Challenging the Music Industry's Commodity Complex: An Interview with Punk-Rock Guerilla, Justin Pearson

By Mimi Soltysik

This interview originally appeared at The Socialist , the official publication of the Socialist Party USA.

"Would the owner of an ounce of dignity please contact the mall security?"

- The Locust

What Justin Pearson has done and continues to do as an artist isn't going to be for everyone. It's a challenge. Perhaps it's a threat. Notes and shrieks spray like bullets through the speakers. Our attention, so thoroughly bombarded by the mass marketing of apathy, pacification, and complacency, is the target. While critics fawn over his work with The Locust, Dead Cross, and RETOX, Justin's resume reads (and sounds) like a massive "fuck you" to a dying music industry's lowest-common-denominator commodity complex. As a longtime fan, I'm here for it. A passive discussion with Justin Pearson might be possible. But when you have a minute with a punk rock guerrilla, why go passive?

Mimi : The first time I saw you perform was with the Locust back in 2000 at the Smell in L.A. At the time, it sounded to me like the audio companion to systems collapse. I mean no offense when I say that. It felt like a storm was brewing and the Locust was going to be the soundtrack. Eighteen years later, it seems to have been somewhat prophetic. Since then, we've had the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the financial crisis, incredibly bleak news about climate change, and of course, Donald Trump. And all of this happening at a point where, with social media, we're seeing the collapse in real time. I'm wondering what you were feeling, as an artist, that led to that sound? What was your environment like? Was there a relationship between the socio-political environment and what you were creating musically? How does an album like "Plague Soundscapes" fit today?

Justin : Thanks for the analogy of our sound. I think you are pretty accurate in that description. I think that music in a much broader platform, perhaps addressed just as art in general, can draw from non-musical aspects. Where one would ask a band what their musical influences are to understand what pushes them to do what they do, it might be just as important, or maybe even more important to address the things outside of music that are influential. Of course, what we do is subjective and anyone can interpret it how one wants to. And even with that being said, most of the time, for me at least, I am not even aware of what might have influenced something I was part of when it's coming to life. So with The Locust and probably a lot of stuff I'm part of, influences come from social politics, culture, economics, and then it also brings in science fiction, absurdity, subversion, and probably a million other elements that helped shape what we do. I do feel, unfortunately in 2018, something like The Locust's "Plague Soundscapes" is relevant, both musically and lyrically. Perhaps even aesthetically still relevant too. I grew up thinking that it's the job of artists to reflect what the world that they live in consists of, and with that, it's also their job to change it or influence change. But with all that being said, it's just music, or just art. It's not like we are great revolutionaries in the world. However, it is music that transcends certain things such as age, gender, language, geography, etc. It speaks to people, it enables people to do certain things, and at times, keeps people alive. But a lot of the stuff you mentioned, such as the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as stuff like climate change and possibly the overall destruction of the planet, were already on our radar. Those were things that we were aware of at the time, so I wouldn't call it prophetic, but more accurately just being aware of the world as a whole. Sure, before Rump managed to get into office, it seemed impossible and extremely absurd. But if you were to consider a lot that has happened previous to that, such as Vietnam, the assassination of Kennedy, the Nixon administration and Water Gate, even Reagan, a crappy actor, becoming President, it all seemed unimaginable.

On a basic musical level, I have always been drawn to what some might see as non-traditional musical elements. I grew up with stuff like PIL, Septic Death, This Heat, and even more known artists like Cecil Taylor, or maybe even Sigue Sigue Sputnik. So stuff like that coupled with not having a proper musical education possibly translated into the general realm of what I have been part of. And with those musical influences, they all seem to have depth to what they did. It wasn't the run-of-the-mill lowest common denominator music that is often what is marketed on a larger level. I grew up really resonating with stuff that people thought was garbage.

Mimi : I think that the piece about the impact that outside influences can have on songwriting might be overlooked a bit. I'm glad you brought that up. Would it be safe to say that, with something like the new Dead Cross EP, we're hearing that impact, or is there a concerted effort to put something together that has a specific sound? And shit, how are you feeling in 2018? I don't know that I see many cases where artists are asked how they might be holding up emotionally. It's such a big consideration within organizing and activism circles. How are we taking care of ourselves? Are we supporting another? Seriously, how are you?

Justin : I wish there was an easy answer. For me, what I end up doing, or being part of, usually stems from my subconscious, or comes from something that might include elements that I am not initially aware of. It's the retrospect where I can fully study the outcome of something that I was part of. I can breathe and dissect it with ease and in peace (with myself). I think over the years, while everything that happened, tons of weird energy was exchanged and moved. It made sense to some degree, but it took time to really see the broader picture or possible understand the magnitude of something. I'm not sure if that makes sense or not. I suppose, the simplistic way to answer that part of this question would be that fortunately things seem to come organically, for the most part. However with that being said, organically doesn't mean that it's a simplistic way, or a peaceful experience, or that it comes from a natural space. So moving into the later part of your question, about the era that we are in, it's grim in many respects. It's more and more absurd. I feel a great deal more anxiety than what I felt in recent years. It seems that time might be running out. I can feel the tension in the air, and smell the shit that is lingering. But with that being said, I can see new ideas, I feel rad power from people, and change is being birthed and evoked in a lot of creative and powerful stuff. Man, this is a massive, massive topic to try to articulate and nail down in a simple answer. I guess over all, I see things being polarized. I do think that might be what was and is needed, to avoid the stagnation that seemed to keep everything at bay. For so long, I could see that nasty band-aid on everything was gonna fall off eventually. It sure seems to have fallen.

Mimi : The band-aid metaphor really strikes a chord, no pun intended. From where folks on the radical left stand, capitalism is a cancer that is consistently growing. Reforms are essentially band aids, providing some minor relief and perhaps offer a veneer of progress. But with each band aid applied, the cancer grows. It seems like we're getting to a place where the band aids no longer offer that veneer, that hope. I mean, for so many oppressed communities throughout the world, there's been no band aid. And I'm seeing little hints here and there that some are in the U.S. are becoming aware of that. In that context, do you have feelings about the potential impact of your music, whether it be RETOX or Dead Cross? Your audiences are living in that context. Do you feel any sense of responsibility to play a role in how we move forward? To how your audience perceives your output and where they might go with that perception? And I do acknowledge that, when I'm asking this, I know that this is some heavy shit. I know of very, very few artists who would be willing to engage in this kind of dialogue and I have tremendous respect for you in agreeing to participate.

Justin : It's so interesting to do this interview. I'm also doing some press for the Dead Cross EP that just came out and to be honest, most of the questions I get are garbage, have no substance, and are not challenging aside from challenging me to figure out how to write something interesting to a vague irrelevant inquiry. So thank you for providing the opposite of that stuff.

As for the concept of responsibility, you are correct, that is a massive topic. I'm not trying to take the easy way out, but I don't feel that I'm responsible for anyone aside from myself. When someone creats art that is in the public sector, it can reach one other person, or a million other people and I still don't think that the artist is responsible for anyone outside of themselves. Maybe that is the part of me who identifies with the concept of anarchy. But for me, I feel I have aligned myself with people to communicate certain things, or even just one certain general thing. We then say what we have to say, maybe over and over each time we play, or with each album, and so on. We are calculated, educated, and aware, for the most part. Once we create that art, we can also learn from it, and adjust it, for the next attempt. Then we grow on our own, and hold ourselves responsible for our own actions and words. Or perhaps we adjust that thing being communicated and see if we can speak differently, and possibly set things straight outside of ourselves. A song is something that might not be linear, it's not physical. It's energy and that energy at times goes beyond language, class, race, geography, gender, etc. I think I might be going down a wormhole here, trying to figure out how to address the responsibility on an artist, but it might be the artist who are reflecting the world that they live in. It could be the world's voice. At least it is for myself. So maybe the responsibility could be placed on the world that we live in, which is what created the art.

Mimi : Why do you think that questions posed to artists are frequently garbage? What do you think fans lose as a result? I mean, I know there are probably many who feel that's "just the way it is" or that "it's the nature of the beast", but does it have to be that way? I also wanted to ask you, as someone who has been involved with the music business for quite some time, albeit not necessarily in the employ of the major labels, how do you think the music business might be different if it was run on a socialist model, where the workers owned and controlled production, where they had democratic control over process, and where the full value of their labor couldn't be exploited from above?

Justin : I assume there are a few reason why interviews are garbage. For one, the person conducting the interview isn't always invested in it. Perhaps there is some sort of need to get a piece about a band's new album, so the publication just assigns the interview to whoever works there. I really don't care to talk about how Dead Cross started, or what the date was when we put the band together, or why we play hardcore. You can Google those answers. And with questions like that, it's void of conversation and substance. You can tell, even out of ten or so questions, where there isn't one thing that is unique or specific to the band, that they are just uninterested. It's almost like it makes more work for the band to come up with a way to spin something that won't come off as boring and general just to locate some sort of substance. I'm not sure that socialism would play into making an interview be better for a certain publication. I think more so, it's just people being lazy, or being told what to do, or people being uneducated, or perhaps it's part of some facet of a broken industry. I have done way too many fill-in-the-blank interviews over time to really understand why they even still exist. You'd assume with the internet, and blogs, that people would be able to create new things and communicate about genuine things by people who are genuine. There are really awesome publications out there and great interviews do exist. But at the end of the day, I'm not in a place to pass up interviews, since they could help with a show, or a tour, or perhaps equate to at least one new listener.

Mimi : When did Dead Cross start? Just kidding. At the end of the day, while what you do is art, it's also how you make a living. Do you feel that artists, and you specifically, are treated fairly for the work they do? And how do you think a broken music industry can repair? Is it possible? If Justin Pearson was tasked with fixing the music industry, what would he do?

Justin : Good one! Make a living? Another good one. You are on a roll here. I often reference this thing that John Waters once said to me, something like, if you want to make art that is legit and by your own standards, you have to intern for yourself for roughly forty years before you make money. So I'm half way there by those guidelines. But as far as fixing something like the music industry, shit. If I had an answer to that I wouldn't be doing this interview. I'd be a wealthy philanthropist and my intern could answer this for me. But maybe there is no need to fix the industry, or at least no need for me to come up with a way to do so. It's done a great job at killing itself over the past few decades. It's been rude and arrogant. But with that being said, to me, the industry as it's perceived, is becoming more and more irrelevant. I see music in a much larger picture. Music is more than sound for me. It's part of something bigger that fits under the umbrella of art. There are aspects that are part of music, such as intellect, chance, aesthetic, and so on, that are never the industry focal point. Making profit was never an objective. And with that, we can take it a bit further. It wasn't something that was done for fun. It was a necessity in our lives. It still is that very same thing.

Mimi : You wrote on your label's website that you "started Three One G in hopes to better the quality and creativity of stuff that I was part of, as well as the music culture that I am part of - something obtainable, tangible, and real." Would you say that, to achieve that goal, that hope, ownership (not in some sort of greedy "it's mine, asshole!" way, but in a direct involvement way) of the process is necessary? And as possible advice for artists who might have an interest in taking a similar approach, what are you doing to realize that vision? Are there artists that may have forged a path that you've been following?

Justin : I mean, the creator of something is the owner. Or we could use a different term I suppose. Something less capitalistic, ha! But nonetheless, we own what we create in my opinion. Nonetheless, the concept of obtainable, tangible, and real is basically something that my ethics are derived from. You know, the basic ideals behind what "punk" was born out of, and what later became known as DIY. We all can do this stuff. I'm not special. We can all own our creations. We can also give that stuff away for $8.99 or for gas money, or a floor to sleep on, or whatever it is that we need to survive. Whatever we feel is suitable. As for artists who steered me on a path, I would say that Dischord was easily one of the biggest influences on my early life in the world of music. Then Ebullition, which I ended up releasing records on. And then later, perhaps Gravity. I think those tree labels are what have collectively made Three One G what it is.

Mimi : Dischord was probably the first time I'd seen some sort of ethics introduced on what might be called the "business" side of things. I still look at what Dischord's done - frequently - and find inspiration. It's like Ian MacKaye found a way to say "fuck you," in a really empowering way, to the gross excess of corporate music. You mentioned a bit ago that you see these glimpses of power coming from the people. Are you seeing those glimpses in the music community? Are there things you might be seeing from your side of things that the rest of us aren't quite yet? Where do you think music might be headed? Where might the industry overall be headed? I hear arena rock artists like KISS (fuck Gene Simmons, by the way) say that they might not make full-length albums any longer because there's no money in it, that they won't be paid fairly for their work.

Justin : My reference to power might be misconstrued. Power definitely has a negative or oppressive element to it. But I think I meant power more along the lines of energy that humans exchange, and sometime though music, and therefore, a positive concept. I suppose my terminology comes from stuff like The Stooges "Raw Power," other than some bullshit spewed out by Ian Stewart. As for the music community, just like the music industry, I'm not sure I have answers there. I think outside of those guidelines. And again, if I knew where things were headed, I would prepare myself. I just have no idea where most things on this planet are headed.

Mimi : I just gotta ask. What does "punk" mean to you? Is punk inherently an expression of resistance or rebellion? If it is, do you think it's a good sign when a band like Motley Crue covers a Sex Pistols song?

Justin : Awe, the "what is the meaning of life" question. I can certainly tell you what punk doesn't mean to me, which is Sid Vicious, or the commercialized image of nihilism. To me, it's cultural, political, social, progressive, and a million other things. Punk is James Chance deciding to wear a suit and play a sax since punk was said to be the opposite. Punk is The Weather Underground, pet rescues, re-purposing the bourgeoisie's trash, the Me Too movement, sustainable living, Planned Parenthood - it's everywhere.

Mimi : There's been a lot that you've said that would be fairly-well in alignment with what we might call "radical." The interesting thing about radical ideas, to me, is that when you say them out loud, they appear to be common sense, like they are just expressions of care and support. Yet, in the U.S., those ideas are packaged as being subversive or worse. Do you think we'll see the day in this country where we'll penetrate the propaganda surrounding radical/revolutionary politics and shift toward models that see people, not profit, as the priority? I mean, I think we can understand why the rich would have an interest in protecting their power and systems of exploitation and oppression. Do you feel like it's a foregone conclusion that they will maintain that power? You're going to have fans that will read this. What message would you have for them about the roles they might play in fighting that oppression and exploitation?

Justin : I do think ideas that were once looked at as radical are the norm now. It just takes times. Unfortunately too much time though. It's like that saying, change comes one funeral at a time. When I was fifteen, and had to stick up for LBGTQ+ friends as well as myself, or when I decided to have a plant based diet, or even when I started playing music, all of that stuff was so out there, and people thought it was crazy. Now, all of it seems normal. Homophobia is not acceptable by any means, you can get vegan food just about anywhere now, and my first band sounds like stuff you hear on the radio or on TV now. It just takes a lot of time, but it will change. I'm not sure it's necessarily a class thing though. I do feel that there are wealthy progressive people, who do good for the people. However, it's the oppressive forces in charge who use the idea of having people hate downwards to keep others oppressed. We've seen it first hand, in our faces recently, with the white middle class hating the poor. But as far as a message to send, in relation to oppression and exploitation, I'm not sure. That is a massive space to try to fill with one's ideas. I do think, no matter what class one falls into, it's extremely important to pay attention where you spend your money and what it's going to. That is the real way to vote, by how you spend, or don't spend your money. We can bring down corporations by being smart and funding progressive entities and not the garbage ones out there.

Mimi : Before we wrap up, I want to thank you for doing this interview. I've seen very, very few artists agree to engage with a radical publication. Why do you think that is? And why did you agree to do this?

Justin : Perhaps a lot of artists are scared to make not be known where they stand on things. Or they don't care to discuss such topics. I agreed for a couple reasons. I'll pretty much do any interview that someone wants to do with me. I'm grateful for that in itself, being aware that someone cares to some extent about the stuff I am part of. But with you, I was pretty psyched to get into an interesting conversation. If anything, it's a honor to have you want to talk with me about the stuff we have covered.

Mimi : Again - many, many thanks. I really appreciate that you've taken the time to do this. In parting, I think there are going to be a lot of radicals/revolutionaries reading this who are just learning about what you've done. What about you, as an artist, do you feel is the most important piece or takeaway that folks walk away with? Any parting words you might have for the comrades?

Justin : Speaking of how interviews pan out, the parting ways last words part is so fucked. Especially to fellow comrades. Ha! There is a lot that we should be discussing, and a lot that I could, or should say, but where do I start or what is punctual enough to wrap this up? I guess I can leave it with a quote that I reference almost daily.

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference" - Elie Wiesel

Thank you for taking the time to talk to me.

Liberation Theologies: Decolonizing the Masters' Tool

By Gregory Stevens

On August 21st, 1831 Baptist preacher, Nat Turner, lead one of the largest slave insurrections in the history of the United States. In an explosion of prophetic and apocalyptic rage, Turner overthrew his legal owners ruling by fighting back, killing the elite colonial slave-owning families who had subjugated his life to a hell on Earth. With more than 70 other liberated slaves, Turner's insurrectionary self-defense sparked brutal repression from local white vigilante militias and the State. After six weeks of freedom, he was caught and brought back to Southampton County, Virginia to be put on trial; his revolutionary actions were recorded by white lawyer, Thomas R. Gray, later titled, The Confessions of Nat Turner.

And on the 12th of May, 1828, I heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men, and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first! (Gray)

Being Born into slavery as the chattel property of Benjamin Turner, Nat or Nathaniel (the Hebrew meaning, "gift from god") Turner inherited two conflicting yet syncretized versions of religious expression; the first, and most obvious, being his Christian identity as a Baptist preacher, sharing the religion of his slave masters (he was bought and sold between 4 legal owners); the second, being his Mother Nancy's African folk-traditions brought directly over in the year 1799 when she was purchased by a Methodist slave owner. Further in his recorded confession he details multiple mystical experiences: talking to spirits, having flash backs to previous lives, practicing divination through tree leaves, and deciphering hieroglyphic characters all of which direct his passion toward revolt. In an act of religious syncretism Turner used knowledges from Baptist Christianity (individual freedom and soul freedom), the Hebrew prophets (histories of prophetic witness), and past-life ancestral mysticism (possibly informed by indigenous African traditions) to act upon his direct liberation from slavery. In this way Turner used the religious tool of his master and the indigenous traditions brought over from Africa by his Mother to subvert and challenge the legal slave-system for collective emancipation. For Turner, God had judged the materiality of slavery as demonic and condemned the institution to exorcism; it was God who actively directed him through revelation, signs, scriptures, visions, and dreams to defend himself from slavery. Turner embraced the counter-violence of God against slavery and dehumanization, igniting violent insurrection to advance the Kingdom principles of freedom, equality, liberation, justice, and salvation for the common good. "It was not motivated by hatred, racism, fanaticism, or evil. His revolutionary violence was the self-defense of the oppressed slave and God's counterviolence against the inherent barbarism and violence of slavery" (Lampley 3).

To understand the use of colonial religion as a strategy of liberation it is important to understand the severity of oppression and the overwhelming violence that colonialism brings to a people. The psychological, emotional, physical, spiritual, and social distress brought on by slavery creates an existence defined by perpetual trauma, abuse, and objectification. The opium of the masses loses its mind/body-numbing affects in the face of endless violence against black and brown bodies and becomes the methamphetamine advancing insurrectionary resistance.

The structural repercussions exacerbate conditions of trauma on a local and global scale through what Anibal Quijano theorizes as, the coloniality of power. Quijano argues that the development of the colonial project begins with the fabricated notion of race as a "supposedly different biological structure that placed some in a natural situation of inferiority to others" (533). The conquered and dominated peoples of Africa and the Americas were racialized as "other;" they were "situated in a natural position of inferiority and, as a result, their phenotypic traits as well as their cultural features were considered inferior" ultimately determining racialized categorizations as the "fundamental criterion for the distribution of the world, population into ranks, places, and roles in the new societies structure of power" (Quijano 535). With the development of newly racialized historical identities, a foundation was created for the global structuring of social roles, geohistorical places, and the unequal planetary phenomenon of transmodernity (Mignolo 57). This social hierarchy of racialized bodies and knowledges forms the crucible of eurocentrism, modernist epistemologies, and the Westernizing project of the North through a coloniality of power that also controls the labor force, the means and lands of production, and the flow of capital itself. In this Western expansion, ideas from the colonized peoples were expropriated or ignored, often stripped of their ability to be re/produced from below. This equates to the destruction of cultures through the racialization, alienation, and commodification of peoples. Resistance lead to the hanging, burning, and murdering of millions of people for the promotion of an "evolved, modern, and civilized" society (it was an evolved, modern, and civilized Methodist pastor who first bought Nat Turner). "The expansion of Western capitalism" Coloniality theorist Walter Mignolo writes, "implied the expansion of Western epistemology in all its ramifications, from the instrumental reason that went along capitalism and the industrial revolution, to the theories of the state, to the criticism of both capitalism and the state" (59). This Western supremacy was crafted in suppressing other- and non-scientific forms of knowledges, and was especially suppressive to the subaltern social groups whose social practices were informed by such alternative epistemologies (Santos ix). Portuguese scholar Boaventura de Sousa Santos sees the suppression of indigenous peoples of the Americas and of the African slaves as a form of epistemicide - the other side of genocide. The epistemological foundation that the global world capitalist economy is structured on is the imperial ordering of knowledges with the North at the top and the South at the bottom. This North/South divide is metaphorical and geographical in Santos' use, consisting of systems of visible and invisible distinctions that have material and cognitive ramifications. "The invisible distinctions are established through radical lines that divide social reality into two realms;" in the creation of "the other" as inferior, "the other side of the line vanishes as reality, becomes nonexistent, and is indeed produced nonexistent" (Santos 118). This non-existence is a radical exclusion, deeming all that is produced by the other as inferior, incomprehensible, and unworthy of serious consideration. Thinking from above abyssal-line, from the North, is the foundation on which modern theologies, sciences, and everyday societies are situated and are therefore in need of radical uprooting, decolonizing, and re-envisioning.

The cognitive supremacy of the Western expansion chose Christianity as its divine right to domination. The Christianity of the Spanish Empire used Theologies of Domination to "disseminate a characteristic ideology through all segments of society, propounding a set of fundamental values and principles which, while expressed in terms of lofty abstraction or eternal truth, nevertheless serves to further the interests of those who hold power" (Lincoln 269). These religions of the status quo replicate and co-produce the ideologies of capitalism: competition, hierarchy, racialization, epistemicide, and patriarchy. If Christianity was the religion of the colonial project, is a decolonial Christianity even possible? Is it possible to develop a Christian theology that subverts, challenges, and decolonizes its recent historical use in crafting the Western expansion of colonialities of power?

Audre Lorde's well-known declaration that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" proves helpful in this integration of the colonial religion of choice. The immensity of the coloniality of power through Western expansion and the development of the United States as a force of global Empire by the blessing of a majority of Christian authorities, institutions, and lay persons alike, brings many to a frightening conclusion: "if the master's tools cannot be appropriated then, in an age where our capitalist masters claim ownership over everything, only resignation is possible." Do we give up on our faith and spiritual tradition forfeiting our theologies to colonial powers as we seek material emancipation? Do we give up on our Christianities as the masters' tool to colonize, modernize, and under-develop most of the world? Or do we use the masters' tool against the masters by re-shaping the tool itself, after all it was the Hebrew prophet Isaiah who wrote, "They will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks" (2:4)?

The masters did not pluck their tool out of an ahistorical revelation but co-opted the religiosity of Christ-followers (the pejorative 'Christian' translated directly) to transform the world by thinking-with religion to bless their oppressive colonial project. Lorde was not making her argument to squash revolutionary determination, but rather attempting to articulate a similar message to that of the decolonial project that is attempting to open epistemology up to other ways of knowing and being, as valid, and co-equals in the production of our various worlds. Speaking from her experience as a black lesbian feminist, she refused to replicate the modes of racist patriarchal white-feminisms that honored her oppression through their ambivalence toward the continuing colonial project.

The question remains, can our Christianities be used as a tool to destroy the masters' house? Activist and co-creator of Occupy Wall Street, Michael White, complicates our answer with this insight: "If we learn anything from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's exceptional, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, it should be that the dominant powers appropriated from us first." He uses the example of war, which most associate as a tool of the master, to demonstrate his point, "based on anthropological, archeological and philosophical evidence, they hold that warfare was originally developed by nomadic anti-State forces and was only later appropriated and turned against its developers" (White).

Christian theology has not always been a colonial project. Based on anthropological, archeological, and philosophical evidence, Christian theology began in Roman Occupied Palestine, from within a peasant's movement inaugurating the Commonwealth of God in direct confrontation to the Kingdom of Caesar. It would be a mistake to think we could reverse 1700 years of Christian world-making to discover a pure first century form, rather early Christinaities are a reminder that the "masters' tools" have not always been in the hands of the masters, he stole them.

The convoluted histories of Christianity defy the simplistic conclusion that the entire tradition is a product of the coloniality of power. Exilic, resistant, and silenced voices have glittered Christian theological praxis for its entire history. And in the same way "religion" seems impossible to define, Christianity can be equally difficult "not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes" (Asad 29). If we take Talal Asad's critique of religion seriously, we must refute any notion of a monoculture of theological discourse and seek to resurrect the various historical elements of Christianities worth saving. In this way, our theological reflections can reclaim stolen tools, blending cultural and social multiplicities that defy the homogeneity of dominant culture, and forming something altogether new. For liberal theologians, this kind of syncretism is often rejected as "cafeteria style" consumer religion, but for the colonized, syncretism is their mode of survival. By reclaiming and recreating the masters' tool the possibilities of collective liberation are opened wide.

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui troubles indigenous notions of identity by theorizing hybridity as a potent mixture of coexisting multiplicities of cultural difference that do not collapse in on one another but "antagonize and complement each other" each giving the other a possibility to "reproduce itself from the depths of the past and relates to others in contentious ways" (Cusicanqui 105). Theology from below is not a sterile mule without an ability to reproduce, but a motley trinity of indigeneity, de/coloniality, and critical theory with the ability to birth something quite different "merg[ing] features of its ancestors in harmonic and as yet unknown blend[s]" (Cusicanqui 105). This decolonial hybridity, a mixing of knowledges that are not limited by their original logics, is a defining character of Liberation Theology, for it is the reclaiming of our stolen tools for the purpose of emancipation/salvation.

In the 1960s the redemption of the Christian tradition was attempted again by using the masters' tool for emancipatory soteriology. Liberation Theology birthed out of the historical struggles of epistemicide and genocides in the Global South (Gustavo Gutierrez), and from persons within the heart of the United States empire who were racialized others and deemed inferior (James Cone). This mixology of Marxism, (de)colonial theologies, and indigenous traditions for the sake of liberatory emancipation created an entirely new decolonial theological discourse. The shift Liberation Theology brought to the larger conversation was a much stronger reflection on the matrix of material conditions creating poverty and dependence on capitalist economic social formations. It was Karl Marx's social and critical theories, along with the Marxist guerilla movements birthed out of the early 20th century, that greatly influenced the priests and theologians expressing theologies of material soteriology from below. The liberatory theologies developed by Latin American and Black American scholar-activists of the radical 60's were syncretic for the sake of survival, the oppressed were also using the master's tools without replicating the masters' epistemic coloniality.

Theologians of the North, those above the abyssal line, were debating classical philosophical ideas about the Kantian "priority of concepts versus things," while ignoring the structural and physical violence brought to marginal communities around the globe (Cone 56). Theologies of material soteriology interested a colonized people, for what was 'real' for them was the very presence of oppression and the dire to end the brutality. The problems of the auction block, Jim Crow Laws, Neoliberal developmentalism, and the prison industrial complex will not be solved through philosophical and theological debates void of the materiality of demonized peoples' intersecting oppressions. In this way liberation theologies break from dominant colonial discourses on Christianity by embracing radical subjectivity and rejecting theology as a universal Western language that never spoke with oppressed peoples, only down to them (or completely ignored them all together). Reflecting on theological epistemicide Lampley writes, "Euro-American and European theologies have tried historically to claim objectivity and universality while black theology and other liberation theologies have exposed their Eurocentric tendencies and worldview" (33). Christian theologies that do not rupture the colonial suppression of alternative knowledge production continue to reproduce the logics that uphold world-systems of planetary devastation and should be discarded to the fires of Hell.

Black Liberation Theology in the United States emerged alongside Latin American Liberation theology as a way for black Americans to assert their dignity as God's beloved and fight for their freedom and self-determination. In the same ways academics and activists have ignored the Global South they have ignored Liberation Theologies birthed out of the colonial distress of life on the margins of empire. The father of Black Liberation theology, James Cone [1], argues black Americans have been systematically ignored and removed from legitimacy, their oppression and marginalized ignored by liberal protestants and Catholics alike leading to a Liberation Theology as a rupture within the abyssal line of colonial theologies. Cone writes,

Whites debated the validity of infant baptism or the issue of predestination and free will; blacks recited biblical stories about God leading the Israelites from Egyptian bondage,…White thought on the Christian view of salvation was largely "spiritual" and sometimes "rational," but usually separated from the concrete struggle of freedom in this world (Cone 54).

Black Theology uncovers the "structures and forms of the black experience," creating emancipatory theologies through "the thought forms of the black experience itself" (Cone 17). Black Liberation Theologies, much like the decolonial project of subaltern studies/activism, arises out of alternative epistemological formations centered on the experience of blackness, the experience of dehumanization, the experience of the Global South. The theological discourse of the North, of the West, and of Liberal academia centered on the White experience and White logical systems re/produces the colonial subject.

There is a striking similarity between the oppressed racialized communities in the Unites States with those below the abyssal line in the Global South fighting for cognitive and social justice, fighting to be heard, to be recognized, and to be validated. Blackness is produced through modernity, it is created and shaped by coloniality. Whiteness in Cone's context is the colonial project as expressed in the United States, the racialized ideas of the West - where everyone has to look, think, and act the same. Whiteness is for Cone the capitalist economic structure and way of organizing society into slaves and owners, producers of knowledges and those subjected to them. The creation of emancipatory knowledges from the black experience, was and is the purpose of Black Liberation Theologies. This too is the purpose of decolonization and the only hope for Christian theology if it is to matter today.

As a product of decoloniality, Liberation Theologies are "undertaken by the oppressed people themselves" and stem "from the values proper to these people," that is, the logics and grammars of anti-capitalist decolonial world making through which a "true cultural revolution comes about" (Gutierrez 91). We see this in the life of the Baptist revolutionary Nat Turner, his rejection of the theologies that bless racialization, colonialism, and economies of slavery; we also see it in his recreated theological imaginary emerging from his direct experience of all three. He reclaimed the stolen tool of Christian religiosity to remove the nails driven through his life and climb off the cross of coloniality. A hundred years later Liberation Theologies are attempting to further this work: these alternative ways of knowing and shaping the god-world-relationship reject the myth of progress and the myth of historical evolution into a modern state of abundance. Locating the site of hermeneutical reflection for decolonial theology in the experience of colonized bodies necessitates this rejection. Out of a motley mixology of theological, social, and critical knowledges from below a strategy for liberation and revolution emerges without replicating the logics of the colonial masters. Theo-knowledges birthed out of liberatory struggles can and do refuse to replicate the masters' use of tools. The tool of religion in general, and decolonial Christianity in particular, can be used to articulate an egalitarian, life-affirming, ecological society, one that stands in direct contrast to the religious tool used to develop the coloniality of power. In this reshaping, the masters' stolen tools used for domination are queered for collective and self-determined decolonial liberation.

This originally appeared on Gregory's blog .

Works Cited

Asad, Talal. 2009. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.

Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera. 2012.

Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera. 2012. "Ch'ixinakax Utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization." . South Atlantic Quarterly. 111 (1): 95-109.

Cone, James H. 1975. God of the Oppressed. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books.

Gutierrez, Gustavo. 1979. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation. London: SCM Press.

Gray, Thomas R.; Turner, Nat; and Royster, Paul (Depositor), "The Confessions of Nat Turner" (1831). Electronic Texts in American Studies. 15. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/etas/15

Lampley, K. 2016. Theological Account of Nat Turner: Christianity, Violence, and Theology . New York City: Palgrave Macmillan.

Lincoln B. 1985. Notes Toward a Theory of Religion and Revolution. In: Lincoln B. (eds) Religion, Rebellion, Revolution. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Mignolo, Walter. 2002. "The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference." South Atlantic Quarterly. 101 (1): 57-96.

Quijano, Anibal, and Michael Ennis. 2000. "Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America." Nepantla: Views from South. 1 (3): 533-580.

Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2008. Another Knowledge is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies. London: Verso.

Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2016. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. New York: Routledge.

White, Michael. The Wisdom of Audre Lorde. Web. https://www.micahmwhite.com/on-the-masters-tools/

Notes

[1] James Cone passed away on April 28, 2018 just five days before the presentation of this paper. I am forever indebted to his work. May he rest in Black Power.

South Carolina Prisoners Reflect on Causes of Violence in Prisons, and Solutions

By Jared Ware

The deadliest incident of violence in a United States prison in a quarter century took place at the Lee Correctional Institution in South Carolina on April 15, 2018.

According to multiple reports , including SCDC Director Bryan Stirling's own, prison guards and EMTs made no attempt to break things up or lend medical aid from moment the fight commenced until hours after it was over, while imprisoned people were beaten and stabbed to death. Seven people were killed and dozens were injured, with at least twenty two requiring hospitalization.

On April 22, I interviewed three individuals from various prisons inside the South Carolina Department of Corrections. One of the prisoners identified himself as a member of Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, a group of imprisoned human rights advocates that has made national calls to action for a prisoner-led strike in response to the conditions they feel are truly responsible for the violence and hopelessness within prisons across the United States. The strike is expected to begin on August 21st, 2018.

Throughout our conversation, these three individuals, who are identified only as D, S, and E to protect their identities and prevent retaliation by prison officials, highlight the impacts of policies pushed by President Bill Clinton's administration and implemented by states across the country. They also point to the dehumanization of prisoners and challenge our conception of "gangs," which does not take into account the ways in which incarcerated people are forced to create their own collective means for safety, survival, and camaraderie in a situation where hope is the scarcest commodity.

They also urge the public to reconsider the nature and source of violence within prisons and the absence of human dignity and a rehabilitative environment within our nation's prisons. They present actionable solutions to mitigate some of the harm caused by prisons on our ultimate path toward shedding carceral responses to legitimate societal needs.

As I write this introduction on May 2nd, 2018, South Carolina prisoners have confirmed that all Level 2 and 3 facilities have remained on a statewide lockdown since April 15th. This means people imprisoned in facilities have been denied any freedom of movement, regular access to showers, recreation, or meals outside the confines of their cells.

We grant permission for individuals and news organizations to republish this interview in its entirety for their audiences. It is imperative that we deepen conversations around the causes of violence in prisons and the real impacts of incarceration on all people, inside and outside the walls.

Editor's note: this transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Jared : Firstly, for context for folks who are reading this, there have been a lot of things that have gone down in South Carolina prisons over the last year or two, if you guys could lay down some of that context for people, because I think a lot of people don't understand some of the things that prisoners throughout South Carolina have been dealing with and how those conditions might contribute to prisoners really feeling a sense of hopelessness?

D : I'm going to take you back a little step here, to 1996 at least. I'll cover it a little bit, and I'll be as brief as possible. Prior to Bill Clinton's Prison Litigation Reform Act, anti-terrorism act, these acts that went into full effect in 1996, initiated what is known as the 85% or Truth In Sentencing [1] throughout most of the states inside this nation today. It's not just necessarily something that incubated inside the South Carolina, it was actually national. There was a domino effect, okay? But in 1996, specifically, the reason why I'm pinpointing that is because at that particular point in the state of South Carolina, there was no such thing as a natural life sentence in the department of corrections. There was no such thing as a forever-type sentence, where individuals thought that they weren't going to be able to get out.

Even if you had a violent offense, or a labeled-violent offense, you still had something known as a work release date. You still would have some type of eligibility to go to work release, and that also meant the eligibility to go to work at some place on the street, or go home even on the weekends in the state of South Carolina. They had opportunity to make state pay [2] during that particular time period. Even when you [were] at what was known as the max yard. These yards [were] clearly open, everybody could roam and move around free.

But when 1996 set in, and you had this mindset that started to kicked in, that was known, as Hillary Clinton called [it], as locking down these "super predators." They called it also the War on Drugs, which I call the war on the Black and Brown community. All these things is playing into effect at that particular time period, and that created the environment inside.

We found fences starting to be wrapped into the prisons, we found prisoners that was labeled as violent offenders, was sent into these fences, and caged into buildings all day. We found that the food started deteriorating, we saw the clothes removed, and we saw the ways that [imprisoned people] could make money removed out of the system. There was no longer any type of state pay. Even though state pay was very minimal, it was still an opportunity to buy a bar of soap or a Honey Bun or something like that. We saw that visitation was being restricted.

It was just a host of things that started being incubated. And then the hopelessness set in. Because what happened then is we started having these life sentences coming through under 85 percent, where prisoners knew they were never going to see daylight again. We started having what we call "football numbers:" 80, 100, 150 years coming through 85 percent [time served, where prisoners knew they were] never going to see daylight again.

So this is where actually a lot of the problems started accumulating. And not only that, but actually education was removed by the prison system. Any type of Pell Grants, all that was gone. Education, technical colleges, everything was removed. So that's a little bit of a picture of what kind of started to shape the environment back here.

Jared : Thank you, so that changed obviously the overall conditions of how prisons across the country changed and sort of the hopelessness that set in. Can you talk to me a little bit though of some of the specific things that happened in South Carolina over the last couple of years?

D : And this is when the most sadistic mindsets start to set in. Prisoncrats… And I'm going to [let] the brother answer that one.

S: So for one, as the brother was just telling you with the "football numbers," prisoners got a lot of time to serve, but actually with nothing to do. When they took away all the privileges, they took away a lot of the programs. Stuff like that, it leads to just standing around with nothing to do, except to indulge in negative behavior, and reactionary behavior, and just all different forms of escapism--whatever they can do to pass the time.

They drug test you so they can take away your privileges. Why do they need drug testing inside the prisons? People are already in here doing time, it's irrelevant. I can see if somebody's getting ready to go home for parole or something like that and you're going to test them, but just to constantly test them, that's kind of like a waste of money. They always waste their funds on things they don't need to waste their funds on. [1]

We have no means of supporting ourselves because there's no state pay. Because we have no state pay, we have no way to eat. As the brother said, even though it was just a little bit of money, but it still was something. You still could buy some hygiene [products].

When they do lockdown, they're supposed to give you showers Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, whatever the lockdown be for. But they don't ever honor it. They want to do one cell at a time, and it'll take you a whole week before you get a shower. You have some prisons where the water system is messed up. Particularly at Lieber [Correctional Institute], their water system has been messed up forever. When you flush the toilet or pour your water, it smells like rotten eggs. They say it has sulfur in it or whatever, but it eats up the actual metal, and causes mold and stuff to be all over the prison. If they were to go do a tour through that prison right now, and they go all the way from the lock-up to the yard, the ceiling is falling in, metal hanging down, it's dripping all over the place, mold is all over the place, people who are in prison for 15-20 years are dying from cancer. But they don't have no cigarettes inside, you feel me?

We're confined to a cell a lot. They do a lot of counts and the counts always last for a long period of time. The purpose of counting is to make sure that we're here. In all reality, they should just count us and then let us back out for recreation. If you count from the time you eat dinner on a Friday night to your next meal on a Saturday, it's 17-18 hours before you get your next meal. And on the daily basis, you're talking about 12 to 13 hours from when you get your first meal to your next meal, that's almost like a half a day, that's a long time.

So you eat up all your [food purchased from the] canteen, which forces you to go the canteen and spend a lot of money on a bunch of a junk that they price gouge, that's super high, but this money is coming from their family members who are out there working hard to help support you as well.

D : One of the things that has not fully been addressed in South Carolina is the nature and culture of disrespect from the officers inside the South Carolina Department of Corrections, as well. They have completely in my eyes mastered the art of dehumanizing prisoners. Once again, we have to keep in mind they intentionally went into an overdrive of taking the prisoners clothes. Not only taking the prisoners clothes, cutting the prisoners hair the same way, had it to where you can't have your money in your pocket, just a number of things to take away your individuality. And in the process of taking away your individuality, they begin to treat you as if you were garbage. What I mean by treat you as garbage, just by dehumanizing us it makes it easier for them to abuse us, and this abuse a lot of times takes place as physical abuse.

We had in the Super Max Units out in Columbia, South Carolina maybe about a year or two ago, guards bumrush a prisoner inside his cell, stab him up. We've always had a number of incidents with regards to them cuffing prisoners, then cut prisoners up, slamming prisoners on their heads. In some cases we've had some mysterious deaths, some hangings that prisoners are clearly not comfortable with labelling them as hangings on these maximum security prisons.

We've also had incidents where prisoners, when he speaks of recreation, understand something about this recreation a lot of places and a lot of areas right now, prisoners are no longer getting rec at all. It's like every blue moon before we even see any sunlight or daylight to be able to get rec. What we are finding is that, that itself is causing a lot of attitude problems. A lot of aggressiveness.

When we talk about the food, we don't get any fruit, no real fruit anyway. At one time they actually had salad bars; they removed all of that over two decades ago. Now you get nothing. Some of the food is labeled "not for human consumption." So these are normal things that we are actually dealing with inside the prison system.

For visitation, there's no contact with your visitor, with your loved ones. One kiss in, one kiss out. Rather than a hug, sit down, embrace each other. Be in the comfort of each other's company. We're finding that is moving further and further away, and I'm very fearful that we're moving to the stage of video visits very soon, in the very near future.

Jared : Talk a little bit about the angle of this around technology. Bryan Stirling has been for at least a year now, probably more, he's been on this kick about getting cell phones out. You know there was this sort of fairly high profile escape less than a year ago, and they blamed cell phones for that. And they're also blaming this riot on cell phones. They're talking about phone jammers. So just talk a little bit about cell phones in relation to the prisons and what they mean or provide to prisoners and how realistic some of these narratives or fears that are being stated by SCDC are.

S : SCDC's main reason for not wanting the phones inside the prison system is because the phones got camera access, video access, and the phones can expose the things that they do. When they're using extreme force - the same way people are using cell phones out on the street when they're catching certain things that cops aren't supposed to be doing and stuff like that - see they can be exposed, they can't hide when we've got the phones.

The prisoners utilize the phones to communicate with their family members. The phone system that [SCDC has], the phone prices are entirely too high, nobody would use that. They get money off it, too, and everybody knows that. And prisoners use the phone as a means of staying connected to their families, fathers staying connected to their children. Some fathers back here are raising their children from prison by staying in contact with them. [2]

So SCDC just wants the phones out of the prisons because they don't want to be exposed. They don't want the videos of the fights and stabbings to be shown. There's other things prisoners are shooting videos of. They're showing videos of the brown water, they show videos of the mold inside the buildings. They show videos of the prisoners who've been dead in the bed for two hours and the guard ain't come and check on the man yet. So it's a fly on the wall for them, that's why they don't want them in here.

Jared : I've heard some reporting on how high the death numbers are from South Carolina over the past couple years, but I've also heard from some prisoners that they believe the death numbers are actually much higher than what's being reported. For example, I've had a prisoner tell me that, even though SCDC is officially stating death toll numbers in the teens over the last year, and these numbers are very high based on national averages, that the numbers are actually higher but they believe SCDC is only reporting certain kinds of deaths.

S : Yeah they are only reporting certain kinds of deaths, not including some deaths that they have caused themselves. And just to give you an example, they have a cell in the area they call the RHU (Restrictive Housing Unit) that's supposed to be the area they put people that get in trouble or whatever. And they've got a cell that's called a CI (Crisis Intervention) cell. That's where they strip you, make you get butt naked you got no clothes on, no nothing, and when they do bring you something, they'll bring you a suicide blanket only.

So you had a guy years ago, where he said he was going to kill himself, so they put him in the CI, so the guy told one of the Lieutenants later on that night he was cool. The Lieutenant gave the man a sheet and then they say the man hanged himself. That's what they said. But by policy and by rule, nobody is supposed to have [any] sheets in [any] CI cell and everybody know that, especially the Lieutenant, who's a supervisor. So that's their fault. He was a mentally ill patient. That's on them. So of course you know when they write it up, or they give the information to the public or his family, they [aren't telling those] people that.

D : Absolutely. I'd like to add to that as well. One of the reasons why the number is probably higher as well is they're dealing with medical neglect. So I'll give you an example. I saw a guy that fell out of his seat. And the guard looked over the guy, but the prisoner was the only one that responded and started to give the guy mouth to mouth resuscitation. Well, come to find out the guy who was giving him resuscitation, his face started turning blue. Five minutes later the nurse arrives, and they lean over and they tell the guy and tell the officer they'd been giving mouth-to-mouth the wrong way. I honestly sat there and saw them kill this man for that particular incident.

And we've also seen incidents where guys fall out, no medical treatment whatsoever. I consider those direct murders, as well, of the state. When staff are failing to respond or respond and say, "Oh, you're faking it, you're not having a heart attack," and you fall out and die right there. We saw that happen several times as well. So this also would account for why some of the prisoners would say that these numbers definitely would be higher, after they are witnessing some people being allowed to die, the way that they're being allowed to die.

If I can, I wanted to kind of backtrack on the question you asked earlier on cell phones.

Jared : Sure.

D : First things first, I always have to understand the basic fundamental nature of today's prison system throughout this nation is slavery. We understand that it's based on the 13th Amendment of the United States constitution, we can't get around that. There's a profit business, so it's all about profit, it's about the profit margin. That's what fuels the numbers in the prisons across this nation. It's no different in the state of South Carolina.

Technology, with prisoners having access to communication, the phone business has lost billions literally, in this state right here alone. Billions! They have put in certain rooms in here, they've put these machines in called kiosks, they are getting no play. This is where you're supposed to be able to send out literally something like text messages to your people. They thought this was going to be a booming industry, nobody is using it. This is a loss of revenue.

We have these same phone companies that are investing in the department of corrections, literally for free, giving them equipment to find cell phones. Giving them equipment to search our families at the front gate when they come in to visit us, giving them equipment to monitor the gate areas. So they're giving them this. This wasn't just a free handout, but this was because [they] need to make money, [they] need to get these phones out of the system. That has always been understood.

Even now, I'm hearing that, even with the jamming equipment that Bryan Stirling is requesting and supposed to have a hold of for Lee County right now, I think the company is called "Tech something," I'm not really sure exactly, but my understanding is that the parent company is GTL.

Jared : I heard that rumor as well.

D : So, I have to do my research on that, [but] this is definitely what I'm hearing. This is all about business, this is all about money. The minute they can wipe out, it's like using one stone to kill two birds at the same time. You kill that communication gap, that gap where they've been reporting on, because most of the time, when they come out with a lot of frivolous things, it's immediately refuted by us, by some pictures or some videos or something. Saying, "No, this is what happened." This is unusual. This is something that's very revolutionary, [a] very new generation in the prison system. They are not used to that; they had all communications with media locked down.

Keep in mind, SCDC has a policy where we are not allowed to converse with the media unless it's authorized by the South Carolina Department of Corrections. And I have a big beef with that.

Jared : Absolutely. So let's pivot a little bit because there's a lot of talk right now about violence. So there's a couple of questions I wanted to ask related to that. One is, what do you all see as the source of violence within prisons? And then the other one is about gangs and this idea - because I think that people don't really think about this very thoroughly - about why someone might join a gang in prison and why they might be even more likely to join one in prison versus when they're out on the outside?

E : I would have to say dealing with the gangs… Well, I'm going to start first with what the brother asked about what stimulates the violence. Me personally, I feel that the violence is stimulated by the overt oppressive nature of the beast and what they're doing. Like y'all already had mentioned, they're constantly taking [things] away and keeping us confined to a box. And you take three or four different tribes, who normally may get along, or see eye-to-eye on a business level or whatever the terms may be, but you put them in a box and you don't separate them or give them anything to be… So you may know that this area may be predominantly this culture, or that area may be predominantly that culture, but I'm going to take them all and mix them up, just so I can make it confusing. Because to me, it seems like they stir the violence up because that's the type of media they need to put their spin on things.

Then it goes back to the [cell phones], and we come and tell the truth on the fact and that's a problem for them, because they're going to say [the violence] is because of a cell phone, or it's because of this and that. They're not going to sit there and tell you it's because [they] keep oppressing us, and taking away from us, and not giving us any outlets to do and be about positive things. [3]

Nowadays, you got the tribes, or the "gangs" as some may say, coming up with positive ideas to do and bring together and unify, despite what the police or the officers are doing. They're steady trying to take away all our hope, but we still got brothers and organizations coming together, still trying to rectify unity on a level where we don't even have nothing to look forward to. So you can only imagine how discouraging it gets when it's like we're striving to do so much better and so much greater but we're still getting a foot on our neck. Me personally, that can ignite [drama] any time, any place, on the street, in the penitentiary, wherever.

So I have to say, it's incited by them, themselves. I feel like they feel like, if enough violence goes on, they can put their spin on it and they can basically - like my comrade said - bring lock-up to the yard. They keep us locked down for nothing. Every little thing, they blame it on [staff shortages]. They don't give us showers, they blame it on [staff shortages].

If an incident goes on, there's no officers there to protect anybody. That's another thing about the gangs. Nowadays, you don't know, these young brothers might need protection. They can't look at the officers and say these officers are going to protect me and keep me safe. It ain't no such thing as that. You gotta fend for yourself back here. So I look at that, that's another reason why people are joining these gangs like that. Not everyone, but you can only imagine, you've got kids coming back here 16, 17, have nobody. You're throwing them in here with [prisoners] in a maximum security prison with a 100 year [sentences]. You're going to have to have somebody or some type of way to get around. Or some people just lose hope and just fall by the wayside, and just do whatever they've got to do to get through, but you got some people that try. And to me, it's like sometimes the gangs [are] a better outlet for them, because then they don't have to worry about people taking advantage of them.

Because like I said, it's fend for yourself back here. It ain't like it used to be where you had enough officers and stuff. [Back then], something might pop off, it might go down, and it gets broken up and under control. Nah, now the officers are running the opposite way.

You might try to escape from being hurt, they'll lock you on the wings and cause your death. That's exactly why they're trying to take these phones, because we're the ones who are putting that out there and letting people know this is what they're doing. This man live could've been saved, but the officers didn't do their job.

S : People aren't born criminals. They are criminalized by the environments they are socialized within. United States Constitution's 13th Amendment is proof alone that the mass amount of the warehousing of prisoners is not by accident. And even prisoners convicted of violent crime or who may be involved in violent activities, they may one day return to society still. People's cases can be overturned, some of these guys got max-out dates, some may make parole. So wouldn't it be wise for them to be implementing programs that would better the prisoners, not make them worse? They should want to heal anything that they consider to be sick or whatever.

Society itself promotes and produces violence. People ain't getting like that in prison, they're already like that out there. [4] Television, movies, video games, comic books, novels, cartoons alone. They are indoctrinating this psychological behavior. They're doing that out there in society.

Like the brother said, some of these guys that are locked-up in here are juveniles. That's a learned behavior, they weren't born violent. And in regards to the survival thing, we create our own means of survival, because the state don't provide us with adequate supplies of anything. They give us one roll of tissue a week. One roll a week, that's it. It's 15-18 hours between meals in here sometimes. That's just reality.

Only prison industries workers get paid for working. Everybody else's work is free labor. But we're looking at these other prisoners going to work, knowing that they're getting a paycheck, they even file taxes. They can pay child support and provide for their families on it. All prisoners should get paid for all work, not just prison industries.

They're making millions of dollars off federal prisoners and state prisoners across the country through prison industries. That's facts.

D: Very true. Most prisoners, when they come to prison, come with the mindset that they want to get themselves together, and I think a lot of people miss that right there. Even the ones that are labeled violent--and when I hear people say "violent," we have to be careful with that term. Because a lot of times people are using this term "violent," and we're seeing politicians saying "well, we're not going to be supporting violent offenders." It's a new theme now, where we just promote policies [that benefit] non-violent offenders. And that kind of sickens me because, at the end of the day, who determines what's violent? Who determines what's a violent offender? To me, that's a bunch of people making up these laws, and they determine what's violent and what is not. And a lot of times people have non-violent offenses and these are straight up violent offenses in my eyes. You know, so I'm very careful with that term non-violent versus violent offenders.

The people that they want to categorize and label as violent offenders for the most part, these brothers and the women that come into prison, they come in with the mindset that they want to do the right thing. I think the minute they enter through those gates, and the minute they begin to observe their surroundings, they begin to recognize immediately, that any change they wanted to do, they don't need to do it, because they're going to be perceived a certain way and they're going to be handled a certain way, you know, and it's going to be a lose-lose situation for them. And people have to really understand that humans are entering through these gates and becoming prisoners, and in the process of that, the environment back here is making it worse. It is creating something in these prisoners that is a lot worse than when they came in for a lot of these guys and women.

Because, once again, they may have done some terrible things out there, but for the most part, when they start going through and they recognize the days ahead of them, they want to change, they want to do something different. Hell, I know I was about that when I came in here until I went through the reception and evaluation center, and saw it wasn't going to work out that way.

That is another reason why some people want to group up. Some people want family back here as well. I like to call them street formations [as opposed to using the term gang]. A lot of times, people need someone that can look out and care for their best interests, too. Not just in the protection role, but also somebody that gives a damn, because the system is so cold. So when you're sitting back here, and you're drinking, you're smoking, you're dabbing, you're talking about your loved ones with your homeboy there, that's a different feeling versus when you can get outside that cell and you're looking at the prison itself, and the environment itself, which is a cold place.

So everybody looks for some sense of comfort, some sense of love, which is another reason I think the prison system eliminating our contacts, our family ties, is really detrimental to prisoners re-entering society successfully, but that's another subject.

S: Let me do a quick rebuttal on what he said on the non-violent versus violent offenders, because I like what he said. Out there in society, when they're talking about what people are incarcerated for--like if somebody is convicted for murder--that's considered to be a violent offense. But that could've been a first time offense. And then he comes to prison, he's been in prison for fifteen years, and he ain't never had another violent offense on his record, he ain't never had a violent offense in prison, he's not involved in any violent activity [on the inside], so why is he still considered to be a violent person? Just because he's got a violent charge on his record, that don't mean that he's indulging in violent activities. Because sometimes, the people in prison that have non-violent charges, sometimes they're the ones involved in violent activities back here.

Jared: Lee Correctional Facility is named after the county, Lee County. And that county is named after Robert E. Lee. So you have a Confederate General and a former slave owner and you have a facility that is in his name, that really, as you all have mentioned, really carries on that same tradition into 2018. To what degree do you think this registers with prisoners? What does it mean to prisoners that make that connection?

D: And when did Lee open up, 1994?

Jared: Yeah in that era. [3] And just to give a little more context, the county was first named Lee County in the 1890's after Reconstruction had ended.

S: My only response to that is that the prisoners, who were probably from the Bishopville area who may have had that information through the educational system, or conscious prisoners who read and research things--those prisoners might be aware of that, but for the vast majority of prisoners, that don't have any significance to them because most of them are not aware of that.

D: I would have to second that. I don't think prisoners for the most part have any awareness of that. Matter of fact, to be honest with you, as much reading as I have done, as much cultural reading as I have done, I was very ignorant of that up until very recently, up until the last several weeks. I just learned this information.

As far as the effect, I can tell you for me, personally, it says something about progress and where we were at mentally. When this prison came about, I think between '92 and '94, for you to still name a prison after that during that time period... Although, don't get it wrong, we all know a prison is nothing more than a modern day plantation. So we understand that fact, so really it's quite fitting. But still, it would seem you wouldn't want to name one of your state institutions after this right here. It seems like someone would raise their hand and say, "No."

I think that also tells me, as a Black man, how conditioned a lot of Black people are around in these southern areas as well. Because I'm sure that they knew what the Lee County name stood for, what the name represented. The ones that voted in this particular institution in that area, the ones that were saying it would hold this name, they knew, and they didn't say anything.

This is the type of mindset we're dealing with in the state of South Carolina today, which is why I'm constantly reminding people we have the highest rate as it relates to racial disparities in the nation. We are in the top six or seven states as far as racial disparities as it relates to sentencing and imprisonment rates in the nation. I think we're only like 20-30 percent of the population in South Carolina [4] and over 60-something percent of the prison population. [5]

They did a recent study not too long ago that told us that Black people specifically were being automatically over-sentenced by judges. It said if you were Black, you were 50 times more likely to get jail time for a minor offense versus if you were any other race. If you were compared to white defendants, you were over 70 percent more likely to be sentenced to longer sentences, based on your race. [6] Everybody knows the color of the state of South Carolina when you walk into the prison system. [5] I think all of this is an indicator of the nature of the beast that we are dealing with.

And I have to note that, even when South Carolina was going through their Reconstruction phase, all of these same Blacks that were a part of the Reconstruction phase were eventually thrown out of power, and that's because there was a compromise between the North and the South. And we have to always remember that right there. That's when we get back to 1865, that's when we get back to the 13th Amendment, that constitutional amendment and the compromise that was reached across the table. The power dynamics in the South has never changed. And I think we're seeing the rottenness of it in today's times. That's why I think we're seeing these extreme responses, these extreme reactions in the prison systems throughout these southern states.

S: Every time prisoners do strive to organize, to come together to make things better for themselves, the administration really doesn't give you much support or they attack you. For example, one of my comrades, he recently had been released from prison over the last year or so. He was housed at Lee County at one point and he was a coordinator on the compound.

He was able to organize over 150 members every week to come together positively, sit down and have discussions, and things of that nature. Whenever there would be any type of altercations or whatever, they would try to talk over things first and most often if they couldn't, then they would handle it like men and knuckle it up. But there wasn't so much knives, and people getting killed or stabbed up. All of that was calmed down for a while. So you had the STG (Security Threat Group) supervisor from headquarters and he got with the warden at that time, and they called him to a conference and they wanted him to explain to them how is it that you could have Crips, Bloods, Muslims, etc., in the same room every week and there's never any violence going on? The [STG] told [the warden] that [the prisoners] were up to something, that's how they felt. And what did they do to [the prisoner coordinating the program]? They shipped him to another institution.

When they moved him to another institution, they started to do things on the Lee County yard from a program perspective. To make a long story short, [the coordinator] was eventually sent home. While he went home, now you had other things popping off at other yards, who didn't have these types of positive things going on. They moved these guys around, piled all these guys up on one yard, all on one side, waited for one thing to happen. Boom! You get the worst thing that happened in the last 25 years. That was strategically implemented.

D: Yeah. Absolutely. And I think that's very important to note that, back to Lee County very briefly, that all of this right here is not by accident. None of it is by accident. That's the sad part about it. [6]

S: Yeah, they were used as lab rats. One more thing with regards to laws and stuff like that: a lot of times in South Carolina, people get convicted unjustly. And whenever somebody discovers that--and it's something that affects a lot of prisoners--and they put it into the courthouse and they pass a law or something on it, and they know they've done a lot of wrong to a lot of people, but what they'll do is they'll slide a word in it so that [it doesn't take effect] retroactively. Because if they had to [implement it] retroactively, they'd have to let a lot of people go, because they convicted a lot of people unjustly. They've been doing that for the longest.

Jared: So I want to give you all an opportunity to talk about change. What changes would you like to see in the prison system? What changes do you think could improve the situation? And then the second part of that is, what would you like to see people on the outside do to support? But let's start with the first part.

D: So what changes would we like to see in the prison system?

Jared: Yeah. I know some of you are abolitionists, but what can be done for immediate needs in terms of reforms.

D: Yeah, I'm always thinking about it as a dismantling process. I've been trying to push that for a while. We call it a dismantling process. And that gives the opportunity for other people to get in with their reform ideas, because I don't think we can go from one angle all the way to the other angle, like from zero to a hundred, it's just not going to happen like that. It is not going to play out like that.

Nonetheless, some of the things that I feel can actually improve. Improvement. First and foremost, sentencing. Sentencing reform in the state of South Carolina. It's not just sentencing reform in the state of South Carolina, it's actually sentencing reform across the nation. They need to get rid of that Truth-In-Sentencing deal, period.

We need an end of dehumanizing conditions, and that means food improvement. We need open yards again, not just enclosed rec yards, we need these open rec yards again, where prisoners can move. We need prisoners to start being treated like humans. We need more rights to our visits. We need education programs, I'm a big one on education programs, in particular Pell Grants, there's some other names, they need to be brought back to the prison systems again.

Not only that, but what the state of South Carolina did as the prison population fell they--instead of closing down the maximum security prisons, they closed down their work releases. We need work releases re-opened back up and expanded. Then we need one last thing: we need pay. We need prisoners to be able to be paid for their labor. If you're doing general labor, you need to be able to be paid for that labor, just the way it comes in at ending prison slavery. We need to end prison slavery, which I think is a trigger toward abolitionist work. But nonetheless, we need to end prison slavery to bring back a lot of these prisoners getting paid their wages. So I think those are immediate things that can be improved on. Was there another question beyond that?

Jared: The second question was, what can people on the outside do that actually care about the situation, care about the conditions of prisoners, care about what's going on in South Carolina?

D: On the outside right now, one of the biggest things we're moving into in particular in Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, we need to move into becoming more involved in the electoral process, in particular local politics. We need to become more involved in that. We're hoping that our loved ones outside that support us, we need to organize more ground support as it relates to prisons. We need to see more protests, we need to see more meetings with these directors, we need to see more organizing at state capitols. We need to see more support of what has already been initiated on the ground in the state of South Carolina.

We need to figure out how to get our local county jails and get people who are detained there registered to vote, and get the voting machines into these county jails, and get these prisoners the ability that they can have the vote. The problem with state of South Carolina is it's a good-old-boy system, and we need to change the face of it. And the only way we're going to be able to change it is we have to get more involved in the electoral process, but not just voting for a Democrat or Republican or Independent or whatever, but voting for people that have prisoner's best interests. [7] Every group of people have interests and we have to find people that have our interests at heart.

E: I really agree with what D said, that's all I was really going to say, really, about sentencing reform, more programs, even the better nutrition, and rec, let us get some physical exercise and more education.

S: I think we also need an outside grievance system. Because the grievance system is definitely not fair or impartial back here. The same people that work for the prison are the same people who are deciding if we should get results or not from our grievances. Everything else I think the brother already covered. But I also want to say for society, to them let he who has not sinned cast the first stone. Prisoners, some of us in here, have made mistakes and some of us did the things we did, but we made mistakes. But we have paid for our mistakes. Show some humanity. That's what we want society to do is show some humanity.

D: One last note that I wanted to add, the ground is vibrating right now for a national strike August 21st throughout the nation. We have a number of states that are already vowing to participate in this national strike, particularly in support of the state of South Carolina and the recent issues that just happened. They say South Carolina is an example of what's actually occurring throughout the nation. It just so happened that these particular people died here [at Lee Correctional] so they want to get in the back of this right here and they want to highlight it by mobilizing throughout the inside.

So we can ask those folks to support it on the outside, we need to support it on the outside to really support these actions. Let the people know that wherever prisoners may decide to have a strike or a sit in that the public is mindful and they are watching for any type of retaliatory actions that may take place throughout the process of this resistance that may be taking place across this nation, on August 21st.

Jared: Great, absolutely, is there anything else anyone wants to add about Lee or any of the other points where we might have missed something?

E: I would just like to add that in the aftermath of the incident that happened over at Lee, and all over the state, we're being massively punished. No showers, power is being cut off all this time, we've been locked down for a week, almost going on two weeks, and we've only had one shower and that was like, they cut the hot water off. What type of inhumane thing is that?

Jared: Are there other conditions you want people to know about since the incident at Lee that haven't been addressed?

S: One of the things is they have the metal plates on the window where you can't see outside, you can't see the sunlight, you can't see the grass or the daylight. They got it sealed out where you can't get no oxygen through it, the ventilation is all messed up, these are things that they just recently did. They're putting flaps on the doors so you can just slide the meal through it. They are animalizing the prisoners.

Jared Ware is a freelance writer and advocate for the rights of incarcerated peoples. He is also the producer of the prison abolitionist podcast Beyond Prisons, and co-host and co-producer of the anti-capitalist podcast Millennials Are Killing Capitalism.

Notes

[1] Truth In Sentencing Laws were part of a national movement in the mid-nineties to end parole and increase the length of prison sentences, as well as ensuring that offenders for certain offenses served at least 85% of their sentences. Although it was a national movement, here are some details about South Carolina's laws: http://www.ncrp.info/StateFactSheets.aspx?state=SC

[2] According to Jailhouse Lawyers Speak, "state pay" was a system where the state paid every prisoner, for example, $5.45 an hour for up to 18 hours every two weeks. It was enough to buy real hygiene products, a few snacks, and smokes. Prison officials took it away during the national changes that were rolled out in the mid-nineties.

[3] It opened up in 1993 according to SCDC http://www.doc.sc.gov/institutions/lee.html

[4] 27.5% according to the most recent US Census https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/SC/PST045216

[5] Black people represent 62% of the prison population in South Carolina, despite representing roughly 28% of the state population.

[6] This may not be the study D is referencing, but here is a study that talks about disparities in sentencing in South Carolina and other states: http://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/The-Color-of-Justice-Racial-and-Ethnic-Disparity-in-State-Prisons.pdf

A Liberation Theology as Black as Malcolm X: The Uncompromising Vision of James Cone

By Ewuare X. Osayande

"If the church is to remain faithful to its Lord, it must make a decisive break with the structure of this society by launching a vehement attack on the evils of racism in all forms. It must become prophetic, demanding a radical change in the interlocking structures of this society." So begins what is one of the most controversial and consequential works of theology in the history of the United States. Black Theology and Black Power stands as a work of theological passion that sought to break the stronghold of white supremacy that lies at the foundation of the ivory towers of Christian thought. From this theological torrent would emerge an entire new canon of theological interpretation of the Christian message in the modern world.

A work wrought against the backdrop of Black rebellions across America in the aftermath of the assassination of Dr. King, Cone's Black Theology and Black Power gave theological voice and justification for the rage that marked the Black liberation movement at that time. A new testament from one of our own. Who never denied us. Who never betrayed us to his last breath. As King himself said, "A riot is the language of the unheard," Cone's tome was a wake-up call that was received by a slumbering Christian church as a slap in the face. Cone channeled every ounce of anger and communal pain experienced by Black America and called for atonement on the part of a white Church establishment whose theology justified slavery, made peace with segregation and rendered Black people an aberration of God's creation. His challenge was clear. His charge unequivocal. Cone dared declare that "in twentieth-century America, Christ means Black Power."

As one would suspect, Dr. King loomed large in Cone's theology. But for Cone, it was Malcolm that made his theology Black. And Cone further stated that it was Malcolm's "angry voice that shook [him] out of [his] theological complacency." And like Malcolm, Cone had little patience for Black apologists for white liberal appeals for reconciliation. According to Cone, "black people cannot talk about the possibilities of reconciliation until full emancipation has become a reality for all black people." But Cone didn't stop there. He went on to offer a radical reinterpretation of reconciliation as an experience of Black people being reconciled to an acceptance of our Blackness as made in the image of God and a shedding of the shame that has been imposed on us by a racist society that would address us as "some grease-painted form of white humanity."

Cone's first articulation of Black theology was not without its holes, gaps and outright contradictions. But, unlike, the white theologians he challenged, Cone was open and receptive to the challenges of his peers and students as they helped him hone his theological outlook into one that would come to move beyond the strict confines of a Black nationalism that was male dominant, homophobic, classist and US-centered. The debates that followed would usher forth a host of Black and Third World theologies that, together, would be united in two volumes of works Cone co-edited with his long-time friend and comrade Gayraud Wilmore.

One of the most critical and prophetic essays collected within those pages that would aid in the development of Black Feminist and Womanist theologies was Jacequlyn Grant's "Black Theology and the Black Woman." She targeted the issue squarely, "In examining Black Theology it is necessary to make one of two assumptions: (1) either Black women have no place in the enterprise, or (2) Black men are capable of speaking for us. Both of these assumptions are false and need to be discarded." Later, she concluded, "The failure of the Black Church and Black Theology to proclaim explicitly the liberation of Black women indicates that they cannot claim to be agents of divine liberation. If the theology, like the church, has no word for Black women, its conception of liberation is inauthentic."

Cone came to terms with this prophetic indictment when, writing in the Preface to the 1989 Edition of the book, he confessed:

"An example of the weakness of the 1960s black freedom movement, as defined by Black Theology and Black Power, was its complete blindness to the problem of sexism, especially in the black church community. When I read the book today, I am embarrassed by its sexist language and patriarchal perspective. There is not even one reference to a woman in the whole book! With black women playing such a dominant role in the African American liberation struggle, past and present, how could I have been so blind?"

He went on to discuss his temptation to rid the 1989 edition of the book of its sexist language and add references to women that are missing in the original edit. He would leave it as it was stating that, "It is easy to change the language of oppression without changing the sociopolitical situation of its victims. I know existentially what this means from the vantage point of racism."

Cone's desire to change the sociopolitical situation was evident in his sustained commitment to being in conversation with other Black theologians invested in the project of developing a Black Theology that spoke to the aspirations of all Black people to be free, not only from white supremacy, but from the oppressions that plagued the Black community from within as well.

In addition to Black Feminist and Womanist theologies, Black queer theologies would also emerge during this period as a criticism of the entrenched forms of homophobia that remain embedded in many Black churches and Black communities. Speaking about the radical inclusivity of an "in-the-life" theology of liberation in the second volume of Black Theology: A Documented History, Elias Faraje-Jones clarifies that "an in-the-life theology of liberation would be one that grows out of the experiences, lives, and struggles against oppression and dehumanization of those in-the-life. It understands our struggle for liberation as being inextricably bound with those of oppressed peoples throughout the world, as we all struggle against racism, classism, imperialism, sexism, ableism, and all other forms of oppression. Such a theology also offers to other theologies a liberation from the strictures of homophobia/biphobia, as well as liberation from heterosexism which creates the climate for homophobia/biphobia with its assumption that the world is and must be heterosexual, and by its display of power and privilege."

These Black theologies are, in themselves, an expression of the undying will of Black people to be free by any means necessary. The very expression "Black Lives Matter" that has captured the imagination of organized Black struggle all over the world is - in itself - a theological statement that is as poignant and prophetic as any text written since Cone first penned Black Theology and Black Power. Written on the bodies of Black people marching in the streets, it is stating unequivocally that Black existence is sacred and complete and whole without need for apology or compromise in the face of a white supremacist assault that continues with renewed vigor and violence. It is the fundamental theological text written on the dark-hued faces of unarmed Black youth staring into the blue wall of violence. They come untutored in the Testaments. Yet, no Bible required to show what must be done. Here Cone's Black Theology is born anew in their defiance to injustice; their self-love and love for the living and the dead. With arms outstretched in a show of surrender. But not to the authority of this land. They walk in the valleys of death, fearing no evil. Unintimidated. Undaunted. Undeterred. As Gospel as it gets.

The promise of Black Liberation Theology lies in its potential to awaken churched Black people in the same way that Malcolm's rhetoric shook Cone out of his slumber to an awareness of the need for revolutionary struggle against the forces of white supremacy. The promise of Black Theology uncompromised by a Black church operating within the dogmatic confines of middle class aspirations or stuck within the ideological blinders of a Black intellectual class more concerned with dissertations and divinity degrees is the development of a theology that presents itself as a challenge to the very foundations of the system of capitalism that is profiting from and predicated upon the exploitation of Black people worldwide. If Black Liberation Theology is to have a future, it will be found here.

As the spiritual forebearers of Cone's Black Theology, Dr. King and Malcolm X both would come to this understanding in the final year of their lives. In his speech "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence," King makes the clear the relationship of racism to the global structures of economic inequality:

"… the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

Malcolm, for his part, also was in the process of making clear connection between racism and capitalism. In an interview conducted shortly before his death Malcolm says, "… all of the countries emerging today from under the shackles of colonialism are turning toward socialism. I don't think it's an accident. Most of the countries that were colonial powers were capitalist countries, and the last bulwark of capitalism today is America. It's impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism. You can't have capitalism without racism."

Cone, himself, articulated the need for a deeper understanding of socialism, indicating his disbelief that capitalism could solve the problems Black people experience in the United States. At a seminar addressing "Religion, Socialism and the Black Experience" in 1980, Cone said the following, "Although the socialist tradition among Black church people is small, it is still present and we black theologians and historians should rediscover it in order to enhance our vision of liberation." He goes on to state, "The Black Church cannot simply continue to ignore socialism as an alternative social arrangement. We cannot continue to speak against racism without any reference to a radical change in the economic order. I do not think that racism can be eliminated as long as capitalism remains intact. It is now time for us to investigate socialism as an alternative to capitalism."

Cone is envisioning a Black Theology that is truly revolutionary in that it is committed to the restructuring of the very socioeconomic order that profits from the oppression that Black people have faced since those first Africans were sold as property on the shores of the colony of Virginia. Such a Black Theology is most necessary if it is to take seriously the work of Black liberation today.

Such a Black Theology can no longer be confined to the white-funded walls of academic conferences. It can no longer just write or preach about the problems of the poor. It can no longer be a Black Theology that, like white theology, appeases the Black poor with neoliberal acts of charity and affirms philanthropy and mission as the Gospel's answer. It must become a Black Theology that is responsive to and affirming of Black workers and the Black poor marching not just in the streets of Ferguson and Flint in the United States, but those in the favelas of Brazil and the shantytowns of Soweto. As Cone asserts in God of the Oppressed, "… who Jesus Christ is for us today is connected with the divine future as disclosed in the liberation fight of the poor. When connected with the person of Jesus, hope is not an intellectual idea; rather, it is the praxis of freedom in the oppressed community."

In the last years of his life, James Cone said it was the cry of Black blood that called out to him as he wrote Black Theology and Black Power. That cry of Black blood has only grown louder and more insistent in recent years as the bruised bodies of Civil Rights activists at the bully clubbed hands of a Bull Connor have been replaced with the bullet-ridden bodies of random Black people murdered by police across this nation. Like Malcolm before him, Cone's criticism was not only reserved for the white Christian church and white society at-large. That cry of Black blood urged him to call out the contradictions of a Black church that is all too often reluctant to defend the defenseless.

"The black church must ask about its function amid the rebellion of black people in America. Where does it stand? If it is to be relevant, it must no longer admonish its people to be 'nice' to white society. It cannot condemn the rioters. It must make an unqualified identification with the 'looters' and 'rioters,' recognizing that this stance leads to condemnation by the state as law-breakers. There is no place for 'nice Negroes' who are so distorted by white values that they regard laws as more sacred than human life. There is no place for those who deplore black violence and overlook the daily violence of whites."

That question posed fifty years ago has now become a condemnation of a Black Church establishment that has grown sinfully silent in the face of the wholesale state-sanctioned slaughter of Black youth. That condemnation is echoed in the sound of Black youth leading themselves in a confrontation with the American Empire. By the multitudes, in the streets across this nation and around the world, there is a generation of Black people that are the living, breathing embodiment of Cone's Black Liberation Theology who are saying with their feet what Malcolm made plain: "I believe in a religion that believes in freedom. Any time I have to accept a religion that won't let me fight a battle for my people, I say to hell with that religion."

The crisis of Black survival in a world run over by a white supremacist order, in a country led by the likes of an ungodly crypto-fascist capitalist, cannot be overstated. Such should become the challenge and inspiration for advancing a Black Liberation Theology that is wholly Black in all the expressions of our shared humanity and determination to be free. A Black Theology as uncompromisingly Black as Malcolm. A Black Theology as courageously Black as Fannie Lou. A Black Theology as Black in aspiration and articulation as the Black working class that gave birth to them both.

Ewuare X. Osayande is an activist, essayist and author of several books including 'Whose America?: New and Selected Poems' and 'Commemorating King: Speeches Honoring the Civil Rights Movement.' Learn more about his work at Osayande.org.

The Colonial Roots and Legacy of the Latinx/Hispanic Labels: A Historical Analysis

By Valerie Reynoso

An influx of immigrants throughout the decades as well as centuries of colonialism has resulted in a heterogeneous population in the US composed of different ethnic groups and races. This diversity among US residents has also sparked debate on whether or not the fastest-growing pan-ethnic group in the country, Hispanic/Latinx, is a race. In a larger context, the question that will be answered in this piece is how the labels Latinx/Hispanic are colonial, what are the roots, and how do their political implications differ in Latin America versus the US. Exploring the history and politics surrounding the labels is purposeful and of importance because readers will gain an anti-colonial perspective, and likely previously unknown knowledge, on the development of said terms and implications in the Americas. In a majority of published writing and especially those within the West, the terms Latinx/Hispanic are seldom acknowledged in regards to how they reinforce colonialism and how their socializations differ depending on what region of the world one is observing.

Given the lack of information provided on the pan-ethnic group Latinx/Hispanic, many persons in the US do not know much on the subject and have misinformed preconceptions based primarily on ethnic stereotypes and mainstream media portrayals of said group. Being provided with a detailed analysis of Spanish, French, and Portuguese colonialism in the Americas, and the racial hierarchies that were established as a result of that in said regions, is necessary to deconstruct and decolonize these terms. In this paper I argue that in the US, Latinx/Hispanic is treated as a homogenous group and often times as a race, when it is not; and the roots of the terms as well as the developments of capitalism and Latin-European imperialism in what is now known as Latin America are proof as to why that is.

Using historical instances such as the codification of institutional racism in 15th-Century Spain, the idea of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) as a result of this, and the development of the casta system in the American colonies of the Iberian Peninsula, it will be proven that racism is a European conception and that the creation of the terms Latinx/Hispanic are informed by that through Iberian imperialism. Another idea that will be demonstrated is that the term Latin refers to those from the predominately Catholic countries where Latin-based languages originated and which colonized the Americas, where the non-white colonized subjects of these regions would then be referred to as Latin as well.

In regards to the chronological order of this paper, I will start off by discussing Iberian colonization of the Americas, focusing on Spanish imperialism, and how racism was first institutionally codified in Spain during the 15th Century, which was then followed by Spanish invasion and ravaging of the Americas and Africa. I will then follow with discussing the idea of limpieza de sangre and how this idea is based in white-supremacist ideology and was used as a tool to institutionalize anti-Black racism when the conquistadores invaded the Americas. Moreover, I will analyze the racial and class hierarchies established by the Iberian colonizers as well as the racial categories they created, which include the subsequent formation of the terms Latinx/Hispanic, what they mean, and the groups they include. Following this, I will examine the division of the North-American continent between the US and Mexico given the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which resulted in the US annexation of Aztlan territory, and how this act deepened apartheid conditions among the Americas which resultantly informed the ways in which the terms Latinx/Hispanic are constructed. I will conclude the paper by talking about how constructs of race differ in the US versus Latin America due to all the historical instances I mentioned above as well as opposing viewpoints and why they are ahistorical and factually incorrect.

Origins of Institutional Racism in 15th-Century Spain

The racist and imperialist circumstances that shaped the Latinx/Hispanic label cannot be deconstructed without first addressing the origins of Iberian colonization of the Americas, the institutionalization of racism in Spain, and how these built the racial hierarchies in Latin America that are still in place today. Along with chattel slavery of Africans, whose free and cheap forced labor would be used to construct the system of capitalism for the benefit of European Crowns, and which in part was used to codify racism, European imperialism was the other significant factor that was complicit in this. Moreover, racism was first institutionalized in Spain in 1449 by rebels in Toledo, Spain, who published an edict that became known as the first set of racially discriminatory laws. This edict, along with the Spanish classification and marginalization of Jews, paved the way for the development of anti-Black racism informed by the white-supremacist ideals of Eurocentric Christianity in the Iberian Peninsula, as well as the origins of the idea of biological race with the popularization of Spanish limpieza de sangre.

Limpieza de sangre as an expression was popularized in the 16th Century; however, at the time it denoted the idea that blood was central to the formation of one's character since it circulates throughout the body. Limpieza attained its white-supremacist connotation in the mid-16th Century with blood purity restrictions being imposed in Spanish archdioceses and churches. Likewise, limpieza became a central tenant in the foundation of anti-Black racism with the birth of Iberian imperialism of the Americas, enslavement of Africans, and expansion of plantation agriculture beginning in the 1440s when Iberia became involved in the slave trade of Africans. In 1552, the Spanish Crown mandated that Iberian settlers in the Americas provide evidence of limpieza, so Spain could spread "purity" throughout its colonies while Portugal did the same in Brazil. In the American colonies of Iberia, limpieza served to indicate a lack of Black blood and of Jewish blood; however, it was mostly used as a colonial tool to enforce anti-Black racism through the justification of chattel slavery of Africans and the establishment of the racial casta system. Limpieza in the Americas was modeled from the Spanish system and used to systemically prohibit Black people from civil, religious, and many commercial occupations (Gorsky, Jeffrey).

Foundation of Spanish Casta System through Limpieza de Sangre

In The Origins and Demise of the Concept of Race, Charles Hirschman explicates that the racist beliefs of the European settlers is evident in the systems founded in nations they colonized, such as their racial categorizations in censuses and racial identities through limpieza. White-supremacist ideologies and constructs of race became a new foundation in the societies of colonized peoples despite these ideas having originated in Western nations (Hirschman). Due to this, the formation of the terms Latinx/Hispanic are also informed by the white-supremacist institutions that are still intact in Latin America to this day. Along with anti-Black racism and racial stratification, limpieza also played a key role in the formation of the Spanish casta system that was used to racially categorize Iberians and their descendants, as well as the Black and Native peoples they colonized and exploited throughout the Americas. Casta means "lineage, breed or race" in numerous Iberian dialects and stems from the Latin "castus," which is a term that suggests the encouragement of "white racial purity."

Castas was an Iberian term used in the 17th-18th Centuries to label the multiracial people of their colonies. Casta ideology functioned simultaneously with the structure of grouping built upon assimilation and proximity to Hispanic culture, which differentiated gente de razón (people with rationale), which were Spaniards and colonized peoples who assimilated into their culture, and gente sin razón (people without rationale), which were Black and Native peoples who maintained their tribal affiliations and pre-colonial cultures independent from Iberia (Native Heritage Project, "Las Castas - Spanish Racial Classifications").

The Spanish Casta System

Las castas was a socioeconomic and racial classification system founded in the 18th Century in the Spanish colonies within the Americas and included 16 racial casta combinations. The multiracial offspring of the Iberian settlers who mated with or coerced the Native and African women in the Americas became known as castas. The casta system was influenced by the belief that the birth, skin color, racial and ethnic origins of a person determined their value and character and permeated every aspect of life in the Americas, not just socioeconomically speaking. The Spanish colonial state and Church demanded more taxes and tribute payments from the lower socioeconomic racial castas who were the Black and Native peoples not mixed with Iberian blood. The prime categories of the casta system were: Peninsulars, who were the Spaniard settlers who were born in the Iberian Peninsula and settled in the Americas; Criollos, who were the Spaniard descendants who were born in the Americas; Indios, who were the pure Amerindians; Negros, who were the pure African descendants; Mestizos, who were the Spanish and Native mixed people; Castizos, who were the Spanish and Native mixed peoples predominantly of Iberian ancestry and sometimes had enough proximity to whiteness to be racialized as criollo; Pardos, who were those of mixed Spanish, African, and Native descents; Zambos, who were of mixed African and Native descents; and Mulatos, who were of mixed African and Spanish descents (Native Heritage Project, "Las Castas - Spanish Racial Classifications"). People in the Americas who were colonized by Spain and Portugal existed prior to the creation of the terms Latinx/Hispanic. Their diverse cultures also existed and they were never socialized as a homogenous group in the Iberian colonies and still are not so.

Creation of the Terms Latinx/Hispanic

Latinx/Hispanic are terms of European origin that were then brought to the Americas through imperialist conquests and enforced on non-white populations by colonial means. The denomination Latin was created in Europe in the early 19th Century given the increase of romantic nationalism and racism which prompted Europeans to identify their countries with the languages they spoke. The concept of a Latin race initially referred to nations where Romance languages (Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, French, Italian, etc) originated or were spoken and where the populations were predominately Catholic. The nations and regions that would become known as Latin Europe are Portugal, Spain, Basque Country, Galicia, Catalunya, France and Italy, respectively.

Latin was spread as a label by French intellectuals in the 1830s in reference to those residing in former Iberian colonies in the Americas (Gobat, Michel). This was in part to legitimize French colonial aspirations in the region by persuading people from these regions that they are all members of the Latin race, regardless of whether or not they were European, and that they therefore had proximity to the French as well as a duty to combat US and British expansion in Latin America. In the years of tensions between the US and pre-Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo Mexico, Anglo-Saxons became the standard of whiteness in the US, and non-Anglo Europeans such as the Irish, Italians, and Spaniards were not racialized as white in the US at the time. Criollo elites affiliated the Hispanic race as those in the Americas who shared Iberian culture regardless of race, and Hispano-América was built against former Portuguese colony Brazil (Gobat).

Hispanic refers to cultures and people from Spain as well as people from former Spanish colonies who are identified as having a Spanish culture due to colonialism. Despite this, the cultures of Spanish-speaking Latin Americans are rather a blend of primarily Iberian, Amerindian, and African influences-as well as some Arab influence due to Moorish conquests of Spain during the 13th to 14th Centuries and establishment of Al-Andalus and the Umayaad Caliphate in the Iberian peninsula, stretching through North Africa and the Middle East. Likewise, not all people in what is now known as Latin America identify as having an Hispanic culture, such as Natives, who the colonizers would refer to as gente sin razón due to their continuation of their tribal affiliation and pre-colonial cultures with little Iberian influence, as well as Afro-descendants, such as many Afro-Colombians in regions like Choco, Colombia, who have primarily afro-centric cultures.

Historically White-Supremacist Standards of the Latinx/Hispanic Labels

Criollos and other white settlers in Latin America began to embrace their new identity as the Latin race, among the first to do so being the liberal, Parisian émigrés such as the Chilean Francisco Bilbao, who befriended 1848 French Revolution icon Félicité Robert de Lamennais. Lamennais encouraged Bilbao to advertise the unity of Latin Europe and South America; as a result, the idea of the Latin race rapidly dispersed throughout Latin America and Latin Europe. This concept reached Brazil by the early 1850s, especially seeing that the Brazilian elite yearned for Brazil to become the France of South America, as well as to associate themselves more with Spaniards and their American colonies (Gobat, Michel).

The Latin race was also socialized as an identity that non-white people could be part of if they spoke Spanish or Portuguese and were Catholic, or that they would be excluded all together from by those who associated Latin explicitly with whiteness. For instance, Juan Batista Alberdi was an Argentine intellectual who stated that anyone in the Americas who is not Latin or Anglo-Saxon of European descent only, is a barbarian. To him and others who agreed with him, the Latin race was one founded by and for Latin Europeans and their settler descendants only; one that Native and African descendants could never become part of, despite their forced assimilation into the culture. Alberdi was advocating for a political system in which the "inferior" Natives and mixed-race peoples of Argentina would be eliminated and the white Latin race would dominate in all its hegemony, such as what occurred in the Argentine genocide of the Conquest of the Desert in the 1870s.

These absolutist and white-supremacist views were not unique to Alberdi and other white Argentines who sided with him, as these ideas were common throughout Latin America among criollos and other European settlers (Gobat, Michel). The rise of manifest destiny in the US and strengthened desire of Anglo-Saxons to take over the non-Anglo and therefore, "inferior," races of the region led criollos to view themselves as the Latin race that was under US attack and had to resist US dominion over their colonies. Due to this, many criollo elites felt compelled to embrace the Latin race because they thought that by doing so they would receive help from France, the most powerful Latin power, in resisting US invasions of Latin America. During this time period, the Latin race was constructed against the Protestant Anglo-Saxon race of the US that posed a threat to the criollo elite of the former Iberian colonies; the Latin concept was one that denoted Iberian settlers who wanted to defend their conquered territories against other white settlers in North America (Gobat, Michel).

Latinx/Hispanic is homogenized in the US without any regard to the fact that it is not a race, but instead a colonial term that was built by and for Latin Europeans. It has historically excluded non-white colonial subjects of Latin Europeans, especially if they refuse to assimilate into the cultures of Latin Europeans and convert to Catholicism. Another common misconception is that Latinx/Hispanic people cannot be African simultaneously, which is also false given that a majority of enslaved Africans were taken to Latin America, not the US, and that Brazil has the largest population of Afro-descendants in the world outside of the African continent.

The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, Its Influence on Latinx/Hispanic Constructs, and the Perpetuation of Indigenous Erasure

Along with the history of the development of the term, the notion of the Latin race is constructed against indigeneity as well as Blackness, which was reinforced with the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo between the US and Mexico. The Mexican-American war of 1846-1848 ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo on February 2nd, 1848 at the city of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The Mexican government surrendered to the US on September 1847 following the demise of the Mexican capital, Mexico City, and defeat of the Mexican troops. Peace talks were mediated between chief clerk of the US State Department, Nicholas Trist, and General Winfield Scott-who concluded that Mexico should be treated as a defeated enemy.

Trist and Scott negotiated with a particular delegation of the fallen Mexican government represented primarily by Don Bernardo Couto, Don Miguel Atristain, and Don Luis Gonzaga Cuevas. Trist negotiated a treaty which stated that Mexico should cede to the US its Upper Californian and New Mexican territories, also known as Aztlan. This was also recognized as the Mexican Cession and consisted of what are now the states of Arizona, New Mexico, and portions of Utah, Nevada, and Colorado. Mexico had given up territorial rights to Texas and identified the Rio Grande as the US-Mexico border (The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo).

The division of North America via an imperialist treaty in which the US claimed Aztlan created the artificial border between the US and Mexico as well as a division between Natives in the US, whose colonizers were from England, and Natives below the US border, whose colonizers were from Spain. When entering the US by any means, Natives from below the US border are labeled Latin and therefore illegal foreigners in the country, due to their colonizers having been from Latin Europe rather than the UK. The Latin concept was designed to give non-white subjects of Iberian colonialism more proximity to whiteness; to label oppressed peoples of Latin America derivatives of Latin Europeans and Iberians, and therefore not indigenous to the lands they either inhabited prior to European settlement, or were forcefully taken from by Latin Europeans.

The Latin concept also gives criollos and other white settlers in the former Iberian colonies a false sense of indigeneity; that they are the original peoples of the region their conquistador ancestors labeled Latin America, that Spanish and Portuguese languages are native to the Americas, and that dialects of Native languages throughout the region are what is considered foreign. Non-white Latinx/Hispanic people are expected to assimilate into the white standard of the Latin race, especially considering that Latin Americans with lighter skin possess a disproportionate amount of wealth and political power in comparison to their non-white counterparts due to criollo inheritance from their Iberian, colonizing ancestors (Planas, Roque). Given the casta system, the closest one is to the criollo category or any derivative of that, the more one is able to reap material benefits from being racialized as closer to white.

Homogenization of Latinx/Hispanic People in the US Due to Different Constructs of Race in the US

In her article "For Many Latinos, Racial Identity Is More Culture than Color," Mireya Navarro addresses the complexities of Latinx racial and ethnic identities, especially in regards to the US census. She explicates how the race classifications offered by the US census are not satisfactory to many Latin American descendants for numerous reasons; some of these reasons being that they are racialized differently in their home countries, that they are very multiracial and have difficulty drawing fine lines in terms of racial identity, or disconnections they may feel with their cultures if they did not grow up around other Latinx, or if they have a parent who is not of the heritage. On the other hand, Navarro also brings up a portion of Latinx who do not identify as such on the census and just put their race instead.

The US census contributes to the identity issues many Latinx/Hispanic people experience because constructs of race and socio-racial categorizations are different in Latin America than in the US. This has created debates in the US regarding whether or not Latinx/Hispanic should officially be considered a race since Fronteras Desk reported that 37 percent of Latinx/Hispanic participants marked that they were "some other race" (Planas, Roque). Despite this, categorizing Latinx/Hispanic would not change the socioeconomic and racial disparities that exist among the pan-ethnic group and the region they come from even if they are homogenized as a single group in the US. In addition to this, racializing Latinx/Hispanic would lump colonized peoples with their Iberian colonizers, which erases the history of Iberian colonialism and ravaging of the Americas and Africa as well as the need for reparations to be given to Native and African descendants who are systemically disenfranchised as a result of the capitalist system that was forced upon them by Latin Europeans.

The Pew Research Center reported that a growing portion of the Latinx/Hispanic population in the US is identifying as white and it is assumed that similar to the Italian and Irish, Latinx/Hispanic could be the next group in the US to become racialized as white. It is also argued that Latinx/Hispanic people chose the white category on government forms that told them the pan-ethnic group is not a race (Liu, Eric). The issue with the assumptions based on the Pew Research Center is that Latinx/Hispanic is not a race and that criollos are white settlers from Spain and Portugal; in other words, Europeans just like British descendants in the US are. Therefore, Criollos labeling themselves as white on documents is not stemming from a desire to be white, but rather from the fact that they are racially white. In contrast to criollos, non-white Latinx/Hispanic people categorizing themselves as white on US government documents may more often be due to Latin-European imperialism and the desirability to be white, which stems from the white-supremacist, capitalist system and las castas that was inflicted upon them.

In 2016, a US appeals court ruled that the pan-ethnic group Latinx/Hispanic is a race under US federal anti-discrimination laws. This was stated after a white man named Christopher Barrella was rejected from a position of police chief in Long Island so the position could be given to a white Hispanic man named Miguel Bermudez instead. Barrella filed a racial discrimination lawsuit in 2012 (Iafolla, Robert), further complicating an already complex and misunderstood history. The issue with US anti-discrimination laws classifying Latinx/Hispanic as a racial category is that it is not a race; members of that group will be racialized and experience discriminations, or lack of, differently as a result of their races. A Latinx/Hispanic of African descent will experience anti-Black racism in legal systems due to them being Black even though they are from a country that was colonized by Iberia. On the other hand, Spaniards directly from Spain are considered Hispanic on the US census, which would imply that the US anti-discriminatory laws would be racializing them as non-white people, which is false because they are white Europeans.

As much as US legal systems and their US-centric understanding of the Latinx/Hispanic pan-ethnicity try to homogenize the group, these efforts will fall apart due to the fact that it is ultimately not a race and not all members of the group are colonized peoples.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the terms Latinx/Hispanic have colonial origins and have been historically used to subjugate peoples who were colonized by Latin Europeans and to force them to assimilate into Latin European cultures. Because of the racial casta system that formed from the colonization of the Americas, whiteness became the standard for Latinx/Hispanic, and those who are not Iberians are obligated to do what they can to gain proximity to whiteness and become as close to criollos as possible. US society doesn't understand this complex history. And as long as the US attempts to homogenize diverse peoples from the Americas through the Latinx/Hispanic label, it will be confronted with contradictions that are exposed when people of that pan-ethnic group experience discriminations based on their races rather than on the fallacy that is the colonial term.

References

Gobat, Michel. "The Invention of Latin America: A Transnational History of Anti-Imperialism, Democracy, and Race." The American Historical Review, vol. 118, no. 5, 1 Dec. 2013, pp. 1345-1375. Oxford Academic.

Gorsky, Jeffrey. How Racism Was First Officially Codified in 15 th-Century Spain. Atlas Obscura, 22 Dec. 2016.

Hirschman, Charles. "The Origins and Demise of the Concept of Race." Population and Development Review, vol. 30, no. 3, Sept. 2004, p. 395. JSTOR.

Iafolla, Robert. 'Hispanic' Is a Race under U.S. Anti-Bias Laws, Court Rules. Reuters, 16 Feb. 2016.

Las Castas - Spanish Racial Classifications. Native Heritage Project, 15 June 2013.

Liu, Eric. Why Are Hispanics Identifying as White? CNN, 30 May 2014.

Navarro, Mireya. For Many Latinos, Racial Identity Is More Culture Than Color. The New York Times , 13 Jan. 2012.

Planas, Roque. "Latino Is Not A Race, Despite The Census Debate." Huffington Post, 17 Jan. 2013.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

What About Kurdistan?

By Daniel Rombro

A people's right to decide their own fate is undeniable. And for the majority of those on the revolutionary left, this principle (referred to as national self-determination) is a fundamental part of liberatory politics. For the last several years, one issue of national liberation has been, generally speaking, in the forefront: Kurdistan. However, to truly understand the Kurdish issue as it exists today, and to develop the correct position one should have on it, we must also understand the origins of the modern Kurdish nation and its political aspirations.

With the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1920, the Kurdish nation was divided by the Great Powers among Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Whereas before the Kurds had been mostly united and receiving somewhat beneficial treatment from the Ottomans, now there was division and persecution.

In Turkey, the Kurdish population was subjected to a state founded on intense nationalistic values, collected in an ideology known as Kemalism (after the nations founder, Kemal Ataturk). Kurds were not even seen as Kurds, but referred to as "Mountain Turks". Their language and cultural traditions were outlawed, all a part of a nationalistic assimilation campaign. Attempted Kurdish uprisings were put down violently.

In the predominantly Arab countries, the Kurdish people were no better off. In Syria, with the rise of the Ba'athist party, and the failure of several attempted uprisings, the Kurdish population had their citizenship systematically revoked, rendering them stateless. As well, the Syrian government initiated a campaign of ethnic cleansing, forcing Kurds off their land and implanting Arabs from the South.

Iraq was much the same story, once the Ba'athists came to power. However, Kurdish revolts in response to discriminatory policies were treated differently. Instead of widespread revocation of citizenship, outright slaughter and ethnic cleansing ensued. From the years 1986 to 1989, Saddam Hussein's government committed countless massacres along with an intense "Arabization" campaign. This offensive, dubbed the Anfal campaign, included the use of chemical weapons, with the most deadly episode being the Halabja massacre. Nearly 5,000 Kurds were murdered by chemical weapons. Estimates for the number of Kurds murdered during the Anfal campaign vary, but numbers are estimated from a low of 50,000 to as high as 150,000.

Finally, there was Iran, where Kurdish organizations were suppressed and Kurds were considered Iranian, but which never quite reached the level of oppression as the Kurdish people endured in neighboring countries, with sporadic on-again off-again small scale Kurdish insurgencies.

Yet in these incredibly difficult times, consciousness still managed to thrive. Two movements of note would arise in two different parts of Kurdistan, representing very different streams of thought. In Iraqi Kurdistan, with a Kurdish populace distinct from the rest of their brothers, the traditional Sorani Kurdish tribal leadership built and led a movement founded on traditional nationalist secular values. This movement became organized into a party known as the Kurdistan Democratic Party. A later split, the more social-democratic-oriented Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the PUK, would go on to challenge the KDP for power and influence. The Kurdistan Democrats oriented themselves towards the West (mainly the U.S. and Western Europe), cooperated with political rivals of Hussein's Iraq, and launched numerous uprisings and guerrilla campaigns, culminating in the establishment of a de facto independent Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq in the aftermath of the first Gulf War.

In the northern reaches of Kurdistan, a different kind of movement was being built. Inspired by the Turkish New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, several Kurdish and Turkish adherents of the movement took the newly-cemented position of Kurdistan as an oppressed nation to new levels.

Led by Abdullah Ocalan, the Kurdistan Workers Party (or PKK) was established. With a small initial cadre, the PKK initiated an insurgency that began with nothing more than "propaganda of the deed" acts, before culminating into a full-scale war that would engulf the entirety of Turkish Kurdistan. The PKK would grow to become an organization with a strong presence in all four parts of Kurdistan along with the diaspora. However, in 1999, Ocalan was captured in a joint MIT-CIA operation (MIT being the national intelligence agency of Turkey), signaling a new turn in the PKK's political evolution. Negotiations were opened with the Turkish state, reforms implemented, and the electoral process was engaged in by PKK-supporting individuals.

The most notable change came in the ideological realm. While in Prison, Ocalan familiarized himself with the works of a former American anarchist, Murray Bookchin, and his recently-developed social theory of Libertarian Municipalism, among others. Discarding the New Left-inspired and partly Maoist-tinged "Marxism-Leninism" of their past, the party quickly adopted Ocalan's newly-adopted ideology of Democratic Confederalism, which stressed the democratic organization of the people counterposed to the militaristic nation-state.

After decades of both progress and setbacks, the PKK was finally given a chance to begin building their social project. Based on Ocalan's new theories, the Syrian affiliate of the PKK was able to storm into the mayhem of the Syrian civil war, taking control of the primarily Kurdish northern areas (Known as Rojava) from the Assad regime in a mostly peaceful handover.

Syrian Civil War, Da'esh, and Developments in Iraq

Forming a political entity, today named the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, the PYD (the PKK's Syrian affiliate) quickly went to work securing their statelet and implementing Democratic Confederalist values, which included a commitment to ethnic and religious pluralism, women's liberation, and a form of cooperative economics. Yet, for both the PKK and KDP projects, the ability to finally realize their deepest aspirations would only become possible when everything around them began to crumble and burn. In 2014, amidst the Syrian Civil war and a continued armed Iraqi resistance, the region was shaken to its very core. An Iraqi Salafist group, commonly referred to as ISIS, or Da'esh, launched a blitzkrieg style offensive, seizing nearly half of Iraq and, later, half of Syria in a matter of days and weeks.

ISIS declared war on all foreign involvement in the region, along with every other government, religious group, and social strata that didn't fit its image of an ideal fundamentalist caliphate. A wave of reactionary brutality was unleashed against the peoples of the region that was truly heinous. And yet, in the midst of this lightning advance, the Kurds were able to secure their best hope for a bright future.

In Iraq, the KDP/PUK-led forces were able to secure disputed areas between them and the Iraqi government, whose forces collapsed rapidly in the face of Da'esh's offensive. The most notable gain among these areas was the city of Kirkuk, often referred to as the "Kurdish Jerusalem", whose surrounding oil reserves are some of the largest in Iraq.

Syrian Kurdistan was a different story however. Newly established, and without western support, both factors that the KDP/PUK had going for them, the PYD and YPG (the PYD's military arm) were militarily unprepared for what came next. Declaring the Rojava administration to be atheist communists, ISIS launched an offensive into Kurdish-held lands, seizing much territory and culminating in the battle of the city of Kobane, with some observers said was reminiscent of the battle of Stalingrad. As all looked lost, and the defenders of Kobane were pushed to the brink, the tide turned.

With international pressure mounting, the U.S.-led imperialist Coalition, sensing an opportunity to expand their influence in the region, which had previously been maintaining its interests in Iraq, intervened directly in a large scale manner in Syria for the first time. With continuous American air strikes, and an influx of Kurdish volunteers from across the border, the YPG managed to push Da'esh out of Kurdish areas, and then, under the direction and leadership of the Coalition, eventually seized Raqqa, ISIS's self-declared capital, as well as many other Arab-populated areas, effectively spelling the end of Da'esh's territorial rule. Kurdish-held and administered territory was at its peak in modern history, and it looked as though the survival of the existing Kurdish projects was assured. But nothing is ever certain, and Kurdistan was no exception.

In late September 2017, the KRG, the KDP/PUK-led autonomous Iraqi Kurdish region, held a long desired independence referendum. With a participation rate of over 70 percent and a "yes" margin of over 90 percent, the Kurdish people's choice was obviously clear. Despite this, the position of the Iraqi government remained firm, and the government itself threatened harsh consequences if the referendum was held.

The KRG took these threats in stride, hoping that their aid in the war against ISIS and years of Western support would translate into support for an independent Iraqi Kurdistan. Their hopes were misplaced; the Western powers were more concerned with maintaining influence and some semblance of control over a united and federal Iraq. With no fears of foreign government intervention, Iraqi federal forces and Shi'ite militiamen invaded KRG territory several weeks later, routing Kurdish military forces that remained and negotiating for others to withdraw. The disputed areas were secured, Kirkuk lost, and the KRG brought to heel. Any hope for an independent Kurdish nation in Iraq was squashed for the foreseeable future.

Across the border in Syria, their compatriots fared little better. The offensives into ISIS-held lands had pushed far enough west that there seemed to be a distinctly strong chance that Rojava's westernmost outpost, the area around the city of Afrin, would be united with the bulk of land held to its east. This possibility was violently struck down however when the Turkish government, fearing a PKK-linked independent Kurdish entity on its borders, invaded in conjunction with Syrian opposition forces the area around the city of Jarabulus, dashing any immediate hopes for uniting the Kurdish areas. For months, this situation remained static, with brief skirmishes occurring along the Manbij-Jarabulus border area.

On January 18, 2018, however, Turkey finally launched its anticipated offensive into Afrin, after years of blustering. The timing made sense, as the imperialist Coalition was less likely to intervene due to Da'esh being all but defeated. The offensive itself was brutal, with reports of hundreds of civilian casualties, chemical weapon use by Turkish forces, and the enforcement of Sharia law by Syrian rebels, who made up the bulk of the invading manpower.

Afrin remains under Turkish/Syrian rebel occupation, with sporadic unconfirmed reports of Kurdish guerrillas attacking occupying forces. Erdogan, Turkey's president, has threatened to move east into more Kurdish-held territory. Whether he will follow through waits to be seen.

Kurdistan and the Western Left

What is a revolutionary's response to these recent events? What is a revolutionary's response to the wider Kurdish struggle? The radical left is hardly unanimous.

Some, those often guilty of wholehearted unconditional support to anti-Western bourgeois regimes, blow the Kurds off as nothing more than shills, undeserving of nationhood and deserving of whatever abysmal fate eventually befalls them. These leftists, labelling themselves as "anti-imperialist", more often than not forget those basic tenets of revolutionary thought. They point to the horrifically corrupt and nepotistic tribal run regime of Iraq Kurdistan as justification for condemning all Kurds. They argue that since the Iraqi Kurdish authorities are nothing more than a puppet government of the western imperialist powers (which is indeed true) and that the Rojava government has essentially become a base and partner of U.S. imperialism, that any hopes, desires, and fight for nationhood among the Kurdish people only serve to strengthen western imperialism in the region, at the cost of other powers.

To deny a people's right to self-determination, for the notion that this will somehow strengthen western imperialism's hand, is nothing less than coddling the ambitions of the anti-western capitalist powers they hold so dear. To this we must say, did Lenin scream for the Kaiser's victory? Did Luxemburg plead for French soldiers to march into Berlin? One must be against their own nation's imperialism first and foremost, yes! But not at the cost of becoming nothing more than a shill for different capitalist nations' bloody conquests.

At the other end, however, is a crime that is even more unforgivable in the history of the revolutionary movement. Some so called "leftists", seeing the destruction and slaughter that a carefully built up national arsenal can reap on a people, declare their support for imperialist intervention by their own nations! When the Kurds are used as the tools of imperialist powers, seizing Arab areas, infringing on the Arab nation's right to self-determination, they cheer it. "Who cares? It is only reactionaries and murderers whose land they take."

These leftists are fools and poor students of history at that. It matters not what reason your own nation's imperialism justifies itself, what matters is that it is indeed imperialism! And if there is one elementary position above all in revolutionary politics, it is that imperialism must be defeated at all costs.

What is counterposed? What is the alternative? First and foremost is that basic principle, sewn into the very fabric of revolutionary politics by Lenin, of national self-determination. Kurdish military forces and political organizations, protecting and representing Kurdish majority areas, must be defended. Kurds have a right to decide their own fate, as an independent nation or otherwise, against all who would oppose them.

When Kurdish soldiers defend Kurdish lands, we raise our voices in support, and will do everything in our power to aid their cause. When Afrin is invaded by Turkish military forces and their cronies, we should all say: Turkey out of Syria, victory to Kurdish forces in self-defense! We say the same if Turkey threatens to move into other Kurdish-populated areas. We say the same if Iraqi forces move into Iraqi Kurdish lands! We call for the defeat of invading forces, we call for support to Iraqi Kurd forces! Yet no political support to the feudal Barzani regime. Kurdish history is one of blood and betrayal, a nation is the least they deserve.

We must also speak up when mistakes are made. When Kurdish forces are used as mercenaries in the service of imperialist agendas, when they host large contingents of imperialist troops, when they sign long-term agreements with imperialist governments (as the Rojava administration has done as well), we must speak up!

When Arab national self-determination is violated, it matters little if the government that dominates them claims to be multi-ethnic and multi-religious when their administration is dominated by Kurds in all aspects. We must voice our opposition to Kurdish complacency and cooperation with imperialism. This is said with the truest hopes for Kurdish nationhood in our hearts, as the closest friends and strongest allies. You will never be free and safe so long as imperialist hands guide your decisions.

The Kurdish nationalist movement faces the utmost danger. Danger of both war and defeat, but also danger of being led astray down paths that put a different sort of chains on their people. While leftists can only do so much, it's important that we are right and correct in our positions according to revolutionary theory and history. We cannot tarnish our past if we hope to build a brighter future.

Daniel Rombro is a revolutionary Marxist who served with the YPG and Turkish comrades in Northern Syria for 6 months, from January to August 2016, in a military capacity.

The Significance of Karl Marx

By Chris Wright

I often have occasion to think that, as an "intellectual," I'm very lucky to be alive at this time in history, at the end of the long evolution from Herodotus and the pre-Socratic philosophers to Chomsky and modern science. One reason for my gratitude is simply that, as I wrote long ago in a moment of youthful idealism, "the past is a kaleidoscope of cultural achievements, or rather a cornucopian buffet whose fruits I can sample-a kiwi here, a mango there-a few papayas-and then choose which are my favorite delicacies-which are healthiest, which savory and sweet-and invent my own diet tailored to my needs. History can be appropriated by each person as he chooses," I gushed, "selectively employed in the service of his self-creation. The individual can be more complete than ever in the past!" But while this Goethean ideal of enlightened self-cultivation is important, perhaps an even greater advantage of living so late in history is that, if one has an open and critical mind, it is possible to have a far more sophisticated and correct understanding of the world than before. Intellectual history is littered with egregious errors, myths and lies that have beguiled billions of minds. Two centuries after the Enlightenment, however, the spirit of rationalism and science has achieved so many victories that countless millions have been freed from the ignorance and superstition of the past.

Few thinkers deserve more credit for the liberation of the human mind than Karl Marx. Aside from the heroes of the Scientific Revolution-Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Boyle, a few others-and their philosophical 'translators'-Francis Bacon, Spinoza , Voltaire, Diderot, David Hume-hardly any come close. But not only did Marx contribute to our intellectual liberation; he also, of course, made immense contributions to the struggle for liberation from oppressive power-structures (a struggle that, indeed, is a key component of the effort to free our minds). These two major achievements amply justify the outpouring of articles on the bicentennial of his birth, and in fact, I think, call for yet another one, to consider in more depth both his significance and his shortcomings.

My focus in this article is going to be on his ideas, not on his life or his activism. He was certainly an inspiration in the latter respect, but it is his writings that are timeless. The fanatical and violent hatred they've always elicited from the enemies of human progress, the spokesmen of a power-loving, money-worshipping misanthropy , is the most eloquent proof of their value.

*

The central reason for Marx's importance and fame is, of course, that he gave us the most sophisticated elaboration of the most fundamental concept in social analysis: class.

He was far from the only thinker to emphasize class. One might even say that the primary of class verges on common sense (despite what postmodernists think-on whom, see below). In his Politics, Aristotle already interpreted society according to the divergent interests of the poor and the rich. The semi-conservative James Madison, like other Enlightenment figures, agreed, as is clear from his famous Federalist No. 10:

[T]he most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes actuated by different sentiments and views.

Could anything be more obvious than this proto-historical materialism?

But Marx was unique in systematically expounding this materialism and grounding it in rigorous analysis of production relations-the concept of which he practically invented, or at least self-consciously elevated to a determining status and analyzed with exhaustive thoroughness. As everyone passingly familiar with Marxism knows, such notions as exploitation, surplus, surplus-value, and class struggle acquired a quasi-scientific-which is to say exact and precisely explanatory-character in the context of Marx's investigation of production relations, in particular those of capitalism.

Given that historical materialism is often ridiculed and rejected, it isn't out of place here to give a simplified account of its basic premises, an account that shows how uncontroversial these premises ought to be. This is especially desirable in a time when even self-styled Marxists feel compelled, due to the cultural sway held by feminism and identity politics, to deny that class has priority over other variables such as gender, sexuality, and race.

The explanatory (and therefore strategic, for revolutionaries) primacy of class can be established on simple a priori grounds, quite apart from empirical sociological or historical analysis. One has only to reflect that access to resources-money, capital, technology-is of unique importance to life, being key to survival, to a high quality of life, to political power, to social and cultural influence; and access to (or control over) resources is determined ultimately by class position, one's position in the social relations of production. The owner of the means of production, i.e., the capitalist, has control over more resources than the person who owns only his labor-power, which means he is better able to influence the political process (for example by bribing politicians) and to propagate ideas and values that legitimate his dominant position and justify the subordination of others. These two broad categories of owners and workers have opposing interests, most obviously in the inverse relation between wages and profits. This antagonism of interests is the "class struggle," a struggle that need not always be explicit or conscious but is constantly present on an implicit level, indeed is constitutive of the relationship between capitalist and worker. The class struggle-that is, the structure and functioning of economic institutions-can be called the foundation of society, the dynamic around which society tends to revolve, because, again, it is through class that institutions and actors acquire the means to influence social life.

These simple, commonsense reflections suffice to establish the meaning and validity of Marx's infamous, "simplistic," "reductionist" contrast between the economic "base" and the political, cultural, and ideological "superstructure." Maybe his language here was misleading and metaphorical. He was only sketching his historical materialism in a short preface, the Preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, and could hardly have foreseen that generations of academic sophists would later pore over his words, pick at them, cavil at them, fling casuistries at each other until a vast scholarly literature had been produced debating Marxian "economic determinism." As if the relative primacy of economic institutions-which is to say relations of production, class structures-that are, by definition, directly involved in the accumulation and distribution of material resources and thus power, isn't anything but a truism, and can be seen as such on the basis of such elementary reasoning as in the preceding paragraph.

The Communist Manifesto's epoch-making claim, therefore, that the history of all complex societies has been the history of class struggle is not ridiculous or oversimplifying, contrary to what has been claimed a thousand times in scholarship and the popular press; it is, broadly speaking, accurate, if "class struggle" is understood to mean not only explicit conflict between classes (and class-subgroups; see the above quotation from Madison) but also the implicit antagonism of interests between classes, which constitutes the structure of economic institutions. Particular class structures/dynamics, together with the level of development of productive forces they determine and are expressed through, provide the basic institutional context around which a given politics and culture are fleshed out.[1]

Thus, to argue, as feminists, queer theorists, and confused Marxists like Peter Frase are wont to, that class is of no special significance compared to group identities like gender and race is quite mistaken. Neither feminism nor anti-racist activism targets such institutional structures as the relation between capitalist and worker; or, to the extent that these movements do, they become class-oriented and lose their character as strictly feminist or anti-racist. If you want a society of economic democracy, in which economic exploitation, "income inequality," mass poverty, imperialism, militarism, ecological destruction, and privatization of resources are done away with, the goal of your activism has to be to abolish capitalist institutions-the omnipotence of the profit motive, the dictatorial control of capitalist over worker-and not simply misogyny or vicious treatment of minorities. These issues are important, but only anti-capitalism is properly revolutionary, involving a total transformation of society (because a transformation of the very structures of institutions, not merely who is allowed into the privileged positions).

Moreover, as plenty of feminists and Black Lives Matter activists well know, you can't possibly achieve the maximal goals that identity politics pursues while remaining in a capitalist society. Most or all of the oppression that minorities experience is precisely a result of capitalism's perverse incentives, and of the concentration of power in a tiny greedy elite. This ties into the fact that, since the time of Marx and Engels, a colossal amount of empirical scholarship has shown the power of the Marxian analytical framework. (I summarize some of the scholarship here.) Even ideologies of race, nation, and gender are largely a product of class-of slavery and its aftermath in the U.S., of European imperialism , of attempts by the Victorian upper class to control working-class women's lives and sexuality.

In the case of religious fundamentalism in the U.S., for example, historians have shown that since early in the twentieth century, and especially since the 1970s, conservative sectors of the business community have subsidized right-wing evangelical Christianity in order to beat back unionism and liberalism, which have been tarred and feathered as communist, socialist, godless, etc. More generally, for centuries the ruling class has propagated divisive ideas of race, religion, nationality, and gender in order, partly, to fragment the working class and so control it more easily and effectively. By now, leftists see such arguments, rightly, as truisms.

On the other hand, most intellectuals, including academically trained leftists, also see Marxian "economistic" arguments as overly simplifying and reductivist. Mainstream intellectuals in particular consider it a sign of unsophistication that Marxism tends to abstract from complicating factors and isolate the class variable. "Reality is complicated!" they shout in unison. "You also have to take into account the play of cultural discourses, the diversity of subjective identities, etc. Class isn't everything!" Somehow it is considered an intellectual vice, and not a virtue, to simplify for the sake of understanding. It's true, after all, that the world is complex; and so in order to understand it one has to simplify it a bit, explain it in terms of general principles. As in the natural sciences, a single principle can never explain everything; but, if it is the right one, it can explain a great deal.

Noam Chomsky, with characteristic eloquence, defended this point in an interview in 1990 . I might as well quote him at length. Since he is in essence just an idiosyncratic and anarchistic Marxist - in fact one of the most consistent Marxists of all , despite his rejection of the label-his arguments are exactly those to which every thoughtful materialist is committed.

Question: But you're often accused of being too black-and-white in your analysis, of dividing the world into evil élites and subjugated or mystified masses. Does your approach ever get in the way of basic accuracy?

Answer: I do approach these questions a bit differently than historical scholarship generally does. But that's because humanistic scholarship tends to be irrational. I approach these questions pretty much as I would approach my scientific work. In that work-in any kind of rational inquiry-what you try to do is identify major factors, understand them, and see what you can explain in terms of them. Then you always find a periphery of unexplained phenomena, and you introduce minor factors and try to account for those phenomena. What you're always searching for is the guiding principles: the major effects, the dominant structures. In order to do that, you set aside a lot of tenth-order effects. Now, that's not the method of humanistic scholarship, which tends in a different direction. Humanistic scholarship-I'm caricaturing a bit for simplicity-says every fact is precious; you put it alongside every other fact. That's a sure way to guarantee you'll never understand anything. If you tried to do that in the sciences, you wouldn't even reach the level of Babylonian astronomy.

I don't think the [social] field of inquiry is fundamentally different in this respect. Take what we were talking about before: institutional facts. Those are major factors. There are also minor factors, like individual differences, microbureaucratic interactions, or what the President's wife told him at breakfast. These are all tenth-order effects. I don't pay much attention to them, because I think they all operate within a fairly narrow range which is predictable by the major factors. I think you can isolate those major factors. You can document them quite well; you can illustrate them in historical practice; you can verify them. If you read the documentary record critically, you can find them very prominently displayed, and you can find that other things follow from them. There's also a range of nuances and minor effects, and I think these two categories should be very sharply separated.

When you proceed in this fashion, it might give someone who's not used to such an approach the sense of black-and-white, of drawing lines too clearly. It purposely does that. That's what is involved when you try to identify major, dominant effects and put them in their proper place.

But instead of trying to systematically explain society by starting from a general principle and evaluating its utility, then proceeding to secondary factors like race or sex and using them to elucidate phenomena not explained by the dominant principle, the approach that tends to prevail in the humanities and social sciences is a sort of methodological relativism. In historical scholarship , for example, especially social history, you're generally expected just to describe things from different perspectives. You should discuss gender, and race, and class, and various relevant "discourses," and how people identified themselves, how they reacted to given developments, and perhaps issues of sexuality and the body, etc. Some knowledge may be gained, but often this work amounts merely to unanchored description for its own sake - description from an idealist perspective , not a materialist one. The anti-Marxian idealism is an essential quality of this mainstream writing, and is quite dominant in the humanities and social sciences.

*

On the bicentennial of Marx's birth, it's intellectually shameful (though predictable) that idealism is still the primary tendency in scholarship and journalism. I've criticized bourgeois idealism elsewhere, for examplehere,here, and here, but it is worth discussing again because of how dominant it is, and how damaging.

What idealism means, of course, is an emphasis on ideas or consciousness over material factors, whether "social being"-economic conditions, institutional imperatives (the need to follow the rules of given social structures), interests as opposed to ideals or ideologies, and the necessities of biological survival-or, in the context of philosophical idealism such as that of Berkeley, Schopenhauer, and the logical positivists , the existence of mind-independent matter. Philosophical idealism, while no longer as respectable as it once was, persists in forms less honest and direct than that of Berkeley, especially in postmodernist circles and schools of thought influenced by the Continental tradition (e.g., phenomenology) and even American pragmatism. More important, though, is the type of idealism that disparages class and social being.

This idealism comes in different varieties. Its most common manifestation is the uncritical tendency to take seriously the rhetoric and self-interpretations of the powerful. As Marx understood and Chomsky likes to point out, humans are expert at deceiving themselves, at attributing noble motives to themselves when baser desires of power, money, recognition, institutional pressures, etc. are what really motivate them. The powerful in particular love to clothe themselves in the garb of moral grandeur. They insist that they're invading a country in order to protect human rights or spread democracy and freedom; that they're expanding prisons to keep communities safer, and deporting immigrants to keep the country safe; that by cutting social welfare programs they're trying honestly to reduce the budget deficit, and by cutting taxes on the rich they only want to stimulate the economy. When journalists and intellectuals take seriously such threadbare, predictable rhetoric, they're disregarding the lesson of Marxism that individuals aren't even the main actors here in the first place; institutions are. The individuals can tell themselves whatever stories they want about their own behavior, but the primary causes of the design and implementation of political policies are institutional dynamics, power dynamics. Political and economic actors represent certain interests, and they act in accordance with those interests. That's all.

The example I like to give of academics' naïve idealism is Odd Arne Westad's celebrated book The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times , which won the Bancroft Prize in 2006. Its thesis is that "the United States and the Soviet Union were driven to intervene in the Third World by the ideologies inherent in their politics. Locked in conflict over the very concept of European modernity…Washington and Moscow needed to change the world in order to prove the universal applicability of their ideologies…" It's a remarkably unsophisticated argument, which is backed up by remarkably unsophisticated invocations of policymakers' rhetoric. It rises to the level of farce. At one point, after quoting a State Department spokesman on George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq-"I believe in freedom as a right, a responsibility, a destiny… The United States stands for freedom, defends freedom, advances freedom, and enlarges the community of freedom because we think it is the right thing to do"-Westad states ingenuously that the Iraq invasion was a perfect example of how "freedom and security have been, and remain today, the driving forces of U.S. foreign policy." As if gigantic government bureaucracies are moved to act out of pure altruism!

Related to this idealism is the self-justifying faith of liberal intellectuals that ideals truly matter in the rough-and-tumble of political and economic life. John Maynard Keynes gave a classic exposition of this faith in the last paragraph of his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, which has stroked the egos of academics for generations:

…[T]he ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. [?!] Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas… [S]oon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.

These are backward fantasies, which grow out of a poor sociological imagination. The point is that the ideas that come to be accepted as gospel are those useful to vested interests, which are the entities that have the resources to propagate them. (In the typically bourgeois language of impersonal 'automaticity,' Keynes refers to "the gradual encroachment of ideas." But ideas don't spread of themselves; they are propagated and subsidized by people and institutions whose interests they express. This is why "the ruling ideas of a society are the ideas of its ruling class," which has the resources to spread them.)

Keynes' famous book itself contributed not at all to the so-called Keynesian policies of FDR and Hitler and others; in fact, such policies were already being pursued by Baron Haussmann in France in the 1850s, because they were useful in giving employment to thousands of workers and raising aggregate demand and thereby economic growth. Is it likely that had Keynes not published his book in 1936, the U.S. government during and after World War II would have pursued radically different, un-Keynesian economic policies? Hardly. Because they were useful to vested interests, those policies were bound to be adopted-and economists, tools of the ruling class, were bound to systematize their theoretical rationalizations sooner or later.

But liberals continue to believe that if only they can convince politicians of their intellectual or moral errors, they can persuade them to change their policies. Paul Krugman's columns in the New York Times provide amusing examples of this sort of pleading. It's telling that he always ends his analysis right before getting to a realistic proposal: he scrupulously avoids saying that for his ideas to be enacted it's necessary to revive unions on a systemic scale, or to organize radical and disruptive social movements to alter the skewed class structure. Such an analytic move would require that he step into the realm of Marxism, abandoning his liberal idealism, and would thus bar him from being published in the New York Times.

If I may be permitted to give another example of liberal idealism: I recall reading a few years ago Richard Goodwin's popular book Remembering America: A Voice from the Sixties (1988), a memoir of his time as speechwriter and adviser to John F. Kennedy. It's a flabby centrist whitewashing of history, a nostalgic apotheosis of Kennedy and America and democracy, etc., not worth reading on its merits. However- to quote myself-

The book is enlightening as a window into the mind of the Harvard liberal, revelatory of the sort of thoughts this person has, his worldview. Liberalism from the inside. A prettified ideology, bland but appealing, with the reference to spiritual truths, reason, ideals of harmony and peace, a rising tide lifting all boats, the fundamental compatibility of all interests in society (except for those we don't like, of course), the nonexistence of class struggle, government's ability to solve all social ills, history as a progressive battle between knowledge and ignorance, light and darkness, reason and unreason, open-mindedness and bigotry, and any other set of binary abstractions you can think of. The whole ideology hovers above reality in the heavenly mists of Hope and Progress. It's all very pretty, hence its momentary resurgence-which quickly succumbed to disillusionment-with Barack Obama. And hence its ability to get through the filters of the class structure, to become an element in the hegemonic American discourse, floating above institutional realities like some imaginary golden idol one worships in lieu of common sense. It serves a very useful purpose for business, averting people's eyes from the essential incompatibility of class interests toward the idea of Gradual Progress by means of tinkering at the margins, making nice policies.

Such is the function of liberal idealism for the ruling class.

One other type of idealism that must be mentioned is the postmodernist variety (or rather varieties). It's ironic that postmodernist intellectuals, with their rejection of "meta-narratives" and the idea of objective truth, consider themselves hyper-sophisticated, because in fact they're less sophisticated than even unreflective doctrinaire Marxists. They're not so much post-Marxist as pre-Marxist, in that they haven't assimilated the important intellectual lessons of the Marxist tradition.

In both its subjectivism and its focus on "discourses," "texts," "meanings," "vocabularies," "cultures," and the like, postmodernism is idealistic-and relativistic. Foucault's Discipline and Punish, for example, tends to ignore class and particular economic and political contexts, instead concentrating on the opinions of reformers, philosophers, politicians, and scientists. (Far better-more illuminating-is Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer's Marxist classic Punishment and Social Structure , published in 1939.) Later on things got even worse, as with Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler's much-heralded collection Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (1997). I can't go into depth here, so suffice it to say that this book, like so much of postmodernism, consists essentially of playing around with ideas of cultural "contestations" and the tensions involved in people's "negotiations" of disparate identities. The analyses are so particularistic and so purely descriptive, focusing, say, on (the cultural dimensions of) some little village in Senegal or some protest movement in Ecuador, that no interesting conclusions can be drawn. Instead there is a fluctuation between hyper-particularity and hyper-abstractness, as in the typical-and utterly truistic-"arguments" that the colonized had agency, that colonized cultures weren't totally passive, that "colonial regimes were neither monolithic nor omnipotent" (who has ever said they were?), that "meanings" of institutions "were continually being reshaped," and so on. After all the "analysis," one is left asking, "Okay, so what?" It's all just masturbatory play undertaken for the sake of itself. No wonder this sort of writing has been allowed to become culturally dominant.

The postmodern focus on the body, too, is, ironically, idealistic. Subjectivistic. Which is to say it's more politically safe than Marxism, since it doesn't challenge objective structures of class (except insofar as such subjectivism, or identity politics, allies itself with a class focus). Any intellectual who finds himself being accepted by mainstream institutions, as hordes of Foucault-loving postmodernists and feminists have-contrary to the treatment of materialists like Gabriel Kolko, Thomas Ferguson, Jesse Lemisch, David Noble, Staughton Lynd, Rajani Kanth , Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Glenn Greenwald, and many others-should immediately start to question whether his ideas get to the heart of the matter or do not, instead, distract from the workings of power.

Said differently, the problem with identity politics is that it doesn't completely reject Margaret Thatcher's infamous saying, "There is no such thing as society." It takes a semi-individualistic approach to analysis and activism. A revolutionary answers Thatcher with the statement, "There is no such thing as the individual"-in the sense that the focus must be on institutional structures, which mold us and dominate us. To the degree that the focus turns toward the individual, or his identity, his body, his subjectivity, the radicalism becomes more anodyne (while not necessarily ceasing to be oppositional or important).

There is a great deal more to be said about postmodernism. For instance, I could make the obvious point that its particularism and relativism, its elevation of fragmentary "narratives" and its Kuhnian emphasis on the supposed incommensurability of different "paradigms," is just as useful to the ruling class as its idealism, since it denies general truths about class struggle and capitalist dynamics. (See Georg Lukács' masterpiece The Destruction of Reason for a history of how such relativism and idealism contributed to the cultural climate that made Hitler possible.) Or I could argue that the rationalism and universalism of the Radical Enlightenment , which found its fulfillment in Marxism, is, far from being dangerous or containing the seeds of its own destruction-as postmodernists and confused eclectic Marxists like Theodor Adorno have argued-the only hope for humanity.

Instead I'll only observe, in summary, that idealism is not new: it is as old as the hills, and Marx made an immortal contribution in repudiating it. Idealism has always afflicted mainstream intellectual culture, all the way back to antiquity, when Plato viewed the world as consisting of shadows of ideal Forms, Hindus and Buddhists interpreted it in spiritual terms and as being somehow illusory, and Stoics were telling "the slave in the mines that if he would only think aright he would be happy" (to quote the classicist W. W. Tarn ). Idealism persisted through the Christian Middle Ages, Confucian China, and Hindu India. It dominated the Enlightenment, when philosophes were arguing that ignorance and superstition were responsible for mass suffering and a primordial conspiracy of priests had plunged society into darkness. Hegel, of course, was an arch-idealist. Finally a thinker came along who renounced this whole tradition and systematized the common sense of the hitherto despised "rabble," the workers, the peasants, the women struggling to provide for their children-namely that ideas are of little significance compared to class and material conditions. The real heroes, the real actors in history are not the parasitic intellectuals or the marauding rulers but the people working day in and day out to maintain society, to preserve and improve the conditions of civilization for their descendants.

Had there been no Marx or Engels, revolutionaries and activists would still have targeted class structures, as they were doing before Marxism had achieved widespread influence. Unions would have organized workers, radicals would have established far-left organizations, insurrections would have occurred in countries around the world. Marx's role has been to provide clarity and guidance, to serve as a symbol of certain tendencies of thought and action. His uniquely forceful and acute analyses of history and capitalism have been a font of inspiration for both thinkers and activists, a spur, a stimulus to keep their eyes on the prize, so to speak. His prediction of the collapse of capitalism from its internal contradictions has given hope and confidence to millions-perhaps too much confidence, in light of the traditional over-optimism of Marxists. But having such a brilliant authority on their side, such a teacher, has surely been of inestimable benefit to the oppressed.

As for the narrow task of "interpreting the world," the enormous body of work by Marxists from the founder to the present totally eclipses the contributions of every other school of thought. From economics to literary criticism, nothing else comes remotely close.

*

Marx did, however, make mistakes. No one is infallible. It's worth considering some of those mistakes, in case we can learn from them.

The ones I'll discuss here, which are by far the most significant, have to do with his conception of socialist revolution. Both the timeline he predicted and his sketchy remarks on how the revolution would come to pass were wrong. I've addressed these matters here , and at greater length in my book Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States , but they deserve a more condensed treatment too.

Regarding the timeline: it has long been a commonplace that Marx failed to foresee Keynesianism and the welfare state. His biggest blind-spot was nationalism, or in general the power of the capitalist nation-state as an organizing principle of social life. Ironically, only a Marxian approach can explain why national structures have achieved the power they have, i.e., why the modern centralized nation-state rose to dominance in the first place. (It has to do with the interconnected rise of capitalism and the state over the last 700 years, in which each "principle"-the economic and the political, the market and the state-was indispensable to the other. See, e.g., Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times . )

In essence, while Marx was right to locate a capitalist tendency toward relative or even absolute immiseration of the working class, he was wrong that this tendency could not be effectively counteracted, at least for a long time, by opposing pressures. That is, he underestimated the power of tendencies toward integration of the working class into the dominant order, toward "pure and simple trade-unionism," toward the state's stabilizing management of the economy, and toward workers' identification not only with the abstract notion of a social class that spans continents but also with the more concrete facts of ethnicity, race, trade, immediate community, and nation. These forces have historically militated against the revolutionary tendencies of class polarization and international working-class solidarity. They have both fragmented the working class and made possible the successes of reformism-the welfare state, social democracy, and the legitimization of mass collective bargaining in the wake of the Great Depression and World War II. Like other Enlightenment thinkers, Marx was too optimistic.

On the other hand, he was right that capitalism isn't sustainable-because of its "contradictions," its dysfunctional social consequences, and also its effects on the natural environment. No compromises between capital and wage-labor, such as the postwar Keynesian compromise, can last. The market is just too anarchic, and capital too voracious. Stability is not possible. Sooner or later, with the continued development of the productive forces, capital mobility will increase, markets-including the labor market-will become more integrated worldwide, elite institutional networks will thicken worldwide, and organized labor will lose whatever power it had in the days of limited capital mobility. In retrospect, and with a bit of analysis , one can see that these tendencies were irresistible. Genuine socialism (workers' democratic control) on an international or global scale never could have happened in the twentieth century, which was still the age of oligopolistic, imperialistic capitalism, even state capitalism. In fact, it wasn't until the twenty-first century that the capitalist mode of production was consolidated across the entire globe, a development Marx assumed was necessary as a prerequisite for socialism (or communism).

The irony, therefore - and history is chock-full of dialectical irony - is that authentic revolutionary possibilities of post-capitalism couldn't open up until the victories of the left in the twentieth century had been eroded and defeated by hyper-mobile capital. The corporatist formations of social democracy and industrial unionism, fully integrated into the capitalist nation-state, had to decline in order for class polarization in the core capitalist states to peak again, deep economic crisis to return, and radical anti-capitalist movements to reappear on a massive level (as we may expect they'll do in the coming decades). Many Marxists don't like this type of thinking, according to which things have to get worse before they get better, but Marx himself looked forward to economic crisis because he understood it was only such conditions that could impel workers to join together en masse and fight for something as radical as a new social order.

The best evidence for the "things have to get worse before they get better" thesis is that the relatively non-barbarous society of the postwar years in the West was made possible only by the upheavals of the Great Depression and World War II, which mobilized the left on such an epic scale and so discredited fascism that the ruling class finally consented to a dramatic improvement of conditions for workers. Similarly, it's quite possible that decades from now people will think of neoliberalism, with its civilization-endangering horrors, as having been a tool of (in Hegel's words) the "cunning" of historical reason by precipitating the demise of the very society whose consummation it was and making possible the rise of something new.

But how will such a revolution occur? This is another point on which Marx tripped up. Despite his eulogy of the non-statist Paris Commune, Marx was no anarchist: he expected that the proletariat would have to seize control of the national state and then carry out the social revolution from the commanding heights of government. This is clear from the ten-point program laid out in the Communist Manifesto-the specifics of which he repudiated in later years, but apparently not the general conception of statist reconstruction of the economy. It's doubtful, for example, that he would have rejected his earlier statement that "The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class." Moreover, he seems to have endorsed Engels' statement in Anti-Dühring that "The proletariat seizes state power, and then transforms the means of production into state property." It appears, then, that both he and Engels were extreme statists, even though, like anarchists, they hoped and expected that the state would (somehow, inexplicably) disappear eventually.

In these beliefs they were mistaken. The social revolution can't occur after a total seizure of state power by "the proletariat" (which isn't a unitary entity but contains divisions)-for several reasons. First, this conception of revolution contradicts the Marxian understanding of social dynamics, a point that few or no Marxists appear ever to have appreciated. It exalts a centralized conscious will as being able to plan social evolution in advance, a notion that is utterly undialectical. According to "dialectics," history happens behind the backs of historical actors, whose intentions never work out exactly as they're supposed to. Marx was wise in his admonition that we should never trust the self-interpretations of political actors. And yet he suspends this injunction when it comes to the dictatorship of the proletariat: these people's designs are supposed to work out perfectly and straightforwardly, despite the massive complexity and dialectical contradictions of society.

The statist idea of revolution is also wrong to privilege the political over the economic. In supposing that through sheer political will one can transform an authoritarian, exploitative economy into a liberatory, democratic one, Marx is, in effect, reversing the order of "dominant causality" such that politics determines the economy (whereas in fact the economy "determines"-loosely and broadly speaking-politics). [2] Marxism itself suggests that the state can't be socially creative in this radical way. And when it tries to be, what results, ironically, is overwhelming bureaucracy and even greater authoritarianism than before. (While the twentieth century's experiences with so-called "Communism" or "state socialism" happened in relatively non-industrialized societies, not advanced capitalist ones as Marx anticipated, the dismal record is at least suggestive.)

Fundamental to these facts is that if the conquest of political power occurs in a still-capitalist economy, revolutionaries have to contend with the institutional legacies of capitalism: relations of coercion and domination condition everything the government does, and there is no way to break free of them. They can't be magically transcended through political will; to think they can, or that the state can "wither away" even as it becomes more expansive and dominating, is to adopt a naïve idealism.

Corresponding to all these errors are the flaws in Marx's abstract conceptualization of revolution, according to which revolution happens when the production relations turn into fetters on the use and development of productive forces. One problem with this formulation is that it's meaningless: at what point exactly do production relations begin to fetter productive forces? How long does this fettering have to go on before the revolution begins in earnest? How does one determine the degree of fettering? It would seem that capitalism has fettered productive forces for a very long time, for example in its proneness to recessions and stagnation, in artificial obstacles to the diffusion of knowledge such as intellectual copyright laws, in underinvestment in public goods such as education and transportation, and so forth. On the other hand, science and technology continue to develop, as shown by recent momentous advances in information technology. So what is the utility of this idea of "fettering"?

In fact, it can be made useful if we slightly reconceptualize the theory of revolution. Rather than a conflict simply between production relations and the development of productive forces, there is a conflict between two types of production relations-two modes of production - one of which uses productive forces in a more socially rational and "un-fettering" way than the other . The more progressive mode slowly develops in the womb of the old society as it decays, i.e., as the old dominant mode of production succumbs to crisis and stagnation. In being relatively dynamic and 'socially effective,' the emergent mode of production attracts adherents and resources, until it becomes ever more visible and powerful. The old regime can't eradicate it; it spreads internationally and gradually transforms the economy, to such a point that the forms and content of politics change with it. Political entities become its partisans, and finally decisive seizures of power by representatives of the emergent mode of production become possible, because reactionary defenders of the old regime have lost their dominant command over resources. And so, over generations, a social revolution transpires.

This conceptual revision saves Marx's intuition by giving it more meaning: the "fettering" is not absolute but is in relation to a more effective mode of production that is, so to speak, competing with the old stagnant one. The most obvious concrete instance of this conception of revolution is the long transition from feudalism to capitalism, during which the feudal mode became so hopelessly outgunned by the capitalist that, in retrospect, the long-term outcome of the "bourgeois revolutions" from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries was never in doubt. Capitalism was bound to triumph after it had reached a certain level of development.

But the important point is that capitalist interests could never have decisively "seized the state" until the capitalist economy had already made tremendous inroads against feudalism. Likewise, socialist or post-capitalist interests can surely not take over national states until they have vast material resources on their side, such as can only be acquired through large-scale participation in productive activities. As the capitalist economy descends into global crisis/stagnation over the next twenty, fifty, and a hundred years, one can predict that an "alternative economy," a "solidarity economy" of cooperative and socialized relations of production will emerge both in society's interstices and, sooner or later, in the mainstream. In many cases it will be sponsored and promoted by the state (on local, regional, and national levels), in an attempt to assuage social discontent; but its growth will only have the effect of hollowing out the hegemony of capitalism and ultimately facilitating its downfall. And thereby the downfall, or radical transformation, of the capitalist state.

I can't go into the detail necessary to flesh out this gradualist notion of revolution, but in my abovementioned book I've argued that it not only radically revises the Marxian conception (on the basis of a single conceptual alteration), in effect updating it for the twenty-first century, but that it is thoroughly grounded in Marxian concepts-in fact, is truer to the fundamentals of historical materialism than Marx's own vision of proletarian revolution was. The new society has to be erected on the foundation of emerging production relations, which cannot but take a very long time to broadly colonize society. And class struggle, that key Marxian concept, will of course be essential to the transformation: decades of continuous conflict between the masters and the oppressed, including every variety of disruptive political activity, will attend the construction-from the grassroots up to the national government-of anti-capitalist modes of production.

Glimmers of non-capitalist economic relations are already appearing even in the reactionary United States. In the last decade more and more scholars, journalists, and activists have investigated and promoted these new relations; one has but to read Gar Alperovitz, Ellen Brown , and all the contributors toYes! Magazine, Shareable.net, Community-Wealth.org, etc. A transnational movement is growing beneath the radar of the mass media. It is still in an embryonic state, but as activists publicize its successes, ever more people will be drawn to it in their search for a solution to the dysfunctional economy of the ancien régime. Local and national governments, unaware of its long-term anti-capitalist implications, are already supporting the alternative economy, as I describe in my book.

I'll also refer the reader to the book for responses to the conventional Marxian objections that cooperatives, for instance, are forced to compromise their principles by operating in the market economy, and that interstitial developments are not revolutionary. At this point in history, it should be obvious to everyone that a socialist revolution cannot occur in one fell swoop, one great moment of historical rupture, as "the working class" or its Leninist leaders storm the State, shoot all their opponents, and impose sweeping diktats to totally restructure society. (What an incredibly idealistic and utopian conception that is!) The conquest of political power will occur piecemeal, gradually; it will suffer setbacks and then proceed to new victories, then suffer more defeats, etc., in a century-long (or longer) process that happens at different rates in different countries. It will be a time of world-agony, especially as climate change will be devastating civilization; but the sheer numbers of people whose interests will lie in a transcendence of corporate capitalism will constitute a formidable weapon on the side of progress.

One reasonable, though rather optimistic, blueprint for the early stages of this process is the British Labour Party's Manifesto, which lays out principles that can be adapted to other countries. Such a plan will necessarily encounter so much resistance that, early on, even if the Labour Party comes to power, only certain parts of it will be able to be implemented. But plans such as this will provide ideals that can be approximated ever more closely as the international left grows in strength; and eventually more radical goals may become feasible.

But we must follow Marx, again, in shunning speculation on the specifics of this long evolution. He is sometimes criticized for saying too little about what socialism or communism would look like, but this was in fact very democratic and sensible of him. It is for the people engaged in struggles to hammer out their own institutions, "to learn in the dialectic of history," as Rosa Luxemburg said. Nor is it possible, in any case, to foresee the future in detail. All we can do is try to advance the struggle and leave the rest to our descendants.

*

Marx is practically inexhaustible, and one cannot begin to do him justice in a single article. His work has something for both anarchists and Leninists, for existentialists and their critics, cultural theorists and economists, philosophers and even scientists . Few thinkers have ever been subjected to such critical scrutiny and yet held up so well over centuries. To attack him, as usefully idiotic lackeys of the capitalist class do , for being responsible for twentieth-century totalitarianism is naïve idealism of the crudest sort. Ideas do not make history, though they can be useful tools in the hands of reactionaries or revolutionaries. They can be misunderstood, too, and used inappropriately or in ways directly contrary to their spirit - as the Christianity of Jesus has, for example.

But in our time of despair and desperation, with the future of the species itself in doubt, there is one more valid criticism to be made of Marx: he was too sectarian. Too eager to attack people on the left with whom he disagreed. In this case, Chomsky's attitude is more sensible: the left must unite and not exhaust its energy in internecine battles. Let's be done with all the recriminations between Marxists and anarchists and left-liberals, all the squabbling that has gone on since the mid-nineteenth century. It's time to unite against the threat of fascism and-not to speak over-grandiosely-save life on Earth.

Let's honor the memory of all the heroes and martyrs who have come before us by rising to the occasion, at this climactic moment of history.

Notes

[1] In my summary of G. E. M. de Ste. Croix's 1981 masterpiece The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, from the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests , I added the following thoughts to the foregoing account: "Class struggle is central to history in still more ways; for instance, virtually by analytical necessity it has been, directly or indirectly, the main cause of popular resistance and rebellions. Likewise, the ideologies and cultures of the lower classes have been in large measure sublimations of class interest and conflict. Most wars, too, have been undertaken so that rulers (effectively the ruling class) could gain control over resources, which is sort of the class struggle by other means. Wars grow out of class dynamics, and are intended to benefit the rich and powerful. In any case, the very tasks of survival in complex societies are structured by class antagonisms, which determine who gets what resources when and in what ways."

[2] In reality, of course, political and economic relations are fused together. But analytically one can distinguish economic activities from narrowly political, governmental activities.

America's Gun Fetish is a Symptom of a Deeper Sickness

By Ben Luongo

The tragic shooting that took place at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in February breathed new life into America's gun debate. Surviving students confronted political leaders about gun violence during a CNN town-hall meeting, President Trump invited victims to the White House for a "listening session," and March for Our Lives events spread across the country demanding a change in U.S. gun laws.

Unfortunately, none of this has led to any real policy changes, and we continues to debate our gun laws after yet another shooting at Santa Fe High School took the lives of 10 students and inured 13 others. There have already been 22 school shootings in 2018 , and the number of students and teachers killed by guns at school has exceeded the number of active-duty military deaths this year.

Other governments around the world have successfully lowered their gun violence by taking proactive steps to restrict access to firearms. However, America's conservative legislators in power continue to peddle the same tired arguments against changing America's gun laws. The most common attempt for gun advocates to frame the debate in their favor is to focus on mental health instead of gun control. For instance, the only specific solution Texas governor Gregg Abbott offered in response to the Santa Fe High School shooting was to improve mental health resources. Representative Randy Weber, who represents the Texas district the shooting took place in, also emphasized to reporters the importance of mental health despite the fact that he was asked a question about gun control. President Trump's televised response to the shooting on Friday mentioned nothing about gun control, but his speech two weeks earlier to the NRA conference focused primarily on mental health .

Conservative legislators argued the same points after the Parkland shooting. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan responded to the high school shooting saying "As you know mental health is often a big problem underlying these tragedies […] We want to make sure that if someone is in the mental health system that they do not get a gun if they should not have a gun." President Trump's first responded with a tweet stating that: "So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled from school for bad and erratic behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities, again and again!" Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Committee, then-CEO of the National Rifle Association Wayne LaPierre blamed America's mental health system as one of the major problems behind gun violence.

To be absolutely honest, the attempt to frame the debate as a mental health problem is a conservative tactic meant to deflect attention from sincere conversations about gun regulations. The relationship between gun violence and mental health is, nonetheless, a concern on the minds of the majority of Americans. According to a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll , 77% of the respondents say that the Parkland shooting could have been prevented with more effective healthcare screening, where only 58% of those respondent agreed that gun control could have prevented the shooting.

America's concern with mental health and violence is understandable, but it is the wrong way to think about America's unique gun problem. The simple fact is that mental health is not a predictor of gun violence or mass shootings. Mental illness only explains 14.8% of mass-shooting (as defined by a shooter killing four or more people). Mental illness becomes even less important when considering that it constitutes only one percent of all gun related homicides . In fact, only three to five percent of violent crimes are tied to serious mental health issues. The narrative that shooters suffer from a mental illness only stigmatizes those who do suffer from legitimate mental or emotional health issues who are more likely to be the victims of such crimes rather than the offender.

If we want to be honest about what all of the shooters have in common then we need to have serious conversations about gender and America's culture of toxic masculinity. The grand majority of shooters are men , most of them white. Out of the 94 mass shootings in America since 1984, 92 of them were committed by men (that's 98% of mass shootings). Men actually dominate the statistics on violent crime in whole. In fact, 90% of murders are committed by men . In general, gender is more effective predictor of gun violence than mental health is.

In no way does this suggest that men are inherently more violent than women. It may be tempting to interpret these numbers as indicative of real biological differences. However, modern psychology shows how men and women are much more alike than they are different and any real behavioral differences between the two have more to do with society than biology. If you want to understand why violence and antisocial behavior occurs along gender lines, then you have to consider the cultural messages that construct male and female gender roles. Specifically, America's gun epidemic reflects the social standards of masculinity that men are expected to meet.

In reality, America is still very much a patriarchal society. Men exercise more power than women in economics, politics, and culture. Economically, men are likely to be paid more than women for doing the same work. Men also make more money strait out of college despite the fact that women outperform men in college and graduate school . Politically, men control just over 80% of Congressional seats despite constituting only 50% of the population. As a result, women's health and rights issues are never fully represented appropriately in legislation. Culturally speaking, men dominate writing and directing positions in movies and TV. Woman only constitute 10% of the writers and directors of 2017's top 100 grossing movies. As a result, women's issues barely get highlighted in our public discussions. Just consider how long it took the #MeToo campaign to highlight systemic sexual abuse in Hollywood.

Indeed, our society sends messages to both men and women as to what we value and who should exercise power. Male politicians draft legislation that fails to address women's issues while making it easier to legally obtain a gun. Male writers and directors create the movies that place women in subordinate roles while celebrating the heroic use of male violence to save the day. Male employers manage the workplace where women still suffer from vocational discrimination and sexual harassment while men are more likely to enjoy economic success.

By all standards, this is a patriarchal society, and woman have to cope with the masculine structures working against them. As a result, women are more likely to suffer from mental and emotional distress , such as depression, anxiety disorders, PTSD, and low self-esteem. In fact, Women are twice as likely to suffer from depression . Despite the fact that women are more likely than men to suffer from these condition, it doesn't lead women to gun violence. Again, women constitute less than two percent of mass shootings. If mental health was a predictor of gun violence, then women would make up a larger percentage of violent gun offenders.

Instead, women are more likely to be the victims of gun violence committed by men. More than half of the mass shootings are situations of domestic violence and at least four out of five gun owners are men . The presence of a gun in a violent domestic relationship increases the woman's chance of being shot fivefold . In fact, 4.5 million women report that an intimate partner had threatened them with a gun at some point in their life. Regarding domestic violence in general, woman are the victims of domestic violence in 85% of the cases.

The gross amount of violence that men direct towards women, whether its gun violence, domestic abuse, sexual assault and rape, all reveals how men have internalized cultural messages of male superiority. The term used for this is 'toxic masculinity' which refers to the endorsement of stereotypical roles of male dominance, misogyny, and aggression. Research demonstrates the role that these cultural expectations play in male violence and coercion, especially when one's masculine identity comes under threat.

This is an important point to make because it illustrates how the patriarchy isn't just bad for women, it's bad for men too. Men are barraged daily with messages from the media, the military, professional sports, and the business sector that tell them how to be masculine. Such messages frame masculinity in terms of economics success, social power, physical strength, etc. This reveals the common theme behind the shooters. Most of the mass shooters have experienced what they see as threats to their masculinity - either they struggled as children to fit in or they had trouble meeting the social expectations of adulthood. Failing to meet these expectations, American shooters respond in ways meant to reaffirm their masculinity. Before they were known for their mass shooting, the grand majority of these shooters have all exhibited aggression towards women.

Omar Matteen, the shooter of the Pulse night club who killed 50 and injured 53, has a history of beating his wife .

Robert Lewis Dear, who killed three and injured nine at the Colorado Spring Planned Parenthood shooting, has a history of violence towards woman , including cases of domestic abuse against his two x-wives and a rape case in 1992.

Elliot Rodger, who killed six people at the Isle Vista Killings, uploaded a disturbing video where he said, "I don't know why you girls aren't attracted to me but I will punish you all for it …You will finally see that I am, in truth, the superior one, the true alpha male"

Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook Shooter, wrote a document where he disparaged women for being inherently selfish .

Dyllan Roof, the Charleston Church shooter, told his black victims that "you rape our women and you're taking over our country." Many sociologists have used the term benevolent sexism to explain his attitudes towards women

Seung-Hui Cho, the shooter behind the Virginia Tech shooting, had police called on him for stalking and harassing women .

Stephen Paddock, responsible for the concert shooting in Las Vegas, was known for regularly and public abusing his girlfriend , and paid prostitutes thousands of dollars for them to satisfy his rape fantasies .

Nikolas Cruz, the shooter behind the Parkland high school shooting, was abusive towards his girlfriend and got into a fight with her new boyfriend. He was also accused of stalking a female student . A friend said that he had to cease being friends with him after he would threaten his female friends.

The most recent shooter, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, also had a history of sexually aggressive behavior. Reports are now emerging of him harassing female students that he was interested in . Shana Fisher had to publicly tell him in class that she would not go out with him - he later killed her in the shooting. Other reports are coming out of him being picked on and emasculated by both his football teammates and coaches.

Of course America's gun problem is complex and can't be reduced to a single problem. Indeed the sheer amount of guns, as well the ease of obtaining them, is just as much of a problem as anything else. In fact, the scientific research is clear that more guns leads to more gun deaths (some of the peer-reviewed research can be seen here , here , here , and here ).

However, we must also ask where America's gun fetish comes from in the first place. The only way to makes sense of this is to understand how guns fulfill the desire to satisfy social expectations of masculinity. Shedding light on these gendered ways of thinking reveals why politicians and the media are willing to emasculate the shooters by calling them cowards or crazy and, thus, able to shift the debate to mental health. The bottom line is that we need to stop blaming mental health - the real sickness is our culture of toxic masculinity.

Ben Luongo is a doctoral candidate at University of South Florida's School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies where he teaches courses in international human rights and global political economy. Previously, he worked as a campaign organizer and directed several campaigns for groups like the Human Rights Campaign and Save the Children. His articles have appeared in the Foreign Policy Journal, Foreign Policy in Focus, International Policy Digest, New Politics, and the Hampton Institute.

The Multiple Meanings of Marx's Value Theory

By Riccardo Bellofiore

Karl Marx's "critique of political economy" is grounded in his value theory. "Critique" has to be distinguished from criticism: Marx aimed not only to point out the errors of political economy, but also to learn from its scientific results. Here the key names are François Quesnay, Adam Smith, and David Ricardo. Marx was also interested in assessing the conditions and the limits of the knowledge provided by classical political economy. At the same time, he saw the critique of the "science" of political economy as the means to develop a critique of capitalist social relations.

Among Marx's unique contributions was that his value theory is the only one consistently put forward within a monetary analysis: that is, it introduces money in the very initial deduction of value. In fact, Marx's object of inquiry is capital understood as a "social relation of production," defined by two main traits: the exploitation of labor within a monetary commodity-producing economy and an internal tendency to crisis. The connection between money and class exploitation on one side and the endogeneity of crisis on the other is related to the view that, in a capitalist economy, the "value added" (a monetary magnitude) newly produced in a given period has its exclusive source in "abstract labor" as an activity - more precisely, in the living labor of wage workers.

In a nutshell, Marx's reasoning may be considered a macro-monetary theory of capitalist production. In the capitalist labor process, the totality of wage workers reproduce the means of production employed and produce a net product. The net product is expressed on the market as a new money value that is added to the money value attached to the means of production, historically inherited from the past. This value added is the monetary expression of the living labor time that has been objectified by the wage workers in the period. The value of the labor power (for the entire working class), which is exhibited in money wages, is regulated by the labor-time required to reproduce the capacity for labor, and hence by the labor-time required to reproduce the means of subsistence bought on the market. Accordingly, the surplus value(value added less value of labor power) originates from surplus labor, defined as the positive difference between, on the one hand, the whole of living labor spent in producing the total (net) product of capital and, on the other, the share of that living labor which has been necessary to devote to reproducing the wages, which Marx labels "necessary labor."

The Marxian critique of political economy is inseparable from the meaning Marx gave to the "labor theory of value," which in his case was rather a value theory of labor. The issue is how relations of production and circulation are affected by the fact that labor takes the capitalist social form of producing value and surplus value embedded in "things," in commodities. In what follows, I will look at Marx's value theory from five perspectives: (1) as a monetary value theory; (2) as a theory of exploitation; (3) as a macro-monetary theory of capitalist production; (4) as a theory of individual prices; and (5) as a theory of crises.

A Monetary Value Theory

Marx's starting point is that capitalism is an economy wherecommodity circulation occurs throughuniversal monetary exchange. The analysis of exchangeas such is given priority relative to the analysis of capitalist exchange, and money is introduced before capital. In exchange "as such," individual commodity producers are separate and in competition with each other. The labor of these asocial individuals is immediately private and "becomes" mediately social on the market. Socialization of labor goes on indirectly, through the selling of commodities. Each commodity is shown to be equal to the others in certain quantitative ratios. The commodity has a use value, but it also possesses an exchange value: though invisible in the commodity, it is externally exhibited in money as the "universal equivalent."

At this stage of Marx's original argument, money must be a (special) commodity with universal purchasing power, gold, as a result of a historical process of selection and exclusion sanctioned by the state. The equal "validity" of products sold on the market is in fact an a posteriori equalization of the labors producing them. Thus, labor is not social in advance, but only insofar as its true output will be money, a form of "generic" or "abstract" wealth. Individual labor, which is concrete labor producing an object with some utility for some other agent (a social use-value), counts for the producer as its opposite, as abstract labor. Abstract labor is a portion of the total labor exhibited in the money value of output: it is then also a portion of the gold-producing concrete labor, the latter being the unique, immediately social labor. The "value of money" is fixed when gold first enters monetary circulation, in the original exchanges with the other commodities.

Although private labor becomes social labor only through money as a universal equivalent, it is not money that renders the commodities commensurable. On the contrary, commodities possess an exchange value because, even before the final exchange on the commodity market, they have already acquired the ideal property of being universally exchangeable, giving them the form of value. This property, so to speak, grows out of objectified labor as the substance of value: the form of value in the individual commodity is a ghostly entity, but it materializes by taking possession of the body of money as a commodity; the internal duality is now "redoubled" in the external duality of commodity-money. Money is nothing but value made autonomous in exchange, divorced from commodities and existing alongside them, and as the form of value it is the outward necessary exhibition of abstract, indirectly social labor.

This qualitative analysis of exchange-as-such has a quantitative counterpart. The magnitude of value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labor-time needed for its production. "Socially necessary labor-time" has two meanings: production must run according to average techniques and intensity (determined by intra-industry competition), but it is also driven by the paying social need (what Marx calls "ordinary demand"). In a particular branch of production, each commodity of a given type and quality is sold at the same money price. Hence, the magnitude of value is ruled not by the "individual" labor-time actually spent by a single producer (i.e., by its individual value) but by the labor-time that has to be expended under "normal" conditions (i.e., by its social, or market, value). The magnitude of value is inversely related to the productive power of labor (the labor time required to produce the commodity, given the prevailing level of intensity). Commodity values are necessarily manifested as money prices. The quantity of money that is produced by one hour of labor in a given country and period may be defined as the monetary expression of labor: the magnitude of value of a commodity multiplied by the monetary expression of labor gives the so-called simple or direct price.

From this perspective, it is always possible to translate the external monetary measure of each commodity's value (ideally anticipated by producers before exchange) into the immanent measure in units oflabor-time. Note, however, that value is not identical with price, with the latter defined as any arbitrary relative ratio between commodity and money fixed on the market. Value instead expresses a necessary relation with the (abstract) labor-time spent in the production of commodities. To be effective in regulating market prices, value implies a coincidence between individual supply and demand. In that case, the spontaneous allocation of the private labors of autonomous producers affirms itself a posteriori on the market as a social division of labor. Price is the money-name taken by commodities, and since individual supplies and demands may well diverge, price may in turn exhibit a labor amount that differs from the socially necessary labor contained in the commodity. The whole mass of newly produced commodities is a homogeneous quantity of value whose monetary expression is necessarily equal to their total money price. The discrepancy between values and prices simply redistributes among producers the total direct labor, i.e., the content hidden behind the money form taken by the net product.

This approach to value theory, where value eventually "comes into being" in money, may be characterized as Marx's monetary value theory. In it, value and money cannot be divorced. It is formulated most clearly in the opening pages of Capital, where Marx moves from exchange value to value, from value to money, and from money to labor. It may be attacked on several grounds. In his famous critique of Capital, the nineteenth-century Austrian economist Eugen Böhm von Bawerk failed to notice the essential monetary side of Marxian value theory, instead looking only at what he saw as a linear deduction in the sequence exchange value-value-abstract labor. Quite reasonably (from this limited reading), he observed that abstracting from specific use-values does not mean abstracting from use value in general. Moreover, an exchange value is also attached to non-produced commodities. It follows, then, that hidden behind the notion of value are the common properties that allow for exchange on the market, namely utility and scarcity.

A more recent criticism stresses that while the backward connection from money to value is convincing, less so is Marx's idea of an absolute or intrinsic value justifying that inverse movement from the inner dimension of value to the outer dimension of money. Marx himself shows that the social equalization among labors is achieved only when commodities are actually sold in circulation: before that, in production, we meet only concrete labors, which are heterogeneous and non-additive.

A Theory of Exploitation

All these positions ignore the fact that for Marx, commodity exchange is universal only when the capitalist mode of production is dominant-that is, only when workers are compelled to sell their labor power to money as capital, as self-valorizing value. Consequently, labor is for him the content of the value-form because of a more fundamental sequence going from money-capital to (living) labor to (surplus) value. The private "individuals" who are distinct and opposed on the commodity market, where they eventually become "social" (in capitalist terms) through the metamorphosis of their products into money, are now to be interpreted as the collective workers organized by particular capitals in mutual competition.

To explain the origin of the value added, and thereby of the surplus value contained in it, Marx begins from two assumptions: supply meets a demand of the same amount, and commodities are sold at prices proportional to the labor required to produce them ("simple" or "direct" prices). The argument is based on a two-step comparison. First, he sketches a hypothetical situation (but one that expresses something very real and significant in capitalism) where the living labor extracted from wage workers is equal to the necessary labor required to produce the historically given subsistence. It is a situation of simple reproduction without surplus value, akin to Joseph Schumpeter's "circular flow," where the rate of profit is absent. In the second step, Marx imagines a (or rather, reveals the actual) prolongation of the working day beyond necessary labor imposed by capitalists. The extension of the working day beyond the necessary labor time creates a surplus labor and its monetary expression, surplus value.

In this argument, some points must be noted. First, Marx does not abstract at all from circulation. Account must be taken, before the capitalist labor process, of the buying and selling of labor power on the labor market, and of the way subsistence is determined. He must also assume that the potential (latent) value within the commodities produced will be confirmed as a "social use value" in circulation: the metamorphosis of the commodities into real money must happen according to sales expectations. Moreover, to make clear that abstract living labor is the only source of value, Marx must abstract from the tendency toward the equalization of the rate of profit between the branches of production. Throughout the first and second volumes of Capital, Marx ignores "static" (Ricardian) competition as the tendency towards the equality of the rate of profit among industries. Already in the first volume, however, he cannot avoid considering "dynamic" (Schumpeterian) competition, the intra-industry struggle to obtain extra surplus value. The diversification and stratification of the conditions of production is determined by innovation and spreads the rate of profit within the sector.

The "generativity" of the surplus is an endogenous variable, influenced by the social form taken by production as production for a surplus value to be realized on the market. With given industrial techniques, and assuming that competition on the labor market establishes a uniform real wage, necessary labor is constant. Surplus value is extracted by lengthening the working day. Marx calls this method of increasing surplus value the production of absolute surplus value. When the length of the working day is limited-whether by law or through workers' resistance-capital may enlarge surplus value by the production of relative surplus value, that is, through technical innovations or by speeding up the pace of production (a greater intensity of labor). Technical change, which increases the productive power of labor, lowers the unit-values of commodities. To the extent that the changing organization of production directly or indirectly affects the firms that produce wage-goods, necessary labor falls, and with it the value of labor power. This makes room for a higher surplus labor, and thus a higher surplus value.

Changes in production techniques yielding relative surplus value are a much more powerful way of controlling worker performance than is the simple personal control needed to obtain absolute surplus value. Moving from "cooperation" to the "manufacturing division of labor" to the "machine and big industry" stage, a specifically capitalist mode of production is developed. Here labor is no longer under a formal subsumption to capital (with surplus value extraction occurring within the technological framework historically inherited by capital) but it is under a real subsumption to capital (enforced by "technology," i.e., a capitalistically designed system of production). Workers (the human bearers of labor power) become mere "appendages" of the means of production, a means of "absorption" of labor power in motion (living labor). The concrete "qualities" possessed by laborers spring from a structure of production incessantly revolutionized from within and designed to command living labor. At this point in the argument, labor does not only "count" but really "is" purely abstract, indifferent to its particular form (which is dictated by capital), in the very moment of activity, where it has lost the nature of the active element and become the passive object of capitalist manipulation in the search for profit. This stripping away from labor of all its qualitative determinateness and its reduction to mere quantity encompasses both the historically dominant tendency to de-skilling and the periodically recurring phases of partial re-skilling.

A moment of reflection is needed to appreciate the special features of this unique social reality where labor is made abstract already in production. Profit-making springs from an "exploitation" of workers in a double sense. There is, first, exploitation through the division of the social working day, with laborers giving more (living) labor in exchange for less (necessary) labor. The perspective here is that of the traditional notion of exploitation, which considers the sharing-out of the quantity of social labor contained in the new value, added within the period. Its measure is surplus labor over and above necessary labor. This, however, is the outcome of a second, more basic exploitation of workers, in the form of the use of workers' labor power. Capitalist wealth is created only on the condition of this "consumption" of workers' bodies and minds, which perverts the nature of labor. The quantitative measure of this "productive" notion of exploitation, which refers to the formation rather than the distribution of the fresh "value added," is the social working day in its entirety. From this second perspective, exploitation becomes identified with the whole working day, and with the abstract (living) labor of wage workers. This is the ultimate reason for tracing back value to labor, because of the value form taken by labor.

Marx shows that abstract labor reflects an inversion of subject and object (what philosophers would call a "real hypostatization"), which is deepened in the theoretical movement back from the commodity-output market to the labor market and the production process. Within commodity exchange, objectified labor is made abstract because the products of human working activity, as long as they are commodities, manifest themselves as an independent and estranged reality, divorced from their origin in living labor. The consequent "alienation" of individuals is coupled by "reification" and "fetishism": reification because in a commodity-capitalist economy production-work relations among people necessarily take the form of an exchange among "things," and fetishism because, as a consequence, the products of labor seem endowed with social properties, as if these were bestowed upon them by nature. These characteristics reappear in the other two moments of the capitalist circuit. On the labor market, human beings become the personification of the commodity they sell, labor power (or "potential" labor). Within production, living labor (or labor "in becoming") is shaped by capital as abstract labor, and embedded in a definite technique and organization specifically designed to enforce the extraction of surplus value. Abstract labor in motion (as the activity producing value and money as its result) is the true subject of which the real individual workers performing it are the predicates. In this way, Marx's capital as self-valorizing value is akin to Hegel's Absolute Idea, seeking to actualize itself and reproducing its own conditions of existence; but it is potentially limited by workers' resistance to their "incorporation" as internal moments of capital.

At this point, it is possible to understand that behind the anarchic "social division of labor"-carried out by private producers independently of one another and effected a posteriori via the market-a different "technical division of labor" within production is taking place. In the latter, inasmuch as it is subjected to the drive of valorization, an a priori despotic planning by capitalist firms leads to a technological equalization and social pre-commensuration of the expenditure of human labor power, tentatively anticipating final validation on the commodity market. This process imposes on labor-already within direct production and before exchange-the quantitative and qualitative properties of being abstract labor spent in the socially necessary measure. Even though capitalist production is completely actualized only in exchange-and therefore single capitals in competition are not guaranteed to find an outlet for their production-individual workers are immediately socialized in production.

Capitalist production is the paradox of dissociated firms whose production is "in common," but which have yet to appear as part of total social labor in the eventual validation on the commodity market. This pre-commensuration of labor and socialization within production, in its turn, is conditional on a monetary ante-validation expressed by the finance for production that money-capitalists grant to industrial capitalists. For Marx, once capitalism has reached its full maturity in large-scale industry, the subjection of wage workers to capital, with the consequent (ex ante) abstraction of living labor already in production, and hence the theory of exploitation, must be seen as the foundation of the monetary value theory.

A Macro-Monetary Theory of Capitalist Production

I have heretofore surveyed two interpretations of Marx's value theory: as a monetary theory of value and as a theory of capitalist exploitation. Here I will summarize a contemporary analysis that may link these two: an approach to the value theory as a macro-monetary theory of capitalist production. This interpretation was put forward by the Italian economist Augusto Graziani, as part of his version of the theory of the "monetary circuit," and it has the advantage of revealing a hidden Marxian current in the work of the "bourgeois" monetary heretics of neoclassical theory (Knut Wicksell, Schumpeter, D. H. Robertson, the Keynes of the Treatise on Money).

According to both the Marxian view and these monetary heretics, the capitalist "cycle," or circuit, is logically split into a sequence of successive phases: first, the initial buying and selling of labor power on the labor market (where money wages are bargained); then, immediate production, where labor power is used; and eventually, the final selling of commodities in the moment of circulation (where real wages are eventually fixed), leading to the reconstitution of the money capital which has been advanced. If we distinguish money-capitalists from capitalist-entrepreneurs, this series follows the tripartite separation of Graziani's macro-agents in the most basic abstract picture of the monetary circuit: financial capital, industrial capital, and the working class. Means of production circulate only within the firm-sector, out of reach of wage-workers, whose purchasing power can only materialize in buying the means of consumption that the capitalist class makes available to them.

The defining features of Marx's value theory can be characterized as follows. It is, first of all, a class macroscopic analysis, which leads directly to a description of the capitalist economic process as a monetary circuit. In the cycle of money capital, money is initial finance from the banking system, allowing the firm-sector as a whole to purchase labor power from the working class. Money, before being the universal equivalent in circulation (the "social relation" in circulation), is what puts capitalists in a specific "social relation" with workers in production. The possibility of crisis arises when money is hoarded, because of the pessimistic prospects of capitalist-entrepreneurs or money-capitalists, and brings with it unsold commodities and involuntary unemployment. Crisis is a "break" in the circuit-a point which encompasses both Keynes's view of crisis as the result of a rise in liquidity preference (failure to "close" the circuit), and circuitists' view of crisis as an outcome of capitalist-entrepreneurs' reluctance to invest (failure to "open" the circuit).

"Valorization" means an enlargement of abstract wealth. In a truly macro-monetary perspective, no exchange internal to the firm-sector can contribute to valorization. If we assume Marx's macrosocial, monetary, and class point of view, it is clear that surplus value (gross profits) cannot originate in internal exchanges within the capitalist class: inter-firm transactions could only give way to "profit upon alienation" (or "profit upon expropriation"), cancelled out at the level of the firm-sector as a whole. The genesis of surplus value can be found instead in the only external "exchange" for capital as a whole, the one between capitalist firms (financed by banks) and the living bearers of labor power. Following Michał Kalecki's revision of Rosa Luxemburg's argument, the level, composition, and distribution of output can be easily determined. The "autonomous" capitalists' expenses for investment and their own consumption fix the amount of their profits, their market power (expressed in the "degree of monopoly") defines the profit share on income, and from here it is straightforward to derive the level of output, income and employment. In this view, in a capitalist economy, the totality of the means of production must go to capitalist-entrepreneurs. Thus, the entrepreneurs must be able to buy all the new means of production which have been produced. The profit margin must be set at a level such that the mass of profits is equal to realized investments.

It is noteworthy that in this reconstruction of Marxian theory what the working class actually receives are the consumption goods that firms put on the market for them, even if there are household savings. Financial wealth allows individuals to modify their consumption stream over time, but it is irrelevant for the aggregate. A reduction in saving is followed by higher real consumption by workers only if the firm sector autonomously decides to increase the supply of wage goods. Even shares represent a fictitious ownership, as long as decisions over real production are out of workers' control. This does not mean that distribution is immutable. However, workers exert influence on firms' or government's decisions about the real composition of output through non-market actions: conflict in production, or struggles in society, or political interventions.

On the Marxian theory of money, Graziani also offers some original insights. We must distinguish "money" (Geld in Marx's original German) from "currency" (Münze). The former represents abstract "wealth in general," while the latter is the universally accepted intermediary of exchange, and is one among many representatives of wealth in general. If we accept this distinction, the valorization process is defined as money-commodity-more money, or M-C-M´, while the monetary circuit enabling its reproduction is defined as currency-commodity-currency. It follows that the specific goal of the capitalist is to acquire money in the sense of abstract wealth, not to accumulate money as currency. When Marx discusses the nature of gross profit, he makes clear that it is acquired by capitalists solely in the form of commodities.

While Marx stresses that currency as "means of circulation" in commodity markets is itself a commodity, currency representing money as a form of capital must be a form of credit, and more specifically bank credit ex nihilo. The role of currency as bank credit ex nihilo is not made explicit in Capital because, when Marx writes of money and currency, especially in volume 3, he does not present a "pure" theory of the monetary circuit, but only an inquiry into what we today call the practice of money markets. Moreover, he assumes an open economy and the presence of the state. It has been suggested that the assumption that money is a sign (like that made by the monetary heretics) threatens to undermine Marx's theory of exploitation, since money as capital may seem to be valueless. This is not so. The problem of the value of money as capital is reduced to the problem of determining wages, because in a class macro-monetary approach the only purchasing power of the advanced currency is the number of workers hired: following the general principle of the theory of value, the value of the real wages of workers is equal to the given (subsistence) real wage .

A Theory of Individual Prices

The macro-monetary reconstruction, like the other perspectives on Marx's value theory I have presented, deflates the theoretical drama which has been going on for a century or more about the so-called transformation problem. This debate centers on Marx's value theory as a theory of the determination of (relative) prices: the conclusion many drew from the discussion was that Marx failed to transform the "simple" or "direct" prices (proportional to the labor contained in the commodities exchanged, sometimes labelled "labor-values") into the "prices of production" (containing an equal rate of profit, and systematically diverging from simple prices).

The reason is easy to understand. In volume 1 of Capital, Marx focuses on the rate of surplus value (identical to the rate of exploitation)-that is, the surplus value divided by the money capital spent in buying labor power (what Marx calls variable capital). This ratio is identical to that between surplus labor and necessary labor. The rate of surplus value is positively related to the length and intensity of the working day. It also rises with increases in the productive power of labor, which is positively affected by the capital composition: the ratio between the money capital advanced to buy means of production (labelled by Marx constant capital) and variable capital. Surplus value springs only from the use of labor power bought with variable capital, and not from the means of production bought with constant capital-hence, their respective names.

The rate of surplus value explains the origin of gross profits for total capital, confronted with the working class as a whole. Total capital extracts the new value, as exhibited in money, of the living labor of the working class, and pays back the value of labor power, as exhibited in the necessary labor. However, for the individual capital, the success of an investment is rather measured by the rate of profit: the ratio between total surplus value and total capital (the sum of variable capital and constant capital). Because of inter-industry, "static" competition, the rate of profit tends to be equal among branches of production.

Here the problem is said to emerge. The rate of profit is positively related to the rate of surplus value, and negatively related to capital composition. The rate of surplus value tends to be equal in every industry, but there is no reason for capital composition to equalize across industries. Commodities, including the elements of constant and variable capital, cannot be evaluated at labor-values when inter-industry competition is introduced-hence the need to transform the labor-values in prices of production, with the rate of profit helping to determine the elements of variable and constant capital.

I will not go into the intricacies of this debate. The point is that, whatever the opinions on the technical details of the transformation, the problem simply cannot exist as such: it is a pseudo-problem. If the core of Marx's value theory is taken to be the a posteriori socialization of labor on the market against the universal equivalent, the argument may be put forward that there are no actual "labor-values" before the eventual validation on the final market . There is only a single system of prices, and the assumption of simple or direct prices is just a "law of exchange," to be removed at a lower level of abstraction. The vision of Marx's value theory as a theory of capitalist exploitation, tracing back surplus value to the extraction of living labor from human beings as bearers of labor power, is even more radical: the point there is that valorization arises from the social relation of capital and workers in the capitalist labor process as a contested terrain, through class struggle in production. Accordingly, the extraction of living labor meets specific social difficulties for the buyers, because the labor power sold by workers (and hence the living labor to be extracted from them) are attached to the sellers, who in capitalism are supposed to be "free" and "equal" individuals. Thus the new value produced in the period cannot but be the monetary expression of living labor alone: whatever the "rule of prices," the ratios by which commodities exchange cannot but redistribute the new value. By definition, gross profits appropriate a share of workers' living labor.

The macro-monetary theory of capitalist production complements this argument, assigning a more fundamental role to the labor-values hidden behind simple or direct prices as a price rule. In fact, it is maintained that in the macro-social argument, in the first volume of Capital, the relevant price between class macro-agents is the rate of surplus value, adequately expressed through simple or direct prices. The reason is easy to see. The new value added by current production is identical to the monetary expression of living labor, and the value of labor power is the monetary expression of the labor contained in the real wage of the working class. All this occurs independently of saving behavior, and, we may add, it remains true whatever the ruling price system. As Graziani argues, in a quite extreme but effective fashion, Marx's theory of value has nothing to say directly about the phenomenon of the prices in final commodity-circulation, since valorization has been accounted for in the macroscopic class analysis, which includes the buying and selling of labor power and immediate production.

The macroeconomic inquiry into valorization is prior to the microeconomic determination of individual prices. At stake in the latter are not the relations between total capital and working class, but the exchange-relations of single firms. The determination of prices of production may well give way to a disparity between the labor commanded (in exchange) by gross profits and the labor contained (in production) within surplus value, and between the labor commanded (in exchange) by the money wage bill and the labor contained (in production) within the real wage for the working class. However, this "unequal exchange" can only obscure the process of valorization, not erase it. The new value (and then the living labor extracted by total capital from workers) and the value of labor power (and then the necessary labor required to produce the given real wage of the working class) remain the same.

Both the Marxists, and their neo-Ricardian or neoclassical critics-who dealt with the determination of prices of production within a simultaneous exchanges perspective-were unfaithful to Marx, because they overlooked the process that constitutes the equilibrium position. In fact, Marx's value theory as it has been depicted here is a non-equilibrium theory. This is something intrinsic to all the foregoing accounts of Marx's value theory: that value eventually comes into being with money as its phenomenal form (the monetary value theory); that class struggle and intra-capitalist competition affect the extraction of living labor (the theory of exploitation); as well as in the view of the essential monetary ante-validation of labor power as potential labor through the financing of production (the macro-monetary theory of capitalist production). "Non-equilibrium" refers to the constitution of the economic magnitudes, allowing us to distinguish, afterward, between equilibrium and disequilibrium. This is not a "temporal" but a "logical" re-reading of Marx's value theory. In my understanding, this duality of value theory (an out-of-equilibrium perspective, embodying both an equilibrium and a non-equilibrium) is at the core of David Harvey's notion of "anti-value," which has eluded many commentators.

A Theory of Crises

Another controversial area in Marxian political economy is the theory of crises. According to Marx, accumulation-i.e., the conversion of some portion of surplus value into additional (constant and variable) capital, to produce more surplus value-is a contradictory process. Crises are at once necessary explosions of the contradictions, and temporary solutions to them.

Capitalism's tendency toward instability is already evident in its structure as a monetary economy, where commodity-exchange is universalized. For some of the separate and autonomous firms, the anarchy in capitalist social division of labor may easily lead to an incomplete "realization" in circulation of the value potentially produced in immediate production. The presence of money dissociates sales from subsequent expenditures, so that hoarding may disrupt the smooth sequence of supply finding its own outlet on the market as incomes are spent. Most of Marx's inquiry in the three volumes of Capital, however, rests on the assumption that commodities are sold on the market at their "social values" (in volumes 1 and 2) or at "prices of production" (in volume 3)-something akin to Keynes's basic model in the General Theory of fulfilment of short-term expectations.

In volume 2 of Capital, drawing on an original insight by Quesnay, Marx constructs his schemes of reproduction, which show that a balanced growth path, independent of the level of consumption demand, is a theoretical possibility. Marx divided social output into two departments, the first producing capital goods and the second consumption goods (which may be subdivided into wage-goods and luxury-goods). The value output of both sectors is seen as the sum of its three constituent parts, i.e., constant capital, variable capital, and surplus value. In simple reproduction, capitalists unproductively consume the entire surplus value, resulting in zero growth. In enlarged reproduction, they more or less completely invest surplus value in new constant and variable capital, allowing for accumulation. What the scheme clarifies is that each value component of the output is also a component of demand for its own or the other sector. Equilibrium, which is always possible, depends on some balance among intersectoral trades. Against Malthus and Sismondi, Marx affirms that capital may expand over time without meeting a barrier in effective demand, because it is the mainspring of its own demand. Nevertheless, against Ricardo and Say, Marx also states that, since equilibrium needs exchange in definite, "correct" proportions-and not only in value, but also in use value and money terms-a balanced long-run accumulation is not a guaranteed outcome, but rather materializes by "accident" (a point taken up again in the Harrod-Domar growth models).

The likelihood of departures from equilibrium because of this absence of planning simply reflects the possibility of crises occurring in a market environment. Marx instead seeks to explain the necessity of crises arising from the capitalist class relation itself. In his view, failures of effective demand issue from a fall in investments, which itself proceeds from a profitability crisis. Thus, the question becomes one of understanding the systemic, recurring causes of profit shortfalls. A first argument is described in the "general law of capital accumulation" at the end of volume 1 of Capital: assuming a constant composition of capital, a sufficiently rapid growth in the value invested exhausts the supply of labor power and tightens the labor market. Wage increases outpace the rise in the productive power of living labor, the rate of profit starts falling, and consequently, accumulation and the demand for labor slow down. A more lasting solution to this difficulty, located in distributive struggles over the partition of the new value added, is the introduction of labor-saving, capital-intensive methods of production. For a given capital, mechanization reduces the share of variable capital, and thereby the demand for labor, to produce the same output: it displaces workers, replacing them with machines.

Theoretically, a rise in the rate of accumulation may enhance or reduce employment, according to the relative weight of the two forces, the increase in the size of capital and the change in its composition. Through the cycle, the pace and structure of the accumulation of capital (the independent variable) constantly vary to reproduce an industrial reserve army of potential workers ready to be included in the valorization process, exerting a downward pressure on wages-the dependent variable. A permanent downward pressure on the real wage, i.e., an "absolute" impoverishment of the workers, is among the possible outcomes. All the same, the normal situation is very different. Capitalist accumulation is propelled by the production of relative surplus value, which presupposes a positive dynamics of the productive power of labor. The real wage, then, has room for improvement (without impeding the tendency for a greater share of the surplus value in the new value added to go to the capitalist class), as long as the increased level of workers' consumption is expressed in a lower value of labor power. This is what Luxemburg called the tendency toward a fall in the relative wage, i.e., a contraction in wages as a proportion of national income-a relative, not an absolute, impoverishment. On the other hand, with the rise of trade unions and a more militant working class, wage struggles can become partially independent from the labor market, break the tendential fall in the "relative" wage, and develop into an independent cause of capitalist crises.

Mechanization of production is also an autonomous drive for capital to control living labor and to remove workers from the point of production. If mechanization is a powerful lever to regulate both the exchange value and the use value of labor power, it nevertheless creates a further difficulty. The rise in what Marx calls the technical composition of capital - the "physical" ratio of the number of means of production to the number of workers employed-contributes to the expulsion of workers from the productive process; but workers' living labor, we know, is the exclusive source of value and surplus value. According to Marx, the consequent rise in the composition of capital expressed in value terms yields a tendency of the rate of profit to fall. It must be noted, however, that Marx expresses the "law" with reference to the rise in what he calls the "organic" composition of capital (in which the elements of constant and variable capital are evaluated at the prices before the diffusion of innovation), and not in the value composition of capital (in which these elements are evaluated at the prices after such diffusion). The latter definition fully reflects the revolution in the evaluation of constant and variable capital produced by mechanization, whereas the former measures inputs at their original prices. The "organic" composition follows the increase in the "technical" composition, but the trend in the profit rate depends on the "value" composition. The clarification of the distinction between physical, value, and organic composition of capital was a fundamental contribution made by Ben Fine and Laurence Harris in the late 1970s, and developed more recently by Alfredo Saad-Filho.

Some authors have interpreted the tendency of the rate of profit to fall not only as a cause of cyclical crises, but also of capitalism's long waves, and others have considered it the reason for a secular downward trend in profitability. There is some justification for this view. The application of greater quantities of constant (and especially, fixed) capital per unit of output is the most effective means to propel surplus value extraction from workers. Marx thought that the increase in the rate of surplus value could not compensate in the long run for the negative influence on the rate of profit of the higher (value) composition of capital, and so he downgraded it as a mere counter-tendency. Marx's strongest argument in favor of the "law" is an appeal to an absolute limit to the surplus labor that may be pumped out of a given working population.

To understand what is involved here, it is best to view the composition of capital as an index of the ratio between, on the one hand, the dead labor contained in the means of production and, on the other, the living labor expended in the period-that is, to represent it as the ratio between constant capital and the sum of variable capital and surplus value. Assuming that variable capital is tending toward zero, and thus that the whole social working day is objectifying itself as surplus value, the (value) composition of capital becomes the reciprocal of themaximum rate of profit. This latter can be seen as the ceiling for the upper movements of the actual rate of profit. Marx suggests that the numerator of the maximum rate of profit meets a "natural" constraint in the amount of living labor that can be extracted from workers, while, on the contrary, its denominator is free to grow without limits. At the ruling social values, individual capitalists are willing or forced to introduce more capital-intensive methods of production. In this way, they lower unit costs to gain excess temporary profits, but the longer-run effects of their behavior force a reduction of the social values of commodities and depress the average rate of profit.

Nevertheless, to deduce a necessary fall in the rate of profit would be unjustified, because progress in the productive power of labor, accelerated by mechanization, ends up reducing the values (i.e., prices) of all commodities, and thereby also those of the means of production. It cannot be excluded a priori that the devaluation of constant capital might even be strong enough to raise the maximum rate of profit, removing the barrier to the actual rate of profit. The latter is both a positive function of the rate of surplus value and a negative function of the composition of capital. Another criticism is thus that there is no reason to exclude the possibility that the rise in the rate of surplus value can offset the (possible, not necessary) rise in the value composition of capital.

It is interesting to observe that the higher the rate of surplus value soars, and thereby the more the tendency for the rate of profit to fall is repressed, the more likely the system is to run into a third type of crisis, that of realization. Some Marxists have indeed suggested that the rate of profit falls because actual (or expected) effective demand is insufficient for the system as a whole to buy commodities at their full value (including the average rate of profit). Two conflicting positions have been dominant in this group of theories. One approach (that of Hilferding, for example) stressed that disproportionalities-i.e., sectoral imbalances between supply and demand-were intrinsic to a spontaneous, chaotic market economy. If excess supply persistently affects important branches of production, this can spread to other sectors and easily degenerate into a general glut of commodities. This kind of difficulty, however, depends on the speed of price-and-quantity adjustment to disequilibrium, and may disappear in a more "organized" form of capitalism. Some of its proponents (such as Mikhail Tugan-Baranovski) even ended up endorsing the view that, being "production for production's sake," capitalism encounters no true barrier in effective demand, and in principle sustain a balanced growth path with declining consumption. The other approach (associated with Luxemburg and others) is sometime wrongly labelled "underconsumptionist," though in fact it stresses under-investment. It maintains that net investment could not compensate for insufficient consumption forever, since the long-term profitability of new machine-goods depends on future outlets, and these latter are less and less predictable with a decreasing share of consumption in total demand. The same reproduction schemas prove that the inter-sectoral trade proportions required for expanded reproduction are precarious and unsteady. An increasing extraction of relative surplus value-which is needed to overcome the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, and which strengthens the tendency for the relative wage to fall-shifts them continuously, making them unlikely to be met for long.

For some of these theorists, such forms of realization crisis are of increasing severity and lead to a final breakdown, when the "external" factors mitigating them (such as the net exports to non-capitalist areas) are exhausted. Other writers in the same tradition, as Kalecki, objected that the insufficiency of effective demand may be solved by what he dubbed "domestic exports," i.e., governments' budget deficits financed by the injection of new money; indeed, Luxemburg already hinted at something of this kind in her original argument, under the heading of military expenditures on armaments. A similar role may be played by unproductive consumption by "third persons," drawing their incomes from deductions from total surplus value. To be compatible with a stable accumulation of capital, these "solutions" call for continued pressure on living labor. This confirms the role of the rate of surplus value as the pillar of capitalist development, and of the outcome of the class struggle within the capitalist labor process as the crucial determinant of its dynamics.

A re-reading of Marx's theory of crisis looks at the tendential fall in the rate of profit as a meta-theory of crises, incorporating the different kinds of crises which can be derived from Marx, and extending them to a historical narrative of the evolution of capitalism. From this point of view, the tendential fall in the rate of profits due to a rising value composition of capital was confirmed during the Long Depression of the late nineteenth century. The increasing rate of exploitation needed to overcome the tendency was implemented by Fordism and Taylorism, which jointly strengthened the tendency for the relative wage to fall. The rise in the rate of surplus value, however, created the conditions of a realization crisis, the Great Crash of the 1930s. The so-called golden age of capitalism after the Second World War was predicated on a higher pressure on productive workers, to obtain enough living labor and gain ever higher surplus labor. This in turn opened the way to a social crisis of accumulation, because of the struggles within the immediate valorization process-a key factor in the stagflation of the 1970s.

From this point of view, the so-called Great Moderation, leading to the recent Great Recession (if not Lesser Depression), must be interpreted as capital's reaction to a crisis originating from a rupture in the same capital-labor "social relation" within production. "Great Moderation," of course, was a misnomer, coined by Ben Bernanke in 2004 and founded on the delusion that finance and business cycles were at last under control. Neoliberalism is best captured as a real subsumption of labor to finance and debt within a Minskyian "money manager capitalism": the subordinated integration of households into the stock exchange market, and their descent into bank indebtedness. As I have argued several times with Joseph Halevi, even before Minsky the tendency to household private indebtedness was captured by Paul Sweezy and Harry Magdoff as a powerful countertendency, and Sweezy developed a reading of the new phase of capitalism in terms of "financial dominance." The other side of the coin was the "deconstruction" of labor in the new phase of capitalist accumulation, characterized by new styles of corporate governance leading to a centralization without concentration, and then to a weakening of workers in the labor market and in the labor process. This form of capitalism was based on a capital market inflation, which, though it stabilized the system for a time, has proven unsustainable.

This piece originally appeared at MROnline . It is a revised version of a paper presented at the Union for Radical Political Economics session of the Allied Social Sciences Association Conference in Philadelphia in January 2018, and previously presented at the Historical Materialism Conference in London in November 2017.

Riccardo Bellofiore is a professor of economics at the University of Bergamo.

Contrived Connections of Capital

By Steven L. Foster

Unpastoral Limps

I made a couple of connections while taking an early morning bike ride along tree-lined, deeply rutted and pot-marked, dirt access lanes leading me through expanses of flooded checkered rice fields, sprouting green and dotted with white heron. One connection was a barbed-wire fence newly stung and anchored by poured concrete posts rising higher than the older bamboo barriers tied to trees along the pathway designating ownership over parcels of land.

The other was an old man in a not-too-distant wooded area emerging from his tiny platformed shack constructed from corrugated sheet metal, rough-hewn wood planks, and bamboo. Remnants of a wood fire in an arched ground level mud oven smoldered. Chickens were scampering about with dogs barking-once I became sighted, and a couple of penned-up pigs grunting near a small vegetable garden. The abode was likely his year-round home, and not a makeshift shelter built in shaded areas for temporary field laborers escaping the tropical sun.

Clad in grimy clothing, he listed to his left, severely limping (I too have limps), and slowly trudging toward a beat-up grimy motorcycle with side-car. He nodded towards me in acknowledgement while calming his dogs as he hoisted a bundle of wood kindling taken from the side-car. The old man's likely working as a tenant farmer hired by the land owner who constructed the new barbed wire fencing. Less than 14 percent of the farmers in the largely agrarian country where I reside own the land they work, even though less than three decades ago 44 percent were small land-owning farmers.

Triggered by the fence and seeing the farmer-representing to me an arduous life of poverty and toil for someone so old, I briefly thought: All three of us are commodities.

A contrived connection? Yes. But, not by me. We were intentionally made commodities and had little choice in the matter. After all, who wants to be merely a commodity unless you're branded as a wealthy superstar, luring others "to be like Mike," Madonna, or Rihanna? Especially, since I believe far more intrinsic connections exist between the three of us-whether we know it or not.

In what follows, I'll briefly explore the broad historical processes in how the land, the old man, and I received our assigned roles in the socially constructed capitalist global market. Retired (also with little choice in the matter) after nearly five decades of working, I've had time reflecting on my life in a society designed to turn as much as it can into commodities where my value resided largely in making someone else profits.

Let me first clarify what is meant by commodity and the processes of commodification.

Marx's analysis of a commodity basically stresses a thing's exchange value, quite different than the use an item possesses. For instance: A new case-hardened steel axe may have higher value to the tenant farmer when gathering fire wood than his old axe. That steel axe doesn't have much use value for someone living in a Chicago high-rise building. However, a hardware store owner in selling it (she lives in a high-rise) changes the nature of value the axe possesses. It becomes valuable for the profit it makes by buying the axe at a low price, then selling it at a high price beyond initial costs of purchase and overhead. The axe is now a commodity to the store owner.

Selling everything it can as commodities is essential to capitalism. That's how profits are made. The higher the degree of profit, the more valued a commodity becomes, often outstripping its worth as a useable item.

Take as an example a sturdy handbag and an elegant Gucci satchel. Both perform similar tasks by carrying things and may even require similar material. But, the Gucci sells at a significantly higher price, very likely making much more profit, and therefore, retaining higher commodity value when sold. Not surprisingly, you don't want to harm a costly satchel by carrying potentially leaky groceries in it. Just as you'd not want to take a grocery carrying handbag-maybe stained from previously seeping fresh fruit that got squashed, to a stylishly sophisticated restaurant. You pull out the Gucci for such an occasion and not carry much in it so there'd be no conspicuous bulges breaking its lines complimenting the sleekness of your evening wear.

Economic historian Karl Polanyi noted from his study of capitalist history (modern western history): the commodification of land, labor, and money was necessary for capitalism to work as a social system (see The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, Beacon Press edition, 2001). Without a capitalist market built around these three forms of commodities, we have something other than capitalism. He also suggested that commodifying these things stretches the seams of our social makeup where vital connections to our environments and the people in them breaks down.

We'll look at a broad history of how land and then labor changed into commodities that fueled my initial lament connecting me, the fenced land, and the (other) old man.

(I'm connecting large historical dots with thick lines in keeping with the essay's scope.)

Something Called Nature: Dominated and Sold

Modern humans have hypothetically labelled things in the world not made by us as part of nature. A tree is natural. The wood from it making a press board book shelf isn't. It's made by a human culture. The cultural worlds of people somehow became separated from a "natural" world comprised of nonhuman things: wild forests and jungles, oceans and reefs, and all the animals and strange stuff in them we study and use for our purposes. We moderns think of ourselves as minds living in bodies that we steer and engineer like a space craft from another world fashioned from material that's alien to the aliens.

Thinking and living like that's true provides us an illusion of our transcendence from a non-living world of atoms and what they combine to make, just waiting for us to give them meaning. People with minds give minds to mindless matter found in nature. Nice of us.

It's an unfounded modern concept. Our current sciences are showing the separation between nature and culture is patently artificial, a mere abstraction created by people in the past considering themselves scientific; yet, unaware of their specifically historical conditioning and the perspectival limits of knowledge saddling our finitude as humans. Examples of current scientific inquiry blurring distinctions are: quantum physics-with theories of massless (or nearly so) "fields" forming the primary essence of an organically connected universe (very likely one of many universes); molecular biology informed by this (meta)physics suggesting particles can be in two places at once that's important for respiration and nutrient absorption; sciences pursuing theories around consciousness finding it in more than just smart animals-like the self-awareness of tree communities; neurosciences questioning the existence of a unique self that's separated from "outside" experiences forming an individual; anthropology studying human cultures and still asking: what are humans and their societies-really?, etc.

But, this "Great Divide" between nature and culture persists. That's because the "Divide" has been, and continues to be, useful. (For analysis of the Divide see Bruno Latour: We've Never Been Modern, Harvard University Press, 1993, and, Beyond Nature and Culture, by Philippe Descola, University of Chicago Press, 2013. I've taken current science references from a plethora of sources).

The nature part of the Divide is seen by modernity as a thing to be subdued. The Christians of the 16th century and 17th centuries took the biblical mandate from Genesis-subduing God's creation of a natural order, in a way very different than a Hebraic understanding of the passage. The myth of humans subduing and having dominion over nature was likely viewed by the authors of Genesis as caring for and nurturing a creation as one of its creatures placed on earth as a divine vassal, totems of God's cherishing presence (humanity in the image of God). The European religious understanding shifted the meaning to what the father of the scientific method- Francis Bacon (1561-1626), proposed. Nobly concerned as he was with the plight of humans struggling against uncertainties in a natural world, his search for scientific knowledge was for bringing nature under utter control of people. Now, subduing the earth means exercising dominating power over it in a constantly raging battle to conquer it as something other than us.

It's important to recognize this understanding between us and nature when considering how land became a commodity in the capitalist world. Using land productively for profit as an individual owner sees fit, with the land passed along to other individuals through sale or inheritance as a commodity, became like a religion in the west vehemently protected by law.

To be civilized, however rich and ancient your historical traditions, you must adopt the modern capitalist understanding regarding land. The primary meaning of "the rule of law and order" is the protection of private property and the absolute rights of an individual owner over that property, especially land. This is a very modern understanding, legally codified as recently as the later part of the 19th century, though theoretically formulated by John Locke two centuries before then. If you're one of those societies resisting 'the rule of law," you're automatically thrust into being from the natural world and not of culture, or at minimum, in a nebulous area in between the two (Latour); and therefore, less human and in need of civilizing.

Land use for myriads of cultures throughout human history was not for individual exploitation, but, for communities to take what was necessary for their cultural existence, replenishing the resources when able, or moving on when unable-allowing the land to recover and revitalize itself over time. The heads of communities-both women and men, provided land allotments based on specific family needs. Larger families got more land for their sustenance. Most often, there was redistribution of pooled resources ensuring needs be met for those unable, or under-able, to care for themselves. Reciprocity was the basis of economic practices and not individual gain central to commodity exchange-now nearly a universal feature in our global capitalist cultures. In some societies, leadership was chosen based on their capacities to give away the material excesses they accumulated through war or other means and ways.

Yes, there were resource wars over land and its contents. Tribal boundaries existed designating areas used by specific communities and infringement on these territories could amount to conflict, especially in times of scarcity. However, treaties were made allowing other groups certain access rights as needed, and inter-tribal marriages brought communities together effecting allocations of combined resources.

In sum, the singularly individual ownership of land for most our globe's cultures was a totally outlandish concept.

Of course, land was controlled. Under empires, it many have fallen under the jurisdiction of individual rulers and the religions supporting them. Though, what control primarily meant was exacting tribute over populations on the dominated land, payments often in the form of produce from it. There wasn't ownership of a thing called "private property." The subsistence needs of the populous garnered from land were granted by those in authority; that's if a dominating leader wanted to remain in power. When populations were denied land access, they violently rebelled jeopardizing a ruler's position.

In ancient Greece, private ownership for the sake of individual commercial exploitation occurred as prominent men transacted with other city-states and cultures through trade networks. But, land was still provided to non-slaves by law. Of course, tribute/taxation and other services were required for a ruler's protection.

Absolute ownership by an individual becomes legally granted under Roman law, statutes passed in the Republic by the elite landed classes. It was a break with tradition. Again, land was provided as a cultural practice to plebeians-classes of commoners. Access to land was vital to Roman self-understanding since citizen farmers served in the army when called upon with payment for military service often coming through land grants. House-holding networks were central to the Roman economy with redistribution of booty from the conquered supplementing the basic house-hold units.

After the break-up of the Roman empire, access to land for all classes of people during the middle ages followed centuries of socially engrained custom. This was the right of the commons (common land use).

The lowest of peasant groupings in the constructed social hierarchy-villeins, were able to maintain subsistence from the land: growing food, using materials for housing, raising livestock, and making things needed for essential living which was also traded for other needed items based on local markets controlled by social custom. The villeins maintained about 13 acres in their modest farms, holding between 40-50 percent of all the arable land according to geographer Gary Fields ( Enclosure: Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror, University of California Press, 2017, kindle location 821). In 1300 CE, nearly 50 percent of farming in England was on the commons (Fields). Landed nobility exacted tribute consuming most surpluses and would also demand services from villeins that could change like the weather.

Life was not easy. However, the deeply felt pride of self-sufficiency was part of the social fabric. Fields reveals that villeins, even though legally land insecure, still had recourse through manor courts protecting rights to the land based on custom. They were able to procure more holdings of land left fallow after the Black Plague depleted the population. Copyhold practices became a legal process in the 15th century where land occupied by villeins could be passed on to family if fines were paid to nobility.

They, like freeholding farmers, were vested in the land they worked, upgrading and maintaining both their individual lots and common fields worked by the community. It was a unique balance between individual farms and collective agrarian practices on the commons (Fields). Peasant farmers along with the manor courts ensured individuals would not dominate the commons and regulated grazing, crop rotation, and land regeneration ensuring individual farmers would preserve their lots for the benefit of the community and its future. Agricultural innovations boosting productivity were implemented well before the modern technological revolutions occurred.

All was to change by the dawning of the 16th century as England nobility, driven by a number of factors, most notably-commercial greed as mercantile capitalism was on the rise, began a long march of physically enclosing the land under their control. It was, as Fields states, "a long-term project of improving land by 'making private property' on the English landscape. This transformation represents a decisive moment in the long-standing lineage of reallocations in property rights, in which groups with territorial ambitions gained control of land owned or used by others." The result was "…eradicating common field farming and remaking a landscape that once boasted a large inventory of land used as a collective resource (loc 759)."

Very importantly, Fields points out that enclosing the land-using fences, barriers, and roads to designate individualized private property, not only meant inclusive control over it and all that it contains; but, exclusion of others. Even access passages leading to other areas of land that still held common use were denied. Boggs and forested areas were closed off from common use making hunting, food foraging, even fire wood-gathering, illegal to all except the owner. A whole way of life existing for centuries was slowly, yet systematically, dismantled as agrarian societies throughout England, Europe, and then the world lost vital access to land.

The rationale was improvement of land for commercial ends that would bolster integration of a national economy trading increasingly on a global scale. Whether turning grain producing fields into pasture or using it for monocrop growth in order to maximize exports outside of region or country, the goals were profits for elite landholders. Larger estates dominated the English landscape. The villeins, the most precarious members of society, were the first to be affected as peasant residents were expelled. Smaller holdings (yeoman farmers and copyhold villeins) were bought out or outright ousted with the rationale being "efficiency" (read-maximizing profits) in using land. What happened was an all-out assault on common field agriculture. And after the enclosing processes, whether noticeable efficiency in greater productive capacity over the long haul was really achieved or not-other than increased profits, is still a matter of debate among agricultural historians. Over grazing and soil exhaustion through large scale monocrop production had detrimental effects decades after initial increases in produce occurred over the short term because of so called improvements.

Land is now fully a commodity; a thing to be personally possessed and valued for its profitability as an investment. All others are excluded from using this commodity.

Importantly, land enclosures caused unrelenting social upheaval. It was the primary impetus for the institution of wage labor on a mass scale.

Behold! A Labor Market Is Birthed

It's always remarkable just how actions become supported by theoretical 'reason' after events have already occurred. John Locke, a founding thinker regarding land use and any "natural law" surrounding it, systematized what constituted proper land management while the English were slaughtering Indigenous peoples and taking their lands for decades prior to his ruminations. He served as a colonial bureaucrat overseeing the process in the Americas. Adam Smith, father of the "science" of modern economics, theorizer of free markets and worshipped by adorning capitalists in following generations, saw all people in history acting like his local butcher; that is, humans as essentially bartering, trucking, and trading beings driven by individual self-interest looking for personal gain. However, as Polanyi suggests, "…the alleged propensity of man to barter, truck, and exchange is almost entirely apocryphal (pg. 46)." Like the dichotomy between nature and culture, Smith's reductive speculations concerning human motivation is more useful than fundamentally truthful.

This was a necessary understanding of what constitutes the human for transforming society into capitalist culture. Polanyi notes, "The transformation implies a change in the motive of action on the part of the members of society; for the motive of subsistence that of gain must be substituted. All transactions are turned into money transactions (pg. 43)." Subsistence labor on the land must be displaced in capitalist society, workers now becoming wage earners.

The cultural change of the 19th century where, according to Polanyi, full-fledged capitalist culture occurred, was set-up in the 16 th and 17th centuries. As stated above, enclosures increasingly eliminated peasant copyholds, making remaining villeins at-will tenants, meaning they could be removed from the land at the whim of the owners without legal recourse and protections. Rents levied on leases of land and housing increased significantly over this period of time.

It wasn't that peasants didn't rebel against nobility's reneging on responsibilities as reactions were found in the high medieval period and continuing. Enclosing barriers were destroyed. Major rebellions, in Norfolk with Kett's Rebellion (1549), to the revolt at Midlands (1607) "would mark numerous protests against specific enclosures well into the eighteenth century (Fields, loc 770)." Violent crackdowns by local magistrates and state authorities met the insurgences. It was also a time of heightened religious persecutions in support of elites, including the church "inquisitions" of heretics and other evil-doers from among the lower-class rabble who were upsetting burgeoning commercial successes and calling into question questionable practices.

Incidents of poaching were on the rise throughout the long period. Capital punishments also increased, especially following armed poaching by masked raiders in the 18th century, not infrequently sending an offending party to the gallows for stealing a goose. Law enforcement groups were organized by gentry and the idyllic rural countryside was laced with precarity and the thievery and violence that accompanies it. Poaching only increased during the 19th century in spite of harsh laws inflicting weighty penalties.

After the Glorious Revolution in 1688, the merchant classes and large land owners winning the day in controlling English monarchal power, the enclosure processes began to hit full stride, not stopping until the beginning of the 20th century. With the triumph of the capitalist classes came an onslaught of parliamentary actions that assaulted the traditions of law protecting rights of common land use, passage and access rights, collective farming, and tenant occupancy rights.

How did the once landed peasantry survive other than by illegal means?

The newly un-landed hired themselves out to large land owners for wages. Wage labor became a necessity if peasantry was to survive.

A degree of wage labor did exist prior to the enclosures. Landless folks unable to fully support themselves from farming would hire out to a manor lord, as well as to yeomen farmers who held larger plots, and even to a cohort of villeins who gained more copyhold land access. There were also local and increasingly regional cottage industries making needed items for use by local communities. However, wage labor was not a typical form of sustaining life. Society largely frowned it. Even if self-sufficient peasants were themselves poor, they were independently self-supporting. The social mores around idleness were severe to say the least. A chronically offending vagabond (unemployed, unauthorized traveler between parishes), or an able-bodied beggar, could be put to death.

Unemployment, or underemployment-pauperism, as never before seen was now a regular feature of the countryside. Enclosures were a key feature propelling this, although it must be granted that other processes were also at work. There were instabilities in commodity prices making for fluctuations in available work, especially after an increasingly nationalized and globalized mercantile capitalist markets spread.

During this time of upheaval, merchant groups were procuring charters for expanding once local cottage industries into manufacturing settlements, towns making commodities for sale to a larger region and on the growing international markets that would include supplying finished goods to colonial populations abroad. Un-landed peasants supplied them with workers. The towns grew into manufacturing cities with a workforce no longer restricted to manors and feudal life under a lord as of 1795. With the Industrial Revolution in full swing, the industrial cities were fostering the inhumane conditions that Charles Dickens spoke about in the early 19 th century and Upton Sinclair in the early 20th century. Historical social research has confirmed their insights into urban squalor as the countryside was emptied of its hungry inhabitants needing wage labor for survival and travelling wherever work could be found.

And very usefully, the power of the parish craft guilds was broken. Previous to the privatizing of land as a commodity, guilds through the manor courts had authority controlling production: how many producers of given items in a geographic location averting undue competition, prices of goods and services with minimal standards of living specific to professions, as well as product quality-including worker training in all aspects of production, social support for the infirmed, etc. When agrarian society was dismantled, so was the cultural power of the guilds helping control individualistic merchant greed and manorial excesses. Meager wages now bought necessities with money and no longer through locally defined economics based on reciprocity and social convention. Now, "…all incomes must derive from the sale of something or other, and whatever the actual source of a person's income, it must be regarded as resulting from sale. No less is implied in the simple term 'market system' (Polanyi, pg. 43)." A national labor market being birthed in England was coming to full force.

Under the growing labor market income systematically fell short in meeting basic sustenance. Pauperism was becoming rampant. Previously, wages under the guilds were designed to be adequate for a worker to sustain his family appropriate to life's social stations (not everyone was to have the same standard of living). Not now. The roles of women changed along with the men, as their labor responsibilities in the mass-producing industries of factory towns were formed replacing those of the cottage. Hiring out as domestic servants took women away from the fields. Men, women and children, in making ends meet, were forced to work long, arduously monotonous hours of hard and dangerous factory labor. They were re-socialized into labor's divisions imposed from the outside-theorized in Smith's production of pins for maximizing profits, and not as workers who once made end products through all stages of manufacture.

The new labor force was disciplined and punished (M. Foucault) into new cultural configurations radically different than the centuries long traditions that formed them, traditions that were based on the cycles of nature and the harvest. Now lives were reflected in the factory and the inhuman drudgery it imposed. It was socially fracturing contributing to alcoholism, domestic abuse, petty thievery, and the ills and disease that infested their new environs.

Was there social relief for an enlarged population in distress? There was.

Beginning in 1494 and continuing through 1547 and beyond, laws were formed distinguishing between the deserving and undeserving poor. Those deemed deserving had recourse to support in special living arrangements-poor houses, with orphans and children of single mothers living with the elderly and those unable work-the infirmed. Those undeserving served under harsh workhouses that only grew harsher as time went on. But, as the feudal social system continued breaking down, more vagabondage, begging, and unemployment occurred growing the populations of the work-houses and debtors prisons.

The later part of Queen Elizabeth I's reign witnessed Poor Laws enacted, the 1601 laws codifying the previously established legislations and harsh penalties surrounding begging and undocumented travel between locales, and more systematically defined what was meant by being poor. It also provided relief for the pauperism plaguing the crown's subjects. These laws were administered at the local parish levels with lots of disparity between the parishes- who gets and how much assistance was given. The funding was also local through compulsory taxation rates on land, pressuring mostly smaller landholders and business people, not the elite whose personal wealth was exempted from the tax. Keeping costs down was a big motivation. Population movement to parishes better off and with better benefits was restricted with stark limits placed on travelling without appropriate permits in the mid-17th century.

The Speenhamland System, enacted around the same time of nationally "freeing" peasants for travel between parishes (1795) so they could find work, suggested an allowance system based on the price of bread and family size since grain prices were increasing primarily due to England's part in fighting the French revolutionaries, then the Napoleonic Wars, and subpar harvests. It was intended to supplement the cries of low wage earners for a "right to live," something wage rates did not afford. The system was a failure on many accounts.

Speenhamland, though national, was administered unevenly on the local level, and mostly in rural areas where peasant unrest was an ever-present reality. Little assistance went to the newly urbanized populations who also needed it. It became too easy for a worker not to work, or to not produce on a level of one's reasonable capacity, since there was a guaranteed income, even though survival on it was dismal. This was demoralizing and degenerating to long social traditions of self-sufficiency and the benefits work provided for families and their cohesion. Being "on the dole" was too similar to the social stigma attached to the work and poorhouses even though the system paid benefits 'outdoor' with recipients not having to live in one of the houses of disrepute if receiving assistance. The local taxation pressure placed on the smaller landholding and manufacturing employers made for deep animosity between those receiving benefits and those supporting the system.

The taxation levels only grew because of an important central flaw to a well-meaning system. There was never any pressure for raising wage rates. Quite the contrary. Employers lowered the wage rates as much as they could, knowing the system would make up the difference. Further, commodity prices remained high since public money was provided based on the price of buying bread. It also made what jobs were available more unstable when profits levels fluctuated and an employer could ready eliminate positions knowing workers would retain a basic income regardless. When it became clearer that the program hurt capitalist production in the long run, important public opinion decried the Speenhamland system, again-a program well intentioned, but, poorly conceived. Though costly to those paying the funding rates, it mostly hurt and dispirited the intended recipients-the working poor.

Prominent public policy figures and theorizers, such as Edmund Burke, Jeremy Bentham, David Ricardo, and Thomas Malthus railed against the relief. Foremost, the lack of a "free" self-regulating market for labor was being jettisoned by Speenhamland. Ricardo suggested that wages would "naturally" stabilize at a basic survival level. Malthus felt 'right to live' wages would only encourage the poor to reproduce beyond the capacity of the land to sustain human life and starvation was a natural phenomenon for necessary population control. For him, the poor only waste any wage surplus in the ale house. (The Reverend Malthus appears an avatar for some of our current forms of (un)Christianity.) In the end, the old Poor Laws under Speenhamland were repealed and new Poor Laws enacted in 1834, cruelly sharpening the conditions of relief and removing outdoor assistance, making all who received support live in the workhouse, separating family members and deleting any dignity to life in a place worse than the poorest of working people's conditions.

At bottom, under the new Poor Laws, being poor was declared a moral character deficiency.

Polanyi indicates when the new Poor Laws of 1834 were implemented, a completely commodified labor market was born, the last of his three processes of commodification necessary for shaping capitalist society. Removed from subsistence sources and the land supporting agrarian communities, people were now left for a labor market to decide wage payments, hunger motivating a workforce to take whatever wages were offered them.

Yet, ironically, capitalism created its own critics and chief nemeses in a phenomenon labelled the proletariat.

Retorts and Exports

Though we've engaged an English commodification history, the process didn't stop within those borders. Other like-minded countries of Europe quickly followed the economic path the English elite trod, they too transforming their agrarian societies, such as: the 16th century independent Netherlands, France, Germany, late-comer Russia, along with a number of others joining the capitalist profits parade. However, it wasn't as if it was smooth sailing in socially transforming cultures into capitalist societies.

Retorts of seething revolutionary rumblings burst into action in the revolts of 1830, widespread throughout Europe, where demands were made for greater public participation through parliaments forming their country's direction and placing limits on monarchies. Even more unsettling to the system run by ruling elites were the revolts of 1848 (the People's Spring) involving a large part of western Europe that demanded greater democratic voice in national affairs. It didn't stop there as the Paris Commune shook all of Europe's profit-oriented leaders when coalitions of workers, craftsmen and artisans declared Paris independent from the French monarchy and showed the world that the rabble was very capable of self-governance outside the existing capitalist culture foisted upon them. They had to be utterly crushed to prevent others from undergoing the same machinations. And, brutally, in 1871 the French army-with the aid of the Prussians who had just signed a peace treaty with a defeated France, along with the political support of the rest of capitalist Europe, did just that. An alternative to capitalism was decapitated.

It's important to recognize that capitalism demands removing any ability for people sustaining themselves through other alternatives. This is an obvious lesson modern English history taught us when the population was removed from self-sustenance via land privatization while having a wage system thrust upon them. Capitalists also implemented minimal programs when necessary to thwart revolt against the system. The remedies of the Poor Laws were most active in areas bordering on revolution.

Capitalist leadership learned that making the labor market more humane through safer workplaces and providing some benefits to workers-like Bismarck's reforms in the later part of the 19th century, would ensure the system could continue operating. However, any reforms were still in the context of a system that had already commodified land and working people destroying any existing forms of collective self-sufficiency. When reforms impede the profit-making roles commodified land and labor possess, the impediments are removed, just like the Poor Laws were banished and harsher rules implemented.

This historical fact is very apparent today. The systemic pressures to remove the welfare side of state responsibilities to its citizens-obligations demanded and won through generations of workers fighting (and dying) for greater security, respect, and dignity, demanding the "right to live," have never been greater. Witness roll-backs of wage gains throughout the world, cut-backs of public safety nets under austerity as capitalists assume less responsibilities funding public programs, privatizations of public services through selloffs and private/public "partnerships," including national parks to roadways, from bridges to postal services (postal-England); even retirement programs (Chile), and fully public funded health-care services are being transformed into profit making endeavors.

I emphasize, it's not about neoliberal capitalist ideology versus a good capitalism where a paternal state will protect its people from the system's excesses. The socially destructive aspects of commodifying life have been apparent from capitalism's mercantile origins regardless of the liberal-electoral forms undertaken in the 19th and 20 th centuries that attempted to mitigate capital.

Stronger state interventions attempting to train an untrainable and individually greedy capitalism may have helped over the very recent historically anomaly-capital's golden age after the Second World War, but, not over modern history's long duration. Just as remedies were applied to social ills created by the enclosures and labor market, the modern state-intrinsically wed to capitalism, will suspend its paternalistic role whenever so demanded by capital. And under severe systemic threats, capital and its nation/state merge into a totalitarian state-run economy and society, taking fascist forms as seen following the World War I, and during the Great Depression after the 1929 market crash, and is now seen again, if under 21st century circumstances.

The same commodification processes of land and labor, and everything else it can, continue in various stages throughout the globalized world. It's the metastatic legacy of imperialism. This is where my fenced land and limping old man come in.

Consolidation of land into the hands of a few - now fueled by major corporations and investment firms (witness the voracious corporate land grabs in the food insecure areas of Africa and other parts of the world) dominate the remaining vestiges of a natural world ripe in generating profits while feeding populations of consumers. The mass migrations over the last few decades have forcibly expelled innumerable populations in a developing world from their ancient sustaining lands into cities where wage labor now provides their sustenance. Giant agribusinesses force feed existing agrarian societies with land exhausting technologies when they've been very capable of feeding themselves apart from global commodity markets while sustaining their land (unless disasters caused by global warming or profit-driven wars befall them.) Just like the brief history outlined in this essay, the globe is undergoing the necessary processes of social transformation needed to make capitalism supreme, regardless of any preexisting cultural structures.

Cultures founded on capitalism are irreformable. Mitigating reforms attempting to save societies, that's taken many generations to achieve, are being dismantled within far less time than a single generation. And answers don't mean trying to reassemble pre-capitalist pasts. These are long gone with social aspects that should be gone. Potential futures are bleak should capital remain dominant.

It will take visions of a flourishing future without capitalism from a new generation of the systemically dispossessed and disgruntled, dreams looking past the present, while recognizing how this moment came to pass by critically engaging history, and then saying no longer. Local ways will be found for working around the current system, and then networking of local successes into regional and more global alliances building new futures (local change cannot stand alone). Whatever alternatives will take place, they must not include making all things into commodities if life on the planet, as we know it, prevails.

The old man likely limps from his hard labors. A limp of mine from my past labors is now exposed.