Overcoming Liberalism from Within: On Solidarity and American Socialism

By Daniel Tutt

"We are dealing with two factors in American life: the absence of feudalism and the presence of the liberal idea."

- Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America [1]

A helpful framework for thinking modern political struggles revolves around how political communities achieve the unmet demands of the French revolution: liberty, egalitarianism (equality) and fraternity. As the Japanese Marxist thinker Kojin Karatani argues, these demands form a dialectical knot of contemporary politics, where liberty stands for upholding the sphere of the market economy; fraternity represents the ideals of reciprocity (the nation); and equality stands for the redistribution of wealth and resources carried out by the state. [2] Political philosophers have conceived of these names as receptacles of demands for social freedom, as a thinking of different organisms in search of homeostasis. For example, Hegel applied theories of living organisms to social spheres and Marx discussed the 'crisis free society' as a social organism.

But liberalism, the reigning political philosophy of the post-French Revolution, has failed in achieving these demands. Why did liberalism fail? The primary opponent of liberalism in the post French Revolutionary period was civic republicanism that posed a two-way dialectic of social freedom between liberty on the market as the best means to producing the social conditions of fraternity. But civic republicanism radically excluded the sphere of equality in its conceptions of social freedom for fear of an ossification of state bureaucracy would impinge on personal individual liberties on the market. But what gave liberalism a particular hegemony is that it was able to achieve what civic republicanism could never dream of achieving by tempering demands for individual freedom by opening them to the fraternal dimension of political life. In many ways, this is a story we know all too well. It is also a story that, post-2016, seems to be coming to an end. The liberal approach to promoting social freedoms has resulted in the rise of immense inequalities of wealth and to racist and xenophobic populations. Somehow, the future feels socialistic.

In a series of lectures entitled The Idea of Socialism: Towards a Renewal, the third generation Frankfurt School theorist Axel Honneth argues that today's socialists must overcome the failures of liberalism from within liberalism to achieve the unmet demands of the French Revolution. Honneth's argument is that social freedom must be put forward as a "normative guideline [3]" in the economic sphere. Honneth argues that to achieve the sort of equality within the economic sphere that liberalism has failed to develop, we must return to the praxis of solidarity Marx and other socialists discussed in the late nineteenth century.

To correct the dynamic of liberalism, Honneth argues for solidarity that is immanent to capitalism but no longer tethered to class exclusively. Unlike the Marxist address of solidarity to "workers" Honneth's expansion of social freedom is one that he claims should be addressed more broadly, to "citizens." So 'citizen' replaces the revolutionary category of Marx's proletariat. Expanding the address of social freedom has the potential to disrupt the republican and liberal trap of opposing freedom to fraternity to the neglect of equality. Thus, in the uneven relation of the three spheres of political life solidarity replaces equality - we must achieve solidarity to restore the missing homeostasis. Social freedom is best secured by relations that emphasize mutual solidarity in the economic realm of life as a precondition to secure individual freedom in civic and national life.

Criticizing socialists after Marx, Honneth argues that the early socialists limited their promotion of freedom because they insisted on demands from "societal labor" and not in terms of what Honneth advocates, "political democracy." The task of today's socialists must be to build on what liberalism achieved in terms of individual liberties by appealing to expansions of social freedom in the realm of fraternal relations of civil society, but unlike liberals, socialists must insist that those same freedoms be expanded to the economic realm. In reading Honneth, one gets the sense that he is, in many ways, the philosophical voice of American democratic socialism à la Bernie Sanders.

Honneth is correct to observe that socialist movements from their nineteenth century origins and throughout the 20th century ascribed interests to workers based on a pre-existing set of desires that were thought to already reside within workers by virtue of the exploitation they face as wage laborers. The proletariat was treated as a messianic, albeit secularized, agent of the abolition of existing class society. The effect of the economic determinism of socialist thought was that socialist theory became self-referential and unevenly concerned with the achievement of freedom in the domain of liberty through egalitarianism afforded by state intervention either through redistribution or communist state seizure. Where socialists emphasized the knots of liberty and equality will only come about through achieving proletarian solidarity, liberals sought to govern the state by privileging the sphere of the market as the means for producing fraternal modes of social life.

Do liberals, or at least a certain philosophical version of liberalism; have something to teach socialists today? Honneth insists they do. Today's socialists have refused to learn something vital from liberals: addresses and demands to freedom must appeal to social freedoms broadly understood, and not isolated to economic emancipation. The idea of social freedom Honneth is proposing is thus a praxis of solidarity that is capable of meeting the unrealized ideals of the French Revolution, a praxis that might "offer[s] a mechanism or scheme of action according to which the freedom of each would directly presuppose the freedom of the other." [4] The philosophical source for the generation of greater social freedom is found in the American pragmatist John Dewey. For Dewey, social freedom is enhanced when communication barriers are lifted, wherein the idea of human history becomes an ever-expanding process of human communication through social interaction.[5]

The biggest failure of socialist movements, in Honneth's view, was their "inability to adapt the groundbreaking concept of social freedom to the reality of a functionally differentiated society, making it impossible to apply this concept to a gradually separated social sphere." [6] Communication across the three spheres of political live "functional differentiation", if done through the liberating mode of enhanced communication, is capable of achieving new modes of value beyond capital. Unlike the new reading of Marx's value form in the work of the German Marxist Michael Heinrich, Honneth does not place the task of socialist movements as one directed towards the revolutionary task of abolishing the value form. Such a task reeks of an economistic focus and fails to produce the sort of societal homeostasis he is after. Honneth remains a staunch democratic socialist committed to the existence of market mechanisms in social and political life.

Honneth's idea of social freedom is underpinned by the concept of will-formation and how the collective will of the community ought to ideally form. To overcome liberalism from within, democratic will-formation must function as a communicative act, that is, it must extend the same tendencies of enhanced liberties that liberalism extended to the sphere of the nation and individual liberties, to that of economic liberty. This begs the question of how will-formation occurs in producing inclusive forms of solidarity. What Republicanism has blinded liberals to is the necessity to see the economic sphere as a space of will-formation that must consist of forms of solidarity. Liberals have accepted as a fait accompli that the market is a quasi-sacred sphere. To rival this blind spot within liberalism and its relation to the sacred market, socialists must present an appeal to freedom through solidarity on a global scale and back that up locally lifting of barriers to communication. How socialists go about lifting barriers to communication in the age of big data, social media and algorithmic marketing mechanisms, is not clearly answered. The task ahead for socialists is to once again pick up the banner of the Enlightenment to expand the realm of social freedom to the market.

In homage to Marx's ethical maxim "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs", Honneth's praxis for achieving this political community emphasizes communication so that institutions (including economic institutions) can develop to promote the well-being of others for non-instrumental ends. Socialists should thus seek out a political conception of achieving ends that are for the political community, broadly construed. A political community that is inclusive of ethnic, racial and religious difference. This communicative political community would then be capable of posing a new conception of freedom from that of the liberal conception that places emphasis on the solitary individual based in the sphere of the market, but communicatively free in the sphere of civil life. The individual in the new socialist framework must be understood as a communally grounded subject rooted in forms of solidarity and mutual dependence. [7]

The Case of American Liberalism

With the rise of the democratic socialist ideas in American life following the 2008 economic crash and later the 2010 Occupy Wall Street movement and hitting a crescendo moment with the 2016 campaign of Bernie Sanders, Honneth's critique seems to offer insight to the American context. But is American socialism capable of overcoming liberalism from within? Recent discussions of the collapse of liberalism following the defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016 has led many commentators to think of American liberalism as a temporary ruling class that comes and goes. In Ross Douthat's widely read New York Times op-ed[8] on the decline of WASP's as a governing coterie in American life, we are presented with an idea of political power that transfers from distinct ideological communities-most recently the transfer has been from the WASPs (neoconservatives) to the meritocratic Third Way centrists (neoliberals). What Douthat misses is the ideological consistency of liberalism across these two projects.

I want to argue that, on the contrary, American political history and American political thought has been seized by an unmovable liberalism all the way down. The very question of contesting the hegemony of America's deep commitment to liberalism requires that we develop new thinking on what a political community is and how one is formed. In what follows, I want to offer a historical overview of utter dominance of the liberal idea in American political life and from that analysis offer a critique of Honneth. The question of overcoming liberalism from within depends on understanding the magnitude and the inertia the liberal creed actually possesses in America. Before unearthing whether Honneth's model of functional differentiation that emphasizes solidarity can truly rival the liberal idea, we have to understand the unique form liberalism in America has taken historically.

American political life has been formed around a commitment to fraternity and liberty with a hostile relation to equality. It's well known that America has rejected socialism, but even more significant is that America's version of liberalism has also rejected utilitarianism, the nineteenth century social philosophy that supported redistributionist ideals in European societies. The high priest of American liberalism is John Locke whose natural rights philosophy granted liberalism a sense of equality that had no capacity to speak to extreme forms of inequality and class hierarchies. While Locke's foundational insights into private property as a domain of natural rights are significant, what remains even more important is the philosophical notion of original equality Locke offers.

The most important, and overlooked, fact of the American Revolution resides in the absence of feudalism in the social relations from which it sprang. Unlike the French Revolution and other European bourgeois revolutions of the early nineteenth century that had feudal structures looming in the social life of the societies, the American Revolution was a solidly bourgeois revolution. The American Revolution was a form of inverted Freudianism with no primal father ever killed. Hartz, the historian of the groundbreaking history of American liberalism, The Liberal Tradition in America (1955) is our guide in this regard. Hartz notes that it was not until very late into the American Revolution that effigies of King George were burned. America never killed a primal father, not having a primal father to kill.

Despite the settler colonial and chattel slavery systems embedded in its origins, these oppressive systems were not sources that reformed the guiding idea of liberalism. American political thought rather relied on a metaphysical Lockianism that conceived of every moral, economic and social problem from the same baseline of equality that founded the American project. The belief that America's equality arose ex nihilo was of course only true for the elite and bourgeois classes within the American society. But the result of this myth of the equality of origins lies the profound inability of liberalism to truly revolutionize social relations when those social relations ossify into rigid racial and class hierarchies. Whereas Europe had developed a sense of community built around multiple moral codes, America had developed one moral code alone: a religious zeal built around the idea of liberalism. Hartz understood that the result of the immunizing effects of the liberal idea in American political life was such that it produced an uneven commitment to the knot we have been tracking between fraternity, liberty and solidarity.

Cathedral Liberalism

Can American liberalism be overcome by socialism? The first place to begin to unravel this problem resides in understanding the role of what I will name the American Cathedral. If liberalism has replaced the moralizing function of conscience politics that came out of the early Christian socialist movements and later the progressive movement, the idea of a Cathedral liberalism is fitting as it evokes the quasi religious homogeneity of the public sphere or civil society liberalism manages over. Unlike the neoreactionary invocation of the concept of the Cathedral by the likes of Nick Land and Mencius Moldbug, the Cathedral I am referring to is one that persists through its function of supporting conscience above commitments to the political community. Put differently, the Cathedral succeeds by valorizing the individual on the condition that collective solidarity or collective-based notions of the individual embedded in a political community are swept to the side. The Cathedral succeeds by placing conscience above solidarity and then weaponizing the sphere of representation and morality to vent the alienated antagonisms of the political community.

We are not facing an either-or proposition in unraveling the American Cathedral of liberalism. Rather, we are facing an ideological matrix that has achieved such profound inertia that it's nearly impossible to think of politics without it. At every crisis and historical juncture of profound political transformation from the Civil War to the New Deal, liberalism has exerted its hegemonic force by preserving the sphere of moral conscience to reinforce an individualized ethic of public rights without aiming to reverse or adjust the fundamental inequities of the market. While the Cathedral is felt perhaps most acutely in today's politically correct politics: 'virtue signaling', 'wokeness' and the figure of the 'SJW', these figures are also frustrated responses to the inadequacies of the Cathedral's limited mode of political address. We are not dealing with a spatial logic of inside/outside with the Cathedral. Like capital, there is no outside to the Cathedral. The task, as Marx imagined it, is one of burrowing inward, not of inhabiting an imagined outplace. It is not that socialist political community must abandon appeals to conscience and moralizing, it is rather that socialists must do so without reinforcing the core creed of America's Lockianism. The Cathedral cannot think a multitude of struggles from within because each time it props itself up what we are faced with is the empty origin of the mythical sameness of each citizen.

But just what is the ideological underpinning of the Cathedral? Again, Hartz is our guide. For Hartz, what keeps the engine of individual liberty humming is the guiding ideology of what he names Algerism, the Gilded Age precursor to post-90s meritocracy. The popular novels and stories of Horatio Alger tell tales of scrappy young white men born into extreme poverty who through perseverance and providential luck enter the Middle Class. In true Gilded Age form, the tales of Horatio Alger rely on the assistance of a paternal wealthy patron that elects the young boy based on his merit and passionate hard work. Algerism is the next logical mutation in the ideological framework opened by the Puritan work ethic Max Weber argues founded the ethical support system of industrial capitalism. Algerism formed the backbone of resilience to the sphere of the market as a sphere of unquestioned liberty. As the guiding myth of the American Cathedral, Algerism ensured that:

No comfortable aristocracy awaited the millionaire success and no apocalyptic dream of revolution functioned as solace for the failed proletariat. But even more significant than these denied satisfactions was the simple fact of denial itself: the compulsive impact of a single creed. [9]

The effects of Algerism have been to reinforce liberalism as an irreversible ethic. All social problems or resistances from working classes or racial justice movements to the injustices of the market have been transformed into technical problems that necessitate a pragmatic solution. This technical turn to every problem was a result of America's abiding liberal faith and origin. Most notably, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal was never painted in anticapitalist terms. On the contrary, Roosevelt adopted many of the quasi-collectivist measures of the European liberal reformers, but he refrained from framing the crisis of capitalism in the language of class as his socialist critics had.[10] Roosevelt instead fell back on the Cathedral logic of "solving problems," which meant that no larger number of New Dealers drifted into socialism than did progressives. The New Deal was a demand for property on the largest scale ever conceived, a dream to extend the promise of Algerism to ever-greater numbers of people. In its origin myth of a society born equal we are faced with the very limits to America's imagination of a possible socialism.

Similar to the New Deal compromise, Gilded Age liberal reformers corrected the excesses of monopoly capitalism by reinforcing the rights of small propertied bourgeoisie by isolating the socialist critique of the system. The liberal reformers of the late nineteenth century swallowed up peasant and petit bourgeois in the same breath, and they consequently swallowed up the vibrant socialist movement and chained it to democratic capitalism. In the background of this movement was the Alger mythos, which grew to become the ideal flag for liberals to wave against the excesses of invisible hand capitalism. As Hartz notes in his treatment of the Gilded Age liberal reforms, if the trusts were at the heart of all evil during the Gilded Age, than the Alger mythos could be resurrected by smashing it. With Alger on their side, American liberals could effectively silence their progressive and nativist critics by reinforcing the sphere of the market as sacrosanct. The task of a socialist politics is to seek out an alternative to this guiding myth. [11]

The dominance of the liberal idea is on display even in the writing of the great literary bard of America, Walt Whitman. Whitman, like Emerson and Thoreau never embraced the Christian socialist movements of their time, which were fairly prominent. For Whitman, the Christian socialism of the late 1800's possessed the right impulse in that the ideals of socialism sought to preserve the dignity and the humanity of the citizen outside of oppressive social and economic arrangements. Socialism, as Whitman remarks, sought to "put the crown on man and take it off things." [12] Whitman, like many American socialists after him, was not prepared to place any work or trust in the idea of the socialist party, nor was he prepared to deal with what comes after the revolution, what Marx called the dictatorship of the proletariat. Whitman exhibited a distinctively American view of socialism when he said, "I am with them in the rebel, but I don't know about what comes after." The American political imaginary can think the idea of revolution, but it is revolution qua moral individualism that remains its limit point. From the time of the American Revolution, America was born in liberalism, never knowing a break with truly oppressive social conditions.

Cracks in the Cathedral: Achieving Solidarity

Socialist movements today are not facing the same problems socialist revolutions faced in Russia and China during the 20th century. Firstly, once these revolutionary movements achieved the seizure of the state, the nation and the economy (the sphere of liberty and fraternity) were thought to wither with the enhancement of enlightenment. The nation and the state were conceived as extensions of the superstructure of society and not rooted in the base material relations of exchange or production. As superstructure effects, socialist and communist movements of the 20 th century saw the task of overcoming the nation and the state as limits of representation requiring the expansion o enlightenment. But the hegemony of capital over social relations proved this thesis wrong. As Karatani has indicated, this assumption has neglected the modes of exchange inherent in the state form, which makes the state and the nation extensions of the base.[13] Secondly, the premise of revolutionary socialism during the 20th century was built around the unification of heterogeneous, albeit identifiable, elements of the proletariat: workers and peasants, students and factory workers, for example. Contra Honneth's argument, the figure of the masses did in fact possess coherence due to the fact that exploitation at the hand of wage labor provided the grounds of the potential organization of disparate parts of the proletariat.

I would like to argue that what matters in achieving solidarity today does not come through enhancing communicative apparatuses and communicative capacities solely. What matters is waging experiments in formations of communities of solidarity that have no formal existence within civil society. The task is to construct the identity of the proletariat of our time. Freedom is not found in preexisting identities, it is found in structural failures, in points of dissolution, in cracks in the Cathedral. In the exchange we have been discussing, the three spheres are receptacles of unmet demands that must interact fluidly. This tripartite knot is underpinned by a commitment to the subjective solidarity of a proletarian subjects. Capital necessitates that liberty remain immune from the demands of solidarity. It has been proven time and again that liberty and fraternity can produce a stable equilibrium at the enormous cost of human suffering and exploitation in the market. We have understood furthermore that liberalism maintains this partial stability through its refusal of forms of solidarity in its core idea of the political community.

The task of constructing the proletariat must begin with facing and dismantling the historical hegemony of the liberal idea in American political life. The ascension and popularity of socialist ideas and principles from Medicare for all to universally free college must not fall into the same moral protest rhetoric that prior movements have done from the Gilded Age through to the New Deal. Socialists must invent an alternative ideological framework that is capable of overcoming the Alger mythos that permeates ideals of individual liberty. The Cathedral reproduces a sphere of social life that Marx and other nineteenth political philosophers called civil society.

In the political community, he regards himself as a communal being; but in civil society he is active as a private individual, treats other men as means, reduces himself to a means, and becomes the plaything of alien powers.[14]

This quote from the early Marx is a good reminder that any address to the political community is in fact an address to the subject in the dimension of the most communally connected aspect of their social being. Since 2016, the Cathedral logic, reliant as it is on an address to a homogenous civil society, is no longer capable of sustaining communicative modes that are capable of instituting reforms or justice. Liberal forms of community formation, as Niall Ferguson has rightly observed, rely on "a prescriptive commonality, one leading inexorably toward normative unity. [15]" In the Marxist vision, on the other hand, what threads thinking on community into a common concern is "the practices of judgment, a descriptive commonality, that leads towards multiplicity and contestation. [16]"

Hartz points out that while Locke has guided the American ideals of equality, missing is the Rousseau of the Social Contract, where he theorizes the formation of community beyond identification with the preexisting ideals of civil society. Rousseau's political community allows for a dissensus at the level of the common sense, a community is united in the division of their different and singular senses. Rousseau's innovation in thinking community is that he thinks togetherness outside of an organic essence, or substance. In his famous Social Contract, political community is no longer identified with transcendent figures such as the nation, God, or the leader, and he gives the subjects of the community an interior freedom by opening a new space by which the will of the subjects, what Rousseau refers to as the general will, might gain autonomy from the sphere of the immunizing social totality. To get around immunizing logics that essentialize the will of the people, Rousseau develops a theory of political community that is grounded in sense and existence.

This type of model of political community formation is also found in the work of contemporary French political philosopher Jacques Rancière and his idea of the 'dissensual community.' For Rancière, the political community of dissensus is a political version of Rousseau's generic community, grounded on the notion of what he calls, 'being together apart'. Rancière develops a theory of an aesthetic community that avoids identification with any transcendent entity to ground the community. Rancière develops an ethics of what he terms "dis-identification" with the common wherein subjects are formed in the ruptures and interruptions of normative political existence. These ruptures might often occur at moment of crisis in the capitalist system, or moments of uprising or insurrection. It is these de-stabilizing moments that bring about an otherwise invisible 'un-counted' community, what Rancière calls the "part of no part" into social visibility. He theorizes these communities throughout history, from nineteenth century worker movements up to more contemporary art-collectives. What holds the dissensual community 'together-apart' requires a mode of dissensus from the Cathedral.

In the Russian revolution, the demand of the people was "Bread, Peace and Land" -these were not conceptual demands, but large receptacles where in grievances that did not have to do with these particular demands were expressed through them.[17] Cathedral liberalism cannot think of the same sort of receptacles by which demands can be unloaded. The Cathedral grounds a homogenous political community bounded by the liberal idea. The task of socialism today is to invent the grounds for new ideas of solidarity accompanied by mythic and ideological alternatives to the immunizing pull and sway of the liberal idea.

Daniel Tutt researches and writes about contemporary philosophy. His writing and work has been published in Philosophy Now, the Washington Post, and Crisis and Critique, among other publications. He teaches philosophy as an adjunct professor at George Washington University, Marymount University and he has taught courses in prison through the Georgetown University Prisons and Justice Initiative. He holds a Master of Arts from American University in philosophy and ethics and a Ph.D. in contemporary philosophy from the European Graduate School based in Switzerland.

Notes

[1] Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution , Harcourt Inc. New York, NY. 1955, 20.

[2] Karatani, Kojin, The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange , Duke University Press, 2014, 234.

[3] Honneth, Axel The Idea of Socialism: Towards a Renewal, Polity Press, Mladen, MA. 2016, 98.

[4] Ibid, 77.

[5] Ibid, 64.

[6] Ibid, 77.

[7] Ibid, 25.

[8] Douthat, Ross Why We Miss the WASPs, New York Times, December 5, 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/opinion/george-bush-wasps.html

[9] Hartz, Louis The Liberal Tradition in America, 211

[10] Post, Charlie, The New Deal and the Popular Front Models for contemporary socialists? International Socialist Review, Issue #108 https://isreview.org/issue/108/new-deal-and-popular-front

[11] A good idea for a research project would be to track the genealogical through-line from the Alger myth of the Gilded Age all the way up to the meritocracy of neoliberal Third Way politics up to today's Green New Deal.

[12] Marsh, John In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America from Itself , 3Monthly Review Press, New York, 2015

[13] Karatani, Kojin, Structure of World History: Modes of Exchange, 2. Karatani notes that a major flaw in historical materialism and its interpretation in the 20th century is that it led to conceptions of the state and the nation as intrinsic parts of the superstructure on par with art or philosophy. Overcoming these imaginary structures could thus be conceived as an act of enlightenment. He argues that in fact the state and the nation should be understood as extensions of the base and namely, as extensions of the dominant modes of exchange.

[14] Marx, Karl, On the Jewish Question, 4.

[15] Ferguson, Kennan (2012) All in the Family: On Community and Incommensurability Duke University Press, 2012, 51.

[16] Ibid, 51.

[17] Laclau, On Populist Reason, Verso Books, New York, NY 2012, 97 - 98.

All the Ways Bernie Might Lose: A Socialist Critique of Social Democracy

By Andrew Dobbs

The largest political organization on the US left, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) just informally polled its members as to whether or not they should immediately endorse Senator Bernie Sanders for president. About a quarter of the group could be bothered to vote, and they supported the Sanders endorsement three to one. DSA's membership grew eleven-fold since the last presidential election, with most observers giving Sanders credit for raising the popularity of "democratic socialism," his self-described philosophy. The outcome makes sense.

Despite many revolutionaries likewise joining DSA, the political center of gravity in the organization seems to be in favor of electoralism and collaboration with the Democratic Party; DSA's endorsement of Sanders now seems to be a foregone conclusion.

This is a profound display of willful historical ignorance. DSA's growth is an encouraging sign in some ways, but they are on the precipice of plunging into failure the way so many leftists have in recent decades.

There are six generally possible outcomes for this exercise, each with clear historical antecedents that demonstrate the ease with which the ruling class would blunt any electoral effort even calling itself socialist. It is crucial that DSA members remember this history and resist the well-trod path to embarrassment they are considering right now. Here are the ways history has shown a campaign like this one can be destroyed.

Losing: the Jackson Outcome

Far and away the most likely outcome for the Sanders campaign is the most likely outcome for all presidential campaigns: they lose. There are about a dozen Democrats running with at least a few more still waiting to jump in, and by definition all of them but one - at most - will lose. Sanders supporters have fooled themselves to a great extent about his chances and popularity, a trend reminiscent of how the left perceived the Jesse Jackson campaigns in 1984 and 1988.

In light of Jackson's later foibles and eclipse their eagerness now seems absurd, and even at the time he was deeply controversial. The left did not acknowledge this. "The more Jackson gains, the more he upsets both the right and the established Democratic Party leadership," an article following early 1988 primaries in the socialist newspaper Unity said. "These are further signs it will be an uphill fight all the way - but Jesse Jackson can win!"

This sentiment sounds familiar to those who have followed Sanders supporters online. Those arguing that the Sanders campaign could be used to build political power subsequent to the election even if he loses should ask themselves what we have to show for the Jackson campaigns.

The Party Thumb on the Scale: the 2016 Outcome

The other, more exigent lesson from 2016 should be to remember the ways the Democratic Party's establishment went out of their way to block Sanders from the nomination. Former DNC Chair Donna Brazile admitted that the party was being run by Clinton's campaign even before the nomination was settled, confessing that "if the fight had been fair, one campaign would not have control of the party before the voters had decided which one they wanted to lead."

Before her later confession Brazile used her position at CNN to obtain planned questions for Clinton prior to a primary debate, and the debates themselves were clearly scheduled by the DNC to minimize viewership and shield the front-runner Clinton from insurgent challenge.

Of course, the most likely outcome if none of this had happened would still have been a Clinton nomination, but they weren't going to take that chance. Afterwards there was effectively no accountability for this scheme. What would keep them from pulling out the stops to direct the nomination away from Bernie and towards one of the other, less concerning candidates again? Nothing, but for whatever reason DSA is considering playing a rigged game.

Sabotage the Election: the McGovern Outcome

Even if Bernie does overcome these profound obstacles the party could sabotage his chances in the general election. We know this because they did it the last time a modestly leftist candidate won the party's nomination, George McGovern in 1972.

McGovern backed an immediate end to the Vietnam War, a massive reduction in defense spending, what would now be termed a universal basic income, amnesty for all draft resistors, decriminalizing pot and even went on to coin the term "Medicare for All." The Democratic Party's leadership went out of their way to crush the campaign. The urban political machines central to the party's operations of the era mostly stayed at home, and the large unions stayed formally neutral or endorsed Nixon.

McGovern was crushed in the largest landslide in modern history to that point. He would likely have lost no matter what, but the party's leadership made sure that it was a total rout so that no Democrats would get the wrong idea about running on the left again.

The same mechanisms are not necessarily available this time, but one is already presenting itself - Howard Schultz. The billionaire has made it clear that his campaign is about blocking Sanders from being president, and there is every reason to believe that key Democrat thought leaders, influencers, and organizers could legitimize him and send enough of the electorate over to him to cost Bernie the race. Sure, it would re-elect Trump, but it's not like they didn't hate Nixon back in the day, too. The ability to maintain their control of the party and the comfort of their class is worth four more years of what amounts to annoyance for them.

You can be sure that the corporate media would frame the whole thing as Sanders' fault as well, questioning whether his "socialist" politics had alienated voters and opened the door for four more years of Trump. DSA will be villains, and whatever gains they have now will be gone.

Making Bernie Sell Out: the SYRIZA Outcome

This outcome may be the one the ruling class would enjoy most. Bernie wins the White House only to be compelled to betray all of his stated principles and enact the very sort of abusive capitalist policies DSA et al. got behind him to stop.

Again, this has happened when actual leftists have won office. One notorious example was in 2015 when the Greek leftist party SYRIZA rode a wave of mass outrage over EU-led economic bullying to win that country's general elections on a militant, anti-capitalist platform. A few months later the SYRIZA government held a nationwide referendum on whether or not to capitulate to EU austerity and bailout demands. 61% of voters said no - there was a clear mandate to struggle against the neoliberal impositions of European finance.

Only 8 days after the referendum, however, Prime Minister and SYRIZA leader Alex Tsirpas gave in to an agreement even more harsh than the one voters rejected. The agreement's terms included tax increases - especially on farmers - major service cuts, raised retirement ages, increased contribution requirements for insurance, slashed wages, canceled labor contracts, and major privatization of state assets.

The next US elections could very well happen in the context of a major recession, according to a variety of indicators. If Bernie were to come to office with unemployment soaring, stocks plummeting, growth at next to nothing, etc. would he really pull the trigger on gutting some of the largest industries in the country, the insurance and medical industries, for example? Would he raise taxes on the wealthy - and even the middle class, as would be necessary for most of his programs? Or would he delay the big stuff "for now" and focus on the very same kind of austerity any other candidate would take up?

The fact is that his whole program is dependent upon capitalist industry creating profits and managerial/technical wages to tax to fund his programs. But the rate of profit for US firms is less than half what it was during the New Deal era, and average economic growth has declined by more than two-thirds. This downgrade is what prompted neoliberal gutting of the welfare state in the first place.

If DSA members really are socialists they should know that capitalism isn't just mean or ugly, it's doomed. Any political program that rests on the idea of allowing it to persist by just rearranging its output through taxation and government expenditure is also dead on arrival.

Make the Economy Scream: the Venezuela Outcome

Even if Bernie accomplishes the near impossible task of winning and then actually pursuing a socialistic program, he can expect pointed economic warfare to crush his movement once and for all. "If you try this, you'll end up like Venezuela" is not a prediction or a possibility, it's a warning.

Because both the Bernie agenda and the Bolivarian program to date have assumed the continued existence of private production and finance, a capital strike can immediately produce crucial shortages and financial disruption. In Venezuela they stopped importing toilet paper, beer, and flour used for staple baked goods, or they hoarded them and drove up the price to make money off the black market. Banks refused to provide dollars to Venezuelan sovereign accounts so they could not pay debts and their currency collapsed.

Similar economic warfare plagued Chile when a "democratic socialist" took power there in 1970. The CIA worked with the AFL-CIO to organize middle-class owner/operators like truckers, taxi drivers, and shopkeepers to go on strike. This plunged the country into chaos as shelves went empty, pumps ran dry, and transportation became impossible. By the time September 1973 rolled around there was substantial support for a coup just to try and bring consumer life back to normal.

Now imagine if hospital companies announced that "Medicare for All" just won't cover their bills so they are shutting down half the facilities in the country. Pharmaceutical companies could announce they are ceasing production of chemotherapy drugs - they just can't afford to make them under "socialism." Store closures, layoffs, 401(k)s going broke, the list is endless really.

Actual socialist governments face many of these threats and many other hardships, but they prevent the worst by expropriating entire industries and putting them under public control. Sanders is not planning for any such thing, and the right-wing unrest liable to follow would be presented on every channel and newspaper as "peaceful protest" in glowing tones. Bernie does not want to eliminate the ruling class, and so they will rule over him too, one way or the other.

Social Chauvinism: the "Democratic Socialist" Outcome

Finally, the most pernicious outcome of all would be what many DSAers might consider victory. Bernie could win the election and enact a social democratic reform effort with huge new benefits for people living in the US without doing anything whatsoever for the billions of people around the world exploited by our system as a whole.

This again is a well-established historical possibility. The social democratic movements of Europe that created the welfare states of those countries all depended upon imperialist extraction. The Iranian coup against Mossadegh was fully backed by the same Labour government that founded the National Health Service. France's first "socialist" president, Vincent Auriol, waged war in Indochina, overthrew the government of Morocco, jailed Tunisian independence leaders, and pursued a brutal war of repression in Madagascar. Even in the US, the "Great Society" came at the same time as the Vietnam War.

Bernie would fit right in this tradition if he got everything he wants. He's promising more drone strikes, continued military spending, ongoing hostility to anti-imperialist governments and a transfer of exploited surplus not back to the workers we stole it from, but mostly to middle-class folks in this country.

This isn't socialism; it's imperialism with a human face. Its days are just as numbered as any other capitalist program, and at best we'd get what Europe got - a generation or so of social democracy followed by ever-deepening austerity and reaction. If this is what DSA is looking for, by all means they should endorse Bernie.

Conclusion

As DSA, for whatever reason, lines up behind this folly, actual revolutionaries need to leave the organization and do something else. The great news is that there is a burgeoning, if still loose and immature, network of revolutionary collectives popping up in communities all over the US. Even if there isn't one where you live, the folks who have done it elsewhere can give you insight on how to get going. Find them, reach out, and start building something new so that we don't waste time doing what we know has never worked.

Let's remind each other of this truth staring us in the face from repeated historical experience. For the moment it means treating Bernie as the obstacle and danger he is so that we can instead fight until victory, always.

Evaluating Venezuela as a Socialist in the US

By Colin Jenkins

In all of the talk about Venezuela, many are missing the real conversation that should be had. Naturally, after being subjected to sensationalist and heavily-biased media reports, most Americans frame the situation in terms of “dictatorship,” “humanitarian crisis,” and “U.S. intervention.” This is expected. Modern U.S. media always has been, and always will be, a mouthpiece of the Pentagon. It has helped to falsely justify every illegal war and intervention the U.S. has embarked on over the past half century. And part of its duty is to delegitimize socialism wherever it appears. Again, expected.

The U.S. left (not liberals & Democrats, the real left) has higher standards. However, despite this, the conversation in leftist circles often gets reduced to the typical “authoritarian vs. libertarian” duality when talking about Venezuelan socialism, to the point where the same superficial media biases are reproduced. Context and nuance are desperately needed. Thus, the primary question we should be asking is this: If you’re a country trying to implement socialism within a global capitalist system, how do you accomplish this?

A vast majority of Venezuelans have supported the Bolivarian Revolution (Venezuela’s socialist movement) for the good part of two decades because they know of the ravages that come with capitalism/imperialism. Socialism has a confirmed pattern of legitimacy within the country. The people want it. So, how does the Venezuelan government proceed with implementing it? How does it deal with imperialism? How should it handle internal dissent? Old wealth? The lingering capitalist class? How does it deal with embargos? Blockades? Restrictions and obstructions from global banking? Foreign influence (U.S. and global capital) and funding of opposing political parties?

What the Bolivarian Revolution has undertaken for the past two decades (with significant support from the masses) has been a delicate and, often times, near impossible task. Any socialist project that is subjected to the powerful forces of global capital is. Heavy hands are needed at times. But who should carry out this heavy-handedness? Who are its targets? How extreme does it need to be? And how can it be balanced enough to provide defensive measures without alienating supporters?

Too much heavy-handedness and you risk losing support and giving ammo to global capital and its propaganda organs worldwide. Not enough heavy-handedness and you risk internal and external sabotage from powerful interests. There are real-life factors that don’t allow us to reduce this to a false dichotomy of authoritarian or liberatory.

This is the discussion we should be having. Not only for Venezuela, but for all socialist movements that currently exist and will inevitably be born in the coming years.

Renewable Energy under Capitalism: Why It Won't Happen

By Thomas Sullivan

Renewable energy is usually agreed to be the way forward. Nuclear, solar, wind, tidal, geothermal; all can revolutionize the way we generate power and prevent the dangerous warming our planet is experiencing. However, we haven't adopted these sources of energy in any systematic, widespread way. To examine why, this paper will explore a Marxist interpretation of why such technologies would not be adopted.

In his third volume concerning Capital, Karl Marx discussed what will cause the end of Capitalism. He theorized that over time, the profitability of a capitalistic economy would fall. Eventually, the system would become untenable and collapse into a new system (Marx, n.d., pp. 153-164). To understand the mechanism of this demise, we will need to explore the basic foundation of Marxism.

The Marxist worldview holds one key point as fundamental to production; nature, and by extension labor, is the source of all value. But a pile of wood, while of nature, will remain such, unless labor is applied to make something useful from it. Likewise, no one will purchase that pile of wood as a chair unless some work is done to make it a chair. In the capitalist system, the wood, as means of production, is separated from the labor. Workers who would perform labor do not own the wood or the chair they produce. (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1970)

The capitalist owns and profits from the chair, while the worker is paid a set wage. We can understand this wage as the embodiment of the value being added to the basic components through labor power. The average time the average means of doing this required work is important to determining how much this wage value is adding to the final value. This average is called the socially necessary labor time. The capitalist then needs to buy other items for production, the wood, the polish, the nails, the factory. All the components and other fixed costs can be viewed as the non-labor aspect of a products value. From this, the product is brought to market and sold for a value higher than the wages and non-labor value put together, called the exchange value. The difference between the exchange value and the other two values is called surplus-value. As the labor power purchased by the capitalist has already been paid for, the worker gains no value from any of this process. All together this process represents a very high concept view of Marx's labor theory of value. (Sekine, 1997, pp. 3-6)

From this theory, we gain two insights into what motivates the actions of capitalists. The increase of the surplus-value by way of negotiating a higher exchange value and by decreasing the necessary labor time value. Internally, a capitalist company would only be able to do this in the short-term by marketing, for higher exchange value, and by controlling the price of labor value, the wages of workers.

Marx uses the theory of value to predict how technology will allow for greater automation and result in a fall in rates of profit over time. This represents the greatest achievement within the theory in the view of the capitalist, the elimination of wages as an expense. There is a short-term advantage with the adoption of automation. However, Marx's fundamental point of labor being what gives a product value shines through. The initial boon is generated by the labor that was used to install the automation. Over time, there is no labor input and no value generated by the production besides occasional maintenance. The necessary labor time to produce more from the existing automation becomes zero. This eliminates the value that would be added by labor. As such, the exchange value of the products drops as well. The capitalist would need to increase production in order to recover costs, only to find no-one able to afford their products. With workers having been replaced by automation, they have no income of which to afford the products.

As an example, we can look at the agriculture industry in the United States. Upwards of 40% of produce are left unharvested or otherwise uncollected for sale. The stated reason of cosmetics (dents on bananas, spots on apples, etc.) can be seen as an artificial attempt to limit the availability of these products, inflating the exchange value of them. (Johnson, et al., 2018) The value of these products has been falling and requires this manipulation due to the decrease in the necessary labor time for their production. Parallel to this, the number of Americans involved in agriculture has decreased from 11.77 million in 1910 to 2.05 million on 2015 (Herrendorf, Rogerson, & Valentinyi, 2014). Automation and advanced machinery have made the labor required to farm and harvest miniscule compared to the amount being produced. The lack of scarcity destroys all value for the capitalist and requires the waste of edible products to limit supply. As this type of automation and value loss spreads up the production chain, more industries will become as such. They will have little labor required, the scarcity of their products eliminated, and massive waste required to maintain profitability.

This can also be explained using common capitalist economic understanding. Let's say that demand for corn is at 100 bushels. We can chart this as a line graph from the demand of 1 bushel at $100 and 100 bushels at $1, descending from the top left of a chart to the bottom right. We can then chart all possible supply amounts in the inverse, trending from the bottom left to top right; 1 bushel for $1 and 100 bushels for $100. Where this demand and supply line meet would be the equilibrium of the market, the price and supply the producer should set. When there is an increase is the quantity available, there is a corresponding shift to the right for the supply line. With the wider availability of the goods, demand normally shifts to the right with the quantity increase. The market is then able to readjust, allowing the producers who are providing the higher quantity the ability to sell more products at a lower rate. They can outbid the competition for the existing demand and capture the market. However, there comes a point where demand cannot increase anymore; the consumer can only eat so much corn. A producer will introduce a new technology or process that increases the quantity in an attempt to undermine competitors, but the market cannot accommodate the extra quantity. As such, the supply line shifts right, the demand line stays the same, and the price drops. The price drop does not correspond with an increase in sales, reducing the overall profitability of the market. (Free, 2010, pp. 69-78)

So how does this apply to renewable means of energy production? Understanding the tendency for rate of profits to fall can show us why a new green revolution would be avoided by capitalists. The current system of relying on coal, oil, and natural gas offers a limited supply, and therefore scarcity, that can be exploited for the maximum profit. Renewable energy offers unlimited sources and is not capable of being exploited in the same manner. While solar panels may require labor to produce and install, that initial value is all that would sustain solar power production from then on out. The automation of solar energy production is built into the system and therefore very little necessary labor time when compared to oil. The exchange value for this energy production would be too low to cover a company's costs, let alone create profit. This greatly affects the necessary labor time of any part of the subsequent supply chain, energy storage, transportation, and sale. Meanwhile, the massive amount of labor required to locate, extract, process, transport, and eventually sell traditional energy products makes the exchange value something capitalists can easily extract surplus-value from.

Likewise, supply and demand can be applied in a way similar to agriculture. With the quantity of crude oil/natural gas limited, there is already a system of controlling the supply. The limited and specific locations of the quantity means the producers are able to extract exact amounts for supply to maximize equilibrium within the market. This wouldn't be the case for renewable energy. With numerous sources of the quantity in question and the inexhaustible nature of those sources, producers would not have the same level of control over supply. If renewables were to be implemented in a systematic way, energy supply would quickly outpace demand. Some manipulation on the part of the producer would be required to maintain marketability.

With this understanding, we can see why the profit-driven motivations found in capitalism will not result in any reduction in the use of fossil fuels until the market for them literally dries up. Renewable energy offers only lower profits and the requirement of new methods of market manipulation for energy producers. If it is in our nature to do what is in our best interest, then those with the means to choose our energy production are of a nature that would resist this change wholeheartedly.

References

Free, R. C. (2010). 21st Century Economics: A Reference Handbook. London: SAGE Publications, Inc.

Herrendorf, B., Rogerson, R., & Valentinyi, A. (2014). Growth and Structural Transformation. In P. Aghion, & S. N. Durlauf, Handbook of Economic Growth (pp. 855-941). Amsterdam: Elsevier B.V.

Johnson, L. K., Dunning, R. D., Bloom, J. D., Gunter, C. C., Boyette, M. D., & Creamer, N. G. (2018). Estimating on-farm food loss at the field level: A methodology and case study on a North Carolina Farm. Recources, Conservation & Recycling, 243-250.

Marx, K. (1970). Critique of the Gotha Programme. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Marx, K. (n.d.). Capital Volume III, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole. New York: International Publishers.

Sekine, T. T. (1997). An Outline of the Dialectic of Capital, Vol. 2. Ipswich: Ipswich Book Company.

West Virginia's Ongoing, Anti-Capitalist Struggle

By Michael Mochaidean

One year ago, teachers and school service personnel in West Virginia rocked the nation with their historic nine-day statewide walkout. The movement was sparked in part due to declining state revenue for state employees' insurance plan - PEIA - and a persistent lack of wage growth compared to contiguous states. In the wake of the Mountain State's first statewide walkout in twenty-eight years, a rupture began to emerge between education workers and their states. Soon thereafter, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Arizona witnessed their own statewide actions, ranging from a few days of actions to weeklong walkouts.

State legislatures were forced to compromise by these strike actions. In Oklahoma, teachers won an additional $6,000 raise and an increase in school funding by over one hundred million dollars. In Arizona, teachers won a twenty percent raise and increase in support staff salaries to entice teacher retention. West Virginia's victory was smaller by comparison, but no less impactful. There, state workers won a five percent pay raise (equivalent to $2,000 for teachers), a one-year hiatus on PEIA premium increases, and the promise of a PEIA Taskforce whose sole purpose was to find a long-term revenue source for the state's ballooning health care costs. The year had ended with an empowered, engaged, and militant rank-and-file, who were at the forefront of these battles.

The present legislative session in West Virginia is reminiscent, in many ways, of last year's militant struggle. Before the session had even begun, Senate Majority Leader Mitch Carmichael had touted Senator Patricia Rucker's appointment to the Republican-controlled Senate Education Committee. Senator Rucker, a bourgeois reactionary Venezuelan who has spoken damningly about the Bolivarian Revolution, ended 2018 with an attack on socialism in her op-ed, "Socialist-style policies won't grow WV." Senator Rucker, who moved to West Virginia only a decade prior, founded a local Tea Party chapter in 2009 whose sole purpose it was to recruit "liberty-minded" candidates to run for office. Rucker even claimed that she and her family had moved to West Virginia "as refugees from socialist Montgomery County [Maryland]," and thus her desire to implement right-wing libertarian fringe elements into the state's political discourse could be better accomplished in more conservative-leaning West Virginia.

Yet despite her consistent redbaiting, which became an all too common feature during last year's legislative session, Senator Rucker's most troubling pieces of her background are her ties to the far-right in both the religious and education realms. Rucker is a self-described member of the Traditionalist Roman Catholic strand of Catholicism, a right-wing segment of the Roman Catholic Church that believes Vatican II was an illegitimate liberal reform effort. Rucker is also a homeschool advocate who has no experience teaching in public schools. Though Rucker had initially claimed to be a public-school teacher, a freedom of information request with the Maryland State Department of Education found that Rucker never held a teaching certificate with the state board of education, but was only a substitute teacher between 1993 and 2002, before she began homeschooling her children full-time.

In conjunction with her role in the reactionary right's religious and education fields, Rucker is also one of a handful of West Virginia legislators affiliated with ALEC - the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC is a front group for corporate lobbyists and state legislators who help funnel resources from large corporate donors into crafting legislation beneficial to the ruling elite. Corporate backers of ALEC help to draft "model" bills that are then used by ALEC-sponsored legislators in a hastily-fashioned copy-and-paste procedure, whereby tax breaks and deregulation maneuvers are inserted into legislation on a state by state basis. Ninety-eight percent of ALEC's revenue, according to ALEC Exposed, comes from "sources other than legislative dues, such as corporations, corporate trade groups, and corporate foundations." Some of the largest donors to ALEC include the Koch Foundation, the Castle Rock Foundation, the Allegheny Foundation, and the Claude R. Lambe Foundation, all backed by some of the wealthiest Americans - the Koch, Coors, and Scaife families.

Rucker was highlighted as ALEC's "State Legislator of the Week" last year as a model for right-wing libertarian deregulation and privatization efforts in state legislatures. Her down-home charm as a candidate, running for "limited government, lower taxes, and personal freedom" obscures her larger role as an austerity-minded politician whose proudest achievement at the time was the repeal of Common Core. The ability to receive taxpayer funds to provide religious indoctrination - either at home or in private school settings - appears to be one of Rucker's larger goals now as Chair of the Senate Education Committee. Intersecting her relationship to ALEC with the reactionary religious right makes it evident that Rucker's initial goal to help modernize West Virginia's education system is a ruse, obfuscated by her larger desire to implement neo-liberal "reforms" within the state's public education system.

Once this legislative session began, Rucker's Senate Education Committee wasted no time in pushing their privatization, austerity-ridden omnibus bill - SB 451.

The omnibus bill would impact education in the following ways:

- Unlimited charter school development throughout the state.

- The creation of educational savings accounts (ESA's) that provide families with a percent of district funds should they choose not to send their children to public schools.

- Payroll protection clauses, which force unions to individually sign up members rather than having members sign up and have their paychecks automatically deduct their dues.

- Eliminate seniority as a factor in transfers and layoffs when consolidations occur, potentially eliminating higher scale workers in favor of lower scale state employees.

- Increase student cap sizes in elementary schools.

The bill itself passed quickly through the Education Committee - spending less than a week in committee - before it was debated for only two hours, passing in the State Senate on an 18-16 vote. Senator Mitch Carmichael stated at the time that, "It's a historic, great day for the state of West Virginia," at a press conference soon after. "We are so thrilled about the vote today and the aspect of finally, comprehensively, reforming the education system in West Virginia." Senator Rucker likewise claimed that she and her committee were "determined to do the right thing no matter the political pressure."

Education workers, however, were prepared for the worst retaliation from the Senate in advance. On the first day of the legislative session, roughly one month prior to SB 451's passage, hours before Governor Jim Justice held his State of the State address, teachers in twenty counties held walk-ins to remind their fellow workers, parents, and community members what it was they were fighting for. The theme of the walk-ins was a need for mental health and community support for children most impacted by the twin factors of neo-liberal capitalism and the opioid crisis.

To give some perspective on the relative crisis schools are facing, West Virginia:

- Ranks forty-sixth for child poverty, and last for child poverty for children under the age of six.

- Has over one-third of children being raised by their grandparents, which ranks it second in the nation for this. Grandfamilies, as they are called, make on average $20,000 less than the average household in the state.

- Is operating at sixty-six percent efficiency for school counselor to student ratio, and at twenty-three percent efficiency for school psychologist to student ratio.

- Has more than one-in-four children experiencing an adverse childhood experience (trauma leading to depression, violence, substance abuse).

The educator and activist Bob Peterson describes this brand of unionism social justice unionism in that the union represents the interests of the community in conjunction with the material interests of the workers themselves. It is little wonder that this was the theme, given that the walk-ins were organized by the newly-formed West Virginia United caucus, whose five core principles include social justice unionism. An affiliate of UCORE (United Caucuses of Rank and File Educators), West Virginia United began in the wake of last year's statewide walkouts. The caucus is a combination of members from the state's three primary education unions - West Virginia Education Association (WVEA), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the West Virginia School Service Personnel Association (WVSSPA). In a video released back in September that announced the caucus' formation, steering committee member Jay O'Neal stated that, "We need a caucus, because we saw what happened when teachers and service personnel came together, stood together, and said, 'Enough is enough.' We know that our power lies in us; it's not in the politicians down at the capital."

Worker self-management of unions with respect to bargaining and actions is a component of what the famous Wobbly historian and organizer Staughton Lynd calls solidarity unionism. Solidarity unionism, in its broadest form, is a concept in union organizing that recognizes that the individual union member knows best their conditions and their contractual obligations. In lieu of relying on business unionism - lobbying and mediation to gain power - solidarity unionism utilizes direct action to mediate disputes between members and management. Union representatives become less impactful in organizing efforts or disputes, as workers themselves take on the task of building their union at the local level. In addition to social justice unionism described above, solidarity unionism is also one of United's five key principles.

Already, West Virginia United has begun the work of constructing a left-libertarian dual power institution that can challenge both their own business unions and the reactionary right. Members engage in online-on-the-ground campaigns that work to build power across the state within online spaces that are then transformed into on-the-ground efforts. On the Public Employees United page, which was used last year during the nine-day walkout for organizing efforts, over 20,000 public employees engage with one another across the state to educate themselves on this legislation, agitate their co-workers against it, share stories of triumph and anger, and organize as a larger collective. West Virginia United is uniquely poised to capture and redirect this anger towards the larger struggle against austerity, given that their model of organizing relies on worker self-management in both a right-to-work state and in a state where public employees do not have the ability to collectively bargain. The primary education unions in West Virginia act more so as business representatives for teachers, assisting them with insurance, certification, and classification issues. Both WVEA and AFT lobby the legislature to push for laws that benefit members while holding electoral campaigns through their PAC's to provide resources that help elect likeminded candidates. The disconnect between business unionism and the militancy West Virginia has sparked nationwide last year, however, means that the tactics of solidarity unionism and social justice unionism must be central in the fight against neo-liberal capitalism.

The battle between the austerity-minded education reformers and the militant education workers will continue regardless of what happens to SB 451. As of the writing of this article, SB 451 is being debated in the House of Delegates, and its longevity is uncertain. Whatever may come of this lone bill, it is clear that the fight West Virginians are taking on once again is one in opposition to the rampant capitalism we have witnessed since privatization of public education began a little over two decades ago. The victories of the recent UTLA strike provide hope to many in the Mountain State that unions, driven by a desire to protect public services and in direct confrontation with neo-liberal capitalism, can win the day, but we cannot concede an inch to privatizers in the meantime. To open the floodgates would be disastrous to far too many engaged in this struggle. Should West Virginia strike again, it will be because the working-class educators of this state have developed a burgeoning class-consciousness that was lit last year, and is now carried on in the ranks of its militant citizens.

Michael Mochaidean is an organizer and member the West Virginia IWW and WVEA. He is currently co-authoring a book detailing the 2018 education walkouts, their triumphs and limitations one year later.

Returning Libertarianism to its Proper Place: The Current Fight for Socialism within the U.S. Libertarian Party

By Colin Jenkins

The following is an email interview with Matt Kuehnel and Dane Posner, two members of the Libertarian-Socialist Caucus (LSC) of the Libertarian Party. The interview took place over the course of a few months, between December 2018 and February 2019. The LSC may be contacted and followed on Facebook and Twitter. If interested in learning more or interacting, the LSC welcomes prospective members to participate in their discussion group on Facebook.

Colin Jenkins: Please tell us a little about yourselves, your personal political paths/evolution, and about the Libertarian Socialist Caucus of the Libertarian Party?

Matt Kuehnel: Born and raised in Macomb County, Michigan, home of the Reagan Democrats, I'm 35, he/him, skilled trade worker, former candidate for Michigan's State House of Representatives and currently organizing a committee to run for mayor of my home town of Warren, MI.

Bordering Detroit, Macomb County is a mix of rural and suburban communities that has shaped it to be a thermometer on the electoral pulse of America. I was raised in the upper middle-class city of Sterling Heights, but found myself attracted to the realness of the more poverty-stricken southern communities and people. The suburbs, to me, was fake people living fake lives trying to put on their best show for each other, to appear well-adjusted and successful.

My first awareness and resentment of authority was school. I got into drugs and vandalism, bounced around schools, and by senior year I dropped out. I then attended an alternative school and got my diploma. Started my professional career in food service, then CNC machining, residential construction for almost a decade, got my associate degree at age 32 for HVAC (heating and cooling), and I've been doing commercial maintenance for 4 years now.

My political beginnings were largely shaped by my middle-class parents who are Reagan Democrats, now Trump supporters. My first presidential vote was for Bush's second term, then I voted for Obama his first term, and it was then I became disenfranchised with the two parties following Obama's betrayal re-signing the Patriot Act his first week in office. I found the Tea Party, expected revolt. I showed up to the first rally in camo, masked up, with a sign that said, "eat the rich, burn the banks." This was a preclude to me finding the Libertarian Party, where I have an upbringing that should connect me with these conservative middle-class white people, but I reject the identity and advocate for those forgotten, or often vilified, by the suburbanites. I'm able to communicate and be heard, but my priorities and ideals are radically different. I realized that what I was doing was confronting toxic ideas in their safe space. In a way, I see it as de-platforming, challenging them on their own turf. I now consider myself a libertarian, a socialist, and a communist, and I'll use those terms interchangeably. I see ideology weaponized often, treated as religion, and for that reason I refuse to proclaim myself as a specific sect of socialist. I believe all revolutionary ideas hold value, some more than others, but ideology without praxis is nothing more than debate.

Dane Posner : My name is Dane Posner, currently 26 years of age. I've considered myself an anarchist since I first discovered punk rock towards the end of elementary school. Of course, I didn't understand most of the subject matter at the time, but as I transitioned into adolescence, I felt I could certainly relate to the alienating feeling of distrust of authority espoused in those lyrics - especially faced with the assertion from my so-called "superiors" that as a youth, I was discouraged from questioning this hierarchical relationship, as if my elders were somehow infallible. All the while, I was spoon-fed heaps of imperialist propaganda from American textbooks, telling me that everything our government did was for "the greater good", regardless of the human rights violations we committed in the name of "freedom", "liberty" and "justice for all".

I abstained from involvement in the electoral process until around 2015-2016, though I had paid attention to political matters for quite some time before that. I supported Ron Paul in 2012 from hearing his anti-war rhetoric, along with his rhetoric about the importance of personal civil liberties, but I didn't want to get involved with the Republican Party, and I saw how the corporate media controlled the narrative in the first place. During the 2015-2016 primary season, I discovered the same sort of corporate propaganda unleashed upon the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. Of course, it all made sense, as the rhetoric he espoused was fundamentally at-odds with the corporate agenda. I finally learned firsthand that the two-party system was not at all concerned with democracy, liberty, or the people's best interests. I had registered as a Democrat to vote for Bernie Sanders during the 2016 primaries, then traveled from Houston to Philadelphia to protest the dog-and-pony show that was the 2016 "Democratic" National Convention. I immediately "Dem-exited" following that farcical event in which the more unpopular candidate somehow "won" the party's nomination, then proudly voted for Dr. Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka in the 2016 General Election.

I had long identified as an anarchist, and throughout my teen years, as a libertarian, though I was definitely turned off by some of the poor-shaming rhetoric I had heard from that crowd, coming from a background of poverty myself. In early 2018, I learned about a "socialist infiltration" of the Libertarian Party. That certainly piqued my interest, as I had long-identified as "left-leaning." but didn't quite adopt the "socialist" label until late 2015. I had read Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's famous work What is Property sometime during intermediate school, and as I learned more about the Libertarian Socialist Caucus of the Libertarian Party, I was able to draw parallels between that text (in which Proudhon famously declared "Property is theft!") and the phrase "libertarian-socialism". "Finally!" I thought to myself, "a label that I can truly identify with!" I started reading more works by the likes of anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin and communalist Murray Bookchin and got more and more involved with the so-called "commies" in the Libertarian Party. Finally, I decided to travel to New Orleans to attend the 2018 Libertarian National Convention, to support self-proclaimed "an-com" (anarcho-communist) Matt Kuehnel, who was running for Libertarian National Committee Chair, along with other members of the LSC-LP who were running for various offices within the Libertarian Party (infamous stripper James Weeks for LNC Vice-Chair and Povertarian Caucus founder/LGBT-rights activist Mike Shipley for LP "At-Large"). Unfortunately, no members of the LSC-LP were elected to any offices within the LP, however our very presence there sent shockwaves throughout the Libertarian Party. I personally caught quite a bit of attention by flying and donning the famous red & black anarcho-syndicalist flag of the Spanish Revolution as a cape on the Convention floor. To many of the capitalists' ire, we made it known that the socialists were there to stay.

CJ: Historically and logically speaking, "libertarian socialism" is essentially anarchism - with its primary focus on eliminating coercive, hierarchical structures from both capitalism and the state. Thus, to many anarchists, it is a redundant term. But the redundancy has become necessary in the U.S. due to the capitalist cooptation of the term "libertarian." So, being in the U.S., I suspect you've received a lot of confused responses from folks (the "socialism is anything the government does" lot) thinking "libertarian socialism" is an oxymoron. As well as from those who incorrectly label anarchism as a right-wing ideology. How do you respond to this?

MK: It depends on who I'm addressing. When I hear "libertarian socialism is an oxymoron" from someone who genuinely doesn't understand, I do my best to educate patiently. I understand that the right wing has hijacked the term libertarianism in the US. They did this purposefully and they considered it a victory. When I encounter a right-wing libertarian who proclaims the ideas an oxymoron, I attack, I ridicule, I make an example of them. It exposes the ignorance and hypocrisy of US libertarianism. They are proud of being anti-authority, often posturing against each other as the "most-libertarian" libertarian. This competition to be anti-authoritarian makes them easily manipulated by those of us that oppose authority not just by the state, but in all human interaction. I did learn their ideologies, I learned their language and ideas, and it makes me a formidable opponent in debate.

DP: We encourage those individuals to read up on the origins of libertarian thought, by citing the writings of early anarchist thinkers such as Joseph Dejacque, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Errico Malatesta, etc., as they all predate the works of American libertarian thinkers such as Murray Rothbard and Milton Friedman.

CJ: Touching on the term "libertarian" some more, leftists are often more aware of the rich history of left-libertarianism than others, especially in the U.S., where the term has become bastardized. This history includes the "first socialist schism" that occurred within the First International, where the Bakunin and Marx camps had their differences, leading to the expulsion of Bakunin and his brand of anarchist socialism. It's found in Dejacque, an anarchist communist who is known for the original use of the term "libertarian" in 1857; and in Kropotkin's subsequent work that cemented the philosophical basis for anarcho-communism as a formidable socialist current.

Do you have an educational component that focuses on this history? Or do you take the approach of avoiding too much "dead white-guy theory" (something that's becoming more popular alongside attempts to "decolonize" anarchism and political education in general)?

DP: We try to frame the history of libertarianism not only in the context of its linguistic origins in 19th-century Europe, but also within the context of natural society, as espoused in Peter Kropotkin's work Mutual Aid or Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Libertarianism is the natural state of being. Non-hierarchical collectives have existed throughout human history, far predating any capitalist or proto-capitalist system such as feudalism. Of course, "libertarian-socialism" is a large umbrella term representing various philosophies ranging from anarcho-communism to mutualism or individualist anarchism. Ownership of the individual product of labor is the basis for this socio-economic philosophy, which can then be applied in various ways, either through voluntary distribution, or self-sustainability. Sometimes we frame it in terms of the Marxist doctrine, "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs," however our disagreements with Marx, in conjunction with Bakunin, stem from the methods used to achieve such a goal. We as Libertarians reject the initiation of force to achieve social or political goals, however we do view economic exploitation as an act of aggression, often backed up by theft-funded state force. This is why we argue that private ownership of the means of production, or the protection of absentee private property, cannot exist without a state or state-like entity.

MK: I honestly try to avoid being overly philosophical these days. Ideals are, by definition, unrealistic. I appreciate philosophy and theory, I think it does have a place in educating. Especially when defending the caucus's presence in the party, it's essential to combat their ideals because it's a party that prides itself on theory and purity. It can be persuasive when dealing with other nerds who read theory, but it's kinda useless with the general population. In my public interactions, I try to keep things simple, focus on policy where the most common ground can be found. It's hard enough to get people over apathetic tendencies of feeling helpless, let alone sell them on the idea that we can have some perfect, specific theory. Anything man makes will be imperfect, and expecting to get a whole community or whole nation to adapt and organize a perfect government is naive. I focus on immediate needs, immediate solutions, and that's where I find the most success.

CJ: Tell us about your experiences thus far within the Libertarian Party. How are you being received overall? Tell us about some of the debates and relationships that have formed with USAmerican libertarians within the party.

MK: I joined the party in 2016 to support Gary Johnson. Being a former Reagan Democrat, he was the perfect centrist to me at the time. He was the compromise candidate, he won my trust on a personal level, and I was raised to judge the person's character more than their politics. Immediately, I realized how small and disorganized the party was. Macomb County is one of the largest counties in Michigan, and the local affiliate was comprised of two elderly couples and a young guy who was their secretary. They were supporting Trump. Me and others had to create a new affiliate and ended up absolving the other affiliate and being recognized as the official Libertarians of Macomb County. It was exciting, because it was a bunch of us younger, new activists just finding our way through the political process. The bonds I formed locally have been what had kept me in the party despite the pushback I've received.

I had no idea of theory prior to the LP. It was there that I was exposed to anarchist philosophy and it started my journey. Originally, I was fighting with the anarchists for supporting Gary Johnson, then I was fighting the "pragmatists" when I took to anarcho-capitalism. Then, I found mutualism and started questioning and challenging capitalist rhetoric. I just kept reading, learning, and drifting further and further left, slowly losing most of my friends and allies in the party. I ran for their national chair position in 2018, the first ever open communist to run for that position to my knowledge. I had enough support at that time to get enough tokens at the national convention for my chair race to make the debates. I don't think I have that 5% support anymore. The Audacious Caucus was where most of my support was, and they are a radical anarchist caucus. Many of the original LSC members were from that caucus. When I received the dual nomination from the Socialist Party of Michigan, an affiliate of SPUSA, for my state representative race in 2018, I lost a lot of that support. I took on more pragmatic positions, and that caused backlash. It also exposed the anti-communist beliefs many of the LSC members hold, referring to things as "authoritarian socialism" and "state communism." which I find to be oxymoronic. It's now been a fight for me within the caucus, to defend against anti-communism and capitalist sympathies. I'm still in the party, still in the caucus, but it's a fight for solidarity and understanding of fellow socialists.

DP: While it has certainly been an uphill battle educating the right-wing Libertarians on libertarianism's leftist roots long predating the Libertarian Party, we have found many left-libertarians who have been waiting for an organization such as ours to spring up for quite some time. The Libertarian Socialist Caucus has only existed since August of 2017, but we've been making waves ever since! At the 2018 Libertarian National Convention in New Orleans, I even got thrice-elected Libertarian National Committee Chair Nicholas Sarwark to admit to me in a room full of capitalists that American capitalists stole the word "libertarian" from the likes of individuals like Proudhon and Bakunin - though to not completely ruin his reputation, he did add "but it's ours now," (as is the capitalist way). "True" libertarians don't believe in intellectual property rights, but it's the principle behind the right's attempted erasure of history that irks me.

CJ: What do you view as the main problems with the U.S. version of libertarianism?

DP: The emphasis on private property rights is fundamentally at odds with opposition to a theft-funded state. The way I see it, a "private security company" is not much different from a gang of police officers, perhaps besides how they receive their funding. I support the right to defend one's own personal property by any means necessary, or the right to collectively organize to defend common property, but the ultimate goal, of course, is to ensure that the basic needs of all individuals are met. "If liberty does not exist for all, then liberty does not exist at all." - Benjamin Dryke, LSC-LP member, former State House candidate for Michigan's 36th District and presidential candidate seeking the Libertarian Party's nomination in 2020. We share many common goals with right-Libertarians, such as dismantling the surveillance state, police state, ending the drug war, decriminalizing all non-violent offenses such as sex work, etc., however we feel that many of them are a bit misguided when it comes to our ideas of what a post-state world might look like. Personally, I would rather live in a unified community in which all necessities are readily available to all than a land of unnecessary competition and constant struggle for land rights and access to other natural resources.

MK: Shaming the poor and idolizing the rich is by far the biggest issue. Racism and sexism is also rampant and largely accepted in the party. Social Darwinism is a common theme. The right has done an excellent job forming an ideology based on ideals of morality that justify the most immoral ideas. The party attracted me for their anti-war and anti-police-state stances. Finding opposition to civil rights was the first eye opener for me. Then discovering how stances such as abolishing public education and welfare would have the greatest impact on marginalized people helped snap me out of the dogma I had originally bought into. I think most just don't recognize this, but some are fully aware and proud that they would be operating and depriving marginalized people. There is a very real libertarian-to-alt-right pipeline. The LSC has put a fork in the pipeline, diverting at least some newcomers to the left.

CJ: The left in the U.S. is known for sectarianism. One of the main wedges is that between anarchists and so-called "tankies" (Communists, Marxist-Leninists, Maoists, etc). This wedge is often described as "libertarian" vs. "authoritarian," something that represents a vulgar interpretation, but nonetheless prevails. What are your views on this particular split? What are your experiences working with "tankies"? How do you view sectarianism in general?

MK: I mentioned before, ideology gets weaponized and treated as religion. I find it so toxic. I have comrades throughout organizations like SPUSA, IWW, and the DSA. Prioritizing ideology over things like racism, misogyny, transphobia, ableist, etc., causes unnecessary division. So much stems from confusion, propaganda, and just the general combativeness of politics. That's why I prefer to focus on realistic reform and direct action, where the most common ground is found across ideologies. Even among the LP, that's where I can connect with many people. I like to say that I'm for working class solidarity, not left unity. In practice, we could all be socialists, creating a new and unique application of the ideals without following a specific ideology just through solidarity with our neighbors. I think ensuring organizing spaces are safe and inclusive is the most important factor in exclusion, not purity and conformity of philosophy.

DP: The roots of our disagreements tend to stem from what we interpret to be the most viable methods of achieving our idea of a classless, stateless, non-hierarchical society. The libertarian-left feels that the abolition of involuntary hierarchy cannot be achieved by replacing one hierarchy with another, especially through violent means. That said, we are willing to work with anyone who shares our common goals of dismantling the classist and racist institutions such as the police state that prevent us from living the way we choose.

CJ: A section of your Statement of Principles reads: "We concur that imposed communism would be the most detestable tyranny that the human mind could conceive, and free and voluntary communism is ironical if one has not the right and the possibility to live in a different regime, collectivist, mutualist, individualist - as one wishes, always on condition that there is no oppression or exploitation of others."

I anticipate that many leftists would view this as problematic for a number of reasons, the most obvious to me being the insinuation that a classless society where the means of production are owned and operated in common could be imposed on anyone? As if people would not want more control over our lives. In other words, contrary to capitalist propaganda, a true communist society seems perfectly in line with that of liberty ("the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behavior, or political views.") Can you explain the thought process behind including this section and what it means to you? Have you received any negative feedback from it?

MK: There is a struggle of tactics and goals within the LSC. My tactics are that of agitation, my goal would be to fill and usurp the party with actual leftists. Others believe it better to blend in and persuade current membership to accept our presence with the goal of creating an anti-state coalition. The platform was created democratically, and there's very few obstacles to becoming a voting member, although roadblocks are being created to combat a supposed "tankie takeover." The most active members are those that were already party members, so they not only hold less than socialist views, they also have bonds and alliances with party members that they are afraid to lose. I honestly loathe this language, and the idea of pandering to anti-communism to appease capitalists is one I am constantly fighting against. I prefer to appeal to actual socialists, and I would encourage leftists to join and help me combat the right, but I can't in good faith without being honest about what you're getting into - a horribly toxic party and a caucus where we have to combat toxicity in our own space. That's politics, though. A large part of my activism is just showing how easy it is to participate. There's elitism for sure, but, for the most part, all you need to do is show up and speak up. It takes away the feeling of powerlessness we've been accustomed to with politics. I'm able to be an open communist in the Libertarian Party; and the Party, as well as the caucus, cannot figure out a way to get rid of me. That's all we need to improve - good people showing up and speaking up, and we should do this in every party, organization, union, etc.

DP : The working class has never fully owned the means of production under any so-called "socialist" or "communist" regime. Socialism, as we define it, means "worker ownership of the means of production and products of labor", whereas communism is a "classless, stateless society in which the means of production and products of labor are commonly-owned". State ownership of the means of production and products of labor is not by any means the same thing as worker ownership.

As long as involuntary hierarchies exist, neither socialism nor communism has been achieved, in my view.

CJ: A section of your Platform that stood out to me reads, "We reject attempts to do away with the violent state's 'crutches' for the most marginalized and at-risk among us, while still maintaining its 'teeth,' and we seek abolition now of its most violent and oppressive elements." Can you elaborate on this a little?

MK: This is a plank I fought for, and it's meant to allow for incrementalism and pragmatism. If you took the philosophies encompassed in what we call libertarian-socialism and applied them strictly, in that the state should not exist, it could lead you to support anything from repealing the Civil Rights Act to public schools. It is my belief that we cannot operate with this mindset, because it feeds into the already oppressive conditions for the biggest victims of state and capitalist oppression. The proletariat must have their needs met in order to be able to fight. The caucus and philosophical ideal are equal distribution through mutual aid networks, but those should come first and eliminate the need for govt assistance programs. Otherwise, it's a social Darwinist 'sink or swim' mentality until inequality is addressed and eliminated. So, the biggest intersects that we share, not only with current party members but also the general population, is the major structures that uphold oppression by the state. By those, I'm referring to the imperialist military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex, the pharmaceutical industrial complex, corruption, and pollution. These big problems are staring us straight in the face and a good 50% of the population can immediately find themselves in agreement against them. Those are where the greatest number of victims are created, where the largest amount of protection and tools for oppression by the capitalist class are found. I think there should be MORE assistance given, like Medicare for All, until these large systems are eliminated, making equality possible. And that's kinda the point of this plank, allowing members to reject idealism for pragmatism.

DP: Militarized police forces serve as a theft-funded tool of oppression and nothing more. The police serve to protect the property of the "haves", oftimes at the expense of the "have-nots" - that is to say, they exist to protect the possessions of the rich at the expense of the working class, who pay more taxes in proportion to their income than their wealthy fellow citizens (through sales taxes, rent, etc.).

CJ: Staying on this topic regarding the Welfare State and mutual aid, your platform reads, "We reject the offensive and paternalistic premise that ordinary people of modest means are unable to run their own lives and need government to 'help' them. Thus, we reject the coercive redistribution of wealth and call for the voluntarily mutualization of the welfare state through a compassionate transition to voluntary, community-based mutual aid networks."

Can you tell us what you mean by "the coercive redistribution of wealth" and how this transition from welfare state to "voluntary, community-based mutual aid networks" would take place and what it would look like?

MK: The "coercive redistribution of wealth" is opposing systems imposed by states to direct resource allocations. It's basically saying 'taxation is theft' in leftist terms. This plank may accurately describe ideals, and a big part of why it's included is to be cannon fodder against right libertarians when they call us "statists". How we transition from a state tax system to voluntary cooperation can be answered in so many ways by so many people. Many in the caucus would envision a stateless free market of competition allowing socialist market practices to outcompete capitalist modes of production rendering capitalist businesses few or obsolete. Others might say that capitalist modes of production are inherently aggressive and worthy of defensive action, essentially outlawing them through a collective rejection, boycott, strike, or insurrection making wealth redistribution unnecessary following the transfer of the means of production into the hands of the working class. An example of what a voluntary system would look like might be like GoFundMe or UNICEF. Organizations of people collectively and voluntarily working towards shared commonwealth, justice, and relief. Ultimately, this plank and others are shared ideals but not necessarily with uniform solutions, tactics, and ideas of how to achieve them or what they might look like.

DP: We believe that without a state, the legal claims to absentee private property will become null and void. It is a shared view amongst most libertarian-socialists that natural resources, as they exist without the additions of human labor, cannot be legitimately claimed or protected without the use or threat of force, however we feel that instead of fighting over these resources, it would be far more beneficial to the community as a whole to voluntarily share these resources amongst ourselves to ease the suffering of all of our fellow humans. Most of us advocate a push towards a post-scarcity world, in which all goods are available to all people free of charge. The innovations of technology in the modern age have pushed us closer than ever to achieving such a world, however, we feel that the state, on behalf of those who claim the most capital, has hindered the human race from achieving that goal. Modern technology has significantly diminished the demand and necessity for human labor, and has made mass food production a possibility, which could ultimately end world hunger, even without leaving a huge carbon footprint (by incorporating green technology and diverting away from the use of fossil fuels). Even healthcare could ultimately be provided to all people with little to no human labor required, however our ideal for the current day and age is a transition to worker-owned healthcare cooperatives through the systematic dismantlement of corporation and state, which currently exists to accumulate profit at the expense of the sick, disabled, and those in pain.

CJ: You mention the 'free market' a few times in your platform and even refer to the free market as "a cornerstone of a free and prosperous society." You also call for an end to "the government enforcement of capitalist property laws and exploitative financial systems" in this vision. Can you elaborate on this? What would your version of a free market look like, as opposed to the capitalist version?

MK: In the libsoc (libertarian-socialist) understanding, the term 'market' is economically agnostic. In a market, you might have some elements of capitalism, some of socialism, and maybe ones we haven't thought of yet. A free market is one absent of restrictions, especially imposed by a state, self-regulated by its natural forces and conscious actors. Some believe that by simply eliminating the state, and thusly the structures that defend and uphold capitalist norms, capitalism would not be possible, especially at the current level. Not all libsoc's are communist, and therefore we are not in full agreement that markets should exist. I'm in favor of abolishing markets altogether, as markets are inherently competitive. I prefer communist ideals of cooperation. Putting ideals into practice, my state rep position included abolishing private property. The way I would describe that in practice as a state rep, is that I would support any measure to give a worker more control over their labor, an individual more control over their possessions, and a community more control over their resources. I'm running for mayor of Warren this year on the platform of banning evictions. This means having our city courts refuse to process, approve of, and aid in evictions as another way to address the destructive nature of private property and offer a solution to strip the owning class of power over our means of shelter.

DP: What we view as a "free market" is a system of trade free of involuntary hierarchy, i.e. government and corporate intervention. "Free market socialism" is not an oxymoron, by the definitions I used earlier. We believe that the individual owns that which they individually produce, and if a collective of individuals decides to collaborate to increase production and productivity, then they should most certainly have the right to do so. This, we feel, is the essence of a truly free market. The complications come when we start figuring out how to trade with entities that exist on a hierarchical, for-profit system, however many basic needs can be met through localization. How is it that humanity was able to thrive in the Americas for millennia, prior to European colonization?

CJ: Under the Labor section of your platform you state, "the exploitation and control of labor, slavery, both direct and indirect, has been the single greatest violation of the liberty of individuals throughout history. We oppose this violation." Can you talk a little bit about this point and tell us what role you believe capitalism has played here?

DP : Income inequality has long been a problem throughout American history, even prior to our declaration of national sovereignty at the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783. It should not be ignored that this nation was built on the backs of slaves and other involuntary laborers such as indentured servants, who had no real choice but to labor for so-called "lords of the land" for the "opportunity" to survive in colonial America. But by what right does man claim dominion over another, either through direct coercion or deprivation of vital resources?

Private property rights in America were claimed through the initiation of force in the form of genocide against the mostly peaceful indigenous peoples of this land. This harsh reality cannot be ignored, regardless of the fact that it is was the past. The enslavement and forced assimilation of indigenous peoples, both in the Americas and Africa, built this country from the ground up. Private property rights were claimed through systemic violence, and passed down from generation to generation. That is how we got to where we are today. The so-called "Founders" of this country, according to our history textbooks, were a union of wealthy, white male landowners, who for the most part inherited their own wealth from generations past. At the founding of our country, many fortunes were made through the systemic exploitation of involuntary labor, maintained through the use of force and the threat of death. Even following the executive order of President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which allegedly freed the slaves, and the bloody battles fought between the Union and Confederacy during the US Civil War, black and brown men and women struggled for well over a century to be recognized as equal beings who deserved the same rights to land and resources as their Caucasian counterparts. To this very day, there is a blatantly stark contrast between the economic conditions of whites and non-whites. While it is true that white people exist in poverty, per capita, black and brown individuals make up a far larger proportion of the lower economic classes. This does not denote a difference in productivity between races - rather, this is the manufactured design of the American capitalist system. When private ownership of the means of production can be claimed by European colonizers through the use of force and passed down for generations, while depriving non-whites of their rights and subjecting them to forced labor for the accumulation of individual personal wealth, it cannot come as a surprise that the current socioeconomic racial divides exist as they do.

MK: This is an attempt to articulate wage theft, along with any other forms of exploitation of labor. The LP is very much into the idea of things being voluntary, so almost everything gets analyzed in the lens of consent. I don't always like when things that aren't slavery get called slavery, because it minimizes the atrocities committed through chattel slavery, but it's common on the left to consider capitalist exploitation as wage slavery. You're forced to participate, it's coerced consent to surrender portions of your labor to your boss. This becomes a big talking point against what right Libertarians will call voluntary.

CJ: I appreciate what you all are doing and for taking part in this interview. I think your efforts are an important part of the socialist revival we are witnessing in the U.S. That being said, what are your short-term and long-term goals for this Caucus? Where do you see this movement in another few years?

MK: Short term is just to have a presence in the party. Just being there, despite being largely outnumbered, has had a huge effect. What I would love to see long term is a full takeover of the LP, and it would be so easy if people would just show up locally. Most counties don't have affiliates, most affiliate can't even break double digit attendance to their monthly meetings. The national convention had less than 1000 delegates. It is completely possible for the left to swallow up the LP by 2020, but I just don't see the interest in it yet. Even myself, I'm losing interest and prioritizing my non-partisan mayor run and considering running as a Democrat in 2020, assuming I lose the 2019 mayoral race. I'm glad the caucus exists, flaws and all. I'm proud of my involvement and the work we've collectively done. I think taking over the party would be a symbolic and significant victory, but just having the caucus exist is a victory in itself for leftist ideals. The LP is a great place to start your activism, to learn political processes, to practice public speaking, but I find all third parties ultimately ineffective to getting elected. My goal originally wasn't to get elected, but just use the platform to advance my ideals. I've since evolved, I enjoy being a public speaker and giving a voice to those who previously had none. There's often fights between reform and revolution. I support both, but, until a revolution is actualized, people need relief and reform can provide that. I would say my future in the caucus and the LP is undecided, but regardless I hope that the caucus continues to grow, takes on more true socialist tendencies, and continues to challenge and disrupt the LP.

DP: We hope to provide the anti-authoritarian left an outlet for sharing their ideas for achieving our common goal of a world set free. Though we exist as a relatively small organization within a minor political party, our focus is not solely on electoral politics. We encourage direct action, as a more "pragmatic" means of achieving this goal. We hope to build our organization up to include like-minded individuals from various walks of life; a multiracial, multicultural amalgamation of free spirits - like a modern-day "Rainbow Coalition" - working towards the liberation of all people, through peaceful and voluntary means. We want to unify as one resounding, echoing voice that cannot be ignored by the masses currently distracted by the farce and fraud of the bipartisan false dichotomy known as our so-called "two-party system," which ultimately exists to serve the same capitalist masters. We hope to establish voluntary cooperatives all across the nation that can end our communities' dependence on the oppressive institutions that govern our daily lives, forcing us to depend on them or face incarceration for the crimes of free movement and challenging the status quo. We hope to become a force to be reckoned with that expands far beyond the electoral system, that could ultimately change the world for the better by achieving liberty for all in a world truly set free. Our goal will certainly not be easy to achieve, but what have we got to lose besides our chains? Give me liberty or give me death!

Teaching and Resistance in Los Angeles: An Interview

By Devon Bowers

Below is the transcript of a recent email interview I did with Jen McClellan, a teacher in the Los Angeles school district. We discuss her journey to becoming a teacher, the recent LA teacher's strike, and the state of teachers in the US.

What made you want to become a teacher? How long have you been working in the LA school system?

I like the first part of this question. I have so many answers. I'll give just a few.

I was in fourth grade when I gave my first summative assessment. My best friend, a very distracted person like me, was going to spend the night. I wanted her to watch The Tigger Movie with me because I had seen it and I liked the themes or morals of it. I knew we usually couldn't sit through a whole movie paying attention only to the movie the way I could alone, so I made a quiz with questions that would assure my friend got the main points I wanted her to get. She made fun of me, but I knew she would, and I insisted that it was of upmost importance, what this movie had to teach us. I don't remember that particular movie or the lesson that the 4th grade me thought was so important. It was probably something to do with friendship. The best part of that experience though, is that it set precedent for our relationship, one that is still and will infinitely be how I understand the term "soul mate." From that night on, every book we read, every movie we saw, every song we heard, every week of summer camp, every notebook full of poetry, every major life accomplishment and every utterly tragic loss we've held in common, so many pieces of our lives are stamped with a theme. Because of this, we can take a period of our lives, classify it, reflect on it, move on from it, draw connections and distinctions from it, and write about our experiences like our lives are stories that mean something. That's a big deal for us, because we hit nihilism and existentialism hard and young and we held on tight to that reckless abandon for so many years that sometimes it still surfaces and tries to drag one or both of us under.

That didn't make me want to become a teacher, though. That's just one of those things that when I did make the decision to pursue teaching as a career, I realized, I've always been a teacher. Then again, I am absolutely certain that there is no one that is not a teacher, and in that sense, deciding to teach is really about recognizing and stepping up to meet this responsibility consciously; and for money.

Another distinct memory I have that I cited as my inspiration for teaching in my scholarship or college application essays is of Mr. Gill running up to my trouble-maker-ass as I was skateboarding loudly up and down school hallways during class time, shouting with quick, sharp, certainty, "HEY!" and once he was right up in my face, with a final stomp and his outstretched arm dramatically pointing towards his classroom, and in a slightly quieter voice, he goes, "there are students trying to learn in there." That was all he had to say to throw me reeling in my newfound sense of self-awareness. I may forever be trying to attain that Gill level mastery over metacognitive teaching. That kind of teaching where you can't remember the teacher telling you anything except maybe two life-changing truths like, "writers write everyday" or "if you're going to insult someone, publicly and in writing, make sure you know how to spell." Someone had written "Mr. Gill is Satin" on the board. He left it up all day for everybody to see and laugh about. That kind of teaching, like how Basil (my criminal justice professor and Bujinkan Sensei) can lecture for three hours and afterwards none of us students knew we'd been lectured or learned anything because we thought we'd just been having a long, super-engaging conversation, but then when it was time for finals, if you showed up to class you got an A, because we had been learning everything that was in the textbook through his conduction of everyone's experiences and knowledge, supplemented with just the necessary sprinkles of what only he knew.

However, "what made (me) want to become a teacher" was deep, fundamental unhappiness. Not just the philosophical self-imposed kind I mentioned before. Not the psychological, clinically diagnosed and medicated kind; though I certainly had that too. No, because it's hardly describable. It's universal, you know? It's that feeling of knowing how insignificant any one of us is in isolated introspection. It's looking at the stars in the middle of the night in the middle of the Eastern Sierras, seeing the Milky Way, and feeling both incredible awe and unfathomable loneliness. It's the reason we love stories about orphans so much, that permeable sense of abandonment I imagine all beings on this planet must get the very moment they come into conscious life. At least that would explain why the smartest (or most conscious) of us, hurt the most.

As I was saying, I was made to want to become a teacher by my own unhappiness, and after a solid eight years of indulging that spiraling dissent, I found the right combination of tools, practices, and willingness to climb up out of myself. I stole a lot of things before and after I went to jail for petty theft as an 18-year-old, so it wouldn't surprise me if I had stolen the book that made me see my unhappiness as a simple monster. I was twenty-three and in an abusive relationship with a six foot three, two hundred eighty pound, twenty-eight year old, thrash-metal guitarist, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal version of myself when I pulled the gold-yellow hardback copy of The Art of Happiness out from the books that lined the uneven floor from the bedside table to my desk in the old workers' quarters I was renting then.

Back in Mesilla, New Mexico, in the pecan fields off the Rio Grande, my insomnia and I watched the packs of wild chihuahuas transform, into the giant toads our pit-bull mutts loved to lick until their mouths salivated with foam, into mosquito swarms so thick I couldn't step outside into the dim light of dawn before I would slap my arm instinctively and look down to see it covered in blood. The fields had been flooded. Another summer was coming to an end. I had gone out there in 2006 after graduating high school with a scholarship to NMSU. And after serving 24 hours in San Luis Obispo Women's County for minor in possession of a stolen fifth of vodka, which stuck me with a lifetime ban from the Vons in Grover Beach and a nine hundred dollar fine that followed me over ten years. It's sad that I left my home town, my family, my friends, my coaches, my mentors and my memories on that note of shame and guilt. It's humorously ironic that when I came back to California to teach, it was the loan money from the state of California to go to school that paid off the remaining eight hundred something dollar fine to - you guessed it - the state of California. And maybe it's karma that the book Howard C. Cutler published, that contained his interview with the Dali Lama about Buddhism in the West, the book that had belonged to someone I once knew as a friend, someone who had revolutionized my ideas of music and politics, of film and art, of how to be a human being, the book that symbolized my betrayal of him and of all those things, and of myself, was the book that made me want to become a teacher.

That September I had reread all the writing I had compiled over ten years. I had started searching for a way out of the suicidal cycle of working thirty to forty-five hours a week in food service for five fifteen to seven fifty an hour just to stay drunk and in so many ways fucked up under transient roofs. Thank God for Mr. Gill and that statement prompting one of our free-writes. "Writers write everyday" gave me the notion that even if I failed at everything else, even if I didn't know what else to do with my life, even if I never fully tried at anything, so long as I kept writing, at least I'd always be a writer. I love and have always loved writers, not always for what they write, but at least for how I could always relate to the shit in their lives. You know? The shit that they had to go through to be able to write anything. The shit they had to go through to write like that was all they had and they could die without anyone ever reading anything they wrote just so long as they didn't have to take all that shit with them into whatever came or didn't come next.

Autobiography and biography. That's my favorite genre if anyone asks. Everything California's public education system ever taught us under the guise of "history" was a lie; propaganda for our modern state. Everything except autobiography, especially those of Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Mary Prince, Harriet Jacobs, W.E.B. Du Bois, and every black person up through Malcolm X, Assata, and Ta Na-Heisi Coats, including every Asian-American, every Chicano and Latin-American, and every indigenous person who ever wrote or inspired one. Everything except biography, excluding any written by or about white settler-colonialists and especially the ones like John Smith's because his ego was so overwhelming, even to him, that he had to write his own autobiography in third person.

Becoming a teacher wasn't ever something I wanted to have to do. I knew, in kindergarten, when the kid at the table near me declared his belief in our beloved teacher's sincere suggestion that we could be "anything" we wanted when we grew up, that I didn't believe anybody could be the president. I knew when he used the picture of Abe Lincoln on the worksheet to guide his answer, that I didn't want to be someone who lied to people or let them think they were smart and "good" for saying or doing what they were obviously supposed to do or say. I knew, increasingly, with every teacher, with every detention, suspension, and Saturday school, that most people in charge, even if they had started out with the right intentions, had become or maybe always were tools. I feel this way about the teachers I have loved the most too.

I have loved them because... well, because as long as I haven't been able to see a way out, I have felt the timeless empathy teachers are able to sustain for their students. Because students are our best selves as we have ever been, and they are all the potential we have ever had and might ever hope to see met.

I didn't ever want, I still don't want all that empathy to come from me. Because empathy means you have the hurt, the pain, the suffering, the particular kind of sadness that someone else is feeling.

I didn't want to have to be a teacher, because for teaching to take place there has to be someone who is willing to receive and someone who is willing to give. The best conditions for teaching are those where people are in need, are searching, are students. Those are the conditions for empathy and empathy is the only bridge I know of that can hold enough authority to see the human race from this world with its globalized late-stage capitalism, rampant individualism, ever expansive militarization, and polarizing dichotomies through communism, through socialism, to the abstract idealistic notions of interconnected autonomy and stateless anarchy that fuels my dreams.

Or if you believe the same misinformation that still confuses us and keeps us from acting in the face of global warming when it says anarchy is chaos, then substitute "anarchy" for "freedom." Anarchy, as I dream it, means I don't have to be what you say I have to be and I don't have to tell you what to do or be. Freedom means I have the autonomy to neutralize gender norms and that I live unhindered in whatever my idea of a home is, on public land. I mean that everything we ever called "public" can't be private, can't be owned, and can't be used to oppress people in any way, shape or form because "public" means we all share it. "Public" means it belongs to everyone and therefore no one. "Public" means you can carry shit around with you and call it yours, call it "personal" but even that ignores the disprovable physical laws of spacetime every human being is linearly confined by. How did you come to be? How did the things you think you own come to be? "No man is an island entire of itself," if you like Donne.

From that gold-yellow book, in September of 2012, the Dali Lama asked me to see myself and he did it a different way, but also the same way that Gill did when we he ran up on me in my high school hallway. After Gill, who I only knew then by reputation through the rumors spread by poor spellers, showed me that new way of seeing things, I sought him out. We don't have much choice or agency as high school students, but I dropped out of AP English the following year because I had learned that Gill taught regular English classes, and when I went on to the next grade and back into AP, I also took creative writing because I had learned that he taught creative writing. I took journalism and wrote a column in the paper too, because if I was going to take creative writing, I might as well take journalism too.

If I could go back and do it all intentionally, I would have studied the sciences. I would have passed pre-calc rather than failing it twice out of a concocted aversion I manifested out of early onset senioritis. I would love to know where that would have taken me. But Charles Gill got to me, so I'm teaching English and I am grateful to read biographies about Einstein, to be able to translate religious texts that give context to phrases like "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds", and to have even the slightest theoretical comprehension of what is being discussed in papers on String Theory. I'm even grateful to have been allowed to audit Charles Hatfield's Science Fiction and Time Travel course, since it's there I last learned that while multi-verses and parallel timelines are widely accepted as possibilities, the only thing that goes wrong more than traversing those, is the story that supposes we can go backwards in time.

Just think, this is only one of my stories about what made me want to become a teacher, and I haven't even finished answering the first half of that question yet! Let me shorten it up by directly addressing the "made" in that prompt. I was made to want to become anything by drugs. Specifically, I abused drugs and alcohol to the point that I was frequently blacking out and overdosing without a second thought past "fuck. Being hungover fucking sucks." My journals said I was a writer and could potentially teach other people to write. The Art of Happiness said it was my right as a human being to be happy and that to be happy I should do less of the things that made me unhappy and more of the things that made me happy. So, I put as much as I could fit in my car while the passed out freckled drunk who would later justify holding me off the ground against the wall in a choke hold as a response to me punching him in the face snored. In the morning I left.

I stopped at the Grand Canyon. I wandered through the woods on the edge of those gaping cliffs in the dark of 2am, with my delirious, sleep-deprived paranoid echoes bouncing off the startled silent forest around me, and with my own madness and fear that this was as far as I was going to make it flying back at me in blinding flashes of lightlessness. After the second sun rose, I decided the things I learned in school were good enough, the things the Dali Lama said were simple enough, and I had gone nowhere enough, that I could at least make it back to California. From there, with a lot of help from a lot of people, I figured out that I wanted to teach.

The way I saw it, I was joining the army or becoming a monk, only I wasn't going to murder anybody with a righteous fist of forced democracy, and I wasn't going the other extreme of disappearing into some other desert or mountain range in a vow of silence. This way, under the guise of teaching English, I would forfeit my ego, be humbled before everyone around me and be of service to their learning, to their seeking and finding, and thereby enter the realm of possibly finding purpose or meaning in my life as I simultaneously repaid everyone and anything which came before me and contributed to me still somehow being alive.

I decided I wanted to teach in LAUSD because the teaching at the school I went to felt too small. San Francisco seemed unattainable, too costly, and I simply felt as though I shouldn't go there. Maybe one day, if I had a real reason, I would go there. Los Angeles, with Hollywood, the ports, LAX, all its smog, traffic, diversity, and skateboarders everywhere, shouted at me like, "aye! Your moms is an hour away. Halfway point. Sleep there for a minute, then come down. Do you really need to think about it?" That was it. I was made to become a teacher by a long series of mistakes, because yeah, you have to make mistakes to learn anything worth knowing, but if you don't do better, do different, you can't really say you're learning anything. I learned that I needed my mom's help then and that I might at any time so I worked to restore that relationship first, and then every other relationship I had. Then I made new ones.

I met Justin Simons in Nenagh Brown's Monsoon Asian Civilization class, after wrestling with the concept of Western imperialism and its effects on China, India, and Japan all semester, after falling asleep for months to Marx and Engles audio readings, on the very last day of the semester. That was May 2013. That summer I started going with Justin to Los Angeles. He showed me the places he knew, like The Bourgeoisie Pig and Amoeba, and his friends' houses. We went to Socialist Party USA's LA local meetings and I learned about alternative structures of power like horizontalism. [1] I learned what the feminist process meant in practice. I threw myself into the LA left, joined the California Student Union (which coincidentally took me on a life-changing weekend trip to San Francisco), started a chapter of the Young Peoples' Socialist League at Moorpark with Justin, took the prerequisite classes I needed to tutor for the college's Writing Center in the library, got to know people in every club across campus as I toured their initial meetings to see who was there and how they did what they did, tabled and used free doughnuts and anarcho-syndicalist zines to lure in new members, got to know the school's groundskeepers, custodians and maintenance workers, asked them and the students, professors and staff about their experiences and working conditions on campus, then with the practices I learned in LA I taught my peers in affluent, conservative suburbia how to earn a reputation as the most active and subversive club on campus. A legitimately recognized and funded club, I might add. Well at first. After a year we outgrew the parameters that came with that status.

So some of us focused our efforts on taking direct action to provide the students that would come after we left with a long term solution to the scarcity of food on campus resulting from a district wide contract with Coca-Cola and the Vending Machine company that claimed sole distribution over all nutritional possibilities and hence left us stuck on a relatively remote campus for up to fourteen hours, not giving a fuck that all we had to eat was gummy worms and the occasional over-ripened apple.

From the summer of 2013 until I transferred to CSUN in the fall of 2015, I learned from Schools LA Students Deserve, the International Socialist Organization, the Valley Socialists (club at San Fernando Valley's Community College off the Orange Line a couple stops north of NoHo), independent organizers, politicians (one of whom became an LAUSD Substitute just in time to go proudly on strike with UTLA the second week of January 2019), members of the International Workers of the World, people like Vanessa Lopez whose identity I can't limit with labels or affiliations, people who stood out to me because in the midst of this new (to me) realm they were able to think ahead and convey to those around them a general, but malleable, flexible and collectively inviting purpose and place to envision direction.

That summer, 2015, I moved into a two bedroom apartment with Jose and Jay who taught me about being American with Salvi parents, about being Korean in LA, about how to bring the motherfucking ruckus almost anywhere, about how to share a kitchen with the smell of abandoned squid, and a hallway with a forth roommate; also from Korea, but he got his own master bedroom and bathroom because he had more money than us - from the App he had invented - and I don't remember his name, but I do remember us all stifling laughter as he marched with the overzealous and disproportionately heavy weight of his own self-importance, up and down the hall, in his saggy off-white underwear). I smoked cigarettes on the roof next to 18th Street tags and watchers who watched the watchmen who always hover above all of us in black ghetto birds. They oppress us with the loud pervasive sound of rapidly spinning blades and thereby they unite the richest diversity of the densest populations in the nation with a common enemy. #FTP

I had been doing Supplemental Instruction which is basically being a TA with mad tutoring and small group teaching skills, at Moorpark. I applied and qualified to be an SI Leader at CSUN when I transferred. So, Fall 2015, I started teaching my own class of freshmen in English for 50 minutes a day, two days a week. Then I had two classes in the spring. That is the valley; I don't know if you count it as LA's school system. But if we're being particular about when I started working as a teacher in LA's schools - I haven't started yet. I'm in my second semester of student teaching (unpaid) as CSUN's credential program requires. I've been a student for, well as long as I've been alive - 30 years. I will be over 40,000$ in debt after a quick two-year AA, two more years for a BA, and this last year and a half for my credential work (not classified as graduate school but is essentially graduate school). If all goes as planned, I'll be paid to teach in LAUSD this fall.

Give us a historical background for this strike. Place it into a larger context of what has been happening to teachers, students, and the school system at large.

I mentioned that when I started going to meetings in LA in summer 2013, one of the grassroots organizations whose meetings I frequented was Schools LA Students Deserve. We called them SLASD then. They were high school students, parents, teachers, staff, and a community of dedicated, unyielding, persistent public education advocates. We met at and near Dorsey and Robert. F Kennedy, in classrooms, auditoriums, cafeterias, and community spaces. I met one of Dorsey's English teachers because she hosted a series of free public classes about how capitalism, industry, and global warming had historically affected and was currently affecting people and their neighborhoods in and around, of and in fact, Los Angeles. She hosted an interesting group of us students, workers, student-workers, teachers, people, at her house off the Expo line in Inglewood. I thought, this is what I want. I want to live in this place that feels like the word neighborhood and brings it new meaning.

For five years I've worked towards that goal. Now it is the end of January and the beginning of 2019. I'll get lost in too many words if I give historical background beyond my personal experience of it, but I can recommend Bill Ring's " Guerilla Guide to LAUSD " for that history.

I felt inspiration, happiness, and hope from Students Deserve's role in the strike. They work to bring a vast, diverse, segregated, and by all means intentionally divided district together to repair, reinvigorate, rebirth, decolonize, demilitarize, and democratize public education in Los Angeles. They have proven that the people have the power. They have it because without people, the rich, white, elite, house of cards currently dictating the abuse of our collective resources does not stand. The current pyramid scheme of a system stands only to be further stacked against humankind's survival. This is not something that can be concealed anymore. The students, parents, teachers, psychologists, nurses, librarians, groundskeepers, custodians, maintenance men, and everyone who hungers for learning or yearns to live rather than to be murdered or just barely survive, have the power. They have social media to make transparent all that might be concealed. They have strategic planning, passion, and humility. Their vulnerabilities are their strengths.

I have explored Marx's critique of capitalism my whole life. Through punk rock, skateboarding, writing, the blues, gender defiance, criticism of those who falsely claim authority, and every breath I take is an effort to teach through action what I, and they, and every person must instinctively know.

Why is it that whenever teachers' strikes occur, people argue that the strikes are related to pay? Why does the media never focus on the other demands of teachers that actually help to aid students learning?

This is a rhetorical question. Have you read George Orwell's " Politics and the English Language " essay? What do you know about the Sapir-Warf Hypothesis? The question you are asking yourself is why are you on the side of teachers rather than the state-run, corporate-sponsored media?

In what ways do you think that this country undermines education?

What comes to your mind when you think of public education? The sentiment I'm hearing is that the education system is "broken." If that's the case, privately owned charter schools aren't going to fix it by taking students, and therefore funding, out of the public sphere. They're just going to profit off of the work of others.

What did you feel about school as you were in your last years of it? I loved learning, the few good teachers I had, my friends, and having somewhere to go be away from my parents. But I got in trouble a lot for challenging authority in various ways. From my experience there, San Luis Obispo County undermined education by denying us the responsibilities, respects, decencies and liberties everybody needs to experience from a young age if they're meant to graduate and go off to college with the ability to sustain a living.

Don't even let me get me started on student debt.

Schools in LA are segregated by race, class, and status. My school had gates and fences around it, but it also had large gaps or holes in the back fences where we'd easily get out into the cow pastures or strawberry fields; circa rural Arroyo Grande, 2002-2006. However, the schools in Koreatown don't even try not to look like prisons. The tracking systems like GATE (Gifted and Talented Education), AP (Advanced Placement), and Honors make sure that the right candidates are given advantages to counter its failing efforts to exclude students by race (aka ethnicity), nationality or citizenship, gender, sexuality, class, or ability.[2] Those that do make it through without conforming to become another agent of this web of oppression are rare.

Those people, the ones that manage to escape the school to prison pipeline or manage to make it in and out of the prison industrial complex are the best educators we have. And most of them probably don't teach in public schools (I'm thinking of bell hooks at The New School or people who teach under other employment classifications). Hence, I see school as the Juvenile Detention Recruitment Facilities that scout for slave labor more than a system of education that should empower citizens of a free nation with the agency and autonomy to actively practice democracy within their local communities, at least.

It seems we pay lip service to the idea of it being a 'great equalizer' but then aren't willing to do the heavy lifting to actually make that a reality.

If you're alluding to the saturation of empty rhetoric our lives are bombarded by, I agree. We are living a crossover of every piece of Dystopian Literature ever written. We let it happen too. Remember when the Simpsons predicted Trump as president?[3]

This gives me insight to another reason I was so happy with the victories won by the recent UTLA strike. The fact that there still exists powerful veins of opposition in an Equilibrium-like dictatorship is amazing when you consider how much it takes to live versus how much it costs to live.[4] Economic surveys give us some ideas about this, though there are so many more un-quantified, unrecorded, and unrecognized variables that should be factored into cost of living. Even so, the abstract understanding I have of wealth disparity from profit driven reports whose audience is intended to be capitalist investors is enough to fill me with humility when I see organizers who work well beyond the legal maximum of 8 hours a day.

My own short-lived period of organizing, when paired with what I am able to observe in LA equates to burnout. How long would you be able to go 16-24 hours a day and seeing people that are basically your grandparents, parents, siblings, cousins, or children passed out in the middle of the sidewalk, clothes dirty and falling off their bodies, pushing carts full of plastic bags full of plastic things, discarded human beings hauling around discarded belongings like ghosts? How long would you go into Skid Row to meet with, plan and carry out action with, organize with folks to detail the level of surveillance and control the military and police and corporations have over everybody? How long would you go to "public," "democratic," Board of Trustees meetings to speak in shaking vulnerability knowing all you stand to lose, just to be given a 3 minute maximum time slot in which you are made to stand outside the circle where menacing, suit-wearing demagogues who sit facing each other and ignoring you like the judges, jurors, and executioners of your hopes and dreams?

How long before you burn out? How long before the cynicism overcomes you?

And then what?

Unions are demonized in general, but teachers' unions seem especially hated. Why do you think that is?

An old adjunct professor and mentor of mine is a union representative. Adjuncts are called freeway fliers because universities or community colleges "can't afford" to hire them full time (because they are spending money building facilities that will draw more students who can afford to pay higher tuitions). My friend, the professor who I invited to lunch immediately after Justin Simons told me she was an anarchist, she says adjuncts don't have offices. Then she laughs, unless you count their trunks. She burns an image into my mind, of the post-secondary educator's car filled trunk, back, and passenger seats, floor to ceiling with books, student and personal supplies, as they drive from classroom to classroom dawn to dusk. Before I got butt-raped by the UAW she let me know how useless unions have become. But we are historians, we listen to Eugene V. Debs speeches and read about him in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. We know it's useless, but what else can you do? You have to fight with everything you have left until you die even if all you're doing is pissing them off or slowing them down a little.

I haven't worked in UTLA's ranks yet. I don't know how long I'll last when I do get in there to see how it is. However, I have to hope beyond hope that the reason you or anyone thinks that teachers' unions are hated is because they are most widely supported, most critically strategic, and most international laborers the world has. Teachers are the last resistance and I'm joining up, if nothing else, at least for vengeance.

What labor has not been assembly-lined? What effective union member has not been murdered, banished, enslaved or otherwise lost, broken, and forgotten? Yet here we are with our poetry and banned books, with our librarian allies, with our entire communities of food-deserted, exhausted, fed-up, impoverished families behind us. Here we are, after Raegan, Nixon and Bush and they're dreading us still being here after Agent Orange (Truuu - no I can't say it - he's like Voldemort).

Here we are after the drugs and diseases they've infested us with so they could quarantine us, go to war against us, send us to war against ourselves and make us manufacture all the weapons we use against ourselves while they profit and laugh. And we're still fucking here, because the working-class teacher unions still holding out are punk rock and kung fu. The teacher's unions aren't hated, but the hills have eyes and mouths that spread lies, and that sounds like good news to me. Sounds like it's working, no?

Do you have any regrets about becoming a teacher. I ask this as being a teacher seems to be extremely disrespected, no matter where one is.

I could ask the same of any service member. In fact, I asked my fiance, an Iraq Army Veteran of the U.S. Calvary, a similar question once. He said that when he found himself pointing his gun at women and children, he found himself knowing he was being made to do things entirely opposite of what he had signed up for. He came back from a dirty war, after being blown up more than once, with PTSD. I won't even tell you what he had planned to do before he started coming to Socialist Party USA meetings. I'll just say that even after the straight-up, downright, real human love we gave him dissuaded him from carrying out those plans and even after Agent Orange became Commander in Chief, he was considering rejoining because he thought that was his only option. But then we got together as I was graduating with my BA and talking about how it would only be another year or two before I was a salaried teacher with summers off and a strong union. Then he proposed and re-enrolled in community college and I don't doubt that he'll get to be whatever he wants to be in life. Right now he dreams of being a director and a father. We lost our first baby 7 months in utero and he's currently delayed from school to work 6 months to extend his VA benefits. We won't let anything stop us though, you know? We've got a foundation of unconditional love and acceptance, between us, with our families, with our neighbors, and in our community at large.

Really terrible shit happens all the time and it's unavoidable that we do things to contribute to the horrors of life and death. But I think once you see clearly what the things are that people to do cause suffering to themselves, to other people and all manner of living beings, then you have the opportunity to stop. From that point on the more you do contrary to all that horrible shit gets you further and further away from the guilt and shame and regret that would eat you alive while keeping you trapped in that cycle of destruction. Regret is a negative feedback loop.

So, no. I have had no regrets only ever since I decided to become a teacher. And I think, so long as you have a genuine love and conscious intent to practice compassion, as long as you work to cultivate or revitalize a support network, as long as you know that your purpose is to make meaning by holding fast to the ropes, and as long as you remember that he who fears death cannot enjoy life and those who hesitate are lost... then you have no cause for regret.

Endnotes

1: Marina Sitrin, "Horizontalism and the Occupy Movements," Dissent, Spring 2012 ( https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/horizontalism-and-the-occupy-movements )

2: Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, United States Department of Education, https://sites.ed.gov/idea/

3: Maya Salam, "'The Simpsons' Has Predicted a Lot. Most of It Can Be Explained," New York Times, February 2, 2018 ( https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/arts/television/simpsons-prediction-future.html )

4: Investopedia,

Cost of Living https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/cost-of-living.asp

Boricuas Seek Support for Protecting Indigenous Sites: Threats to Bateyes in Jayuya highlight need for community vigilance

By Liliana Taboas Cruz

On the morning of Friday 18th of January 2019, a call on social media was made by visiting Boricua archaeologist Dr. Isabel Rivera-Collazo asking for urgent help in protecting an archaeological site in Jayuya. The site, known as Bateyes Sonadero and Muntaner, is located in the Barrio Jauca in Jayuya. According to records at the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture (ICP), is known to contain a batey (Caribbean ceremonial plaza and ball court, outlined with stones which include monoliths), remnants of a village, ceramics, and lithic material. Archeologist who reported the land movements on site, Adalberto Alvarado, told local press "Ese yacimiento era de uno de los yacimientos que tenia menos impacto en el pueblo" (This archaeological site was one of the less impacted sites in the area.). Alvarado had been inspecting the known batey sites following hurricane Maria. The owner of the property used heavy machinery to clear land for agricultural purposes. In Puerto Rico, land removal requires permits to protect archaeological sites. The owner did not have proper permits to comply with the 112 law. Though the ongoing threat had been reported earlier in the week through formal channels, it wasn't until that Friday morning that the owner forced the archaeologists off the property and started the land removal despite warnings of the illegality of his actions. It was at this point that the social media call was made by Dr. Isabel Rivera-Collazo, who pleaded with the Institute of Culture and the general public to intercede.

The call was answered by many native Puerto Rican and indigenous activists. Personal visits were made by a local Boricua archaeology students to the ICP office in Old San Juan, who informed that archaeologist Dr. Carlos Perez, head of the archaeology office at the ICP, would visit the Jayuya site that Friday evening. Since then the ICP representatives have assured that the destruction has been delayed, though claiming the severity of the removal was still unclear. Their investigation is ongoing.

In Jayuya, local indigenous elder and activist Margarita Kukuya informs that the damage to the site has been extensive and "devastating," describing a scene where batey stones are pushed into a nearby river, while others piled up and broken with debris from the land clearing. This particular site had been the subject of study in 2007 by Dr. Yasha N. Rodriguez Melendez as part of her doctoral thesis. She wrote, "Bateys are endangered and their study becomes increasingly difficult as fewer of them remain." Yasha described bateys as "a permanent structure that has become part of the landscape and visibly identifies a space as different from the rest." These statements only reinforce what indigenous communities have tirelessly expressed. These sites, having immense cultural value and significance, need to be protected and should remain undisturbed.

Indigenous activists have used this opportunity to highlight the need for community vigilance of archaeological sites which have immense historic, social, cultural, and spiritual value to Boricua People, Caribbean Indigenous Peoples, and as Global Patrimony. The need for further education to generate more public awareness and pride in these important historical sites is critical to their preservation. For Caribbean Indigenous Peoples these sites represent the presence of their ancestors and connection to their traditional lands and should remain undisturbed. For archaeologists, the invaluable information contained in these places are completely destroyed with any disturbance and represent a loss of cultural and historic knowledge for the people of Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and the world. For local Boricua, as well as those in the diaspora, these sites are meant to be cared for and protected for future generations.

Indigenous Puerto Ricans do not belong to any federally-recognized tribe, they remain as part of the hundreds of non-recognized tribes and indigenous peoples in the United States, despite the US adopting the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007, which, among many others, includes the right of self-determination. Puerto Ricans living in Puerto Rico are currently facing one the of worst political, economic, and humanitarian crises in modern times, dealing with a colonial government, an imposed control board, the whims of the federal government, and a debt negotiation where they have no say. The austerity measures being imposed to pay for the debt (parts of which are already being declared illegal) directly affect healthcare, education, natural resources, energy production, pensions, and security. These issues took a turn for the worse after hurricane Maria hit the island in September 2017, causing the death of over 3,000 people and the exodus of hundreds of thousands in a single year.

Caribbean Indigenous Peoples and all living in Puerto Rico deserve better than this. This call is for URGENT support and assistance to those organizing to protect their sacred sites and cultural patrimony, as well as highlight the need for education that includes indigenous perspectives, methodologies, and philosophies that generate the social consciousness needed to protect these sites as a united community.

Let the ICP know you support indigenous participation and perspectives when it comes to access, protection, and management of sacred sites, as well as to demand the strict application of Puerto Rico's laws that protect archaeological sites so that they may be respectfully enjoyed and studied by future generations. The Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquena can be reached by calling (787) 724-0700.

Let your local representative know you support a just recovery for Puerto Rico, reject the undemocratic federal control board created by PROMESA, and support a full audit of the debt of Puerto Rico, a US colony.

If you wish to support the indigenous coalition, Pueblo Indigena Taino Unido, created to address these issues, please contact vigilantesboricuas@gmail.com for further information.

Lili, Jibaro-Boricua/Taino

Cupey, Boriquen

I humbly present these words to all those willing to receive them. Seguimos.

Decade of the Animals: Eco-Horror and the Cinematic Lessons of the 1970s

By Sean Posey

When Michael Myers donned the Captain Kirk mask in the 1978 classic Halloween (yes, that's a mask of William Shatner) he helped change horror movies forever. For most of the next decade and beyond, the horror subgenre of the slasher film dominated drive-ins, multiplexes and video store shelves.

But before Halloween surged at the box office, another now almost forgotten horror genre made waves by combining the environmental anxieties of the era with giant, murderous rabbits, vengeful dogs and bloodthirsty frogs, among other angry critters. The "Nature Strikes Back!" films of the 1970s ran the gamut from schlock masterpieces and haunting classics to the downright unwatchable. However, these films are also part of a time capsule - giving us a glimpse into an era when a building environmental crisis seemed to provoke real soul searching. What were we doing to animals and the natural world? What might they in turn do to us?

In the opening of her seminal 1962 book "Silent Spring," Rachel Carson describes an idealized American town where nature and man are still in balance, at least for a time. Foxes and deer frolic amidst orchards and fields of grain, and a general bucolic feeling pervades. But soon "a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community," Carson writes. In particular, the birds disappeared. "It was a spring without voices."

She was writing about the chemical industry and the destructive effects of pesticides on animals and the environment. "Silent Spring" played a key role in ushering in the environmental movement, which gained strength as the 1960s progressed. But in the film world, in an unplanned coincidence, Alfred Hitchcock answered Carlson's question: "The birds... where had they gone?"

The Birds hit theaters less than a year after "Silent Spring" debuted, and it quickly captured the nation's imagination. The site of something so benign as the common avian viciously turning on man terrified audiences and helped redefine horror. But it wouldn't be until the 1970s that the "eco-horror" film fully blossomed.

The 1972 cult classic Frogs, which ushered in the era's eco-horror films, replaces Hitchcock's birds with an unlikely assortment of reptiles and amphibians - all bent on extracting revenge on a polluting Florida patriarch and his unlikeable family. In the film, Jason Crockett (Ray Milland) is a cranky millionaire intent on wiping out the frog population in and around his private island so that he and his clan can properly celebrate the Fourth of July.

A wildlife photographer named Pickett Smith (Sam Elliott), who is working on a story in the area and encounters the rampant pollution, tries to dissuade him from launching his own private war on the local frog population, to no avail. "I still believe man is master of the world," Crockett tells him.

But the amphibians and reptiles are one step ahead of the game. Guided by the omnipresent frogs, which never seem to directly attack anyone themselves, a bevy of snakes, lizards and even an alligator snapping turtle wreak death and destruction on the dullard cast members. Smith leads a small contingent off the island, where it appears that a mass animal uprising is under way. Crockett refuses to leave and is trapped in his mansion as hordes of frogs - in all of their croaking wrath - descend on him.

Frogs was released the same year DDT - which was applied over Florida for years in a quest to eliminate fresh and saltwater mosquitoes - was banned. The first Earth Day had been held two years previous. "Environmentalism, much like the anti-war subculture, started to influence not only activists and the newfound socially aware, but also the style and consciousness of the new eco-horror films," writes Lee Gambin.

After Frogs, the eco-horror genre gathered steam. Perhaps the most unintentionally funny film to follow was Night of the Lepus, which premiered only months after Frogs. It opens with a news broadcast reminiscent of the TV segments from Night of the Living Dead. But instead of warning of the walking dead, the broadcaster informs the audience of the growing problem of invasive species in Australia and the American Southwest - namely the rabbit. This was a real-life problem, and the issue of invasive species was one of the most readily recognizable environmental topics of the time. Interestingly enough, the broadcaster compares rapidly multiplying rabbits to the human population explosion, a popular intellectual to subjects after Paul R. Ehrlich's 1968 book "The Population Bomb" debuted.

As the film opens, a beleaguered rancher (Rory Calhoun) enlists a group of scientists to help tame a scourge of rabbits in Arizona. They attempt to use an experimental serum in order to scramble the animals' breeding cycle, but one of the scientific team's children switches an injected rabbit she's fond of with one in the control group. When the rabbit makes it back to the wild, it helps breed a group of oversized killer bunnies.

The director used close-ups scenes to depict "giant rabbits" in miniature sets, and in scenes where they attack up close, actors in fuzzy bunny costumes were used. Never again will you hear rabbits referred to being "as big as wolves and just as vicious." And never again will you see a character grimacing in horror as he watches a caravan of adorable but murderous rabbits appear in his rearview mirror. But beneath the bargain-basement special effects is a message about humanity's harmful tampering with ecosystems and the deleterious effects of introducing invasive species.

Oddly enough, despite featuring a fearsome animal munching on unsuspecting bathers, Jaws, released in 1975, isn't much of an eco-horror film. As entertaining and suspenseful as it is, there's a never a concrete reason given for the great white's assault on Amity Island. If anything, Jaws is more about masculinity and the relationships between men than it's about man's relationship with animals and the environment. Nevertheless, it helped spawn numerous '70s films about how tampering with animals and the natural world will bring down nature's wrath, including Piranha (Then... you were shocked by the great white shark - Now... you are at the mercy of 1000 jaws!), Tentacles (It's turning the beach ... into a buffet! ) and Grizzly (Not since JAWS has the terror been like this!).

So many eco-horror films were made in the '70s that sub-genres soon emerged, including films dedicated to deadly domestic animals. Before Cujo became a household word, 1977's The Pack introduced man's best friend as a murderous foe. In the film, a swift tourist trade is part of the backbone of a small fishing island during season, but well-heeled visitors from the city have a bad habit of leaving their recently adopted dogs behind when it's time to return to their regular lives.

The film follows one such canine that's abandoned by a departing family before joining a pack of wild dogs living in a derelict building. When a readily available food supply runs out, the dogs come for the island's human population. The Pack shows that humanity's disregard for animal life doesn't stop at wild fauna.

A group of trapped tourists who are part of the main cast are depicted as either clueless or venal. It's left to a scientist, played by Joe Don Baker, to save the group. However, Baker's character also sympathizes with the attacking animals, and at the film's end, after the main pack has been destroyed, he saves the helpless abandoned dog we've been following throughout the movie from being killed by a vengeful tourist. In The Pack, man's carelessness and disregard for the animal world extends even to a subspecies that's been his companion for at least 14,000 years.

In 1974, F. Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina of the University of California found that chlorinated fluorocarbon gases, then found in everything from aerosol spray cans to refrigeration units, were seriously damaging the ozone layer, which helps block ultraviolet light from the sun. That environmental emergency was used as the central conceit in the 1977 film Day of the Animals, which incorporated a real-life environmental emergency to a greater degree than most eco-horror films.

The central plot involves a group of hikers ascending a mountain in Northern California just as a mysterious psychosis begins to effect wild animals in the area. The higher the altitude they ascend to, the more animals begin to act strangely, until finally, they attack. What's driving them? The hole in the ozone layer is allowing in ultraviolet radiation that in turn is causing the animals to kill, though in a karmic twist, they only target humans.

The cast consists of an assemblage of telling archetypes: a Navajo Indian who is the first to sense the rift in the natural world, a racist and misogynistic advertising executive (Leslie Nielsen) who himself goes crazy, and a New York socialite (with no love for nature) who berates her put-upon son. In the town below, news reports reveal the connection between the ozone hole and attacking animals. "God sent a plague down on us because we're just a bunch of no-good fellers," one of the yokels exclaims.

Mountain lions, bears, wolves and snakes (left over from Frogs?) proceed to chomp, tear and dismember the hiking expedition and the nearby town as martial law is declared and troops in environmental suits move in. But the animals themselves also soon die and the "shift in the ozone level" normalizes, according to news reports.

The film's pre-credit sequence announces that this is a scenario that "COULD" actually happen. As silly as it is (and as awesome as a shirtless Leslie Nielsen challenging a bear to a wrestling match is), Day of the Animals is an earnest film that's a time capsule from an era when a pending environmental crisis could be counted on to at least inspire some political action. CFCs were ultimately phased out under the 1987 Montreal Protocol.

Probably the best of the many '70s eco-horror movies is the Australian classic The Long Weekend. Focusing on an estranged couple seeking to rekindle their relationship over a weekend getaway to an isolated seashore in the bush, the film is much more of a psychological horror picture where the danger is never fully shown. The screenwriter gradually reveals the deep rifts that have eaten away at the couple's relationship as the tension builds, one that is echoed by the rifts between man and the natural world. As the two fight, litter, spray insecticide and, in the case of the husband, shoot a dugong (a kind of sea cow), animals and the landscape around them begin to grow hostile.

"My premise was that Mother Nature has her own autoimmune system, so when humans start behaving like cancer cells, she attacks," screenwriter Everett De Roche said in a 2012 interview. No one animal (a mutated bear in 1979's The Prophecy or worms in the case of 1976's Squirm) is responsible for the mayhem that ensues.

It's as if the environment itself wants to do away with the couple. In a way that few other films of its kind succeed in doing, The Long Weekend gives the viewer the sense that the ecosystem and all the animals it supports are attempting to strike back against humans.

This is reflected in the atmospheric soundtrack. A long, slow death rattle punctuates parts of the film, almost as if nature itself were crying out in agony and outrage. The Long Weekend is not only one of the best eco-horror films of any age, it's also a grim warning from the end of a decade where the environment, albeit briefly, seemed to take center stage in the cultural and political world.

By the 1980s, eco-horror films were on the wane. Dystopian productions such as the Mad Max series - also classics of Australian cinema, like The Long Weekend - figured strongly in a cinematic decade more concerned with nuclear annihilation and urban collapse than ecological crises. Films such as Escape From New York, Blade Runner,The Running Man, The Quiet Earth and Night of the Comet cashed in on the new trend. In more recent years, The Day After Tomorrow and The Road have been among a spate of films with an even grimmer outlook than the '70s eco-horror genre.

The idea of animals taking revenge against man now seems quaint. Indeed, we are currently going through what scientists call the Sixth extinction or the Holocene extinction. Approximately 20 percent of all species on Earth face extinction - a number that could increase to 50 percent by the end of the century. It wouldn't make much sense to produce a film like Frogs today as amphibian populations have been in decline for the past 20 years, according to Science magazine. A third of amphibian species are currently at risk of extinction with chemical pollution being a large contributor to their plight. Perhaps the Jason Crocketts of the world won in the end?

The eco-horror films of the future might feature poisonous jellyfish, sea snakes and other creatures that could expand their natural ranges as ecosystems change due to global warming. Or perhaps now we've come to realize that man is the most dangerous and terrifying animal of all. Rising seas, desertification, chemical pollution, scorching temperatures and other disasters (e.g. California wildfires) - all linked to manmade climate change - now seem to be nature's way of dealing with us. And that's a reality more horrifying than any screenplay.

Between Developing and Defending the Cuban Revolution

By Joshua Lew McDermott

Recently, I picked up Leon Trotsky's forgotten classic "Their Morals and Ours: Marxist vs. Liberal Views on Morality." The pamphlet offers a scathing critique of what today is known as the "horseshoe theory," wherein the far left and far right are considered morally identical from the standpoint of liberalism, because both employ radical (and sometimes) violent tactics. This viewpoint will be familiar to anyone who has watched the corporate media decry anti-fascist activists as indecipherable from the neo-Nazis they combat.

The crux of Trotsky's argument, which is astoundingly relevant today, is not only that liberals are embarrassingly inconsistent and hypocritical when it comes to passing moral judgments (the lack of outrage from moral crusaders on Yemen's genocide, Hillary Clinton's destruction of Libya, and many other instances of imperial aggression has long been deafening), but the fact that liberals derive their morality from an ahistorical universalist ideal means that liberal morality inherently serves the rich and powerful. Adherence to abstract and eternal moral laws such as "thou shalt not steal" or "always obey the laws of the land" leads to a remarkably reactionary system of ethics. For example, is it immoral for a starving man to steal a loaf of a bread from a bakery owned by a wealthy business owner? In liberal societies, in which property is the ultimate sacred cow and morality is not contingent upon material/historical context, the answer is "yes." Never mind the relevant economic and legal structures which enabled the business owner to become wealthy and led the other man to starvation.

What's more, Trotsky also grapples with the notion of "the ends justify the means" morality, a sentiment which was doubtlessly tested by Communist regimes throughout the 20th century, sometimes to indefensible ends. Yet, the cynical exploitation of sincere revolutionary upheavals by authoritarian figures does mean that there is a divine law which proves that means can never be justified by ends, as pragmatist John Dewey pointed out in his relatively agreeable response to Trotsky's piece. Again, the true determent of morality for any activist who sincerely cares for other humans being must be based upon a sober calculation of real-world facts and contexts and driven by a sincere desire to create a fair world for all people. As Che Guevara famously said, "At the risk of sounding ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love."

I do not bring up this moral debate to comment on morality as such or to arbitrate in the often absurd, abstract, and counterproductive clashes within the leftist social media sphere between what's become known as "tankies" and "ultraleftists," but because I found the deficiencies of liberal moral outrage especially cogent and consequential while on a recent educational trip to Havana in July 2018 which I took with a small organization known as La Luchita (run by a lovely and well-meaning husband and wife couple) tailored towards building networks between grassroots American and Cuban organizers and activists.

In an interesting dynamic, the American group, of which there was maybe fifteen of us, largely consisted of vaguely progressive activists, mostly in their late-twenties, who were nonetheless highly critical, or even outright dismissive, of Cuba's socialist project. For one week, we met with a cross-section of Cuban activists, from civil-society activists to students to university professors, all with legitimate critiques and praises of the Cuban revolutionary experiment. As one would expect, almost none of our hosts viewed "the Revolution" (as it is referred to on the island) in simple black-and-white terms, though some were more apologetic than others. The same cannot be said for many of the Americans, who were quick to confirm any anti-revolution bias by latching onto any critiques offered by the Cubans, but slow to acknowledge any triumphs of the revolution. The Americans were, as far as I could tell, not conscious that their knee-jerk responses to the most laudable aspects of the revolution (when finding out that wealthy persons were forced to give up any extra homes they owned in order to provide housing to the poor, some of the Americans audibly gawked) were highly reactionary, a condition indicative of so many American progressives. This blindness is symptomatic of gaining a "progressive" education sans any sort of class-analysis, a condition which defines so many well-meaning activists here. This is a symptom of hailing from an imperial heartland wherein questions of class are largely considered irrelevant, where billionaires such as Elon Musk and Oprah Winfrey are even considered radical by some. This selective blindness is the result of not of an absence of ideology, but the product of living deep beneath an invisible ideological shroud: for my colleagues, it seemed, anything good in Cuba was the result of some nebulous category vaguely defined as "Cuban culture" and anything bad in Cuba was due to socialism. For example, on nights out socializing in the city, the beauty of the fact that people from all professions (one night we went out to a jazz club with a group of Cubans comprised of a dentist, a professor, students, a cigar-factory worker, and a janitor) and races intermingled to an extent unimaginable in the U.S. seemed largely to be lost on my American counterparts. "That's just how Cuba is," I imagine they assumed, not realizing the huge strides made for the poor and Afro-Cubans since the fall of the Batista regime.

As a Chinese colleague of mine who travels to Cuba regularly once pointed out to me, Cuban society does not rest on a cult of personality, as in China, nor is it defined by social engineering and violent state control: police presence was almost non-existent within the city. At risk of romanticizing a country with many serious problems, I felt a deep authenticity and cohesiveness in Cuban society I have not experienced in any other country. The difference between Havana or Mexico City or Freetown, Sierra Leone, or any major American city could not have been starker.

I experienced the absolute strangeness of walking across a major city at 1am while seeing children and families enjoying the public parks free from fear, of knowing that every person I saw had full access to one of the world's best healthcare systems and the right to basic human necessities such as housing and employment, still makes my head spin. Where was the oppressive state presence I had heard so much about? The crime-filled streets? I felt I had caught just a small glimpse, for the first time in my life, of the potential harmony that we, as human beings, could achieve in society. What stood out to me most, perhaps, was the prevalence of dignity. Yes, Cuba has tremendous poverty. But the poverty is different than that in the U.S., where social isolation and a lack of access to even the most basic goods abounds despite our unfathomable wealth.

When I raised these insights with my fellow American travelers, the response was not surprising, nor altogether wrong: "you can't tell someone else to be grateful for what they have if you have more than them," one American told me when I expressed concern that the thawing of Cuban-American relations would hasten the-already-quickening erosion of Cuban social welfare. Many of the Cubans we met were under the impression that this would mean more, not less, prosperity for all islanders: to build upon Steinbeck's famous "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" sentiment: it seemed that many of even the poorest pro-American Cubans assumed (in large part due to American cultural influence that the government has long tried to keep out of Cuba) that they themselves would be the casino and resort owners once capitalism comes back to the island (this was often spoken of as an inevitably). Imagine the surprise of some of my Cuban friends, then, when I told them of growing up in America without health insurance, of experiencing homelessness and abject poverty. As any international traveler can attest, American cultural products, such as Hollywood films, have been remarkably successful at one thing: convincing many of the world's poor that poverty does not exist in the U.S.

Regardless, my American traveling companion was right: as an American who benefits greatly from being a citizen of the world's imperial center (take for example, the ease with which I can attain a visa for travel) with just a few relatives from Cuba and little experience on the island myself, I am in no position to tell Cubans they ought to be grateful for living under a government which has, undoubtedly, at times weaponized the threat of imperialism to silence legitimate dissent. Like many other members of my generation and as a young adult recovering from a childhood in Mormonism, there is little I dislike more than living subject to a governance structure which cannot allow for deviation. But, context and material facts do matter if we, as socialists and activists wanting to change the world, are to give any sort of fair appraisal of the Cuban Revolution. The liberal, postmodern project which reduces all legitimate political activism to thoughts and actions based solely upon one's own life experiences and identity categories is antithetical to social solidarity and all forms of class-politics and anti-imperialism. Case-in-point: after informing another American colleague that I was, in fact, a communist, she replied: "I believe subscribing to any sort of label or ideology destroys the political imagination." I don't doubt her sincerity, but neither do I doubt that her aversion to an actively radical ideology was inherently ideological. It is precisely this sort of nebulous belief in the moral superiority of the (nonexistent) apolitical which explains why so many well-meaning liberals can call a revolution which eliminated illiteracy and homelessness in a generation "monstrous," just because some wealthy people lost their second homes.

Regardless, it's important that all freedom-loving people acknowledge the right of Cubans to self-determination, whatever that means for Cubans. Yet, it's also important that anyone who puts stock on truth and morality acknowledges the great successes the revolution has entailed for inhabitants not only of the island, but for the poor all throughout the world, including especially Africa, where Cuban soldiers helped fend off apartheid and Cuban doctors continue to save countless lives. Socialists, in particular, have a political and moral obligation to denounce the U.S. embargo and calls for regime change.

As for appraising what the revolution can teach non-Cuban socialists about how to fight for a better world going forward, the crux of the matter was illustrated for me in a debate over a single word. One of the Cuban activists, an anarchist, asked me: should Cubans be "defending" or "developing" the Cuban Revolution? To defend the Revolution, he told me, assumes that the revolution was a specific historic event that occurred in 1959 and is now complete. According to him, this imagining of the Revolution entails stagnation, nostalgia, authoritarianism. Instead, he argued, Cubans must develop the revolution; this means emphasizing the need for evolution, growth, self-reflection. For him, an end to Cuba's socialist economy (in its present form) would be a step in the right direction as it would mean an easing of state control and an allowance for the sort of dissent necessary for evolution.

For a communist activist I met, however, if one is not defending the revolution, one is working with the project of American imperialism to defeat it. "The revolution has this much room to maneuver," he told me, squinting through an imperceptible slit between his thumb and index finger. This does not mean that this individual was uncritical of the Communist Party; on the contrary, he offered some of the most insightful critiques of the Cuban system. Nor does this mean that the anarchist comrade was not aware of the threat of U.S. economic imperialism. But to act like it will be good for Cuba to simply throw open its borders and government to unchecked American influence, as many American liberals attest, is not only naive but ideological par-excellence: an end of the Cuban socialist project will no doubt mean suffering for the average Cuban.

In other words, the Cuban revolution is not black-or-white. The Cuban government has long been stuck between a rock and hard place. We have an intellectual and moral responsibility to note that if the Cuban socialist government does, in fact, fall, it is more than likely that the millions of Cubans that the revolution lifted out of poverty, taught to read, offered education and healthcare, will face dire consequences in that brave new world of authoritarian neoliberalism that has always defined counterrevolutionary regimes in Latin America, from Pinochet to the newly elected president of Brazil.

Socialists in the 21st century have an obligation to acknowledge the successes of the revolution and to reject the off-hand moral denunciation that liberals are so quick to heap upon any political organization which dares to buck the conventions of the capitalist ruling system. Is Cuban Socialism perfect? No. No system made by humans will ever be and workers should always be free to critique and develop existing socialist projects. But resistance to capitalist exploitation, to poverty, to imperialism, cannot exist if we hold ourselves to an absurd, abstract, and inconsistent moral standard designed to protect the status quo. Revolution is not easy nor morally straightforward. But Cuba has lifted millions from abject poverty and offered its people and people throughout the world dignity and true sovereignty. For this, it deserves our praise, solidarity, and defense, as do all Cuban people, whether they believe in developing or defending revolution. Ultimately, what the Cubans decide to do about their revolution is up to them, but all socialists have an obligation to defend the island and its revolutionary government from outside aggression.