Jordan Peterson: Reactionary Guru and Accidental Incel Intellectual

By Matthew Dolezal

Jordan Peterson loves to talk about lobsters. I assume they are one of his favorite animals. In the 90-minute presentation I agreed to watch (after losing a bet), the best-selling author and former clinical psychologist recounted a cute little factoid about these crimson crustaceans.

"I was reading these articles on lobsters, and I came across this finding that lobsters govern their postural flexion with serotonin," said the gaunt middle-aged man in a crackling and nervous tone.

The anecdote was meant as an extension of Peterson's first "rule for life": Stand up straight.

"Fair enough," I thought, "That is interesting."

But shortly thereafter, mere minutes into his monologue, the "self-help" facade began to crumble. Peterson promptly advanced his discourse by using lobster "dominance hierarchies" as a vague metaphorical justification for hierarchies in human society.

This enigmatic notion got me thinking. First of all, if any behavior in nature should either be mimicked by humans or is "natural" when conducted by humans, then what about eating your babies ? Does Peterson advocate cannibalism? Secondly, if he's saying that human hierarchies are inherently justifiable simply because hierarchies exist in nature, then, in order to be logically consistent, he would have to say slavery, Jim Crow, apartheid, and other racial hierarchies were justifiable, as well as all other iterations of human dominance and coercion throughout history.

At this point I had more questions than answers. But I could surmise that Peterson was simply using the naturalistic fallacy in order to rationalize his pre-existing ideology. If I wanted to be really creative, I could defend one of my own beliefs in a similar fashion. For instance, abortions happen all the time in nature; they're called "miscarriages." Therefore, abortion is morally justifiable.

To be clear, I do think abortion is morally justifiable, but for other reasons (such as bodily integrity ). I'm not arrogant enough to claim that my specific moral views are warranted by some pseudo-pantheistic "order." Unfortunately, my entire moral outlook hinges on my ostensibly functional amygdala and subsequent experience of empathy. I am therefore entirely biased in my opposition to the systems and institutions that perpetuate unnecessary death and suffering worldwide. But apparently Jordan Peterson can just breeze through conservative moral platitudes as though they are simple math problems with but one empirical answer.

Continuing with anti-Marxist remarks and statements like, "smart, hardworking people are the most likely to succeed," Peterson asserted that individuals climb up social hierarchies based on their own competence (calling it a "competence hierarchy"). His related commentary made his support for the current class system (and economic hierarchies in general) crystal-clear. These sentiments seem perfectly delightful in a vacuum, but a glance at the reality on the ground (in the U.S., for instance) makes this meritocratic dogma look wildly delusional:

Three men own as much as half the population.

Half the population is living in or near poverty.

CEOs of large firms makes 300 times more than their average employee.

The vast majority of new income goes to the top 1 percent.

White families have nearly 10 times the net worth of black families.

Inheritance plays a huge role in determining individual wealth.

Your parents' income strongly predicts how much money you will make and whether or not you will go to college.

I continued watching and taking notes. But the rest of Peterson's performance followed suit; self-evident advice like "compare yourself to who you were yesterday" or "treat yourself like you're someone you care about" peppered with neo-McCarthyist rhetoric and social Darwinism. Toward the end, the man was ranting about the superiority of Western culture like some washed-up white nationalist . The entire presentation could be summarized by the following quote from journalist Nora Loreto :

"Peterson cloaks his anti-progressive opinions in folksy, common-sense advice. He is a master at inventing an enemy and offering young men a solution to various straw men. Peterson has perfectly tailored his self-help style to the individual, no doubt a holdover from his days as a clinical psychologist, which he mentions a lot when he talks."

To further clarify his reactionary worldview, Peterson has accused the Left of " weaponizing compassion ." Of course this is a doltish oxymoron straight out of The Onion, but it is also a bit hypocritical, since Peterson's androcentric language and influence could readily be used to weaponize male supremacy.

The general public became quickly aware of the term "incel" after Alek Minassian killed ten people in a terrorist attack in Toronto last April. The label is a portmanteau of "involuntary" and "celibate," and members of this movement have been described as "male supremacist[s][…]who believe women should be treated as sexual objects with few rights."

In a scathing New York Times exposé , Nellie Bowles interviewed Peterson in his Toronto home. When asked about the aforementioned atrocity, this highly credentialed academic said, "He was angry at God because women were rejecting him. The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That's actually why monogamy emerges."

In addition, during the same interview, Peterson stated, "The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don't want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence," and, in a Vice interview , waxed profound when asking, "Can men and women work together in the workplace?" He later added, "How about no makeup in the workplace?"

Upon discovering these statements I realized that, in addition to class hierarchies, Peterson espouses another hierarchical concept: patriarchy. He even seems to inadvertently side with the incels. I am left wondering about his views regarding racial hierarchies, but this (along with other observations ) was sufficient evidence that lobsters would be utterly ashamed of the psychologist in question.

Toxic masculinity is already an entrenched aspect of the Western culture this man holds in such high regard. For those who espouse this destructive outlook as a latent and unquestioned tendency, Peterson is preaching to the choir. He is simply telling them what they want to hear, dressing his message in the garb of academic jargon, redundant axioms (e.g. "Endless failure is not good."), and recycled, reactionary, anti-communism. As a public figure, his style, rhetoric, and avid fan base are comparable to a combination of Dr. Atkins, L. Ron Hubbard, and Joseph McCarthy. Despite his name-dropping of psychoanalysts of yore, these are his true predecessors. Jordan Peterson is simply a bitter and paranoid huckster, attempting to protect and maintain his position of privilege while selling as many books as possible. But, due to the particular ultra-traditionalist framing of his subject matter, this pursuit of fame and fortune might not be harmless.

This article was originally posted on Matthew's blog.

Peter Kropotkin's Anarchist Critique of Capitalism

By Jon Bekken

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

Economic Doctrine

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

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

It was this task that Kropotkin took on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Capitalism Not Productive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wage Slavery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Production is Social

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even then such a view was not quite correct:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Private Ownership Absurd

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

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

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

Production for Needs

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

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

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

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

This was republished from Anarcho-Syndicalist Review .

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

[8] ibid. p. 166.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[16]

Fields, Factories and Workshops, p. 193.

The Violence of Dogmatic Pacifism

By Gregory Stevens

"Violence means working for 40 years, getting miserable wages and wondering if you ever get to retire…

Violence means state bonds, robbed pension funds and the stock market fraud…

Violence means unemployment, temporary employment….

Violence means work "accidents"…

Violence means being driven sick because of hard work…

Violence means consuming psych-drugs and vitamin s in order to cope with exhausting working hours…

Violence means working for money to buy medicines in order to fix your labor power commodity…

Violence means dying on ready-made beds in horrible hospitals, when you can't afford bribing."

- Proletarians from occupied headquarters of the General Confederation of Greek Workers (GSEE), Athens, December 2008

I was once a hardcore Christian pacifist who would justify non-violence in the face of rape, robbery, military occupation, police violence, or systemic racist violence. I have read much of the literature, attended and taught pacifist trainings/conferences/events, and have previously been one to publicly shame more militant tactics. As my political work has transitioned from liberal policy activism to revolutionary organizing (lead by and for the oppressed, working toward collective liberation) I have learned more historically-nuanced notions of violence, non-violence, and self-defense. I have come to think dogmatic Christian pacifism can be extremely dangerous and violent to oppressed human and non-human peoples.

One of the first things done in religious debates about pacifism is proof-texting verses from the Bible, picking verses (usually out of context) to prove one/your vision over the other. If we hold a more complex and nuanced version of our faith stories we recognize the goodness and the vast diversity, often contradictory, in biblical narratives and Church traditions. Much like the diversity of gospel accounts shows us the diversity of the early Church, the diversity of revolutionary tactics within our biblical stories and faithful traditions can help us shape our contemporary movements through a diversity of tactics. Rather than assume one way of thinking is right for all times and all places, no matter the context or people involved, we are better off using a diversity of tactics in our goal of our collective salvation from sin (aka our collective liberation from oppression). We need every tool in the box, we need all sorts of tactics available, and we need a great multiplicity of strategies if we want to win in taking down the capitalist, imperialist, hetero-patriarchal system destroying planetary life.

I do not think the world will ever be, or has ever been, a world without violence. Violence is a broad word with many different meanings. I am using the term violence in a very general sense when I suggest that the world will never be a place without some forms of violence. An indigenous Elder of mine teaches this in relation to rain: just the right amount of rain creates new and thriving life, too much rain and life is violently swept away. When the hungry tiger pounces on an antelope, digging their sharp teeth into the flesh to kill for nourishment, violence erupts for life to maintain living. When a glacier cracks and crumbles down into the fishing villages of the far northern regions, entire communities can be lost to the tidal waves and impact of the moving mountains of ice. When a fire takes over a forest, burning down trees and decaying plant matter to ashes, nutrients flood the soil and stronger rays of sun can then reach the forest floor providing more ingredients for new life to flourish.

Mother Earth is not a dogmatic pacifist, she uses violence to transform the world. It's not always Her favorite tool, but it sometimes is; it doesn't seem to be Her ultimate philosophy but a tactic within Her larger strategy for survival.

To claim a completely pure dogmatic pacifism goes against the patterns we see in the world around us. Pacifism becomes a fundamentalist religion or ideology rather than one of many tools within our revolutionary strategies. It is important that we begin to see non-violence or non-resistance as a tactic within a diversity of strategies; it is not the only answer but one very useful answer to very specific historical moments. Non-violence is not dogmatic pacifism, non-violence does not need to be universalized as an ideology for all times, places, and circumstances as in pacifism. The militant non-violent tactics used by some of the civil rights movement (boycotts and sit-ins) have shown that some non-violent tactics can be successful. The militant self-defense tactics used by others within the larger liberation movements (Black Panthers, Young Lords, UHURU etc.) were also proven successful. Neither would have been as successful without the other.

Capitalist Violence

To claim some sort of purist pacifism as the only way forward is also illogical for those who live, move, and have their being within the capitalist world economy. Central to Marx's critique of the capitalist system was the inherent violence of private property, centralization of wealth, worker alienation, and vast hierarchies of domination. Through the ownership of other humans, water, air, and land; the pillaging of global lands for resource extraction; the centralization of property ownership within the hands of the few; and the endless pursuit of 'infinite growth' on a finite planet, life itself is being violently destroyed. With billionaires and millionaires centralizing their wealth and power, strengthening and broadening the gap between the rich and the poor, extreme acts of violence run amuck in society: rampant impoverishment, and no or terrible access to healthcare, food, education, shelter etc. While capitalist pacifists sit rich and pretty, a majority of the world suffers immeasurably.

The capitalist system thrives on the racialization of peoples and their subjugation to colonial power through extreme violence. The capitalist economy thrives on war for oil, land, monopoly-imperialist power, and for the many markets opened up through the production and sales of millions of high-tech weapons. To claim a pacifist existence of non-violence is to assume your life is not actively executing violence on the world through the very social systems those who claim such lofty ideals benefit from.

It is white middle-class pacifists who do not experience capitalist violence in the disproportionate way black, brown, differently able, queer, trans, mothering/care-giving, migrant, female, and religiously diverse people experience daily. It is these same middle-class pacifists who greatly benefit from the violence enacted by the state and corporate business forces on Earth and peoples around the world. They experience health, wealth, and property; they experience the abundance of food, shelter, and access to the excesses of capitalism but they do so on the backs of the global south and the middle east. It is these white middle-class dogmatic "peace police" who scream and yell at people defending themselves from state violence, telling them they are immoral and violent. In this way, they stand directly in the way of someone seeking their own liberation.

Writing in his personal journal about the rise of fascism in Germany, George Orwell mused, "Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one.… others imagine that one can somehow "overcome" the German army by lying on one's back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen.… Despotic governments can stand "moral force" till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force" (emphasis added).

Pacifist capitalists are extremely violent and can even be regarded as home-grown terrorists, as they are committing senseless acts of violence by perpetuating a state of extreme inequality through violent relations of domination, hierarchy, alienation, and exploitation. They project this violent privilege onto the impoverished, the working class, and other radical organizers who seek to defend themselves from the extreme violence of a capitalist society. Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks to this problem among political leaders, "When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con." ( "Nonviolence as Compliance" in the Atlantic )

A key to understanding this problem lies within the social location of many pacifists. The free-market, private ownership of property, elected governmental officials, and the legal system itself have all been managed by and for white people (often white Christian men). When all of these systems do not work in your favor and when they do not protect you but are in fact a great source of the violence you face, then your political actions focus on ending these systems of death, if not just defending yourself from their violence. This is exactly why disenfranchised people do not always choose "civility" as their response to liberal violence. The state defines "civility" and their "civilization" - they chose to define their civil state through genocide, colonization, imperialism, slavery, inequality, etc. Civility is the problem.

Revolutionary Resistance, Diversity of Tactics, and Liberation

People of color, trans people, and folx with differing abilities know this, and have been leading struggles with diverse tactics for a very long time. In an article posted on April 26, 2015 on the Radical Faggot blog , Benji Hart writes, "Calling them uncivilized and encouraging them to mind the Constitution is racist, [sexists, ableist] and as an argument fails to ground itself not only in the violent political reality in which black, [trans, and differently abled] people find themselves but also in our centuries-long tradition of resistance - one that has taught effective strategies for militancy and direct action to virtually every other current movement for justice."

In reaping the benefits of violence and then subjecting oppressed peoples to violence so they cannot escape their oppression, you not only thrive off their perpetual suffering, but you take away the ability to claim dignity and self-determination. It is extremely violent to push pacifism on those who exist under the heaviest of boots of capitalist and colonial exploitation when you greatly benefit from the exploits of capitalist and colonial violence.

The colonizer tells the colonized not to defend themselves.

The rapist tells the raped not to defend themselves.

The attacker tells the attacked not to defend themselves.

The murderer tells the victim not to defend themselves.

The slave owner tells the slave not to defend themselves.

The civilized tells the savage not to defend themselves.

The pacifist tells the oppressed not to defend themselves.

The revolutionary joins the colonized, raped, attacked, victim, slave, savage, and oppressed in solidarity; together they seek collective liberation. It is "precisely marginalized groups utilizing these tactics - poor women of color defending their right to land and housing, trans* street workers and indigenous peoples fighting back against murder and violence; black and brown struggles against white supremacist violence - that have waged the most powerful and successful uprisings in US history." (from an April 2012 pamphlet written for Occupy Oakland, Who is Oakland? ).

It is often argued that by offering your own life in martyrdom, the violence of the state will be exposed when the state or armed forces act in violence against you for all to see, and then put an end to once and for all. This is terrible logic, especially if applied to every context in all of history. We should not expect someone to die or not defend themselves in abusive and violent situations so that the violence of their actions can be exposed, somehow convincing others not to be violent in the same way.

Jesus was nailed to a cross and Caesar didn't have a change of heart in the face of such oppressive brutality. He celebrated.

Black and Brown people were lynched, and white supremacists didn't have a change of heart in the face of such oppressive brutality. The community celebrated.

Violence is exposed all the time, and nothing is done about it. How many videos of police murdering unarmed teenagers do state officials need (or do liberals need) to watch before they realize their violence and magically chose to stop it via a change of heart? How would that even make sense coming from an institution founded just after slavery to harass, watch, and catch non-white former slaves? The very same legal system that didn't have a change of heart in the face of violent white supremacy but rather created an entire white supremacist billion-dollar business: the prison industrial complex.

White feminist theologians in the 1960's critiqued the idea of "sacrificial living" as the mission of their faith-filled lives. It was being forced upon them by liberal theologians of the day: the highest calling is kenotic, sacrifice, emptying oneself for thy neighbor. The white cis male liberal theologians making these claims on the bodies of women did not consider the thousands of ways women are already subjected to capitalist hetero patriarchy, especially the unpaid reproductive labor it takes to produce such a society. This critique was later enhanced in the 1970s by revolutionary black feminists in the Combahee River Collective who first wrote about intersectionality: "The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face."

This narrative of sacrificing one's life to the powers and principalities also assumes that the upper class, the capitalist class, and the exploiting classes will suddenly choose to sacrifice their wealth, power, and privilege in order to liberate the masses who have (at their own expense and for their own survival) produced all of their wealth, power, and privilege. Not only does this idea take autonomy away from the oppressed, continuing the elitist narrative that the oppressed are uneducated filthy savages, but it also supports oppressive violence through demanding non-resistance in hopes of revealing the brutality of oppression to the oppressor.

Here's another example: A man breaks into a woman's house with a knife and has intention to rape, rob, and kill her. As a pacifist she chooses not to use a gun to defend herself. Rather, she creatively tells him that his ways are unjust, that there is another way of living, and that compassion is the way of truth; she hopes that her rape and murder will be a shining example of compassion and courage - she offers her own life as a sacrifice to show him that his ways are unjust, that he should change his ways, that he should rape, rob, and murder people no more. She hopes to convert his heart along the way, through her sacrifice she hopes he will repent.

It's also absolutely absurd to think a woman who fights or kills a rapist, becomes like the rapist. Colonized Indigenous and African peoples forced into slavery did not become like their slave owning colonizers when they violently rebelled, resisted, revolted, and rioted. The Jewish people who killed or fought the Nazis trying to exterminate their people, did not become like the Nazis. Using violence against those who exploit, oppress, and abuse you does not make you like them. Reality is more complex than dogmatic pacifism allows.

Don't Speak Truth to Power; Destroy Power

If someone is suffering and experiencing oppression, we should act to stop the violence and not hope that timely bureaucratic answers of policy reform will actually do anything to alleviate suffering and fight injustice. Wasn't it the elite classes and their bureaucrats who created the very legal system that attempts to make extremely complex realities into black-and-white situations for "educated" judges to dictate someone's future?

Most people in the world are already experiencing violence and are not defending themselves; most people are not acting violently in direct confrontation with their abusers, and these hoped-for non-responses have not motivated liberals or conservatives into action. Slavery did not end because all the salves were full of hope or because they were pacifists. Slavery was abolished because of slave revolts, organized rebellions, and armed underground rail roads like the one Harriet Tubman led thousands to freedom through. Slave abolitionist, Frederick Douglas , speaks so eloquently to these ideas in his 1857 speech delivered on the 23rd anniversary of the West India Emancipation:

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.

Liberal dogmatic pacifism is one of the most effective tools of violence used by the State to keep marginal and oppressed communities from rising up, restoring their dignity, and protecting themselves from further abuse through liberatory communal armed self-defense.

What then does it mean to love your enemy? Does it mean you continue to allow you enemy to attack you? Is it loving to allow someone to attack you, to bomb you, to exploit you, to oppress you - is that really what Jesus and the early church were getting at?

"Love your enemy" does not mean: stay in an abusive relationship, take the abuse because it's good and holy. If such an abusive relationship is complexified and organized on a mass scale why would the logic of resistance be any different? Why is the abuse of the state or of right wing fascists any different than the abuse of a spouse? It absolutely seems more intense, it seems more organized, it seems more brutal - and if anything, it doesn't seem to be worthy of our acceptance. We should always defend ourselves and others from oppression. Why would we accept the abuse as if pacifism is more righteous? Ending the abuse and setting each other free is far more righteous.

When experiencing oppressive violence, it is important to remember that our struggle is a struggle for life itself. We are not struggling for voter recognition or policy reforms, we are not assuming life is good and just needs a few adjustments; we are struggling because our very existence depends upon it. The 13th trans woman to be murdered in 2018 was killed on July 10th; the police have killed 446 people so far this year (1,147 people in 2017); the military has dropped thousands of more bombs than ever before, murdering record breaking numbers of people and places; over 1,200 children have literally been lost by the federal government; white supremacists were directly responsible for 18 out of 24 US extremist-related deaths in 2017; and over 200 species go extinct every single day amidst apocalyptic ecological conditions that are ultimately leading to our very own species' extinction.

There is no time to wait for oppressors to stop oppressing us, as if one day they will wake up to their extremely violent ways. This is exactly what the plantation owner would hope their slaves believed. We must choose life, and we must choose to defend ourselves, our communities, and our ecosystems from colonization, industrialization, state formations, and coercive social control. To live for life is to live in opposition to capitalism and the violence it perpetuates on the world around. We do not advocate revolution because we hope to see our tendencies win the day, but because we seek the flourishing of planetary life.

Liberatory self-defense is a far greater framing than dogmatic pacifism as it encourages dignity, self-determination, and participation in the shaping of a new world beyond appealing to "representative" authorities to pass less abusive policies. When these politicians do make decisions for the masses they create more bureaucracy and make it possible to define and categorize more bodies, and thus further discriminate, oppress, and define our bodies through legal definitions. Under the rules of pacifism, the oppressors win, they always hold the bargaining power, and they always decide who gets the goods and who gets nailed to a cross.

Liberatory, Community, Armed Self-Defense

Scott Crow's recent anthology, Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense , explores liberatory, armed, community self-defense as a tactic within a larger revolutionary strategy through theoretical reflections and historical studies. He and the various other author-activists make it very clear that the armed component of any self-defense strategy should never become the center (or we risk becoming standing militaries). Rather power is sought to be shared and equalized as best as possible, thus distinguishing armed self-defense from armed terrorist, armed insurrection, armed military organizations, armed guerilla armies, or armed law enforcement. Crow writes, "The liberatory framework is built on anarchist principles of mutual aid (cooperation), direct action (taking action without waiting on the approval of the authorities), solidarity (recognizing that the well-being of disparate groups is tied together) and collective autonomy (community self-determination)."

Crow goes on to say that this form of liberatory self-defense is not to be used to seize permanent power, or that arms are to be used as the first resource for self-defense but should be taken up only "after other forms of conflict resolution have been exhausted." This isn't about revolutionary vanguardism or storming the white house with guns. This is about self-defense from literal Nazis who have been murdering, mass shooting, and assaulting people at record-breaking numbers in the past few years (Rest in Power Heather Heyer ).

It should be noted that Crow's brand of liberatory, community, armed self-defense differs from other forms of armed action in two main ways: the first is that it is organized but temporary, "people can train in firearms tactics and safety individually or together but would be called on more like a volunteer fire department - only when need and in response to specific circumstances" (9). The second, and probably most distinct and important element of liberatory, community, armed self-defense (as used historically by groups like the Zapatistas, those fighting in the Rojava revolution, and the Black Panther Party from the 1960's), is power-sharing and egalitarian principles incorporated into the ethics of the group and its culture well before conflict is engaged (9). Unlike, for instance, right-wing militias (anti-immigration patrols of the Minutemen Militia, or the racist Algiers Point Militia that patrolled New Orleans after Katrina), who have nothing to do with collective liberation. "These militias are built on racist beliefs, conspiracy theories, and a macho culture where the strongest or loudest is the leader. They are typically organized in military type hierarchies with no real accountability to the people in civil society and the communities they operate within" (9).

Another key component to the tactics of self-defense is dual power which is about both resisting and creating. The resistance is toward exploitation and oppression, the creation is toward "developing other initiatives toward autonomy and liberation as part of other efforts in self-sufficiency and self-determination." This model is about creating a better world, much like the Black Panther breakfast program did when they stopped waiting around for white governing officials and started to feed their own communities' kids, so they might succeed in school and life generally. Self-defense isn't merely about being armed, but about building networks and infrastructure of people powered mutual aid. The Church institution has muddled this but in many ways has a strong people powered infrastructure: when you get sick, the care team will drop off some dinner; when you have a baby, just about everyone in the church is willing to hold, play with, or baby sit your child as needed; and if you total your car in an accident, someone in the church offers to drive you places or gives you their grandma's old car. How might we use this infrastructure in more radical ways with more revolutionary purposes? How might we use this infrastructure to establish the Queerdom of God in the US Empire?

Conclusion

What I hope to have accomplished with this article is to expose some of the more basic and less nuanced notions that are often used by dogmatic pacifists who refuse to engage radical critiques of their ideas. These dogmatic pacifists keep themselves in their privileged existence, waving the finger of judgment at both lumpen and proletariat communities that choose dignity through emancipatory self-defense. In relation to violence within our movements, our tactics, and our overall philosophies, it is important we continue to ask tough questions. Here are some really great questions to ask in thinking about violence in our direct actions:

• Are we harming state and private property, or are we harming people, communities, and natural resources? Is the result of our action disrupting state and corporate violence, or creating collateral damage that more oppressed people will have to deal with (i.e., Black families and business owners, cleaning staff, etc.)? Are we mimicking state violence by harming people and the environment, or are we harming state property in ways that can stop or slow violence? Are we demonizing systems or people?

• Who is in the vicinity? Are we doing harm to people around us as we act? Is there a possibility of violence for those who are not the intended targets of our action? Are we forcing people to be involved in an action who many not want to be, or who are not ready?

• Who is involved in the action? Are people involved in our action consensually, or simply because they are in the vicinity? Have we created ways for people of all abilities who may not want to be present to leave? Are we being strategic about location and placement of bodies? If there are violent repercussions for our actions, who will be facing them? [1]

In conclusion, some more thoughts from Scott Crow on forming organized, liberatory, community, armed self-defense:

• Many questions remain, including those concerning organization, tactical considerations, the coercive power inherent in firearms, accountability to the community being defended and to the broader social movement, and ultimately, one hopes, the process of demilitarization. For example: Do defensive engagements have to remain geographically isolated? Are small affinity groups the best formations for power-sharing and broad mobilization? How do we create cultures of support for those who engage in defensive armed conflict, especially with respect to historically oppressed people's right to defend themselves? What do those engagements of support look like? Additionally, there are many tactical considerations and questions to be discussed and debated to avoid replicating the dominant gun culture. How do we keep arms training from becoming the central focus, whether from habit, culture, or romanticization?

Further Reading and Research

Akinyele Omowale Umoja - We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement

Charles E. Cobb - This Nonviolent Stuff′ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible

Cindy Milstein (editor) - Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism

CrimthInc - The illegitimacy of Violence, The Violence of Legitimacy

Derick Jensen - Endgame (Volume 1 and 2)

Francis Dupuis-Deri - Who's Afraid of the Black Bloc?: Anarchy in Action Around the World

Franz Fanon - The Wretched of the Earth

Kristian Williams - Fire the Cops!

Scott Crow - Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense

William Meyer - Nonviolence and Its Violent Consequences

Notes

[1] https://radfag.com/2015/04/26/in-support-of-baltimore-or-smashing-police-cars-is-logical-political-strategy/

Exposing the American Okie-Doke: Russiagate, Corporate Propaganda, and the Historical Obstruction of Class Consciousness

By Colin Jenkins

The "founding fathers" deliberately arranged a system of governance that would protect the wealthy minority from the majority. Over time, as it fused with capitalism, this arrangement transformed the US government into a market. Railroad tycoons and robber barons forced their way into this market during the Gilded Age. Big business controlled the "public agenda" throughout the 20th century, with multinational firms taking root in the 1980s and 90s. Ronald Reagan ushered in the neoliberal era, which amounted to an all-out corporate coup of American politics. And, in 2010, the Supreme Court placed its stamp of approval on this system with its Citizens United decision, allowing anonymous donors unlimited access to politics through Political Action Committees (PACs).

In other words, the US government has been a traded commodity for a long time, in many ways since the beginning of the country's founding. Wealth determines elections (over 90% of the time the campaign with the most money wins). Politicians are commodities that are bought by capitalists. Legislation is a commodity that is bought by lobbyists (employed by capitalists). This is the case for both parties and all politicians (because it is built into the system).

The point : If you still believe your 5th-grade textbook and think you have a say in determining public policy in the US, you are furious right now. Because you believe democracy exists and that it was hijacked by a foreign government. However, if you realize democracy (or a republic) does not exist, the Russia/Trump revelations mean only one thing: the traded commodity known as the US government has gone global, following all of the other capitalist markets that have been globalized over the past 40 years.

The bottom line : We, the working-class majority, have never had a say in our political system. Whether it's the Koch brothers, George Soros, Goldman Sachs, the Israel Lobby, the Saudi royal family, some anonymous hedge fund manager on Wall St, or a dozen Russian oligarchs, "foreign" entities have always controlled our government. Our problems are wholly internal, created by our founders, intensified by capitalism and both capitalist parties, and solidified by Congress and the Supreme Court. Our everyday ills - poverty, debt, unemployment, underemployment, eroding safety nets, homelessness, inadequate housing, inadequate healthcare, inadequate education, debt-to-live scenarios, war, police brutality, campaign financing, corporate lobbying, corporate subsidies, etc.. - are homegrown. The systems that smother us in our everyday lives - capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, patriarchy - are purely homemade.

The solution : The cries of Russia "interfering with our democracy" are both a distraction and a product of a system that intentionally obstructs critical thought. As working-class Americans, our enemies are the capitalist system, the dictatorship of capital, and the wealthy interests that dominate and control our lives, regardless of their supposed citizenship. This truth can only be realized through an embrace of class consciousness, something that has been stripped from us for the good part of the last century. Corporate "news" plays a crucial role in this process.

Today, when republican/conservative ignorance is met with informed, structural analysis, it is quickly deemed "fake news." When democrat/liberal ignorance is met with informed, structural analysis, it is immediately met with screams of "Russian trolls." Despite the cognitive dissonance that is sparked, ignorance usually prevails in both cases because Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC are incredibly skilled at packaging entertainment as information and analysis. The production value is top notch, and the range of "experts" who are trotted out every night gives the illusion that they are presenting "all sides" of the matter, leaving nothing to be questioned beyond agreeing or disagreeing with each side. In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky broke it down like this:

"The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda."

Our time, or lack thereof, is used against us. Capitalism smothers us from all angles by placing us on that proverbial hamster wheel, forcing us to run ourselves ragged in the pursuit of a paycheck. We live our lives one or two weeks at a time, spending half of our waking hours in a place we do not want to be, doing something we do not want to be doing, struggling to keep our lives and those of our families afloat, scraping by as best we can for that next piece of paper that allows us to eat. In this smothering environment, regurgitating corporate-propagandized talking points becomes the default mode because it takes much less time and effort than actually learning (reading a variety of sources, building historical context, discussing, engaging in the reciprocal process of praxis and theory, and deploying structural and systemic analysis).

Nuance is important, but class analysis is vital. With it, we understand that our problems are systemic, our immediate enemies are domestic, and our struggle against power cannot be sidetracked by a feud between global elites. In the end, our allegiance must lie with the oppressed of the world. And when our own oppressors begin to stir up a patriotic fervor, calling on us to pledge our loyalties to them, consider this advice from human rights activist Ajamu Baraka: "What does the working class have to do with a struggle between capitalists in the US and capitalists in Russia? That is not our fight. Our interests are not the same as their interests… Black, Brown, and white working-class and poor folks have nothing to do with the US capitalist elite."

For all intents and purposes, Donald Trump is an enemy of the people. As is Vladimir Putin. As are the Clintons, the Bushs, Barack Obama, and any individual that fills the power structure which has smothered us since the country's founding. Their allegiance is not to us; it is to global capital. It is to the system that was deliberately arranged by our founders with the purpose of protecting wealth and power from "the mob" (us). As such, our allegiance should be to the poor, oppressed, and working people of the world. Through its media channels, US/capitalist propaganda tells us otherwise, packaging its elite interests into some vague form of "national interest," while tugging on our emotional strings with primetime spectacles. The power structure relies on these propagandized, emotional triggers to override any potential shift toward rational and critical thinking. This is why organic/working-class intellectualism is so desperately needed. It is the key to revolutionary change. And we all have it. But, for many, it is obstructed by layers of conditioning. It is the duty of radicals to chip away at these layers without accidentally fortifying them. A delicate task, indeed.

Trump In Helsinki: A Trip Back to the 1970s

By Michael Orion Powell

The climate in the United States in 2018 is portrayed as inexplicable and unprecedentedly bad. And, despite a sense of uniqueness, it is full of precedent.

During the early 1970s, the United States was shedding away from the world. The Vietnam War, a protracted invasion by the U.S. war machine, left with the Vietcong victorious. It was one of the United States' most obvious defeats - despite a bombardment with superior technology, 58,220 Americans died in Vietnam and, to this day, Saigon remains Ho Chi Minh City, in honor of the Vietnamese revolutionary.

Military withdrawal was not the only mark of defeat. Then President Richard Nixon, in the midst of the 1972 election that led to the Watergate scandal that brought down his presidency, convened with the Soviet Union in the Moscow Summit of 1972, meeting with General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. The meeting came after meeting in China with Chairman Mao Zedong earlier that year; much like how Trump's meeting with Putin was preceded by a meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Paralleling Nixon's series of agreements that seemed like capitulation to many Americans caught up in a Cold-War frenzy, Trump's meeting with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, where he expressed an agreement with the Russian president's claims that he had no involvement in interfering in the 2016 election, has the appearance of capitulation. During his own tour, Nixon signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, and the U.S.-Soviet Incidents at Sea Agreement, in effect enabling the policy of detente that enabled the Soviet Union the space to invade Afghanistan in 1979.

There is much speculation about what motivation Trump had to be so passive and deferential in Helsinki, with the New Yorker arguing that he is somewhat compromised. There is a culture of corruption in many "Eastern Bloc" countries (an outdated term that suddenly seems back in vogue) that may be hard to shed oneself of once they become embroiled in it. As Eric Trump said, the only color that his father sees is green. Therefore, most likely some sort of investment, business move, or debt is imploring Trump to give Russia a benefit of the doubt that he is unwilling to provide many others.

Beyond Trump as an individual is a world that has been led to a very similar situation as the early 1970s. The place the United States (and the world, largely) is in is so similar to four decades ago that it makes one wonder if we are in some sort of self-repeating simulation; long wars in the Middle East, disenchanting liberal political figures, and economic stagnation have led the United States to American retreat, racial tension, and many of the other problems that made the 1970s a hard decade for most.

As mentioned earlier, the Soviet Union took the space of American retreat to invade Afghanistan, a poor move that resulted in the dissolution itself of that country ten years later. Vladimir Putin's Russia most likely has its sights on the Muslim world once again, with Russia providing support for Khalifa Haftar, a Libyan general who would act as a "regional strongman" that would preside over a country left largely leaderless since Muammar Gaddafi was taken out of power by a US-backed coup in 2011. Gaddafi's own son Saif is poised to run in an upcoming election in Libya, as well.

Russia's attitudes toward Africa are strange. Despite racist incidents occurring regularly in the country (especially at soccer events), Moscow has long sought open relationships with many African countries. The murder of Gaddafi has been reported to have upset Putin deeply, with him developing a fear that NATO would attempt that same fate on him. Russia has provided visa free travel to Moroccans, provided arms to Cameroon to fight Boko Haram, and has made economic investments in Ethiopia. Russian intervention in Libya would provide access to the surprisingly large reserves of groundwater that the country provides in its interior.

The repeat of the 1970s would only complete in analogy if it reached a similar conclusion, as well. The Soviet Union overstayed its hand in Afghanistan and was vulnerable to its own compromise when political winds shifted. Putin may be a very deft and intelligent leader, but he is a mortal man who will not be around forever. His country has a history of instability when regimes provide vacancy. Something very unpredictable could happen if he ever resigns from or dies in power.

Likewise, with the development of an "enemy list" and bizarre relationships with celebrities (Nixon gained the friendship of Elvis Presley and James Brown), Donald Trump is really shaping into a Nixonian figure. If he were to meet a similar fate as Nixon, which is increasingly likely if a planned second summit with Putin has a similar reception to the first, a much more seasoned and mainstream American leader could find their place on the American stage, making countering Russia in the world his or her chief sales pitch.

Michael Orion Powell-Deschamps is a writer living in the Bay Area. He also has a music project called Tilhas, which can be seen at Tilhas.org.

A Humanist Capitalism?: Dissecting Andrew Yang's 2020 Presidential Platform

By Charles Wofford

One of the most delightful experiences I've had as a leftist is when I hear someone who has no apparent class consciousness express, seemingly from nowhere, a remarkably perceptive comment on class society. I recall a coworker once mentioning aloud how strange it was that we were all so frightened of the boss and what they might do to us. Entrepreneur and 2020 democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang of Venture for America has given us another example with his essay, " Humanity is more important than money - it's time for capitalism to get an upgrade ." Throughout the article, Yang advocates for a new capitalism, based on three principles: that humanity is more important than money, that the individual person ought to be the unit of the economy rather than the dollar, and that markets exist to serve "common goals and values." In the end, Yang explicitly calls for federal government intervention to "reorganize the economy."

There is little to disagree with in Yang's moral analysis and his point that capitalism does not serve the interests of the great mass of people. To be clear, I also think the government ought to reorganize the society along more egalitarian lines. But Yang also appeals to certain widely accepted economic beliefs about the "invisible hand," and self-interest and competition being the main drivers of economic prosperity. As a result, Yang's case is subject to the same critique that Marx made of the classical political economists in his 1844 economic manuscripts :

"Political economy starts with the fact of private property; it does not explain it to us. It expresses in general, abstract formulas the material process through which private property actually passes, and these formulas it then takes for laws. It does not comprehend these laws - i.e., it does not demonstrate how they arise from the very nature of private property...Precisely because political economy does not grasp the way the movement is connected, it was possible to oppose, for instance, the doctrine of competition to the doctrine of monopoly, the doctrine of craft freedom to the doctrine of the guild..."

Translation: Like the classical political economists, Yang looks at the capitalist world in which we live and simply takes it as a natural order, whose economic tendencies are unchanging laws. Because he does not understand the historical origins of the divisions of labor that make up capitalism, Yang can posit such oxymorons as "human-centered capitalism." Because he sees capitalism in the misleading and pedantic terms of supply-and-demand ("capitalism prioritizes what the world does more of") he thinks we need to merely demand a more just world and capitalism will provide it. Yang is clearly not involved in activist spaces, otherwise he would know that people have been making radically humanist and egalitarian political demands for longer than capitalism has been around, and at no time has capitalism worked toward those goals. If Yang read up on the founding of the United States (particularly Madison's Federalist Paper No. 10), he would know that the founding fathers intended this anti-egalitarianism. If Yang read up on Hamilton, he would know that many founding fathers thought the wealthy were the natural representatives of all people - a complete fabrication and a lie.

Yang argues for a conception of markets that meet human needs rather than compelling humans to meet the needs of markets. But then he talks about how we can change our behavior as economic subjects in order for the market to provide what we want. The contradiction seems lost on him: if markets are to be geared toward human need, then the question is not an economic one, but a political one. The question is not "how do we read the market?" The real question is "how do we get the power to create a human-centric society?" And this is the conceptual problem behind Universal Basic Income (UBI). Yang justifies it in terms of the productivity it may increase. But that's not a humanist concern; it is a capitalist-economic concern.

A brief history of how capitalist relations came to be is in order. Yang never defines exactly what he means by capitalism, but he suggests that it goes back over 5,000 years, conflating it with the invention of money. In reality, the notion of capitalism - private, for-profit ownership of industry with wage labor and commodity production - has its origins in 17th-century England. Over the centuries the city dwellers of the country - who were mostly merchants and exchangers by profession - had acquired so much money, and thereby power, that they were able to appropriate common-owned land in England. Up until the late 18th century, most of the land in England was commons: the people who lived there had rights to the land irrespective of whatever the "owner" may wish to do with it. Modern concepts of ownership did not exist at the time. As the merchants in the cities grew more wealthy, they bought out or often outright stole commons land in order to expand their holdings, and thereby their businesses. By the late 18th century, the merchant class (who Marx called the bourgeoisie, which literally just means "city-dweller") had bought parliament itself, and started passing parliamentary laws of enclosure to finish up the long consolidation process the bourgeoisie had begun over 100 years prior. At the end of this process, a tiny number of people concentrated in the cities owned some 98% of the land and industry in the UK. 99% of the population, formerly peasants, had to go work for them in a condition called "employment" in order to live. They were now wage laborers: the proletariat. This is the origins of what we now call capitalism. It did not come about through some peaceful transition, but through a violent process of robbery by a small class of an entire country. One of the relevant points to take from this history is that the peasants of England did not voluntarily employ themselves to the nascent bourgeoisie. They were compelled to go to work in the factories because they had been robbed of their own access to the means of existence. None of this has anything to do with freedom; it is all coercion.

The standard economic view of money is that it is a neutral means of exchange. However, if any one individual or clique acquires enough money then they may purchase and bribe politicians, control entire fields of media coverage giving them huge influence on political opinion, and they may commit horrible crimes with impunity because no one will take them to court, etc. In short, having enough money allows one to shape society to one's whims at the expense of others. The conclusion is that money is not merely a neutral means of exchange; it is a form of social power. A society focused around human need, and not markets and money, would therefore have, at the very least, strict limits on the amount of money any individual may possess. Ideally, it would abolish money altogether. But this is against the capitalist premise, which is about free exchange.

With this in mind, where does Yang propose that the government get the power to do these things that he suggests? Short of forcibly expropriating the wealth of the 1%, I do not see a way. Money is a form of social power, and the government is a prime target for that power. Yang has perhaps watched one too many episodes of the television show The West Wing, which shows some fairy-tale vision of politics as an honest journey of visionaries. Yang does not seem to understand that it's all about accumulation of wealth, exploitation of resources, the maintenance of power systems, and that capitalist society is unavoidably inhuman.

David Harvey gives a beautiful example that may help to illustrate the point. In almost every major city in the world today one can find thousands of high-rise condominiums existing in the same city as thousands of homeless people. The condos are empty except for a few weeks of the year. They were not purchased to be lived in; they were purchased to be speculated on in a housing market. This housing market grew to such proportions and has been given such reign that it caused a housing crisis which foreclosed some 4 million people of their homes. Those who lost their homes are not the same people who speculated on the housing market; those people are doing just fine. What does this show? Precisely that the market itself, if allowed to grow unchecked, may wreak havoc upon a society; a truism that seems obvious to everyone except business people and economists.

Ok, so we control the market via government regulation. But those market owners do not like that, and they lobby against regulation laws, they bribe politicians, they control the media discourse etc. Those without the money do not have any real recourse within the system to stop them, for the system has been hijacked via its own methods. So it's not as simple as "well, the government can just do this." The government has long ago been bought out by the capitalists, and politics is treated like another market now. Since the 1980s laws have been made such that it is all but impossible to reregulate the markets. The solution is that we need a completely new system, because "capitalist democracy" (so-called) has fallen past the event horizon into unworkability. This means the end of capitalism, and it means a newer, more direct, less representational form of government. It means public banking rather than private banking. It means the redistribution of wealth from those at the top who have robbed from all of humanity through a coercive system. Interestingly, this would also entail smaller government in many ways, as institutions like the FBI, the CIA, the military industrial complex, and others which exist to protect the status quo would be abolished. Just to drive the nail home, it would also mean the abolition of the Constitution and its replacing with something more progressive and centered around human values rather than defending the "minority of the opulent." (Madison)

Harvey rightly blasts the UBI idea as simply a front for Silicon Valley to get more effective demand for their products. The UBI is really a subsidy to Silicon Valley, not a method of providing for the people. That Yang is an entrepreneur from Silicon Valley is no coincidence.

In other ways, Yang's entrepreneurial training implicates him in the very values he attempts to refute. His "human-centered capitalism" is not a society that is in fact based on human need, but simply around the old fallacy of "meritocracy." A moment's reflection would tell us that a truly humane society would not be meritocratic, as the notion of "merit" is inherently politically implicated. Who defines what counts as merit? A truly humanist society would allow all people the means to develop to their fullest potential on their own terms.

Yang proposes a "parallel economy around social good." The capitalist economy would simply allow this parallel economy to get plump before taking it over. That is exactly what the capitalists are currently doing with the internet. If Yang's "parallel economy" were possible, it wouldn't be needed.

Yang writes, "Most entrepreneurs, technologists and young people I know are chomping at the bit to work on our problems." Our problems are known and have been known for at least 100 years. The problem is capitalism: private control over the means of production. The solution is socialism: worker control over the means of production. The means are popular revolution, which is above and beyond electoral politics. Unless and until you are speaking that language, your "human-centric" ideology is just a sham. Technology will not save us on its own; otherwise it would already have done so.

Lastly is Yang's line about how a humanist capitalism could "spur unprecedented levels of social activity without spending that much." This sounds like the opposite of a humanistic anything, and very capitalist. Why? Because Yang is thinking of more ways to get people to work more, produce more, engage in more activity. But we are already working ourselves to death; American worker productivity is higher than it's ever been. We don't need new ways to do more; we need new ways to do less. We need a new concept of what it means to "contribute" to society. A humanist society would not be obsessed with getting people to work, producing, exchanging, etc. but would rather leave them in relative peace while providing at least for their basic needs. But this is what the entrepreneur is trained to do: produce more, take more risks, and be more daring in the market. In this mindset, people are inherently viewed as commodities, tools to be used by the entrepreneur. We need to move beyond capitalist thinking if we are to move beyond the problems of capitalism.

In conclusion, Mr. Yang's proposed solutions are impressive to those armchair theorists and liberals who lack a deeper understanding of capitalism. They will not solve our problems. They may, in fact, empower capitalism to appropriate even more of our lives. I cannot help but suspect that Mr. Yang is just the liberal version of Donald Trump: the "successful" businessman who is "outside the system." Yang is noticing that there is a political market for progressive values and he is attempting to cash in on it.

He is, after all, an entrepreneur. But treating politics like a business is part of our problem. We've seen how capitalism can posture around the idea of "freedom." Do we not think it could do the same with ideas like "humanism?"

Charles Wofford is an activist and PhD student in historical musicology.

Why Black People Need Maoism in 2018

By Carine Williams

When they hear Maoism, many people think of China, Peru, and the Philippines. They picture peasants "surrounding the cities from the countryside." This is, of course, understandable, but a mistake. Maoism is not simply "everything that Mao did," or "everything that happened in China between 1949 and now." I have spent a great deal of my time writing working to dispel these sorts of myths, some peddled in an unprincipled fashion by anti-Maoists. Maoism is a living, breathing science. By science we mean something with universal principles that can be taken and applied by all who have a material interest in making revolution. In the United States, this is Black people, or the New Afrikan nation.

It was not by accident that the original Black Panther Party (BPP) developed close relations with the revolutionary leadership of the People's Republic of China. Huey didn't go to China to play; he went to study and learn things that could be applied back home. Of course, he eventually degenerated in political line and practice, taking a right opportunist course along with Bobby Seale (always a centrist) and Elaine Brown (who guided the party, in his absence, into a mainstream political force that led into the arms of the Democratic Party). This opportunism in the highest expression of revolutionary sentiment, practice, and force in this country to date needs to be studied and ruthlessly criticized, yet we should be careful. We must place things in their historical context and ensure that we are able to divide one into two, meaning see the beneficial as well as the negative aspects of a thing but also realize that one aspect must be primary.

The BPP was destroyed by a combination of factors: lack of a really scientific method of analysis and cohesive program of political education, failure to promote and apply the Marxist-Leninist principle of Democratic Centralism (debate inside the party, formation of a political line through this debate, and the upholding of this decision by all party members and organs), and a culture of liberalism that ended with comrades fighting comrades, thus opening the door for external factors (the FBI and other LE agencies) to play havoc and get cadre railroaded into prison and killed. We must study and learn all of these lessons, because when we develop another organization with the prestige, mass base, and power that the Panthers had, and we will, they will come for us all again.

So, why do we need Maoism? Because we are against the most brutal, bloody, and vicious empire known to humankind. This country is looting and enslaving our class siblings all over the world. To overturn this order of things, to smash it and rebuild it in the interests of the revolutionary proletariat of the entire world, we must apply the synthesis of 200 years of systematic, organized class struggle, which is Marxism-Leninism-Maoism: the continuity of the revolutionary project that was Marxism-Leninism, with a rupture from the dogmatism and revisionism. Maoists do not uphold "Actually Existing Socialism" because a scientific analysis rooted in the principles laid down by the revolutionary movements and projects that gave us Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao would demonstrate that stealing food from Filipino fisherfolk, like the People's Republic of China (PRC) has been doing, is 100% non-Marxist. This is in disagreement with many Marxist-Leninist organizations today, which uphold these things and other imperialist depredations carried out under the faded red banner of China.

The Maoist argument is that Marxist-Leninist terrain has been spent, and the 21st century must learn from Maoism. "You haven't seized state power yet!" others cry. Indeed, and there has never been a truly Maoist party that has initiated armed struggle in the imperialist metro poles. This doesn't mean that Maoist principles cannot be applied to these countries, this means that we must be ever more creative in our application and ever more disciplined in our party-building efforts. Party building in the USA requires the careful and thorough cultivation of a mass base. Tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people must depend on and follow this party and participate in mass organizations before it can even begin to call itself a vanguard. This is what many who came out of the New Communist Movement of the mid-late 1970s failed to realize. The days of endless squabbling sects that fight over "mass bases" of a handful of other activists must be put to an end, and we must have a truly mass perspective.

There is optimism in the spread of For the People (FTP) organizations and the development of the Organizing Committee for a Maoist Communist Party (MCP-OC) which has a more mass orientation and places primacy on the development of a class analysis and political line in the USA that is based in painstaking investigation and rooted in the aspirations and struggles of the most oppressed, along with a record of seeking to develop international solidarity and prison work. This, I believe, is the best hope for New Afrikan Maoists in the United States and I wholeheartedly encourage Black comrades to develop FTP-type organizations in their own communities under OC guidance. Even if this isn't done, at the very least studies in Maoism, studies in Maoist revolutions, and studies in Maoist theory are beneficial. After and during these studies, think about how it can be applied on your block and in your community.

Learn about and be like Fred Hampton. Time is up for spinning our wheels; we must get together, unite on a principled and unshakeable basis, and mount a formidable resistance against decades and centuries-old oppression based in capitalism and white supremacy. I also encourage support and donation to the Hampton Institute as an invaluable resource in promoting revolutionary ideology and practice in the finest Marxist tradition.

Melting the Ambiguity and Power of ICE

By Canyon Ryan

In less than a week, the people of the world have forced the President of the United States of America to no longer allow detained immigrants to intentionally be separated from their family members. Such an inhumane practice has been permitted at more than 400 detention facilities supervised by ICE agents in the United States.

What this piece aims to do is delineate ICE as an organization and provide a critical analysis of U.S. foreign-policy initiatives, the proposed solution to the ICE facility attention, and an honest call to action.

ICE: Its History and Functions

When discussing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), there is an ambiguity in consideration to its foundation. We know that ICE is the problem, but what is ICE?

ICE was born in 2003, in accordance with the Homeland Security Act of 2002 following the events of September 11, 2001. Since, ICE has become the largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security, the second largest body of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the second largest "criminal investigative agency" in the U.S. (trailing the FBI). There are more than 20,000 ICE employees in over 400 offices in the U.S. and in 46 countries abroad.

ICE has two primary arms: Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO). Each are equally important.

There are approximately 6,500 HSI agents. HSI agents have the authority to enforce the Immigration and Nationality Act ( Title 8 ), U.S. Customs Laws ( Title 19 ), general federal crimes ( Title 18 ), Controlled Substances Act ( Title 21 ), as well as Titles 5, 6, 12, 22, 26, 28, 31, 46, 49, and 50 of the U.S. Code .

The HSI agents are to investigate national-security threats such as human rights violations, human trafficking, drug trafficking, document and benefit fraud, transnational gang activity, cash smuggling, money laundering, and the like.

Their international offices are used to combat transnational criminal activities and work with governments abroad to prevent such activities from entering the U.S. This policy framework can be considered something similar to the "National Security States" used in Central America to repress what was then considered a communist infiltration, known as the supposed "Real Terror Network". Today, we must keep in mind that we've passed the "end of history". Communism is out, terrorism is in. With terrorism at the frontline is bred the dehumanization of the migrants, no longer the Reds. The war on communism has morphed into the war on terror; and ICE, with its HSI agents, are spearheading this new war.

There are other functions of the HSI, but this synopsis should do. Next, we will investigate the ERO.

The ERO are the ones primarily responsible for the current national spotlight. Their function is to capture illegal immigrants and assure their removal from the U.S. In the time between this removal, the families being expedited are held in government and "charity-sponsored" detention camps, or in the case of the Brownsville Detention facility in Texas, a shelled-out Walmart.

The ERO has been strengthened by the Immigration and Nationality Act Section 287(g) , which allows ICE to cooperate with state and local law enforcement agencies. In doing such, it authorizes the Secretary of Homeland Security to also work with state and local law enforcement agencies, permitting officers to perform immigration law enforcement functions. As such, ICE provides these law enforcement officers with the training to identify, process, and detain immigrants.

In detainment, the so-called aliens are placed in the detention centers (similar to jails) mentioned above. Something very important to note here is that, as of 2009, the U.S. Congress has mandated that ICE detention centers must have at least 34,000 people confined each night. Thus, by law and similar to prisons again, there is a requirement (quota) for detention.

Between 2003 and 2007, 107 people died in ICE custody. The New York Times reported that in some cases officials used their supervisory roles to cover up evidence of mistreatment and avoid media coverage of "substandard care or abuse". Between 2010 and 2017, The Intercept reported that 1,224 sexual assault complaints had been made in ICE detention facilities, with only 3% being investigated.

U.S. Foreign Policy: Fighting "Terrorism" with Terrorism

Considering the youth of ICE as an agency, as well the timing of its inception, ICE is undoubtedly a component of the "war on terror." Created by the Bush administration, emphasized and vastly expanded by the Obama administration, and now mushrooming under the Trump administration, we must recognize that ICE is part of a much larger conglomerate. While it is ICE that is attracting much attention, it is not just ICE that we should call into question. Its purpose is to refuse all "aliens" who are "infesting" the U.S., but it is simply a bullet in the gun.

We must see this segment of the government as piece of their new war against the people of the world. The wars that the U.S. have escalated abroad, causing mass refugee migration crises in Central America, the Middle East, and Africa, are primarily responsible for such successions. With the rise of climate change as well, we will soon have a world unstable to support current and expected living standards.

Clearly then, ICE's purpose is to fend off migrants and refugees developed from the wars promoted by the US's other militaristic forces. Last year, people were worried about Syrian refugees flooding the states. Today, the focus is back on the Mexican border. In the future, expect further crises in Africa. HSI operates abroad, they are the international eyes for the ERO. Working with both foreign and domestic law agencies, ICE has created in less than two decades a global force of supervision and detention.

This analysis goes along with the U.S. Commission on National Security which stated , "In the new era, sharp distinctions between `foreign' and `domestic' no longer apply." Accordingly, former President Barack Obama noted , "there is no distinction between homeland and national security". The importance here lies in the conundrum considering that U.S. foreign policy initiatives have been disastrous, for the soldiers sent abroad, for the world in general, and for democracy as a whole. The same values the U.S. government claims to represent in every war it initiates are those which it refuses to allow develop without its supervision, and what ICE and the quotes above illustrate is that the leaders of our country are very aware of their dwindling control over the masses, and specifically who the masses are that they must control. But this conundrum posed appears common knowledge, thus we begin to ponder why we keep making the same mistakes?

Simply put: the U.S. is the producer of terror. It is the producer of terror abroad and thus the engineer of the very terrorism it aims to fight. This is not the result of stupidity. This is its purpose. Such social stratification is ideal for the ruling class. If they can decimate countries abroad, they can go in and offer their assistance. This assistance of course comes with loans. Those loans of course come with interest. Yes, the U.S. is the most indebted nation, but it also makes its money by indebting other nations! These are not mistakes, they're markets.

The terrorism that the U.S. has promoted in the overthrow of governments in Mexico, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, Haití, Greece, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and so on, is on a scale never seen in history. This is what the U.S., as the main facilitator of the global capitalist system, strives for. The U.S. just passed a $716 billion defense budget. The U.S. allowed the Pentagon to misplace $21 trillion in 17 years. Across the world, the U.S. has promoted right-wing, ultra-conservative, authoritarian regimes, reaping the benefits while the workers of these countries are murdered and forced to live at starvation wages. Even today, the U.S. operates with approximately 75% of the world's dictatorships. Our policy is not democracy, it is detention. Thus, the same military that caused many to flee their homelands is now being asked to detain them at home.

A quick historical contextualization of the "Mexican immigrant crisis" is needed. The U.S. under President James K. Polk went to war with Mexico over territory and conquered 525,000 acres of land in 1848. Afterwards, the Native Mexicans, now Americans, were exterminated by a California state-sponsored genocide that massacred over 80% of their population. Come 1914, the U.S. intervened after the Mexican Revolution, toppling the government in order to protect its imperial interests in Mexico's oil, mines, and railroads, which were predominantly owned by USAmericans. In 1938, after discussions of reparations which were not paid to Mexico after the U.S. invasion, Mexico decided it would nationalize its oil reserves. Consequently, President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided not to imperialistically intervene, though during the great depression the U.S. did expel between 400,000-2,000,000 Mexicans from the U.S. (60% of who were birthright citizens). In 1982, during the world oil crisis, the nearly 150% drop in oil's worth meant that Mexico's foreign debt more than doubled . This foreign debt was owed to the U.S.-sponsored World Bank. And after NAFTA passed in 1994, Mexico's government became so reliant on the U.S. that now over 88% of its exports go directly to its neighbor, the U.S.

NAFTA has made it more difficult for Mexican workers to organize, thus wages have plummeted and corruption has run wild in the country. This is perfect for the neocolonial empire as it creates an austere society, with money coming from the top to colonialists, who then protect those giving them money if threatened. By destabilizing Mexico, they allow the society to fight itself at the bottom, while the corrupted officials remain floating above the general public.

What CIA-trained forces did during Operation Condor in Central America has passed. The Japanese internment camps during World War II were temporary. But what they have being built now, these ICE detention facilities, they are here to stay. They are here to stay unless we stand up and fight back against such terror. We cannot become desensitized to these detention facilities, as we have with the creation of a military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, and the slaying of innocent young black men. We must fight.

Trump's Solution: A Crumb to the Beggars

President Trump recently signed an Executive Order that will no longer allow families to be separated unless criminal laws say otherwise. For this, I have seen liberal praise. We must reject such gains as "wins". Such an order goes along with another liberal argument I've seen that separating families in the detention facilities is morally wrong. Yes, indeed it is. But so is the blanket detention of non-violent immigrants. So is the containment, isolation, entrapment, and debilitation of so-called aliens. The liberal "resistance" seemingly wants us to settle for allowing them to be in cages so long as they are together in these cages.

What this Executive Order does not do is mend the separation that has already taken place. Moreover, it seeks to indefinitely detain these families-- calling for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to file a request in court to change the settlement in Flores v Reno. What's more, it calls for families to be detained at military facilities, as well. The same military that has brutalized the world, trained torturers, tortured others themselves, and killed on mass scale, is now being called upon to "care for" detained immigrants. This is a scary revelation. The average citizen cannot just walk on to military facility grounds. We cannot walk into jails for inspection, let alone military facilities. What they hid before, they will hide again.

Such detainment facilities are beyond just immoral, they are abhorrent. They are heinously inhumane and such institutions should not exist anywhere. There are borders today, yes. There are laws and rules, and there are important procedures in place to protect our citizens from potential terrorists. This, however, does not require the detention and deportation of all "illegal" families. In fact, prior to 2012, such a notion was not only unheard of, it was structurally impractical.

Our Solution: A Call to Action

The protest-blockade against the ICE facility in Portland, Oregon is unprecedented. Here, protesters have effectively shut down and ICE detention facility by sheer will of the human body. They blockaded the garages so that ICE vehicles could not exit. For a while, ICE employees even could not exit the facility. Eventually police were called in to escort them out of the building.

Such direct action should set as a reminder that we the people have the power. In numbers, when organized, we have the potential to shut down each facility in the U.S. Approximately 1,000 citizens surrounded the building, the garage, and even ICE employee's cars (provoking the police to arrest one demonstrator) in Portland. These protestors were so effective that the ICE center was actually shut down indefinitely, due to security concerns!

These protests were against Trump's separating of families. What is important is not allowing this Executive Order to calm the fire. We must fight ICE at every step, we must melt ICE. Starting with preventative care, we can help our immigrant communities know their rights by circulating literature on how to defend from ICE raids. It is also important that we verify when ICE is in the neighborhood and document it. We owe gratitude to Sam Lavigne, who doxxed the Linkedin profiles of the majority of people working as ICE agents. We now we know who our enemy is. We have the locations of ICE detention facilities (via ICE's own website), we know where they are stationed. What happened in Portland can just as easily happen in any US city!

We must take a stand. Times are ripe, people are awakened to the monstrosities of this administration because it is Trump, and because it is Trump it is profitable for the media to "uncover." The capitalists only think of money, not the substance. And this substance is accidentally revolutionizing our country. Come an economic collapse, which we are due for as it's been 10 years since the 2008 recession, the honest Left should and will be ready. We must begin organizing and fighting now, and it starts against ICE.

What Leftists Get Wrong About Guns

By Cameron Hughes

A passing glance at the headlines might suggest that the debate around gun control breaks down along the typical liberal/conservative divide. Most elements of the mainstream right have coalesced around a narrative that "big government liberals want to eliminate the second amendment" - that is to say that their arguments lay strictly in the realm of respecting the 'sacred text' of the constitution. Other, more fringe elements of the right make similar points, though the crux of their position tends to portray gun ownership as a last defense against a tyrannical government; think militias of the far-right-libertarian or Bundy ranch disposition. Following their rhetoric to its logical conclusion, the right offers a view of mass shootings as a series of aberrations, unconnected to a larger pattern.

The liberal philosophy regarding guns has solidified behind a vision of gun culture as belonging to the unsophisticated, poor, or un-evolved. The liberal elite sees no use in understanding, let alone owning, firearms. These same liberals have historically offered paltry technocratic solutions to the gun-violence problem; they favor increased background checks or the outlawing of certain gun accessories. Liberals may recognize that the violence perpetrated by mass shooters fits into a cogent pattern, but like those on the right, they are incapable of recognizing the structural root of the problem. Regardless of the rhetoric emanating from either pole in the debate, mass shootings have continued unabated, constantly spurring renewed calls for sweeping gun control. Herein lies a fundamental problem.

The calls to massively overhaul existing gun laws betray an understanding of who exactly a new regime of restrictive legislation would most effect. If we understand that jurisprudence is disproportionately meted out based on race, then clearly we should also understand that new laws - especially those which call for enhanced sentencing, like most gun control legislation does - would disproportionately be applied to people of color and the poor. Despite all of their bluster, it would not be the suburban, 'middle-class,' 'don't-tread-on-me' libertarian types who would bear the judicial brunt of new gun-control ordinances. Rather, as evidenced by cases like that of Tamir Rice and John Crawford III, the police are already eager to use the guise of 'being armed' or 'reaching for one's waistband' as a cynical cover for their obviously racist murders. Imagine then for a moment that they are extended a further legal precedent to criminalize those that they already subject to excessive arrest or violence. If we take the problem of mass incarceration seriously, then so too should we take our understanding of how the state actually functions in its application of the law. In this way, we must confront the fact that racial justice is a prerequisite for tackling gun violence, not the reverse.

We must chart a different path forward. Free from both the inaction of the right and the liberal reliance on violent state coercion. As revolutionaries, we understand that the abolition of class society, and its replacement with a wholly more democratic and equitable alternative, is our only viable option. We contend that much of the violence we experience in our everyday lives, as well as that which is brought to bear in the horrific actions of mass shooters, has itself risen out of the violence, alienation, and degradation that we are subjected to by the forces of capital and state. The building of a society which not only acts to reduce isolation and anomie, but also allows individuals access to comprehensive physical and mental health services would, in our contention, make great leaps toward curtailing episodes of mass violence.

But how do we make a break from our current situation? Though the left has a history of successful armed insurrectionary events to look back on, it's clear that the current US left is nowhere near this stage, capability, or willingness. If anything, the capacity to drum up support for an insurrectionary anti-state imaginary has more life among the militias of the right. Despite this, we recognize that firearms have played a historic role in helping to create the material preconditions for popular power. We must only look to the Black Panther Party - whose program of armed self defense spurred Ronald Reagan and the National Rifle Association to pass extraordinarily racist gun control laws in California - for confirmation that the incorporation of arms into a broader program of popular organizing can strike fear into the heart of the state, giving a burgeoning movement enough defensive breathing room to build its base.

While firearms have their place in revolutionary activity, as the Panthers well understood, it is imperative that we on the contemporary left disabuse ourselves of the notion that bullets are the ultimate praxis. Instead, we must incorporate arms as but one component in a wider strategy of building up a popular, revolutionary mass movement. Contemporary groups like Redneck Revolt, the Socialist Rifle Association, and Huey P. Newton Gun Club, among others, have made strides toward rejecting a fetishization of armed insurrection, while still recognizing the necessity of self defense that firearms help to facilitate in the context of popular organizing. An anecdote from an NPR interview with Charles E. Cobb, author and former member of SNCC, about his book, This Nonviolent Stuf'll Get you Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible , further drives this point home:

"William Worthy, who was a journalist...tried to sit down in an armchair in Martin Luther King's house and was warned by Bayard Rustin, who was with him, that he was about to sit down on a couple of handguns. [...] Martin King's household, as one person noted, was an arsenal with guns all over the place."

In his book, Cobb makes the assertion that the vast majority of civil rights leaders who championed a commitment to 'non-violent' struggle were still willing to use arms as a measure of self defense against white-supremacist mobs and assassins.

Taking a cue from our forbearers, we should recognize that guns have a place in our tactical and strategic outlook as revolutionaries, but in the same way are limited in their potential role. Members of Redneck Revolt and the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, for example, spend the vast majority of their time building programs of autonomy and survival, away from the range. Both groups have initiated food-sharing programs, first-aid courses, and firearm-safety training. When hurricane Harvey struck the south coast of Texas, the Houston chapter of Redneck Revolt sprung into action, helping to distribute supplies and clear debris from waterlogged houses.

We should reject the glorification of firearms that so often occurs on the right, while also rejecting the revulsion and ignorance that is simultaneously offered by liberals. We should emphasize that the roots of mass-shooting events are linked intrinsically to the unequal material conditions of our society - and that neither intransigence nor reform can hope to bring this type of explosive violence to an end. This task can only be achieved through a fundamental reshaping of our society.

Cameron Hughes holds a bachelor's degree in sociology, with an emphasis in social movement studies. He is a founding member of the editorial collective which publishes Salvo. He is also a member transitioning into the Black Rose Anarchist Federation.

Protectionism and Globalization Have the Same Mother: The Crisis of Capital

By Celso Beltrami

Has "globalization", the freedom for capital and goods to move from one end of the planet to the other, with no barriers to limit trade and its miraculous effects, come to an end? Looking at what has happened recently, it seems that an ideology, and, even more so, one of capital's ways of being has reached the end. It seems like the bourgeoisie, or at least a part of it, has taken a suit from its wardrobe which it has not worn for a long time, one which was needed for a tougher climate and the storms that come with it.

Beyond the metaphors, Trump's protectionist turn, which is carried out in a threatening manner and not just aimed at China, constitutes another turbulent factor, both from an economic point of view and that of imperialist relations on a world scale. These two aspects reflect two sides of the same coin, as Trump's economic measures serve an imperialist strategy aimed at both declared rivals and allies who are applying the brakes and who would like the embrace of the stars and stripes, which they have suffered for more than seventy years with varying degrees of enthusiasm, to be less suffocating. In fact, it is very doubtful that the custom duties will really be able to protect the entire US economy from foreign competition. Perhaps they will give a bit of respite to certain sectors of US manufacturing, like steel or aluminum, but many more will be hit and the retaliation will fall upon the workforce (but not just on them), who will probably be the victims of redundancies and worsening working conditions.

As is well-known, after decades of "globalization", it is difficult to disentangle the chain of value, since the productive process involves so many states: you just have to look at the "made in" label stuck on goods to see to what extent their constituent parts are "international". Moreover, it is no mystery that, for example, the large distribution chain Wal-Mart has many articles on its shelves which are entirely made in China. Therefore, "America First" served up in a protectionist sauce threatens to seriously reduce the enormous advantages that the tax reform launched a few months ago is generating for American firms. In this regard the mountain of money given by Trump to his capitalist accomplices is yielding the expected fruit - far from stimulating investment and therefore jobs in the so-called real economy, this mountain of money is mostly employed for speculative purposes, to strengthen financial activities aimed at realizing extra value, at collecting surplus value extorted from the productive process, without taking part in that process.

But, to return to protectionism, perhaps the duties, like those threatened on May 11th for cars produced abroad, are intended, in the creative mind of the New York property speculator, to compel the car manufacturers of Europe and Asia to increase their production in the US, but this would require large investment, more publicly-funded incentives at the expense of the taxpayers (as always) and, not last, conditions of work that approach those imposed on the working class in "offshore" destinations, like, for example, those in Mexico. Which, moreover, has already happened; however, "approaching" does not mean equal to. So as to not pose as prophets, we say that it is very probable that so-called reshoring, the repatriation of productive activity located abroad, will not go that far. But the thinking heads of the US bourgeoisie, and perhaps even those that think like Trump (who a few years ago was considered a buffoon of popular entertainment, good only for rubbish TV, but, who has been propelled to the top of the leading world power by the difficulties in political management generated by the crisis), know this. It is this, the story of the "populists", who have won power or made gains everywhere, that has made (political) life more complicated for the traditional bourgeois political class. The history of the bourgeoisie is not lacking in figures like Trump (remember Italy's national glory, the ex-cavalier Berlusconi?), starting with that Emperor of the spectacle, Louis Bonaparte, to whom Marx dedicated some of his most brilliant and magisterial works.

But, beyond the "unpredictability" of his course, the US President, even if in the badly joined-up and partly disconcerting terms which are characteristic of him, expresses a need, as was said at the beginning, to combat the economic and political growth of the US' competitors (to not say adversaries) on the world imperialist chessboard, or at least to put the brakes on their unhealthy idea (for the US) of, if not striking out on their own, at least carving out more room for autonomy vis-à-vis their burdensome ally. In short, the USA must continue to set the good and the bad tempo over the centuries and the rest should adapt themselves to it. This, however, is more and more complicated, because of the crisis that began 40 years ago, whose development has put China closer and closer to the heels of the USA and pushed the quarrelsome European bourgeoisie to undertake the difficult, and not to be taken for granted, road to a unitary pole of imperialism.

If China has become what it is, this is due in significant part to "Western" capital, including US capital, but now Chinese "market socialism" (that's not a bad joke…) is menacing the first place held by the USA in many economic sectors, starting with hi-tech manufacturing. Behind the duties on steel and aluminum, there is the real objective of harming the "Made in China 2025" [1] project, which aims at developing or accelerating the development of high technology, to make the leap from the "factory of the world" based on products with a medium or low added value (to use bourgeois terminology: in reality, value extorted from the working class), to one that uses the most advanced technologies. Although, according to certain bourgeois observers, the distance between China and the US is still large, and in certain sectors, very large, the gap is being made up very rapidly, even, it seems, more rapidly than forecast, which cannot fail to make the Yankee bourgeoisie think, no matter who their supreme representative is. Washington justifies the duties and the blocking of the acquisition of certain companies by Chinese capital as retaliation against China's supposed addiction to the theft of intellectual property. True or not - something which is anyway judged by the norms of the bourgeois world - it remains a fact that the USA cannot simply dominate the world through its brutal military superiority, which, furthermore, presupposes a military-industrial apparatus second to none, especially in the hi-tech sectors.

In some ways the same considerations can be made with respect to the protectionist "insults" announced against Europe, which, in passing, are supposed to release more money for the maintenance of NATO. Trump, obviously, didn't like Merkel's musing about the fact that Europe (guided by Germany) is starting to walk by itself, without always having to have Uncle Sam holding its hand. Clearly, in the present state of affairs, such a hypothesis is just a hypothesis, and isn't even close, but, if the US trade deficit with the EU, and, in particular, Germany, is added in, then there starts to be more than just something unpleasant.

We are in the first stages of this new phase of imperialist relations, a phase in which diplomatic formalities rooted in good manners still play a role, even if substantially as a façade (see the China-US summit of May 3rd, where practically nothing was decided), but, alongside the fake smiles, weapons are being waved, up to now only economic ones. China, in fact as a first response, has announced that it will stop importing soya from the USA (the world's biggest producer). China is the biggest importer of soya from the US. If this happens, it will hit the agricultural state of the Mid-West, which, among other things, gave majorities to Trump. Some think that the import block on soya "could cost more than 300,000 jobs in the Mid-West and Donald Trump's re-election, not withstanding his tweets on 'America First'."

It is not possible to yet know if, how and how far this protectionist battle will go forward, but it is a type of battle that has historically laid down the preconditions for the birth of acute tensions between states or for the accelerated worsening of these, to the point where they vent themselves in open conflict, no longer on the economic terrain, but on the military one. Already proxy wars have flared up in various parts of the planet and there is no guarantee that sooner or later these will not be fought in more direct fashion. The horizon is heavy with storms and it will be the course of a crisis which isn't going away to write the screenplay for the near future.

Originally published by The Internationalist .

Notes

[1] Without mentioning the new Silk Road, or rather China's geostrategic expansion to the four corners of the World, with the development of ways of communication which favour trade. And one can also add in the US's substantial trade deficit with Peking and the fact that the latter holds a portion of the US public debt that cannot be sniffed at. For more on this in English see leftcom.org