A Time Machine to the 1970s to Save Us: Towards a Socialist Feminism

By Collin Chambers

The Marxist Feminist Kathi Weeks (2014, xi) suggests that "we are now at a point when the standard critiques of 1970s feminism can be approached as orthodoxies of their own need of unsettling". Feminism, Weeks (2014, ix) says, has a rather "exceptional relationship to its historical traditions. It is as if the clocks in the world of feminist theory run at a faster rate than those in other theoretical domains." Marxist theorists treat Marx as if he were still living, using his work done in 19th century to understand contemporary contradictions of capital accumulation (just read any of David Harvey's work). By contrast, feminist theory treats the theories produced in the 1970s with almost scorn and "as if it were the distant past, over and done." Since the cultural turn in the social sciences and humanities Marxism has been pushed aside. The work of Foucault and Judith Butler (and others) have come to dominate contemporary feminist thought which focuses on discourse and language as if it exists in air and separate from any material determinants i.e., the mode of production. However, as of late-and especially since the financial crisis of 2007/8-there has been a resurgence of Marxism in general and a renewed interest in feminist theoretical formulations from the 1970s within feminist theory in particular (e.g., Barrett 1980/2014; Benzanson and Luxton 2006; Bhattacharya 2017). This renewed and refreshed focus on Marxism within feminism is rooted in what Bhattacharya (2017) calls Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) and this where I think the future of feminist thought is going towards (and should if we are serious about changing the oppressive world in which we live).

SRT theorists do not want to simply critique the sexist and patriarchal world we live in, but they want to change it and act upon their critiques politically. In this essay I argue that SRT is the most efficient way to understand oppression based on identity within a social formation that is dominated by the capitalist mode of production (which is most of the world). Additionally, I argue, since we are going back to the 1970s, we need to take Althusser's (2014) work on the reproduction of capitalism and ideology seriously again. I will do this first by first exploring the methodological and theoretical differences between intersectionality theorists and SRT. Then, I will to attempt to provide a historical-materialist conception of how oppressive ideologies get embedded into the capitalist mode of production to the degree that they become essential to the functioning and reproduction of that system (Sumner 1979). Finally, I offer some thoughts on how we can apply SRT to real political praxis.

Intersectionality and Social Reproduction Theory (SRT)

Intersectional thought has become so incorporated and ingrained into contemporary feminist though that Naomi Zack states that intersectionality "a leading feminist paradigm" (as cited in Nash 2008, 89). Intersectionality has a "theoretical dominance" of understanding and "conceptualizing identity" (Nash 2008. 89). Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989 139), who coined the term intersectionality, defines it as taking seriously and understanding the "multidimensionality of marginalized subjects." It has become so entrenched in feminist thought that Nash (2008, 89) even calls it a "buzzword" that academics use to show that they are not abstracting away from difference even if their studies merely mention difference rather than seriously engage with it. Though there are similarities between intersectionality, originally coined by Crenshaw (1993), and SRT there are some key methodological and theoretical differences that have real political implications. As Bhattacharya (2017, 17) says: "what we theoretically determine has strategic import in the lived experience of our world." One key difference is that Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) is rooted in Marxist understandings of social formations (i.e., historical materialism) and intersectionality does not. This may seem knit-picky considering that perhaps SRT and intersectionality have similar political goals in emancipating oppressed peoples, but as we will see there is clear division between the two in regards to how they understand root cause to oppression (intersectional theorists tend to not deal with "root causes") (Nash 2008).

While class is an important aspect for intersectional theorists, it is simply one of the many "vectors" and "lines" of difference that intersect externally with each other and thus not any more important than race, gender, sexuality, etc. For example, Helma Lutz claims that there are "fourteen lines of difference," while Charlotte Bunch suggests that "social differences run along 'sixteen vectors" (as cited in McNally 2017, 96). The problem with intersectionality for SRT theorists is that intersectional theorists do not connect "interlocking and mutually reinforcing vectors of race, gender, class, and sexuality" back to the material base on which they arise from (Nash 2008, 89). It is as if these different "mutually reinforcing vectors" exist in air independently from any material determinants (determinant in the last instance). SRT takes the role modes of production play in social formations seriously.

Within intersectionality itself there has been critiques and modifications of the notion of separate preconstituted identities that externally relate with other most notably from Black Feminism and others (e.g., Kaur Dhamoon 2011; Nash 2008; Razack 1998). However, as McNally (2017, 96) points out: "these modifications continue to be plagued by the ontological atomism inherent in the founding formulations of intersectionality theory: the idea that there are independently constituted relations of oppression that, in some circumstances, crisscross each other." Theoretically formulating identity in this fashion limits the possibilities for political solidarity across difference. What is the alternative then? Through Patricia Hill Collins' understanding of interlocking systems of oppression being a "part of a single, historically created system," David McNally argues for a "dialectical organicism" understanding of oppression, which "sees a diverse and complex social whole as constitutive of every part, and each part as reciprocally constitutive of every other" (as citied in McNally 2017, 106; 100). Althusser (1969/1996) calls this "overdetermination." Understanding oppression in McNally's dialectical and historical materialist fashion one sees oppression in relation to totality and in relation to the social whole that capitalist mode of production creates, rather than in in fragments as postmodernist and poststructuralist thinking emphasizes. Why this is beneficial not only theoretically, but politically will be explored below.

If read in a certain fashion, McNally's understanding of oppression in relation to capitalism and social reproduction may be looked at with a critical eye by certain feminist thinkers. For example, Gayle S Rubin (2011, 37) acknowledges that "since no wage is paid for housework, the labor of women in the home contributes to the ultimate quantity of surplus value realized by the capitalist." However, Rubin continues: "to explain women's usefulness to capitalism is one thing. To argue that this usefulness explains the genesis of the oppression of women is quite another. It is precisely at this point that the analysis of capitalism ceases to explain very much about women and the oppression of women." Rubin points out that women are systematically oppressed in social formations that can by no means be called capitalist or contain any signs of the capitalist mode of production and its relations. For example, foot binding in feudal China, or chastity belts cannot be explained in relation to capitalism or the reproduction of capitalism. However, I am not talking about capitalism per se, but rather the total system that the capitalist mode of production creates to ensure continued reproduction. The capitalist mode of production did not produce sexism, racism, heteronormativity, etc. In fact, the capitalist mode of production emerged from within sexist and racist social relations. However, the logics of capital accumulation have taken over them and transformed them to such a degree that it has made oppression of particular identities central and integral to the system's reproduction and has also changed these relations to the degree that these forms of oppression take on a historically specific character to the capitalist mode of production itself (more on this below). The social whole (i.e., the combination of the base and superstructure) that capitalism creates relies upon racist, sexist, heteronormative, ableist ideologies to sustain itself and reproduce itself.

This expanded notion of social reproduction that exists within SRT will help us better conceptualize and understand how each kind of particular oppression is ingrained in this complex web of the social whole created by the capitalist mode of production. Each particular mode of production creates its own particular complex web of social relations. As Rubin (2011, 39) states: "The realm of human sex, gender, and procreation has been subjected to, and changed by, relentless social activity for millennia. Sex as we know it-gender identity, sexual desire and fantasy, concepts of childhood-is itself a social product." Additionally, the conceptualization sex/gender system, that Rubin (2011, 40) calls for to replace the term patriarchy, "is the product of the specific social relations which organize it." This means we can't fight heteronormativity without also fighting racism, ableism, etc., at the same time as they are all systematically integrated and connected all at once.

All of this has implications for intersectional theory because to be related systematically (i.e., a part of the social whole that a mode of production creates) involves more than simply intersection. Lines or vectors that intersect can do so at random and haphazardly. Systems cannot. Thus, with SRT: "These relations [of oppression] do not need to be brought into intersection because each is already inside the other, co-constituting one another to their very core. Rather than standing at intersections, we stand in the river of life, where multiple creeks and streams have converged into a complex, pulsating system" (McNally 2017, 107).

Before we go any further, we must clarify what is SRT exactly. In a general sense it is about understanding that the "production of goods and services and the production of life are part of one integrated process" (Luxton 2006, 36). This theoretically vindicates the equal importance of different and variegated types of work that exists in a particular social formation. Work that is done in the home, childrearing, work of care, etc. is equal and just as important to the functioning of the capitalist system as the work done in a factory, in academia, restaurants, etc. As Marx (275, my emphasis) says: "The labour-power withdrawn from the market by wear and tear, and by death, must be continually replaced." And this is done through social reproduction. Work that occurs outside production. Social reproduction as defined by Brenner and Laslett (1991, 314) is:

the activities and attitudes, behaviors and emotions, and responsibilities and relationships directly involved in maintaining life, on a daily basis and intergenerationally. It involves various kinds of socially necessary work-mental, physical, and emotional-aimed at providing the historically and socially, as well as biologically, defined means for maintaining and reproducing population. Among other things, social reproduction includes how food, clothing, and shelter are made available for immediate consumption, how the maintenance and socialization of children is accomplished, how care of the elderly and infirm is provided, and how sexuality is socially constructed.

Thus, this necessarily changes and expands orthodox Marx's notion of class. The traditional notion of class for Marxists can be defined by a person's objective relationship to the means of production (technology, machines, tools, factories, land, etc). One group of people own and control the means of production (the capitalist class), and another own nothing but their own labor-power which they are forced to sell to a capitalist, so they can earn a wage to purchase- through the capitalist market-their means of subsistence (the working class). For SRT this traditional conceptualization of class is correct, but not adequate and complete enough if we want to take the labor that is done outside the workplace as fundamental in reproduction of the capitalist system in general. Thus, the working class "must be perceived as everyone in the producing class who has in their lifetime participated in the totality of reproduction of society-irrespective of whether that labor has been paid for by capital or remained unpaid" (Bhattacharya 2017, 89).

This reconceptualization of class for Social Reproduction Theory helps us "restore a sense of the social totality to class," and through this we can "immediately begin to reframe the arena for class struggle" (Bhattacharya 2017, 90). Capital can extract more surplus-value from the unpaid-or under-paid in the case of domestic workers-labor that is done in the household. Capital is able to extract more surplus-value from the realm of social reproduction because the value of labor-power is defined by the value of the bundle of commodities necessary for the worker to come back to work the next day. This "sum of means of subsistence necessary for the production of labour-power must include the means necessary for the worker's replacement i.e., his children, in order that this race of peculiar commodity-owners may perpetuate its presence on the market" (Marx 1990, 275). If part of the reproduction of labor-power (i.e., the worker) relies upon the unpaid or underpaid domestic labor, which is done historically by women, the value of labor-power consequently remains low because that bundle of commodities necessary for the worker to reproduce his/her/their self does not have to include child-rearing, cleaning, cooking, care work, etc., thus, capital can pay the worker less and make increased surplus-value. Thus, through the SRT framework we can consider the struggle for better conditions within the realm of social reproduction as a class struggle as well rather than as simply a gender or woman's issue by itself.

Gender and Sexual Ideology, Capitalism, and Althusser

In the first volume of Capital Marx goes at length about the difference between the formal and real subsumption (or in other translations subjection) of labor under capital. Capital is a "coercive relation;" it forces all social relations to bend to its will. Capital first emerges in already-existing material and social relations which are mostly feudal, such as particular types of division of labor, a particular level of development of productive forces, gender relations, sexual relations, etc. As Marx (1990, 425) says: "At first capital subordinates labour on the basis of the technical conditions within which labour has been carried on up to that point in history." In the historical development of capitalism in England, capital finds the labor-process in its undeveloped handicraft form where workers have a degree of power in regard to the pace and type of work that is being done. However, "the life-process of capital consists solely in its own motion as self-valorizing value" (Marx 1990, 425). Thus, the labor process has to be revolutionized to match the demands and logics of capital accumulation. The real subsumption of labor under capital occurs when "[i]t is no longer the worker who employs the means of production, but the means of production which employ the worker" (Marx 1990, 425). The production process completely controlled and dominated by capital can dictate the pace of work and the type of work that is done by individual workers. As Marx would say, dead labor (machines, technology) under capitalism suck the blood of living labor-power like a vampire. I argue that a similar process occurs to other social relations such as gender, sexuality, and race once capitalism becomes the dominant mode of production in a particular social formation. While I do not have enough room in this essay to explore how each social relation gets transformed in detail, I will use Barrett's (1980/2014) work (and others) to help us think through the role ideology, and in particular gender ideology play in sustaining the capitalist system itself and how it has been so transformed by the capitalist mode of production that they both cannot function as they currently do without each other.

Alan Sears (2017, 185) argues that "[g]endered norms are not simply a discourse but a set of everyday practices framed by a matrix of power relations that structure production and reproduction in capitalist societies." Ideas about masculinity do not just emerge from nowhere, they exist and are produced in particular historical epochs. It is historically specific to the capitalist mode production that production and social reproduction (work and life) occur in different spaces (though these spaces can be "porous" as some point out). The different lived experiences between this spatial division of labor between care/social reproductive labor, historically and contemporarily occupied by women, and wage-labor creates variegated ideas and understandings about the world (Smith 1990). In relation to this we can also see how "the formation of identities around erotic preferences (such as 'lesbian')" are a "product of capitalist social organization" (Sears 2017, 173). John D'Emilio (1992, 8) offers a compelling argument that capitalism created the material foundations for the rise of a homosexual identity:

Only when individuals began to make their living through wage labor, instead of as parts of an interdependent family unit, was it possible for homosexual desire to coalesce into a personal identity-an identity based on the ability to remain outside the heterosexual family and to construct a personal life based on attraction to the one's own sex (see also Morton 2001 for a similar argument in relation to the Closet)

Can we not see here how capitalism emerges within a given set of gender and sexual relations and fundamentally changes them to serve its own needs i.e., formally subsumes them and constructs new ideologies around them? Michele Barrett (1980/2014) argues that there is an "integral connection between ideology and the relations of production." The classical view of "relations of production" are simply defined by class relations. Barrett says this is inadequate if we want to construct a historical materialist theory of the ideology of gender, sex, race, etc. Gender "ideology has played an important part in the historical construction of the capitalist division of labor and in the reproduction of labor power" (Barrett 1980/2014, 98). In addition, "[r]elations of production reflect and embody the outcome of struggles: over the division of labour, the length of the working day, the costs of reproduction" (Barrett 1980/2014, 99, my emphasis). If we take seriously Barrett's arguments about how gender ideology is a part of the relations of production and that they play a fundamental role in reproducing the capitalist system in general, then we must engage with Althusser's ideas about ideology and its apparatuses because Althusser (2014, 209- 217) argues that the relations of production play the determining role, "in the last instance," in characterizing a social formation. I want to turn to Althusser here because I think his concept the Ideological State Apparatuses can help schematically see and understand how the gender and sexual ideology that is embedded in the relations of production are reproduced and how they can be struggled over and thus changed to benefit oppressed groups under the capitalist mode or production.

Althusser (2001; 2014) complicates the orthodox Marxist theory of the state by differentiating two apparatuses where a ruling class consolidates and perpetuates its class power-the Repressive and Ideological State apparatuses respectively (RSA and ISA). The Repressive State Apparatuses, like the army, police, the courts, the prisons, function mostly though violence and the Ideological State Apparatuses function mainly through ideology (the ruling class' ideology):

the ISAs 'function' massively and predominantly by ideology, what unifies their diversity precisely this functioning, insofar as the ideology by which they function is always in fact unified, despite its diversity and its contradictions, beneath the ruling ideology, which is the ideology of 'the ruling class'.

It is largely within the ISAs where the relations of production are reproduced "behind a 'shield' provided by the repressive State apparatus" (Althusser 2001, 101). Examples of the ISAs are: Churches, the family, schools, law, communications (press, radio, television, etc), political ISA ("the political system, including the different Parties"), the cultural ISA ("Literature, the Arts, sports, etc.") (see Althusser 2001, 96). One may question the ISAs by saying how can the state be involved in matters that are "private" like the family, churches, literature, the Arts, sports, etc? Althusser states (2001, 97):

The distinction between the public and private is a distinction internal to bourgeois law, and valid in the (subordinate) domains in which bourgeois law exercises its 'authority.' The domain of the State escapes it because the latter is 'above the law': the State, which is the State of the ruling class, is neither public nor private; on the contrary, it is the precondition for any distinction between public and private. The same thing can be said from the starting-point of our State Ideological Apparatuses. It is unimportant whether the institutions in which they are realized are 'public' or 'private'. What matters is how they function. Private institutions can perfectly well 'function' as Ideological State Apparatuses.

Althusser does not mean the state owns the ISAs in any legal sense. He means that the ideology of the ruling class (which holds state power) runs throughout the different ISAs to reproduce the relations of production and thus the capitalist system as a whole. The ISAs do not reproduce the relations of production in any "functionalist" as some accuse Althusser as being (e.g., Barrett 1980/2014, amongst many others). Quite the contrary, Althusser (2014, 218-219, my emphasis) stresses that:

the dominant ideology is never…exempt from class struggle. […] the reproduction of the dominant ideology is not simple repetition, simple reproduction. It is not even automatic, which is to say mechanical…The combat for the reproduction of the dominant ideology is a combat that is never over; it has to be taken up again and again, and always under the law of the class struggle" (Althusser 2014, 219, my emphasis) [1]

One can see that change is possible both within the confines of the capitalist mode of production and even wholesale change of the mode of production if the political and material conditions allow it.

Synthesizing Barrett's and Althusser's ideas about ideology and the relations of production can be fruitful for oppressed groups under the capitalist mode of production. Even though Althusser did not necessarily theorize about gender, sex, race in any meaningful way or length, we can extend his notion of the ruling ideology that exists within each ISA as being composed of ideologies/discourses about gender, sex, race, ability, etc. With Social Reproduction Theory's expanded notion of class and class politics, we can conceptualize how oppressed groups can struggle politically to change their material and discursive relations i.e., by forcing a change in the dominant ideology in a particular Ideological State Apparatus. We can see this abstract claim if we look historically to the 1960s. The Women's and Civil Rights movements were movements that radically changed the dominant ideology that existed in the family ISA, the cultural ISA, etc. The movements from the 1960s (and other historical eras) can be broadly conceived as class struggles within the Ideological State Apparatuses. It is useful to think of class struggle in this broad conception because it can unite many people with largely different lived experience against the most organized class to ever exist in human history: capital.

Though these ideological changes within particular ISAs are important and do improve the lot of oppressed groups, as long as the capitalist mode of production exists these changes are limiting in two senses. One, the ideological changes get re-incorporated (i.e., appropriated) to the logics of capital accumulation and the production of surplus-value (i.e., capitalist profit from the exploitation of labor-power within the production process). Second, certain people within oppressed groups will always be silenced, excluded, etc., because complete "inclusion" (in quotations for the lack of a better word) and equality is impossible in a capitalist society where power relations are an ingrained structural feature. Capitalism is a class-based society and thus inherently unequal, exploitative, and oppressive.

I must mention in passing that these ideological struggles cannot be thought of as separate or divorced from their material bases. New ideas/ideologies do not just emerge from air, they are tied to the development of the productive forces:

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production…From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution [(i.e., class struggle within the Ideological State Apparatuses)] (Marx 1970, 21).

Some scholars associate the move from Fordist standardized production techniques to more flexible, just-in-time production as being the material condition that undergirds the cultural shifts in the western capitalist counties to "postmodern" capitalism, a capitalism that is more "inclusive" to difference. It is a capitalism where women, and people of color can be CEOs, where there is an emphasis on "diversity" and "multiculturalism" (see for example Harvey 1989; Morton 2001). So-called multiculturalism becomes integrated into the logics of capital accumulation in postmodern capitalism. Everything from "coming out of the closet" to oppressed culture becomes commodified. One can enjoy postmodern capitalism if one can afford it. As the productive forces develop and change, so do the ideas/ideologies that correspond to them. The material conditions exist to sustain a socialist (and eventually communist) society, where poverty is eradicated and society in general can struggle to put an end to oppressions that exist in relation to identity in a real meaningful way rather than in a generic fashion as is the case in capitalist social formations. What is blocking this from happening is the capitalist class ideology that permeates through the Ideological State Apparatuses. This is where a range of political and social struggles can (and must) unite to end sexism, racism, heteronormativity, ableism, etc.

Conclusion

In this essay I argued that Social Reproduction Theory is the best way to understand oppression based on identity and that we have to once again take feminist arguments originally produced in the 1970s seriously again. Through SRT's understanding of oppression and its broader conceptualization of class we can better act upon on our world to change it. We have theorized enough about how bad the world is, it is time to change it; this was emphasized in the 1970s.

Cinzia Arruzza (2017, 196) urges that "diversity must become our weapon, rather than an obstacle or something that divides us." We must build solidarity amongst ourselves if we are going to win and create a better world. However, the current political forms we have cannot do this type a work. We need a multinational communist party that is led by women, LGBTQ, and people of color that intervenes in a range of struggles based on exploitation and oppression and connect how each struggle/oppression connects to the broader social whole and totality of the capitalist mode of production. Not everyone sees their group-based oppression/struggles as class struggle. This is not necessary, but a political party that is involved in a multitude of struggles can overcome this problem. Arruzza argues that "[i]n lived reality, class, race, and gender inequality are not experienced as separate and compartmentalized phenomena that intersect in an external way: their separation is merely the outcome of an analytical thought process, which should not be mistaken as a reflection of experience" (Arruzza 2017, 195). Taking a time machine back to resurrect the Marxist feminism of the 1970s (that tended to ignore difference and suffered from essentialism at times) and to put it in conversation with a nuanced and contemporary Social Reproduction Theory can provide a theoretical and political plane of analysis that is useful for activists involved in many different struggles.

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Notes

[1] I am quoting Althusser at length here out of necessity. There are plenty of misconceptions of Althusser's work in the social sciences and humanities in general and in Marxist circles in particular.

On the Latest Developments Within the U.S. Working Class

By Ekim Kilic

The 2016 Presidential Elections were a turning point for U.S. labor and popular movements. Since then, provocative statements and decisions by the Trump government have been threatening millions of working peoples' lives. However, the actions of the current U.S. government are not independent of its predecessors and their economic applications that also carried out the needs of U.S. capital and its forces. Today, precarious employment and life conditions, a declining social safety net, and not being able to resonate their voice politically are headlines of the U.S. workers' current problems as a result of long-standing neoliberal policies and the 2008 financial crisis.

In the midst of these issues, the U.S. working class experienced a revival the likes of which that has not been seen in a long time. According to an opinion article that was written for CNN by Richard Trumka [1] , the president of AFL-CIO, " In the year since, working people have been doing just that. From airports and hospitals to newsrooms and college campuses, workers are organizing on a scale that I haven't seen in decades. More than a quarter-million Americans joined unions [2] last year - three-quarters of them under 35. Half of the nonunion workers say they would vote to do the same [3] if given the chance, and Gallup has even pegged unions' popularity at a 15-year high. " [4]

As a side note, the unions organized Labor Day 2018 at a time when the workers' struggle was accelerating: the successful state-wide strikes of elementary school and high school teachers, the struggle of the Chicago hotel workers, which then inspired several others in the sector across the country, the strike authorization of the United Metal Workers' Union (USW) on the collective bargaining agreement with the metal bosses, 27% wage increase of window cleaners as a result of their struggle, 260,000 UPS postal workers authorizing a strike and struggling against the union bureaucracy, struggle for unionization from New York construction workers, and the university assistants' struggles for unionization. The US labor forces celebrated Labor Day in an unusual and special atmosphere. On the other side, one should note that the U.S. labor movement saw several struggles for unionizing and wage increases against weak work conditions in prisons and main sectors, such as cable, automotive, packaging, arms, and agriculture in last 2 years.

Despite the recent upsurge in labor struggles, current demands and problems of U.S. labor are rooted in the past. A short account of the history of U.S. labor may be helpful to make sense of the significance and characters of today's labor actions. Because the dominant narrative on labor comes from liberal or social-democratic accounts, which have avoided representing the U.S. labor as a working-class force for a long time. Instead, their accounts consistently blur the line between working class and middle class through using income and level of education as almost the only metrics. Besides that, the story of U.S. labor remained either one-sided and descriptive academic sources on the U.S. labor or narrating the labor history as if it was only a cultural motif.

AN OVERVIEW OF THE U.S. WORKING CLASS

Based on 2016 data from "employment by major industry sector" chart of the U.S. Department of Labor, distributions of the labor force are in mining, construction, manufacturing, 12.6%; in service industry, 80.3%; agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting, 1.5%; and nonagricultural self-employed 5.6%. [5] Another important finding from the statistics is that although union membership is more likely to experience a revival, the general situation remains stagnant. According to data on union affiliations was obtained from the Department of Labor website, employees from all backgrounds, industries, and occupations who are 16 years old and over;

Change in union membership and Representation in the US, 2007-2017, by the data from the Department of Labor [6]

As is illustrated in the chart, although the popularity of the unions has an upward trend, according to a Gallup poll referred to before, union membership and representation capability still remain steady. [7] However, this recent situation is not independent of national and international condition for the U.S. labor movement. The Taft-Hartley act of 1947, which strengthened the right to work law, the witch-hunt operations of McChartyist era against American communists after WW2 throughout the 1950s, the removal of communists from union leadership as a result of the Communist Control Act of 1954 [8] , then Nixon's dirty war against Black and Anti-War activists through the "war on drugs" after Lyndon Johnson's acceptance of "civil rights act of 1964" as an adjustment of the American social contract, then trickle-down economics of Reagan era, which sought to decrease taxes on the companies that they may encourage growth in the short run and benefit society in the long run, all weakened the labor unions politically, economically and socially. Even though some of the honest unionists maintain their struggle to some extent, most unions are stuck with an extremely legalist approach, which directly or indirectly broke the workers' initiative.

As a matter of fact, the historical processes considered above also grew U.S. capital's capacity for outsourcing and movement overseas. NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) increased the mobilization of the U.S. capital, and reduced tariffs, which caused loss of many manufacturing jobs, and increased the competition to the detriment of small producers. Seeking markets that have lower labor prices left American workers jobless eventually. On the other hand, weak healthcare services, precarious employment conditions, weak access to education, affordable daycare, safe housing, healthy and reasonably priced food, gender wage inequality in non-unionized workplaces, open-shop practices, and politicians who ignore workers' concerns are main challenges that the U.S. working class currently has.

All in all, this overview may draw attention to the background of the current situation of the U.S. working class. The escalating problems of the working class generated a discussion around the 2016 presidential elections among the media, pollsters, and academics. Despite the imposition of the caricatured idea that " president Trump was supported by the white working class" it is becoming clear that the radicalizing right-wing anxiety of petty-bourgeois classes as a result of losing their class positions, unemployment, and years of years of nationalist and religious propaganda were other main reasons. This caricatured idea is utilized as a scapegoating attempt by the Democrats to avoid their responsibility in the current political, economic and social atmosphere in the U.S.. While Charles Post explains why white workers supported Trump, he underlines that casting no vote as white workers could be more effective than casting a vote for Republicans, which Christine J. Walley and Claudine M. Pied make similar points. [9] In other words, the loss of trust in the electoral democracy that may fundamentally shift the tides of U.S. politics can be read as another reaction to neoliberalism. As a result of analyzing three workers' cases, their resentment and voting behaviors/rationalities, Pied concludes that " there is… not one white working-class reaction to neoliberalism ." [10] That is, one may say that the US working class has been seeking different solutions instead of just supporting right wing nationalist candidates. Yet, we have to acknowledge the considerable impact of right-wing nationalism on white workers.

CHARACTERS OF CURRENT WORKING CLASS ACTIONS 2017-2018

Since the 2016 presidential elections, new Trump anti-labor appointees to NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) [11] , recent restrictions by the NLRB to unions' right to picket, and demoralizing decisions in the cases "Epic Systems Corp. vs. Lewis" [12] and "AFSCME vs. Janus [13] have been unrelenting, successive defeats for the labor movement.

In April 2018, the U.S. Senate confirmed pro-business lawyer John Ring to the National Labor Relations Board. The senate handed control of the board over Republicans. Ring is a partner at Morgan Lewis & Bockius, and was appointed to a five-year term. The board now has three Republicans appointed by President Donald Trump and two Democrats.

An October ruling of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) declared that janitors who were picketing for better working conditions were not protected from unfair labor practices committed by their employer. The Board ruled that the janitors, who were being contracted by a building management company, were engaged in secondary picketing. [14]

In May 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the bosses could hinder workers' rights to collective and legal action for better wages and working conditions in the "Epic Systems Corp. vs. Lewis" case. Another case, which was concluded in June and known as "AFSCME vs. Janus," was again decided against the unions. Even if the U.S. unions manage a majority in the workplace, not all workers in that workplace are required to become members of that union. However, workers who are not members of that union paid a certain amount of contribution to the union, because they still benefited from the collective bargaining in the same workplace. In June 2018, such a necessity has now been eliminated in unionized workplaces of the public sector by the Janus ruling.

However, tides are still turning for the U.S. working class. Even if the labor movement received significant counter-attacks, these are not likely to end this new and energetic tide. Because patterns of today's strikes for wage increases and betterment of working conditions and unionizing struggles in non-unionized workplaces appear as radical, contagious, and encouraging worker and laborer actions.

Radicalization of workers for their economic demands are important as future opportunities for the political transformation of the unions and boldness of the labor movement. For a long time, U.S. unions have relied on collective bargaining processes with bosses, in which the most union leaderships would seek were ways of compromising with bosses. On the other hand, except a few labor occasions, one may find union presences mostly through their political action committees, which run election campaigns for a candidate that union endorsed. And those candidates are mostly from the Democratic Party. Additionally, union representatives run their campaign through the motto "more middle class jobs" as if they already acknowledged that being a part of the working class is unsustainable. Hence, these unions are more likely to avoid even from the strike authorizations since they can negotiate with bosses through union lawyers and court cases.

Worker and laborer struggles in the aftermath of the 2016 elections reveal radical characteristics in many aspects. Pending strike authorization of UPS workers, whose union has tended to compromise with bosses, state-wide wildcat strikes of teachers, early morning protests of New York construction workers once every week, hunger strikes, and occupations of grad students are several examples of this radical turn. In addition to that, laborers in the same sector, but from different states, follow each other's example. Hence, this pro-active pattern may spark a fire easily in the same sector, such as in teachers, grad students, prison complex, and hotel workers.

Therefore, it shows that emergent radical union members will not necessarily tolerate waiting for legalist solutions as it has always been; because these are generally long-lasting court cases, which may break workers' initiative. On the other hand, workers' reactions to the Democratic Party became apparent in the 2016 presidential elections. Rising support for the Trump's Republican Party, not casting a vote at all, or voting third parties instead of for both grand parties were different reactions against the neoliberal policies that are being supported by former labor Democrats, especially in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Wildcat teachers' strikes had an encouraging effect on the labor struggle. On February 22, starting with West Virginia, wildcat strikes spread out among 8 states, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Virginia, and West Virginia with reactions to low wages for teachers and support staff, inadequate school budgets, overcrowded classrooms, and other problems. Following this wave, workers at 26 hotels of Chicago went on strike as members of UNITE HERE Local 1 on September 7, which was then followed by Marriott hotels workers' strike in 8 cities, in Detroit, Boston, San Diego, San Jose, Oakland, San Francisco, Maui, and Oahu. Wages, workloads, and health insurance are among the issues at play. [15]

Although grad students are the most vulnerable one because of their recent recognition of employee status, their strikes and unionizing struggles are still ongoing. Cafeteria strikes, occupations, hunger strikes and ongoing strikes take place at the country's most privileged schools, such as the New School, Columbia University, and Yale University. They are also faced with weak working conditions, precarious insurance-pay, and lack of resources for their livelihoods. Additionally, the CUNY adjunct's struggle arose from precarious work conditions. Full time lecturer positions are difficult to come by. As academic laborers say, more than half of CUNY classes are taught by CUNY adjuncts, their salaries make 5% of the budget.

As another type of precarious work, seasonal farm workers, who are mostly Central American immigrants, from Sakuma Brothers and Driscoll's (the world's largest distributor of berries) were successful in their struggle for unionizing and obtaining their rights for minimum wage. In a statement from their website, the union claims that Sakuma Brothers is guilty of " systematic wage theft, poverty wages, hostile working conditions, and unattainable production standards. " [16]

On the other hand, since December 2017, New York construction workers, who work in the Hudson Yards redevelopment project, have been fighting against the union-busting tactics of the bosses, who impose the open shop model. The Hudson Yards redevelopment project is the largest construction project in North America and the largest private real estate project in U.S. history. The open shop agenda pushed by Related Co. may create a precedent for the expansion of the already growing open shop work model. The struggle of workers against the open shop model is crucial for future labor struggles that will take place in the city. Since December 2017, workers have been regularly doing protests in front of the construction site every Thursday morning at 6 a.m near their workplace. That can also be count another radical characteristic of the recent labor struggle.

Last spring, negotiations between the Teamsters, UPS, and UPS Freight started over the union's proposals, which would address a range of critical issues facing UPSers - ending forced overtime for package car drivers, raising part-timers' wages, imposing monetary penalties for management harassment, and protecting jobs from automation, among others. This negotiation included about 260.000 workers. Even though an overwhelming majority of workers voted yes for strike authorization last summer, and no for UPS contract in this fall, union leadership ignored the decisions of workers, creating a wave of reactions to union leadership from rank-and-file union members and workers.

In another important development, the U.S prisons saw the largest strike in their history. Beginning at the end of last summer, prisoner workers were on strike for voting rights of millions of American prisoners and better prison conditions against slavery-like work conditions. In the U.S., the anti-slavery law includes all citizens except prisoners. According to 13th Amendment, it abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime.

Moreover, in heavy industry, USW's (United Steel Workers) pending strike authorization, IBEW's (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers) struggle against Spectrum Cable Company last year, and UAW's (United Automobile Workers) unsuccessful attempt to organize union in a Nissan factory of Mississippi in summer 2016 have been other headlines of the U.S. workers' struggle. Unfortunately, the struggle is relatively weak while comparing with other sectors. Considering that terrific and racist anti-union campaign in Nissan plant, especially against African-American workers, the union's inability to build a strong organizing committee, and the fear of losing their jobs at Nissan, underlines how the U.S. represses their workers while hiding it from public eye. However, as one of Nissan workers mentioned, those are educative processes that may prepare workers for future struggles.

As a last note on the current struggles, Amazon workers' voices are still up for a union in the U.S. A month ago, McDonalds' workers led by Fight For $15 went on strike for better wages, against weak working conditions, and harassment. For Chicago teachers, strikes are on their agenda.

TEACHERS AND UPS WORKERS SHOW HOW TO USE "THE STRENGTH THAT COMES FROM PRODUCTION" [17]

Among all fruitful labor struggles, wildcat teachers' strikes and UPS's collective bargaining process show many other lessons specifically and clearly. Wildcat teachers' strikes were named by the U.S. media as "the red wave" which refers to dominant Republican politics in those states. Another reference to "the red wave" is that almost all statewide strikes happened in right-to-work states. Beyond being widespread, teachers' strikes have a daring character as we mentioned before. These strikes had that daring character because they were mostly led by grassroots organizing among teachers with the progressive rank-and-file teacher union caucuses in AFT (American Federation of Teachers) and NEA (The National Education Association) since the union leadership had shown a trend of abandoning the working class. [18] Similarly, the progress among Teamsters (International Brotherhood of Teamsters) affiliated UPS workers is being directed mostly by rank-in-file members. A pending strike of UPS workers has been unexpectedly persistent. One may expect that workers would quickly lose their hopes in the struggle, but it consistently developed while challenging the union bureaucracy and bosses in a well-organized manner. Considering that this labor issue involves 260,000 workers, it is not easy to maintain such a struggle.

Teachers' strikes took the stage in West Virginia on February 22, 2018 with the demands of lowering health insurance costs, made worse by stagnant wages. [19] Undercover groups in social media were utilized as a way of organizing, and debating. West Virginia has a famous history within the U.S. working class struggles. Including the famous struggle of the Battle of Blair Mountain, heroic miners struggles of the 1920s, wildcat strikes of the 1970s, and the victories of the Miners for Democracy movement are several key historical moments, which make American worker today "proud to be union." [20] It truly shows that the memory of class struggle is alive, which appears through discussions on social media, or the general trend of daring to follow rank-in-file instead "the leadership."

Teachers went on strike against budget cuts, decreased employee benefits, low per pupil spending, low salaries, right-to-work laws, school choice, and school vouchers. A 20% pay raise in Arizona, 2% pay raise and increased school spending in Colorado, increased school funding, teachers raises by $6000, support staff raises by $1250 in Oklahoma, and 5% pay raise in West Virginia are the gains of these struggles. [21] Arizona teachers, for instance, won their struggle with their gradual action from low-intensity to high-intensity actions, such as wearing red T-Shirts on Wednesdays and posting photos on social media, then handing out flyers, then rallying at the capitol with signs and stickers: " I Don't Want to Strike, But I Will" and finally, walking out and massive marches. [22] The West Virginia teachers' strike, the most advanced struggle of the many that erupted in 2018, started with rallies and walkouts from the beginning of February 2018, the strike month. [23] Therefore, one may say that although the social media reach-out played an important role, more or less all strikes and labor struggles escalated from low-density actions to high-density actions.

However, strikes remained valuable considerable remarks. Almost 80% of U.S. public school teachers are women, and women made up almost all of the leadership of strikes in Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Particularly because of this, some of West Virginia teachers carried out the matter of preserving abortion rights into the strike efforts. Another positive development is exposure of the betrayal of the union leadership, or their compromising tendencies with state governments. Teachers do have a feeling of being undervalued by the business and state governments. But the political perspective of many teachers, for example in Kentucky and West Virginia, doesn't exceed the slogan "vote all the enemies out of office," which means for them supporting teacher-friendly candidates in the Democratic Party. [24]

As a note for our readers, one may expect that the U.S. democracy values on the surface liberal values and human rights, besides the racist history and present that could not be solved totally. Ironically, similar to slanders and racial slurs of the bosses and their associates against black workers of the Nissan factory, teachers were mostly blamed by the state incumbents and political authorities to hurt educational process. Kentucky governor went further, and said " You know how many hundreds of thousands of children were left home alone today? I guarantee you somewhere in Kentucky today a child was sexually assaulted that was left at home because there was nobody there to watch them. " Oklahoma governor found her cure to the strikes by classifying striking workers as: "a teenage kid that wants a better car." [25]

CONCLUSION

Some of the struggles considered here are still ongoing among the workers. The most important characteristics that may be extracted from these examples are the radical, contagious and encouraging actions. In addition, a majority of these actions ended with relative victory. This new accumulative process as for workers' experiences may provide future opportunities to transform unions politically towards unions which are strongly tied with workers and their class interests. On the other hand, the awakening sections of the youth, and an increase in sympathy to socialism are turning towards to the working class and the organizational problems they face. Although it might be early to make a guess about what may happen, one may definitely say that the U.S. working class is seeking ways to escape from this recent, oppressive and extremely exploitative situation, while organizing politically and economically.

Notes

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/03/opinions/labor-day-working-people-deserve-our-fair-share/index.html

[2] https://www.epi.org/publication/biggest-gains-in-union-membership-in-2017-were-for-younger-workers/

[3] https://aflcio.org/2018/6/22/study-popularity-joining-unions-surges

[4] https://news.gallup.com/poll/241679/labor-union-approval-steady-year-high.aspx

[5] https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-sector.htm

[6] https://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpslutab3.htm#union3.xlsx.f.1

[7] https://news.gallup.com/poll/241679/labor-union-approval-steady-year-high.aspx

[8] "The Communist Control Act of 1954", The Yale Law Journal 64, no. 5 (1955): 712-65. doi:10.2307/793898.

[9] Post, C. (2017). The roots of Trumpism. Cultural Dynamics, 29(1-2), 100-108.

[10] Pied, C. (2018). Conservative populist politics and the remaking of the "white working class" in the USA. Dialectical Anthropology, 42(2), 193-206, sf. 204.

[11] https://www.reuters.com/article/labor-nlrb/senate-confirms-trump-nlrb-nominee-handing-control-to-republicans-idUSL1N1RO28L

[12] https://theredphoenixapl.org/2018/05/22/a-blow-to-the-working-class-reveals-capitalist-ruthlessness-and-fear/

[13] https://www.afscme.org/now/janus-for-leaders

[14] http://www.fightbacknews.org/department/labor

[15] http://www.fightbacknews.org/department/labor

[16] https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-07-18/workers-who-pick-your-summer-berries-are-asking-you-not-buy-them?fbclid=IwAR03gjveysa610ss2nzGxqiaGe_H56hpBjtqtUh8Y_LLerArll_20On14nk

[17] The Strength Comes From Production: A widely used worker slogan from Turkey. One may encounter with this idiom in workers' and unions' informative materials in Turkey.

[18] http://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2018/05/whats-behind-teachers-strikes

[19] http://www.labornotes.org/2018/02/west-virginia-teachers-launch-statewide-strike

[20] http://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2018/03/west-virginia-teachers-learned-1970s-miners

[21] https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-arizona-teacher-protests-20180503-story.html , https://www.denverpost.com/2018/05/12/pueblo-teacher-strike-is-over/ , https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/04/teachers-strikes-oklahoma-socialism-sanders-unions , https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/05/politics/west-virginia-teachers-strike-future-unions/index.html

[22] http://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2018/04/heres-how-arizona-teachers-organized-their-first-ever-statewide-strike

[23] http://www.labornotes.org/2018/02/west-virginia-teachers-launch-statewide-strike

[24] https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3732-striking-teachers-and-wildcat-politics

[25] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2018/04/04/oklahoma-governor-compares-striking-teachers-to-a-a-teenage-kid-that-wants-a-better-car/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.c9f793c87e21 , https://www.vox.com/2018/4/16/17242812/kentucky-governor-bevin-teachers-strike-child-assault , http://time.com/5176094/west-virginia-teacher-strike/ , https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/04/23/arizona-teachers-walkout-governor/544535002/

Disaster in Zimbabwe: Cyclone Idai, Climate Change, and Capitalism's Assault on the Global South

By Mafa Kwanisai Mafa

About a month ago Zimbabwe, Malawi and Mozambique were devastated by a tropical cyclone which has been described as one of the worst disasters ever to strike the southern hemisphere. Approximately 2.6 million people were affected in the three countries. Cyclone Idai hit the Mozambican port city of Beira with winds up to 170km/ph., it then proceeded into inland Zimbabwe and Malawi, flattening buildings and took more than 1000 people and others unaccounted for across the countries. Torrential rainfall washed away road networks in Zimbabwe. The United Nations called it possibly the worst ever weather-related disaster to hit the southern hemisphere.

Western capitalists are largely at blame for climatic changes that cause natural and environmental disasters. Poverty, which is a result of the diabolic and pernicious economic sanctions, as well as a natural byproduct of global capitalism, has resulted in poor and weak structures which do not withstand the heavy winds and storms.

The economic prescriptions of the IMF and World Bank has forced countries like Zimbabwe to reduce their budgets on social services as governments are forced to impress and attract investors in line with the neoliberal path. Things like sanitation, emergency services, and disease-outbreak prevention are poorly resourced and often times lead to unnecessary loss of life. From the statistics of past natural disasters in poor counties like Haiti, and impoverished cities like New Orleans, these factors lead to high death tolls compared to well-resourced sectors in the western world. The Civil Protection Unit of Zimbabwe had developed the National Flood Plan Management framework; however, because of depleted resources caused by IMF and World-Bank intervention, was not fully implemented. Very little of the nation's budget is allocated for disaster management, as determined by the needs of capitalism's pursuit of profit.

The Donald Trump Administration and EU have extended their sanctions on Zimbabwe despite its reforms and capitulation to neoliberal dictates in the form of austerity measures. This means that Zimbabwe must brace for further economic turmoil because of the renewal of sanctions. To further exacerbate the situation, Zimbabwe is facing drought and trying to recover from the gory effects of tropical cyclone Idai, which has killed many and displaced thousands. The entire infrastructure of Zimbabwe is now in ruin. If Zimbabwe was not under sanctions, its response to Cyclone Idai could have been much better. Destruction could have been avoided; lives could have been saved. Like every nation under US sanctions, Zimbabwe is experiencing failing healthcare, dwindling government coffers, failed service delivery, and food and basics shortages. In a similar situation, Iran took the US to the International Court of Justice in October 2018 and the ICJ ruled that the US must stop restricting medical and basic supplies to Iran. What is the impact of the ICJ ruling on Zimbabwe's medical system?

Tropical cyclone Idai brings vital lessons: it's a stark reminder of the deadly effects of greenhouse effect. A hotter world means more damaging cyclones because they draw their energy from the oceans. The hotter the ocean, the more powerful and devastating the cyclones have become. Hotter oceans and melting ice caps also mean a rise in ocean levels, which means cyclones spin faster, do more damage, and have more energy to get into the interior. The governments that have the power and resources to effect change, like the US, are failing to take climate change seriously. Governments who would like to effect change remain impotent due to global capitalism's demands. It is a threat to humanity and its environment.

The Global Connection

The inequalities within the poor global south are caused by the capitalist economic systems of the rich North. The legacy of colonialism and apartheid still manifest in most of the African and third world countries, and this has adversely hampered human and economic development. The poor and the working class in these countries are suffering the most from climate change and must push for climate justice. The global North are the biggest culprits in environmental degradation and carbon emissions; thus, are responsible for creating an environment ripe for natural disasters.

The rich countries have technology of early warning systems and disaster management and preparedness. It is only the poor countries like Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Mozambique who bear the brunt of the effects of natural disasters, with the biggest number of casualties. Western capitalism must give poor nations debt relief and allow them to chart their economic path using their own natural resources, which in many cases exist in abundance. Zimbabwe at independence adopted the Rhodesian debt whose money was used kill the black people in their quest for freedom and self-determination. South Africa also adopted the Apartheid debt which it is still paying up to this day - a debt whose money was used to oppress butcher them with impunity.

With so many resources at their disposal, countries throughout the global south would be able to redistribute their wealth equally for putting up flood defenses, social services, and investing in appropriate technology. Humanitarian assistance has been a curse to African development - a trojan horse used to push through capitalist austerity. African countries have the capacity to stand on their own if they are allowed to chart their independent path. The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), which is assessing the damage on food crops, estimates that about 200,000 Zimbabweans will need urgent food aid for the next three months. Most of the food aid which is provided on humanitarian grounds is genetically modified and poses a serious health risk to the local people.

The US military is contemplating sending rescue teams to Mozambique; however, this is not trusted since they are butchering people all over the world in unprovoked wars. Most countries are suffering and millions dying through the US's direct or proxy wars and economic sanctions. Mozambique is wary and considering denying them entry into their country, despite desperate times.

Because of the rapacious nature of the capitalist economic system, which has no regard for nature or human life, we are now confronted with an environmental crisis that threatens to undermine the basis of civilization and survival of human species. There is now a global consensus that the emission of greenhouse gases is caused by use of fossil fuels which global capitalism has relied upon as the main source of energy supply. Global temperatures are precariously rising.

China is now the biggest player in the global capitalist economy and it has overtaken the US as the biggest carbon emission emitter. China and US combined account for 40% of the global emissions of carbon dioxide worldwide. If the levels of emission do not subside, the world will experience more extreme floods, droughts and storms, disappearance of the Arctic ice cap, dramatic cuts in food yields, and the drying out of the Amazon rainforest. Notwithstanding all the looming catastrophe world gas and coal production is surging.

Capitalism is the Cause

The root cause of the climate change is capitalism, an economic system that thrives on exploitation of human beings and the natural environment. The world, if it is to survive, needs an alternative system that values social equity, justice, and environmental sustainability. Humanity and the natural environment are under threat because of the capitalist system, which is based on private ownership of the means of production. Overproduction and waste are endemic. The crisis of humankind requires putting an end to capitalism. Capitalism is only concerned about profit.

The great danger today, with the way in which these environmentalist topics are being addressed, is that they are being used with a short-term political objectives in mind. Many researchers and scientists are reaching a conclusion that there is a tendency towards climate warming. More organisations and political parties are being formed on the pretext of fighting against global warming without any practical result. There is a deliberate diversion away from the real polluters by asking citizens to be responsible and make them understand that they must take care by throwing plastic materials into different waste bins and that they should stop buying cotton buds from supermarkets because they are terrible source of pollution. A systemic issue is being individualized, in true capitalist fashion. And it is a smokescreen.

Capitalists pollute billions of tonnes of oil into the China Sea, while a citizen throws three cotton buds into the wrong bin. Are we really going to save this planet through these everyday actions? It is a claptrap. While many politicians, world leaders, and big corporations speak about the future effects of climate change, poor and impoverished nations are already struggling to battle the consequences of rising global temperatures. They speak as if it's a future problem, but its already here and happening throughout the global south. It's only a matter of time before it hits the north.

The world's poor are not causing the problem, but they bear the brunt of climate change. They are suffering from drought and suffer in worsening storms because they cannot afford to build houses that can withstand storms or escape to higher ground. Governments encourage citizens to do "one green action a day" but ordinary citizens are not the root cause of climate change. Extreme weather disasters are becoming more prevalent around the world, be it Zimbabwe or elsewhere. Capitalism is the culprit. Let's save our environment and nature from global capitalism.

How Did Capitalists Get So Rich?: On the Marriage Between Capitalism and Government

By James Leach

It is difficult to know what to say to the smug self-satisfaction of the business class who gaze upon the enormous wealth of their country, and then pat their back for the capitalist utopia they have built. In critical analyses of capitalism, considerable weight is put on examining the contradictions in the modes of exchange, the formation of crises, and the tension between labour and capital. But I want to address how capitalism developed, and how the considerable wealth of developed nations was produced, as well as how it became so acutely concentrated within a few pockets. As Marx asks in Wages, Prices and Profit, "how does this strange phenomenon arise, that we find on the market a set of buyers, possessed of land, machinery, raw material, and the means of subsistence… and on the other hand, a set of sellers who have nothing to sell except their labouring power, their working arms and brains?"

"Primitive Accumulation": Enclosures and Erasing the Commons

There is no concrete date which we can mark as the first day of capitalism, or the last day of feudalism, since its development was somewhat gradual. The results of the English Revolution in the seventeenth century, for example, saw movements away from feudal society and towards capitalist society, but it was not until two centuries later, during the Industrial Revolution, where capitalism truly flourished. However, a significant policy which marked a shift towards the dominance of private property is the agricultural enclosures. This involved the fencing of farmland into private property, mostly within the hands of large, propertied landowners. Before this, agricultural labourers either worked on common land within their village, or they were peasants working for a local lord. A portion of the labourer's produce would be seized by the lord as a tax and the labourers would then sell what was left in local markets. Enclosures saw the new dominance of wage labour, the separation of agricultural workers between themselves and their means of production, the formation of the first labour market, and of the first proletariat.

Before enclosures, common land was able to significantly rival wage labour. Jane Humphries essay Enclosures, Common Rights, and Women, published in the Journal of Economic History, explores the results of enclosures, as well as the significance of common land. Humphries finds that the family possession of a single cow on common land could "remain significant compared with landowner's wages" and on an annual basis "the comparison would probably be even more favourable to cowkeeping." Keeping cows communally also had other benefits. The by-product of rearing cows was goods such as skim-milk, which provided a 'gratifying addition to the monotonous diet of the adult farm workers', and was crucial to the healthy development of the labourer's children. However, after enclosures, due to high rents and resistance from farmers, common cowkeeping virtually vanished, and labourers could not often afford to buy milk.

Now that the efficiency of "communing" has been briefly established, to what extent did this communal lifestyle exist? Peter Linebaugh's exceptional text Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance is instrumental in answering these questions. Linebaugh documents the work of the seventeenth century statistician Gregory King, who estimated that were was "twenty million acres and pasture, meadow, forest, heath, moor, mountain, and barren land in a country of thirty-seven million acres', Linebaugh continues to say that 'even if common rights were exercised in only half of these, it means that in 1688 one quarter of the total area of England and Wales was common land.' Such an enormous measure of common land would have been extremely valuable to agricultural workers. Naturally, enclosures reversed this. 'Between 1725 and 1825 nearly four thousand enclosure acts appropriated more than six million areas of land… to the politically dominant land owners.' It does not take a genius to work out the effects on the newly formed working class. Reliance on Poor Relief went up, there was a poverty crisis in the eighteenth century, and as Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis simply puts: 'More than 70 percent of the peasants were thrown out of their houses and off their ancestral lands. It was devastating, brutal, cruel and… highly effective.' E.P Thompson called enclosures a plain case of class robbery.

It is difficult, however, to drill into the minds of a global population that they do not own much besides their labour power. The Indonesian novelist Promoedya Ananta Toer reported on the response from native Indonesians to enclosures in his memoirs: 'The native people had no word for "fence"- the concept was completely foreign to their culture. They didn't recognise such manmade limitations on land-use rights.' How could such a disaster for the global population not be overthrown immediately? Unfortunately, the rich and powerful have 'experts in legitimation', to use Antonio Gramsci's words. Garret Hardin's text The Tragedy of the Commons sought to justify enclosures. Hardin's thesis appears rational. He suggests that the commoners, in their simultaneous desire to profit as much as possible from the land, and the un-fettered access to land, would bring 'ruin to all.' Hardin's misanthropy is de-bunked with plain historical fact by Linebaugh: '… the commons is always governed… [an] officer elected by the commoners will impound that cow, or will fine that greedy shepherd who puts more than his share onto the commons.'

Imperialism

The consequences of imperialism are, and always have been, deeply lodged within the cognitive dissonance of the body politic. For example, it takes the most basic logic to recognise that capitalism developed alongside Transatlantic slavery, and it takes little extra effort to make the connection between them, yet this line of reasoning is often left un-pursued.

Pre- Civil War America is often seen as split between the free-market north and the plantation complex of the south. They were, however, inextricably linked. Forbes, a popular and prestigious business magazine, ran an interesting article on the subject, in relation to Sven Beckert's book Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. It turns out, in contrast to popular fantasy, that the capitalists of the American north were crucial in keeping slavery alive, and, of course, it was crucial to their development. The slave economy effected the north with 'plenty of merchants in New York City, Boston and elsewhere helping to organize the trade of slave-grown agricultural commodities…' The slave production of cotton 'offered a reason for entrepreneurs and investors to build manufactories… thereby connecting… Industrial Revolution to the advancing plantation frontier…' The latter point is particularly poignant. The Industrial Revolution ushered capitalism into a golden age where it could stand with two feet on a fertile ground of free trade accompanied with low tariffs (a subject which I will later address). The swollen shadow which shades the conscience of capitalism, of course, is the fact that it required the possession of human beings to help stimulate its progression. This can not be understated, since, for the first six decades of the 19th Century, raw cotton amounted to more than half of the nation's exports.

It would be tough to go through the entire history of modern imperialism to weigh its effects and thus measure the arms which propped up capitalist development, because there are simply too many cases. But it is worth addressing the very land that is now the 'United States of America'. It goes without saying that before European colonists arrived, there was a Native population who organised themselves locally and communally. It also goes without saying that this way of life has been mostly exterminated with state violence and the commodification of land. In 1845, California was part of Mexico. How did this change? Imperialism. Back in those days, the mainstream press could be more honest about the practices of the state. An article by the Washington Union said: 'Let the measure of annexation be accomplished… For who can arrest the torrent that will pour onward to the Wes? The road to California will be open to us.' In the 19th Century, the establishment did not have to wax lyrical with tales of 'democracy'. There is surely no questioning that such actions are inhuman; they create 'the wretched of the earth', to use Franz Fanon's turn of phrase. But what is the motive? It is rare for humans to be motivated by sheer violence. There must be a reward to legitimize violence. In the case of the United States' invasion of Mexico in 1847, the reward was the rich natural resources of California. Historian Howard Zinn, in his seminal text A People's History of the United States, quotes the Illinois State Register in 1846:

Shall this garden of beauty be suffered to lie dormant in its wild and useless luxuriance?... myriads of enterprising Americans would flock to its riches and inviting prairie's; the hum of Anglo-American industry would be heard in its valleys; cities would rise upon its plains and sea-coast, and the resources and wealth of the nation be increased in an incalculable degree.

This quote goes some way to explain how much the expansionist ethic of the American government meant to slave-owning economy of the south.

We need not go as far back as the 19th Century to look for examples of state force providing for the economy of a nation state. War has always been profitable. The neo-imperial oil wars of the 20 th and 21st Century have meant that the U.S and Britain have had cheap access to oil. Given that state force has brought this about, it has nothing to do with free trade.

Anything but Free Trade, In the Name of Capitalism

If we only pay attention to the dictates of Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and other free-market enthusiasts, we can be easily fooled that (with a few nuances), the un-rivalled wealth of the modern superpowers is owed to its policies of free markets and trade. If we look at economic history plainly, however, we find remarkably different results. Ha- Joon- Chang's tour-de-force Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective , is a good place to start in studying what policies truly led to economic development.

Chang begins by invoking Friedrich List, the 19th Century German economist who fathered the 'infant industry promotion' theory, which proposed that budding industries require state protection from competitive markets which were dominated by experienced and long-standing manufacturing countries. List, in his albeit tediously named 'The National System of Political Economy' is important. He finds that Britain was 'the first country to perfect the art of infant industry promotion' because

[the monarchies of Britain] perceived that their newly established native manufactures could never hope to succeed in free competition with the old and long-established manufactures of foreigners… Hence, they sought, by a system of restrictions, privileges, and encouragements, to transplant to their native soil the wealth, the talents, and the spirit of enterprise of foreigners.

Chang then systematically goes through the historical development of almost every highly-developed nation, starting with Britain, 'the intellectual fountain of the modern laissez-faire doctrines…' The fourteenth century monarch Edward III is known for being the Brit to first actively start developing British wool production. His tactic was to ban imports of raw wool, centralise its trade and bring in Flemish weavers (he also only worse English cloth, to set an example). Naturally, through the most anti- free trade policies possible, Britain became the dominant exporter of wool. It was a hundred years after Henry VIII's import substitution policies of 1489 that Britain decided to be competitive in a market, which consequently drove the industries of the previously dominant Low Countries into the ground.

As already stated, the Industrial Revolution formed the blueprint for un-fettered capitalism. But how was this blueprint written? Britain had 'very high tariffs on manufacturing products as late as the 1820's, some two generations after the start of its Industrial Revolution, and when it was significantly ahead of its competitor nations in technological terms.' As well as tariff protection, Britain felt that for its businesses to develop, it needed to ban the imports of superior products from the colonies, in order for its own industries to remain economically viable. In 1700, for example, Britain banned the import of Indian cotton products, leading to the decline of the Indian cotton industry. It was then totally destroyed by the 'ending of the East India Company's monopoly in international trade in 1813.' Clearly, the economic supremacy of Britain in the 19th Century was not predicated on free trade. There was, however, developing pressure from the business community for free trade, once they had acquired enough wealth from protectionist policies to be competitive in global markets. By the 1850's, considerable steps (such as the eradication of tariffs) set in motion a liberalised capitalist economy. This did not last long. 'By the 1880's, some hard-pressed British manufacturers were asking for protection.' However, the true move away from free trade occurred in 1932, when the manufacturing advantage of Germany of the USA demanded protectionism from Britain.

Conclusion

What can be seen is that there have been gigantic impediments to true laissez-faire economics. These impediments have taken numerous forms: violence, colonialism, protectionism etc. Today, the impediments are slightly different. Enormous taxpayer subsidies to the corporate sector, for example, turn free-markets from fact into fantasy. The state ghosted every step capitalism took; their relationship is fascinating. Capitalism and the state are the main actors in a Sophoclean tragedy in which capitalism cannot function with or without the state. On the one hand, capitalism has considerably relied on the state for the conditions of its development, may that be enclosures, access to the captive markets of colonies, tariff protection, or plain violence to silence the rebelling masses. On the other hand, centralised government can be a leech on the efficiency of business. It has the cheek to demand

for taxes, and occasionally it represents 'we the people', and the interests of 'the people' are at odds with the interests of the capitalists. The government is often accused of being a threat to the freedom of the capitalist class, but history has shown that the latter needs the former to protect its interests. It is within this tragic comedy that we have lived since the origin of capitalism, and that we continue to live in today.

Against Ignoring Race: The Zanj Revolution as Black Slave Revolt

By Derek Ide

Numerous controversies exist surrounding one of the most historic uprisings in the pre-modern world. The Thawrat al-Zanj was a mass uprising in the area surrounding Basra against the Abbasid Caliphate from 869 to 883.[1] The Zanj revolt has been variously described as a "typical class war" and "proletarian movement based on a coherent politico-religious doctrine,"[2] a "state run by bandits," [3] a "semi-barbarian movement,"[4] and a "terrible revolt" which "sowed the seeds of Lower Mesopotamia's ruin." [5] Eventually, the Abbasids brutally crushed the rebellion, particularly after the leader of the Saffarid uprising in Persia declined a formal alliance with theSahib al-Zanj, Ali ibn Muhammad. [6] Despite prodigious bloodshed, the revolutionaries who revolted against their former masters, landlords, and the general class of Arab ruling elites were driven by a deeply-rooted egalitarianism, officially articulated by Ali ibn Muhammad, who at times borrowed from Kharijite slogans. There were certainly material and ideological limits to the revolution, limits that adherents of modernity's universal humanistic claims may find unsavory. One in particular was the unwillingness or inability to abolish slavery as an institution but instead to reverse the position of slave and slave-master. Yet, in spite of limited primary source material, enough evidence exists to understand the Zanj revolution as primarily a slave revolt first, and a racialized one at that. This neo-traditionalist analysis positions the former slave class in a vanguard role, even if other classes eventually joined the revolt.

There are a few distinct criteria that can be established in order to confirm that the Zanj revolution was a slave rebellion led by black slaves. First, we must trace the etymological lineage of the word "Zanj," a word of considerable disputation. Second, we must establish that the rulers of Abbasid Iraq did indeed utilize black slave labor, particularly in the marshy areas around Basra. Finally, we must establish that Ali ibn Muhammad specifically organized the black Zanj as the primary motor to lead the revolt against the Abbasid caliphate. After addressing these three variables, the second task of this essay will be to review existing literature on the topic, primarily split between those who assert the black slave character of the revolt and those who obscure or deny it. For the sake of simplicity, the labels "traditionalist" (or neo-traditionalist) will be used for the former while the term "revisionist" will be used for the latter. Despite the claims of revisionist historians who attempt to obscure the racialized nature of the revolt, [7] the Zanj revolution was certainly about slavery, even if its goals were not to abolish slavery as an institution but simply reverse the role of slave and slave master.

The Etymology and Use of the Word "Zanj"

There are several theses on the origin of the word Zanj. The one common denominator is that it is not an Arabic word in origin, but that its tri-consonant structure (z-n-j) allowed it to be easily adapted. At least one scholar asserts it is of Ethiopian origin, connected with " zenega" (to prattle, stammer, to barbarize). Another group of scholars claim it is of Persian origin, claiming zang/zangi is used to denote "Negro." [8] Others still claim it is Greek, coming from "zingis," although this is less likely. The more heated area of contestation focuses on the interpretation of the word and how contemporaries of the Zanj revolt employed it. In general, however, Popovic asserts that to talk about a "land of the Zanj," as it has sometimes been employed, to denote a general territory south of Abyssinia and along the Eastern coast of Africa, is misleading. This is due to the fact that the term "Zanj" include "blacks from numerous peoples bought or seized in all ports of call all along the coast." [9]

It is evident from both contemporaneous Arab commentators, as well as those who lived in the wake of the Zanj revolt, that racial tropes were regular elements of Arab thought. For instance, Arab cosmographer and geographer Kazouini attributes "fetid odor, limited intelligence, extreme exuberance, [and] cannibalistic customs" to the Zanj. [10] Masudi likewise notes the Zanj are of "smelly skin, excessive petulance, sparse eyebrows, [and] highly developed sexual organs." [11] Fourteenth century Arab writer Al-Bakoui notes the Zanj are characterized by their "odor, their quicknes ot anger, their lack of intellect, their habit of eating one another and their enemies." Finally, Arab geographer al-Kindi argues that the hot climate in the land of the Zanj causes the brain to lose "its balance, and the soul can no longer exert its complete action on it; the swell of perceptions and the absence of any act of intelligence are the result."[12] French translator L. M. Devic that amongst Arab authors of the Middle Ages, such commentaries were ordinary. The Zanj are variously: evil, "surpass brute animals in their unfitness and perverse natures," are "so hideous and so ugly," idolaters, etc.[13] It should be noted, however, that exceptions to such characterizations exist. For instance, centuries later Ibn Khaldun chastises Masudi, Galen, and al-Kindi for asserting that the Zanj character is dominated by a "weakness of the brain," which for Ibn Khaldun was a "worthless" explanation that "proves nothing." [14]

In 1976, M.A. Shaban argued that a distinction between the term sudan and zanj was integral to understanding the revolt around Basra. As he explains, this terminology was "not used at random; they were meant to define certain groups of mankind." The Zanj were from East Africa and extending into Central Africa, while the sudan indicated the Western Sudan of today to the shores of the Atlantic. [15] According to Shaban, the governor of Egypt Ibn Tulun enlisted tens of thousands of "negroid" Sudanese to fight against the Zanj, in order to capture certain port cities and restore lucrative trade routes that had been severed because of the uprising.[16] However, this binary etymological distinction is complicated when Shaban discusses the Qaramita revolt after the crushing of the Zanj. For instance, he suggests that the Qaramat first appeared to describe a "group who had supported the Zanj revolt, the reference being to the Qarmatiyyun and to Nubians who could hardly speak Arabic." [17] He notes that the geographer Maqdisi associates these two people with the Sudan. Shaban argues that the Qaramita were "remnants of the Zanj revolts who… were ready to take part in any revolt." [18]

In her 1986 work "Toward a Definition of the Term Zanj," Marina Tolmacheva makes a compelling and cohesive argument undermining the thesis that "Zanj" is etymologically associated only with a specific portion of the East African coast.[19] In many ways, she borrows from Talhami, who argues that there is an "overemphasis" on Arab commercial interactions with East Africa in the early Abbasid era, and that "the assumption that 'Abbasid writers used Zanj to mean specifically the East African coast, and that therefore the people they called Zanj originated in a specific part of that region, is completely unjustified."[20] Tolmacheva posits a new argument:

I would like to suggest that the history of the term Zanj, and the growth of its geographic and racial scope, may be more closely connected with the history of commercial ties between Africa, Arabia and the Persian Gulf than with political-military expansions, whether of Rome, Persia or the Islamic caliphate. Continually under certain constraints of navigation and temporarily focused under the Sassanids on the Red Sea area, these ties were eventually restored to include the East African coast. In this process the word formerly used to describe negroid slaves exported from north-east Africa may have developed a new connotation for peoples of the coast well past Cape Guardafui .[21]

Thus, while possibly weakening the idea that the slaves working in the marshy areas of Baghdad were specifically Southeast African in origin only, this reinforces the notion that these were likely black slaves from other areas of Africa.

The Class Economy of Basra in the Latter Half of the Ninth Century

The Zanj Revolt primarily occurred in what is modern day Iraq and a section of Iran (Khuzistan). Two regions in particular, Batiha and Maysan in lower Iraq's canal region, are of particular importance. [22] As Alexandre Popovic notes, this importance can be attributed to the "nature of their soil," which were largely marshy flatland areas that are regularly flooded with mud.[23] Swamp reeds and growths permeated the wide but shallow canals crossed the area. Only small, flat boats could navigate these canals, making navigation in al-Batiha extraordinarily difficult (and often a perfect hideaway for brigands and rebels of all sorts).[24] Lower Iraq's "Canal Region," especially the Nahr Abd al-Khasib where the Zanj capital of al-Mukhtara ("The Chosen") was established, facilitated guerrilla activity and acted as the base from which the rebels could launch raids.[25] While the reeds and rushes that naturally adorned the area were put to many uses by local inhabitants, the agrarian population also grew melons, onions, rice, barley, corn, and other grains. Yet, as al-Tabari noted, swarms of mosquitoes were a scourge on the population and malaria was an omnipresent threat.[26]

Prior to Umayyad governor al-Hajjaj and his successors, the Arabs of Iraq (either Bedouins or merchants) showed little care for land reclamation projects. The Abbasid Caliphs augmented the land revival projects, which were carried out by overseers (wakil) and freemen (mawla) who had been granted the land as rewards. As Popovic notes, four points are of significant interest: 1) the existence of "dead lands" around Basra, 2) the possibility of "acquiring these lands," 3) the presence in Basra of people with substantial capital, and 4) the presence of slave laborers to transform the land.[27]

The date of arrival for black slaves to Iraq from the East Coast of Africa is contested. One scholar, F. Al-Samir, suggests 720 as the date for Muslim trade outposts in East Africa. If, as it is believed, black slaves were captured, bought, or obtained from subject states on the coast as tribute, it can be surmised that slaves proliferated in Iraqi society after this date. Some scholars, such as Charles Pellat claim an earlier but indeterminate date of origin, noting that Arab historians reported general "Zanj revolts" (not the Zanj revolt of Basra) as early as 689-90 and 694-5. [28] As Jere L. Bacharach explains:

It was not unusual to find references to African slaves in Iraq without any warning of when and how they got there or what happened to them after the specific event was recorded; for example, a revolt of African Zanj slaves in Basra in 76/695 or the appearance of 4,000 Zanj military slaves in Mosul in I33/75I. Therefore, the silence in the Arabic chronicles on the numbers and activities of African military slaves in Iraq from 210/825 to the Zanj rebellion (255/869-271/883) may reflect their absence or, more likely, their relative unimportance in the eyes of the chroniclers. [29]

By the Abbasid era, as Bacharach argues, the "Muslim military reflected an organizational pattern more familiar to the pre-Islamic Fertile Crescent than to the Arabia of Muhammad." [30] Imported military slaves, notable Turkish cavalrymen and African infantry, were used by Arab rulers to control large swaths of territory. Africans were generally considered inferior to Turks due to a circular logic (infantry inferior to cavalry, Africans associated with the former and Turks with the latter) that was self-reinforcing. The kind of racialized and occupational inferiority assigned by Arab rulers and writers to Africans in a military context was grafted onto slaves utilized for extractive labor as well.

According to Tabari, the future rebels were employed as laborers ( kassahin) to prepare the land in lower Iraqi so that the area around Shatt al-Arab could be cultivated. The arduous objective was removing the top crust from the surface, transfer it by mule, and pile it in large heaps. These laborers were recruited from among black slaves, camped in groups of 500 to 5,000, [31] and forced to survive off handfuls of flour, semolina, and dates. In general, only the wealthy had access to such lands and could afford to purchase and exploit such large quantities of slaves. Al-Tabari suggests around 15,000 slaves were employed in such a manner. [32] Louis Massignon's description of Basra's "intense crisis" during this period is apt:

Basra was destined to furnish the first example of the destructive social crisis of the city in Islam, when social restraints were broken, when usury, indirect taxes, government borrowing were rampant, and the opposition was exasperated by the luxury of the wealthy… expensive clothes and jewelry, African ivory, pearls from the Gulf, precious wood from India made a mockery of the working proletariat's misery on the plantations. Canonically, the lands of Basra were "amwat" ("dead lands"), under their original crust of unproductive natron or sebakh, "revived" by the coolie labor of the Zanj… who were refused their claim to freedom following their conversion… in Basra it ended in a fight to the death between the privileged elite of the City that wanted everything for itself, and the starved proletariat of the plantations and sand-filled oases who pounced on the City to destroy it. Babel, which was alive as long as it was a place where the exogamous exchange of values and language was carried on, became Sodom, and burned. [33]

Yet for all the hyperbole regarding the "burning" and "destruction" caused by the Zanj, there is remarkably little information regarding the actual internal organization of the revolutionary state. It is also likely that the "destructive" nature of the event has been overemphasized by Arab commentators who were driven by a severe disdain for the black rebels.

Black Slaves as Revolutionaries under Ali ibn Muhammad

Information on Ali ibn Muhammad is quite scarce. The book of Ali ibn Muhammad's foremost biographer, Muhammad ibn al-Hasan ibn Sahl's Kitab Akhbar Sahib al-Zanj, which Tabari relies on for biographical information, has been lost to us. [34] It is likely that the Sahib al-Zanj was born in a village outside of Tehran, although he was probably of Arab descent. [35] His maternal grandfather had been a Kharijite involved in the struggle against the 10 th Umayyad caliph Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik, and had fled to al-Rayy outside of Tehran as an exile. [36] Ali ibn Muhammad spent some time as a court poet in Samarra, where he also taught writing, grammar, and astronomy.[37] In 863-4 he left Samarra for Bahrain, where he claimed to be a descendent of Ali.[38] In the Bahraini village of Al-Hajar, Ali ibn Muhammad attempts to galvanize a following, which he partially succeeds in doing. After acrimonious clashes between his supporters and detractors, he leaves al-Hajar and ended up in al-Ahsa (modern day Saudi Arabia), where he convinced certain tribes of his prophethood and collected taxes in his own name. Already he was mobilizing against the Abbasid caliphate. After some wayward clashes in the desert, where he loses many of his supporter, he decides to make his way to Basra. His attempts to organize there are quickly smashed by the ruling tribes, his supporters are jailed, and he is sent fleeing to Baghdad.

After a year, Ali ibn Muhammad snuck back into Basra, pretending to be a wealthy merchant who was selling land in the area. One of his first recruits was a man named Rayhan ibn Salih, who was a worker that transported flour from Basra for distribution to the Zanj slaves. Through Rayhan, Ali ibn Muhammad was able to begin organizing amongst the Zanj. [39] In the month of Ramadan, 869, Ali ibn Muhammad proclaimed the revolt. He began intercepting groups of slaves on their way to the worksites, bound the slave drivers, and compelled the slaves to join his uprising. Within days he had organized hundreds of slaves. Ali ibn Muhammad promised improved conditions, wealth, and to never deceive or fail the newly emancipated slaves. He condemned the former slaveholders, ordered the slaves to beat their former masters, and after a period of physical vengeance the former masters were allowed to leave after an oath of secrecy regarding the rebels' location. One of the former owners escaped and warned the overseer of a "large camp" where reportedly 15,000 slaves were employed. [40] Still, as others have noted, success brought more success: "there is no doubt that the blacks were quickly aided by poor peasants, Bedouins always eager to pillage… and finally, even black deserters from the Caliph's army." [41] Most scholars, including Popovic, Lewis, Cahen, and Noldeke assert that it is likely poor peasants joined the Zanj revolutionaries.

Popovic's reading of Tabari's narrative, in line with the traditionalist scholars, is one of a battle between slave and slavemaster. As he explains, "one after the other, successive detachments sent out by the 'people of Basra' were defeated and freed slaves swelled the ranks of the insurgents." [42] At one juncture, according to Tabari, the Abbasid general Rumays offered Ali ibn Muhammad five dinars for each slave returned and promised him free passage out of the territory. In response, Ali ibn Muhammad assembled the Zanj, and through an interpreter (as many of the slaves did not speak Arabic), swore that none would ever be returned to their former master. In one particularly moving line, Ali ibn Muhammad proclaims: "May some of you remain with me and kill me if you feel that I am betraying you." [43] As late as February, 881, two years from total defeat, Ali ibn Muhammad refused an absolute pardon and great rewards in exchange for capitulation. [44] It was clear that Ali ibn Muhammad's sincerity to the cause of Zanj liberation was genuine. We find another measure of his class and racial egalitarianism in the fact that of his two daughters, one was married to Sulayman ibn Jami'a, a black slave and measurer of grain from Hajar. [45] At one juncture, Hamdan Qarmat approaches Ali ibn Muhammad in order to negotiate an alliance. From Tabari's account, Qarmat purportedly met the "prince of the blacks" but decided they could "never agree" and refused to concretize any alliance.[46]

The task of outlining the internal organization of the Zanj state under Ali ibn Muhammad is a difficult task for two reasons. First, Arab chroniclers were significantly more interested in the minutiae of the battles between Abbasid generals and Zanj rebels. Second, the writers generally considered the Zanj enemies of religion and law, and as such any descriptions handed down are generally pejorative in nature. Either way, it is hardly accurate to describe Zanj social relations, as some earlier writers have, as "communistic" in nature. [47] It is far more likely that the social order was reversed, not abolished. One anecdotal passage from Al-Masudi is of importance in this regard. Masudi, who despises the Zanj, explains that their "insolence" was so great that at one point they "auctioned off the women of the Hasan, the Husayn, and the Abbas families, descendants of Hashem, of Quraysh and of the most noble Arab families… Each black owned ten, twenty, and even thirty of these women, who served them as concubines and performed humble tasks for their wives."[48] Thus, Masudi's consternation is in large part derived from his racial sensibilities. For him, it is inconceivable that blacks could hold noble Arab women as concubines, even though black women were regularly forced into concubinage by Arab masters.

The Divide Between Traditional and Revisionist Historians

For a long time the Zanj revolt was understood as a classic slave revolt. Both al-Tabari, an influential Persian contemporary of the Zanj episode, and al Mas'udi, an Arab historian and geographer born not long after the crushing of the Zanj, speak at length about the role of black slaves in the revolution.[49] Both scholars regularly asserted their disdain for what are variously described as Zanj, Sudan, 'abid, ghulam, or khawal.[50] As early as 1892, Theodore Nöldeke described the uprising as a "negro insurrection."[51] Much of the contemporary mid-20th century scholarship in Arabic confirms this thesis.[52] Marshall Hodgson, writing in the 1950s in his monumental magnum opus The Venture of Islam, describes the Zanj revolt as such: "the Negro slaves, called 'Zanj,' many of whom were used for labour in the marshy areas at the mouth of the Tigris, had risen in 869 under a Khariji leader and set up their own state, which tried to turn the tables on the former masters, enslaving the former slave-owners." [53] Zakariyau Oseni, in his more recent work "The Revolt of Black Slaves in Iraq Under the 'Abbasid Administration 869-883 CE," explicitly situates himself as a modern writer sympathetic to the Zanj. He writes that the primary agents were "Black slaves whose race, more than any other, had suffered the atrocities and humiliation inherent in that ancient institution throughout the course of known history."[54] More recently, Alexandre Popovic has asserted a "neo-traditionalist" analysis in his The Revolt of African Slaves in Iraq in the 3rd/9 th Century , an English translation of the work he carried out mostly in the 1970s. This approach stands in stark juxtaposition to a more recent wave of scholarship that has attempted to obfuscate the role of race in the Zanj revolution.

One of the earliest revisionist accounts of the Zanj revolt appeared in 1977. Ghada Talhami's "The Zanj Rebellion Reconsidered" does not strictly discount the role of race or black slaves in the revolt, but attempts to complicate the narrative by including the role of other social classes. Her account is fairly nuanced, moreso than other revisionist scholars like M. A. Shaban for instance, when she asserts that: "The slaves were merely one among several oppressed classes who participated in the rebellion, which was not an attack on the institution of slavery but on social inequality… If one group contributed more than others to the success of this drawn-out revolt, it was not the black slaves but the Bedouins from the surrounding region, who provisioned the fighters throughout the insurrection."[55] Her sub-thesis is that no major slave trade existed with the East African coast of Zanzibar during the ninth century (or else scholars would have noted it) and thus, it is unlikely that this was primarily a black slave revolt. [56] Although there are legitimate critiques of Talhami's approach, a rather absurd revisionist narrative is constructed by M. A. Shaban, who denies that the Zanj revolt was a slave revolt at all, and instead proclaims that it was a revolt primarily of Arabs and some East Africans. Slaves, he asserts, would have lacked the resources to challenge the Abbasid government for such an extended period of time. [57] Although they do so in distinct ways, in general these arguments tend to conceal the role that racially-based slavery played in fomenting the Zanj revolt.

One of the most prominent revisionist historians is M.A. Shaban, who counterpoises his analysis with Noldeke by asserting that the Zanj rebellion is "one of the most misunderstood episodes in Islamic history." [58] The notion that the Zanj episode represented a "slave revolt" has been "slavishly regurgitated by modern scholars" who were tempted by the "romantic idea of a slave revolt in a slave-ridden society" and could not be bothered with the "cumbersome task" of "wading through the considerable amount of valuable material" which would suggest a different narrative. [59] Shaban begins by noting correctly that the Zanj revolt occurred in conjunction with other serious forms of dissension in the Abbasid Empire. It was one of many revolts against the central government, including the prominent Saffarid rebellion as well as the Shia of Tabaristan, amongst others.

For him, however, the Zanj was not a slave revolt. It was a "Zanj, i.e. a Negro, revolt."[60] Shaban argues that equating Negro with Zanj is a nineteenth-century racial trope not applicable to ninth century Arabia. Salves rising against the wretched conditions of work in the salt marshes of Basra is a "figment of the imagination." For Shaban, a "few runaway slaves who joined the rebels" does not make a slave revolt. [61] Instead, the Zanj was an "Arab-Negro alliance" that represented Free East Africans who had made their home in the region alongside Arabs of the Persian Gulf. For Shaban, the fact that even "Jews were among the supports of the revolt" is proof that it was not slave revolt. [62] In a passage that perhaps most betrays his highly elitist conception of the incapacity of slaves to act as historical agents of change, Shaban argues:

If more proof is needed that it was not a slave revolt, it is to be found in the fact that it had a highly organized army and navy which vigorously resisted the whole weight of the central government for almost fifteen years. Moreover, it must have had huge resources that allowed it to build no less than six impregnable towns in which there were arsenals for the manufacture of weapons and battleships… Significantly the revolt had the backing of a certain group of merchants who persevered with their support on the very end. [63]

For Shaban the "bone of contention" was African trade with the Persian Gulf, not slavery.[64] The expansion of trade and the demand for African goods "stimulated the setting-up and growth of East African colonies in all the trade centers of the Gulf."[65] A high rate of taxation, as high as 20%, on imported goods imposed by the central government under Muwaffiq encouraged revolt by these East African merchants.[66] It was this combination of wealth and manpower that allowed the Zanj revolt to occur.

Whereas Shaban argues that in "the Islamic world slaves were mostly employed in domestic housework and of course as concubines," Alexandre Popovic acknowledges this fact but explains this is precisely the importance of the Zanj episode. [67] Popovic's thesis is that the Zanj revolt is significant because it "suppressed the unique attempt to transform domestic slavery into colonial slavery." [68] For him, it is clear that "the conditions of the Zanj slaves in Iraq were wretched, and there were two uprisings before the great revolt." [69] Yet, Popovic also sees in Ali ibn Muhammad nothing more than an "ambitious, totally unprincipled man."[70] As for his ideology, Popovic asserts that he had a "tendency to embrace difference doctrines" as a "powerful political tool." This allowed him to borrow variously from Shiite, Kharijite, and Azrakite tendencies. [71] Thus, in Popovic's final analysis, the Zanj revolt was "in part a social revolt, but it was not, as some have said, a true (modern) social revolution with a definite plan."[72] The revolt's most important consequence, other than its geopolitical assistance to other movements,[73] is that it forced the abandonment of Lower Iraq's barren lands, leading to a disappearance of the large slave work sites and their concomitant misery.

Conclusion

To conclude, the Zanj revolution was a slave rebellion led Ali ibn Muhammad, who rallied black slaves for the purpose of revolution. The etymological lineage of the word "Zanj," even if it does not denote black slaves of specifically East African origin, was used as a catchall for blacks more generally. Furthermore, the rulers of Abbasid Iraq did indeed utilize black slave labor. In particular, the ruling classes of Basra utilized them for transforming the "dead" lands of the marshes into agricultural land. Traditionalist and revisionist scholars differ over whether or not they view the revolt as racialized, and in particular whether the Zanj revolution was actually driven by black slaves. However, upon review of the evidence, the Zanj rebellion was certainly a racialized slave revolt, in which the Arab slave masters were subjugated by former slaves. In this sense it was not a modern social revolution, where the social structure was abolished and replaced with something totally new. Instead, the social order was inversed. The Zanj revolt, despite failing, was successful in warning Arab rulers against transitioning slavery from primarily domestic servitude to chattel slavery (in the way that Philip Cutin's "plantation complex" did first in the Mediterranean, then in the Canary Islands and finally the Caribbean and South America). [74] Slavery was not abolished, but the Zanj were no longer the ones who would be enslaved at the hands of Arab overlords.

Bibliography

Bacharach, Jere. "African Military Slaves in the Medieval Middle East: The Cases of Iraq (869-955) and Egypt (868- 1171)." International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 13 (1981).

Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex. Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Furlonge, Nigel D. "Revisiting the Zanj and Re-Visioning Revolt: Complexities of the Zanj Conflict (868-883 AD)," Negro History Bulletin (Vol 62, No. 4, 1999), 9-10.

Hodgson, Marshall G. S. The Venture of Islam, Conscience and History in a World Civilization, Vol. 1: The Classical Age of Islam. University of Chicago Press, 1974.

Nöldeke, Theodor. "A Servile War in the East," in Sketches from Eastern History, (Beirut: Khayats, 1963, originally printed in 1892).

Oseni, Zakariyau I. "The Revolt of Black Slaves in Iraq under the Abbasid Administration in 869-883 C.E.," Hamdard Islamicus (1989).

Popovic, Alexandre. T he Revolt of African Slaves in Iraq in the 3rd / 9th Century. Markus Weiner Publishers, 2011.

Shaban, M.A. Islamic History: A New Interpretation, Vol 2: A.D. 750-1055 (A.H. 132-448) . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Silkaitis, Emily Martha. "Modern Takes on Motivations Behind the Zanj Rebellion," Lights: The Messa Journal (Spring 2012, Issue 3, Vol. 1).

Talhami, Ghada Hashem. "The Zanj Rebellion Reconsidered," The International Journal of African Historical Studies (Vol. 10, No. 3, 1977).

Trimingham, Spencer. "The Arab Geographers and the East African Coast," H.N. Chittick and Robert I. Rotberg, eds., East Africa and the Orient (New York, 1975), 116-117, n. 4.

Tolmacheva, Marina. "Toward a Definition of the Term Zanj," Journal of the British Institute in Eastern Africa, 21:1 (1986).

Notes

[1] The first period, from 869-79, was characterized by the Abbasid Caliphate's inability to crush the revolt, partially because its attention was diverted to other pressing challenges. The second period, from 879-83, when the empire could address the revolt with its full coercive powers, was one of slow decline but terminal defeat for the Zanj. As Popovic argues, "In spite of Ya'qub b. Layth's rejection of Ali b. Muhammad's proposal for an alliance, there is no question about the Saffarid contribution to the Zanj cause… it was only when the Saffarid question was settled that al-Muwaffiq was able to undertake the large-scale operations that would eventually crush the revolt," See Alexandre Popovic, The Revolt of African Slaves in Iraq in the 3rd / 9th Century (Markus Wiener Publishers, 2011), 1. Furthermore, the Tulunid issue forced the Abbasid's to remove one of their best generals, Musa b. Buga, from the Zanj front and place him in Syria.

[2] Charles Pellat, quoted in Popovic, 2.

[3] C. Brockelmann, quoted in Ibid., 3.

[4] Bernard Lewis, quoted in Ibid., 3.

[5] G. Marcais, quoted in Ibid., 3.

[6] There is considering divergence on this question. M.A. Shaban laments that it "is a sad comment on research in Islamic history that, in spite of the proximity of the territories where these two movements took place, no attempt has been made to examine their relationship… It is a curious fact that the two movements never made any attempts to ally themselves against their common enemy, the central government, and instead actually fought each other." M.A Shaban, Islamic History: A New Interpretation, Vol 2: A.D. 750-1055 (A.H. 132-448) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 99.

[7] There is an entire intellectual lineage that attempts to surreptitiously avoid racialization in the Islamic world, particularly in the pre-colonial era. When racialization, and anti-black racism in particular, is addressed, it is usually done so as a colonial legacy, one that the British or French or some imperial power imposed upon the Muslim world. Although it is certainly true that colonial administrators and imperial powers augmented and exacerbated racial hierarchies, especially given the rigid racial categories in European society, it is hardly honest to dismiss claims of racialization in the Islamic world with a host of rhetorical tropes ("one of the sahaba, Bilal, was black," "Islam does not recognize race," etc.).

[8] Popovic, 15.

[9] Ibid., 16.

[10] Ibid., 16.

[11] Ibid., 17.

[12] Ibid., 17.

[13] Ibid., 18.

[14] Ibid., 18.

[15] Other terms, like Nubian, Habasha (Abyssinians), and Beja were also in use. Shaban, 110.

[16] It is important to note that Ibn Tulun sent this contingent of black soldiers to suppress the Zanj not on the orders of Muwaffiq, with whom Tulun was in competition over resources, but in order to augment Egypt's treasury. The leader of the expedition, who Shaban identifies as one Lu'lu, eventually switched sides and began working for Muwaffiq against the interests of Ibn Tulun. See Shaban, 133.

[17] Shaban, 130.

[18] Ibid., 130.

[19] See Tolmacheva, 105. "This paper addresses itself to the use of the word Zanj in relation to black people of East Africa in their domicile. The Zanj slaves of the Caliphate and the so-called Zanj of the Western Sudan! remain therefore outside its scope. This approach implies a basic distinction in cognitive perspective, to be repeatedly referred to later: specifically, that in the Caliphate the wordZanjusually refers to slaves and consequently sets the people called Zanj in a separate socioeconomic category, entailing connotations of dependence and inferiority." Marina Tolmacheva, "Toward a Definition of the Term Zanj," Journal of the British Institute in Eastern Africa, (Vol. 21, No. 1, 1986), 105.

[20] Ghada Hashem Talhami, "The Zanj Rebellion Reconsidered," The International Journal of African Historical Studies (Vol. 10, No. 3, 1977), 461.

[21] Tolmacheva, 112. Emphasis added.

[22] The Batiha Marshlands extend roughly from Kufa to Basra. Al-Mukhtarah, Ali ibn Muhammad's established fortress-city for the Zanj, was located east of Basra. At one point, the Zanj reached as far north as Jarjaraya, just southeast of Baghdad.

[23] Popovic, 10.

[24] Ibn Battuta mentions this region as a "forest of reeds surrounded by water" where "bandits of the sect of Ali" often "fortify themselves in these swamps and defend themselves against pursuers." Quoted in Popovic, 11.

[25] Popovic, 12.

[26] Ibid., 11.

[27] Ibid., 12-3. The first three contentions are generally accepted. On the fourth, the idea that a large slave market existed in East Africa where Arabs could purchase black slaves, is contested. This will be addressed later.

[28] Ibid., 20.1

[29] Jere L. Bacharach, "African Military Slaves in the Medieval Middle East: The Cases of Iraq (869-955) and Egypt (868-1171)," International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 13 (1981), 473. One of the reasons African slavers were "deemed unimportant" was due to the fact that they were not "directly involved in the power struggles consuming the Baghdad court," 474.

[30] Bacharach, 489.

[31] Likely an exaggerated figure.

[32] Popovic, 24.

[33] Louis Massignon, quoted in Popovic, 24-5.

[34] Muhammad ibn al-Hasan ibn al-Sahl (known as Shaylama), was one of Ali ibn Muhammad's supporters that had been pardoned after the crushing of the revolt. As such, in an effort to exonerate himself, his work is full of invective against his former leader and accuses him of the worst transgressions, which Tabari regularly exploits. Shaylama himself is eventually arrested for conspiring against the Caliph while in Baghdad. The stories of his execution differ. One explains he was "skewered on a long iron rod which penetrated him from his anus to his mouth; he was kept like this over a huge fire until he died." Another claims he was tied between three spears, placed above a fire and "turned and roasted like a chicken" before being tied to the gallows between the "two bridges in the eastern quarter of Baghdad." Popovic, 124. Tabari, Masudi, Ibn al-Nadim, and Ibn al-Jawzi all rely upon his work.

[35] Popovic argues that his birth place is what leads many authors to mistake him for Persian, 33, 41.

[36] Popovic, 34. Based on Tabari's telling.

[37] Ali ibn Muhammad was, according to Tabari, "eloquent, a superior mind, and a natural poet." One of his pieces that received significant attention read as follows:

It is a humiliating situation (to be forced) to live in frugality, accepting it all the while…

If the fire becomes lessened because of too many logs,

its progress will depend on their separation

If a saber remains in its sheath, another

Saber will be victorious on the day of combat

[38] Ali ibn Muhammad ibn al-Fadl ibn al-Hasan ibn Ubayd Allah ibn al-Abbas ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib.

[39] Popovic, 39-40.

[40] Ibid., 41. Tabari's figures are certainly inflated, but the general idea remains the same.

[41] Ibid., 137.

[42] Ibid., 45.

[43] Ibid., 48.

[44] Nigel D. Furlonge explains that on at least three separate occasions Ali ibn Muhammad refused to betray the Zanj. Nigel D. Furlonge, "Revisiting the Zanj and Re-Visioning Revolt: Complexities of the Zanj Conflict (868-883 AD)," Negro History Bulletin (Vol 62, No. 4, 1999), 7-14. Also see Popovic, 103.

[45] Popovic, 123.

[46] Ibid., 81-2.

[47] M. Gaudegroy-Demombyne writes, for instance, that the "principles that could best assure its authority over the black masses are those that we have seen repeated by all the Iranian agitators since Mazdak: wives and property in common." See Popovic, 129-30.

[48] Popovic, 132-3.

[49] For an explication of how various modern authors employ both al-Tabari and Mas'udi, see Emily Martha Silkaitis, "Modern Takes on Motivations Behind the Zanj Rebellion," Lights: The Messa Journal (Spring 2012, Issue 3, Vol. 1). Popovic notes that Ibn Al-Athir and Ibn Abd al-Hadid also provide some minor details about the Zanj revolt, but mostly drawn from al-Tabari and al-Masudi.

[50] For a delineation of these terms see Nigel D. Furlonge, "Revisiting the Zanj and Re-Visioning Revolt: Complexities of the Zanj Conflict (868-883 AD)," Negro History Bulletin (Vol 62, No. 4, 1999), 9-10. Furlonge describes each term as such: Zanj (denoting a slave from East Africa), Sudan (free African), 'abid (generic slave), ghulam (attendant or guard), khawal (generic slave).

[51] Theodor Nöldeke, "A Servile War in the East," in Sketches from Eastern History, (Beirut: Khayats, 1963, originally printed in 1892), 149-153.

[52] For a brief overview of the historiography in Arabic, see Popovic, 4. Abdul Karim Khalifa's unpublished thesis on the Zanj is dedicated to "all the oppressed in their struggles against their exploiters." Also see Faysal al-Samir's doctoral thesis, Thawrat al-Zanj (University of Cairo and published in Baghdad). Of interest here is also Ahmed S. Olabi's work, available in French, La revolte des Zanj et son chef Ali b. Muhammad (Beirut, 1961).

[53] Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Conscience and History in a World Civilization, Vol. 1: The Classical Age of Islam (University of Chicago Press, 1974), 487-8.

[54] Zakariyau I. Oseni, "The Revolt of Black Slaves in Iraq under the Abbasid Administration in 869-883

C.E.," Hamdard Islamicus (1989), 65.

[55] Ghada Hashem Talhami, "The Zanj Rebellion Reconsidered," The International Journal of African Historical Studies (Vol. 10, No. 3, 1977), 455.

[56] This is a rather duplicitous and shortsighted claim that will be addressed later.

[57] Shaban, M.A. Islamic History: A New Interpretation, Vol 2: A.D. 750-1055 (A.H. 132-448) . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. This certainly must be news to the Haitian revolutionaries, or Spartacus.

[58] Shaban, 100.

[59] Shaban, 101.

[60] Shaban, 101.

[61] Ibid., 101.

[62] Ibid., 102.

[63] Ibid., 102.

[64] Ibid., 102.

[65] Ibid., 107.

[66] Shaban notes that this rate of taxation is not confirmed, but can be extrapolated from studying the taxation regimen imposed upon Egypt. It is questionable whether or not the same taxation rates were applied to the Arabian peninsula as to Egypt, where more a more formal and established administrative-extractive apparatus already existed. Shaban, 108.

[67] Shaban, 101.

[68] Popovic, 3.

[69] Ibid., 22.

[70] Ibid., 151.

[71] To claim to be an Alid was important for securing religious sympathy, while the egalitarian preaching of the Kharijites was a useful rally cry to organize black slaves.

[72] Popovic, 153.

[73] As Popovic notes, the Zanj certainly facilitated the rise of the Tulunids in Egypt, the Saffarid movement, and even some of Byzantium's military undertakings. Furthermore, some of the followers of the Qaramita appear to have made their debut amongst the Zanj. See 153.

[74] For more on this phenomenon see Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex (Cambridge University Press, 1988).

An Anti-Imperialist Analysis of the 2011 Destruction of Libya

By Valerie Reynoso

The origins of the UN concept of "Responsibility to Protect" (RTP) was initially articulated by former Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who presented his annual report to the UN General Assembly in September 1999, urging Member States to collaborate in abiding by Charter principles and engaging in defense of human rights. In his 2000 Millennium Report, he stated "if humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica, to a gross and systematic violation of human rights that offend every precept of our common humanity?" A year later, the Canadian government filed a report, "The Responsibility to Protect," through the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. The RTP concept, which is partially derived from Francis Deng's concept of "State sovereignty as a responsibility," reassures that sovereignty is not only a matter of protection from external forces, but also emphasizes that nations ensure the welfare of their own populations, internally. Hence, as it goes, the prime responsibility for the protection of "the people" lies mainly with the State. In terms of geopolitics, according to the United Nations, "residual responsibility" also rests on the international community of states; and this clause may be "activated when a particular state is clearly either unwilling or unable to fulfill its responsibility to protect or is itself the actual perpetrator of crimes or atrocities." [1]

Clinton and Kosovo

Interestingly, the formation of the RTP concept has anti-imperialist roots, particularly in the crisis in Kosovo at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century. The NATO military intervention in Kosovo, which was accused by many of being a violation of the prohibition of the use of force, as well as the heinous acts committed in the Balkans and Rwanda in the 1990s, resulted in the international community carefully discussing means to implement protections against human-rights violations. Despite NATO being an international organization, its actions in Kosovo were still perceived as violating Kosovar sovereignty and the "well bring" of Kosovar people. [2]

The NATO military intervention in Yugoslavia, which began on March 24th, 1999, lasted seventy-eight days and set a precedent by becoming the first occasion in which NATO decided to militarily intervene in a sovereign country without prior approval from the UN Security Council. The involvement of nineteen countries, led by the US, was spearheaded by the Clinton administration with the stated intention of "preventing a humanitarian disaster" and establishing a framework for Kosovo, which was the southern part of Yugoslavia under the Milosevic government. Despite these intentions, NATO's bombings of the Balkans caused more harm than good as these violations of international law resulted in the destruction of 25,000 homes, 300 miles of roads, and an estimate of 400 railways, etc. At least 5,000 people were killed in the bombings, with 12,500 more having been injured. The area was contaminated with depleted uranium, an internationally-outlawed chemical that is still to this day producing high rates of childhood cancer defects throughout the Balkans. [3] The accusation that NATO and its allies committed human rights violations was later confirmed and thus became a motivating factor in the creation of the RTP declaration, which sought to avoid such unilateral interventions in the future.

Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Libya

In 1969, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi led a military coup against King Idris in Libya. The coup overthrew the King and resulted in the establishment of the Jamahiriya government, which lasted nearly five decades. The results of the coup were far-reaching: it eliminated the Libyan monarchy, formed a new republic, set the foundation for an accelerated approach to Pan-Africanism, and established key alliances with the Soviet Union, Egypt, and Syria.

Under Gaddafi's rule, Libyan living standards consistently increased. Healthcare was universalized and available to all; the average life expectancy rose from 55 years in 1969 to 70 years in 2011; the average literacy rate peaked 91 percent, making it one of the highest literacy rates in Africa. Libya attained the highest Human Development Index score in 2010 within the entire African continent, demonstrating it had a high level of development in the country, as well as a comparatively low rate of malnourishment at 5 percent.

Libya also established one of the lowest poverty rates, which fell below 10 percent, not only Africa, but in the world. Libya was producing approximately 2 million barrels of oil per day under Gaddafi's leadership. Libya was also a champion of internationalism and sent military assistance to several countries and causes, including Ethiopia, Uganda, Grenada, and Nelson Mandela's Umkhonto we Sizwe. As an important gesture in establishing regional brotherhood, Gaddafi formally apologized for Arab enslavement of Africans in 2010, while he was chair of the African Union.

This all changed in 2011, when NATO decided to yet again militarily intervene in a sovereign country, ala Kosovo. Although, this time, the reasons were less clear. Internal uprisings against the Libyan Jamahiriya had commenced in 2011. In the West, these were quickly reported as "democratic revolts" against an "oppressive government with extreme poverty" - propaganda that has been accused of being rooted in orientalism and the financial interests of Western nations. These reports were followed with sensationalist personal attacks against Gaddafi, one of which claimed that he mass-distributed Viagra pills to his soldiers. Western media was flooded with anti-Gaddafi reports and imagery, calls for "assisting" the people of Libya, and cries for military intervention. Intervention ensued under the guise of RTP, a UN notion that encompassed a political dedication and obligation to struggle against and terminate the most severe forms of violence and persecution, as well as to diminish the gap between member states' pre-existing obligations under international humanitarian and human rights law and the realities of marginalized groups on the brink of genocide, war crimes, subject to ethnic cleansing and other human rights violations. This principle has recently been applied in the 2011 conflict in Libya, where this concept was used, with reference to UN-resolution 1973, to accept the usage of military force in which Libyan counterrevolutionary groups sought to overthrow Gaddafi.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton played a key role in helping align Western and Arab powers against the Gaddafi administration. Clinton had formally requested that the Arab states intervene in Libya and on March 12th, 2011. The Arab League, which was composed of 22 nations, satisfied this request by voting to ask for UN approval of a military no-fly zone over Libya. On March 13th, 2011, Clinton attended a meeting in Paris with foreign ministers from the Group of Eight countries, where she spoke with the Interim leader of Libya's Transitional National Council, Mahmoud Jibril, for the first time. She also privately met with diplomats from the Persian Gulf in order to determine how willing Arab powers would be to send warplanes to potentially enforce a no-fly zone. Former US President Obama had a conversation on the phone with Clinton by March 15th, 2011, which resulted in Obama siding with Clinton's advocacy for US intervention in Libya. On March 17th, 2011, UN-resolution 1973 was approved of with 10 votes, no objections and 5 abstentions, permitting the usage of all necessary measures with the exception of an occupation force, to protect Libyan citizens, enforce the arms embargo and a no-fly zone, and to reinforce the sanctions regime. In this resolution, the UN Security Council authorized intervention in Libya with "all necessary means," which is UN code for authorization of military force (Warrick, Joby).

The Imperialist Attack on Libya

On March 19th, 2011, at 5:45pm, exactly three hours before the official foreign intervention of Libya, four French Rafale jet fighters annihilated a column of tanks that were headed towards the city of Benghazi. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy had wanted to launch a symbolic first strike, which was ideologically supported by Washington and increased French popular support for Sarkozy. Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini played key roles in the provision of air bases as staging grounds for attacks. Numerous Arab states such as Qatar, Jordan, and the UAE also supplied warplanes and pilots to the imperialist project in order to demonstrate Arab support for military action against Libya (Warrick, Joby).

In reference to a NATO airstrike that was aimed at Gaddafi's Bab al-Aziziya compound in Tripoli that killed 3 journalists, Gaddafi said, "I tell the cowardly crusaders (NATO)-I live in a place where you can't get to and kill me, I live in the hearts of millions" (Hadid, Diaa). This NATO-lead intervention retracted Gaddafi's troops from Benghazi and also resulted in the brutal murder of Gaddafi, who was killed in cold blood by Western-backed proxies. According to some of the proxies present during his murder, his final words to his murderers were, "What did I do to you?" (Beaumont, Peter). Likewise, these Western-backed rebels were unable to sell oil nor tap into Gaddafi's overseas bank accounts and by July 2011, were lacking funds for weapons, food, and other supplies. Clinton succeeded in persuading former President Obama to grant full diplomatic recognition to the rebels, which allowed these Western proxies access to billions of dollars from Gaddafi's frozen accounts. Clinton also managed to convince 30 other Western and Arab governments to make the same commitment during a meeting on July 15, 2011, in Istanbul. Tripoli officially collapsed in August 2011 (Warrick, Joby).

The usage of UN resolution-1973 and "Responsibility to Protect" in the Libyan conflict of 2011 was imperialist in that it was used to eradicate a government that had actually improved living conditions in Libya. This intervention served Western-capitalist interests as opposed to being for the sake of humanitarianism, which is ironic given the rampant human rights abuses, bombings, destruction, pillaging, violation of Libyan sovereignty, deaths and rapes that occurred during and after the NATO-led intervention of Libya, including the savage assassination of the nation's former leader Gaddafi, which has even concerned human rights officials from Amnesty International and the UN. Imperialist interventions cannot be justified under guise of humanitarianism when this colonial project in itself and in how it is implemented is a violation of all human rights. These UN laws, which were implemented via consideration of Western propaganda fabricated against Gaddafi, had no actual basis of evidence. This is a contradiction, especially when taking into account its origins in the period of the NATO bombing of Kosovo, which the "Responsibility to Protect" was used to condemn.

The Aftermath

According to US government documents leaked by Wikileaks, the French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron met with the leaders of the new government of Libya under the National Transitional Council (NTC) in September 2011 in Tripoli. Sarkozy and Cameron allegedly wanted to encourage the NTC leaders to reward French and British early support for the coup against the Gaddafi administration, through contracts that would favor French and British energy companies that aspired to play a key role in the Libyan oil industry. It was also reported that the government of France was executing a program of private and public diplomacy in hopes of persuading the NTC to reserve up to 35% of Libyan oil related industry for French firms, specifically the French energy company TOTAL (WikiLeaks, "FRANCE, UK, ET AL, JOCKEYING IN LIBYA/OIL"). Given all this, it is evident that Western powers had aligned in order to enforce an imperialist order on Libya and capitalize off of its resources via an interim government that satisfies their interests.

In modern-day Libya, Libyans fleeing catastrophe in their home country regularly cross the Libyan border to enter Europe and the Libyan coastguard has taken severe measures in handling this migration crisis. As a result, many of these migrants have been held captive, enslaved and sold for as little as $400 to do arduous work with lethal effects on their bodies and well-being. Survivors of the Libyan slave trade provided detail at the United Nations on their traumatic experiences. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) stated that the slave trade in Libya has become so normalized that traffickings of humans for purchase even happen publicly (Warrick, Joby).

Ultimately, the issues that currently plague Libya cannot be discussed without taking into account the dire impact that NATO, France, the UK, the US, Italy, and other Western-aligned powers had in the 2011 intervention and bloody ousting of Gaddafi. This foreign-backed coup, acted out for the sole purpose of fueling western capitalism, was carried forward on a precedent set in Kosovo many years earlier. Other such coups and interventions have continued under this guise of humanitarianism - UN concepts and regulations that should not be utilized for imperialist measures, especially when said actions ironically violate the international laws and human rights they claim to follow.

Notes

[1] United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect, "Responsibility to Protect."

[2] Ibid.

[3] TeleSUR , US, NATO Lie to Justify Genocide and Destruction in Yugoslavia

Bibliography

Beaumont, Peter. Gaddafi's Last Words as He Begged for Mercy: 'What Did I Do to You?' . The Guardian, 22 Oct. 2011.

"FRANCE, UK, ET AL, JOCKEYING IN LIBYA/OIL." Hillary Clinton Email Archive, WikiLeaks.

Hadid, Diaa. Gaddafi Taunt: I'm 'in a Place Where You Can't Get Me'. Associated Press, 14 May 2011.

"Responsibility to Protect." United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect , United Nations.

Travail, Jus. Libya: Regime Change Disguised as a People's Revolution. TeleSUR, 22 May 2017.

US, NATO Lie to Justify Genocide and Destruction in Yugoslavia . TeleSUR, 23 Mar. 2016.

Warrick, Joby.

Hillary's War: How Conviction Replaced Skepticism in Libya Intervention

. The Washington Post, 30 Oct. 2011.

On Consumerism, Capitalism, and Ecosocialism

By Sebastian Livingston

This piece is intended to be an introduction to an ecosocialist approach to production and consumption. What we have today is a hegemonic obsession with mass production that is catastrophic to the evolutionary processes which allow the biosphere to uphold life as we know it. Capitalist modes of production based upon endless economic expansion and mass consumption disrupt the equilibrium of ecosystems by reshaping the metabolism of nature which regulates earth systems. Within this article I will discuss some issues that I see as problematic in achieving an ecological society and address possible solutions. This is not intended to provide a critique of consumers, my aim is to develop an assault on the hegemonic creation of consumer culture and its devastating impact in maintaining the status quo. This is not an outline for revolution, it is merely my attempt to put forth issues as I see them and contribute to the discussion about the construction of consumer culture as a barrier to achieving social transformation.

"Once upon a time the working class had nothing to lose but its chains; but now it has been absorbed within capitalism, is a prisoner of consumerism, and its articles of consumption own and consume it." -Michael A. Lebowitz

We have the productive means to fulfil our material needs and to liberate ourselves from alienated labor. However this idea is incompatible with capital which does not aim to address real human needs beyond what is required to reproduce itself. Rather capitalism is contingent upon the realization of wealth accumulation, an endless expansion that is based upon the production and consumption of alienated products. This mass production is a fundamental problem that restricts our ability to create an ecological society by being the unshakable cause of most of the environmental problems we face today.

In order to mobilize and attack expansive production, consumer culture must be attacked. This entails attacking the hegemonic institutions that spread consumerism, develop our identification with material goods, and enforce the association between goods and freedom. Capitalist forces expend great resources to ensure that we are socialized to identify ourselves with what we consume far more than with what and how we produce which creates a barrier between us and critical revolution. In fact, Americans are subjected to over 20 times the global average of targeted advertisements. We are made to identify so strongly with commodities that a rejection of capitalism will equate to a rejection of self and require a redefinition of freedom that will demand a revolution that stems beyond the workplace. Within advanced capitalism consumer culture serves as a counter revolutionary safeguard, a sedative. And as we come to identify with the products of our alienated labor rather than realize our alienation within the process of production we sink deeper into the veins of capital, becoming the reproductive organs of the beast.

The working class as a revolutionary subject is the force by which the world will be changed. However, change will only happen if the will to do so exists. The American social contract, which states that what we can achieve given our rights as free and equal people to ascend the social economic ladder with no barriers but our own determination, is a pacifier based upon dishonest assumptions. It enables the institutionalized ignorance of systemic oppression, inequality, and environmental exploitation while generating the individualism needed to ignore the roots of the problem. We need to change the course of the struggle away from a struggle for upward mobility, which is at the heart of the capitalist conflict, to one of economic sufficiency and cultural sustainability.

A struggle for upward mobility is a conservative struggle. It will aim to reform until reforms have returned the working class to a state of equilibrium within capitalist society or one of equally distressing productivism. The world cannot survive our economic system. We have an environmental crisis that requires complete recognition however such recognition will require a cultural revolution, one that rejects the products of alienated labor. In order to survive, capital must expand therefore it must synthesize needs and implement planned obsolescence in order to produce and maintain a market for its growth. A systematic manufacture of discontent places commodities as an affordable means of social achievement therefore contentment by upholding an understanding that has elevated capitalism to a position synonymous with freedom by the mere fact that it provisions the goods. This paves the way for a consumer culture that is impervious to systematic change.

Commodity accumulation leads people to not only identify with the means of destruction but it also paralyzes their ability to mobilize action against the ecological crisis. The resistance to capital must be built in communities most affected by modes of exploitation, those closest to the realization of capitals limits of sufficiency. Poor communities and communities of color are an ecosocialist revolutionary force and the movement must take root in these areas. We must aim to disintegrate links in the chain of capital reproduction by building community sovereignty which will enable the active thinking required to liberate humanity from our impoverished condition. We must acknowledge the multi-faceted struggle for ecosocialism as one encompassing the total impoverishment of humanity which entails not only the patriarchal plundering of earth's environment but also the systemic theft of our self-governing, self-realizing, debt free value.

It is widely recognized that the profit motivated consumer fueled industrial waste and pollution is a broad and time sensitive issue which must be addressed to prevent absolute ecological catastrophe. However, capital cannot provide a fix without dissolving itself. The climate issue is in a stage of terra incognito so the global environmental crisis will be positioned to fall onto the consumers and a new "green" market will conjure the illusion of ethical mass consumption and market growth (see Jevon's Paradox). Consumer culture identifies the free market with freedom in general which is a landmark of success for a system that must perpetuate itself through alienated production and identification with the products of alienated labor in order to avoid overthrow. In light of the urgency of our current ecological situation there is no alternative route to developing an ecosocialist bloc and dismantling advanced capitalism that does not entail the targeted dismantling of social identity with consumer goods. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

The continued existence of the biosphere as we know it depends upon the reduction of the human industrial impact. This stands in contrast to capital's need to portray the false idea that human needs are unlimited and that the earth and its natural limits are capable of accommodating such an absurd reality. It is implanted into the growth strategy to enforce such a notion, for once actual needs are fulfilled the market will stop growing so the system must manufacture discontent to raise demand. This demand situates society in a state of derangement which merges desires and needs while denying that consumption is culturally manufactured and that our culture is the stimulus for environmental instability.

In order to liberate mankind and do so in a way that enables a cultural symbiosis with nature we must seek a social model that distances itself from accumulation. This entails establishing the preexisting condition for revolution which is a class based insurrection against mass self-recognition in commodities. The ability to distain capital commodities will enable the induction into common knowledge the absolute limits of capital production. We must reinvent a human identity that is aligned with our place in nature as actors within an ecosystem. This in practice is counter hegemonic against the conservative forces surrounding capital exploitation of nature. We must see the impact of our consumption in disrupting the metabolism of nature, but we must recognize it as systemic and not limited to individual lifestyle politics. We must see the reality behind our identity with these alien products as a defining attribute of capitalism's incompatible relationship with the natural world and its alienating impact on human consciousness. We must recognize consumer culture as a coercive socializing agent of capital not simply a lifestyle choice made between masses of individuals.

Ecological society is made possible by limiting production to fulfill actual needs and to do so by means of maximizing use value. This will eliminate profit by redistributing surplus time back into society by means of reduced working hours and allocating surplus towards human and ecological development. A true cultural revolution will entail human efforts being aimed toward human liberation and ecological harmony. In order to achieve this the dominant social value system must be replace with one not dependent upon material haves and have nots. We can no longer define the pinnacle of achievement as the output capacity of our civilization and a person's ability to obtain a suite of commodities in a private wealth generating system. A new understanding of surplus will be developed to recognize the creative output of humankind as a common heritage made possible through historical efforts and the reshaping of natural environments, raising a new understanding of ourselves in nature history.

The obsession with production has generated circumstances which require an active assault on our cultural understanding of productivity. Productivism must be understood as an enemy to ecological and social balance. A new society will not arise like a phoenix from fire and ashes it will be built on the foundations of history which is entwined with social injustice, oppression, exploitation, and environmentally destructive forces. In building a socialist society we will be forced to deal with the inevitable cultural reproduction of capitalist ideals and do so in part by abolishing the emphasis on productivism. The socialist world view that maintains a possessive relationship between humanity and nature will be condemned to the same toxic existence as its capitalist predecessor.

In the construction of a new world there must exist the preconditions to harness the new order. A transformation from our current alienated world will not be carried out by a seizure of the means of production alone but must entail a seizure of our identity from the clench of alienated goods. The contentment with this capitalist arrangement of society will last until problems arise that cannot be diverted by means of it, such as the crossing of planetary boundaries and the global displacement of entire populations, an approaching inevitability of our economic model. A revolutionary condition is looming and a force beyond our timeless socioeconomic conflict is a driving element. Natural contingencies will arise which will push aside humankind's ability to negate systemic collapse. The readiness to adapt to and seize the state of nature and the state apparatus may not be present in the common stock of knowledge. The revolution may be ready for us, but we may not be ready for the revolution.

Ecosocialist Participatory Economy

Ecosocialist economies are not contingent upon growth, they are oriented toward the development of human potential which means that they do not aim towards commodity production as an end but as a limited means towards the fulfillment of human needs. Contrary to capital's logic human needs are not unlimited so as to develop an entire economic system around that premise is counter intuitive in its limited potential for human enrichment and its paradoxical existence in a world of finite resources. In ecosocialist society economic value will be transformed, prioritizing use value. Whereas in capitalist society economic exchange value dominates all forms of social worth, placing all other achievement in subordination to it.

Ecosocialism focuses on use value as the aim of productive output but use value is not the lens through which we view nature. Capitalism's utilitarian view of nature is divisive, it limits our ability to identify ourselves within the natural world. This is a cause behind capital's inability to see limits to expansive production. The logic behind capital production creates barriers where boundaries should be, making obstacles out of natural limits. It is not an issue of fossil fuels alone which deem our consumption immoral, for once achieved, a renewable energy structure will not erase the exploitative productive systems that capital relies upon. A clean energy source does not prevent the exploitation of nature and people for profit. It is only with the full self-determining power of workers to control their own destiny that we can produce an ecological economy.

The democratization of our entire society is essential in establishing an ecological order that is able to see the abolition of inequality and exploitation. Democracy must be established to a degree in which it allows people to truly control their own heritage. What is a common heritage of society such as the products of labor exist within a social commons therefore must be democratically regulated and distributed. People not profit must decide what is produced and what is consumed while taking into account the impact it will have on ecosystems and workers alike.

The environment is to be considered more than a source of raw materials and by what it generates to accommodate for human life alone. Our economy exists within the biosphere as a social ecosystem, a subcategory that is a part of a self-regulating earth system in which we as organisms alter at great expense to the harmonious flow of life. It is imperative that nature be protected from privatization by enacting democratic laws surrounding the regulation and preservation of environments from human exploitation. With our knowledge of environmental science we can reduce our impact and protect nature and the people who are most vulnerable to environmental instability.

In a democratic economy decisions must be weighed and votes balanced according to the degree in which the measure would affect the voter. Those most impacted will have more say. Worker, producer, and consumer councils are an organization structure that will accommodate for the diverse needs of each system while enabling the preservation of unique ecological limitations per region. A social opportunity cost will be considered in the process of what is produced in relation to its environmental and social exploitative relationship. This is a system in which a true social accountability is accepted and social production becomes normative. Privatization is criminal in a system such as this for it immediately reduces the democratic integrity that a social society operates on.

Major sources of inequality and power such as inheritance must be rejected in this system as it gives disproportionate social influence to people least affected, the deceased, which is then sequestered away from society and funneled into the hands of the few which leads to disparate power structures. Corporate decisions alike would be seen as anti-social however the democratization and worker ownership of the workplace can help eliminate this problem. It is necessary to state however that worker ownership of the enterprise will be a vital element of social society it is not a sure fire way to ensure the integrity of our biosphere is maintained. The bureaucratic development of social means of production can easily assume the same exploitative characteristics of a capital enterprise and it has in the past. Therefore a circulating responsibility structure should be implemented as well as an establishment of democratic council powers and social vetoes to ensure that what is produced is regulated according to the standards of the environmental treaties.

The world will experience a lifestyle shift that will enable a new standard of economic equality to become institutionalized. We will need to decide what people need to live a good life with health and opportunity. Necessities such as access to water, food, shelter, clothing, transportation, communication, education, health care, sanitation, culture, the pursuit of personal development must exist in the new social contract as a standard guaranteed to all. For most of the world's population the conditions of life will be vastly improved, while the minority wealthy classes will experience a neutralizing shift from excessive consumption to sustainable socially conscious living. We must ensure the elevation of impoverished people to an equal global standard while not barring their ability to achieve self-reliance.

In a society not bound by the limitations of economic growth, resources such as labor will be freed up to provide for the continual progress of our human legacy. The divestment of human capital from profit and power driven maintenance of consumer lifestyles will enable a social investment into more culturally enriching productivity. An ecosocialist economy is based upon evolution not expansion and when advancements in productivity sufficiently fuel society we will have achieved surplus time for all.

Environmental consciousness must be emitted into the common procedure of production in that what is taken and produced must be quantified not only by its human value but by the implications such maneuvers will have on the socioecological world. As producers within nature we have an obligation to not only sustain our environment but also improve it. As an eco-conscious society we must strive to enhance our relationship with nature by inventing an economy that produces more than neutral but positive environmental results. This will be achievable with a new productive philosophy and through a new division of labor as humans are liberated from hours spent supplying synthesized needs. Resources then can be redirected towards creative pursuits, science, engineering, and socioecological development motivated by ecological sustainability and social accountability, not economic profitability.

There is no question that capitalism is a self-serving system that has no place in an ecological social organization. The disasters it creates with its monstrous growth principles devour the earth as well as the minds and bodies of all who exist here. We must seek to build a resistance to this oppressive and exploitative system by focusing our efforts away from reform which only strengthens the system. We must establish community sovereignty to allow pre socialist conditions to exist in the hearts and minds of those who are most threatened by capitalist exploitation. The understanding of ourselves as social beings must extend its association to reconnect our society to nature and to do so by liberating ourselves from the shackles of consumer culture. In solidarity.

References

One Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse

The Socialist Imperative by Michael A. Lebowitz

Creating an Ecological Society by Fred Magdoff and Chris Williams

Parecon: Life After Capitalism by Michael Albert

Consumer Culture & Modernity by Don Slater

The Enemy of Nature by Joel Kovel

The Ecological Rift: Capitalism's War on the Earth by John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, Richard York

The Immiseration of Labor: Capitalism, Poverty, and Inequality in Philadelphia

By Arturo Castillon

"...the more alien wealth they [the workers] produce, and… the more the productivity of their labor increases, the more does their very function as means for the valorization of capital become precarious."[1]

"...within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productivity of labor are put into effect at the cost of the individual worker; …all means for the development of production undergo a dialectical inversion so that they become means of domination and exploitation of the producers..."[2]

The Theory of Immiseration

How are we to understand the contemporary economic situation of most people, who experience increasingly unstable conditions of employment and life?

This essay analyzes the growth of poverty and income inequality within the context of a developed capitalist [3] economy, using Philadelphia as a case study. Some might think that this city is an extreme example; for many years now Philadelphia has ranked the poorest of the 10 largest metropolitan areas in the United States.[4] However, the basic thesis of this essay is that immiseration is not an exception but instead a normal outgrowth of the capitalist economy.

The concept of immiseration is usually associated with Karl Marx, as he insisted that the nature of capitalist production resulted in the devaluation of labor, specifically the decline of wages relative to the total value created in the economy. For Marx, this meant that the proletarian class, [5] or working class, was fundamentally defined by precariousness, i.e. material instability, uncertainty, insecurity, and dependency. This theory stems from Marx's analysis of the changing organic composition of capitalist production and the reduced demand for labor that emerges as technology develops and labor becomes more productive. With increasingly productive machines, less labor produces more commodities at a faster rate, leading to the gradual replacement of labor by machines. Marx observed that the realities of capitalist competition necessitated this tendency towards mechanization and rising productivity. If a factory in the South restructures production to raise its productivity - allowing it to sell more commodities, at a faster rate, and at a cheaper price, while employing less labor-while a rival factory in Philadelphia does not, then after a while the factory in the South will run the factory in Philadelphia out of business. In order to protect their market from more productive competitors, therefore, capitalists must reinvest part of their capital into increasing productivity, or perish in the long run.

As capitalists competed and became more productive, Marx noted that labor became more impoverished: "The growing competition among the bourgeoisie, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious."[6] In other words, increases in capitalist productivity were uneven in their effects-they benefited the capitalists, not the workers. As capitalism became more productive and labor produced more capital in a given amount of time, economic output increased; but at the same time, real wages stabilized and even declined, because the input of human labor stayed the same or declined relative to the output of capital.

This constellation of ideas would later be referred to by Marxists as "the immiseration thesis." However, this term is somewhat misleading since throughout his life Marx developed several theses about the absolute and relative immiseration of labor under different phases of capitalist development. Nonetheless, Marx always theorized the devaluation of labor relative to the self-valorization of capital, and in this sense, he did posit a general theory of immiseration.

An Uneven Economy

Even accounting for periodic crises and recessions, it seems that the US economy is strong and growing, locally and nationally, from the standpoint of those who rule it- the capitalist class.[7] It is still the largest national economy in the world;[8] the world's largest producer of petroleum and gas [9]; the world's largest internal market for goods and services [10]; and the world's largest trading power, [11] with roughly a third of this trade based in the export and import of international commodities, while domestic trade between regions in the US generates even more capital, accounting for roughly two-thirds of US trade.[12]

The majority of this trade is concentrated in the 10 largest metropolitan areas of the US. Those ten metro areas, ordered by largest total trade volume, are: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, San Francisco, and Boston. All the commodities that move throughout the nation, in freight trains, trucks, and shipping containers, flow through a vast transportation infrastructure made up of rail lines, roads, and ports that link these ten metropolitan areas in an extensive network of "trade corridors." New York and Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Riverside, and San Francisco and San Jose are among the largest corridors within the national network.[13] These regional trading networks also provide access to distant markets that allows US capitalists to take part in global commodity chains. Still, the largest single part of capitalist value in the US comes from domestic trade.

Primarily as a result of their complementary industries in energy, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and mixed freight, New York and Philadelphia are the largest trading partners in the national interstate network, [14] making the New York-Philadelphia trade corridor the most valuable in the nation.[15] Because it serves as a crucial node in the national trade network, Philadelphia is home to the 7th largest metropolitan economy in the nation, [16] generating the 4th highest gross domestic product in the nation, and the 9th highest among the cities of the world.[17]

The Philadelphia metropolitan economy, which includes Camden, Chester, Norristown, and other peripheral cities and towns, continues to generate massive profits for those who own it. Still, for most people-who are not capitalists, but workers-wages are low, jobs are increasingly insecure, and poverty continues to grow.[18] Despite regional economic growth, poverty has increased more rapidly in Philadelphia than any other major city since the 1970s. However, this trend is not isolated to Philadelphia; poverty has steadily increased throughout the nation since the 1970s.[19]

During this same period which people became poorer, the national economy has continued to grow and wealth has continued to concentrate in fewer hands than ever before. After two decades of relative stability following World War II, US income inequality once again began to grow starting in the early 1970s and continued to grow despite rising business cycles in the 1980s and 1990s.[20] By 2013, the top 1 percent of households received about 20 percent of all pre-tax income, in contrast to about 10 percent from 1950 to 1980.[21] By 2017, the income of the top 20% of households in Philadelphia was up by 13% since 2007, while the income of the bottom 60% of households was below 2007 levels.[22]

While a strong national economy in the late 1990s helped drive down the number of people living in poverty for the first time in decades, this trend was short-lived. Not long after the 2000s began, the bursting of the dot-com bubble sent the nation into a recession, a regular occurrence in capitalism. Millions of people lost their jobs and incomes during the early 2000s, and poverty continued to grow even as the economy recovered by the mid-2000s. The onset of the Great Recession of 2008-2009 only accelerated this trend, and the number of people living in poverty grew even faster. Even with the end of the Great Recession, poverty continued to grow throughout the nation, and Philadelphia registered declines in typical worker wages during the first five years of the recovery. By 2010-2014, 14 million people in Philadelphia lived in neighborhoods with poverty rates of 40 percent or more-5 million more than before the Great Recession and more than twice as many as in 2000.[23]

Although poverty increased among white Americans in the post-Recession period, for Black and Latino Americans poverty rose even more sharply, locally and nationally. [24] In particular, Black Philadelphians today continue to experience record high levels of poverty [25] and low teen employment.[26] This racial disparity is the result of a longstanding pattern in which white workers, allied with capitalists (who are almost entirely white), exclude Black and Brown workers from the better-paying, more-secure jobs.

The De-Industrialization of Labor

How do we explain this disconnect between growing wealth at the top and deepening poverty at the bottom?

It's obvious in retrospect that the rise of poverty in Philadelphia and other former industrial centers is the result of a shift in the capitalist mode of production-from manufacturing industries to service industries, and from city to suburbs. During most the 19th century Philadelphia was a center of craft-based industrial production, well known for its diverse array of small and medium-sized manufacturing industries-textiles, metal products, paper, glass, furniture, shoes, hardware, etc. By 1900, manufacturing workers made up about one-half of the city's entire labor force.[27] However, manufacturing jobs began to decline in Philadelphia in the 1920s, and by the 1970s, the service industries came to eclipse manufacturing entirely. Rather than manufacturing, most people now work in the service industries-food service, retail, health service, and logistics sub-industries such as warehousing, transportation, and delivery services. This "de-industrialization" of the economy and workforce resulted in a loss of income for most workers.[28]

The de-industrialization of Philadelphia, and the corresponding rise in poverty throughout the region, began earlier than most other cities in the North American Rust-Belt, shortly after the economic upturn that came with World War I (1914-1918), which resulted in growing mechanization, automation, and standardization of production on a national and global scale. In contrast, Philadelphia's manufacturing businesses for the most part continued employing the labor of highly-skilled craftsmen who worked in small and medium-sized firms, known as "workshops," which produced custom goods for niche markets. The "Workshop of the World," as Philadelphia was still known in the 1920s, could not compete with mass industrial production, for mass marketed consumption, by means of the unskilled and disposable mass assembly line workers of the factories in Northern cities like Detroit, Chicago, and New York. The new system of mass industrial production signaled the end of the highly specialized manufacturing processes which characterized most of industrial Philadelphia before World War II.[29]

With the national economic downturn of 1929, major sections of the city's craft-manufacturing base began to collapse. By the 1930s, the only manufacturing businesses that remained in Philadelphia were the few that developed mass production methods-factories along the peripheries of the city in Manayunk, Germantown, Kensington, etc. These were the only manufacturing businesses in the city that could compete on a national level.

Eventually, the demand for manufacturing in Philadelphia would pick up as a result of the revival of the national economy during World War II (1939-1945), when federally-funded factories hired over 27,000 new workers.[30] The wartime economy opened new possibilities for Black workers to join the industrial workforce; while only 15,000 African Americans worked in manufacturing jobs in the city in 1940, their representation rose to 55,000 by 1943. Although this represented an increase in wages and jobs for Black workers, more than half of these jobs were in unskilled positions that offered the lowest wages.[31]

Despite a boost in production during World War II, Philadelphia's manufacturing industries began a steep decline during the peacetime transition. Industrial capitalists continued to face the challenge of superior competition, and this time the competition was increasingly global. International trade grew in the decades after the war, as European and Japanese manufacturers began to compete with US manufacturers. In this context, most factories in Philadelphia either went out of business or left the city. By 1955, fewer than 1,000 workers were employed in the city's formerly expansive textile industries.[32]

Black industrial workers hired during World War II were particularly affected by the loss of manufacturing jobs. A big factor in this process was the seniority system embodied in most union contracts, which meant that when recession, closure, or layoffs happened, those with the least seniority were the first to go. Since Black workers were usually the last hired, they were also usually the first fired.

By the early 1970s, when other major cities throughout the North and Midwest were beginning to experience de-industrialization, most of the manufacturing businesses in Philadelphia had already shut down or relocated to the suburbs, as well as to cities in the South and West of the country. The few industrial firms that remained in Philadelphia were those that invested heavily in automation and raised their standard of productivity.[33]

In the 1980s and 1990s the pattern of de-industrialization became international, as it began to hit most nations in Europe, as well as Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Since the beginning of the 21th century, the Southern and Western cities of the US that once drew manufacturers from the older cities have also struggled with the loss of manufacturing jobs. After the economic crisis of 2008, the effects of de-industrialization only intensified on a global scale, especially in underdeveloped nations in the global South.[34]

Hence, the de-industrialization of Philadelphia, and the concomitant rise in poverty, was mostly the result of capitalist market competition. Industrial Philadelphia was mostly composed of craft-based manufacturers that could not compete with highly-mechanized and increasingly-automated factories elsewhere. The manufacturers that kept up their profits in the face of competitors stayed in business by investing in technology that increased productivity. Some also relocated their businesses to cheaper, less-regulated labor markets. In the process, these transformations led to the devaluation and displacement of labor.

Besides the pressures of market competition, another important factor influencing de-industrialization was the militant resistance of the workers who carried out mass strikes and secured higher wages, pensions, health benefits, and better working conditions during the 1930s and 1940s. With the help of the leadership of the major industrial unions (the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations), the capitalist class responded to the workers movement by shutting down or relocating their facilities to the non-unionized South and West in the 1950s. In this way, de-industrialization undermined the power of the unionized working class, and took back the wages and benefits that the capitalists conceded to the workers in previous decades of struggle.

The Growth of Inequality

As capitalism reorganized itself, the service industries came to supersede manufacturing as the primary source of working-class employment. Today, the number of industrial jobs in Philadelphia represents only 5 percent of the total workforce of the city, while service jobs represent 40 percent of total employment, making the service industries the largest sector of the city's workforce.[35] Even within the few manufacturing businesses that remain in the region, they employ increasingly fewer workers, and those they do employ are increasingly part-time, part-year, and paid less.[36]

The social composition of the service industries is much more diverse than that of the manufacturing industries, which are highly unionized and still dominated by white men. Women make up over half of all service workers, while Black workers form a higher-than-average concentration in lower-paying service jobs. While service jobs have grown by 56 percent since the 1970s, the overwhelming majority of these jobs are part-time, part-year, require few skills, pay low wages, and offer few to no benefits. At the same time, the number of high-salary professional and managerial jobs has grown by 85 percent since the 1970s.[37] This means that de-industrialization has improved the earnings of those in the top-tier of the workforce, while most workers have seen their incomes shrink or stagnate since the 1970s.

Further exacerbating the livelihood of the urban proletariat, jobs have increasingly shifted towards the suburban peripheries of the city, after the pattern of large cities throughout the Northeast and Midwest. This transformation was facilitated by the massive construction of interstate highways in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. While low-income populations in the region concentrate in Philadelphia, Camden, and a number of older urban centers, most jobs are now in the suburbs, often in areas accessible only by automobile, and distant from housing that is affordable to these workers. If city residents do manage to find a job in the suburbs, their wages are effectively lowered because of substantial traveling expenses; if they decide to move to the suburbs, wages are effectively lowered because of higher rent.[38]

The decline of manufacturing jobs was particularly devastating for Black workers, who concentrated in unskilled manufacturing jobs and in service jobs within the city, but were almost completely excluded from professional/managerial jobs and skilled trades. Due to the loss of manufacturing jobs, coupled with the suburbanization of the rapidly expanding service industries, Black workers have seen their incomes and jobs decline dramatically since the early 1970s. Although employment rates declined for both white and Black men since the 1970s, the black decline was twice that of whites. Furthermore, while there was an increase of employment for white women in Philadelphia since the 1970s, the employment rate for Black women hardly changed at all.[39] In this way, de-industrialization eroded the gains made by Black workers in the industrial sector in the decades after World War II.

The Immiseration of Labor

As I've shown, the transformation of the Philadelphia economy-from manufacturing to services, and from city to suburbs-has resulted in a deepening of poverty and inequality for most workers in this city. The question remains, why does capitalism develop itself in such a way that results in the immiseration of labor? This much is clear from the outset: nature does not produce, on the one hand, fewer and fewer rich people, and on the other hand, a growing army of workers who own nothing but their labor, which they must sell for an increasingly lower wage. The immiseration of labor results from the contradictions of what Marx called the "capitalist mode of production."

In brief, Marx argued that capitalism was distinct from all other modes of production in its unique aim: the creation of capital. Whereas other modes of production might find their purpose in producing useful things to satisfy human needs (communal production), or in producing a surplus of luxuries to satisfy a class of nobles (feudalism), capitalism, in contrast, produces the abstraction known as capital. Capital is not produced for the private consumption of its owner, the capitalist. If this were the case the aim of capitalist production wouldn't be the creation of capital but the consumption of things (or what Marx called "use-values"). Under capitalism, however, capital is not produced for use or consumption; capital functions as an end in itself-it is the starting and finishing point of production.[40]

Beginning with the industrial revolution in the late eighteenth century, capitalists made labor more productive by investing a greater part of capital into the instruments of production, introducing newer, more efficient, and more expensive machines. Such an accelerated development of the forces of production did not exist in any other mode of production before capitalism. Theoretically, this heightened level of productivity could raise people's standard of life while reducing the amount of time that they had labor for others. However, Marx was quick to point out that "[capitalist] production is only production for capital and not the reverse, i.e. the means of production are not simply means for a steadily expanding pattern of life for the society of the producers."[41] Under capitalism, labor is only an instrument for the valorization of capital, i.e. capital accumulation, and nothing else. Instead of serving the needs of society as a whole, capitalist production serves the specific needs of capital accumulation, which requires the devaluing of labor in order for capital to expand. The immiseration of labor, therefore, is not an aberration, but a fundamental feature of the capitalist mode of production.[42] Thus, Marx concluded: "On the basis of capitalism, a system in which the worker does not employ the means of production, but the means of production employ the worker, the law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of production may be set in motion by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human power, thanks to the advance in the productivity of social labor, undergoes a complete inversion, and is expressed thus: the higher the productivity of labor, the greater is the pressure of the workers on the means of employment, the more precarious therefore becomes the condition for their existence, namely the sale of their own labor-power for the increase of alien wealth, or in other words the self-valorization of capital."[43] This is a fundamental contradiction of capitalist development: as capitalism becomes more productive, and the means of production become more extensive and technically more efficient, the labor that works up those means of production becomes increasingly devalued and unnecessary.

According to Marx, the drive to accumulate capital at the expense of labor is not based on greed or any other negative psychological trait on the part of the capitalist, but rather survival - in other words, it is in the system's nature to operate this way. If a capitalist does not accumulate capital, if profits are not continually transformed into a further increment of value, then that capitalist is unable to keep up with competitors and eventually goes out of business.[44] This is what Marx refers to as the coercive law of capitalist competition. Workers lose their jobs and their incomes not because of the ill will of particular capitalists, but because the sole aim of capitalism is the valorization of capital, which depends on the maximum extraction of value from labor. In the face of obstacles like market competition and (to a lesser degree) labor struggles, capitalists perpetuate the accumulation of capital by reducing jobs/wages/hours, mechanizing and automating production, and relocating to cheaper, less regulated labor markets.

Marx provided us with the analytical tools for thinking about this internal contradiction of capitalist development-the contradiction between the declining value of labor and rising surplus value, i.e. the basis of capital formation. As capitalist production becomes more productive, the working class can only become more precarious, since the increasing accumulation of capital requires an increasing devaluation of labor. This contradiction is inherent to capitalism-it arises independently of the level of class struggle, fluctuations in wages, state interventions in the economy, or economic crises. At the same time, the relative intensity of the immiseration of labor can rise or drop with the limits set by the accumulation process, depending on the degree of control that workers as a class exert over the economy and the state. At different times in history workers have asserted their interests over and against the drive for capital accumulation, and as a result, have been able to gain a larger share of the total value that their labor produces. Still, for Marx, even if wages and standards of living rise for a time, this does not end the immiseration of labor. That would require the end of capitalism.

Implications for the Future

The story of the immiseration of labor in Philadelphia is particular, but not exceptional; it can serve as the basis for general observations on the dynamics of labor-capital relations within a developed capitalist economy. Capitalists in Philadelphia adapted to the challenges of market competition and labor struggle in much the same way that capitalists did in most mid to large-sized manufacturing centers-by shutting down, relocating, and/or automating production. Over time, the bulk of jobs in most US cities shifted to the services sector and to the suburbs. In every city that these changes took place the results where the same: the decline of wages and regular employment for the urban poor.

After having analyzed the antagonistic nature of capitalist production, we can see that the immiseration of labor is the natural result of capitalist development. Therefore, there is no prospect for a return to a so-called "golden-age" of capitalism characterized by moderate wages, benefits, and full-time employment. The easing of income inequality in the developed nations immediately after World War II was an exception, not the rule, in the history of capitalism. Outside of this brief period in the 1950s and 1960s, capitalism has not delivered on its promise of upward class mobility for most workers, and this promise can only continue to fade as capitalism continues to develop.

Today, most people find themselves within the throes of a drawn-out process of immiseration that shows no signs of reversing itself. Incomes have declined since the 1970s to allow for a greater acceleration of capital formation and accumulation. Even as total economic output continues to increase, and even as the job market continues to grow, working class incomes continue to decline, since most jobs are now in the unskilled, unprotected, low-wage service industries. Under these circumstances, the instability that a developed capitalist system subjects the employment and working conditions of the workers becomes a normal state of affairs.[45] The production process reaches a point of no return, continually reproducing a permanently marginalized mass of low-paid laborers with no hope of a professional career.

Rather than functioning as a site for upward mobility and income growth, the late capitalist megalopolis increasingly functions as a warehouse for low-wage service workers. Over the past fifty years, these structural trends have steadily asserted themselves on global level, especially in the global South.[46] As Mike Davis painstakingly details in his devastating book, Planet of Slums, poverty and occupational marginality are especially prevalent in the cities of underdeveloped nations, where urban existence is increasingly disconnected from mass employment. With unprecedented barriers to large-scale emigration to developed nations, slum populations continue to grow at an unprecedented rate in the global South. For Davis, this is the real crisis of world capitalism: the crisis of the reproduction of labor and the inability of capitalism to stabilize (yet alone improve) the livelihood of the proletariat.

The growing division of the workforce into 1) a small, privileged core of professionals and managers that can expect continuous, high-paying employment, and 2) a large periphery of precarious "floaters," to which capitalists provide little more than a low wage, for as long or as short a time as capitalists require these workers-this division will only widen as capitalism continues to develop. To the extent that most workers have access to increasingly irregular employment and smaller wages, the trend toward racial and class inequalities will persist, globally and locally. Black workers will continue to be the "last hired, first fired." White workers will continue to act as labor aristocracy, allying themselves with capitalists to monopolize the professional and managerial jobs, while relegating workers of color-especially Black workers-to the worst paying, least secure, lowest status jobs.

The housing market will continue to reflect the uneven distribution of income and jobs. The white workers who hold the managerial and professional jobs will continue to predominate in the suburbs, or in some comfortable, tree-lined areas of the city like Chestnut Hill, and in the gentrifying neighborhoods close to center city. In contrast, low-income workers will remain in the vast stretches of row houses in Philadelphia and Camden and in the older suburbs like Chester or Norristown.

The Struggle for a Classless Society

Capital seeks to gain the greatest return on its investment in labor and means of production. In pursuing this end, capital has reorganized the production process and with it the realities of working-class existence. This raises strategic questions from the standpoint of class struggle: what forms of struggle are developing today that point to a different future? If industrial production created a particular conception of class struggle, what do the service industries mean for the future of class struggle? What does working class power look like in the context of a service economy?

These are complex questions that must be explored via further research of the class composition and dynamics of class struggle in specific regions. Unfortunately, this is beyond the scope of this essay, which at the most serves as the groundwork for such an investigation. Still, on a general level, this research makes this much clear: as long as capitalism continues as the dominant state of affairs, the contradiction between capital and labor can only become more pronounced. Therefore, it is not enough to reform capitalism or morally condemn capitalists-we must develop a plan to overthrow the structure of capitalism in its entirety.

Of course, the design and implementation of such a plan would take different forms depending on the conditions of working class existence in different regions. Nonetheless, at its core, this plan must entail the abolition of private property in the mode of production and the organization of a system of production that is no longer carried out with the goal of capital accumulation, but instead in a way that is systematically regulated by society-not the capitalists, not the market, not the state, but society as a whole. The members of such a society would have to reorganize the production process in such a way that frees their labor from the constraints of capital-an external, independent force standing above society.

However, given the contemporary circumstances of late capitalism, it is unclear whether workplace-centered struggle is the primary organizational form for building this social project. Even though capital continues to accumulate in industrial production, employment has shifted from the sphere of direct commodity production (agriculture, manufacturing) to the sphere of circulation (services). In such an economy, workplace struggles pose little to no threat to capitalism. Even if workers took over every McDonalds or Walmart, the economy would continue to operate in highly automated essential sectors like agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and logistics. If a proletarian revolution were to occur in such a context, the communization of production would not entail proletarian control of workplaces-as conceived by the traditional approach to labor struggle-so much as proletarian expropriation and elimination of workplaces, most of which are nonessential (i.e. most of the services industries) and serve no useful purpose outside of the context of capital accumulation.

The critical period in US mass industrial relations, which began about a century ago and saw a rapid growth in the power of industrial workers' unions in the 1930s and 1940s, was followed by capitalist counter-organization and restructuring. By the early 1980s it was clear that the New Deal order of relatively strong labor unions was over in the US. Today, the material basis for workplace oriented struggles has fallen apart, shattered by capitalist automation, deindustrialization, and decentralization.

Despite these difficulties, there is still no logical argument for why a classless society is impossible. Even when such a society can only be achieved with difficulty and struggle-in light of rising poverty and racial inequality; in light of constant imperialist wars; in light of the ecological destruction brought about by capitalism-in light of all that, there are still good reasons to fight for a world beyond capitalism, where production is carried out by an association of free people who collectively regulate their own labor. To be victorious, however, we must build organizations that correspond to the present circumstances, instead of simply inheriting the idealized and ready-made organizational forms of the past.

Notes

[1] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One, "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation," 793.

[2] Marx, Capital, "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation," 798.

[3] "Capitalism" is the dominant mode of production in the world. It is defined primarily by the production, circulation, and accumulation of capital. "Capitalists" own the means of producing capital.

[4] Alfred Lubrano, "Throughout the country, incomes are rising. In Philly, their falling," http://www2.philly.com/philly/news/census-data-poverty-income-philadelphia-suburbs-20180913.html

[5] The "proletariat," or "working class," is the largest class in capitalist society. "Proletariats" do not own any means of production ( of their own and therefore must sell their labor-power (their ability to create capital) to those who own means of production (capitalists), in exchange for a wage which is a only fraction of the capitalist value they produce.

[6] Engels, Marx, The Communist Manifesto, 89.

[7] U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, "U.S. Economy at a Glance," https://www.bea.gov/news/glance

[8] "Report for Selected Country Groups and Subjects (PPP valuation of country GDP)" . IMF. Retrieved 29 December 2017. Digital History; Steven Mintz. "Digital History" . Digitalhistory.uh.edu. Retrieved April 21, 2012.

[9] "United States remains the world's top producer of petroleum and natural gas hydrocarbons" . EIA.

[10] "Trade recovery expected in 2017 and 2018, amid policy uncertainty" . Geneva, Switzerland: World Trade Organization. 12 April 2017. Retrieved 2017-06-22.

[11] Katsuhiko Hara and Issaku Harada (staff writers) (13 April 2017). "US overtook China as top trading nation in 2016" . Tokyo: Nikkei Asian Review. Retrieved 2017-06-22. Office of the United States Trade Representative, Executive Office of the President, "Trade and Economy," https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/economy-trade

[12] For overall trade patterns, see: Adie Tomer, Robert Puentes, and Joseph Kane, "Metro-to-Metro: Global and Domestic Goods Trade in Metropolitan America" (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2013). For export statistics, see: Brad McDearman, Ryan Donahue, and Nick Marchio, "Export Nation 2013: U.S. Growth Post Recession" (Washington: Brookings Institution, 2013).

[13] "Trade corridors" are streams of commodities that flow within and through spaces in regular geographic patterns.

[14] Source: Brookings analysis of EDR data.

[15] Adie Tomer and Joseph Kane, "Mapping Freight: The Highly Concentrated Nature of Goods Trade in the United States." Global Cities Initiative. A JOINT PROJECT OF BROOKINGS AND JPMORGAN CHASE. November, 2014. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Srvy_GCIFreightNetworks_Oct24.pdf

[16] "Gross Metropolitan Product" . U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. September 29, 2011. Retrieved November 20, 2011.

[17] "Global city GDP rankings 2008-2025" . Pricewaterhouse Coopers. Archived from the original on May 31, 2013. Retrieved November 20,2009.

[18] "State of Working Philadelphia: An Economy Growing Apart," October 25, 2018, https://www.keystoneresearch.org/media-center/press-releases/state-working-philadelphia-economy-growing-apart

[19] " Philadelphia's Poor: Who they are, where they live, and how that has changed," The PEW Charitable Trusts, November 2017, http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2017/11/philadelphias-poor

[20] "US Census Bureau. (2001). Historical Income Tables - Income Equality" . Archived from the original on February 8, 2007. Retrieved June 20, 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20070208142023/http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/ie6.html

"Shaprio, E. (October 17, 2005). New IRS Data Show Income Inequality Is Again of The Rise. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities" . Retrieved June 20, 2007. https://www.cbpp.org/research/new-irs-data-show-income-inequality-is-again-on-the-rise

[21] Wiseman, Paul (September 10, 2013). "Richest 1 percent earn biggest share since '20s" . AP News . Retrieved September 10, 2013. http://apnews.excite.com/article/20130910/DA8NN7U02.html

John Cassidy (November 18, 2013). "American Inequality in Six Charts" . The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/american-inequality-in-six-charts

[22] "State of Working Philadelphia: An Economy Growing Apart," October 25, 2018, https://www.keystoneresearch.org/media-center/press-releases/state-working-philadelphia-economy-growing-apart

[23] "U.S. centrated poverty in the wake of the Great Recession," Elizabeth Kneebone and Natalie Holmes, March 2016 https://www.brookings.edu/research/u-s-concentrated-poverty-in-the-wake-of-the-great-recession/

[24] " Philadelphia's Poor: Who they are, where they live, and how that has changed," http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2017/11/philadelphias-poor

[25] "U.S. centrated poverty in the wake of the Great Recession," https://www.brookings.edu/research/u-s-concentrated-poverty-in-the-wake-of-the-great-recession/

[26] Brookings, "Employment and disconnection among teens and young adults: the role of place, race, and education." https://www.brookings.edu/research/employment-and-disconnection-among-teens-and-young-adults-the-role-of-place-race-and-education/#V0G0

[27] The Divided Metropolis: Social and Spatial Dimensions of Philadelphia, 1800-1975 (Westport, 1980), 141-168.

[28] Restructuring the Philadelphia Region: Metropolitan Divisions and Inequality, (Temple University Press, 2008) . The Deindustrialized World: Confronting Ruination in Postindustrial Places , (UBC Press, 2017).

[29] Workshop of the World, "Philadelphia's Industrial History: Context and Overview,"

http://www.workshopoftheworld.com/overview/overview.html

[30] John Bauman, Public Housing: The Dreadful Sage of a Durable Policy, 57.

[31] Wolfinger, Philadelphia Divided, 99-107, 121-122, 125-133.

[32] Gladys Palmer, Philadelphia's Workers in a Changing Economy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956), page 37.

[33] Philadelphia: Neighborhoods, Division, and Conflict in a Postindustrial City, (Temple University Press, 1991).

[34] David Koistinen, Confronting Decline: The Political Economy of Deindustrialization in Twentieth-Century New England (University Press of Florida; 2013)

[35] Larry Eichel and Octavia Howell, "A Key Driver of Poverty in Philadelphia? The Changing Nature of Work," January 2018, http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/analysis/2018/01/08/a-key-driver-of-poverty-in-philadelphia-the-changing-nature-of-work

[36] Barry Bluestone and Bennet Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America (New York: Basic Books, 1982). http://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/workshop-of-the-world/#sthash.FIcRzwW3.dpuf

[37] Adams, Bartelt, Elesh, Goldstein,Restructuring the Philadelphia Region: Metropolitan Divisions and Inequality, 56.

[38] Restructuring the Philadelphia Region , 37.

[39] Philadelphia , "Economic Erosion," pages 55-56.

[40] Capital , 769.

[41] Capital , vol 3: 358.

[42] Capital , "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation," 772-773.

[43] Capital , 798.

[44] Capital , "Machinery and Large-Scale Industry," 582.

[45] Capital , "Machinery and Large-Scale Industry," 580-82.

[46] "Inequality on the Rise?: An Assessment of Current Available Data on Income Inequality, at Global, International, and National Levels," Servio Vieira, December 2012, http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/policy/wess/wess_bg_papers/bp_wess2013_svieira1.pdf

Marx for Today: A Socialist-Feminist Reading

By Johanna Brenner

Considering his work as a whole, Marx had little to say directly about women's oppression or the relationship between patriarchy and capitalism. (1) And some of what he had to say was, well, misguided. Yet Marxist feminists have drawn on his thought to create a distinctive approach to understanding these issues. (2)

Marxist feminists begin, where Marx does, with collective labor. Human beings must organize labor socially in order to produce what we need to survive; how socially necessary labor is organized, in turn, shapes the organization of all of social life. In The German Ideology, Marx articulated this foundational starting point:

"The fact is, therefore, that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations. Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production. The social structure and the State are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they may appear in their own or other people's imagination, but as they actually are; i.e. as they act, produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will." (MECW 5:37)

When Marx refers to individuals who are productively active in a definite way, he is thinking primarily about the production of material goods. Marxist feminists expand the notion of socially necessary labor to include that part of collective labor that meets individual needs for sustenance and daily renewal as well as birthing and rearing the next generation.

The term "social reproduction" has been developed to refer to this labor. (3) By social reproduction is meant the activities and attitudes, behaviors and emotions, responsibilities and relationships directly involved in maintaining life on a daily basis and inter-generationally.

Social reproduction involves various kinds of socially necessary work - mental, physical and emotional - aimed at meeting historically and socially, as well as biologically, defined needs and, through meeting these needs, maintaining and reproducing the population.

Among other things, social reproduction includes how food, clothing and shelter are made available for immediate consumption, how the maintenance and socialization of children is accomplished, how care of the elderly and infirm is provided, how adults receive social and emotional support, and how sexuality is experienced. From this starting point, we can see how gender and gender relations - such as a gender division of labor - are social, historical constructs, embedded in structures of social reproduction.

Actually existing capitalist societies each have their own histories and trajectories of change, and gender relations are structured across a diverse terrain. While recognizing this complexity, socialist-feminists have drawn on Marx's work to analyze how patriarchal relations work in capitalist societies. By going back to Marx's texts, I want to highlight some aspects of this socialist-feminist theoretical framework.

Social Reproduction and Gendered Division of Labor

That we speak of production on the one hand and social reproduction on the other is, in part, an artifact of both the (masculinist) development of Marxist thought and the nature of the capitalist mode of production. In capitalism, the work done in households, although crucial to the reproduction of human beings, is separated off from the production and circulation of commodities. In comparison, with the exception of slavery, in pre-capitalist class societies, households organized through marriage and kinship were the basic unit for organizing the production of material goods as well as human care.

As Marx pointed out, in capitalist production commodities (including commodified services) are both use values and exchange values. (MECW 35:45-46) That is, they meet a need (otherwise there would be no point in making them); but they are not produced in order to meet needs. Rather, they are produced to generate surplus value - or profit.

From the point of view of the production of use values, waged and unwaged labor form a unified process which has, as its end result, the reproduction of human beings. The separation of what is, from the point of view of production of use values, an integrated process into two different types of labor (commodified and uncommodified) is a result of capitalist class relations of production, not a universal fact of human social life.

This separation parallels the emergence of divisions between the public and private spheres, between family and work, between the state and the economy. These are also a hallmark of capitalist societies. These double separations - economy/household and economy/state - have shaped the history of gender relations and women's struggles to change them within capitalist societies.

Until now, all known systems of social reproduction have been based on a gendered division of labor (albeit sometimes quite rigid, at other times more flexible). Although this pattern appears to be mandated biologically - by the physical requirements of procreation and the needs of infants - the distribution of the work of social reproduction among families, communities, markets, states and between women and men has varied historically. This variation can be analyzed, at least in part, as the outcome of struggles around class and gender, struggles that are often about sexuality and emotional relations as well as political power and economic resources.

In societies that preceded capitalism, property rights were vested in male household heads and formed the basis of patriarchal authority - literally the rule of the fathers. For capitalist class relations to emerge, this system of property rights had to be overthrown. The forcible legal and extra-legal processes through which men were deprived of their property and turned into wage laborers threatened to undermine this patriarchal system - at least for the working class. Observing the extreme exploitation of women and children in the 19th century factories, Marx argued in Capital, Vol. I:

"However terrible and disgusting the dissolution, under the capitalist system, of the old family ties may appear, nevertheless, modern industry, by assigning as it does an important part in the process of production, outside the domestic sphere, to women, to young persons and to children of both sexes, creates a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of the relations between the sexes…Moreover, it is obvious that the fact of the collective working group being composed of individuals of both sexes and all ages, must necessarily, under suitable conditions, become a source of humane development; although in its spontaneously developed, brutal, capitalistic form, where the labourer exists for the process of production, and not the process of production for the labourer, that fact is a pestiferous source of corruption and slavery." (MECW vol. 35:492-493)

Although Marx was vague about how this higher form of family and relations between the sexes would be constituted, he was quite clear in his critique of the bourgeois family where male property owners continued to hold sway over their wives and children.

"But you communists would introduce community of women, screams the whole bourgeoisie in chorus. The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women. He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production." (MECW 6: 502)

Marx insisted that there was no "natural" or "transhistorical" family form. Thus, he argued, in Capital Vol. I, "It is, of course, just as absurd to hold the Teutonic-Christian form of the family to be absolute and final as it would be to apply that character to the ancient Roman, the ancient Greek, or the Eastern forms which, moreover, taken together form a series in historical development." (MECW 35:492).

While Marx never developed his analysis of this historical evolution, his notes on the family in pre-capitalist societies point to a more dialectical approach than that taken by Engels, for whom the introduction of private property determines the "world historical defeat of the female sex." For example, Marx points to the simultaneous emergence of hierarchical rank and men's collective control over women (as captives/slaves) in clan societies prior to the development of private property. (Brown 2013)

Marx was in one sense right about the long-run possibilities for challenging patriarchal family relations that inhere in women's access to wage labor. However, his critique of exploitative employment, while exposing the destruction of women's and children's health and well-being, also drew on ideals of feminine virtue that were central to the "separate spheres" gender ideology of his age - thus the reference to the "corrupting" influence of factory work under capitalism. (4)

Marx tended to conflate physical and moral health in his scathing critiques of 19th century working conditions, and reserved special condemnation for instances where gender differences were undermined, as in his selection of this quote from a commission report in Capital Vol. I:

"The greatest evil of the system that employs young girls on this sort of work consists in this…They become rough, foul-mouthed boys, before Nature has taught them that they are women…they learn to treat all feelings of decency and of shame with contempt…Their heavy day's work at length completed, they put on better clothes and accompany the men to the public houses." (MECW 35: 467)

An even more important problem with Marx's analysis is that he does not fully incorporate the sheer amount of caring labor required for human survival, and insofar as he does pay attention tends to assume that it is naturally women's work. Marx occasionally indicates the importance of women's domestic work, as, for example, in Capital, Vol. I describing the disastrous consequences for the family (and the increased profit for the employer) in the employment of women and children alongside men:

"Compulsory work for the capitalist usurped the place, not only of the children's play, but also of free labour at home within moderate limits for the support of the family. The value of labour-power was determined, not only by the labour time necessary to maintain the individual adult labourer but also by that necessary to maintain his family. Machinery, by throwing every member of that family on to the labour-market, spreads the value of the man's labour-power over his whole family." (MECW 35:398-399)

Marx goes on to argue that because the family must rely more on purchasing commodities rather than domestic work, "[t]he cost of keeping the family increases, and balances the greater income." Increasing the number of wage earners does not raise but lowers the family's standard of living, because "economy and judgment in the consumption and preparation of the means of subsistence becomes impossible." In other words, the value inherent in women's domestic skills is lost.

During the U.S. Civil War, which disrupted the cotton trade, textile workers in England suffered massive layoffs. Here, Marx argues, the women operatives "had time to cook. Unfortunately the acquisition of the art occurred at a time when they had nothing to cook. But from this we see how capital, for the purposes of its self-expansion, has usurped the labour necessary in the home of the family." (MECW 35:399).

Marx thus identified a central contradiction of capitalism - that although capital depends on the reproduction of labor power, the demand for profit threatens to undermine the reproduction of laborers themselves. Marx captured this conundrum in his famous ironic comment in Capital Vol. I: "The maintenance and reproduction of the working-class is, and must ever be, a necessary condition to the reproduction of capital. But the capitalist may safely leave its fulfillment to the labourer's instincts of self-preservation and of propagation." (MECW 35:572).

Labor power differs in a fundamental way from other factors of production. The capitalist who invests in machinery can be reasonably sure to get the fruits of his investment. Indeed, as a rule, capitalists must invest to raise productivity in order to cut costs and compete. In contrast, the capitalist has no hold over the children of his current employees and so is reluctant to pay a wage that can support them. There is thus a tendency toward pushing wages below the bare minimum:

"In the chapters on the production of surplus-value it was constantly pre-supposed that wages are at least equal to the value of labour-power. Forcible reduction of wages below this value plays, however, in practice too important a part, for us not to pause upon it for a moment. It, in fact, transforms, within certain limits, the labourer's necessary consumption-fund into a fund for the accumulation of capital …If labourers could live on air they could not be bought at any price. The zero of their cost is therefore a limit in a mathematical sense, always beyond reach, although we can always approximate more and more nearly to it. The constant tendency of capital is to force the cost of labour back towards zero." (Capital Vol. I, MECW 35:595-596)

From this perspective, the capacity of the working class to reproduce itself depends on the working class itself - on the level and extent of class struggle. Through struggle over the length of the working day, over wages, over the conditions of work, over the extent of the welfare state and other public services, working-class people have wrenched from capitalist employers the means to care for themselves and their children.

At the same time, the forms these struggles took - how working-class men and women defined their goals, organized their forces, developed their strategies - were shaped by institutionalized relations of power and privilege formed around race, gender, sexuality and nationality. In particular, working-class women's responsibilities for caregiving, and the conditions under which they do this work, have often disadvantaged them in relation to men within both informal and formal arenas of political contestation and decision-making.

On the other hand, women find a ground for respect, authority and power in their care responsibilities. And where women cooperate across households in order to accomplish their work in social reproduction, they create the social basis for collective action. Women's location in the labor of social reproduction, then, is a resource for resistance as well as a source of disempowerment.

By undermining older forms of individual patriarchal control over women's labor within family households, capitalist expansion has opened up possibilities for women's political self-organization - but the organization of social reproduction in a capitalist economy where millions are, from the point of view of capitalist employers, nothing more than a "surplus population," constitutes the basis for new forms of women's oppression.

Some feminists have named this a shift from private to public patriarchy, because it is based in the first instance on men's collective access to public power rather than on their direct control over household members through property ownership. The question remains, however, why are men able to sustain greater access to public power, given that bourgeois democracy at first in principle and, through decades of feminist struggle eventually in fact, confers equal citizen rights on men and women?

Compelling answers to this question have been developed by feminists who start from the observation that discourses of gender difference are central to the constitution and legitimation of political power. (5) Although discourses of gender difference certainly have an effect, from a Marxist feminist standpoint, we would add that ideas do not sustain themselves without some grounding in everyday experience.

This was of course one of Marx's great insights when describing the "fetishism of commodities." That relationships between people come to be seen as relationships between things is a reflection of the wage relation in commodity production. This is not a "false consciousness" in the sense of ideas imposed by cultural and social forces; rather, it is a world­view that expresses, or is consonant with, actual experience under the relations imposed by the commodity form.

In the same way, to understand how male domination sustains itself in any given moment, we have to look for the underlying social relations that confer a logic on, make sensible and even productive, discourses of gender difference.

The resistance of capitalist employers to investing in the reproduction of labor power, competition among workers, the individualizing pressures of the wage form itself, all push in the direction of privatizing rather than socializing caregiving work. But so long as caregiving remains a private responsibility of households whose members must engage in substantial hours of both waged and unwaged labor, the gender division of labor will retain a compelling logic.

Of course, individual and family survival strategies based in a gender division of labor are not simply the outcome of rational responses by men and women to material difficulties. They also reflect women's and men's interests and desires which are shaped socially and culturally as well as economically. (6)

Class Relations and Social Reproduction

Three other features of the capitalist system that Marx identified are helpful to us in thinking about how social reproduction - and the gender division of labor within it - have come to be organized and changed over time.

First is the drive toward commodification that arises from capitalist competition and the search for new arenas for profit-making. Here again, we see the two-sided nature of capitalist expansion - in enabling challenges to patriarchal forms, and at the same time limiting what those challenges can accomplish.

As capitalism penetrates all areas of human activity, use values are turned into commodities - things to be bought and sold rather than given, bartered or produced for one's own use. The conversion of use values into exchange values (commodities) ties people more firmly to the capitalist economy, because in order to consume one has to earn.

On the other hand, ever-expanding possibilities for consumption allow and encourage new forms of individual identification and self-expression. As Rosemary Hennessy points out, in the early 20th century:

"(S)tructural changes in capitalist production that involved technological developments, the mechanization and consequent deskilling of work, the production boom brought on by technological efficiency, the opening of new consumer markets, and the eventual development of a widespread consumer culture…displaced unmet needs into new desires and offered the promise of compensatory pleasure, or a least the promise of pleasure in the form of commodity consumption…This process took place on multiple fronts and involved the formation of newly desiring subjects, forms of agency, intensities of sensation, and economies of pleasure that were consistent with the requirements of a more mobile workforce and a growing consumer culture." (Hennessy 2000: 99)

The spread of consumerism, wage labor, urbanization, the decline of small businesses and the related rise of new professions whose practitioners were a driving force toward state regulation of bodies (e.g. medicine, public health, social work, psychology) all laid the basis for a reorganization of sexuality and family life, particularly in the middle class. Older patriarchal norms of motherhood, marriage and sexuality were overturned, but replaced by a heteronormative regime that re-inscribed the gender division of labor. (7)

By the end of the 20th century, intensified commodification, as Alan Sears argues, had not only generated the spaces of open lesbian and gay existence, but also consolidated gay visibility around a class and race specific identity that relies predominantly on the capacity to consume. (Sears 2005: 92-112)

The more life becomes organized around the production and consumption of commodities, the more people are encouraged/allowed to regard every aspect of their humanity as a potential for making money. The logic of possessive individualism and the commodification of labor power that is its foundation creates a powerful drive toward regarding affection, sexuality, and even biological reproductive capacities as commodities that can be bought and sold.

As Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto, describing the spread of capitalist social relations: "All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify." (MECW 6: 487)

The infinitely repeated counterposition of modernity and tradition, culture and nature, sacred and profane in contemporary political discourses revolves around the dualism between exchange value and use value - between that which can or should be sold and that which cannot or should not be.

There is no way out of this dualism, and therefore out of the debate, so long as the conditions under which people possess their bodily capacities are governed by the scarcity and insecurity of life under capitalism. In a context of coercion, which is always present so long as people are separated from their means of survival, it is difficult to distinguish labor that is meaningful and freely chosen from that which is not.

The commodification of procreation (not all of which requires new reproductive technologies) offers new fields for profit-making, while also expanding access to biological parenthood for new groups: gay men (e.g. egg "donation"/surrogacy), lesbians (e.g. sperm banks) and infertile heterosexual couples (e.g. surrogacy, in vitro fertilization). Commodification of procreation undermines ideals of motherhood as a naturally mandated identity and challenges religious and biologically based legitimations of patriarchal family relations, replacing them with contractual norms of choice and consent.

At the same time, commodification of procreation also opens up new possibilities for generating profit through the exploitation of women's reproductive capacities (e.g. in surrogate pregnancy and egg donation), while defining women's access to these new forms of earning income to be their right as "free" wage earners. (8)

A second feature of capitalist production relations that shapes the organization of social reproduction and the gender division of labor is capitalist control over the work process. As Marx points out, insofar as workers control important aspects of the production process they have a basis for resistance; therefore, capitalist employers seek to minimize workers' control through deskilling and through supervision.

In Capital Vol. I, Marx distinguishes between the coordination required for a complex cooperative labor process and the very different work of control necessitated by the capitalist character of that process, which creates an "unavoidable antagonism between the exploiter and the living and labouring raw material he exploits."(MECW 35: 336).

He goes on to say, "If then the control of the capitalist is in substance two-fold by reason of the two-fold nature of the process of production itself - which on the one hand is a social process for producing use values, on the other a process for creating surplus value - in form that control is despotic."' (MECW 35: 337)

Managerial strategies for controlling labor create, incorporate and reproduce relations of power and privilege organized by race, gender, nationality and sexuality (Burawoy 1979; Munoz 2008). Processes of gendering, racializing, and sexualizing bodies and identities, embedded in capitalist management, take up and reinforce hegemonic constructions of gender dualism that are central to the gendered division of labor in social reproduction. At the same time, strategies of working class resistance to managerial power at the workplace and in the broader society also reflect relations of power and privilege organized by race, gender, sexuality, etc. and may constrain management in ways that benefit some workers at the expense of others. For example, local labor markets, and therefore the wages of different groups of workers, are shaped by political processes and not only economic ones.

The consequence of workers' loss of control over the ways in which labor is coordinated - and the capitalist drive to extract as much surplus labor as possible - is that the full range of human needs cannot be incorporated into decisions about how production is organized.

In no capitalist society is production organized to take into account, to actively support, and to provide for, the socially necessary labor of care. This work is extensive, highly skilled and labor intensive, even though it is often thought of as unskilled and inherent to feminine nature. Even the most "family friendly" welfare state regimes, such as Sweden, do not intrude substantially on private firms' employment policies.

A third feature of capitalism is that exploitation takes place through the free exchange of the wage contract, and therefore requires the separation of political and economic power. One of the most important shifts in the organization of social reproduction in capitalist societies over the past century has been the emergence of the welfare state - the expansion of public (government) responsibility for education, healthcare, and childrearing, as well as increased (and often oppressive) state regulation of families, especially those in the vulnerable parts of the working class (e.g. immigrants, oppressed racial/ethnic groups, the poor, single mothers).

Although it is tempting to understand these developments as state managers acting in the longterm interests of the capitalist class - stepping in to guarantee the reproduction of the labor force when the capitalist employers will not - we might instead follow Marx's lead in focusing our attention on the self-organization of the working class.

In Capital Vol. I, describing the victory that enforceable legal limits on the working day represented, Marx sarcastically describes the "conversion" of factory owners and their ideologues to the ideal of regulation following their defeat at the hands of the working class:

"The masters from whom the legal limitation and regulation had been wrung step by step after a civil war of half a century, themselves referred ostentatiously to the contrast with the branches of exploitation still 'free'[of regulation]. The Pharisees of 'political economy' now proclaimed the discernment of the necessity of a legally fixed working-day as a characteristic new discovery of their 'science.'" (MECW 35: 300)

The extent and form of government expansion into social reproduction is the outcome of reform struggles in which middle-class and working-class men and women, not only capitalist employers and state managers, played important roles. As products of struggle, state policies reflect the level and purposes of women's political self-organization but also the different resources and power available to women and men in different classes and racial/ethnic groups.

Moreover, the terrain on which these groups have engaged is hardly neutral. Developments in the capitalist economy provided political openings and political resources - for example, by drawing women into wage labor - but capitalist class interests also placed constraints on what could be won.

These constraints have been exercised mainly in two ways. First, especially in the liberal market economies, capitalist employers have consistently - and for the most part successfully - resisted government intrusions on their business practices and significant taxation of their profits. More fundamentally, state managers and legislators are ultimately dependent on economic growth and prosperity, which in turn is controlled by capitalist investors. (9)

By acknowledging these constraints, we can better understand how and why state welfare policies have institutionalized rather than challenged the gender division of labor. For example, in the early 20th century United States, the first government programs to support solo mothers emerged out of a period of intense working-class mobilization and politicization; a broad women's movement that engaged organized women workers and Black clubwomen, but whose activists and leaders were predominately white and middle-class/upper-class women; and the interventions of new professional groups who offered their expertise to manage, uplift, and assimilate the unruly classes.

In the context of powerful opposition from the employing class and reflecting its constellation of race/class forces, the movement's predominant discourses sought to legitimize government provision by asserting that paid work was detrimental to good mothering. (Mink 1995; Brenner 2000)

Conclusion

Many contemporary feminist activists and thinkers recognize that gender relations cannot be abstracted from other social relations - of class, race, sexuality, nationality, and so forth. Marx hardly resolved the question of how we might theorize this totality of social relations. (10) Still, his analysis of capitalism as a mode of production provides a fruitful starting point for a feminist theory and practice that might not only understand this totality but also engage in movements that can finally transform it.

This originally appeared at Solidarity .

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.