police murders, there is a spectacle in and of itself in the near constant sharing of videos of black people dying at the hands of police and the footage being played again and again on the nightly news. While one shouldn't discount that videos are being shared to raise awareness and may very well get people involved in activism, at the same time by the videos being shared and viewed over and over, it can very well create a situation where it the death of black people is normalized and an immunity of sorts built up to it. As writer Feliks Garcia notes

To witness the final moments of someone's life is not supposed to be a regular experience, yet it feels like every week, we're presented with a new video of a different unarmed black man-or child-killed by police.

With the reach of social media, each of these videos is viewed ad nauseum, and you have to ask what purpose this serves. Who needs to see these videos at this point?[34]

Due to the constant viewing of black people dying at the hands of the police, coupled with the media's twisted narratives, seeing black people die becomes a normal occurrence.

The ongoing police murders of black people draw strong parallels to lynchings: from the involvement of the police to the utter dearth of justice to the larger social implications. It is both a tragedy and a nightmare, an endless horror.

Notes

[1] This American Life, Suitable For Children, https://www.thisamericanlife.org/627/transcript

[2] Robert L. Zangrando, About Lynching, http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lynching/lynching.htm

[3] E. M. Beck, "The Killing Fields of the Deep South: The Market For Cotton and the Lynching of Blacks, 1882-1930," American Sociological Review 55:4 (August 1990), pg 526

[4] James W. Clarke, "Without Fear or Shame: Lynching, Capital Punishment and the Subculture of Violence in the American South," British Journal of Political Science 28:2 (April 1998), pg 272

[5] Clarke, pg 275

[6] Robert A. Gibson, The Negro Holocaust: Lynching and Race Riots in the United States, 1880-1950 , Yale-New Haven Teacher's Institute, http://teachersinstitute.yale.edu/curriculum/units/1979/2/79.02.04.x.html

[7] Richard M. Perloff, "The Press and Lynchings of African Americans," Journal of Black Studies 30:3 (January 2000), pg 320

[8] Reed W. Smith, "Southern Journalists and Lynching: The Statesboro Case Study," Journalism and Communication Monographs 7:2 (2005), pg 63

[9] Ibid

[10] Ibid, pg 64

[11] Ibid, pg 65

[12] Ibid, pg 70

[13] Rasul A. Mowatt, "Lynching as Leisure: Broadening Notions of a Field," American Behavioral Scientist 56:10 (August 2012), pg 1371

[14] Ibid

[15] Ibid, pg 1376

[16] Amii Larkin Barnard, "The Application of Critical Race Feminism to the Anti-Lynching Movement: Black Women's Fight against Race and Gender Ideology, 1892-1920," UCLA Women's Law Journal 3:1 (January 1993), pg 15

[17] Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, "A Warlike Demonstration,' Legalism, Armed Resistance, and Black Political Mobilization in Decatur, Illinois, 1894-1898," The Journal of Negro History 83:1 (Winter 1998), pg 54

[18] Ibid

[19] Cha-Jua, pg 57

[20] Ibid

[21] Cha-Jua, pg 59

[22] Victor E. Kappeler, A Brief History of Slavery and the Origins of American Policing , http://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-and-origins-american-policing

[23] Ibid

[24] Northeastern University Law School, Austin Callaway, http://nuweb9.neu.edu/civilrights/georgia/austincallaway/

[25] Alan Binder, Richard Fausset, "Nearly 8 Decades Later, an Apology for a Lynching in Georgia," New York Times, January 26, 2017 ( https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/us/lagrange-georgia-lynching-apology.html )

[26] State Sanctioned, Police and State Involvement with Lynching, https://statesanctioned.com/police-and-state-involvement-with-lynching/

[27] David G. Embrick, "Two Nations, Revisited: The Lynching of Black and Brown Bodies, Police Brutality, and Racial Control in 'Post-Racial' Amerikkka," Critical Sociology 41:6 (June 2015), pg 837

[28] Josh Sanburn, "All The Ways Darren Wilson Described Being Afraid of Michael Brown," Time, November 25, 2014 ( http://time.com/3605346/darren-wilson-michael-brown-demon/ )

[29] Simple Justice, The Outrage of the Victim's Rap Sheet Must End, http://blog.simplejustice.us/2014/11/23/the-outrage-of-the-victims-rap-sheet-must-end/ (November 23, 2014)

[30] Brandon Blackwell, "Lawyer representing Tamir Rice's family defended boy's mom in drug trafficking case," Cleveland, November 24, 2014 ( http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2014/11/lawyer_representing_tamir_rice.html )

[31] Brandon Blackwell, "Tamir Rice's father has history of domestic violence," Cleveland, November 26, 2014 ( http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2014/11/tamir_rices_father_has_history.html )

[32] Embrick, pg 838

[33] United Nations General Assembly, Report on the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent on its mission to the United States of America , https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G16/183/30/PDF/G1618330.pdf?OpenElement (August 18, 2016)

[34] Feliks Garcia, "Police brutality is modern lynching- and you may be a part of it," Daily Dot, April 20, 2015 ( https://www.dailydot.com/via/black-men-police-violence-lynching-internet/ )

A Marxist Perspective on Sustainability: Brief Reflections on Ecological Sustainability and Social Inequality

By Raju J. Das

Karl Marx's concept of sustainability is connected to his concepts of metabolism and reproduction. While the first connection is well recognized in recent literature (famously in the work of Paul Burkett, John Bellamy Foster and many others)[2], the second connection is not. Moreover, sustainability is potentially connected to another crucial concept in Marx's thinking - that is, value of labour power (which is expressed as the wage that workers receive), although Marx fails to explicitly make that connection.

In this short paper, I connect sustainability to metabolism, reproduction, and value of labour power. I argue that sustainability (or a healthy environment) can be seen as an "ecological social wage" under capitalism and has to be fought for as a part of a larger fight against the various logics of capitalism, such as endless accumulation, and against the system as a whole. Therefore, ecological sustainability is fundamentally a class issue, one that concerns the working class of the world as a whole that is comprised of people with different gender, racial, and nationality backgrounds, and it is not to be narrowly seen as an ecological issue, separate from the needs and the movements of the working class.

What is sustainability?

To live and to satisfy our needs, we must enter into a metabolic relation with nature, as Marx says in chapter 7 of Capital Vol 1.[3] That is, on the basis of manual and mental labour, we must interact with nature from which we get raw materials and energy and in which we dump waste products. Nature, especially transformed nature, is a part of the means of production.

Seeing society as a temporal process, in Chapter 23 of Capital Vol 1 Marx referred to "simple reproduction" saying: "every social process of production is at the same time a process of reproduction", and "No society can go on producing, in other words, no society can reproduce, unless it constantly reconverts a part of its products into means of production…"[4]

Rubbing Marx's concept of metabolism with his concept of reproduction, one can say this: in producing the things that we need, we use up the means of production, including those that come, more or less, directly from nature, and these means of production must be replenished in terms of their quantity and quality. For example, if we cut trees and pollute air to produce wealth, a part of the produced wealth -- the combined product of labour and nature -- has to be utilized to replenish the trees and to clean the air. We have to reproduce elements of nature, constantly. Not doing so constitutes a threat to sustainability.

Marx talks about sustainability more directly in Capital Vol 3:

an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and, have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good householders]'.[5]

We may conclude that not to do so is to live in an ecologically unsustainable world, a world where the physical environment is not in a state of good health.

Marx's concept of sustainability is quite consistent with that of the United Nations' Brundtland Commission, established in the 1980s to promote sustainable development globally, which views sustainable development as: "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (Brundtland Commission, 1987).[6]

That capitalism has not achieved sustainability is clear from the fact that we are facing massive ecological problems, including global warming, deforestation, soil erosion, air pollution, resource depletion, etc. The question is why?

Causes of threat to sustainability

First, what is not the cause? The threat to sustainability under capitalism does not come from the fact that there are too many people on earth, nor from the fact that some erstwhile poor countries are consuming more things to live a slightly better life, nor indeed from human beings' productive activity as such (e.g. industrialization), although all these facts do involve increased extraction of resources from nature. It is rather the social form in which we live our lives and the attendant nature-dominating discursive framework that constitute the most important threat to sustainability.

The social form in which we live is not one that is just.[7] We live in an unjust world. So one may ask: what connection might injustice have to the threat to sustainability?

I see inequality as a form of injustice. And I see inequality not just as inequality in income and consumption but as class inequality. Class inequality refers to the inequality in the control over society's productive resources, including those that come directly from nature (farm land, water, minerals, etc.), and consequent class exploitation (appropriation of surplus product or surplus labour, by the class that controls the means of production from the class that does not).[8] We are talking here about inequality between those who control productive resources and their uses, and those who do not, and inequality between those who have the power to exploit others in production and outside production, and those who do not.

Lenin said: "As long as there is exploitation there cannot be equality."[9] More specifically, the capitalist or "the landowner cannot be the equal of the worker, or the hungry man the equal of the full man" (ibid.). Because of class inequality, what we receive from society (in terms of goods and services to meet our needs) is not quite in accordance with our abilities; nor is it according to the amount of work we perform (consider how much a bank CEO makes as opposed to an ordinary worker); nor indeed is it according to how much we need in order to satisfy all of our varying needs.

Class-based inequality as class-based injustice is the fundamental threat to sustainability. This requires an explanation.

Most of us have to rely on wage-work to survive because of our separation from the objective conditions of production, including nature (land, etc.). Marx called this primitive accumulation, and this is an on-going process. This separation, with respect to nature, is not a physical separation, for production in all forms of society requires unity - non-separation - of human beings with nature. The separation in question is social-political; it is in terms of class. That is: we have no control over the use of the objective conditions of production, including those that more or less directly come from nature, with which we are physically in contact in the realm of production. We do not decide how much resources are being extracted, in what manner and at what rate. We are a part of nature. We are in physical contact with nature. Yet, under capitalism, we hardly control the basis on which we interact with nature.

We live in a society which, as Marx says in Capital Vol 1, is based on endless accumulation of wealth in the form of money, as denoted by M-C-MΔ. This is a process whose aim is not to directly satisfy human needs but to make profit, on a continuous basis. And this process of endless accumulation, i.e.accumulation for the sake of accumulation, generally promotes consumption for the sake of consumption. Otherwise, how will the endless production of things find a market? And while the accumulation process tends to be endless, many of the natural resources used in production are finite. This means, among other things that there is a disjunction - a contradiction - between capital's time (turnover time) and nature's time. Endless accumulation can take two forms: it is based on increases in the output over a prolonged working-day (especially in a context where technological change has not quite occurred) or per hour (when productivity-enhancing technological change has occurred).[10] And this means intense extraction of resources from nature and expansion of wastes dumped in the natural environment.

Let us explore this disjunction, this contradiction. A capitalist is compelled to engage in endless accumulation by the logic of accumulation and is passionate about this (both logic and passion matter here), so he/she has to, and wants to, invest money today and get back the investment with a profit as soon as possible. However, nature's time, which is driven by nature's own bio-physical-chemical processes that are more or less autonomous of human activities, may not coincide with capital's time. If a seed is planted today, it may take months or years for it to become a mature tree to satisfy human needs. Impatient to make money endlessly and quickly, the capitalist system cannot give nature enough time to reproduce - replenish - itself.

The capitalist class relation seeks to convert nature into a form of capital. Letting a seed grow into a mature tree is a natural process that takes time. This is nature's time, which is, of course, different for different natural processes. But time - from capital's standpoint - is money, and this means that one has to, for example, pay interest on the capital sunk in the form of the tree that is slowly growing out of a seed. The longer the time the tree remains in its natural state, the more is the cost of capital (interest), potentially. Anything that is not a part of circulation of capital, of the M-C-M Δ process, of the money-making process, is literally a waste, an unproductive thing.

We live in a society where nature is bought and sold like other things. Once I buy a piece of forestland, I can do whatever I want to do with it. The fetishism of the commodity - the idea that things that we use inherently have a price-tag (that is, that they must be bought and sold, and for a profit, for them to satisfy our needs) - is most stark in the case of nature (as it is in case of labour power as a commodity):[11] a beach, a forest or a farmland as things appear to be ones which are inherently, by necessity, commodities, and increasingly so since the 1970s when the epoch of the post-war crisis in the advanced capitalist world began. To treat nature and its elements (land, oceans, forests), as commodities is a hallmark of the modern society we live in. This logic of commodification under capitalism counters the logic of sustainability.

We live in a society where there is a profound disjunction, a contradiction, between the global scale of capitalist accumulation, as it is governed by the globally-operating law of value or the law of competition, on the one hand, and the political framework, that is, the state-system on the other, which is nationally-based (in spite of the erosion of some of the powers of the state in certain contexts). This disjunction makes it difficult for humanity to coordinate and to plan the use of natural resources which occur geographically unevenly on the surface of the earth across countries in an effective manner.

This forces, for example, Japan as a territorially separate entity with no oil of its own, located on the earthquake-prone ring of fire, to invest in nuclear energy plants; the ecologically risky nature of nuclear plants is made riskier by their location in the ring of fire. Because of the same disjunction, or contradiction, the low-income countries, more or less deprived of technologies that the advanced countries enjoy, are having to subject the natural environment under their territorial jurisdictions to excessively high level of exploitation, in order to meet their very basic needs. The ability to sustainably reproduce nature is unequally distributed in a world which is subjected to a global logic of accumulation and which is divided by nation-states, some of which are richer and more powerful than others.

We live in a society where old value must be destroyed for new value to be produced, and this means war. In many cases, indeed, economies of advanced capitalist countries rely on the production of military weapons to keep their accumulation system going, and this often means artificially creating conditions for war, and often this war involves war between poor countries. Further, advanced capitalist countries compete with one another for monopolistic control over the politically and militarily weaker countries' markets and workforce as well as their natural resources.[12]

In short, we live in an imperialist world, and imperialism means war. And war means massive destruction of nature. It means pollution. That Agent Orange, a powerful chemical used by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War to eliminate forest cover for anti-imperialism fighters in North Vietnam, is widely known. As a more recent example, the western-capitalist war on Iraq created a massive amount of environmental pollution, producing birth defects and other health problems, as London's Guardian reported.[13] War also means that resources are invested in killing people, while these resources can be used to replenish elements of nature (clean up rivers, oceans, plant trees), to increase the role of public transportation to reduce environmental pollution, and to enhance people's access to the things they need such as healthcare, housing, food, etc.[14] Using resources on wars or on the preparation for wars, when resources can be used to meet basic needs of people and to create a sustainable ecological environment - this problem is most glaring in the global periphery.

We live in a society where, given the high rate of labour exploitation and a large reserve army of labour globally, millions of people are deprived of a decent income with which to afford things produced in environmentally friendly ways (e.g. organically produced food), which are initially expensive in part because of the small-scale nature of production. In parenthesis, and in a slight criticism of Marx and Vladimir I Lenin, I will say that mere separation of direct producers from land, either in primitive accumulation (as per Marx), or in a process of class differentiation under the impact of market (as per Lenin), may create a market for food but not necessarily a market for ecologically produced food.

We live in a society, where there is a long-term trend towards the decline in the rate of profit as investment in constant capital to variable capital increases (because labour, as the ultimate creator of capitalist wealth, is increasingly replaced by non-labour inputs in the production process). This is also a society where there is the problem of a constant possibility of overaccumulation of capital and commodities. This problem is partly caused by lack of planning of production and by competitively-driven technological dynamism resulting in production of more and more things every hour, which, of course, requires more intense extraction of resources from nature and greater generation of wastes.[15] Responding to the declining rate of profit and the problem of overaccumulation, there is a tendency to not only increase exploitation of labour but also to make profit from new forms of commodification and from the destruction of nature.[16]

Sustainable production can be a source of profit for some capitals (consider the production of cleaner technologies; wilderness as an ecotourist place), so there can be, within limits, sustainable development within capitalism. But there are strong limits to sustainability within capitalism, in terms of both the magnitude of sustainability and the temporal and spatial scale of sustainability (how long and over how large an area sustainability can occur). This is because of the social framework within which sustainable development is promoted. This is the framework of markets-in-every-thing, of endless accumulation, and of inequality and of exploitation of people.

Capitalism takes far too much out of labour compared to what it gives it, just as it takes far too much out of nature compared to what it puts into it. There are two metabolic rifts here, joined together in the same process of capitalist accumulation: an ecological metabolic rift and a labour metabolic rift.[17]

Sustainable development means a clean environment, an environment that is a source of mental/spiritual peace, a source of material things that satisfy our needs, and a place to dump what is absolutely a waste product. It means a society where farm production and non-farm production are sectorally and geographically integrated, to the extent materially possible, thus minimizing metabolic rift between where things directly derived from nature (e.g. food, linen) are produced (say, in villages) and where they are consumed.[18]

Our needs as human beings include environmental needs. Like other needs, environmental needs cannot be fully met under capitalism or can be met only in an alienating way that impoverishes nature and us.

A large part of what is called nature is land. Land is an important means of production, and a source of food, and it has been subjected to unsustainable use under capitalism. About the relation between capitalism and agriculture, Marx says that: "the capitalist system runs counter to a rational agriculture" and that "a rational agriculture is incompatible with the capitalist system (even if the latter promotes technical development in agriculture)".[19] Paraphrasing and slightly extending Marx, Lenin says in his Development of Capitalism in Russia: "That capitalism is incompatible with the rational organization of agriculture (as also of industry) has long been known".[20] One can generalize Marx's and Lenin's point and say that capitalism is incompatible with the rational organization of our metabolic interaction with nature. Capitalism violates the principle of humanization of nature and naturalization of human beings.

Let me quote someone who is not a Marxist, Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate in Economics: "The big challenges that capitalism now faces in the contemporary world includes issues of inequality (especially that of grinding poverty in a world of unprecedented prosperity) and of 'public goods' (that is, goods that people share together, such as the environment). The solution to these problems will almost certainly call for institutions that take us beyond the capitalist market economy." (Sen, 1999:267)[21].

So what is to be done?

Capitalism can be seen in terms of its logic, or logics, and as a system[22], that is, the totality of capitalist class relation as such. So the fight against capitalism has to be seen as a fight against both aspects of capitalism. In terms of the fight against the logics of capitalism (endless accumulation, commodification, etc.), sustainable environment must be seen as a human need. More specifically, and under capitalism, it must be seen as a part of the value of labour power itself (something Marx failed to do explicitly).

So sustainable development must be fought for as a part of the fight to improve living conditions. The fight for environmental needs must be a part of the fight for a better "social wage". We can call it an "ecological social wage" and we can extend the scope of the concept of ecological social wage to include the remunerative price not only for peasants' labour performed on their own or leased-in land[23] but also for the indigenous communities working on commonly (or state-owned) owned farm-land and forest areas.

Given that one reason for the unsustainable environment is privatization of nature, the fight for sustainability must be a fight for common property in nature: for our rivers, forests, clean air and land as forms of common property. The fight for a sustainable environment must be a part of the fight for 'nature-commons', and such a fight must be a part of the fight for treating all forms of use-values (natural and non-natural things including factories and banks) as commons, which will be subjected to democratic control by men and women and citizens of different racial, ethic and nationality backgrounds.

Fighting for a sustainable environment is therefore a class issue, in the broadest sense of the term. It is a working class issue, or, more correctly, an issue of the alliance of workers and peasants (or the alliance of workers and small-scale producers, including indigenous producers). The matter of sustainable development is a deeply class matter (even if it is not exclusively a class matter). However, the fight against the logics of the system to obtain improvements within the system of capitalism is limited because there are limits to what capital can grant as long as capital rules.

To conclude: fighting for sustainable environment must be a part of the fight against the capitalist system itself, which exploits people and which is ecologically degrading (and which promotes and/or reproduces undemocratic relations based in gender, race, ethnicity and nationality, in order to be able to super-exploit some sections and to weaken ordinary people's resistance against exploitation and ecological degradation by dividing them).

The fight for sustainable development must be a fight for a society beyond commodification, private ownership of means of production, avoidable inequalities, exploitation, and social oppression. Such a fight requires a revolutionary program, including the nationalization of all the major corporations, banks, large farms and privately owned forests and plantations, under the democratic control of working people with their different gender, racial, ethnic and nationality backgrounds. This would allow the rational reorganization of the world's economy and our relation to nature, to meet the environmental and social needs of the masses, not the capitalists' need for endless private profit.

This was originally published at Links international journal of socialist renewal.

Notes

[1] Das is an Associate Professor at York University, Toronto. His most recent book, published in 2017, is Marxist Class Theory for a skeptical world, Brill, Leiden. He is currently writing a book on Marx's Capital 1, entitled 'Marx, Capital, and Contemporary Capitalism: A Global Perspective', to be published by Taylor and Francis, London. He serves on the editorial board and on the manuscript collective of Science and Society: A Journal of Marxist Thought and Analysis.

[2] Burkett, P. 1999. Marx and Nature. St. Martin's Press, New York. Foster, J. 2000. Marx's ecology, Monthly review Press, New York. See also: O'Connor, J. (ed). 1994. Is capitalism sustainable?, Guilford Press, New York.

[3] Marx, K. 1977. Capital Volume 1, Vintage, New York.

[4] Marx, 1977: p.711.

[5] Marx, K. 1981. Capital Volume 3, Penguin, London, p. 911

[6] This is quoted in Redclift, M. 2005. 'Sustainable development (1987-2005): An oxymoron comes of age', Sustainable development, 13:4, 212-227

[7] There is a large amount of literature on Marxism and justice/injustice. For example, see: Callinicos, A. 2000. Equality, Polity press, London (chapter 3). Geras, N.1985: 'Controversy about Marx and Justice', New Left Review, 1/150; Geras, N. 1992. 'Bringing Marx to justice', New Left Review, 1/195; Nielson, K. 1986. 'Marx, Engels and Lenin on justice: The critique of the Gotha programme',Studies in Soviet Thought, 32:1, 23-63. Also, Heller, A. 1976. The theory of need in Marx, St. Martin's press, New York.

[8] Das, R. 2017. Marxist class theory for a skeptical world, Brill, Leiden.

[9] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/jul/11.htm

[10] On these two forms of accumulation, which are respectively called formal and real subsumptions of labour under capital, see Das, R. J. 2012. 'Forms of Subsumption of labour under capital, class struggle and uneven development', Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 44:2, 178-200. The implications of this duality of capitalist accumulation for nature require a detailed exploration.

[11] This is also true about labour power as well, which has a natural component in so far as our limbs and our energy - the parts of our body-mind complex -- are parts of nature itself.

[12] Henryk Grossman (1929) says: 'Competition among the capitalist powers first exploded in the struggles to control raw material resources because the chance of monopoly profits were greatest here…. Because raw materials are only found at specific points on the globe, capitalism is defined by a tendency to gain access to, and exert domination over, the sources of supply. This can only take the form of a division of the world' https://www.marxists.org/archive/grossman/1929/breakdown/ch03.htm

[13] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/aug/22/iraq-children-health-cost-war-induced-air-pollution-study-toxic-waste-birth-defects

[14] Note that when basic needs of small-scale producers (e.g. peasants) are not met, they try to extract more out of nature (subjecting their land to more intense exploitation that will otherwise be the case) in order to survive, and this in turn can result in an above-normal level of environmental degradation.

[15] I am abstracting from the connection between over-accumulation of capital and the issue of the decline in the rate of profit caused by the rising ratio of the constant part of total capital relative to its variable part.

[16] This is the case even if these strategies can ultimately cause a physically and biologically degraded environment and a physically and mentally unhealthy labour force, reduce labour productivity, and increase the cost of constant capital and decrease the rate of profit.

[17] Das, R. 2014. 'Low-Wage Capitalism, Social Difference, and Nature-Dependent Production: A Study of the Conditions of Workers in Shrimp Aquaculture', Human Geography: A New Radical Journal, Vol 7(1):17-34.

[18] It also means a society where waste produced during the metabolic exchange between nature and society in the sphere of production returns to production, such that waste becomes a non-waste, it becomes productive.

[19] Marx, K. 1981. Capital Volume 3, Penguin, London, pp 216.

[20] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1899/dcr8iv/iv8xi.htm

[21] Sen, A. 1999. Development as Freedom, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

[22] Magdoff, F. and Foster, J. 2010. 'What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know About Capitalism',Monthly Review, https://monthlyreview.org/2010/03/01/what-every-environmentalist-needs-to-know-about-capitalism/

[23] Here land refers to land as farmland, forests, and water, so land-based activities on the part of small-scale producers include farming, forest-based activities (e.g. collection of forest products), and fishing. Many indigenous communities are involved in not only farming but also collection of forest products (e.g. leaves, firewood, etc.).

Retail Work and Customer Relations: An Interview

By Devon Bowers

This is the transcript of an email interview I did with former UK retail worker Helen Howard in which we discuss retail work, relations between customers and workers, and where the US retail industry is headed.

How did you wind up working in retail?

I started at the age of 16 in 1997, and by the next year I needed a weekend position to help me out financially. I was given four hours on a Sunday afternoon working in the music/video section of the store my brother worked at, with the opportunity to work extra hours during the week to fit in around my studies. Once I left college in 2001 I decided to stay on as I didn't know what I wanted to do for a career. I worked for the one company in various branches for 16 years, then left to enter education in 2013.

You stated in our discussion that you went all the way from a regular worker to an asst manager. In what ways did you see the personality differences and attitudes towards workers change as you moved up the ladder? Did you internalize some of these attitudes?

As members of my family had worked in the same store, I was pretty well known anyway and it was always assumed I would have most of the answers to questions. The store I was working at was unlike most other high street stores, giving all members of the store team the authority to solve most issues without having to call a supervisor. As I grew in confidence I dealt with most things myself and soon noticed that my weekend colleagues would turn to me to help them out. I discovered I was good at solving problems and when I was given a new member of staff to train up, I was able to help her settle in and eventually empower her to make her own decisions over refunds etc. I was given the promotion to supervisor in another store when I left college.

I soon gained a reputation as a 'fix-it' person, and was sent by the area managers to other stores that needed support in getting back on track with tasks. I only met with negativity in one particular store, but the whole attitude of the store team was not as it should be, and although I got a few people onside it was not a big success, and I left soon after. I didn't take these attitudes on board, as I knew the problems in that store ran deeper than I could fix.

When the internet first came into existence, how did that affect workers and what was the industry concerned about, if they were concerned at all?

We first noticed that people were starting to question why something was cheaper online than in stores, not something we were prepared for. When people then said, "Oh well I may as well get it online then," we knew we had a problem.

This grew when the cuts to overtime came in. Then we noticed that we were increasingly left with fewer and fewer colleagues around, and that people who had left were not getting replaced. When the large, two-floor store I used to work at was reduced to one floor in the early 2000s: that was when the alarm bells started ringing.

The company saw takings fall and knew it had to increase footfall into their stores and away from the internet so there was a huge increase in promotional activity in the store. Confectionery and stationery companies now do deals with the company to push their merchandise. This was by far and away the biggest change. Bigger signage, more cardboard display stands, more hanging signage, more pre-orders on books and videos were introduced. The pressure increased on workers to offer exemplary customer service, give out vouchers, keep displays filled and push certain confectionery lines at the tills. Stores in the 1990s were clear, tidy and quite open plan. By the 2000s, they were filled with colour, huge signs and displays everywhere to the point where they now look cluttered and visually 'noisy.'

You did a study in which you examined interactions between retail workers and customers. What were your findings and how do they relate to the alienation people experience in the workplace and larger society?

I had long been fascinated by the reactions some customers would have when told they couldn't have a refund, even though I remained calm and explained the store policy very clearly. This led to me deciding to explore this when I went back to university to study a degree in Psychology. I interviewed both customers and my colleagues at the store I was working inat the time. I compared their responses, and discovered something rather interesting. I saw that both the customers and sales assistants had a 'them and us' mentality. The customers saw the assistants not as individuals, but as faceless representatives of the company, and the assistants saw each customer as just one of many people they would serve that day. Significantly, both sides saw themselves as unique individuals. When this view was challenged by the other side, that's when the high negative emotions began to emerge.

Additionally, it should also be understood that human beings have a strong need to belong and to feel safe in a collective. Customers would band together and support each other against the assistant in a refund dispute, and so would the assistants. This effect would heighten the more serious the dispute. (I would theorise that if something extraordinary happened such as armed gunmen coming in to the store, the customers and assistants would then band together against the gunmen as it would make them feel safer.) This all relates to social identity theory, which aims to explain how people behave and feel in society. Tajfel (1979) proposed that the groups (e.g. social class, family, football team etc.) which people belonged to were an important source of pride and self-esteem.

Groups give us a sense of social identity: a sense of belonging to the social world. So customers would see fellow customers as their 'in-group,' and the assistants as the 'out-group.'I understood from my study that the best customer service was when a customer was made to feel their uniqueness and individuality, particularly when an assistant would make an extra effort to solve an issue or query. An assistant would always remember and appreciate a customer who would smile and be pleasant to them, perhaps offering a compliment or something. On each occasion, the customer or the assistant would have their sense of individuality recognised and appreciated, rather than just be treated as 'one of the out-group.'

As a supervisor in a large store (as I was in around 2004), I was effectively Assistant Manager although the official title was almost obsolete by then. I knew that team morale was lead by the store manager and myself. I could sense that when there was conflict between us, the store team was unsettled and uneasy. When we were having a laugh and the store was doing well, the team was happy and worked very well together. If any member of my team felt unhappy or alienated, I would do my very best to talk to them and identify what the problem was. It was essential to make every person feel they were valued, respected and that I was grateful for every contribution they made.

Retail work many times is manual labor. Why do you think society looks down on retail as not a so called real job, but simultaneously admires manual laborers?

Twenty to thirty years ago, a career in retail was admirable and respectable. Nowadays this is not the case.

I would say that the main reason that retail is looked down on by most in other professions, is because there are no real qualifications needed to start, and many store managers have risen up the ranks by experience alone. (We do have some qualifications in the UK to assist in a career in retail, such as a BTEC or NVQ in Business Management, but these are not necessary.) The skills needed in retail (common sense, practical thinking, solution-focused problem-solving, numeracy and literacy, stress and time management amongst many) are not taught in a course but developed over time and mostly learned on the job.

Even though not everyone can develop these skills, they are still not valued as much and are therefore not as well paid. Most people in other professions would have taken a Saturday job in order to bring in a bit of pocket money, so it would be seen as a stop-gap job and not taken seriously.

People admire manual labourers such as builders, plumbers, electricians etc, because there are necessary courses to take to learn how to perform these jobs and a lot of money can be made. To most people, fixing a car or their central heating system is completely beyond them and therefore those that can, are respected and admired.

In the US currently, many retail stores are shutting down due to folks shopping online. Is there a same affect in the UK?

Yes, absolutely. We have lost many beloved high street stores over the past twenty years, particularly record and electronic shops and have also seen many companies buy each other out. However the various pound shop chains are alive and thriving.

For those that remain, store staff has been reduced to a skeleton and pressure exists to cut even more. Branches have been closed down with staff either made redundant or forced to relocate. Self-service checkouts have been introduced to attempt to cut queues. As a side-note, this further exacerbates the feeling of 'de-individualisation' of customers by the company, as they are not even served by a real person!

I think in the future, the convenience of shopping online will slowly bring back the desire to be treated as a human being and people will return to shopping in actual stores. People have never liked using automated systems such as telephone banking or choosing options on a phone keypad and really appreciate more than ever a personal service.

Anarchism and Catholicism: An Introduction

By Chase Padusniak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wayne Price updates the notion for today:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And here is Day sounding almost exactly like Mounier above :

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In support, again Dorothy Day :

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

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

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

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

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

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

This was originally published at Patheos.

Science in The House (of Representatives)!

By Charles Wofford

According to The Huffington Post, more scientists than ever are running for office in 2018. [1] This includes roughly 60 PhD scientists running for federal offices, some 200 people of STEM backgrounds running for various state level seats, and the political action group 314 Action ("members of the STEM community, grassroots supporters, and political activists who believe in science") is apparently pressing upwards of 500 other scientists to run for office at various levels. Why is this happening? The obvious answer is that scientists across the board are alarmed at the failure of our legislature to do anything about climate change. So, there is an effort to get a strong scientific presence in government in order to influence policy on energy and climate change. This is likely a very good thing.

However, we ought to be critical in our embrace of the scientific community's political efforts. I have written recently about the efforts of the right to gut education of its political content. [2] The emphasis on "vocational education" on the part of the Right is part of a larger effort to discourage would-be students from studying "useless" topics like history, philosophy, literature, or others that tend to lead to politicization (the Republican phrase for "politicization of students" is "learning to hate America"). If successful, this effort would create a whole generation of Americans educated in "vocational" fields and who tend to simply "do their job" without questioning the political motives behind their jobs.

Unfortunately, many scientists in the United States are politically naïve. This lends itself to similar thinking about education in "useless" topics like history, philosophy, literature, etc. Observe Stephen Hawking's solemn declaration that "philosophy is dead" from his book The Grand Design. Or Steven Pinker's obnoxious preaching about how "the truth can't be sexist" or how "political correctness" is ruining America. [3] Similar comments may be found on biologist and University of Chicago professor Jerry Coyne's popular blog, Why Evolution is True. Neuroscientist and popular science advocate, Sam Harris, disdains to do meaningful research into any number of historical and political topics on which he comments (see his encounter with Noam Chomsky, where, in response to Chomsky's thorough citations refuting his claims, Harris accuses Chomsky of "running into the weeds"). Observe also the pathetic attempts of others to "debunk" gender studies because it threatens their sense of manhood. [4] Many of these people are major, popular scientists who, when discussing topics related to the humanities, sound like creationists trying to talk about science. Chomsky himself blasted this narrowness of political thought among intellectuals in the 1960s. [5] He is worth mentioning, as he is one of the only major scientists to be politically knowledgeable; usually one must look toward historians like Howard Zinn and Michael Parenti (a political scientist by trade), philosophers and revolutionaries like Angela Davis and Cornel West, or literature professors like Edward Said.

Will the presence of scientists in government help us combat climate change? The obvious answer is yes. However, there may be ways that the political ignorance of many scientists could be used against them. For example, a hypothetical bill that apparently seems to help combat climate change can easily be given at the expense of some technicality buried within its language. The result would be that the bill, ostensibly aimed toward providing climate change relief, would in fact further hamper the powers of the government to do just that. This hypothetical issue has been born out in practice: for example, the fall of apartheid in South Africa was done on the condition that the economy be almost totally privatized. Today, much of the South African economy is held by those who benefited from apartheid. [6] The result is that while apartheid is formally gone, the government was unable to do much to help the real conditions of people, and apartheid lives on today in the South African economy. [7] Similarly, a bill aimed toward, say "combating the effects of climate change," might be misleadingly named. There is no reason to think that scientists, merely by virtue of their scientific expertise, would be less vulnerable to those kinds of tricks. To think otherwise is to fall into the liberal trap that we live in an ideal, perfect political system, and the only problem is that the wrong people somehow got a hold of it. Anyone who knows about the history of the United States (not the idealized history taught in many schools, but the real history) and the explicit intentions of the founding fathers in framing the constitution knows that this is simply not true. [8] There is a class element to our political structures that must be dealt with, and if it is not, then the inclusion of a scientific content to the neoliberal governmental structure will result in even more destruction.

Furthermore, we ought to recognize the many political spaces scientists occupy in the United States. True, the religious Right despises science and has a worrisome amount of political power. However, in other senses, American society fetishizes science. Neil deGrasse Tyson and Carl Sagan are cultural giants (Sagan's admiration of Trotsky is rarely brought up). Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, and Noam Chomsky are loved and supported by millions. With the possible exception of Chomsky and the long-deceased Sagan, these people are more likely to be sympathetic toward, rather than critical of, an ideology that promotes "innovation" in a "free marketplace of ideas." Isn't innovation, in a sense, what science is all about? And the peer-reviewed scientific process is one of ruthless competition. Daniel Dennett, a major philosopher of mind and cognitive scientist, has emphasized the need for science to be competitive. What a convenient opinion for one who happens to be a well-respected and well-paid figure. One wonders why science cannot be cooperative, especially since more and more of it is; most major studies published these days are done by teams of experts working together: theoretical and particle physicists working with mathematicians, etc. The point here is that much of the American scientistic ideology correlates with the intentions of the Right in gutting political education. And the celebrity status of scientists can be manipulated for political ends in much the same way as the celebrity status of anyone else. There is no reason to think that scientists would be above that sort of flattering attention. Indeed, judging by the arrogance of many a popular scientist, they seem ripe for the picking.

We ought to be wary of the scientist in power. Like all political forms, a scientocracy must be held to the glaring light of criticism by an organized and agitated populace that does not trust its leaders, no matter who they are. Scientocracy is not democracy, but another form of oligarchy based on the fallacy of merit, and as Michael Parenti put it, "democracy is not about trust...it's about accountability." Scientists often speak a big game about competition, but they despise criticism directed toward them that does not jump through their particular hoops, sometimes going so far as to attempt to totally discredit those critics by means of hoax publications. It is incumbent on us not to engage only in the kind of competition and challenge that the scientific community insists is legitimate.

It would be good to have more scientists in government. It would also be good to have more writers, philosophers, artists, musicians, librarians, plumbers, cashiers, janitors, more of the unemployed, more of the disabled, more of those who are homeless, and more of the spectrum of life in general in government. The only special space for scientists is the scientific arena - not the political one.

Charles Wofford is a socialist activist in Boulder, CO

Sources

[1] Alexander C. Kaufman, "The Largest Number of Scientists in Modern U.S. History are Running for Office in 2018," Washington Post, 2/3/2018.

[2] Charles Wofford, "Presidential nonsense and Warmongering," Boulder Daily Camera, 2/1/2018.

[3] Steven Pinker, "Steven Pinker at Davos: Excessive Political Correctness Feeds Radical Ideas," Big Think, 1/31/2018.

[4] James McWilliams, "The Hoax that Backfired: How an Attempt to Discredit Gender Studies will Only Strengthen it," Pacific Standard, 5/31/2017.

[5] Noam Chomsky, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals," New York review of Books, 2/23/1967.

[6] Rachel L. Swarns, "Rarity of Black-Run Businesses Worries South Africa's Leaders," New York Times, 11/13/2002.

[7] Haydn Cornish-Jenkins, "Despite 1994 Political Victory Against Apartheid, its Economic Legacy Persists," South African History Online, 6/15/2015.

[8] James Madison, "Federalist Paper No. 10," 11/23/1787.