Black Metamodernism: The Metapolitics of Economic Justice and Racial Equality

By Brent Cooper

I'd been thinking about this idea for a while before a redditor asked the very pointed question: Are there any black metamodernists? I didn't really have a complete answer yet, which is 'yes and no.' It's a complicated question, and it doesn't seem like many are rushing to answer it. Mostly no in the explicit sense like Hanzi , of developing the "metamodern" concept and advancing a program beyond the discourse of the Dutch school . But yes in many other ways, both explicit and implict.

Black to the Future

For starters, there is one obscure but direct source for 'black metamodernism,' in Transatlantic dialogue: contemporary art in and out of Africa , 1999 (limited to a snippet view). Art history professor Moyo Okediji described contemporary African-American art in terms of metamodernism as an "extension of and challenge to modernism and postmodernism." Without access I cannot offer a thorough review, but the point is clear; black metamodernism exists and was another one mostly missed.

The book jacket lists a number of black artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat. He is considered a type of black metamodernist described as 'returnee artists'; "African-American artists who return from Africa with a new awareness of their identiy that affects their work." (from Monni Adams book review ). This concept could certainly apply to Malcolm X or Dave Chappelle as well, who were forever changed and radicalized by their pilgrimages to Africa. I think metanoia, a fundamental change of mind, plays such a role in metamodern sensibility. All of this seems to align with metamodern critique, art, praxis, and values, and yet we do not hear much about a black metamodernism today.

Martin Luther King has already been accurately characterized as metamodern by Alexandra Dumitrescu, who thinks "he might have been a metamodernist avant la lettre ," and I couldn't agree more. King had a vision so progressive that it is only just being fully realized (actualized) today. The dream was cut short by his assassination, for which the white establishment is necessarily implicated. Even though he's gone and from a different era, his actions and ideas resonate now in a crucial way because they are still not achieved, so it's a battleground issue (conservatives try to co-opt and re-write MLK). And if we are going to mention MLK, perhaps we should also include Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Fred Hampton and countless other black activists ahead of their time, as implicitly metamodern.

Cornel West could be a metamodern thinker, pictured above, but he has never used the term, and this distinction matters, given its history at this point and his ability to wax on postmodernism. As I addressed in Gonzálezean Metamodernism, West is a good candidate to embrace the discourse, not only because he is invoked by González in that context, but because more broadly black theology is at the root of Hispanic liberation theology, and West is a cutting edge philosopher of sorts. Now is as good a time as any to (re-)introduce black metamodernism, as it builds on the turn González proposed for Hispanic Americans. Black people too are metamodern aliens in the postmodern promise land.

In Whose (Meta)modernism?: Metamodernism, Race, and the Politics of Failure (2018), James Brunton asks the right question, but also misses the source material I've mentioned. He draws his theory from Vermeulen and van den Akker, and David James and Urmila Seshagiri (2014), as well as many black poets, but he is yet another scholar 'missing metamodernism' in the broader sense I describe, and Okediji 's black metamodernism specifically.

This is a call to action to implicit black metamodernists, many of whom I discuss here, to cross over, to represent, and join the paradigm shift explicitly; my inspiration for metamodernism has in part already come from many of them. Wolfgenghis_Khan wants you; and so do we. I have written just two other articles about race/ black issues; one about black abstract art (where Basquiat is mentioned), and one about how racism is "abstracted " (made obscure), particularly by white racism against black people in the US. These are facets of my approach to metamodernism, and how abstraction can reveal or obscure the nature of racial politics and discourse. And in those I also have missed much of what I describe in this article, so it is all (re)combining into a broader black metamodernism.

Green Metamodernism

In terms of metamodern theory itself we can consider Nordic or Dutch as varieties of green metamodernism. The are green by being or having moved from the left beyond the liberal status-quo, but also green in the sense of being inexperienced or naive. To be sure, they are brilliant, but green (new, fresh) compared to their metamodern forebearers who have been missed. In the dominant Dutch School (art/ history/ culture) mode, the artist Reggie Watts is considered metamodern for his mind-boggling and heart-warming sincere absurdism. Donald Glover is metamodern too, as described here (2014), and here (2017), not least for his meta-humour in the metamodern show Community. Also, here is very comprehensive site, Metamodernity and Because the Internet , dedicated to the study of Donald Glover/ Childish Gambino and metamodernism. And this is all before his song/video " This is America " (2018) made a profound statement about race. After, we can understand him better through a lens of black metamodernism.

Green metamodernists generally do not theorize race directly or explicitly, although Hanzi has deconstructed the alt-right at some length . The general aversion is probably in part because the importance of the subject is generally implied as metamodernism is ostensibly about synthesizing and transcending both the postmodern critique (which includes the intersectionality of race, gender, class, etc) and its target, modernism. Race just becomes a smaller but still important detail in a broader context of meta-theory, planetary crisis, and metamorphosis (systems-change). But race theory is also peripheral in part because these metamodern epistemic communities are mostly white people who are tacit allies.

On the other hand, 'black metamodern' discourse has not been maintained or linked up with contemporary metamodern discourse. So the problem is two-way. This crossover should happen for two reasons: 1) by metamodernism not addressing it, it appears racialized, ignorant, or biased, and 2) by black discourses not combining with the broader paradigm shift, it remains disempowered and marginalized by the anti-postmodern and white nationalist political climate.

Metamodernism, from its Dutch and Nordic schools of origin, appears to have a eurocentric and white bias, though they have a global orientation and sensibility, as well as tacit understanding and concern about systemic racism. As we've seen in all versions, metamodernism doesn't ignorantly deny the merits of postmodern critique, or abandon social justice that conservatives and centrists have written off, nor does it embrace the full excesses of SJW culture and what has been termed 'grievance studies' literature by some determined IDW-adjacent academic hoaxers - The whole problem there is that they don't realize that all academia/ scholarship has similar problems (even their own fields, which aren't social science), but they are singling out and mocking social justice while social justice isn't being achieved in reality.

But metamodernism hasn't yet provided a clear or viral enough answer for the postmodern impasse. Or at least we've tried, and few have paid attention. Meanwhile, the new centrism of the Intellectual Dark Web has filled the void (or rather spoke over the Other) with anti-postmodern and anti-social justice diatribes that actually inflame systemic racism (which they deny exists). Those on the left who have already united against the IDW would do better to understand their moves as metamodern, and generate greater collective coherence as such.

The IDW would have you believe progressivism is a lost cause, yet they stand in the way, provide no alternative, and tune out the people actually working on those problems. The IDW remain do not engage with actual leftist politics, let alone black sociology. I offered a broad critique of the IDW over a year ago , trying to pre-emptively assuage the culture war, much of which still holds up. The IDW have gotten worse in some respects, have been critiqued harder, and now is quickly crumbing and becoming obsolscent, giving rise to a new emergent discourse.

There is also the odd (right-wing) person who is fond of metamodernism, but interprets it for their own ends without really understanding it. They support Trump. They like Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Haidt. They are against immigration for personal (identity) reasons. They have no interest in the thorough critiques of any of these things. They, of course, have also been missing the metamodernisms as I have described in this series, but also in the contemporary sense that comes from Dutch and Nordic versions, because there's nothing in those sources to inspire right-wing ideology. On the contrary, they demand a much closer read of history, theory, and social consciousness.

In general, metamodernism is post-political, beyond the left-right spectrum, and refers to the era we are in (and so does hypermodernity). But along a particular axis of issues, metamodernism as a movement and sociological theory is uniformly aligned with the leftist movement today, as it is expressed throughout this series (vis-a-vis technology, liberation theology, black socialism), and some of my other writings. This doesn't mean conservatives aren't welcome to participate and contribute - they are - but it means zero tolerance for ignorance about what postmodernism actually means, and regressive dogmas about climate change or social justice. In the Dutch and Nordic versions, metamodernism assumes the viability of a socialist steady state, not surprisingly because they are from successful ones, and are relatively successful in such societies. The idea is to provide that to everyone, and it's not a pipedream.

Metamodernism, by all available standards, reflects a progressive culture towards a cosmopolitan post-capitalist demilitarized vision of society that will mitigate climate risk, not an ethnonationalist hyper-capitalist militarist denialist prophecy of social control that will accelerate and exacerbate collapse. The choice is starkly contrasted, and the latter is called hypermodernism, not metamodernism. With this in mind, I see no right-wing person actually theorizing metamodernity, coherently at least, but there is still a need for a course correction in green metamodernism by black metamodernism.

Back in Black Metamodernism

My role here is not to be an expert on black metamodernism per se, but to defer to the real experts in their fields and to help widen the space of the new discourse. Outstanding black scholars are not in short supply, but are still fighting an uphill battle against a white-privileged status-quo. Many are immensely wise, strong willed, and influential, and yet lack the clout they truly deserve. Their critiques have not reached far enough to affect the needed change. And the lack of convergence through metamodernism has not helped either.

Notable black thinkers/ activists/ leaders include Cornel West, Charles W. Mills , Tressie Mcmillan Cottom, Michelle Alexander, Ta-nehisi Coates, Michael Eric Dyson, Benjamin Dixon, Mansa Keita, Bill Fletcher Jr., Wosny Lambre, Briahna Joy Grey, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Presley, Kwame Anthony Appiah , Patricia Hill Collins , Kimberlé W. Crenshaw , Angela Y. Davis , Henry Louis Gates, Jr. , and many more . Could this be a cross section of black metamodern thought? Many of them have theorized or criticized postmodernism as well, so it would not be a stretch to entertain metamodernism, especially with these added perspectives (Borgmann, González, black, in addition to Dutch and Nordic strands).

This negligence of black metamodernism is part of the wider pattern of Missing Metamodernism  - even amongst black scholars. They could perhaps be forgiven for not dropping everything and devoting themselves to Dutch or Nordic metamodern developments, but they also have a precedent with 'black metamodernism,' so we hope they will learn and develop it with us and speak up. Take up this meta- mantle and converge with metamodernism more broadly, to develop a new paradigm.

Much of the public discourse is not lacking in racial awareness, evidenced by the following TED talks, but it's a broader question of some (white) people's interests and attention spans. And the mainstream media is still deeply filtered and divisive over race issues. My purpose here is just to share some of what's out there, so that it can't be ignored or missed by those interested in metamodernism. And so it can't be denied by the centrists and right-wingers that want to preserve some mythical abstraction of white Western civilization. The point is that black culture was metamodern before some industrious white people rediscovered metamodernism.

In The Dangers of Whitewashing Black History, David Ikard recounts the story of his son in Grade 4, who was taught that Rosa Parks was frail old black women, diminishing her life-long struggle and the story of social justice behind her. David wanted to confront the teacher, but because of his experience with the "white fragility" of some people, he knew that might be a bad idea. So he instructed his son to learn the true history, which he did, and his son gave a speech debunking the myth. The teacher apologized to student, and subsequently retaught the Rosa Parks lecture. This is why Rosa Parks wrote her autobiography, so she could tell her own story, David said, but it still so easily becomes whitewashed. In 1950s, lynching was normal. MLK's house was bombed twice. Rosa parks was not an 'accidental activist.' These facts are often submerged by a more sanitized narrative.

Then there was a book draft David reviewed for his brilliant white professor "Fred" (not his real name) while he was a graduate student. Fred was writing a history of the civil rights movement, David explains, "specifically about a moment that happened to him in North Carolina when this white man shot this black man in cold blood in a wide-open space and was never convicted." David saw a problem in a particular personal story of how Fred talked with his black maid (which already has racial undertones in itself).

1968, MLK had just been assassinated, Fred is 8 years old, and his maid is crying and he asks why. "It'll be okay" he says… "Didn't Jesus die on the cross for our sins?" and 'maybe things will work out.' The maid, despondent as she was, tempered herself and gave little Fred a hug and a cold Pepsi. For Fred, it was proof people could cross racial lines to overcome adversity; that love could conquer all; he did a good thing. David called bullshit. The story wasn't about the maid, it was a selfish story about Fred naively thinking he was helping. The whole episode was clouded by the fact Fred was technically her employer, so she couldn't get mad at him. After being called out, Fred then realized that he misread the moment.

And there is many more TEDx that challenge basic misconceptions and expose systemic racism: Black Self / White World - lessons on internalized racism | Jabari Lyles | TEDxTysonsSalon (2017); White Men: Time to Discover Your Cultural Blind Spots | Michael Welp | TEDxBend (2017); Let's get to the root of racial injustice | Megan Ming Francis (2016). Not to mention the ample books and documentaries out there.

From the Intellectual White Web to Black Lives Matter

The more you know, the less ignorant you are, but some people can't be bothered. From the current smorgasbord of trashy thought leaders, Jordan Peterson is probably the most obtuse white person one can picture. He is tacitly against identity politics and racism, white supremacy, and white nationalism, while not having a clue how they actually operate in the world and through his own discourse. The Peterson paradox is being able to unironically praise MLK in one sentence and condemn his core values (like democratic socialism ) in another without an inkling of cognitive dissonance.

Imagine being so functionally ignorant of systemic racism that you lecture about how 'white privilege is a marxist lie' at Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC (2018), behind a picture of Abe Lincoln, as if that means something in this context. It is scholarly dereliction to be so ignorant about those concepts, to say the very least. And then to cry crocodile tears when Michael Eric Dyson calls you out as a "mean mad white man." And then for your demagogic bile and self-help slop to fuel the xenophobic incel rage of white nationalist shooters. And then to get even angrier that you have incessant critics, as if don't they have something important to explain to you. And then you give a high school book report of The Communist Manifesto to Zizek. But at least you've made over $1M in the past year and are now doing a business scam thing with Kobe Bryant and George W. Bush , and chumming with far right politicians who want to purge humanities teachers. So much for classical liberalism. Fear not mean white man, have a cold Pepsi, we know you're doing your best, just like "Fred" was with his maid.

At the end of the day black metamodernism is not just about the 'black' modifier; it's not self-interested minorities with narrow identitarian priorities, like their white majority racist counterparts. Many black scholars do not dwell on race, they are well rounded, but rather race is forced upon them because of their skin color and place in society. Some become experts by choice, others by circumstance. The dream is for racial equality and economic solidarity, not black supremacy, but white anxiety keeps murdering this dream, keeping the nightmare (whitemare?) alive and well in America.

"Black Lives Matter" (BLM) is actually a proportional response to the criminalization of drugs, profiling of minorities, and being incarcerated or killed by racist or paranoid cops. Whether the cops are overtly racist or subconsciously is beside the point, because they are still racist in effect and consequence. Opponents of BLM generally miss the point, only seeing a black power grab, but that itself is a racist interpretation based on ignorance, fear, and (social) media distortion and polarization. The reality is, as Brunton described it;

"The Black Lives Matter movement argues that we need to recognize precisely the opposite of what the movement's hashtag declares that is, historically, white patriarchy has failed to treat black lives as though they matter. American liberal democracy has failed to provide the rights and privileges of citizenship to a large portion of the citizenry, and the election of a black president has failed to usher in a post-racial society." - Brunton, Whose (Meta)modernism?: Metamodernism, Race, and the Politics of Failure (2018)

Like with MLK, this progressive (black) metamodernism includes the racial struggle, but is about the larger quest for socio-economic and even environmental justice. As such, black metamodernism is not reducible to a shallow form of identity politics. To avoid this caricature, the first task is to consolidate the new subfield as metamodern, as could be done for each path in (ie. Borgmann, González, etc…). The second task is to re-integrate back into a broader more inclusive notion of metamodernism to address the meta-crisis of hyper-capitalism. This series tries to advance both tasks in a small way.

Furthermore, it's all about climate change now, the anthropocene, and (quite certain) global existential risks that humanity are creating. There is this overriding sentiment that if 'we're all going to die' then might as well do the right thing now. And as you can see (below), black metamodernists are already ahead of this curve, which is why we should already be united under one paradigmatic umbrella.

The Black Socialists of America were on the podcast New Models - Episode 12: BLACK SOCIALISTS (Z, Busta, Keller, @LILINTERNET ). They describe how they founded it response to how Cornel West was attacked by "black liberals" for critiquing Ta-nehisi Coates, and realized there wasn't a real platform for Black American socialists, anti-capitalists, leftists, etc. At 7:30, they start to get into it;"I don't want to slam postmodernism too hard here but…" Needless to say, they are beyond postmodernism, and have a thoughtful critique that could be described as metamodern.

The Michael Brooks Show (TMBS) invokes black sociology often (consider the work of the Association of Black Sociologists on twitter too), especially with the frequent guest Bill Fletcher Jr . Brooks is so committed his twitter bio says "Member of the Yacubian Left," a nod to the theory that an ancient 'black scientist' created white people through eugenics. On TMBS 91 " Wonkery Won't Save Us & Green Imperialism ," Brandon Sutton (The Discourse podcast) was recently on to brilliantly break down systemic racism and the neoliberal agenda (May 21, 2019). Sutton is also cautious about cancel culture and performative wokeness that run the risk of undermining their goals. TMBS has been critical of Kanye's politics and black activism (vis-a-vis Trump), from black perspectives. Briahna Joy Gray (former Intercept editor and now Bernie's press secretary) is a regular guest too.

Michael Brooks and guests have been the most incisive critics of the IDW, because they already have this implicit metamodern awareness, as noted in Gonzálezean metamodernism. To be sure, black metamodernists would go after the mostly white Intellectual Dark Web, not join it like Candace Owens, Coleman Hughes, or Thomas Sowell to be instruments for a racist status-quo. See ' Coleman Hughes is bad for the discourse ', and this vid , and James B. Stewart, Thomas Sowell's Quixotic Quest to Denigrate African American Culture (2006). Hughes and Sowell, despite whatever intellectual merits, are truly not grounded in racial reality, and are certainly not metamodernists, but reactionary modernists.

Last Light on Black

There is still so much more to explore in this potential subfield than I have not covered here. I have just scratched the surface of black metamodernism, as with the other articles in Missing Metamodernism. Afrofuturism seems pretty metamodern. The movie Black Panther was a critical and commercial success; perhaps a black metamodern film in a metamodern franchise. A black writer named Germane Marvel has authored a couple Medium posts on metamodernism which seem to offer fresh philosophical musings about it; Meta Something? , followed by Meta Nothing? Research in Black Feminist Science explores how "the intellectual endeavors of marginalized black women have historically represented radical challenges to structures of knowledge and systems of oppression."

Some more artefacts of black metamodernism to consider include Get Out , The Legacy of Black Reconstruction, by Robert Greene II , Bernie's Plan for Racial Justice, by Meagan Day , The Boondocks (TV series) , and Into the Spiderverse . And through the internet over the past couple years I have connected with a few black people in Africa and elsewhere interested in metamodernism, but without having a proper African version of it. I think now it is safe to say there is one, and it can be developed more.

Conclusion

I hope I have established a solid precedent for what I suggest by a broad 'black metamodernism'; a shrewd awakening and reality check for what Charles W. Mills calls 'white ignorance,' among many other things, that metamodernism has not hitherto immunized against. Social justice still demands resolution, despite what the (pseudo-)intellectual posturing against it would tell you. The ample literature on structural racism may seem to shout through the matrix of postmodernism, incomprehensible to the new center, but we are listening. In a time when racial tensions are still high and systemic racism persists around the world, particularly against people of color in the United States, not to mention the scourge of white nationalism and dastardly race/IQ pseudoscience, we cannot make excuses for the absence or negation of a black metamodernism that was always present.

Furthermore, postmodernism and social justice are under constant attack for the wrong reasons, while questionable postmodern (gibberish) scholarship is still being produced, normatively for the right reasons, but at the limits of critique. For many of us in the culture war, this is the whole point of a metamodern intervention; to cut through the bullshit and end the culture war itself (along with actual war), while also reforming the research and education paradigm towards these ends. Who but (black) metamodernists could most aptly advocate for this?

→ Read Part 1: Missing Metamodernism
→ Read Part 2: Borgmannian Metamodernism
→ Read Part 3: Gonzálezean Metamodernism

Brent Cooper is founder and Executive Director at The Abs-Tract Organization , a Canadian think tank.

When and Why Did Unions Start Signing Contracts?

By Robin J. Cartwright

In 1911 Bill Haywood complained that

the A. F. of L. couldn't have a general strike if they wanted to. … They have 271,000 different agreements that expire 27,000 different minutes of the year. They will either have to break all of those sacred contracts or there is no such thing as a general strike in that so-called 'labor organization.'

Today labor relations professionals take it for granted that unions seek to sign contracts with employers, but in Haywood's day this was a relatively new and controversial practice, one that started when he was a teenager. Contracts were originally invented by labor unions that believed they needed to give national leaders authority to restrain strikes and militancy, which could bankrupt the union or subject it to state violence. As labor unrest increased, employers looked for new methods to control their workforce and undermine strikes, eventually choosing to work with and co-opt moderate labor leaders and use their authority over union members to discipline the workforce. Over several decades, employers and union leaders experimented with a series of contracts, gradually developing a workplace contractualism that served both groups.

Labor relations before contracts

Prior to the rise of contracts, unions practiced a variety of other methods to interact with management. During the Lowell textile strikes of 1834 and 1836, among the first factory strikes in the United States, the workers made no attempt to get management to sign a collective bargaining agreement. The strikes were waged in response to a wage cut in 1834 and an increase in the price of room and board in company boardinghouses in 1836. In 1834, the workers, nearly all of whom were young women, organized mass meetings and signed petitions against the cuts, pledging to refuse to work if they were not rescinded, and imposing penalties on any worker who broke her pledge. Although the 1834 strike was defeated, the 1836 strike was better organized and succeeded in reversing the price increase - without signing a contract and with little in the way of labor-management meetings and negotiation.

Nineteenth-century craft unions , with a mostly male membership, often attempted to unilaterally impose their preferred wages and working conditions on employers without signing a written agreement, or even negotiating. Typically, union members would meet and vote on what they called "legislation" (i.e. union work rules). This legislation set wages, working hours, break times, days off, terms of apprenticeship, and specifics of how work was to be done (such as the size of work crews, how many machines could be run at once, and how many products would be produced per hour). Union members were obliged to refuse any order which conflicted with this legislation, and refuse to work at any company that did not abide by it. These craft unions organized skilled occupations that required extensive training - making it difficult for management to replace any worker. If a sufficient portion of the limited pool of skilled workers refused to work for any employer that did not abide by union legislation, they could compel employers to abide by the union's terms. For this strategy to work, the union had to ensure that the number of workers who were trained in their craft remained limited, and many craft unions attempted to do this by restricting the number of new apprentices taken on, and by keeping women, people of color, immigrants, and/or the Irish out of their trade.

Another common practice among nineteenth-century workers was to issue a "bill of prices" or "wage scale" - a written list of occupations in the workplace and the pay rate the union demanded for each one - and go on strike. In some cases, workers were able to compel management, via this direct action, to sign these bills of prices. In other cases, management met with a committee of strike leaders and negotiated a compromise bill. Perhaps the most common result, when management did not defeat the strike outright, was to raise pay rates - but not raise them as high as the union wanted - without signing anything. For example, during the New England shoe worker strike of 1860 , a few employers agreed to a bill of prices with the union, but most raised pay by a moderate amount without formally signing an agreement. The strike gradually petered out as management gave workers much of what they wanted; in some cases, the union unilaterally called off the strike after management made sufficient concessions.

If you equate any written agreement between labor unions and management with a union contract (an overly broad conception of contracts), then these bills of prices would be the first union contracts. However, they differed from modern union contracts in that they did not have expiration dates and normally only set the pay rate. None of the other normal components of modern union contracts - management rights clauses, grievance/arbitration procedures, no strike pledges, language on hours and working conditions, dues checkoff, etc. - were present.

In the latter part of the Civil War and after, American workers began organizing trade unions on an unprecedented scale. Prior to the Civil War, labor unions had primarily been local or regional bodies with little in the way of a national or international structure to coordinate local activity. Unionists now established labor organizations that spanned coast to coast, with national conventions, elected national leaders, and a nationwide strike fund for each trade. They formed the National Labor Union as an umbrella federation (and, after a split, the Colored National Labor Union).

Samuel Gompers, who would later become President of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and an advocate of contracts, first joined a union as a young man during this time period. In his memoirs he wrote:

There was a vast difference between those early unions and the unions of today. Then there was no law or order. A union was a more or less definite group of people employed in the same trade who might help each other out in special difficulties with the employer. There was no sustained effort to secure fair wages through collective bargaining. The employer fixed wages until he shoved them down to a point where human endurance revolted. Often the revolt started by an individual whose personal grievance was sore, who rose and declared: "I am going on strike. All who remain at work are scabs." Usually the workers went out with him.

Thus, even after the Civil War and the rise of a truly national labor movement, contracts between employers and labor unions were still unheard of.

The Knights of Labor and the attempt to abolish strikes

Most national trade unions collapsed in the 1870s in part due to a severe depression. High unemployment made it easy for employers to replace union members, and insured a large supply of scabs in the event of a strike. Trade union after trade union went bankrupt funding failed strikes.

When the labor movement revived at the end of the 1870s, the new unions, both the Order of the Knights of Labor (KoL) and the new trade unions that would later found the AFL, were determined to avoid what they thought were the mistakes of previous trade unions. They required all locals seek permission from the national leadership before launching any strike. Any strike not authorized by national leaders would not receive any support from the national organization.

For example, the KoL's regulations stated,

Strikes … are, as a rule, productive of more injury than benefit to working people, consequently all attempts to foment strikes will be discouraged. … No strike undertaken without the sanction and orders of G.A. officers … shall be supported from the Strike Fund.

The KoL's Grand Master Workman (president) Terence Powderly explained ,

Strikes are a failure. Ask any old veteran in the labor movement and he say will the same. … An association well organized need never strike. It is only half organized unions that do so.

In response to the idea that the Order "protect and foster strikes" he satirically proposed that the union also "purchase a rifle and bayonet; also one hundred and fifty rounds of ammunition for each member" and acquire "the latest improved style of Gatling gun." He elaborated that men in office had "enacted laws which make it impossible for you to strike without the troops [being] called out" and that consequently encouraging strikes would bring severe repression upon the Order. Powderly further argued :

There are times when, under certain indignities and tyrannies, a refusal to strike amounts to downright cowardice; but these circumstances seldom arise. The average strike is brought about by the inflammatory speeches of some firebrand. … A strike seldom fails of one result, that is, to create confusion and distrust, and finally break the Union up. Whether the strike was successful, or not, it generally breaks up the branch engaged in it. One reason is, men expect that, as soon as they strike, they ought to walk up to the treasurer and draw five dollars a week, even though they have not paid in five cents.

Like the trade unions, the Knights felt that national union leadership needed to have a degree of authority over the membership to ensure members did not engage in strikes that would deplete their funds and/or provoke severe state repression. However, the Knights had a more ambitious approach to strikes than the trade unions - they wanted to abolish them. In the long run, the Knights intended to abolish strikes by abolishing capitalism, thereby making them unnecessary. In the medium term, they wanted the state to pass laws providing for the compulsory arbitration of all labor disputes. That objective was never achieved in the United States, although laws for voluntary arbitration were passed, and the Knights of Labor in New Zealand did get parliament to pass compulsory arbitration legislation during the 1890s (which the New Zealand IWW would later campaign against).

In the short-term, the Knights arranged for private arbitration with employers, instead of resorting to strikes, whenever possible, reserving direct action as a last resort. This private arbitration took several forms. KoL leaders were empowered to arbitrate disputes between their members and employers; they could order their members to accept a settlement they did not agree with. If the employer agreed, disputes could be submitted to a neutral third-party for arbitration.

In areas where the Knights of Labor were strongest they sometimes signed a written list of "rules and regulations" with an employers' association, laying out a process to use arbitration to resolve all conflicts. Usually one or two pages long, the rules forbade all strikes and lockouts and established a joint board of arbitration to resolve all disputes. These boards were composed of an equal number of representatives from the union and the employers' association, and had the authority to settle any dispute between workers and their employer in the factories covered by the agreement. In the event of a tie vote, each side was to select a disinterested person, those two would select a third person, and then the three of them would decide the matter at hand. Typically, they also provided for grievance committees and established a closed shop (or, as a compromise, permitted members to refuse to work with non-union co-workers).

These rules and regulations signed by the Knights of Labor have a great deal in common with twentieth-century union contracts, but there are some important differences. Perhaps most importantly, they had no expiration date - they were intended to last forever, to permanently end strikes and lockouts. They were much briefer and left most things specified in modern union contracts (including pay rates and working conditions) up to arbitration. There was no seniority and no dues checkoff. The Knights also had difficultly compelling their own members to abide by these terms. In 1886, in response to the failure of the Knights to suppress a wildcat shoe worker strike in Philadelphia , local shoe manufacturers locked out all of their employees for several weeks and then decided to arbitrate with a company union, on an open shop basis, rather than with the Knights - destroying the shoe workers' union in the city.

Initially, the Knights of Labor were larger than the trade unions and they grew rapidly until 1886, becoming larger than any previous labor union in North America. From 1886-1890, employers founded a series of employer associations that led a counter-offensive against the Knights which managed to destroy the union with a series of lockouts, aided by state violence and the backlash against organized labor after the Haymarket affair . The newly founded, and more conservative, American Federation of Labor then took the Knights' place as the largest labor union in the country. The reluctance of the Order's national leadership to authorize strikes did not save the union from being targeted and destroyed by employers.

The early twentieth century: progressive employers embrace contracts

Unlike the Knights, the AFL did not harbor grandiose plans of abolishing strikes or ending capitalism. They viewed strikes as labor's most powerful weapon, but one that should be used sparingly. The AFL compared going on strike to going to war - it was a powerful act, but one that was risky and dangerous, and which should only be undertaken when attacked or in extreme circumstances. They were willing to sign a peace treaty, but unlike the Knights were not willing to give up the right to strike permanently. So their agreements with employers only lasted for a fixed amount of time, after which they were free to strike again. Initially these agreements were called "trade agreements" but by the twentieth century the terms "contract" or "time contract" were used as synonyms. It was these AFL trade agreements that the early IWW denounced when it rejected contracts .

When the AFL began to grow steadily in the late 1890s and early 1900s, it found a section of the employing class (mainly the wealthier section) was now open to compromising with unions - something they were largely unwilling to do with previous labor organizations. This shift occurred for several reasons. Some larger employers believed they could use unions to undercut their smaller competitors . The general trend over the preceding forty years had been for labor unrest to increase, and the growing cost of suppressing it led some employers to start searching for a more cost-effective means of retaining control over their workforce. In addition, some employers were concerned that the suppression of organized labor encouraged the growth of socialist, anarchist, and other radical movements. They worried that the growth of radicalism, combined with the tendency for labor unrest to increase over time, could, in the long-run, result in revolution if left unchecked.

In 1900 these progressive employers, with the participation of AFL leaders, founded the National Civic Federation to advocate for reforms meant to stabilize capitalism. The NCF lobbied for progressive legislation, mediated between employers and unions in labor disputes, and encouraged employers to sign contracts with trade unions. The year it was founded it passed a resolution declaring "trade agreements between employers and workmen where established for a definite term of years have so fully demonstrated their value in maintaining industrial peace that they should be generally adopted." They told their fellow employers that "the practical operations of the trade agreement systems disprove the criticism that they mean a surrender to unjust or uneconomic demands of labor." An article in their newspaper , seeking to persuade their fellow capitalists to sign contracts, argued:

One of the permanent advantages of the trade agreement system is the influence which organized employers have in improving the organization of the workers. As long as employers are hostile, or as long as an association of employers exists solely to fight the lion, the latter is forced to put forward its fighting men. But when employers organize for conference and agreement, and are able to remove the long standing suspicions of the workmen, a change comes in union leadership. The officers become negotiators and bargainers-business men, like their employers.

The reformist wing of the employing class consciously set out to corrupt and co-opt union leaders by signing contracts with labor unions.

The NCF contended that unions would generally abide by the terms of their contracts and that union leaders could be relied upon to suppress strikes by their own members. Their newspaper argued that:

An agreement between an organization of employers and an organization of workmen is backed by the machinery and the power to enforce observance. In the thirteen years of the Iron Molders' and Stove Founders' agreements there has not been a contract violation nor a strike or lockout, except occasionally in a single shop, soon settled by the national officers of the two organizations. … These officers, as in all labor unions, have power to fine and expel members and to revoke the charters of local bodies that interfere with the enforcement of trade contracts.

The longshoremen's organization in their contracts with the dock managers on the Great Lakes have occasionally been called upon to discipline their members for violations, and in the case of the Buffalo strike in 1900 the International President, after revoking the charter of the local union and supplying the places of a majority of the strikers with union men from other locals, filled the remaining places with non-union men. Mr. Samuel Mather, of the Dock Managers' Association, … says regarding their agreements with the Longshoremen's Union, "I am very happy to be able to testify that since that continuous arrangement was inaugurated, about three years ago, our business has been conducted with great advantage compared with what prevailed before. … If any occasion of dispute arises, it has not caused the work to terminate"

By signing contracts with labor unions, employers could convert them from organizations that incited strikes into organizations that broke strikes. In the eyes of the NCF, this was a more effective and cost-effective means of controlling their workforce than their previous reliance on violence and repression.

The NCF also praised a contract signed by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), which established a cartel in bituminous coal mining . As settlement of a nation-wide strike in 1897, the union and coal operators signed a national contract, and a series of district contracts, that not only covered wages, hours, etc., but also specified the minimum price coal could be sold at and the amount each operator was to sell. Prior to this contract competing firms often undercut each other by increasing the amount of coal they sold, flooding the market and causing the price to plummet. This contract allowed them to sell less coal at a higher price, increasing their profits. The UMWA acted as the cartel's enforcer by striking any firm that would not sign the contract and abide by its price fixing. The UMWA also insured that a portion of the operators' increased profits went to its members in the form of higher wages. This early contract is one of the more flagrant cases of larger employers using union contracts to undermine their smaller rivals and deter competition. Higher wages undercut smaller firms because their lower profit margins made it more difficult to afford them. Higher wages also buttressed the cartel's position by acting as a barrier to entry, discouraging the founding of new companies in the industry and protecting operators from increased competition.

A more important contract from this time period was the Protocols of Peace , negotiated between the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (a predecessor to UNITE-HERE) and the Cloak, Suit, and Skirt Protective Association (an employers' association), as settlement of the cloak makers' "great revolt" (strike) of 1910 in New York City. The Protocols established a modern system of grievance machinery to settle disputes and enforce the contract. Its grievance procedures were foreshadowed by the Knights of Labor's arbitration system, but the Protocols was more elaborate, with added layers of bureaucracy, and focused more on enforcement of the contract's terms. Earlier trade agreements, too, had provisions for labor-management meetings to resolve disputes but did not have a true grievance system with numerous steps and arbitration involving outsiders. The Protocols not only allowed union members to file against their employers, but permitted employers to file grievances against the union, usually for wildcat strikes. In order to suppress wildcat strikes and uphold its part of the bargain, the ILGWU put locals into receivership when they defied the no-strike pledge, and recruited unionized scabs to undermine wildcat strikes.

The ILGWU succeeded in signing similar Protocol-like contracts with employer associations in other parts of their industry and in other cities, and it influenced the content of other unions' contracts. Larger employers signed not only to deter strikes and regain control over their workforce, but in hopes of undercutting their smaller competitors (who had smaller profit margins and would have greater difficulty paying union wages). In some cases they secretly agreed to sign a Protocols-like contract with the ILGWU before a strike even began, provided the union was able to compel smaller companies to join the employers' association and sign the same agreement.

After the First World War and the Red Scare, employers largely abandoned their interest in signing contracts with the ILGWU or other unions and attempted to go union-free. Some returned to the use of violence and repression to suppress labor unrest (others had never abandoned violence and repression). Some experimented with what historians call "welfare capitalism" - giving workers relatively generous benefits to reduce turnover and prevent unionization. Some established "employee representation programs" (company unions).

1940s-1970s: Heyday of the union contract

After the great depression began, labor unrest and left-wing radicalism revived, prompting employers and the state to institute many of the reforms they had first experimented with in the early twentieth century. In response to the strike wave of 1934, Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935, in an effort to protect commerce and prevent future strikes by encouraging employers to sign contracts with labor unions. The author of the act, Senator Robert F. Wagner, had been a member of the New York State legislature when the Protocols of Peace was signed, which he supported. The architect of the Protocols of Peace, Louis Brandeis, was appointed to the Supreme Court several years after mediating between the ILGWU and CSSPA during the cloak makers' great revolt, leaving his position on the board of arbitration (the final step in the Protocols' grievance process). He was still on the Supreme Court in 1937, where he voted in favor of the constitutionality of the NLRA.

Force of law alone was never sufficient to compel most employers to abide by the NLRA or sign contracts with business unions. A version of the rights in the NLRA were originally included in the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, but they were ignored by employers and the law was later struck down as unconstitutional. When the NLRA was passed in 1935 it established a government agency to enforce those rights, but because there were no punitive damages for violating it most employers simply did not obey the law. It was the wave of sit-down strikes at the start of 1937 that convinced many employers of the need to sign contracts, or at least keep their anti-union activity legal. Most famously, the notoriously anti-union U.S. Steel (which controlled the majority of steel production in the U.S.) chose to sign a contract with the CIO's Steel Workers Organizing Committee to prevent a sit-down strike at its plants and regain control over its workforce. Most unionists expected that unionizing U.S. Steel would require an enormous battle, but they signed a contract without a fight.

A minority of employers continued to violently oppose unionization even after the sit-down strikes. Perhaps the best known was Republic Steel, which committed the Memorial Day Massacre along with the Chicago police. These employers were finally brought into line during the Second World War. In exchange for a no-strike pledge, the federal government denied any contract for war supplies to any company that violated the NLRA, giving the law some teeth and bringing an end to corporate America's long tradition of murdering union organizers.

Although the NLRA did a great deal to institutionalize workplace contractualism, dues checkoff did not become a near-universal part of union contracts until the Second World War . During the war, union dissidents would sometimes withhold dues as a way of pressuring union leaders, which could encourage them to violate the no-strike pledge. Union leaders and the state insisted that employers directly deduct dues from employees' pay to remove this source of rank-and-file leverage. There were unions as early as the late nineteenth century that had dues checkoff, but it was not until the war that nearly all union contracts had it.

For the next thirty years, it was a social norm for employers to abide by the NLRA. Although most employers remained non-union, they largely kept their union-busting activities legal until the 1970s . To control their workforce, employers treated their employees relatively well (this was the low point of income inequality) and, when that failed, signed contracts with unions, relying on union leaders to keep workers in line. Flagrantly violating the NLRA was stigmatized.

Beginning in the late 1970s, employers began looking for alternative means of disciplining their workforce, which they eventually found in the form of higher unemployment and permanent replacement scabs. In the 1980s, they used these tools to destroy the labor movement and de-unionize much of the workforce, inaugurating the current era of low union density and low strike rates. They have spent much of the past thirty years gradually dismantling the remains of contract-based unionism.

Workplace contractualism and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)

Workplace contractualism developed in fits and starts, with different components added in at different times. What we think of as a standard union contract was really only commonplace for roughly forty years (1940-1980). The previous period of experimentation with different forms of contracts (1880-1940) lasted longer. The later period (1980-present), of tiny, weak unions and very few strikes, has now lasted almost as long as the heyday of the union contract. The exact point when the labor movement started signing contracts depends on how you define contracts. There is no hard and fast point at which the movement passed from non-contracts to contracts, and even agreements that clearly count as contracts took on different forms at different times. One way to approach the issue is to look at how the early IWW viewed contracts, and then find the point in history in which an agreement matching that conception was first signed.

Historians generally write that the early IWW refused to sign contracts, and the IWW of that time repeatedly issued pamphlets and public proclamations denouncing contracts. A 1913 pamphlet written by IWW General Executive Board member Joseph Ettor and published by the IWW stated:

Industrial Unionists disdain to lower the history and ideals of the working class by entering into contracts or agreements with employers … Contracts and agreements tend to foist a false feeling of security on the worker.

In the pamphlet The IWW - its History, Structure, and Methods , Vincent St. John (the second General Secretary-Treasurer) wrote, "No part of the organization is allowed to enter into time contracts with the employers." In her old age, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn recalled that the IWW

did not believe in making any contracts. They believed that as long as you were organized, you could hold the office to what it said it was going to do. But a contract, a piece of paper held you and so they didn't make any contracts.

Bill Haywood told Congress

We say that no union has a right to enter into an agreement with the employers because they are members of the working class; and finally we say that the working class has no right to enter into an agreement because it is the inherent mission of the working class to overthrow capitalism and establish itself in its place.

However, despite this rhetoric, the early IWW actually did make agreements with employers. On Philadelphia's waterfront , the IWW made several verbal agreements with employers to terminate large strikes in exchange for a number of concessions, including a closed shop and partial control over hiring and firing. In the 1912 Lawrence textile strike it drew up a "list of grievances" similar to the "bill of prices" used by unionists in the mid-nineteenth century, negotiated with management, and agreed to call off the strike after management granted most of their demands. If we look at the early IWW's constitution, we find it didn't explicitly ban contracts by name. What it said was:

Any agreement entered into between the members of any Union, or organization, and their employers, as a final settlement of any difficulty or trouble which may occur between them, shall not be considered valid or binding until the same shall have the approval of the General Executive Board of the Industrial Workers of the World.

No Union of the General Organization, Industrial Department, or Industrial Union of the I. W. W. shall enter into any contract with an individual or corporation of employers binding the members to any of the following conditions:

(a) Any agreement wherein any specified length of time is mentioned for the continuance of the said agreement.

(b) Any agreement wherein the membership is bound to give notice before making demands affecting hours, wages or shop conditions.

(c) Any agreement wherein it is specified that the members shall work only for employers who belong to an association of the employers.

(d) Any agreement that proposes to regulate the selling price of the product they are employed in making.

(e) No Industrial Union or any part of the Industrial Workers of the World shall enter into any agreement with any Labor Organization.

This section was removed in the late 1930s, except for the requirement for GEB approval, which was not removed until the 1940s. Histories of the IWW generally label this removal as the IWW signing contracts for the first time. It appears that by "contract" Bill Haywood and others who claimed that the IWW did not sign contracts meant an agreement that violated any of these five conditions, not any agreement in the broadest sense of that term.

The Knights of Labor's arbitration agreements would have been contracts in this sense because they violated part (b) by permanently forbidding strikes, although they did not violate part (a). The AFL's trade agreements violated both (a) and (b), and in some cases other clauses. The UMWA's contracts establishing a coal cartel additionally violated part (d); those contracts may be why early Wobblies included part (d). If merely getting things in writing counts as a union contract, the earlier "bill of prices" used by some unions before the Civil War would count as the first contracts. However, they were not contracts in the sense that the IWW opposed because they did not violate any of these stipulations, and because the early IWW itself issued similar documents. Therefore the first contracts, in the sense of contracts that the early IWW opposed, were invented by the Knights of Labor in order to abolish strikes.

Over the course of the twentieth-century, employers and/or the state in most countries eventually adopted measures designed to co-opt and control labor unions, abandoning older, more violent strategies designed to suppress unions. They used co-opted unions to maintain control over their workforce, and sought to marginalize radical unions that refused to cooperate in this process. In some countries this took the form of works councils or state subsidies for labor unions, but in the United States it took the form of workplace contractualism, because that was the form moderate labor unions invented and preferred. The process of co-opting unions was not entirely one-sided; employers had to make significant concessions to moderate union leaders to get them to cooperate and those concessions affected the structure of labor relations. Since the rise of neoliberalism forty years ago, employers have abandoned this strategy in most of the world, adopting alternative methods to discipline their workforce. The paucity of labor unrest has made working with moderate labor unions no longer an attractive option for most of the employing class. The origins of union contracts in restraining strikes, and the extensive history of employers using contracts to control workers, should make those of us who would like to revive labor unrest cautious about reviving contracts - or oppose it altogether.

This essay was originally published at Organizing Work , a media platform associated with the Industrial Workers of the World.

Public K12 Education as a Capitalist Industry: A Political Guide for Radical Educators and Organizers

By Roger Williams

When I look into the face of a student, I see a human face. As an educator in schools there's a feeling of responsibility that pulls on me to preserve their humanity, partly by my own efforts to make things fair and keep them safe in school and partly by helping them learn the skills to make things fair and keep themselves safe when they enter the "real" world. How to be faithful to the whole of a child's current being and future potential is the daunting task all educators face. Even under perfect conditions this task is difficult enough. Under the conditions of the education system we find ourselves in this task is all too often impossible.

The multitude of problems in the school system leads any caring educator to ask larger questions about why things are the way they are. "Life's not fair" is one answer, one we tell ourselves as often as we tell our students. If we don't see agency in ourselves or in others, accepting the problems of the existing world as inevitable can be the first step in hardening ourselves and others as a strategy for mental and biological survival. "Life's not fair, but…" accepts the world as it is in the present but makes space for the possibility of the world to be changed in the future.

When an educator looks a student in the eye, what about their economic relationship shapes what the educator sees? The educator is paid to be there and the student is compelled to be there to learn skills and get credentials that they'll need later to get a job. These are partly class relations, relations of people in specific economic positions who encounter each other in the context of larger economic systems.

{My most dispiriting encounter with the education system occurred when I was teaching 40 hours a week at a private summer school in Los Angeles making $10/hr. My job was to force a classroom full of 6th graders to do worksheets all day, five days a week. The curriculum was a stack of photocopies of the worksheet pages from outdated textbooks. Because this was summer and kids hate staying indoors and doing worksheets when they should be outside playing with their friends, my students needed a fair amount of "cajoling" to complete their worksheets. When the students weren't doing their job and I was insufficiently forceful in nudging them, my supervisor would come in and yell at the kids extra-loud, partly to whip them into shape and partly to show me how it's done. It was humiliating for my students and for me. I felt like I was destroying something in these kids and I couldn't bear it. I quit after only working there a month even though I really needed the money.}

Capitalism looks different across different industries, regions, cultures, and workplaces. Those of us who want to build a movement against capitalism should always be thinking through ways of applying anti-capitalist analysis to our organizing and making those ideas relevant to the communities we're organizing in. At first blush none of the traditional economic categories of capitalism apply to public education, but deeper inquiry reveals that these economic categories are still very present and have merely taken on modified forms.

Those of us participating in or eagerly observing the recent tide of militant educator organizing and strikes could benefit from a more theoretical grounding of leftist ideas in the analysis of our schools. This post takes an economic look at the education system from the perspective of educators as workers under capitalism.

Capitalism vs. Humanity

The education system is an enormously complex system that fulfills various social roles and is under a litany of often opposing pressures. Trying to make sense of it is a tricky task, but trying to make sense of it in isolation from larger socio-economic pressures is like explaining the orbit of the planets while ignoring the gravity of the sun. The key to critiquing the K12 education system under capitalism is first identifying what capitalist education is and then measuring how distant that is from an education system that meets the full range of human needs and explores the full range of human capacities.

Any social system is designed to embody certain values. If democracy, fairness, human flourishing, and equality are fundamental and interconnected values we want to see in society, those are the values that should be embodied in an education system .

Capitalism has a separate logic, whereby the values of those empowered by capitalism (the rich who own the companies and the real estate) are prioritized above the values of those who are marginalized by capitalism (those who work for a living). Capitalism also works by privileging and marginalizing different groups of people according to race, gender, sexuality, and other social markers. Getting a clear image of capitalist education then is about figuring out how capitalism prioritizes the needs of the power-holders under capitalism while shunning the needs of those disempowered by capitalism.

Distinguishing features of capitalism's realization in the education system are the following:

1. The primary stakeholders in the education system are given little formal influence in how schools are run. Students, educators, and parents don't govern the schools by setting and implementing policy, principals and superintendents do. The decision-making structure in the school is largely the same as the decision-making structure in the factory. This is a subversion of democracy in the education system.

2. The supposed success of one's education is defined in terms of test scores on highly standardized tests and narrow curriculum, prioritizing math and reading over art, music, emotional intelligence, etc… These narrow curriculum are designed to meet the more narrow needs of employers to make profit off of workers over and against the needs of young and developing humans. Students and teachers alike are disciplined and controlled around maximizing these test scores, much like workers are disciplined to maximize profits in the private sector. This is a subversion of fairness and human flourishing in the education system.

3. Funding for schools comes from taxes, and the rich have incentives to try to cut taxes because of the progressive and redistributive nature of taxation, including taxes that pay more to fund the education of kids other than their own. To the extent that the rich do submit to paying taxes for education, they prioritize the funding and quality of schools for their kids over the funding and quality of schools for poor kids. This is a subversion of equality in the education system.

The features of an education system that would be based on human needs and values would be a photo-negative of those we find under capitalism:

1. The primary stakeholders in the education system should have individual and communal self-determination over decision-making.

2. Education should aim for a holistic understanding and serving of the needs and interests of children apart from their later roles as sponges to be squeezed for profit in the job market.

3. Resource allocation for education should be based on meeting child and educator needs instead of on meeting the needs of rich taxpayers.

There's a tendency among even progressives and lefties, including educators, to see capitalism as somehow totally separate from the education system because it's supposed that the education system is state-funded, there isn't a profit motive, and there's not some specific product being produced for market. I think these assumptions are false and lead to counter-productive strategies for fighting back.

The prototypical capitalist relation is that between the worker in a factory manufacturing commodities and the capitalist who owns the factory and who pays for the workers' labor in return for ownership of what the worker produces. In selling the product, the capitalist aims to make a profit by generating revenue that runs above costs from labor, raw materials, and so on. This boils down class relations to their barest elements and is still a useful reference point, but what capitalism looks like is different in each context, especially in the 21st century US where factory manufacturing plays a much smaller role in the economy than it did 100 years ago.

As in any system of domination and exploitation, under capitalism there is always resistance and spaces being opened up for opposing power relations. The factory worker was never merely a maker of widgets but also was active in fighting for better working conditions, higher wages, and a better social order. So too have generations of educators and students struggled against and often confronted the factory model of education by building up practices and politics of teaching and learning that disrupt capitalism.

This post will look at the major concepts of capitalist production (commodities, workers, bosses, capitalists) and investigate how they apply to the K12 education industry. Specifically, for each of these concepts I'll look at 1) how K12 education compares and contrasts to traditional factory production, 2) how capitalism structures the education system to meet its needs, and 3) what alternative approaches to education might look like and how to fight for them.

The Commodity: Making Students into Workers

In factory manufacturing, material goods are the commodity. Assembly lines are organized to put many different kinds of human labor into molding a final product that is useful to people and thus can be sold to consumers.

In the education system under capitalism, turning children into workers is the production process. "Good" workers are the commodity, the product. The assembly line consists not only of teachers and education assistants, but also the bus drivers, the cafeteria workers, the custodians, etc… School children who are given marketable skills and then become workers are not commodities to be "sold" directly to consumers in the same sense as a pair of jeans. But the same overall logic still applies.

Just like the raw materials of fabric and thread that enters the pants factory and comes out a wearable piece of clothing, so the raw material of the child enters the school system and comes out an employable worker. But whereas the pants are sold directly to those who want them, workers aren't sold by others. Instead, the workers sell time-slots of themselves to employers in the form of labor-time which is paid for in wages and salaries. As a commodity, the worker still gets sold, it's just that the workers themselves are the sellers as well as the commodity. As for any commodity, the production of that commodity prioritizes the needs of the buyers, which in this case are employers.

Above I said that "good" workers are the commodity. Workers defined as "good" under capitalism 1) have skills that employers need and 2) are obedient. Regarding the first, employers hire workers who can performs tasks that are profitable to the employer. Many of these things may be unpleasant or unsafe or uninteresting to the worker themselves (think of all the menial labor in the US and across the globe), but that is not a primary concern as long as those things are profitable. The way this looks in schools at their worst is students are made to do lots of repetitive busy work that mirrors the work of a worker on the factory assembly line whose only job is to attach part A to part B of a device hundreds of times an hour. This kind of deadening of mental and physical creativity at work serves a socio-economic function under capitalism and the education system dutifully prepares workers for it.

Of course, not all workers perform such menial tasks at their jobs. Some employers require highly skilled workers who also need creativity to do their job well. While the stereotype portrays skilled workers as "professionals" like lawyers, doctors, and such, most jobs require tons of different kinds of complex skills, it's just that some skills are highly or lowly financially valued for various reasons. Schools can impart any kind of skills in such a way as to produce able workers who are profitable to employers. Whether schools focus on rote learning or more creative and critical thinking often reflects the class backgrounds of the students attending the schools. In many ways it's easier and fits better within the workings of the labor market to offload the skills training that employers might have to do and make the education system do it. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's just to point out that the production of highly trained, creative workers through the education system is not the subversion of capitalist logic but just one expression of it.

One might ask at this point, "Well the capitalist system can't pressure schools to both create menial laborers and highly-skilled creative workers? Which one is it? Make up your mind!" The way this happens in the school system is through the sorting of students through grading and differing tracks for more and less "advanced" or "deficient" students. The grading system plays a pivotal role in this sorting because it isn't just used for helpful feedback but to rank, reward, and punish students and adjust their access to future education opportunities.

This sorting happens not just within schools, but also between schools. For example, some schools, especially those in higher income areas, have more resources to give higher quality instruction while schools in poverty-stricken areas often have fewer resources which results in higher class sizes and more rote instruction. Local property taxes are a major determinant of school funding, which is one more way that class positions are passed down over generations.

The way the current school system sorts students into different kinds of jobs might otherwise be a little reasonable for meeting the needs of a modern economy with many different kinds of jobs if not for the vast difference in pay, respect, and enjoyment there is between these different kinds of jobs. The effect of all this sorting is that often from an early age some students are tracked to become menial and low-paid workers and others are tracked to become more highly paid workers, or even executives and investors. The capitalist class itself can afford all the luxuries that the most highly-resourced education schools can provide, and since wealth is passed down by inheritance and parents who are able to spend more money preparing their children privileged positions, their place at the top of the economic hierarchy is maintained.

At the bottom of the sorting pile are those who end up in prison. With the rise of mass incarceration in the 1980s in the US ( despite decreasing crime rates since the 1990s to historic lows at present), the education system has been a major contributor to this system and has created new forms of sorting to accommodate mass incarceration. These new institutional forms in education are known as the school-to-prison pipeline.

For example, police officers were put in schools in a widespread, unprecedented way supposedly in response to the big school shootings of the 90s, like Columbine. But the effect of these police officers has been to give students criminal records at a young age while having virtually no impact on actually reducing school shootings . The school shootings were a mere pretext and the real function of filling schools with cops was to intensify the school-to-prison pipeline that plays a central role in sorting in the education system. The war on drugs and the accompanying social policies based on the "tough on crime" mantra have been adapted for schools in the form of "zero tolerance" discipline policies. White supremacy is a major overlapping part of the school-to-prison pipeline where black, brown, and indigenous students are targeted. Whereas before mass incarceration, most of those at the bottom of the education sorting pile would still become workers in the economy in some way, now those at the bottom are just warehoused in prisons.

What makes this system of sorting cruel is two-fold. First, all people are worthy of a good standard of living but our economy makes that unattainable through the educational and economic sorting that produces extreme inequality. Secondly, the factors that largely determine this sorting are mostly distributed by forces beyond the individual's control, such as the economic class of one's parents, one's race, one's neighborhood, etc… This is another example of the needs of capitalists coming before the needs of members of society as human beings.

"Is all of this sorting really due to capitalism?" I would say yes, that sorting as it exists in schools is a uniquely capitalist function of the education system. All systems of oppression are essential collaborators in this process too whereby white supremacy and patriarchy do a lot of the dirty work. Even if we lived under a gentler capitalism where inequality and discrimination was less extreme, there would still need to be ways to sort workers into higher and lower paid jobs as well as into the broader and economically unequal categories of capitalists and bosses. If capitalism exists in any form, you have a class of people at the top who are fully invested in maintaining their class position and thus strengthening all the social systems that give them their power, prime among them the sorting done through the education system. The myth of the benevolent capitalist who takes their fair share and who gives the worker their fair share is dissolved by the material reality of opposing economic incentives (higher wages vs. higher profits). The myth of the benevolent school system as meritocracy is dissolved by the crushing reality of sorting masses of people by race and class into poverty wages and prison cells. The fact that a tiny handful of poor students later become rich doesn't disprove the idea of education sorting, but rather props it up ideologically and is used to further justify the punishing and impoverishment of those who don't do well in school.

The second thing that makes a worker "good" is obedience. With all the pressures, indignities, and exploitation that many workers feel, the obedient worker is gold to the employer while the questioning worker who gets together with others to demand more is the employer's poison. Obedience is a product of many things, but the education system is certainly a major one. The hierarchical nature of the K12 education system, where students are at the bottom and spend a significant part of their day just doing what they're told, prepares workers to be at the bottom of the capitalist hierarchy as workers doing what they're told.

The idea that children are raw materials who are then carved by educators into commodities as "good" adult workers to maximize profits for employers should be disturbing to those who work in schools. That's not why we signed up to work in education. It's natural to object to this characterization of the education system because we feel complicit in it because we work in it. But there it is, and the further topics below should help fill out this picture more completely. I think recognizing this fact of our industry is central to finding ways to change it. If capitalists were to ever establish total control, this is approach to education would become all-encompassing.

But capitalists aren't all-powerful, and educators and students are humans with different needs and who have agency that they exercise daily in small and large ways. In different places and at different points in time, capitalists or workers may be in the favorable position of having more power to bend the education system to their priorities.

There are many ways that students disrupt capitalist logic within the school system. Students, as the commodity going down the assembly line, can muck up the gears and motors by refusing to participate in school and actively disrupting it through not doing schoolwork, talking in class, preventing other students from engaging, etc…. They are essentially sabotaging themselves as commodities, the way "bad" raw materials will lead to defective commodities in a factory. Sadly, capitalism co-opts this kind of student resistance through all the mechanisms of sorting that the student was resisting in the first place. "Bad" and disruptive students become fast-tracked into the sorting process and whole systems of discipline in schools are designed to facilitate this pipeline that ends for many in the prison cell.

Student resistance becomes anti-capitalist and liberatory when it finds a way to meet human and social needs by resisting capitalism collectively instead of falling into its traps individually. Students have a complicated relationship to schools because they are not only commodities but are workers too in some ways. Even though they are not producing products for sale directly and are not being paid for their work, they are expending effort by learning marketable skills; they are turning themselves into commodities through their own labor. Students can also muck up the gears of capitalism within schools by collectively withholding their labor as workers and making demands on authorities to bend the education system to their own needs instead of the needs of capitalism.

{In 1968, 20,000 Chicano high school students engaged in walkouts against racist sorting and segregation in East Los Angeles schools. Student organizer Moctesuma Esparza said about the events, "The word started to circulate. 'Walkout. Walkout. Let's boycott school.' And we slowly planned this out, campus by campus, over a six-month period and we set a date, March 6, 1968." After the walkout on the first day was met with widespread police violence, Esparza recalled, "The next day we walked out again, and we walked out the next day after that, and we didn't stop for two weeks." 13 students were arrested, charged, and found guilty of felony conspiracy for "disturbing the peace" for their role in planning the student walkouts but were later exonerated in a higher court. In the end, some of the students' demands were met, and many of them went on to participate in the wildly successful campaigns to start ethnic studies programs at universities across the country. For more, see this short video , this article , and this hour-long documentary .}

In our long-term visions for a better education system, students deserve to have much more say than they're currently given. Whereas the needs of the individual and the needs of society have to be balanced whatever kind of economic system there is, that is very, very different from the education system under capitalism, where the needs of students are balanced not very equally with the needs of a small minority of capitalists who need workers to make profit from. In a non-capitalist society, students would have real decision-making power over their own learning, both individually in terms of the choices they have but also collectively in terms of students as a whole being a major part of the governance of the school system. In any free society, those who are impacted by an institution deserve to have some power over how that institution is run. Student liberation from capitalism is the self-transformation of students as commodities trained only to sell their labor into students as human beings whose full range of needs and capabilities are nurtured and explored.

The Workers: Educators

The waged workers in the education system are the educators. Like the factory worker, the educator is paid for the labor they perform on the commodities that are produced. Like the factory worker, the educator doesn't have any ownership over the workplace and is subject to the oversight and management of bosses. Just like the factory worker whose job consists of connecting part A to part B hundreds of times an hour and who was trained to do so in a very specific way to maximize efficiency, so too the educator's work is being increasingly micromanaged by standardized tests and curriculum. Like the factory worker whose production lags even temporarily, the educator whose products don't meet the standards of quality control put forth by the bosses-like test scores, which are often influenced by forces beyond the teacher's control like poverty and homelessness -are liable for increased surveillance, discipline, and even release. Like the factory worker whose production targets are inched up every year beyond what can reasonably be accomplished, so too are class sizes bursting at the seems in under-resourced schools all across the country.

Some educators who are lucky enough to earn higher wages buy into the myth they're better than mere "workers" and see themselves as professionals who are somehow exempt from the problems that workers face. A teacher might think, "I make more money than other workers, my work is more skilled than other workers, I'm working with children and not with widgets, therefore I'm not a worker." While it's true that working with children is very different than working with widgets, we all have jobs because social needs compel production in certain industries. Working with kids doesn't make educators better than farmers, cooks, custodians, or brick layers, it just makes educators different. In all the ways one can look at the economic relationships in schools, educators are workers.

The myth that educators aren't workers is very convenient for the bosses in education. If you're not a worker and you thus don't care about the money and your own treatment and you only "care about the kids", then it's easier for the boss to cut your pay and benefits and erode your working conditions.

Contrary to the kind of self-sacrifice mentality that some educators take on for the sake of the kids, often what's best for educators is also best for students. Seeing standardized testing both as an intensified form of sorting for students and a form of discipline and control of educators helps us see what alternatives to such tests might be. Students are prime beneficiaries of schools that treat educators with respect and pay them accordingly, and vice versa, policies targeted to improve student learning, like smaller class sizes and more services for student mental health, also make teachers' lives better. In the fight against capitalist education, educators and students should be natural allies.

{A few years ago at a school district in Minnesota, a principal could lobby to have their school designated as a "Community Partnership School" (CPS). While "community partnership" sounds quaint, what it actually did was give principals the authority to ignore parts of the union contract and if test scores didn't improve over three years a school could be closed and reopened as a charter. At one school the principal announced at a staff meeting her intention to submit an application to the district to become a CPS. She assumed that people wouldn't know what that entailed and hoped it would slide beneath the radar. Some educators at the school knew exactly what was happening and got large turnout to the school-wide union meeting the next day where the details of CPS were explained. They came up with a plan to have a staff-wide vote on whether to endorse the CPS plan. The vote was not legally binding, but if it failed it would make the principal's attempts to push it through look bad, and the principal couldn't risk alienating her entire staff. The next day educators walked into the principal's office and told her of the plan to hold a staff vote on whether to support becoming a CPS. Knowing that the vote would clearly sink the plan, the principal started tearing up about how important CPS was in a last-ditch effort to guilt the workers out of it. Undeterred, the educators carried out the vote, 82% of staff cast their ballot against becoming a CPS, the principal dropped the idea, and the school was the first in the district to successfully stop a CPS designation. When a new superintendent came into the district a year later, the expansion of CPS's was halted.}

But who really counts as the "educators" in the schools? Here, a definition that's broad in some ways and narrow in others is helpful. Our concept of educators should contain all who work in the K12 education industry, including those who work directly with kids and those who don't. Many who aren't paid to work directly with students, like cafeteria workers and bus drivers, end up forming relationships with kids that are as important to their education as any other part. Even those who don't interact with students at all, like those who deliver the student meals to the schools each day, are best considered educators, because without them, how would kids eat and be able to learn at school? Those who have managerial powers, including especially the ability to discipline, hire, and fire other workers, should not be included in the "educators as workers" definition here, for reasons discussed in the section on bosses below.

This definition of the educator raises strategic questions as well. For example, a large obstacle to educators working together is not only the professional separations that exist in schools (teachers vs. assistants vs. cafeteria workers vs. office workers vs. etc.), but the obstacles to collaboration created by the mainstream labor movement by slicing up classes of workers into separate and often isolated unions and collective bargaining agreements. This is called "craft unionism" because workers organizations are separated from each other by craft. In my school district, workers are separated into 15 separate craft unions, which doesn't include those excluded from unions altogether along craft lines, like substitute teachers.

If we define educators as all the workers in the K12 education system, then all the educators have the potential to disrupt the education system when they withhold their labor collectively by going on strike. In the 2018 statewide strike in West Virginia, for example, the bus drivers were at one point quicker to go on strike than the teachers and helped push other education workers into taking the action that they did. By uniting across job class, educators have more power together than separate and can win more for all. This is called "industrial unionism" because all the workers in the larger industry come together.

Capitalism's Strategy against Workers: Divide and Conquer

"If the workers are many and the owners are few, why on earth do workers put up with this?" Capitalism's strategy is to divide workers from each other in order to weaken any potential unified force that would threaten the sovereignty of owners. This happens in many ways both within and through the education system.

One way this happens is through the sorting into different jobs. The worker who earns a little more than the one across the hallway (or across the the street, town, state, country, or hemisphere) becomes invested in the system because they know they could be moved across the hallway themselves if they're not careful. The worker who earns a little less comes to focus their resentment on the worker who earns a little more. Meanwhile, those getting rich off the workers are enjoying their mansions and yachts. While this presentation is an oversimplification, the hyper-awareness of our economic positions in relation to those around us and knowing who is above and below us permeates every industry and every workplace. In subtle and not so subtle ways, this awareness is leveraged to make us believe that we are all in (not so) friendly competition with other workers and steers our attention away from underlying economic structures and the largely unseen owners. Sorting in the education system and the myth of meritocracy play a central role in setting up these divisions between workers.

The other major way capitalism divides people is by taking differences that naturally exist between people and turning them into differences that rationalize some getting more and some getting less. White supremacy is in many ways about convincing poor white workers (and white workers of every income strata) that they're better and deserving of more than workers of color, and our white supremacist society backs up these inflated claims by gifting more resources and opportunities to white people. It's not difficult to see how the focus on competition between workers noted above can be refracted through the lenses of white supremacy and patriarchy to reinforce relationships of privilege and marginalization in the economy. White workers and workers of color might have common interests against those who profit from their work, but while mainstream society is able to persuade white people that people of color are the problem, capitalism remains safe. The same is true of religion, gender, sexuality, ability, and so on. All of these forms of oppression provide the cultural beliefs ("white people are smarter", "women shouldn't work in STEM", etc…) that capitalism uses to underpay, exclude, and control marginalized groups. In a very unequal society, oppression is the lungs and capitalism is the heart.

Regarding the education system in particular, gender and race have been used to the great benefit of capitalism and detriment of workers. The teacher workforce is now 75% women , and this percentage has increased over the last 20 years. Studies have shown that occupations in which women hold a high majority of the positions are paid less compared to similarly skilled men-dominated professions. This helps explain the lowering of teacher wages compared to similarly-skilled jobs in other industries in recent decades. Reflecting a similar dynamic, the teacher workforce in New Orleans was easier to fire entirely in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina because the teachers were mostly black (and women). All the teachers had to re-apply for the jobs, which became non-union and without job protections at newly-opened charter schools, and many were replaced with white and temporary teachers from programs like Teach for America. In broader terms, women (and the entire industries they have major representation in) and people of color are marginalized by dominant social norms which makes them easier for capitalism to underpay and discipline.

Fights against capitalism in education are also necessarily fights against white supremacy and patriarchy because of the way these systems interconnect. The silver bullet against capitalism's attempts to divide workers is to unify around the universal right people have to not be oppressed and exploited. That means unifying against white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism.

In education, majority white teachers and teacher unions have often been pitted against mostly poc parents and community members, with unions being smeared for supposedly protecting bad teachers, for only caring about inflating teacher salaries, and for keeping educators of color out of the ranks. While there's always a degree of truth to each side of these conflicts that capitalism plays on to keep people divided, mainstream narratives need to be re-examined to see who is really benefiting from them. One great counterexample in education is how Karen Lewis and the Chicago Teachers Union found ways to break through the impasse with local communities by privileging parent and student concerns around class sizes, opposing school closures in poc neighborhoods, and doing anti-racist work in schools. While overcoming divisions and oppression always sounds easier than it actually is given how deeply rooted social biases are, the challenge is ours to face.

The Bosses: Principals

In the factory, there's the overseer, the low-level manager, the shop-floor supervisor, or what-have-you, and in the school there's the principal. This is the immediate boss that oversees workers at the point of production: the workplace. The principal's tasks are many, including liaising with the higher-level administrators at the district, implementing and designing school policy, crafting budgets, supporting staff, etc… These are tasks that other admin and school workers are sometimes involved in even though the principal often has final say.

However, among other things principals-as-bosses have two distinguishing features. The first one is that the boss, whether in the school or factory, has the authority to discipline workers. This gives them a degree of power in the workplace that no other person in the workplace has and creates an imbalance between bosses and workers.

As with formal authority of any role, it can be used responsibly or abusively. Under capitalism, principals are given the authority to have workers disciplined or fired. Sometimes principals act with integrity and remove workers for good reasons, such as they're harmful to children. Just as often, principals act to advance their own personal agenda by removing workers who ask too many questions about school policy, who object to poor working conditions or or wages, or who they have petty disagreements with.

While the right has done a good job slandering the public image of union teachers as lazy and uncaring, teacher unions' function here is requiring just cause for firing (as recent lawsuits have affirmed). Sure, bad teachers exist and are sometimes protected by unions, but the converse situation of good teachers being fired for bad reasons and bad teachers being protected for bad reasons is a far more serious problem for education. The worst teacher I ever had in school made the students "lead" lessons from the textbook each day in front of class while she surfed online shopping websites at her desk. She was also buddy-buddy with the principal, and removing unions or giving principals more authority would surely not have solved that problem.

Even in unionized workplaces where workers enjoy more protections, the principals can fire probationary teachers on a whim (which is a 3-year period in my district), can rearrange budgets to lay off educators without going thru due process, can out-maneuver educators thru complex grievance procedures, and can re-assign teachers to classrooms outside of their comfortable subject and age range or to understaffed classrooms with behavior challenges to wear them down and pressure them to quit. Even when the principal does have to go head to head with the union, they usually have the full weight of the district on their side, including its legal team, HR department, media liaisons, and relatively deep pockets. To object to the role of bosses under capitalism is to object to the unilateral authority of one person in a workplace to be able to fire and discipline any of the others.

The second distinguishing feature of the boss is that their job is to maximize certain outcomes in the workplace by taking orders from above and enforcing them on the workers below them. In the private sector, higher profit is the outcome which shareholders hire executives, who then hire other managers, to carry out. This maximizing of particular outcomes as passed down from above combined with the power to unilaterally discipline workers is what makes a boss a boss.

In the schools, the spread of standardized testing has lead to higher test scores being the main target outcomes that principals organize production around. This is a huge attack on the human needs of students, whose own needs and desires often don't fit into bubbles on standardized tests which their education experience is constructed around. A watershed moment for the intensification of testing was George W Bush's No Child Left Behind Act , which tied federal funding to states to mandatory standardized testing and punished repeated bad test scores with turning schools into charters or closing them entirely. Then Obama's Race to the Top policy incentivized states to compete with each other for large grants over who could show commitment to basing teacher pay on test scores and use testing outcomes to "turn around" schools . While federal funding for education comprises less than 10% of total education dollars, it greatly influences state and local education policy. All of this focus on testing and evidence-based policy is ironic considering there's little evidence that increased standardized testing improves education outcomes .

Testing regimes coerce teachers into focusing much more on the measurable outcomes of some areas (math, reading, and writing) at the expense of a more holistic vision of human abilities and experiences. Some centrally important but mostly untested domains include emotional skills, creative thinking, interpersonal skills, art, music, physical education, knowledge of one's own history and culture, and so on. The popular backlash against current standardized testing practices does not favor designing "better" tests so that every aspect of being a kid can be "properly" measured, assessed, and sorted. Much like human needs of workers in the private sector shouldn't be wholly subservient to the profit-motives of investors, so too data should be subservient to human needs instead of making human needs subservient to data in the form of high-stakes tests.

A central way to attack capitalism in any workplace is to build worker organization that can take action to force changes in the workplace. This takes decision-making away from the unilateral authority of the boss and at its best democratizes our working lives. In schools, an organized workplace might look like one where teachers make decisions with each other about curriculum, challenging students, and working conditions; feel empowered by each other to design and teach the curriculum they think best instead of the one being pushed by the district to maximize test scores; one where the principal is afraid to implement any new policy before getting approval from the committee of educators at the school who do all the work; one where students and educators together can co-determine how best to meet their intertwined human needs. Ultimately, the end goal is to get rid of bosses and principals entirely, but this goal can be reached incrementally through gradually building worker power by taking direct action and gradually transferring the authority to make school decisions from the bosses to the workers.

While many of the worst things that happen in capitalist education happen under the reign of bullying and abusive bosses , a frequent objection I hear to an anti-capitalist approach to labor organizing is the "problem" where a workplace has a nice and supportive boss. This is especially prominent in schools, where, just like teachers, principals get in the business to "help the kids". This creates cognitive dissonance because then it's hard to match the image of the principal as the bad guy with your everyday experience of your principal doing good work. Those who have supportive principals can be happy that they don't have abusive ones, and there's no use in trying to make up reasons for why you think your principal is really mean on the inside.

The point about analyzing social systems, such as capitalism, and not just individuals is so that we're able to see the forest and not merely the trees. Systems can have overall dynamics and be governed by rules and pressures that aren't apparent from looking at isolated cases. The problem with capitalism isn't that all the bosses are mean, but that capitalism structures our social relationships in such a way that some have power and control over others and that this produces an extremely unequal distribution of resources and opportunities. The nicest principal in the world still has a full arsenal of disciplinary weapons at their disposal that they can use against workers when they so choose. The arsenal of the individual worker to resist discipline and hold a principal accountable is extremely restricted. This is the power relationship between bosses and workers that exists regardless of personality, and is why collective action by workers and collective organization in the form of unions are necessary to counter the principal's and the superintendent's authority.

{How do you organize against a nice principal? The key is to maintain focus on collective action over individual initiative and to emphasize the structural issues in the workplace over individual features of a boss's personality. This might look like getting a bunch of coworkers to ask the nice principal for something. You don't have to be aggressive about your ask if that doesn't seem strategic. If the principal says "yes", then great, it's a victory for workers! In the debrief of the action, highlight that it was the workers asking that got the problem solved and not the principal's personality. You can keep building with your coworkers by asking for something a little more each time. Eventually, the principal is bound to say "no" either because they don't want to give in or because they don't have the authority to give in. At that point it turns into a more traditional worker-boss conflict. Of course, organizing isn't as simple as all this, but this is a rough sketch of one way to approach organizing under a nice boss.}

Upper Management: The Politicians

Whereas principals are the school-level bosses, the bosses that formally sit atop the education system and who make higher-level decisions are politicians. Locally elected and appointed school boards, state legislatures, and the federal government all play important roles in decision-making in the education system. This layer of the structure of the education system is one with no immediately obvious analog in factory production, but a closer look reveals that the role of upper management as higher-level decision-makers in corporations matches well with the role of politicians as higher-level decision-makers in public education . One might think that because politicians are democratically elected that maybe capitalism and oppression don't exist in the education system.

While it's often presented that way, elected politicians, by themselves, do virtually nothing to blunt the effects of capitalism within education. While a full-fledged argument about why voting in US elections is not the pinnacle of democracy is beyond the scope of this piece, here I'll briefly highlight a couple critiques.

Whereas federal elections have middling degrees of voter participation (varying from 50 - 60% in recent decades), voter turnout in state and municipal elections often amounts to half that. Those who do vote tend to be those with the time and proper access to information and those who think there are politicians running who represent their interests, both of which generally exclude the most impoverished and high needs populations. The disparities in voting populations mirrors the disparities in who benefits and who doesn't within capitalist education.

If access to information is the problem, one might think that that can be solved through voter education and encouragement. That can have an effect, but a major factor in mainstream politicians being able to run successful campaigns is the funding they have access to. Usually the candidate needs enough independent wealth or income to devote resources to be able to devote their personal time to campaigning, which is a major filter on the social position and politics of those who run for office. Another filter is if candidates can attract the funding of rich donors and endorsements of big players that are needed to get out of the gate for even local campaigns. These filters make many non-rich voters feel like no one on the ballot represents them, indicating that more information isn't an adequate solution because lack of information isn't the entire problem. For example, in my district of Minneapolis Public Schools in recent years out-of-state billionaires have funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into school board races to effectively buy board seats for their preferred candidates. In state and national elections, fundraising plays an even more fundamental role and is an effective shield against popular proposals like increasing education funding . The general leftist critique is that as long as electoral politics is susceptible to influence from the rich in a society with extreme inequality, the politicians will remain the managers while the rich are the owners. Society as a whole imitates the factory.

The proof is in the pudding. School boards are the ones who hire superintendents, and the supers are the ones who negotiate labor contracts. Just like in the private sector, contract negotiations are fierce battles over resources with the bosses trying to pay the workers less and the workers trying to get more. If society and the school system were remotely "democratic" and wanted education funding to keep pace with other social priorities, educator wages would keep up with GDP or at least inflation. Instead, wages for educators have been hacked at for decades with wages and benefits for teachers vs. wages and benefits for comparable jobs in other industries falling 11% in 20 years . In more than half of US states, teachers make below a "living wage" as defined by MIT researchers , and in 35 states teachers with 10 years of experience and a family of four qualify for multiple kinds of public assistance . Wages for my current position as an education assistant have been, accounting for inflation, pushed down 20% by bosses and politicians in the last 17 years. All of these attacks on educator wages damage student learning by contributing to widespread staff shortages and high turnover .

{In 2012, the Chicago Teacher Union (CTU), the third largest educator union in the country with 27,000 members, went on strike. Unlike in many other big school districts, the school board in Chicago is not elected but is appointed directly by the mayor, who was Rahm Emanuel, Obama's former Chief of Staff. Just as Obama bailed out the big banks but neglected homeowners and workers with his economic initiatives, so Emanuel was close with the business interests of Chicago and helped push school reforms whose functions have been to weaken the teacher union, close "failing" schools, and double down on test scores. In the decade leading up to the strike, 70 schools were closed, many replaced by charter schools, and 6,000 union teacher positions evaporated. A group called the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators within CTU took over the leadership positions in the union in 2010 and started building from day one to a strike by creating a strong base of leaders in each school. When Emanuel was elected mayor of Chicago in 2011 while at the same time being given new powers over the school district by the state legislature, his first move was to cancel a 4% raise guaranteed in the existing teacher contract. More than any other educator strike in recent memory, the CTU strike was essentially one of the workers against a singular politician. The teachers' demands in contract negotiations focused as much on teacher issues as on student issues including guaranteed pre-K, access to less-tested subjects like art, music, and physical education, and smaller class sizes. The strike lasted from Sept. 10th - 18th, and on the first day 35,000 teachers and allies marched and rallied in downtown Chicago, closing not only the schools but the main business center of the state. When a contract was reached, it was declared a victory by the union because it successfully fended off the worst of Emanuel's reforms but it also didn't manage to win major gains either. However, the result is more sympathetic when seen in the light of an economy in the midst of a deep recession, and as the first major teacher strike in decades, it helped educators on the national stage break out of complacency and laid the groundwork for militant teacher strikes later in the decade. Any misconception the residents of Chicago had about their highest elected official working for their interests in a democracy regarding education were shattered and his true colors were revealed. As the years following the strike saw more aggressive attacks by Emanuel on Chicago schools and CTU's continued resistance, one Chicago Tribune headline reported, "Teachers union has triple the public support of Emanuel" regarding education policy. For more information, check out How to Jump-Start Your Union: Lessons from the Chicago Teachers and this article .}

The Capitalists: The Rich

With the factory, there's the rich person who owns the factory or, with today's stock markets, the shareholders who own the company. The owners seek to maximize the return on their investment by hiring a CEO to run the company (I use "owners" instead of "capitalists" often because the latter feels jargony and old-timey and is less obvious to someone new to leftist politics). The CEO's implicit job description is to "Maximize profit", and this is enshrined in and enforced by corporate law . If the CEO doesn't do a good job maximizing profits compared to other industry competitors, the CEO will likely be fired by the shareholders and replaced by a different CEO who will. The company owners don't do the work of the company themselves and instead hire the executive to hire and manage the workers of the company to do the work.

The way to determine if your industry is structured by capitalist logic is to ask if anyone benefits financially from pushing down labor costs. In the private sector, it's the shareholders who benefit financially from keeping wages and salaries as low as possible. In the public sector, rich taxpayers are the ones who financially benefit from gouging the wages and benefits of educators because tax burdens fall disproportionately on those with wealth and labor costs are a primary expense of public sector industries like education.

How this plays out within the school system is a variation on the main capitalist theme. There is no direct owner of the public K12 school system in the same way a rich person has a legal document entitling them to an ownership portion of a company. But just as private investors provide the money that pays for the capital (buildings, machinery, loans) and pays for the wages used in the private sector, so mostly wealthy taxpayers, through the government as an intermediary, provide the money that pays for capital (buildings, curriculum, information technology) and pays for wages in the public sector. In effect, rich taxpayers stand in the same relation to schools as shareholders stand in relation to the company: one of minimizing costs, especially from labor, and, where possible, maximizing returns.

Just as the rich hire CEOs to minimize costs in order to maximize their profits in the private sector, so do they hire professionals to minimize their costs via taxes in the public sector. For example, they hire accountants to find every tax loophole (like offshore tax havens ), hire lobbyists to push down taxes , fund political campaigns of politicians who have friendly tax proposals and who want to cut social spending. Driving down their tax commitments is the most direct way that the rich maintain their wealth, which subsequently starves public services of resources.

While there's a carefully crafted image of the rich as your "ah shucks" neighbors who want to make an honest living and contribute to a good society, actual studies of the opinions and political spending of the rich reveals an extreme and aggressive agenda bent on slashing taxes and undermining public services like education. To take just one example of the effects of efforts to lower taxes for the rich, from 1995 to 2007 the effective tax rate for the top 400 taxpayers in the US them went from 30% to 16% due in large part to Clinton and Bush incrementally lowering the capital gains tax til it hit 15% in 2003. This change in taxes for the rich amounts to each of the richest taxpayers saving an average of $46 million each year compared to a decade earlier. Put another way, as a society we're giving each of the richest 400 people $46 million a year instead of spending it on public goods like education. The capital gains tax rate inched back up to 20% in 2013, but this has likely been overcompensated for by the fact that the wealthiest Americans have captured so much of the wealth created since the Great Recession. The capital gains tax is still far below below what it was in 1995 (25%) and the 1970s (35%), and additionally the income tax rates for the wealthy in the US have plummeted from 90% in the 1950s to 40% today. All in all, the rich have been extremely successful in driving down their tax commitments in opposition to overwhelming public support for higher taxes on the richest Americans.

The opinions and actions of economic elites relating to education policy in particular is just as troubling. A poll of public opinion of the richest 1% vs the general population on public policy issues found that only 35% of the rich agreed with the following statement while 87% of the general population did: "The federal government should spend whatever is necessary to ensure that all children have really good public schools they can go to." Revealingly, this was tied for the widest opinion gap between the rich and everyone else across the 18 issues polled. This is particularly disturbing in light of findings like those from a major study of thousands of poll results and their influence on federal policy: "economic elites and organized interest groups play a substantial part in affecting public policy, but the general public has little or no independent influence."

Furthermore, corporations are aggressively seeking ways to insert for-profit companies into public education through standardized tests , textbooks , subcontracting of busing and food services, those charter schools that are for-profit , and for-profit property companies that rent to non-profit charters. As billionaire conservative investor Ruport Murdoch said , "When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the US alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed" in reference to investing in companies that can take a piece of that pie. While these efforts are particularly exploitative and should be resisted, we shouldn't let them distract from the larger fact that public education as it exists normally is still essentially capitalist in its structure. As long as capitalism is the dominant economic system and the rich hold the vast majority of the political and economic power, public education will be subordinate to capitalist pressures.

As attacks against organized labor have pushed private sector union density from 35% in the 1950s to below 7% today, one of the last bastions of working class institutional power are public sector unions. In the efforts of rich interests to push down labor costs across the economy, they have now strategically singled out public unions for attacks in order to decrease their tax burdens. Additionally, destroying unions and pushing down labor costs in one sector creates downward wage pressures on the rest of the economy and leaves more money for profits.

This anti-teacher union assault by billionaires has increased in intensity over the last couple decades with the rise of non-union charter schools (funded by Walmart fortune heirs alone to the tune of $355 million and with plans for $1 billion more ); alternative teacher-licensure programs like TFA that essentially turns teaching into a low-paid, post-college internship (despite most of TFA's money coming from public sources it has accumulated $100s of millions in surplus above its operating costs on the backs of low-paid teachers and in states with financially struggling school districts); Right-to-Work laws where members can opt out of unions in otherwise unionized workplaces (funded by a slew of billionaires led by the Koch brothers ); and now the Janus lawsuit decision which institutes those laws at the federal level (billionaires, including immediate family members of current Dept of Education head Betsy DeVos, are now funding aggressive post-Janus de-unionization campaigns ). Amid all of this teacher unions have been on the ropes, dropping from 64% density in 1984 to 49% today .

What then are educators to do? If we can't fight against direct shareholders like we can in the private sector, do we have no options for advancing worker struggle? Luckily, most of the same strategies and tactics the factory worker uses against direct owners can be tweaked and applied by the school worker against indirect owners. For example, the strikes in West Virginia were as much against the state's political establishment as they were against the economic elites (that the WV governor is a billionaire tips off how close those two establishments are).

{In West Virginia, public education had been suffering from severe malnutrition due to a decades long attack by both Democrats and Republicans against school funding and educator unions. Teachers in West Virginia were ranked 48th in the country in wages. The spark that lit the strike came from proposed legislation that would increase the health insurance co-pay by 20% while raising wages so little that it amounted to a wage cut amid annual inflation. Organizing started out 8 months prior and culminated in a strike that lasted from February 22nd to March 6th of 2018 and included all 55 counties in the state. 20,000 teachers went on strike as did 13,000 other school employees, making it among the largest labor actions in recent decades. The state's billionaire governor tried to talk teachers down from the strike and scolded them with lines like, "You should be appreciative of where you are". At one point, school bus drivers were the ones in front forcing the work stoppages and bringing along other workers into the strike. Teachers won a 5% raise and killed parts of the legislation that were most egregious (and went on strike again this last February to kill a retaliatory bill targeting educators). These actions inspired similar mass educator strikes in Oklahoma, Arizona, and Kentucky in 2018. All together, the more than 300,000 teachers across the country who went on strike in 2018 was more than the combined number of teachers who struck in the previous 25 years. Expanding into blue state territory in 2019, teacher strikes have been successfully pulled off in Los Angeles, Denver, and Oakland. For more information about West Virginia, see these articles .}

Summary

Conclusion

While public education holds a special place in the liberal imagination as a great equalizer, it is more often a place of exploitation and oppression. Strife and conflict abound over who will be sorted into the corporate boardroom and who will be sorted into low-waged jobs and prison cells. Who will be fired and who will be lucky enough stay around to see their pay cut year after year? The major portion of the working and learning lives of teachers and students are governed by bosses who are more accountable to standardized tests than meeting human needs. We should reject the liberal reverence for public education and see our schools for what they are: sites of struggle over what kind of society we want live in.

In this view of public education there is great potential. As educators and students, we are uniquely placed to affect change in the schools and, by extension, society as a whole. As one of the industries that is least susceptible to automation and outsourcing, it also strategically positioned within the labor movement. Our aspirations should be further elevated by the political moment we're living in, one where teachers are leading strike waves across the country and enjoying broad public support. Similarly, the role of youth in leading social movements like Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street points towards the collective power of youth in challenging the status quo, which is nowhere as contested as in the schools youth attend.

With educator-led actions popping off all around us, we still shouldn't neglect taking the time to inquire about the root problems in society and in the education system. Without a political analysis to root our struggle, we're likely to blow with the capricious political winds and then fall scattered to the ground after things die down. We're caught up in an economic struggle forced on us by capitalism, and there's no better time to firmly choose a side.

The commitments that students and teachers have to making social change are reflected in the commitments they have to each other. The relationship between the teacher and student is at the core of the education system, and yet it is one enveloped in fraught class relations. It is also one where we can discover our humanity and fight for it with each other.

This was originally published at the Fire With Fire blog.

The Ebb And Flow Of Freedom: Haiti, Cuba, and Jamaica in the Age of Bourgeois Revolution

By Zach Medeiros

The power of the Haitian Revolution reverberated across the planet, but the revolution made its most profound and lasting impacts on the neighboring slave societies of the Atlantic world. In the nearby colonies of British Jamaica and Spanish Cuba, enslaved people, free people of color, and white settlers were forced to adjust-materially and ideologically-to an unprecedented, explosive event that upended life as they knew it. In Cuba, the colonial government and the planter class sought to "emulate Saint-Domingue and contain Haiti," doubling-down on slavery to supplant the former as the economic jewel of the colonized Caribbean while working to ensure the latter would not be duplicated. In Jamaica, which was home to the largest concentration of enslaved people in the region outside of Saint-Domingue, the revolution helped facilitate the slow crawl of British abolitionism, despite the sturdiness of the Jamaican slave regime. In both cases, free and enslaved people of color seized upon the new possibilities cracked open by the unmaking of Saint-Domingue and forging of Haiti. Far off imperial governments, colonial administrators, ruling elites, slaves, poor whites, and free people of color jostled for political space, sometimes in conjunction with one another, sometimes in bloody competition, all grappling with the coexistence of a resurgent slave power along with its antithesis.

Just as the victory of the revolution in Haiti did not translate into full-fledged freedom for the Haitian people, it did not produce linear, straightforward results in Cuba and Jamaica. This paper will show that despite geographical proximity and certain similarities common to any colonial, slaveholding society in the Atlantic, the impacts of the Haitian Revolution on Cuba and Jamaica were drastically different, entrenching slavery in the former while speeding its demise in the latter. Human agency and structural imperatives heightened these differences as the revolutionary masses in Haiti moved towards independence, ensuring that all three countries would chart distinct but linked paths throughout the 19 th century.

Saint-Domingue on the Eve of Revolution

The wealth Saint-Domingue produced was matched only by the savagery inflicted on the people who produced it. Shortly after Europeans arrived in the Caribbean in the late 15th century, disease and the brutal working conditions they brought with them killed most of the Indigenous population of Hispaniola, ground zero for the colonization of the Americas. To make up for this labor shortage, the Spanish and Portuguese, and later their French and British rivals, began to import large numbers of enslaved Africans to the region. [1]

At first, the number of slaves were limited; only 15 percent of Hispaniola's population was enslaved at the end of the eighteenth century. The ongoing decimation of Indigenous peoples, the influx of pirates, and conventional colonial expansion ensured the growth of plantations and European settlements, which in turn meant a growing demand for workers. [2]Although many of them would be taken elsewhere, given the often loose boundaries of the colonized Atlantic world, modern studies show indicate that between 850,000 to a million slaves were taken to Saint-Domingue from its foundation as an illegal settlement to the abolition of slavery in 1793. Some 685,000 of those people were brought to the colony in the eighteenth century alone. [3]

The brutal nature of the work imposed by their masters, particularly sugar harvesting and refinement, meant that the mortality rates were extraordinarily high, and replacement labor was always needed. 5-6 percent of slaves on the colony died each year, while the birthrate was only 3 percent. Nearly half of all slave children died on some plantations. [4] For the masters, it was simply cheaper to kill slaves off and find new ones. The cool language of economic rationality, with all its tables, charts, and figures often masks the universe of horrors that capitalist development requires. Over 70 years ago, C.L.R James described the terrors inflicted on enslaved Africans bound for the Americas and trapped on Saint-Domingue, and his haunting prose has scarcely been surpassed since. [5] In many ways, Saint-Domingue was a fitting microcosm for all of modern Western civilization: an island of unimaginable wealth, floating on a sea of skulls.

By the eve of the revolution, Saint-Domingue had been transformed from something of a backwater for buccaneers to the world's richest and most profitable slave colony. By 1789, it was the world's largest producer of sugar and coffee; its plantations produced twice as much as all of the other French colonies put together; and its trade accounted for more than a third of France's foreign trade. [6] The French state, and more importantly, the colonial elite and French bourgeoise, grew fat on the suffering of black slaves. Much like India would be for the British in later centuries, Saint-Domingue was the jewel in the crown of the French Empire. To nearly all white eyes, it stood tall as the epitome of what colonialism and slavery could achieve in terms of material prosperity and a seemingly untroubled racial hierarchy, where nearly half a million slaves could be ruled by a handful of white settlers and free people of color. In nearby colonies like Cuba and Jamaica, colonial officials and planters looked on with a mixture of envy and awe.

But as James once observed, "economic prosperity is no guarantee of social stability. That rests on the constantly shifting equilibrium of the classes...with every stride in production the colony was marching to its doom."[7] This production was only possible through the hyper-exploitation of hundreds of thousands of people concentrated on a small landmass, deprived of nearly every aspect of life that makes human existence bearable. Despite the totalitarian aspirations of their overseers, they had established a distinct and powerful culture of their own, and understood that the whites had far more to lose than they did. Driven by the mass leadership of countless enslaved women and men, Saint-Domingue was poised to explode into a new existence as Haiti, and when it did, the shockwaves would reach far outside the plantations of Hispaniola.

Emulating Saint Domingue, Containing Haiti: Cuba and the Haitian Revolution

Prior to the last decades of the eighteenth century, Cuba was more a society with slaves than a slave society. [8] According to the sociologist Arthur L. Stinchcombe, a slave society is "a society in which very many of the familial, social, political, and economic relations are shaped by the extensive and intensive deprivation of slaves of all sorts of rights to decide for themselves" and whose "pervasive purpose in many kinds of social relations between more and less powerful people is to keep the others (slaves) from deciding or being able to decide." [9] In other words, a slave society is not one where slavery merely exists, but where slavery is essential. For Stinchcombe, the degree to which any slave society can be classified as such depends on 1) "the degree to which an island was a sugar island," 2) "the degree of internal social and political organization of the planters," and 3) "political place of the planters in an island government and of the island government in the empire." [10] In other words, slave societies are at their strongest when sugar is booming, when the planter elite is unified and organized as a class, and when planters enjoy relative autonomy from metropolitan interference. [11]

While some 60,000 African men and women had been brought to the island as slaves from its founding as a Spanish colony in 1511 to the middle of the eighteenth century[12], Cuba could not be described as a slave society until the eve of the Haitian Revolution. Most importantly, Cuba lacked the economic qualifications. Far from being a major source of sugar and other export crops intimately tied to slavery, much of Cuban agriculture was geared towards internal consumption, and in the mid-eighteenth century, only four sugar mills had more than a hundred slaves. Many enslaved people worked in towns and cities or on small farms on urban outskirts, while most of those in the countryside worked in "relatively small concentrations (by Caribbean and later Cuban standards)" on modest tobacco or sugar farms, or sizable cattle ranches with a majority of "free" laborers. [13]

International and domestic developments in the latter half of the 1700s helped set the stage for a true slave society in Cuba. While Cuba was more racially diverse than past scholars have thought, thanks to extensive links between the island and British slave traders, the British occupation of Havana in the Seven Years' War accelerated and intensified pre-war trends. During the eleven-month long occupation, the British authorities monopolized the slave trade even more severely than the Spanish had, as the military governor conspired with the Havana cabildo for their mutual enrichment. Cuban slave imports increased slightly during the occupation, but the most lasting impacts came with the reassertion of Spanish control. By the time Spain retook Havana, the events of the war had helped fuel the modernization drive within the Spanish empire-with Cuban planters playing a leading role.[14]

The economic boon for the planter class was immediate, with the export of sugar in the five years after British intervention averaging more than 2,000 tons a year, compared with a mere 300 tons in the 1750s. [15] The independence of the United States, and the subsequent passage of a limited free trade agreement between the US and Cuba, provided another opportunity for Cuban planters seeking commercial expansion. [16] Pedro Rodriguez, Conde de Campomanes, noted jurist and economist, and later president of the Council of Castile, as well as other influential reformist voices within Spain and across the Spanish world, argued that the future of the Spanish empire depended on a large degree on trade liberalization and the development of tropical commodities, which would necessitate the mass import of enslaved workers. Campomanes "gave Cuba pride of place" in this vision of a more lucrative Spanish colonial project, "arguing that by cultivating large-scale tobacco and sugar industries, Cuba would be capable of competing with the most prosperous French islands." [17]

Mainland Spaniards had their influence over colonial debates, but it was the members of the developing Cuban planter class that proved the main and most effective advocates for the expansion of slavery in Cuba. In 1780, barely a decade out from the uprising in Saint-Domingue, Havana's planters petitioned the king to open up the slave trade, in order to maximize Cuba's economic potential and give Spain an advantage over France and England. To compete with Saint-Domingue, the blood-soaked jewel of the French colonial empire and the envy of its imperial rivals, the Cuban ruling class had to drastically transform Cuba, making it into a true slave society.

The trajectory of the wealthy creole lawyer and planter Francisco Arango y Parreno was emblematic of this process of transformation. After traveling to Madrid in 1787, he became the apoderado (empowered representative) of the Havana city council, and called on the king and his ministers to implement "an absolutely unrestricted slave trade-" a call which they heeded, already convinced by the changing commercial landscape and the pressures exerted by earlier reformist elites in Spain and the colonies. While the Crown's decree of February 28, 1789 was initially valid for only two years, subject to further review, it quickly boosted the legal slave trade in Havana, and signified Spain's commitment to sugar and slavery in Cuba and other Spanish colonies in the Americas, as well as the rising power of the Cuban planter class. The Crown's subsequent efforts to regulate the behavior of slaves and masters, and relatively temper the power of the latter over the former, floundered on the rock of planter resistance, and in 1794 Madrid suspended the execution of those laws. [18] Even as the enslaved masses of Saint-Domingue prepared to rise up against their own masters, Cuba was acclimating to its new role as a bastion of the Slave Power.

Arango's influence did not end there. In the days following the outbreak of the revolution in Saint-Domingue, Arango was in Madrid preparing for the Council of State's final vote on the extension of the open slave trade. When news of the uprising reached the capital, he quickly composed an essay on the roots of the revolt (as he saw them) and their implications for Cuba and Spain's rulers, which he was able to put into the hands of the Council. In his influential treatise, Arango argued that the rebellion of the slaves was a logical side effect of the rebelliousness of their French masters, but that the superiority of the Cuban-Spanish system meant that there was no risk of the conflagration spreading. [19] Critically, Arango made the case for an unparalleled opportunity, writing " it is necessary to view [Saint-Domingue] not only with compassion but also from a political perspective and…announce to the best of kings the opportunity and means by which to give our agriculture on the islands the advantage and preponderance over the French." [20]

In the opening salvo of an unprecedented slave revolution, opportunism dominated the immediate response of the Cuban elite to the misfortune of their French counterparts. Though this would shift as the revolution spread and deepened, the initial reaction of the Cubans and the Spanish state was that of vultures, ready to swoop in and pick the bones clean rather than maintain class solidarity with their fellow slaveowners. While this approach ultimately benefited the slaves of Saint Domingue, who could take advantage of the divisions among the masters, it did not bode well for the tens of thousands of African women and women who would suffer under a resurgent and emboldened Cuban slave regime.

A thwarted uprising in 1812 illustrates the lingering aftereffects of the Haitian revolution in Cuba. Documented in over 6,000 pages of court testimony, the Aponte Rebellion-named for its alleged ringleader, the free moreno (black) artisan José Antonio Aponte-is significant here not so much because of its achievements, which were limited to a few torched plantations and dead colonists, but for its symbolic power: for black Cubans and white Cubans. Shortly after Aponte was arrested on March 19, the authorities' interrogations led them to his home. Inside, they found an item several of the arrested conspirators had described: a book of drawings, containing maps of streets and garrisons throughout Cuba, illustrations of black soldiers defeating whites, images of George Washington, Aponte and his father, and King Carlos III, portraits of black kings from Abyssinia, and most shockingly of all, portraits of the Haitian revolutionary leaders Henri Christophe, Toussaint Louverture, Jean François, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, all of which Aponte produced or replicated himself. Officials later discovered that Aponte regularly showed this book to fellow free black militiamen and others during meetings at his home.[21]

While some of the defendants in the trial claimed ignorance about the meaning of the images, either to themselves or Aponte, and Aponte himself frequently gave innocent explanations for them, the importance of revolutionary and African iconography to free and enslaved people of color in this period (not to mention the exigencies of testifying under threat of more torture and likely execution) puts their words in a different light. [22]

More importantly, the fact that Aponte apparently took the time and energy to replicate images of Haitian revolutionaries, likely knowing full well the repercussions if they were ever discovered, and regularly showed them to his friends and comrades, is telling. At this time, rumors of Henri Christophe as a liberating monarch and anti-slavery bogeyman were rampant across Cuba, as well as other colonies like Puerto Rico. Many slaves and planters alike believed that the king and other Haitian revolutionaries planned to not only inspire revolt through example, but through material and organizational aid.[23] One of the leaders involved in the Aponte rebellion actually claimed to be the famed (but quite dead) Haitian rebel Jean-Francois, known to Spanish speakers as Juan Francisco. However, Christophe's relatively conservative foreign policy, which severely constricted Haitian intervention in foreign slave regimes, suggests that rebels and the authorities alike exaggerated the role the Haitians truly played for their own purposes. [24]

Regardless of where Aponte first saw those drawings, such a stark tribute to the Haitian revolution should not be downplayed. For Aponte, and perhaps for many of the people he shared them with, these images served as a powerful reminder that only a short distance away, slaves and free blacks had led a successful revolution, toppling not only their masters, but multiple white armies, and abolishing slavery once and for all in the process. Even for a free black Cuban like him, this must have been tremendously important. For white Cubans, who had so quickly embraced a reenergized slave system and adopted the mantle of the leading counterrevolutionaries in the Caribbean, the fact that a free black man in the middle of Havana not only had these images in his possession, but actively used them to inspire slaves and free people of color to revolt, must have been terrifying. Even in the heart of regional Slave Power, all was not well. Although Aponte and the other supposed plotters were executed by the state and turned into a public example, the ghosts of Toussaint, Dessalines, and Juan Francisco-indeed, the living specter of Haiti itself-continued to haunt 19th century Cuba.

Jamaica and the Haitian Revolution

Unlike Cuba, the British colony of Jamaica was a longstanding slave society on the cusp of the Haitian revolution. In fact, it had a great deal in common with Saint-Domingue, the only European colony more profitable than Jamaica in the late eighteenth century. [25] Like Saint-Domingue, sugar dominated the Jamaican economy. As Julius Scott noted, by 1740, the planters had contained the elite factionalism and black rebelliousness of earlier years enough to attract more white settlers, clear and cultivate new land for plantations across the island, and purchase hundreds of thousands of African women and men to work it. [26] Following Stinchcombe's model, the Jamaican planter class was politically unified, sugar was ascendant, and metropolitan control over day-to-day colonial affairs was not stringent at this time. As with Saint-Domingue, the labor demands of the burgeoning new sugar economy meant that the "demographic balance between black and white Jamaicans shifted decisively in favor of the African population." This shift was so decisive that "by the eve of the American Revolution almost ninety-four percent of the population of the island was of African ancestry." [27] The demographic tensions inherent in this situation facilitated a sense of defensiveness among the planters, which would come to a head with the beginning of the revolution in Saint-Domingue.

Free trade policies inadvertently encouraged these tensions in Jamaica. While white settlers were perturbed by the growing numbers of French, Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese seamen, merchants, and commercial agents that began to arrive after Jamaica opened its first free ports in 1766, the threat posed by black and brown foreigners was even greater. In 1782, for example, Jamaica's Grand Jury of the Quarter Sessions called on the legislature to compel foreign Blacks to carry "tickets to be produced on demand, or, better, that 'they should have a label round their necks describing who and what they are.'" [28] In the eighteenth century Caribbean borders and other boundaries were often more fiction than fact, and in Jamaica as much as its neighbors, the colonial authorities could not easily abide large numbers of mobile "masterless" people, particularly of unknown origin, and particularly in uncertain times.

When word of the revolution arrived in Jamaica, less than two weeks after the start of the uprising (and probably sooner for the island's black majority, whose networks of illicit communication often outpaced those of the more "literate" settler society, in Jamaica as elsewhere across the region), whites reacted with much less confidence than in Cuba. Governor Effingham wrote to the British Secretary of State about the "Terrible Insurrection of the Negroes" in Saint-Domingue, which compelled French emissaries to plead for assistance from the Jamaica Assembly. William Dinley, a surgeon trying to secure passage back to England, wrote to a Bristol merchant of "rebellion…in some of the French Settlements," and how "the Negroes had killed a great many white people." Given the conspicuous absence of sustained or detailed references to the revolution in public media at the time, Julius Scott argues that "there appears have been an effort on the part of Jamaican whites to suppress discussion" of events in Saint-Domingue. Even as the government prepared open defensive measures to prevent the spread of the rebellion, whites in Jamaica seem to have agreed on a "conspiracy of silence." [29]

Jamaican slaves did not share their reticence. While it is difficult to locate the direct voices of enslaved people, unmediated by elite or white interpreters, there is significant indirect documentation of how enslaved black men and women responded to events in Saint-Domingue. Writing on September 18th, 1791, the commander of the British garrison on the island observed that "many slaves here are very inquisitive and intelligent, and are immediately informed of every kind of news that arrives. I do not hear of their having shewn any signs of revolt, though they have composed songs of the negroes having made a rebellion at Hispaniola with their usual chorus to it." Two months later, the situation had evidently not improved, since the same commander wrote "[The slaves are] so different a people from what they once were … I am convinced the Ideas of Liberty have sunk so deep in the minds of all Negroes that whenever the greatest precautions are not taken they will rise." [30] Other authorities made similar reports. In Kingston, "slaves were said to be 'perfectly acquainted with every thing that has been doing at Hispaniola,'" while parish magistrates in Clarendon arrested several "head Negroes of some of the Plantations" for speaking "very unreservedly" about the rebellion. The prisoners also confessed their hope that a sister uprising would soon happen in Jamaica.[31] For enslaved Jamaicans, the revolution in San Domingue was a harbinger of hope, even when it was by no means clear that it wouldn't be crushed like so many other acts of slave resistance had been and would be in the future.

In Britain, the ruling class and their representatives in the press responded to news out of Saint Domingue with a mixture of mild concern and scarcely concealed glee. In a report published in The Times of London on October 28, 1791, the paper blamed the uprising on the reckless pursuit of racial equality by the French National Assembly, with all the timeless blind arrogance of white racism. Pointedly, the author(s) allege that "it is most certain that the inhabitants [of Saint-Domingue] will invite some foreign power to come and take possession of them" if the rebellion grows more serious. That power, in the unbiased opinion of The Times, should be Britain. In the meantime The report goes on to chastise the more excitable British capitalists who, falling prey to "the apprehensions which timid minds are apt to entertain where there is only the appearance of danger," caused some disturbances on the stock market.[32] Speaking as a leading voice of British imperialism and capital, the Times took a stance not unlike that of the Cuban elite in the early days of the revolution: mild concern, subsumed under excitement at the chance to snatch victory from the jaws of someone else's defeat. Although the report makes a passing reference to the declaration of martial law in Jamaica, the overwhelming sense of confidence is common among many European observers in the first weeks and months of the revolution. They could see something was coming, but they mistook a hurricane for a squall.

Back in Jamaica, white settlers could not enjoy this spirit of entrepreneurial complacency. Shortly after the revolution began, French planters began to flee to Jamaica, bringing their slaves with them. Other slaves from Saint-Domingue came to the island after liberating themselves in the chaos. White Jamaicans reacted harshly to these so-called "French Negroes," who they feared would contaminate their own with rebellious ideas, particularly republican. Governors Effingham and Williamson ordered that authorities do everything in their power to prevent communication between slaves from Saint-Domingue and English slaves, while a royal proclamation issued in December 1791 prohibited "free people of color and free negroes" from settling in Jamaica unless two whites could testify on their behalf.[33] The Jamaican Assembly attempted to track the names, whereabouts and permits of all French-speaking blacks and mulattoes in the colony, and passed a law in 1792 setting strict guidelines on the purchase or hiring of any foreign slaves brought to Jamaica after the rebellion in Saint-Domingue began. These restrictions were regularly violated by slaveowners and employers, not to mention slaves themselves. [34] On the island's north side, historically a hotbed of insurrection, whites established inter-parish safety committees and raised the local militias for the first time in nine years. Numerous reports confirmed that slaves in the area were well-informed about what was happening in Saint-Domingue, thanks in part to foreign small traders and sailors who traveled to Jamaica.[35] In the late 18 th century Jamaica, like much of the Atlantic world, rumors and other forms of information traveled fast and furious, especially among slaves, and masters could do little to stop it.

The feverish early responses of British Jamaica to the Haitian revolution contrast sharply with later events. After the National Convention abolished slavery in 1794, the French began to see emancipation as a tool of imperialist maneuver, with Jamaica as a main target of French expansionism. French ministers of the navy and other state officials urged attacks on Jamaica in the late 1790s, and the French commissioner Phillipe Roume plotted with the mixed-race general Martial Besse and the noted Jewish abolitionist merchant Isaac Sasportas to invade the British colony and abolish slavery there once and for all. [36] Unfortunately, Toussaint Louverture didn't share their priorities. Striking a secret agreement with the British general Maitland, Louverture promised not to attack Jamaica or encourage rebellion there, in exchange for an end to the British blockade of Saint-Domingue.

Furthermore, Louverture requested that British slave traders import more African workers to Saint-Domingue to make up for wartime losses, and encouraged other forms of trade. [37] In the ever-shifting Age of Revolution, politics made for even stranger bedfellows than normal. The white elite in Jamaica may have hated the revolution, but they and the metropolitan British could break bread with someone like Louverture, as long as their interests were assured. Negotiations between Haitians and the British in Jamaica did not end with Louverture's secret deal. More radical than Louverture, Jean Jacques Dessalines nevertheless continued his predecessor's diplomacy with the British in the spring of 1804. Though Jamaican governor George Nugent and his envoy were unable to secure British dominance over Haitian trade or a military base on the island, Dessalines's stringent defense of Haiti's sovereignty did not prevent him from promising non-intervention in Jamaican affairs. [38] While the elite bargained behind the scenes, the people had other ideas. In his 1807 History of Jamaica, Robert Renny writes that the following song was frequently heard in the streets of 1799 Kingston: " One, two, tree, All de same; Black, white, brown, All de same: All de same." [39]

More so than in Cuba, where the colonial ruling class enjoyed more autonomy from Madrid and exerted a greater impact on imperial policy, the impact of the Haitian revolution on Jamaica can be best understood as a process of negotiation. Despite their position as the premier global slave traders and their staunch opposition to republicanism, the British could see the writing on the wall, and decided that détente with Haiti, however unsteady, was the wisest course of action. To this end, they struck bargains with the Haitian government; these agreements did not give Britain the level of control over Haitian affairs that they desired, but they did ensure that Jamaica and other Caribbean colonies would be safe. At the same time, Haiti continued to act as a source of inspiration and refuge for self-emancipating Jamaican slaves, who often made the short journey by boat to take advantage of Haitian free-soil asylum policies. In the Jamaican slave imagination, Haiti stood tall as an ideological and physical source of salvation, however complicated Haitian politics could be. Slavery in Jamaica would not be abolished until 1834, spurred on by post-Haitian slave uprisings and the incremental developments of British parliamentary politics, but the possibilities that the Haitian revolution created could not be easily controlled.

Conclusion

The Haitian revolution was an international milestone. For the first time in history, slaves had led a successful revolution, one which produced the world's first black republic and abolished slavery years before most countries did. The symbolic and material weight of this act, which shook the global order, cannot be underestimated. It inspired fear, hatred, and hope in equal measure, among whites and people of color, free and enslaved people alike.

In Cuba, which had only recently begun to transform itself into a true slave society, the outbreak of the revolution provided a clear and unparalleled chance for the colony to supplant Saint-Domingue as the wealthiest in the world. Indeed, the destruction of much of Saint-Domingue's plantation economy, the disruption of legal and illegal trade, and the sheer loss of human life in the colony meant that the Cuban planters were ideally positioned to realize their dreams. Paradoxically, then, the victory of the slave uprising in Haiti meant the retrenchment of slavery a stone's throw away in Cuba. Cuban slavery would not be abolished until the royal decree of 1886.

In Jamaica, which had been a slave society far longer than Cuba and contained nearly as many slaves as Saint-Domingue, white society's initial response to the revolution was much more fearful. While the British ruling classes in the metropole did not share their trepidation, the Jamaican planters were much closer to the front lines, and vast demographic disparities engendered a sense of insecurity for them white Cubans couldn't understand. As the revolution progressed, and it became clear that Toussaint L'Ouverture and to a lesser degree Dessalines were figures the British could compromise with, political, social, and economic exigencies would push white Jamaicans into a stable status quo with the Haitians. In another seeming paradox, the world's leading slave trader would be the first European power to come to terms with Haiti. Slavery in Jamaica would eventually be abolished in 1834, a fact that was due as much to fears of another mass slave rebellion and the declining economic benefits of the system as it was the Damascene conversion of the British Empire.

In Cuba and Jamaica as in Haiti, history was made through collective and individual human agency but shaped by structural factors. The paths Haiti, Cuba, and Jamaica took during and after the revolution were marked not by a steady march forward, but movement in fits and starts, in several directions at once. Freedom and slavery, bondage and emancipation, could and did exist simultaneously. There was no firm division between an essential Slavery and Freedom, whatever the rhetoric of abolitionists and slavers or the strictures of legal codes. Freedom was, in most cases, better understood as a practical set of possibilities, or a spectrum instead of a hard category. Slaves could be more or less enslaved under different conditions, while "free" people could be more or less free. [40] In the world of the Haitian revolution, slaves, free people of color, and whites discovered a new range of possibilities, made feasible by the collective leadership of the enslaved Haitian masses.

These possibilities would often prove contradictory in practice. In Cuba, the counterrevolution established a firmer foothold, but the revolution continued to inspire insurrectionary plots like the Aponte Rebellion. Beneath the surface of a resurgent slave power, dreams of another Haiti stirred. In Jamaica, the British and the colonial planters would come to terms with the Haiti government, and the threat of further slave revolts would help propel the slow process towards abolition. But the end of slavery hardly translated into freedom or democracy for the black Jamaican majority, as the imposition of direct rule from Westminster later in the nineteenth century showed. Stage-managed abolition did not bring true liberty.

In the end, the Haitian revolution rippled outwards in ways that only seem obvious with the benefit of hindsight. Even the most astute observers, regardless of race, could not hope to fully grasp the ramifications at the time, since no one can truly understand a revolution in the midst of it. For some in Cuba and Jamaica, the fall of Saint-Domingue and the rise of Haiti was an apocalypse. For others, it meant freedom was on the horizon. For still more, it was a new opportunity to be navigated and exploited as best as they could. The story of the Haitian revolution's impact is the story of all of those experiences, the story of how an unprecedented event produced unpredictable results.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Francisco de Arango, "Discurso sobre la agricultura," 1792.

Arango, "Representacion heca a Su Majestad con motive de la sublevacion de escavlos."

"Popular Heroes in Cuba, 1795" from The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History

"Greed and Fear in Cuba" from The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History

Robert Renny, "Jamaican Song, 1799," in The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History, edited and translated by David Geggus (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2014).

The London Times , "Danger and Opportunity: The British Press, 1791," in The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History, edited and translated by David Geggus (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2014).

Unknown, "Jamaican Slaves, 1791," in The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History, edited and translated by David Geggus (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2014).

Unknown, "Aponte's Rebellion, Cuba, 1812," in The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History, edited and translated by David Geggus (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2014),

Secondary Sources:

Julia Gaffield. "Haiti and Jamaica in the Remaking of the Early Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World." The William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 3 (2012).

Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (London/New York: Verso, 2018).

Phillipe Girard, "Did Dessalines Plant to Export the Revolution," in The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy , edited by Julia Gaffield (Charlottesville/London: University of Virginia Press, 2016).

Matt D. Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle Against Atlantic Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

Mimi Sheller, Democracy After Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2000).

Ada Ferrer, Freedom's Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Arthur L. Stinchcombe, Sugar Island Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment: The Political Economy of the Caribbean World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995).

Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

Elena A. Schneider, ""La Dominación Inglesa": Eleven Months of British Rule." In The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1989).

Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

Notes

[1] Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004 ), 15-17.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Dubois, 39-40.

[4] Ibid.

[5] C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1989), 6-15.

[6] Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (London/New York: Verso, 2018), 6.

[7] James, 55.

[8] Ada Ferrer , Freedom's Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 17.

[9] Arthur L. Stinchcombe, Sugar Island Slavery in the Age of Enlightenment: The Political Economy of the Caribbean World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 3.

[10] Ibid, 130.

[11] Mimi Sheller, Democracy After Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2000), 31.

[12] Ferrer, 18.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Elena A. Schneider, ""La Dominación Inglesa": Eleven Months of British Rule." In The Occupation of Havana: War, Trade, and Slavery in the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 163 -216.

[15] Ferrer, 19.

[16] Ibid, 21.

[17] Ibid, 22.

[18] Ferrer, 25-28.

[19] Ferrer, 33-34.

[20] Arango, "Representacion heca a Su Majestad con motive de la sublevacion de escavlos, " quoted in Ferrer, 34-35.

[21] Matt D. Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle Against Atlantic Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 4-6.

[22] Unknown, "Aponte's Rebellion, Cuba, 1812," in The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History, edited and translated by David Geggus (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2014), 189-190.

[23] Childs, 162-165.

[24] Phillipe Girard, "Did Dessalines Plant to Export the Revolution," in The Haitian Declaration of Independence: Creation, Context, and Legacy, edited by Julia Gaffield (Charlottesville/London: University of Virginia Press, 2016 ), 147-148.

[25] Sheller, 42.

[26] Julius S. Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (London/New York: Verso, 2018), 4.

[27] Scott, 5.

[28] Scott, 48-49.

[29] Scott, 142-143.

[30] Unknown, "Jamaican Slaves, 1791," in The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History, edited and translated by David Geggus (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2014), 185-186.

[31] Scott, 144.

[32] The London Times , "Danger and Opportunity: The British Press, 1791," in The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History, edited and translated by David Geggus (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2014), 190-192.

[33] Scott, 144-145.

[34] Scott, 145-146.

[35] Scott, 151-153.

[36] Girard, 142-143.

[37] Girard, 146 and Dubois, 223.

[38] Julia Gaffield. "Haiti and Jamaica in the Remaking of the Early Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World." The William and Mary Quarterly 69, no. 3 (2012): 595-598. Girard, 145.

[39] Robert Renny, "Jamaican Song, 1799," in The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History, edited and translated by David Geggus (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2014), 188.

[40] Sheller, 43-44.

On Historical Materialism: A Theoretical Revival

By Charles Wofford

What is the responsibility of the historian? Historians show how those things often taken for granted, taken as a fact of life, are relatively recent developments. Alternately, they show how those things one may assume to be strange and unusual have, in fact, been present for a long time. That approach fits neatly into the broader critique of ideology, and there is a reason Marx was so invested in history and historical method. He revealed the historicity of "nature" in, among other places, his 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which were not brought to public light until the mid-20th century, well after the developments of "orthodox" Marxisms and Marxism-Leninism (Claeys, 2018). The effort was to expose Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and the other political economists of the eighteenth century for treating historical developments (from which they had conveniently benefited) as though they were eternal nature. Writes Marx, "Political economy starts with the fact of private property; it does not explain it to us. It expresses in general, abstract formulas the material process through which private property actually passes, and these formulas it then takes for laws" (Marx, 1844). If something is historical, that means it had a beginning. If it had a beginning, it can therefore have an end. Historical materialism - the exposure of capital's historical conditions of existence - was a sword forged to slay Mammon.

But a sword is only as good as the steel out of which it is made. Today, many introductions to historical materialism not only fail to show the real power of the Marxist analysis but obscure the nature of Marxist historiography. Some Marxist intellectuals (like Richard Wolff), acting out of the best intentions, recapitulate capitalist historiography. The purpose of this essay is to introduce historical materialism with academic rigor, and to get at its deeper project, i.e. setting a general theoretical foundation for a revolutionary understanding of historical development, with the specific purpose of thinking past capitalism. What is historical materialism, and what is not historical materialism? There are several issues, each to be framed as a critique: The critique of teleology, the critique of "modernity," the critique of technological determinism, and the ideological self-critique.

First, historical materialism is not a theory of history that sees "primitive communism" necessarily leading to "slave" systems, necessarily leading to "feudal" systems, necessarily leading to "capitalist," then to "socialist" and "communist" systems. Any thesis of overarching historical development following from some "necessary" internal logic ought to be seen as outmoded and historiographically suspect. Teleological views of history have been rightly abandoned by academic historians, and Marxism has shown itself flexible and powerful enough to outgrow its nineteenth-century trappings.

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle." But class struggle is not some mechanical, deterministic thing, like a clock. It is rather a dynamic process that may yield any number of results. Feudalism did not have to lead to capitalism, and capitalism arose not from feudalism itself, but from the ruins of feudalism. It is true that feudalism was only formally abolished (in France anyway) on August 4th, 1789, at the beginning of the French Revolution. But feudalism, throughout the Medieval ages with which it is associated, was a largely decentralized mode of production. It was not the same thing as the absolutism of the French ancien regime, overthrown in the revolution of 1789, which aimed to consolidate power into the monarch (indeed, the entire concept of "feudalism" has been challenged by academic historians, and with good reason. Marxist intellectuals have been slow on the uptake, with even people like Richard Wolff casually referring to "feudalism" as though it is a widely agreed upon concept). Wood and Brenner note that absolutism, and the enlightenment which supported it, may be seen as a defeated historical alternative to the rise of capitalism. In any case, it is a mistake to see feudalism as flowing directly into capitalism by means of a bourgeois revolution; rather, feudalism was already on the decline, and capitalism and absolutism of the French monarchy were alternative ways out of the medieval era.

Capitalism did not have to emerge, and that is the fundamental lesson of historical materialism: capitalism is not necessary or natural, and therefore it is not something that any country or society "needs." The idea that certain modes of production must pass into others is an example of the old historian's fallacy of projecting the present onto the past, fallaciously assuming a greater homology between "modern" and "pre-modern" society than may be justified. It also justifies imperialist expansion against non-capitalist societies, as one believes that the imperialist may be acting to bring those societies "forward" in some greater sense, and that any suffering is justified in the name of "progress." Marxist historian Ellen Meiksins Wood (1942-2016) had it right when she identified the point of historical materialism to be isolating what makes capitalism specific, what makes it unique, not how it may manifest age-old human practices like commerce. The job of the Marxist historian, then, is not to show how modern capitalist society has its seeds in the ancient past, but to show how things became the way they are in the relatively recent past. Marxist historiography, understood in this way, is empowered, rather than challenged, by the postmodern polemic against "grand narratives." "We agree, there are no 'grand narratives'" says the Marxist. "That is why we doubt the Thatcherite declaration that 'there is no alternative.'" Are capitalist triumphalism and capitalist realism (Fisher, 2009) not the ultimate "grand narrative?" Historical materialism is about creating a "theoretical foundation for interpreting the world in order to change it" (Wood, 1995). It is not about shoehorning all of history into a preconceived theoretical framework. In this sense, much of the youtube left intelligentsia (with otherwise excellent user "Cuckphilosophy" as an example), recapitulates schoolboy-level understandings of these issues ("Marxism is a grand narrative, postmodernism is against grand narratives" etc).

The Marxist historian ought to search for the breaks, fragments, and gaps, the hidden or lost potentials. Why? Because in doing so we reveal capitalism in its historicity, and take it out of the realm of nature, and thereby bring to light the possibility of surpassing it. The apologists of capital have always situated capitalism as part of nature, never as part of history. Histories of capitalism discuss how commerce has been around for thousands of years, which is true. Yet the aim of such "histories" is precisely to de-historicize; to show how capitalism goes all the way back to the foggy pre-history of humanity, and how modern commercial society is just the culmination of all those tendencies. The Marxist historian will therefore seek the fragments and breaks, and not the continuities or the overarching narratives.

Second, a central project of the historical materialist is the critique of the concept of "modernity." The rise of capitalism, the rise of individual rights, the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, the French revolution of 1789 and the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 are all sometimes taken as one unified package, lumped together under the term "modernity." This is an error.

That is not to say that there is no such thing as the "modern," but a critical engagement with the entire concept is necessary if we are to conceive of an alternative modernity to neoliberal capitalism, one that is not merely some form of nostalgia. Unfortunately, thinkers like Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno still hold undue sway in leftist circles, although their historiography is flawed. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) Adorno and Horkheimer set out a general critique of modernity as overly rationalizing and systematizing the totality of human life. But they take "Enlightenment" in a broad definition, including in its ambit all of the features of modernity noted above.

A detailed account of why Adornian historiography is wrong deserves and entire book of its own, dedicated to the rise of capitalism in England, the French revolution, the German Aufklärung, and other topics. Moreover, I do not wish to state that Adorno and Horkheimer were the only leftist intellectuals guilty of severe historical and historiographical errors (Foucault also comes to mind). But Dialectic of Enlightenment still carries an august status in even some orthodox Marxist circles, when it misleads more than it illuminates.

The historical materialist critique of modernity begins with the following observations: The rise of capitalism in England, the French Enlightenment, the German Aufklärung, the scientific revolution, and the industrial revolution did not come to us as part of a unified package. Capitalism as we understand it arose in rural England (Wood, 2002; Brenner 1976; Marx, 1867), and was not initially tied to the 1789 French revolution. The bourgeoisie and the capitalists were not originally the same class: most French bourgeois were office-holders, lawyers, or intellectuals; they were not capitalists or even merchants. It was the long-established landlord class in England which emerged as the nascent capitalists, and their literature was related to agricultural "improvement" (which in practice meant yielding higher profits), not the "enlightenment" of the citizenry.

Immanuel Kant's famous reply to the question "What is Enlightenment?" defines "enlightenment" as "man's exit from self-inflicted immaturity." He goes on to link this "exit" to "the public use of reason." Is this challenge of finding an "exit" through "public use of reason" not more in line with revolutionary leftist thinking than reactionary thinking? If a philosopher comes along who argues that the pursuit of progressive values (broadly defined) results in greater harm to humanity than otherwise, would we not regard such a figure as a reactionary? Why, then, do we give figures like Adorno a pass when they argue the same (or nearly the same) thing?

Adam Smith's famous passage on the invisible hand goes thusly:

"As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and buy directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was not part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it." (Smith, 1776, emphasis added)

Smith's famous argument is echoed by 20th-century neoliberal economist Friedrich Hayek:

"As decentralization has become necessary because nobody can consciously balance all the considerations bearing on the decisions of so many individuals, the coordination can clearly be affected not by "conscious control" but only by arrangements which convey to each agent the information he must possess in order effectively to adjust his decisions to those of others. And because all the details of the changes constantly affecting the conditions of demand and supply of the different commodities can never be fully known, or quickly enough be collected or disseminated, by any one center, what is required is some apparatus of registration which automatically records all the relevant effects of individual actions and whose indications are at the same time the resultant of, and the guide for, all the individual decisions. This is precisely what the price system does under competition, and which no other system even promises to accomplish." (Hayek, 1944)

In no way can either of these passages be squared with Kant's appeal to "the public use of reason." Both Smith and Hayek argue explicitly in favor of the individual, private use of reason, and believe that the greater good is served via the aggregate of individuals pursuing their own private interests. Nowhere is this argument to be found in Kant, nor is it in Kant's peers in the debate (Moses Mendelssohn, Karl Reinhold, etc.) "The public use of reason must at all times be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among men; the private use of reason, however, may often be very narrowly restricted without the progress of enlightenment being particularly hindered" (Kant, 1784). Is Kant's statement not more easily squared with notions of public planning, and public ownership, rather than some assumed dialectical inversion whereby private greed promotes the public welfare? If the public use of reason is a main criterion, then the main inheritors of the enlightenment in the 20th century might be Salvador Allende and the Cybersyn project, or computer scientist Paul Cockshott's book with political economist Allin Cottrell, Towards a New Socialism (1993). Wood may be right when she wrote in "Modernity, Postmodernity, or Capitalism?" (1996)

"So this isn't just a phase of capitalism. This is capitalism. If "modernity" has anything at all to do with it, then modernity is well and truly over, not created but destroyed by capitalism. The Enlightenment s dead. Maybe socialism will revive it, but for now the culture of "improvement" reigns supreme...The only concept we need to deal with this new reality is capitalism. The antithesis to that, of course, isn't postmodernism but socialism." (Wood, 1996)

My goal here is not to exonerate that heterogeneous phenomenon called "the Enlightenment," which is itself arguably as obscurantist a label as "modernity." But if the main portions of the Enlightenment happened in France and the German states, and capitalism arose in England, the question must be asked, whence arises the idea that the Enlightenment and capitalism were two parts of a united and oppressive modernity?

The answer, I think, is in another misappropriated Marxist idea: base and superstructure. Because ideological developments are assumed to reflect materialist ones, some Marxists conclude that the intellectual movement of the Enlightenment, coeval with the rise of capitalism, must therefore be capitalism's intellectual expression. But again, the main strains of Enlightenment thought were in France and the German states and promoted "enlightened absolutism." They had little in common with the literature of "improvement" that thrived on England, and which was used to justify the mass enclosures that took up special urgency after 1688, and which were associated with different notions of citizenship (such as the English Bill of Rights). The mistake arises from an excess of historiography and a dearth of history. Recall that one third of classical Marxism's foundation was English empiricism. Modern Marxists sometimes place such emphasis on Hegelian method that, though their sword may be made from great technique, the shoddy materials result in a shoddy weapon. A frail weapon will not slay the dragon of capital.

Historians have discussed the "English Enlightenment." However, the idea itself is contentious, as the main representatives of English enlightenment thought (John Locke, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, etc.) were fiercely conservative, while the main figures of the continental Enlightenment were often imprisoned or had to meet in secret to avoid persecution for their radicalism. The "English Enlightenment," was notably distinct from the continental enlightenment(s).

If pressed to choose a single date for the "birth" of capitalism in England, my candidate would be 1688. Capitalism had, of course, been in utero for many years, with the enclosures gradually increasing and the power of the landlords increasing with it. But 1688 was the original revolution, which first enabled the legalization of what we now call capitalism on a mass scale. The Bank of England was founded six years later, which began the long and complex process of redefining national sovereignty along lines of government debt (Goodchild, 2002). The Bank of England was taken over by the state, which amounted to the taking over of the state by the Bank of England. This bank could never crash because it was backed up by the state, which had the monopoly on violence to extract whatever taxes were needed to maintain the bank. This enabled the Bank of England to create infinite loans on the promise that they could always be paid back in the future. That in turn justified the mass creation of paper currency secured against those instabilities suffered by previous paper currencies. Hence, the "creation" of the wealth which eventually allowed for the industrial revolution.

A brief side comment: in Capital Vol I, Marx calls the emergence of capitalism in England the "classic form" of accumulation by dispossession. In a footnote he then writes:

"In Italy, where capitalist production developed earliest, the dissolution of serfdom also took place earlier than elsewhere. There the serf was emancipated before he had acquired any prescriptive right to the soil. His emancipation at once transformed him into a "free" proletarian, without any legal rights, and he found a master ready and waiting for him in the towns, which had been for the most part handed down from Roman times. When the revolution which took place in the world market at about the end of the fifteenth century had annihilated northern Italy's commercial supremacy, a movement in the reverse direction set in. The urban workers were driven en masse into the countryside, and gave a previously unheard-of impulse to small-scale cultivation, carried on in the form of market gardening." (Marx, 1867)

This comment may seem to demolish the thesis of capitalism's origins in England. However, Marx is remarkably vague here. Why is England the "classic" case if Italy is the place where capitalist production developed "earliest?" One idea is that Marx realized at some level he was founding a whole discipline and method of analysis, and thus decided for his own convenience what counted as the "classic" case. However, such an explanation seems too contingent. A comrade suggested to me that early Italian capitalism was destroyed by the decades of invasion and warfare in Italy during the first half of the sixteenth century. Looking into this thesis further, I found that, combined with epidemics of Plague, he Great Italian Wars rendered low the opportunities for investment. As a result, those with capital, rather than investing in improving production, invested in buildings and art-hence the artistic bloom of the Italian Renaissance (Malanima, 2008). Their capital did not yield profit in the same self-perpetuating ways we associate with capitalism, and was turned into use-value, rather than maintaining and expanding itself as exchange-value. Implicit in this explanation is the idea that wealthy Italians would necessarily engage in capitalist behavior unless such behavior is deflected, and that sounds a little too close to the "Capitalism is human nature" position. Whether one agrees or disagrees with this particular analysis, the larger point is this: the capitalism that since consumed the world, the capitalism in which we are living- "our" capitalism-did not come from Italy. Early Italian capitalism was snuffed out.

Philosopher Philip Goodchild couches his analysis in a Nietzschean historiography, inquiring as to when, exactly, the "Death of God" occurred. He places it at 1694, the founding of the Bank of England and the merger of state and financial interests that had been kept apart for thousands of years. "It was this deed which caused the murder of God" (Goodchild, 2002). But if capitalism killed God, then capitalism must first have been born, and the moment of the birth of capitalism as a social system, albeit of course in its infancy, was 1688. Marx notes in chapter 27 of Capital that the 1688 "Glorious Revolution" enabled the "capitalist profit-grubbers" to engage in profit-grubbing on an entirely new scale. While his emphasis is mostly on land, enclosure, and the creation of a mass property-less proletariat, the creation of modern finance is a subject on which historical materialists ought to have much to say.

Third, technological development is not itself the locus of revolution. As Wood notes, the point of historical materialist analysis is that each mode of production has its own logic, and its own way of needing to be understood.

"It is one thing to say that capitalism uniquely fosters technological development. It is quite another to contend that capitalism developed because it fosters technological development, or that capitalism had to develop because history somehow requires the development of productive forces, or that less productive systems are necessarily followed by more productive ones, or that the development of productive forces is the only available principle of historical movement from one mode of production to another […] the principle is that at the foundation of every social form there are property relations whose conditions of reproduction structure social and historical processes." (Wood, 1995, 120-121)

A simple historical example may be used to further illustrate the point: The ancient Romans could have had an industrial revolution of their own. They had simple steam machines and they had wagons. But for some reason, the opportunity or the imperative never arose to stick a steam machine on the back of a wagon and have the steam do the work of pushing it. Had such a moment arisen, the industrial revolution might have been 1,800 years ago. If technology will save us, it would have done so by now. The lesson of historical materialism here is that the revolution will be a class revolution, not a technological revolution (also opening room for critiques of the pseudoscientific cult of Singularitarianism). Building on work done by Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood shows the particular historical circumstances that allowed capitalism to emerge when and where it did, and not before (Wood, 2002). Historical developments need to be seen as historical, not as metaphysical; they do not follow from some predetermined logic waiting for its moment of fruition. History means beginnings. Technology has been around long before capitalism, so the beginnings of capitalism cannot be essentialized to technological development, unless we are prepared to once again view capitalism as existing in utero from the foggy pre-history of humanity.

Fourth, historical materialism involves challenging the categories in which we tend to think as themselves products of history. While Wood emphasizes the falseness of "economic" vs "political," we should also be careful of categories like "base" vs "superstructure," as ripe for reification. The terms of our analysis should be fluid and open to self-critique. As Slavoj Zizek put it in his 2009 debate with Alex Callinicos,

"If communism is an eternal idea, then it works as a Hegelian concrete universality. It is eternal, not in the sense of a series of abstract features which can be applied to every situation, but in the sense that it has the ability, the potential, to be re invented in each new historical situation." (Zizek, 2009).

That is the genuine power of historical materialism, to take the past and re-member it so as to continually recreate the space for revolutionary thought "in each new historical situation."

In the preface to his classic The Making of the English Working Class (1964), E.P. Thompson notes the problems created in thinking of class as a "thing" rather than a process ("If we stop history at a given point, then there are no classes but simply a multitude of individuals with a multitude of experiences"), and how such thinking engenders a framing of any sort of concept of "class consciousness" as embodying the worst caricatures of vanguardist organizational methods. The logical contradictions are clear:

"'It' - the working class - exists, and can be defined with some accuracy as a component of the social structure. Class-consciousness, however, is a bad thing, invented by displaced intellectuals, since everything which disturbs the harmonious co-existence of groups performing different 'social roles' (and which thereby retards economic growth) is to be deplored as an "unjustified disturbance-symptom.'" (Thompson, 1964, 10)

Thompson sees class-consciousness as something that exists empirically, and which ought to be studied. All classes have some kind of consciousness, and it is part of the job of the Marxist historian to study their historical development. In a similar vein, all movements have vanguards, and one may study those empirically too. This is the meaning used by Marx and Engels in the manifesto.

"The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement." (Marx and Engels, 1848)

One may say to a "non-political" person, that while they may not care for politics, others do, and they will not care for their interests. One may also say to those skeptical of vanguards that while you may not pursue a position to influence the movement in ways you think are positive, that does not mean others won't. And those people will not necessarily lead the movement in directions that you think are best. Refusing to recognize any notion of the vanguard is akin to refusing to recognize any notion of politics. As Lenin put it,

"But what else is the function of Social-Democracy [i.e. revolutionary socialism] if not to be a "spirit," not only hovering over the spontaneous movement, but also raising the movement to the level of "its program?" Surely, it is not its function to drag at the tail of the movement; at best, this would be of no service to the movement; at the worst, it would be very very harmful." (Lenin, 1902)

Why does one become an activist (taking that term in the broadest sense) if not because one thinks one has something to contribute? Do we, as socialists, not think that we have a better political program than non-socialists? Are we not, in essence, trying to convince more people to think in socialist terms?

"For there will always be found some who think for themselves, even among the established guardians of the masses, and who, after they themselves have thrown off the yoke of immaturity, will spread among the herd the spirit of rational assessment of individual worth and the vocation of each man to think for himself." (Kant, 1784)

In this vein, see Zizek's emphasis on the nature of an "authentic" master who "forces us to be free" (see, for example, his debate with Jordan Peterson). In this vein, perhaps psychoanalysis may indeed serve a revolutionary role in creating the "maturity" needed to recognize the prospects for an "authentic" vanguard.

Obviously, this essay has gleaned over complex issues with a broad brush. It is really only aimed at correcting some errors that I have seen in explications of historical materialism. As noted above, just the discussion of capitalism and the enlightenment from a historical materialist perspective is itself a book waiting to be written, and this essay does not pretend to be that. Moreover, I have not discussed why feudalism was on the decline already if not because of the very same things that led to capitalism, or the critics of the Woods/Brenner theses (like Jairus Banaji, whose excellent work will be the subject of another essay). I have also shown the limits of my own historical understanding regarding the nature of the economy of the Italian states during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But if we need a way out of "capitalist realism" and to show that, contra Thatcher, there are alternatives, then the first thing to do is look to the past for inspiration and understanding. Historical materialism is a method by which we may ensure that our backward glance is actually historical, rather than merely nostalgic. But it must be re invented as our understanding of history is re invented: historical materialism is a historiography, not a history. What historical materialism will tell you depends on which historical information you put into it. The good historical materialist is not just a communist but is a historian too. And that means really knowing history.

Charles Wofford is a communist and a PhD student in historical musicology.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chomsky, Noam. "The Responsibility of Intellectuals," The New York Review of Books, 1967.

Claeys, Gregory. Marx and Marxism (Nation Books, 2018).

Cockshott, Paul and Allin Cottrell. Towards a New Socialism (Russell Press, 1993).

Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Verso Books, 2009).

Goodchild, Philip. Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety (London: Routledge, 2002).

Greene, Gayle. "Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory." Signs 16 no 2, 1991.

Hayek, Friedrich A. The Road to Serfdom (University of Chicago Press, 1944).

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich. "What Is To Be Done?" in The Essential Works of Lenin ed. By Henry M. Christman (New York: Benton Books, 1966).

Malanima, Paolo. "The Italian Renaissance Economy (1250-1600)." International Conference Villa La Pietra, Florence, May 10th-12 th 2008, Europe in the Late Middle Ages: Patterns of Economic Growth and Crisis.

Schmidt, James, ed. What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (University of California Press: 1996).

Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Prometheus books, 1991).

Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class (Vintage Books, 1964).

Wood, Ellen Meiksins. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (Verso Books, 2002).

Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Verso Books, 1995).

"Modernity, Postmodernity, or Capitalism?" Monthly Review July/August, 1996

Zizek, Slavoj. "Slavoj Zizek: What does it mean to be a revolutionary today? Marxism 2009." Video File. Youtube.com. 2009. Accessed May 18th, 2019. Relevant comment at 2:13. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GD69Cc20rw&t=640s

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.

Bibliography

Althusser, Louis. 2001. Lenin and Philosophy and other essays. New York: Monthly Review

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---. 1996. For Marx. New York: Verso

---. 2014. On the Reproduction of Capitalism. New York: Verso.

Arruzza, Cinzia. 2017. "From Social Reproduction Feminism to the Worker's Strike." In

Social Reproduction Theory . Edited by Tithi Bhattacharya

Barrett, Michele. 1980/2014. Women's Oppression Today. New York: Verso.

Bhattacharya, Tithi., ed. 2017. Social Reproduciton Theory. London: Pluto Press.

Benzanson, Johanna., and Meg Luxton., eds. 2006. Social Reproduction. Montreal: McGill-

Queen's University Press.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1993. "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics and

Violence against Women of Color," Stanford Law Review, 43: 1241-99.

D'Emilio, John. 1992. "Capitalism and Gay Identity." In Making Trouble. New York:

Routledge.

Harvey, David. 1989 The Condition of Postmodernity. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.

Kaur Dhamoon, Rita. 2011. "Considerations on Mainstreaming Intersectionality," Political

Research Quarterly , 64(1): 232.

Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital Volume I. New York: Penguin Books

---. 1970. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. New York: International

Publishers.

McNally, David. 2017. "Intersections and Dialectics: Critical Reconstructions in Social

Reproduction Theory." In Social Reproduction Theory. By Tithi Bhattacharya.

London: Pluto Press.

Morton, Donald. 2001. "Petaphysics of the Closet: Queer Theory as the Art of Imaginary

Solutions for Unimaginary Problems." In Marxism, Quuer Theory, Gender, edited by

Mas'ud Zavarzadeh, Teresa L. Ebert, and Donald Morton. Syracuse, NY: The Red

Factory

Nash, Jennifer C. 2008. "re-thinking intersectionality." feminist review, 89: 1-15.

Razack, Sherene. 1998. Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race and Culture in

Courtrooms and Classrooms . Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Rubin, Gayle. 2011. Deviations: A Gayle Rubin Reader. Durham: Duke University Press.

Smith, Dorothy. 1990. The Conceptual Practices of Power. Toronto: University of Toronto

Press.

Sumner, Colin. 1979. Reading Ideologies: An Investigation into the Marxist Theory of Ideology

and Law . London: University of Michigan Press.

Weeks, Kathi. 2014. "Forward: Re-encountering Marxist Feminism." In Women's Oppression

Today . By Michele Barrett. New York: Verso.

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).