More Than Words: Formulating Slogans for the Struggle

By Derek R. Ford

This originally appeared at Liberation School .

Slogans play a key role in all political activities, whether they be local demonstrations, pickets, strikes, or mass movements. While the fact that slogans are short might make it seem as though they're of minor importance or a mere matter of semantics, the fact is that slogans can be decisive factors in individual and more protracted political struggles, for movements for reform and revolution.

Slogans aren't just words that we put on banners and placards. They are tools to orient and guide political activity-including mass outreach-to unite different sectors of the movement, to educate people by helping them reach their own conclusions, and to educate the Party by revealing the consciousness of the people.

As crystallizations of complex situations and ideas, slogans distill political theory and strategy into concise formulas; they can't say everything. Because struggles are dynamic, they have to be re-evaluated constantly. A slogan could be correct one day and incorrect the next.

All of this means that slogans can have real, material consequences. They can advance a struggle or move it backwards, alienate people or draw them in, communicate the truth or deceive.

Whether a slogan is correct or not isn't an abstract question, but a concrete one. A slogan can be theoretically correct, in that it communicates a political truth, yet still be practically incorrect because it doesn't relate this truth to the specific conditions of struggle at that time.

Slogans have to be accessible to the broad masses of people, not only in terms of wording but in terms of the content establishing a point of contact with people's consciousness. This doesn't mean that they cater to the "lowest common denominator," but that they speak to the broadest possible segments of the movement. In other words, Marxists don't create slogans for ourselves and other Marxists, but for the masses. They're teaching tools.

Like all propaganda, slogans have different scales. They might be specific to one struggle in one town or city at one moment, or they might have national and international relevance. Some slogans take the form of demands, while others take the form of statements.

The purpose of this article is to flesh out the above elements and functions of slogans, and to illustrate the critical roles they assume during concrete struggles. This is illustrated most clearly in the twists and turns of the revolutionary struggle in Russia as it unfolded in 1917. In the final sections, we give some more contemporary examples and then walk through some guiding questions to aid in the formulation of slogans.

Lenin on slogans: All power to the Soviets!

In the middle of July 1917, Lenin published a short pamphlet "On Slogans" (note: in this section we use the Julian calendar dates). In it, he reflected on the recent drastic shift in dynamics and the corresponding need for new slogans:

"Too often has it happened that, when history has taken a sharp turn, even progressive parties have for some time been unable to adapt themselves to the new situation and have repeated slogans which had formerly been correct but had now lost all meaning-lost it as 'suddenly' as the sharp turn in history was 'sudden.'
Something of the sort seems likely to recur in connection with the slogan calling for the transfer of all state power to the Soviets. That slogan was correct during a period of our revolution-say, from February 27 to July 4-that has now passed irrevocably. It has patently ceased to be correct now. Unless this is understood, it is impossible to understand anything of the urgent questions of the day. Every particular slogan must be deduced from the totality of specific features of a definite political situation."

The slogan, "All power to the Soviets," which Lenin first proposed in his April Theses, was at this moment no longer correct because it no longer corresponded to the balance of forces. It could no longer lead the movement forward. On the contrary, it would actually lead the movement into the hands of counter-revolution. As of mid-July, it was a deceitful slogan.

The last sentence quoted above bears repeating: "Every particular slogan must be deduced from the totality of specific features of a definite political situation."

Only by soberly assessing the current political dynamics can the Party form a correct slogan. As these dynamics unfold, the Party must re-evaluate and, when necessary, withdraw, modify, or create new slogans.

To better appreciate Lenin's writing on slogans, it's helpful to review the evolution of the Bolshevik's slogans during the earlier months.

The February 1917 revolution overthrew Czarist rule and instituted a situation of dual power, a totally unique situation in which power rested both in the new Provisional Government and the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' deputies. The real power rested in the Soviets, a grassroots democracy that derived its authority from the workers, peasants, sailors, and soldiers. They were composed of various political parties, and in the early days of 1917 the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) and Mensheviks, both of whom were social democrats of one stripe or another, were the dominating forces. The Provisional Government-charged with organizing democratic elections-was dominated by the Constitutional Democratic Party, or Cadets, which favored a constitutional monarchy with workers' rights. While it's composition changed throughout the year, it also had representatives of other parties, including the SRs (beginning in March) and the Mensheviks (beginning in April).

Lenin described this situation as dual power, as power was divided between these two forces-which he called the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (the Provisional Government) and the nascent dictatorship of the workers (the Soviets)-and there was a more or less stable agreement between them. There was an unprecedented level of political freedom at that time, as communists were able to openly agitate, organize, and protest.

When he returned to Russia from exile in April, Lenin put forward the slogan "All power to the Soviets." He was initially rebuffed within the Party for this slogan (and for the April Theses), but through political explanation won Party members over. The Bolsheviks also withdrew their previous slogan, "Turn the imperialist war into a civil war" at that time.

To understand the significance of this slogan and the work it did, there are a few things to note. Most obviously, the slogan advocated that power should be transferred from the Provisional Government to the Soviets, not that the Soviets should overthrow the government. The Provisional Government was weak and required the consent of the Soviets to rule. The slogan meant that the Bolsheviks should direct all of their energy to building up the power of the Soviets and their influence within them. Further, the slogan was a message to the masses who made up the Soviets: you, the working people and the oppressed, have power and can take it! You don't need the Provisional Government!

"All power to the Soviets" also expressed total opposition to the Provisional Government. This contrasted with the SRs and Mensheviks, who called for confidence in the Provisional Government.

What is particularly interesting is that, at this time, not only were the Bolsheviks the minority of the Soviets, but the Executive Commission of the Soviet of Soldiers' Deputies was actually passing resolutions denouncing Lenin and the Bolsheviks at that time, equating their propaganda with that of the Monarchists. Why would the Bolshevik's call for all power to be transferred to an institution they have no real power in?

The slogan anticipated the inevitability of an open struggle between the government and the Soviets. The Bolsheviks knew that, due to their political orientation, the SRs and Mensheviks wouldn't be able to straddle both forms of power forever. They would have to make choices-through actions and words-and these choices would expose them before the masses. The slogan anticipated certain developments.

Through one crisis after another, the incompatibility of dual power sharpened, and each time the SRs and Mensheviks sided with the imperialist bourgeoisie in the Provisional Government rather than the workers and oppressed in the Soviets. In this way, the slogan was meant to educate the movement, not by lecturing the people with one viewpoint over and over, but by helping them come to their own conclusions based on their own experiences.

During the first crisis in late April-when the streets erupted in protests and meetings, and reactionary elements led by military officers and The Black Hundreds attacked workers-one section of the Bolsheviks marched under the slogan "Down with the provisional government," until the local central committee intervened and ordered them to retract it.

At first, the slogan might appear similar to or compatible with "All power to the Soviets." After all, if there are two powers, calling for all power to one implies zero power to the other, which would result in that power's downfall. But the slogans are different in crucial ways. In a resolution adopted immediately after the protests ended, the Central Committee wrote that the slogan, "Down with the provisional government" was "an incorrect one at the present moment because, in the absence of a solid (i.e., a class-conscious and organised) majority of the people on the side of the revolutionary proletariat, such a slogan is either an empty phrase, or objectively, amounts to attempts of an adventurist character."

It's not that the slogan was wrong in the abstract or for all time, but that it was inappropriate and premature relative to the existing political situation. It didn't do anything to educate or advance the struggle and it unnecessarily left the Party vulnerable to accusations that it wanted to mount a violent insurrection (accusations that appeared in rival newspapers in the following days).

That the Party issued contrasting slogans revealed a weakness in its internal organization and unity, which in turn resulted in a lack of organization and unity in the movement.

The crisis ended when the SRs and Mensheviks cracked under pressure, and got the Soviets to vote confidence in the government. As part of the deal, six SRs and Mensheviks joined the government as ministers. While "All power to the Soviets" remained in effect, they advanced new slogans, including "Down with the 10 capitalist ministers." By framing it this way, the Bolsheviks weren't still weren't calling for an overthrow of the government. They also weren't concentrating their agitation against the six "socialist" ministers collaborating with the imperialists. Instead, the slogan called on the SRs and Mensheviks to break with the imperialists in the government. In so doing, the slogan continued to expose the vacillation of the SRs and Mensheviks and their inability to provide the peace, land, and bread that the masses needed and demanded.

The Bolsheviks advanced these slogans during the next large protest on June 18, which Lenin said at the time marked at "turning point" in the movement because of the political maturity of the demonstrators. It was a short but mass demonstration during which the Bolsheviks' slogans clearly prevailed. Putting the slogans into the streets allowed the Bolsheviks to take the temperature of the movement, to evaluate the level of consciousness amongst the masses.

Slogans are thus a two-way street that not only educate the masses, but also educate the Party.

Just a few weeks later, in what's known as the "July Days," workers staged the most militant demonstrations yet, almost to the point of insurrection. Many workers called on the Bolsheviks to take power at that moment, but they refused because the actions were too concentrated in Petrograd and the Bolsheviks were still in the minority in the Soviets. Pro-government forces opened fire on the workers and burned the Bolshevik's printing press and headquarters.

While there wasn't a large-scale massacre, the events were another turning point in the struggle. The relative peace and freedom ushered in by the February Revolution was broken. There was no more dual power, and no other alternative than to prepare for an armed uprising. This was the moment that Lenin penned his short article "On Slogans" quoted from above.

Later, when the contours of power changed again, the Bolsheviks reintroduced the slogan. In late August, Lavr Kornilov, Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army, attempted a coup against the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government. To defeat the coup, the Soviets and the government actually armed the Bolsheviks, who created red guards. They didn't want to, but they knew the Bolsheviks had the most militant workers on their side. In the face of the red guards, Kornilov's troops backed down. No blood was shed, but a new period began. The Bolsheviks now had the majority in the Soviets of Petrograd, Moscow, and elsewhere.

Under these new conditions, "All power to the Soviets" indicated a preparation for the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks.

The role of slogans in the US anti-war movement

Again, slogans are critical for the development of any movement or struggle under any conditions, including non-revolutionary times. They should speak to people, drawing them into the struggle and moving their consciousness forward.

Whenever struggles unfold, so too do contradictions. Different political forces and ideologies fight to win people over and to push the movement in particular directions. In general, whichever ideologies are dominant in society will also be dominant in mass movements, as those forces have the most resources at their disposal. The ruling class in the United States today has the most refined and extensive ideological apparatus of any ruling class in history.

They have a sophisticated ability to absorb and channel discontent. The bourgeoisie, through its liberal wing, proposes their own slogans that funnel outrage and prevent revolutionary consciousness from taking hold.

During the first war against Iraq, the liberal slogan in the anti-war movement was "Economic sanctions, not war." This was a smart slogan because it was accessible for people who were opposed to war, and then moved them into supporting economic sanctions by presenting it as an alternative to war. It worked to prevent the development of principled opposition to war by latching onto a tactical split within the ruling class and trying to draw people into one side of this split.

The opposing slogan was "No war against Iraq." It was honest and straightforward. It was principled yet appealed to the broadest number of people. It encompassed an opposition to economic sanctions, allowing us to show that they were merely another form of warfare. This, in turn, showed the class character of the conflict.

Another key difference concerns the longevity of each slogan. When the actual bombing campaign ended, the slogan "Economic sanctions, not war" was realized. Everyone who was mobilized under that slogan could, as a result, leave the struggle and stop organizing. For those who mobilized under the slogan "No war against Iraq," however, the struggle continued because the war continued by other means. This latter slogan was oriented toward building a sustained anti-war movement, while the former slogan was oriented toward preventing such a movement. Because it flowed from a Leninist analysis of imperialism, it anticipated the continuation of war.

History confirmed that we needed this long-term orientation. The sanctions regime devastated Iraq and its people throughout the 1990s. Contrasted with the pro-sanctions slogan, the "No war against Iraq" slogan allowed people to see exactly how economic sanctions are a war tactic. In the early 2000s the imperialist tactics shifted again.

As the second war against Iraq approached, our slogans were "No war against Iraq" and "Stop the war before it starts. When Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003, our slogans changed to "Bring the troops home now" and "Occupation is not liberation." These slogans were principled in their opposition to war and refused to capitulate to imperialist arguments for "lesser measures" like inspections and sanctions, and to imperialist propaganda that demonized the Iraqi resistance.

Further, the "Occupation is not liberation" slogan in particular allowed people to see links between the occupation of Iraq and the occupation of Palestine. At the time this was a controversial connection to make, even in the progressive movement. The liberal section of the anti-war movement split off largely because this focus alienated them from the Democratic Party.

It's commonplace for liberals and other left forces to advance compromising or confused slogans to prevent anti-imperialist consciousness from growing. For example, during the US/NATO war against Libya in 2011 one segment of the left advocated the slogan, "Yes to the rebels, no to the intervention." This deceived people into thinking that the rebels were opposed to intervention, when they were actually the ones calling for intervention. They also mobilized around, "Down with Gaddafi." This was the exact same slogan as the imperialists. By contrast, our slogan was "Stop the bombing of Libya." Because this bombing was justified under "humanitarian" pretexts that included the demonization of Gaddafi and the Libyan government, the slogan rejected this demonization campaign.

Formulating slogans: Methods of approach and questions to consider

If carefully chosen, straightforward and simple slogans are effective because they can facilitate effective united fronts in different struggles. Slogans should be uncompromising and principled, yet formulated in a popular and accessible way that can advance mass consciousness.

To begin formulating slogans, it makes sense to first assess the different dynamics at play. When a struggle-or the possibility of one-surfaces, think: What's the immediate issue at hand? What are the larger, or systemic causes manifesting in the issue; who and what are responsible? What are different segments of society thinking about it? What is the bourgeoisie rallying around? To learn what the bourgeoisie or its different sectors think, all you have to do is read the newspaper. Are there left-liberal groups anywhere nationally engaged in a similar struggle, and if so, what are their slogans? You can find this on social media. What are people in your area thinking? To find this out, you have to speak with the people. Beyond speaking with coworkers, family, and friends, you could do a poll or survey at a bus station about the issue.

What would it take to resolve the problem, both in the immediate and long term? What, in other words, are your demands? What do they have in common? What do you want people to learn from your slogans? What do you want people to understand, and how best can you help them understand? How can you phrase them so that they can rally the most people together?

Sometimes slogans start off basic and gain greater specificity later. In general, it's better to start out broader. It's common for two or three different slogans to guide a movement, and usually one of them is quite broad ("No war against Syria," or "Justice for Trayvon"). Others that accompany it will flesh out some component of it. For example, "No to the demonization of Syrian government" is necessary for opposing war against Syria, because the demonization campaign is part of the war drive.

There are also different "levels" of slogans. One slogan might address a specific and immediate demand, while another simultaneously addresses the more systemic causes.

Let's say you're organizing a struggle around housing problems in your town or city. One slogan might focus on a particular component of the problem ("Zero tolerance for slumlords," "Tenants' rights now") or a particular target ("No tax breaks for X developer"). At the same time, another slogan might focus on the foundational causes of the problem ("Housing is a human right"). These two different levels work together and can help people make the connections between the specific manifestation and its general cause (the only way to really eliminate slumlords is to make housing a guaranteed right), or the specific remedy and the more foundational and permanent remedy (getting rid of slumlords is part of the struggle for socialism).

Slogans aren't comprehensive political platforms. It might be helpful to think about the slogan as a frame and the political platform as the picture within the frame. The frame encompasses the picture, allows the viewer to see it, and directs the viewer's attention to it (in a museum, you know to look at something if it's framed).

In the same way, the slogan should frame the issue at hand, directing people's attention to it and inviting them in. Within the frame, you'll paint a more intricate and nuanced picture with leaflets, speeches, and other propaganda and agitational materials.

Exploitation and oppression are deepening, and the capitalist ideologies are increasingly unable to provide excuses for the system. As a consequence, people are taking action and looking for real explanations and alternatives. By advancing proper slogans, we can mobilize people and deepen our collective understanding of the problems and their solutions.

A Tribute to Toni Morrison

By Cherise Charleswell

On August 5th, 2019 we lost Chloe Anthony Wofford, better known as Toni Morrison. This brilliant Griot, who was one of America's most venerated novelists, essayists, editors, social critics, teachers, and professors, died of complications of pneumonia at the age of 88.

One of her first great feats happened during the 1960s, a period of time where the United States of America was still caught up and resisting through the Civil Rights Movement's call for equity and dismantling of oppressive barriers and discrimination. Against this backdrop, Toni Morrison became the first Black female editor of fiction at Random House, and in this capacity she played a vital role in bringing Black literature and authors into the mainstream.

She got a seat at the table and not only took up space, but dragged other seats over to the table to allow room for other marginalized voices. She later described the importance of "Taking Up & Creating Space" in one of the many interviews that she conducted over her many years in the spotlight:

"I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game."

She left behind a remarkable and award-winning body of work, beginning with her first novel, The Bluest Eye, published in 1970. And went on to publish ten additional novels, numerous short stories and essays, as well as works of non-fiction.

Toni Morrison's work will forever entertain, inspire, and challenge us to reflect as individuals and as a society, and it is for those reasons and more that we pay tribute to this formidable woman who epitomized Black Girl Magic long before the phrase was first used. There was magic in her pen and tongue, and it casted spells on our psyche.

So, in this tribute I will lift up her voice and unpack the impact and legacy of Toni Morrison.

The Honors

"I don't believe any real artists have ever been non-political. They may have been insensitive to this particular plight or insensitive to that, but they were political, because that's what an artist is―a politician."

― Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison was a prolific writer who approached writing with intentions and a purpose that went far beyond storytelling. She recognized that the Political has always been Personal, and didn't shy away from using characters, themes, and language (whether engaging dialogue or thought-provoking monologue) to provide social commentary and criticism, and challenge readers to truly reflect on what they've read. Because of this, her work can't be described as "light reading," but it was certainly captivating. And thus, the honors rolled in.

Those honors included:

• Honorary degrees from Oxford University and Rutgers University

• In 1979 she was awarded Barnard College's high-test honor, the Barnard Medal of Distinction.

• She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Her citation reads that she, " who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality." [ She was the first black woman of any nationality to win the prize

• In 1996, the National Endowment for Humanities selected her for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. Federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities.

• In 1996, she also received the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

• She received a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel Beloved, which was adapted into a movie, starring Oprah Winfrey in 1998.

• Her novel Song of Solomon received the National Book Critics Circle Award.

• In 2012, President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

• She received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American fiction in 2016.

Unapologetic About Centering Black Characters and Experiences

"Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form."

― Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison's work builds on the legacy and body of work of the prolific Black authors, novelists, and writers of the Harlem Renaissance, an important artistic movement which The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture described as :

"A movement that brought notice to the great works of African American art, and inspired and influenced future generations of African American artists and intellectuals. The self-portrait of African American life, identity, and culture that emerged from Harlem was transmitted to the world at large, challenging the racist and disparaging stereotypes of the Jim Crow South. In doing so, it radically redefined how people of other races viewed African Americans and understood the African American experience."

The Harlem Renaissance - thought art, music, fashion, and literature - left an undeniable mark on American culture, but it did not end the marginalization of the Black experience in America, and this what Toni Morrison was referring to when pointing out the fact that Black literature wasn't to be taught or viewed as a rigorous art form. This occurred whether Black writers wrote novels and stories using African American Vernacular English, such as the work of Nora Zeale Hurston, or writing in standard American English.

Not only did Toni Morrison's work build on the creativity, critical, and impactful work of authors from the Harlem Renaissance, throughout her career she remained unapologetic about centering Black characters and experiences in her work. There were no White Saviors. She instead displayed the fullness of the Black experience - the good, bad, ugly, and painful. While other writers seemed to abhor labels, such as "Black writer," and didn't want their work assigned to a marginalized classification and shelf that was/is often at the back of a bookstore, Toni Morrison welcomed the term.

And being a "Black writer" didn't diminish her career. It didn't stop her from being presented with esteemed awards, or having her work adapted into a film. She remained an unapologetic "Black writer" who took up space on the highly coveted "Literature" shelves of bookstores as her work was fantastically displayed in stores, outside of and beyond February (Black History Month).

When the question about when she was going to write about and/or center non-Black characters came up, Toni Morrison didn't waste a second, immediately pointing out that those types of questions were inherently racist and were never asked of White writers. They were never asked about when they would center Black characters. And she often went on to explain her exact intentions.

Below is the explanation in her own words:

"I don't have to apologize or consider myself limited because I don't [write about white people] - which is not absolutely true, there are lots of white people in my books.

I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That's what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say 'people,' that's what I mean."

When we look closer, there is one sub-group that Toni Morrison truly wrote for, and that is Black women and girls. Her books allowed us to see our stories come to life on a page in such a meaningful way. She once shared the following:

"I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes."

Her work was intersectional and didn't attempt to make us choose between our Blackness and womanhood. It all-at-once exposed our vulnerabilities, insecurities, strengths, and resilience. And being a Black woman in the United States, or any part of the world, certainly requires a level of resilience. Malcolm X's statement made during the 1960s, remains true today: "The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman."

The ubiquitous and constant disrespect that Malcolm X was describing and what Toni Morrison highlighted in her books is the effect of misogynoir. Misogynoir is something that has always existed, even before we had a word for it. It is a term coined by queer Black feminist Moya Bailey, in 2010, to describe a special form of misogyny that is explicitly directed towards Black women, where race and gender both play roles in bias. Misogynoir makes Black women the most "disrespected, unprotected, and neglected" people globally - not only in the United States. And this is due to the marginalization of our multiple identities, and the fact that every " Ism" that one can think of, whether sexism, racism, colorism, texturism, ableism, classism, along with homophobia, impacts Black women.

Toni Morrison's work gave us vivid examples of this unique form of prejudice, bias, and hatred throughout her work. In fact, it is fitting that her first and last novels, The Bluest Eyes and God Help The Child, both centered Black girls/women whose self-images were negatively impacted by misogynoir. The characters Pecola Breedlove and Bride were both made to feel like the color of their skin and eyes, as well as their features, were undesirable. While Pecola literally prayed for blue eyes, Bride depended on surface beautification that didn't lead to the acceptance or celebration of her beauty, but to fetishization.

Toni Morrison wrote an updated foreword to The Bluest Eyes in 2007, explaining her reason to create a character like Pecola, who was so deeply impacted by misogynoir: She wanted to focus "on how something as grotesque as the demonization of an entire race could take root inside the most delicate member of society: a child; the most vulnerable member: a female"

Gifts of Wisdom

Ultimately, through her novels, essays, interviews, and statements, Toni Morrison left us with gifts of wisdom. Words to reflect on and to better interrogate the world that we live in. Her words also can serve as a tool to reject misogynoir and any feelings of inferiority - a world where Black people and our experiences are at the Center, and not marginalized.

In fact, the entire notion of white supremacy, despite its horrible history, was laughable to her. She pointed out its illegitimacy or historical inaccuracy by asking, "Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks' hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running." And really poked holes at the entire premise by stating, "I always knew that I had the moral high ground all my life. If you can only be tall when someone is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. White people have a serious problem."

And White people, particularly White Americans have certainly proved they have a serious problem. It is a problem linked to the decades-long mass shootings that plague the country that are predominantly carried out by White men, who the media, politicians, and others immediately address with sympathetic treatment. Something "had to happen to them" or "make them" carry out these atrocious acts. That something may be mental illness, trauma, broken homes, and yes, even video games. Just a plethora of ridiculous excuses that ignores the fact that other groups in the country experience and are exposed to the same conditions (or worse), but do not go on these murderous rampages. White privilege created these mass shooters and white privilege protects them long after the dead have been buried.

For instance the Los Angeles Times published this horrible and disingenuous Op-Ed that listed four commonalities seen in mass shooters per some research study, but never once mentions the fact that they are White men. That omission of this obvious factor leaves the research as being nothing more than bias garbage, and the "journalism" lacks any credibility since the obvious is going to be ignored.

America's problems of racism, white supremacy, and white privilege continues to hurt all Americans. Those shooters are also killing white people. And the feat of losing that privilege, of having to live in a changing country led many voters to choose a president (45) whose vision of America resembles the days of decades past, that they deem to have been "Great". Much of Toni Morrison's work is based in those periods. We can just check her written record to prove that those days were far from great.

As pointed out by Toni Morrison, far too many White Americans require others to be on their knees in order for them to be tall and feel secure. Thus, for them, equality (resulting from the loss of white privilege) feels like oppression.

During Toni Morrison' 80+ years of life, she witnessed these changes in America and released the essay " Making America White Again " for The New Yorker, shortly after the 2016 presidential election. This is one of the last essays that she wrote and it is certainly a gift of wisdom that describes the cultural anxiety which motivated most White Americans to vote for Trump:

"So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble.

On Election Day, how eagerly so many white voters-both the poorly educated and the well-educated-embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people. The candidate who questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to condone the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally. The candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos. The candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan."

Among the Ancestors

Toni Morrison was a national treasure and literary genius who garnered global acclaim for her ability to vividly and honestly tell the story of the Black American experience. She was unwavering in her centering of Blackness, and courageously highlighted the damaging effects of racism and colorism when few authors with national platforms were willing to address these issues. Her stories had depth, and were intersectional and thought-provoking.

She is a foremother, an ancestor, whose shoulders - we must now stand on - left behind a body of work that will entertain, challenge, and educate us.

And I will leave you with this challenge that Toni Morrison has left behind - it is the challenge that she first presented to herself, and it led her to write her first novel at 39 years of age:

" If there's a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it."

Guns Don’t Kill People, Settlers Do: The Second Amendment and the Myth of Defense

By Oliver Baker

"Our nation was built and civilized by men and women who used guns in self-defense and in pursuit of peace." - Ronald Reagan

"If you are coming to the idea of resistance as a resolute no to the Empire, then armed self-defense is as much a yes to liberated life as the yes of community gardens." - Ashanti Alson

Many of the households where I grew up in rural Missouri have at least one good hunting rifle in their collections of firearms. Every November, most families here-usually the father and son, but sometimes the father and daughter-will go deer hunting, not only for sport but also for the meat it provides households. They will often say hunting is the reason they own firearms.

Several years ago, I was invited to go target shooting at the property of a long-time acquaintance. He was proud of his expansive and comfortable set-up: he owned several dozen acres of land in the country with a nice three-bed, two-bath home and a stable income to support it all. His property, in other words, allowed him to be a gracious host for friends, neighbors, and acquaintances looking to shoot guns, improve their marksmanship, and build community and comradery.

When I arrived, there were 15-20 men armed to the teeth, strutting around with ARs slung tightly around their chests and handguns of various calibers holstered on their belts. Their wives were inside preparing food and tending the kids. As the men-some dressed in army surplus gear, others still wearing their work clothes-blasted away at various targets, the property owner began talking to me about why he loved his home(stead) so much. It was, in his words, "out in the sticks, good and far away from all of that inner-city mayhem." After showing me a sample of his extensive gun collection, spread out before everyone on the tailgate of his truck, he continued his white-to-white conservation with me:

"Yeah, I have all this firepower because I gotta protect my property and family when, you know, shit hits the fan, and all them inner-city people dependent on government hand-outs are left high and dry and start coming out here where the pavement meets gravel looking to loot food and other things."

It was clear he wanted me to understand that he had guns to defend against, in his eyes, Black people coming to loot his home in the event of a "societal collapse," and that he'd be ready with an arsenal of firepower to repel them. That is, gun ownership for him was about using violence to defend his property-as-whiteness from racialized populations whom he recognized were deliberately excluded from the formal economy and corralled in inner-city ghettos. His guns were the lynchpin for maintaining this line between the "good guys" like himself-the productive worker, the property holder, the respectable law-abiding citizen-and a zombified surplus population marked for death. This metaphor is telling: of all the firearms he showed me that day, he was most proud of some recently purchased specialty ammunition with the tagline: "Supply yourself for the Zombie Apocalypse." Guns and zombie rounds animated the fantasy of defending whiteness by mowing down a racialized surplus humanity on the gravel roads of rural Missouri.

I heard this fantasy many times growing up in such hyper-masculine spaces, in which it is taught that the man of the house has to be prepared to defend his home(stead) from perceived criminal (racial) threats and maintain order in his home . True men are providers and protectors; anything less, and you're an emasculated loser. In this way, the property holder was simply being a good patriot and male leader by preparing for the moment when, in his eyes, he would use guns in self-defense against the racialized poor. From this perspective, all the patriots out there that day sharpening their firearm skills claimed to be doing so for reasons of self-defense. Each saw himself as a Josey Wales , John Wayne, or Dirty Harry, or (more recently) anAmerican Sniper or Rick Grimes, neutralizing racialized criminal threats encountered on the Indian frontier or spilling out from the Black ghetto.

People will often say hunting is the reason they own firearms, but the underlying structural reason, whether acknowledged or not, has more to do with white settler fears of racial rebellion. Indeed, the NRA-the most politically influential gun organization-isn't powerful because it has a lot money to spend, but rather because it markets gun ownership as a means of reinforcing white settler sovereignty. Gun ownership is about staving off the loss of the white settler's power, honor, and privilege, which the global economy no longer respects and the state, it is believed, tramples in its accommodating of the marginalized. Despite the rhetoric, gun ownership has never been about hunting or defending democracy against authoritarianism, which white settlers are ready to embrace if it maintains their power.

In other words, the fear of the dispossessed challenging their subjugation drives gun ownership and gun culture among white settlers in the United States-not hunting, a tyrannical government, or, as I argue, reasons of self-defense. American gun ownership has its structural roots in the desire to uphold and reproduce colonial and racial hierarchies and to maintain the power and benefits received from such hierarchies, putting guns in the hands of white settlers with fantasies of nostalgic redemption through violence. Make America Great Again, indeed.

At its core, then, gun ownership for white settlers is about using tools of violence to defend the political category of white settler sovereignty, which is to say, using guns to harm, kill, or terrorize colonized and racialized people in order to keep them unfree-as their freedom means the dissolution of these categories of power and honor. Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's recent book Loaded (2018) argues that the history of the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms was fundamentally the state-granted right of settlers to arm their households and form voluntary militias in order to seize Native land and/or police enslaved Black people. Gun ownership today maintains what Dunbar-Ortiz contends was the founding vision of the settler state to distribute its monopoly of violence to its settler-citizens in order to carry out campaigns of dispossession and secure white property against threats of rebellion:

"Settler-militias and armed households were institutionalized for the destruction and control of Native peoples, communities, and nations. With the expansion of plantation agriculture, by the late 1600s they were also used as 'slave patrols,' forming the basis of the U.S. police culture after enslaving people was illegalized."

In fact, joining a militia was less of a right than a requirement of settlers; in some cases, particularly at the state level in the South preceding the Constitution, service in the militia or arming one's household was required by law. Dunbar-Ortiz explains this history:

"European settlers were required by law to own and carry firearms, and all adult male settlers were required to serve in the militia. Militias were also used to prevent indentured European servants from fleeing before their contracts expired, in which case they were designated 'debtors.' [. . .]. In 1727, the Virginia colony enacted a law requiring militias to create slave patrols, imposing stiff fines on white people who refused to serve."

These state laws fed into the Second Amendment to enshrine the imperative of gun ownership at the federal level. Requiring participation in counterrevolutionary violence was thus written into the law directly. Today this duty to defend settler dominance continues not through state laws requiring militia membership but through informal gun ownership. The Second Amendment deputized settlers to use violence to steal land and people-in short, to expand empire.

Building on Dunbar-Ortiz's analysis of the Second Amendment, I want to suggest that we understand gun ownership as a material practice through which white settlers engage directly in the work of counterrevolutionary violence that consolidates and maintains U.S. liberal democracy. It is a way of strengthening settler democracy that promises empowerment and redemption. Firearms are the tools and symbols of a larger counterrevolutionary policing that binds settlers together despite contradictions of class in their mutual support of upholding colonial and racial hierarchies. Through gun ownership of today-what was, earlier, participation in militias-the white settler defends the state that in turn ensures his sovereignty and superiority.

In this way, the settler state depends on deputizing its settler-citizens to be the police of dispossessed populations, just as the settler relies on the state upholding his rights of property, or his "pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness." This is why gun ownership is seen as fundamental to liberal freedoms. The Second Amendment is upstream from the other amendments precisely because counterrevolutionary policing maintains the public order of civil society in which liberal freedoms can flourish.

There are three conclusions, then, I would like to discuss that follow from the claim that Second Amendment-sponsored gun ownership in the United States is counterrevolutionary violence harmonizing intra-settler relations. The first is that self-defense belongs to the oppressed and never to the oppressor. From a structural prespective, there is no such thing as white settler self-defense. The second is that gun culture from the 1960s onward serves as an important site at which settlers organize politically across class and gender lines to protect whiteness in response to marginalized peoples' demand for freedom and neoliberalism's attack on labor. The third is that the practice of community self-defense among those targeted by colonial violence radically undermines the ideology of white victimization through which counterrevolutionary violence is legitimated.

Guns and White Victimization

Perhaps the best example of how counterrevolutionary violence is coded as white settler self-defense is the now iconic Gadsden Flag. From its inception during the American Revolutionary War to its revival and proliferation in right-wing gun culture in the years following 9/11, the Gadsden Flag, with its image of a rattlesnake and phrase "Don't Tread on Me," illustrates how the effort to maintain white settler power in the face of marginalized peoples' demand for freedom is branded as self-defense. The coiled rattler signifies a defensive and victimized position, but one that is deadly if provoked. The Gadsden Flag serves as an important symbol for those identifying as patriots, law-abiding gun-owners, and defenders of the Constitution because it supports a larger ideology that holds that white America is under attack by minorities (and the federal government taken over by minorities in the post-Civil Rights era) whose commitments to equality have turned into the discrimination against, exclusion of, and attacks on whiteness.

Some of the earliest versions of the Gadsden flag, as many patriots will mention, is Benjamin Franklin's drawing of the colonies as a snake divided into sections underwritten by the ultimatum of "join, or die." Yet the tyranny the colonies were fighting against wasn't simply taxation without representation, but more broadly the right to expand its own empire rather than remain merely another exploited colony-to form a state strong enough to defend the colonists' pursuit of wealth from Native and Black rebellion. Indeed, Jefferson makes this clear in the Declaration of Independence when he argues that the Crown had prevented the colonies from clearing the lands west of the Appalachian Mountains of "merciless Indian savages" and encouraged slave insurrection in the colonies.

The rattlesnake represents a white settler body politic that feels continuously threatened and anxious about defending its power over conquered and subjugated populations. It claims to take up a position of self-defense when this position is actually one of stopping the efforts of marginalized people to free themselves from structures of violence. The fetish of Franklin's coiled rattler as the iconography of settlers coming together through counterrevolution suggests there is unity and strength precisely through this position of shared white victimization. If disjointed by cleavages such as class or gender, they will be overrun by the dispossessed, but if unified in their mutual opposition to the dispossessed, white settlers will flourish despite such intra-settler contradictions.

This fear of insurgency-from-below justifying the use of counterrevolutionary violence helps explain the emergence and proliferation of right-wing gun culture in the years following the 1960s to the present. As theorist Sylvia Wynter has argued, the global anti-colonial rebellions of the mid-20th century that empowered and inspired national liberation struggles in the United States sent shocks throughout the white-settler body politic. These rebellions ended in the settler state granting concessions to colonized and racialized groups in the form of civil rights legislation, the dismantling of legal forms of racial apartheid, and the overall turn away from overt, codified forms of white supremacy to new forms of colorblind racism. Black, Brown, and Native militancy terrified settlers, compelling concessions as a means to pacify their militant struggle.

It was these attempts of federal government to conditionally include marginalized groups that led white America, using a zero-sum logic, to feel betrayed and abandoned. As a result, white middle- and working-class settlers gave up defending the welfare state as long as it was also going to include nonwhites. In this moment when the state seems to accommodate nonwhites-an act that failed to respect, in the eyes of white America, the colonial and racial divisions binding together settlers-gun ownership became much more meaningful for white settlers looking to hold the line of these divisions where the state had, it was believed, given up doing so.

During Obama's presidency, this fear that the state had abandoned white settlers by catering to marginalized people had a resurgence. Gun purchases were at an all-time high and patriot community-building became widespread, which is to say, gun ownership and patriot communities were seen as necessary measures for saving the original and founding vision of a white settler republic from a federal government that was believed to have sided with the very people whose demands for equality would unravel the sovereignty and power of white settlers.

Militias such as the Oathkeepers and Three Percenters emerged during these years and embodied the view that it is the job of "true patriots" (white male settlers) to save white America from a state that has gone rogue in its perceived embrace of "open-borders" multiculturalism. The Constitution and the Second Amendment are sacred for such groups because they authorize freedom-loving citizens to form militias to restore the founding colonialist vision of the United States.

For all the wrong reasons of preserving their power, such groups actually have a perceptive understanding of the Second Amendment as a law authorizing counterrevolutionary violence. For them, guns are not about hunting or even self-defense, but about the right to ensure colonial and racial rebellion is controlled and that state power is recaptured in ways that it abandons neoliberal multiculturalism for more direct forms of settler-colonial white-nationalist capitalism. Indeed, it is not surprising that Oathkeepers and Three Percenters show up to police Black rebellions or put down antifascist counterdemonstrations. They see themselves as an extension of the police, the National Guard, and border patrol. Like the KKK of yore, these militias, filled with current and former police and military, believe they fulfill the original function of the state-under the Obama years seen as liberal and weak-in putting down racial rebellions. Gun culture, then, serves as a symbolic yet very material compensation for the state's support of neoliberal multiculturalism and the dismantling of welfare capitalism. Just as credit is offered in place of decreased wages, gun culture supplies compensatory ammunition to bolster the value of whiteness in the face of deindustrialization, increased intra-settler inequality, and globalization's attack on U.S. nationalism.

Arming the Police, Arming White Supremacy

It is important not to forget that support for counterrevolutionary violence extends far beyond patriots and right-wing gun culture. Liberals who call for gun regulation but fully support the police and military and their work of upholding mass incarceration at home and imperial violence abroad support the same structures of violence celebrated by the gun-nuts such liberals love to disparage and against whom they define their commitments to nonviolence. The difference is a choice between a monopoly of state violence in repressive state apparatuses or the distribution of state violence among individual settlers and citizen militias. In other words, patriots believe the violence should be democratized and liberals believe it should be concentrated in the hands of state institutions. While one wants to stand alongside the police and military, the other wants the bloody work to be accomplished without getting their hands dirty. Avowed and disavowed to varying degrees, both support counterrevolutionary violence to protect settler democracy. In this way, liberals, despite their pacifist posturing, are not any less supportive of colonial violence than their gun-nut counterparts because they call for a strengthening of the settler state and a disarming of the populace, which will only make marginalized people more vulnerable to killings and incarceration.

This is a view that has the audacity and class privilege of asking marginalized people targeted by state violence, and its extended forms of vigilante violence, to appeal to the same state for protection. While patriots take up actual weapons to target marginalized people, liberals weaponize gun control policy to the same ends of putting people of color in body bags or cages. The only gun control that would reduce gun violence would be disarming the police, the military, domestic abusers, and anyone with ties to white nationalist and misogynist political groups, along with demilitarizing schools and campuses. Whether they are appealing to the Second Amendment or asking people to trust the authority of the police and military, white settlers on the Left or Right demonstrate that the violence they commit, fantasize about committing, or have no problem with the police and military committing for their protection is necessary for their redemptive vision of liberal democracy. It matters not if this vision is a return to when liberal democracy more forcefully upheld colonial and racial hierarchies, or some future point at which this violence and policing ensures genuine equality of opportunity for people believed to be formerly colonized and enslaved.

Community Self-Defense

While it may be easy to oppose right-wing white victimization and liberal support for state violence, it's still very hard for many to accept the premise that marginalized peoples, those targeted by such violence, have the right to use any means necessary to defend themselves and their communities. Yet we have to see, as Malcolm X made very clear, that the only people who have the moral authority to lay claim to the use of force as a means of self-defense are the people targeted by colonial violence in first place. The struggle to get free, gain control over one's life, and have a say in the governing of one's community is always a struggle of self-defense rather than aggression or provocation. The meanings of self-defense in settler society are purposely inverted to legitimate counterrevolutionary violence and to discredit the self-defense actions of communities struggling to get free.

Robert Williams emphasized this point over and over again while organizing armed community self-defense to protect the Black community against KKK violence in Monroe, South Carolina in the 1960s. In Negroes with Guns , Williams explains:

"The Afro-American militant is a 'militant' because he defends himself, his family, his home and his dignity. He does not introduce violence into a racist social system-the violence is already there and has always been there. It is precisely this unchallenged violence that allows a racist social system to perpetuate itself. When people say that they are opposed to Negroes 'resorting to violence' what they really mean is that they are opposed to Negroes defending themselves and challenging the exclusive monopoly of violence practiced by white racists."

When a relationship between people is asymmetrical, meaning it is structurally impossible to rectify or reconcile, the violence that defends this power imbalance appears legitimate while anything that would take power away from the oppressor or build power for the oppressed registers as illegitimate and irrational violence.

With the same force, then, that we can acknowledge the illegitimacy of the notion of white settler self-defense, we should recognize the legitimacy of marginalized peoples' right to self-defense. As theorist Chad Kautzer argues, "our understanding of self-defense must, therefore, account for the transformative power of self-defense for oppressed groups as well as the stabilizing effect of self-defense for oppressor groups." What this looks like is, on the one hand, disempowering, delegitimizing, and disarming institutions of white settler violence such as the police, patriot, and other white-nationalist gun culture groups, and on the other, using a diversity of tactics to create and maintain community self-defense networks among marginalized communities. Community self-defense, as a theory and praxis, can help produce identities, relationships, and habits necessary not only to deter and prevent violence and build/protect power, but also to delegitimize the ideology of white victimization so crucial to white settlers' use of violence to defend their power. This framework reveals who is fighting a war of counterrevolution and who is fighting a war of liberation, whose fight is legitimate and whose is illegitimate.

In this way, community self-defense helps clears the way for matters of seeing where allegiances lie in a war that has been ongoing for over 500 years. For those picking up a gun to defend property that sits on stolen land and that has value through an economy built by and through stolen people, it becomes clear they are arming themselves to kill and die for colonialism and anti-Blackness. For those calling for peace between the oppressor and oppressed, community self-defense forces their hand, exposing where their allegiances actually lie: in support of colonial and racial violence. For those told that their struggle to exist, to be free, to control their own lands and bodies is irrational and illegitimate, they prove through community self-defense that it is irrational, let alone careless, to think that the structures of violence holding them captive or targeting them for elimination will be destroyed through peaceful negotiation and compromise.

This was originally published at Pyriscence .

Oliver Baker is an Assistant Professor at Penn State University.

A Better History Will be Decided by Ending the Rule of the Rich and Powerful

By Jeremy Cloward

"Had I so interfered … [on] behalf of the rich, the powerful … or any of that class … it would have been alright."

- The "Old Man" John Brown, shortly before he was hanged on December 2, 1859.

In a Virginia courthouse in 1859 John Brown was declared insane by his own attorney and sentenced to death for attempting to start a nation-wide revolt to bring an end to the most brutal form of capitalism to ever have existed - slavery. Two years after his execution, a bloody civil war began in the United States which finally brought an end to that barbaric system that had torn apart the lives of millions of men, women, and children. The cost for doing so was the death of some 750,000 soldiers-a total higher than all US lives lost in all other 270 US wars combined-as well as the crippling, maiming, and injuring of 500,000 more.[1] Yet, why was the war fought at all? Because the rich and powerful of the South were unwilling to give up their class privilege and rule. Instead, they engaged in treason by ordering their fellow Southerners to take up arms against the United States government and forced millions of their countrymen, North and South, to pay a steep price-one they were often unwilling to pay themselves [2]-to try to maintain their position atop the existing politico-economic order of the day.

Class power in the South was based on control of the productive forces of society (i.e., farms, factories, etc.) by the rich or what we have come to know as private property. It is the fundamental component of capitalism that allows for wealth, power, and inequality to develop into enormously disproportionate dimensions throughout the world. Those that control property are able to determine what will be produced, how much will be produced, at what cost, and for what wage. Through ownership of the means of production of society, great wealth is produced for the owning class which often translates into great political power as well. While the idea of private property in the West has its roots in Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, its most recent conception comes to us from the Enlightenment and is best understood through the political philosophy of liberalism and the economic doctrine of capitalism. Or more specifically, liberal-capitalism.

Liberal-capitalism holds up individual rights, limited government, reason, and private property as virtues. In fact, John Locke, one of the most notable thinkers of the Enlightenment and for many the father of liberalism, considered property rights to be so important (as well as nearly every framer of the US Constitution [3]) that he argued "the preservation of property [is] the end of government." [4] However, even Locke recognized that "where there is no property, there is no injustice." [5] Thus, in two brief statements Locke made clear the truth about private property. The truth is that private property creates such inequality that any society that introduces it into its social relations will need the full force of the state to "protect" owners of property from those who are the victims of property ownership. Indeed, if private property creates injustice then the state will be needed to both legitimate its existence and suppress any kind of dissent against the privilege and power that comes from its possession. Still, in the end, economic inequality-including slavery-and all the injustices that come from it were not a problem for Locke nor most of the Enlightenment thinkers. Instead, these men helped bring into existence a world where political equality was a necessity (for white men with property anyway) but any notion of economic equality was simply beyond the reaches of human civilization.

Neoliberalism

So, it has been left to those who have come after the Enlightenment to create a social order that is rooted in political and economic equality as the foundation of a just society. While there is no formal name to this post-Enlightenment period that is now emerging, the most recent historical chapter that has been written by liberal-capitalism has been the problematic age of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism might be thought of as an extreme variant of state-regulated (or deregulated) capitalism. The idea of neoliberalism was first developed by the so-called "Chicago Boys." The Chicago Boys were a group of Chilean economists who received their Ph.D.'s in economics primarily from the University of Chicago and were trained by the neo-conservative economist Milton Friedman. They later played high-ranking roles as economic advisors in the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile in the 1970s and 1980s. Neoliberalism is essentially a two-pronged approach to political economy and consists of: (1) the reduction or elimination of government spending on social programs such as education, health care, and programs for the poor, and (2) the deregulation of private industry and the transferring of government services such as electricity, water, and oil into corporate hands. The purpose behind the system is to allow capital to move around the globe unhindered by the state in its never-ending pursuit of profits. Many times, this system of capital accumulation is reinforced by state power, including by a nation's military.

Neoliberalism (as is true with capitalism itself) places into motion the most basic law of wealth accumulation and poverty creation through a simple formula: the owning class pays the working class less than the value of the commodity or service that they produce . Even if there are different degrees of wealth distribution between companies and countries, there are no exceptions to the relationship between the owning class and the working class. The more capital the owning class takes for itself the less there is for everyone else. To not see this is to be awake but not see the sun. However, when the relationship between those that own and those that work is not taught in our schools and universities, revealed by our news media, nor whispered in the once hallowed institutions of our government then it is clear that a conspiracy of silence in understanding power has reached our culture. In so doing, our society has lost its ability to generate fundamental truths about itself from the very institutions that are supposed to provide them. Nevertheless, global capitalism (and one of its recent modifications-neoliberalism) with its opposing classes, remains the dominant economic system embraced or imposed upon nearly the whole of the world. Aside from its unequal distribution of class power, this system of capital accumulation has caused a whole series of national and planetary concerns. Consider just a few:

Responsible for Near Endless Wars Around the World

While many nations fight wars for one purpose or another, no nation behaves quite like the United States on the world stage. In examining the United States and its involvement in war, we can more clearly understand the forces at work within neoliberalism. The United States is the world's empire and its history makes it clear that war is very much a part of the American character. In fact, in its more than 240-year existence the US has been at war for more than 90 percent of the time. Since the end of World War II, the United States has engaged in more than one-hundred separate military "interventions" with more than thirty of them initiated after the turn of the twenty-first century. With none being formally "declared" as required by the Constitution, these often-brutal and long-lasting wars have resulted in the death and dislocation of millions of people around the world. It should not come to us as any surprise then, that from the millions of lives obliterated by the arithmetic of what are the ever-expanding American wars that the United States is now considered by a fairly wide margin, according to global public opinion polls, to be "the greatest threat to peace in the world today." [6]

Still, the massive size of the military, the military budget, and the reasons for military intervention across the planet are rarely questioned or investigated in any genuine way by the corporate press or discussed in any real detail by the United States government. In fact, the US enters one violent conflict after another with virtually no institutional debate, no declaration of war by congress, and virtually no understanding by the American people. Likewise, at almost no time whatsoever is the military budget placed into any meaningful context or even put into question by either the media or the US government. Indeed, the actual US military budget stands at some $1.2 trillion and is greater than all other 194 countries combined but is never even discussed by either the media or the United States government. [7] Rarely do the corporate press or the US government ever identify the hundreds of US corporations and industries located in any of the more than 150 countries where there are United States military forces. No real connection between capital extraction and the need for a military presence is presented, explored, or considered in the media and government or framed as a part of the larger economic system. Instead, questions about the US military in the world tend to be viewed through the prism of the "War on Terror," similarly to how military questions were once viewed through the viewpoint of "anti-Communism" or the Cold War.

Aside from the failings of government and media in explaining the causes for war, mainstream academia and international relations scholars will provide every answer under the sun why two countries go to war except for what is often the truth. The truth is that war is many times driven by a want by the powerful to take from the powerless. Or more specifically, in the case of the United States war on Iraq: the rich bribing the state to kill the poor and then steal from them . This is one of the most basic features of the political economy of neoliberalism. And, it was laid bare for anyone with eyes to see when US economic elites "influenced," through campaign contributions and lobbying dollars, the US ruling class to wage war on the Third World country of Iraq resulting in the deaths of at least one million Iraqi citizens so the oil industry might further increase its already enormous corporate profits. [8] In fact, these cultural thought leaders who often occupy prestigious chairs in our centers of higher education (e.g., Madeleine Albright of Georgetown and Larry Diamond and Condoleezza Rice of Stanford, to name just a few) regularly fail to come to this most obvious of all conclusions for multiple reasons. They do so because either they can't see it, don't want to believe that there are deeper systemic causes for war, out of concern for their own role in the "war crimes" against the targeted country, or out of fear of being labeled a heterodoxic thinker or scholar (or worse still, a Marxist) and as a result have their analysis brought into question by being identified as such.

Yet, the truth remains. And, the truth is that war is good business. Indeed, the provisions of goods and services to the military is a massive source of capital accumulation in the United States and is fundamental to the functioning of the nation's economy. In fact, it is not too much to say that the United States maintains a "permanent war-time economy" as the nation has been at continuous war since September 11, 2001 (if not from its inception) and the military is fueled by nearly every sector of the US economy. For sure, when we think specifically in terms of political economy and examine the top ten donors to the Democratic and Republican parties we see that every single donor comes from a sector or industry within the national economy that is directly tied to military spending, including (but not in rank order): (1) health, (2) communications and electronics, (3) energy and natural resources, (4) transportation, (5) agribusiness, (6) defense, (7) labor, (8) construction, (9) lawyers & lobbyists[9] and (10) finance.[10] Through their massive-sized donations, each industry ensures that it will receive contracts from the United States government including some of the most profitable ones that exist-the contracts for war. In filling their war contracts, one powerful and large-scale industrial center of our society after another more fully embeds itself in the military political economy of the United States and further deepens the nation's dependence on war to sustain the nation's economic system. Thus, again and again since the 1980s, the starting point of neoliberalism, we have watched the state reduce funding for the republic while expanding it for the empire-one of the most basic principles of neoliberalism.

Global Warming and Climate Change

The universe is fourteen billion years old. In it are some two trillion galaxies. One of those galaxies is our galaxy, the Milky Way. It contains at least one billion planets and, at minimum, the same number of stars. Nine billion of those planets are estimated to be in the "Goldilocks Zone"-meaning they are neither too far away nor too close to the star that they are orbiting to prevent life from developing. However, so far, the only planet that we know has life on it is our own-Earth. Of all fifty billion species that have existed on our planet, 99% are now extinct. Human beings have already walked the planet for some 200,000 years-100,000 years longer than the average species. Yet, with all of that knowledge at hand, human beings remain the only species to have ever planned their own destruction. Second only to the terrible power of nuclear weapons-there are now enough to kill everyone on Earth many times over-global warming and climate change are the most immediate long-term threat to the continued existence of the human race.

Global warming and climate change are a product of the Industrial Revolution which is itself a development of global capitalism. The industrialization of global society began just 200 years ago and was brought into existence to make the rich, richer still. It allowed for all kinds of goods and services to be produced at an ever-faster pace which translated into more profits and new markets for an emerging international owning class. In time, industrialization gave rise to powerful cross-country locomotives and the automobile industry which were fueled by coal and oil. As time passed, fossil fuels would come to heat, cool, and power our homes and workplaces.

However, the burning of oil and coal releases carbon dioxide or CO2 into the atmosphere. An excess of CO2 in the atmosphere upsets the Earth's natural chemical balance and creates warmer global temperatures which in turn leads to climate change. In burning fossil fuels for a relatively short period of time, human beings have fashioned a state of affairs where the Earth now has more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than at any other time in the last three million years. [11] Yet, with the whole world already experiencing the harsh effects of global warming and climate change, the real concern is that it may, as the great cosmologist Stephen Hawking noted, become permanent. For certain, he writes that:

"The danger is that global warming may become self-sustaining, if it has not done so already. The melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps reduces the fraction of solar energy reflected back into space, and so increases the temperature further. Climate change may kill off the Amazon and other rain forests, and so eliminate once one of the main ways in which carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere. The rise in sea temperature may trigger the release of large quantities of carbon dioxide, trapped as hydrides on the ocean floor. Both these phenomena would increase the greenhouse effect [and further heat the temperature of the Earth]." [12]

Whatever the case may be, the United Nations has concluded that all countries must take "rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society" to avoid increasing the Earth's temperature by 1.5 degrees Celsius (or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels by as earlier as 2030.[13] If not, then the world risks more extreme weather including more intense droughts, wildfires, floods, and food shortages impacting billions of people across the globe. With that call to action in the background, the United Nation's Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) later explained that climate change and "the relentless pursuit of economic growth" [14] has created a situation where one million species (or one in eight species known to exist on Earth) are now faced with extinction. With the planet already moving into the sixth mass extinction period (or what is known as the "Holocene extinction"), many of these species will begin to disappear within decades if nothing is done to slow the increase in the level of CO2 in the atmosphere. [15] Yet, how did we get into this situation in the first place? Through the non-stop pursuit of capital by capital, irrespective of its impact on the physical environment or the Earth's people.

Created A Massive-Sized and Expanding Global Poor

Neoliberalism and global capitalism have allowed those who own to accumulate wealth at heights almost never seen before in history. Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Ford, and Gates rank behind only a handful of emperors and kings (and one of the most brutal warlords in history in Genghis Khan) whose wealth has been unmatched in world history. As a consequence of this ongoing "Gilded Age" for the very rich, today 80 percent of the world's population, or more than six billion people, live on $10 or less a day, amounting to just $3,650 a year. While troubling enough, according to the anti-poverty organization Oxfam International (founded by Quakers and Oxford scholars) not only is the majority of the world poor but "seven out of ten people live in countries where economic inequality has increased" from 1980 and 2012. [16] In fact, any humane definition of global poverty indicates that not only has economic inequality increased, but so too has the number of people who are poor grown in size as well.[17] Conversely, from 1980 through 2012, Oxfam found that, "the richest one percent increased their share of income in 24 out of 26 countries" that the organization inspected[18] with this trend continuing right through 2018. Though rarely noted in the corporate press or discussed by almost any capitalist-government, if the richest 1 percent are getting richer, then someone else is getting poorer. In the United States and throughout the world, that would be almost everyone else. In fact, not only has poverty increased but it has become so extreme that in the richest country in the world today more than "five million people [are] living in Third World conditions" in the United States.[19] In other parts of the world, poverty has become so entrenched that some people have been forced to consider doing things that many of us would rather not imagine. For example, in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and in a country where 80 percent of the population already lives on $2 or less a day, some people have been left so far behind by the virtues of neoliberalism that they have, at times, turned to eating "mud-cookies" (a mix of dirt and water sunbaked on the cement) [20] to ward off their hunger. Yet, in spite of some Haitian's attempts not to starve, hunger is still the number one cause of death in the world, killing more than HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined each year. [21]

Still, in 2014 it was almost shockingly reported that a mere eighty-five people possessed more wealth than the bottom half of the Earth's population, combined.[22] While a clear sign of massive wealth inequality and all of the problems that come with it, today, depending on whose numbers are correct, possibly as few as eight men control more wealth than the bottom half of the world combined. [23] As the merciless logic of global capitalism continues to place all of the world's wealth into the hands of a few exceedingly rich individuals, neoliberalism's predictable end of also creating and further expanding a massive-sized global poor remains the present state and future trajectory of the world economy. Whatever the outcome, the increased ranks of the global poor as a consequence of the increased concentration of wealth into the hands of the few runs contrary to the common argument made by the ruling classes and the wealthy few the world over that all people are "better off" as global capitalism spreads around the entire planet. [24]

Narrowed Our Sources of Public Information

In a democracy, the news media is responsible for investigating public officials and political institutions to ensure that each is working on behalf of the people or, more generally, the "public good." The investigation of the political arena by the news media is to occur from a variety of independent and unconnected sources which are based upon a variety of ideological viewpoints. In the United States, the airwaves are supposed to be publicly owned which would allow for, at the very least, a not wholly corporate-based telling of the news. Yet, when we examine the American media, we find that this is not always the case.

As recently as 1983 fifty separate corporations owned 90 percent of all the United States' news media-print, TV, and radio. However, as neoliberalism concentrates economic power into the hands of fewer people, today just six large global corporations control 90 percent of everything that people read, watch, or listen to in the United States. Notably, four of the six media corporations are controlled by individuals who are billionaires, and three of the six companies are owned by just two people. By definition, then, the American news media does not include multiple diverse interests but is instead an oligopoly-a market that is controlled by a very small group of for-profit companies.

If the media is controlled by very wealthy members within the global elite, it is reasonable to ask whether or not the news media has an identifiable political and economic ideology. Liberal scholars regularly argue that there is no discernible politico-economic ideology of the news media, or that Democratic and Republican issues are given roughly the same attention in the media. However, this argument is undermined by the fact that mainstream news media focuses almost exclusively on conservative and liberal concerns. If the news media did not have some identifiable ideological value-system, then a whole range of individuals and issues and a whole series of political and economic questions would either be discussed in the corporate press or at the very least, not attacked, such as: the virtue of public ownership in all of its forms, the value of unions and collective bargaining for working people, the reality that the majority of left-leaning Third-party platforms align with the majority of the American people's interests, a thorough and highly critical critique of the exploitation of the Third World by international capital (including by the American owning class), and the nature and massive size of the US military and military spending, including a questioning of why US troops are stationed in more than 150 countries around the globe. Yet, this is not the case. Instead, the corporate press is either silent on each of these issues or is, in fact, hostile toward them.

For certain, it is not correct to say that the news media in the United States is unbiased or does not hold any political or economic ideology. In general, liberal scholars' argument that the mainstream media pays equal or almost equal attention to liberal and conservative concerns is likely correct. However, that misses the point. What is most alarmingly true is that the media ignores, downplays, or places a negative connotation on virtually any issue, person or idea that is in contradiction to the class interests of those that own the corporate media or criticizes the capitalist economic system itself. Instead, the corporate press overwhelmingly tends to see social reality in the United States-and around the world-through the eyes of the class that owns it.

Concentrated Political Power in the Hands of the Wealthy Few

Irrespective of the founders' intentions, today the United States is a plutocracy. Plutocracy is an Ancient Greek word that means: "a society ruled by the rich where wealth is valued over goodness." As wealth accumulates in any society, the owning class, unless politically prevented from doing so, will eventually come to shape state policy. As the state is a reflection of class power, they will do so not on behalf of the bonum populi (i.e., "good of the people") but instead on behalf of their own class interests. This is done in the United States by the wealthy few spending hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions and lobbying dollars to "influence" the state. Known as bribery in other countries, this arrangement (made worse by "corporate-personhood" [25]) has allowed powerful American trusts and wealthy individuals to essentially purchase the state for their own use. If this were not the case then we would see a whole series of issues debated and resolved by the government in favor of the people and not the rich. For example, today the United States would provide free health care and a free kindergarten through graduate school education to each of its citizens. All American wars would be brought to an end and US troops would be recalled from their many locations around the world. People throughout the country would be paid a living wage and housing and day care would be provided affordably, if not free. But this is not the current state of affairs in the United States nor is it the reality of daily existence for an enormous majority of the world's people. In the US (and often times throughout the world) it is because of a longstanding class advantage by the rich even if it is not recognized as such.

In the United States, through their massive-sized campaign contributions and lobbying dollars, the wealthy few are able to produce policy outcomes that provide for immense-sized tax-payer provided bailouts for their already giant-sized banks. How big are the banks? The top ten financial institutions in the United States have combined assets that are greater than the total GDP of China which is second only to the US. The amount each bank uses for "political influence" amounts to only a tiny fraction of their total assets and is often the best money they will ever spend. So too is the owning class able to ensure huge tax breaks for their class [26] yet at the same time make it more difficult for the working class to be released from heavy financial burdens or file for bankruptcy. [27] Through their class rule, the rich have been able to make sure the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have continued for more than fifteen years even though the majority of the nation's people have been against them since less than two years after the start of each war. And, the wealthy few are able to ensure that healthcare remains private and highly lucrative for their class though70 percent of the country favors a state-funded healthcare system. [28] Thus, when we examine national policy in the United States it becomes quite clear where real class power resides-with the wealthy few.

In Sum: Neoliberalism & Future Generations

As today turns into tomorrow and future generations begin to write the history of our time, they may look at the physical world that has been ravaged by neoliberalism and unrestrained global capitalism and may point to Native American culture with its respect for the Earth and ask why it wasn't paid attention to more closely. Or upon considering the horrible conditions created by poverty, they may ask why we did not better follow the example left by Martin Luther King Jr. Or in thinking about the terrible destruction of war they might wonder why we didn't take John F. Kennedy's position about war more seriously when he said, "Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind." Or to our horror they may have a more sympathetic view toward people like Ted Kaczynski and his critique of the "techno-industrial system" than the one that we currently possess.[29] In fact, in due time, as global capitalism and an ever-increasing technological-neoliberalism continues its stampede across the globe, creating great wealth but generating planetary-sized concerns, Kaczynski may well someday be viewed more as a modern-day prophet than a historical pariah. Whatever the case may be, capitalism marches on, with the rich and powerful continuing to provide every reason under the sun why the system that so richly benefits their class is the only one possible and is, irrespective of the evidence to the contrary, beneficial to all.

Consequences of Confronting the Rich & Powerful: The Case of Chile in the 1970s

Dating back to the Ancient Roman gladiator and slave Spartacus and continuing right up until the present day in countries such as Venezuela and Cuba, those that have opposed the rule of the rich and powerful have often paid a heavy price. They have opposed the class rule of the privileged few not out of greed but instead out of a want of ending the inequities and injustices that come with it. Dr. Salvador Allende and the nation of Chile are a case in point. One of the best and most thoughtful men to have ever graced the political stage, Allende tried to breathe life into a new conception of government and society in his country. After becoming the first democratically elected socialist president in the history of the world in 1970 he began to transition the Chilean economy, which was controlled by the international owning class, into a socialist economy that would be presided over by a democratic-socialist state and Chile's working class.

With more than one hundred US corporations in Chile at the time, key sectors within the United States' owning class stood to lose billions of dollars under a man and government that had every intention of nationalizing industries and corporations for the benefit of the Chilean people. Once in power he did exactly that. One of the largest and most profitable sectors brought under national control was the mostly US-owned copper industry. After expropriating Chile's mines from US corporations, Allende provided relatively little money in return. His argument for doing so was based on the American companies past exploitation of Chilean workers and the damage that they had done to the country. Allende's government also seized control of the utilities sector which was owned by American capital and nationalized US and internationally owned banks. Not stopping there, in its move toward a more equal society, Allende's government imposed heavy state regulation on or nationalized the iron, coal, and steel industries. And, if that was not enough for the owning class, he began to increase wages for workers and impose price freezes on goods and services throughout the country. Finally, Allende's government focused on an agrarian reform program not unlike the one undertaken by Fidel Castro in Cuba. [30] A program that was popular in Latin America at the time for its ability to redistribute wealth amongst a nation's poor and unpopular in the United States for the same reason.

By early September of 1973 the Chilean oligarchs and key members within the American ruling class had enough. Daring to call themselves patriots, and with the full support of the United States government and many of Chile's rich, a clique of Chilean generals and admirals conspired to overthrow the Allende government. The events that followed made up one of the most tragic chapter's written about democracy during the twentieth century. Indeed, the future military junta that was now forming in close alliance with the United States government ordered the Chilean Air Force to bomb the presidential palace, La Moneda-Chile's White House-with Allende and members of his government still inside. In his final hours, Allende chose to end his own life (for some, rather valiantly) instead of falling into the hands of what would become the murderous General Augusto Pinochet regime. After the coup and Allende's death, and fully reinforced by the United States government, the military junta allowed Chile's rich and the American owning class to regain control of industries and factories that had been nationalized by Chilean workers and the state just a few years earlier.

Later, the Pinochet military dictatorship would go on to torture and "disappear" (i.e., murder and vanish from the face of the Earth) thousands of Chilean citizens from 1973 to 1990 who were considered to be opponents of the regime or supporters of Allende. This again was done with the full support of key members of the US ruling class. [31] In time and with the Chicago Boys fully entrenched in Pinochet's government, any chance of a return to a working-class republic disappeared from Chile's foreseeable future as did any sign of democracy for almost two decades. In destroying this once promising socialist-democracy, the US and Chilean owning class made it clear that when their class power was threatened, they would use violence and unconstitutional measures to restore their class privilege atop the social order of Chile. While Pinochet's rule eventually came to an end and he was later indicted for hundreds of human rights violations (though he was likely guilty of thousands more), his dark legacy remains that of introducing "the gun" into Chilean politics to resolve the class conflicts that are so elementary to the system of capitalism and capital accumulation on behalf of the rich and powerful.

Yet, the case of Chile is just one example of the same brutal history lesson taught many times over by the United States government in the past 75 years. As popular movements and government leaders who have attempted to nationalize their country's resources, redistribute wealth, or keep US multinational corporations from exploiting their nation's riches have so bitterly learned, they have often been the target of US-backed assassinations and government overthrows. In fact, since 1945, the United States (via the CIA) has assassinated, attempted to assassinate, or played a role in the assassination of at least fifty foreign leaders or heads of state and tried to overthrow, through a variety of means, at least thirty separate foreign governments. [32] In spite of its public pronouncements to the contrary of "spreading" democracy" or "nation-building," not one time since 1945 has the United States government worked to protect a democratic government, improve the living conditions of the poor or working class, or assist a popular movement abroad. Instead, each time the US has "intervened" in a nation's affairs since the end of World War II it has been done to support or enhance the class position of a very specific class.

An American Caligula and a Troubled Republic: When the Rich Rule

The long and violent history of US involvement all around the world is a legacy that we will leave to future generations. In fact, they may well one day think of the US troops spread all around the globe, the ongoing deadly wars, the seemingly non-stop social violence throughout the country, the ravenous greed of the rich, and an increasingly corrupt government that is led by a man that resembles the Roman emperor Caligula (12 AD-34 AD) and view this time in history as the beginning of the end of the American republic. Like children wandering through the ruins of their ancestors and confronted with the vicious truth of a powerful empire that they have inherited, they may well wonder why those who came before them seem to have brought back into existence some of the darkest days of the Roman Empire.

In fact, the parallels between Rome under Caligula and the United States under the current American president might be quite striking for them. The historical record is in almost complete agreement that Caligula was insane, self-obsessed, cruel, a tyrant, and a sexual deviant. Or as Anthony Barrett writes, he was a "self-indulgent and unpredictable ruler devoid of any sense of moral responsibility. Totally unsuited to the task of governing, without training and with little talent for administration." [33] While his debased personality traits likely would have made him noteworthy in Roman history, his actual rule as emperor brought about or exacerbated a whole series of problems that Rome was already facing. In just four years, he further undermined the Roman notion of republican government and the rule of law and made it even more remote that this once promising city-state would ever return to its previous formulation as a republic.

Caligula's time in power included not only waging costly wars but also sending Roman troops on meaningless military excursions. He worked to increase the political power of the emperor to almost unlimited degrees and used state funds to build grand-scale and self-aggrandizing "public-works" projects. Never shy to enhance his own wealth and prestige, while emperor Caligula continued to build expensive residences for himself with it not always being clear if the money being spent came from the state or himself. After squandering much of Rome's money, Caligula tried to replenish the republic's treasury through a series of unpopular tax measures and legally doubtful and dishonest expropriations. With Rome knocked askew from his unscrupulous rule, Caligula announced that he was going to Egypt to be worshipped as a living god. After already making his horse a priest, this decision was apparently one step too far for the Roman elite. His announcement led to an assemblage of murderous-minded men to coalesce around him resulting in his assassination by the Pretorian Guard-the very men assigned to protect him. Though removed from the political scene, the damage Caligula had done to Ancient Rome cast a dark shadow over the once great city-state long after his death. Today, his rule echoes down through history as an example of the toxic mix of power and madness.

Yet when we think of the United States and consider the actions of the man leading the republic and empire today can we really conclude that the United States is so different than Rome was under Caligula? The American president too has debased personality traits, is self-obsessed, cruel (and ignorant), a sexual deviant, amoral, and appears to be of an unsound mind. With respect to his governing style, the president has pushed the limits of power of his once venerated office to bounds never before seen in American history and not intended by the framers of the Constitution. He has openly violated the Constitution and the rule of law as well as disrespected the republican principle of a separation of powers by trying to fund a "public works" project with money that has not been approved for it by congress and by ruling through his constitutionally questionable decrees. In so doing, he has undermined the very foundation of American government.

With a military already unrivaled in world history, he has further turned plowshares into swords by increasing the size of the military budget and then sent American troops on a meaningless military expedition to the US-Mexico border. In fact, some of his actions are more reminiscent of the grim character Fames in the Roman poet Virgil's Aeneid than they are of Caligula. Fames-or "Hunger"-loitered in front of the "Gates of Hell" urging people to commit crimes. [34] Yet in the United States, instead of loitering as the embodiment of hunger, the American president has given massive tax-cuts to the rich (including to himself and his family) while he and his party have made deep cuts to important social programs for the people and the poor. He has done this all the while requiring hundreds of thousands of federal employees to work without pay. Then the president and his wealthy cast of cabinet members wonder mindlessly why some federal employees can't "make ends meet" by simply taking out a loan, borrowing from their local grocery store, or relying on a food bank. Like a thief for the rich (and not unlike Fames), he tempts the American people to become like a modern-day Jean Valjean, an otherwise honest man who resorts to stealing bread so he might continue to live.

Whatever the case may be, perhaps worse than his debased personality traits and morally questionable policies, the current American president has tried to murdered Truth. In fact, "this man of the rich" (yet out for himself) has told more than 10,000 lies in just over two and one-half years. If there is such a thing as a national tragedy then it will be if he is successful in this pursuit. While obvious to many, it seems that nearly one half of our citizens, and many of them working class, seem not to notice or care about his dishonesty. Or worst of all, they have become like a collective Pontius Pilate-all quietly asking themselves, "What is truth?" as they and the Republican Party continue to support the "Father of Lies" irrespective of his daily dishonest, and many times, disrespectful public pronouncements. In reality, if the Republican Party had an ounce of self-respect, they would have voted to impeach the president the first day he took office for violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution. With interests in over a thousand businesses in more than one hundred countries when he took office, today it is impossible to know if he is working on behalf of the United States or on behalf of himself. But they did not. Now, too often in ruling unchecked it is hard not to read the daily newspapers about one of the president's delusions or lies and not wonder how far away his mind is from considering if not he too should be worshipped as a living-god, much like Caligula once did. If Caligula's rule was characterized by chaos and absurdity then minimally we too have moved to the reductio ad absurdum (i.e., reduction to the absurd) or the "Age of the Absurd" when, in addition to the above, a man who presides over the most powerful nation in the history of the world has also…

- 24 women accuse him of sexual assault

- Taken the side of two foreign leaders who are enemies of American democracy

- 100 plus documented instances of contact with a foreign power during his election

- Chronically denied the scientifically proven reality of global warming and climate change

- 15 plus ongoing investigations against him involving his businesses and politics

- 10 plus documented instances of what appear to be "obstruction of justice"

- Continued multiple "undeclared" wars abroad

…yet, the Democratic Party, which now controls the House of Representatives and was largely elected in response to the policies and personality of the current president will not even begin impeachment proceedings against him in that chamber. To their shame and ours, our children will likely only shake their heads and wonder why we didn't do anything. They will be right to do so and we will have no excuse. For in the final analysis, just as the "disaster that followed" the elevation of Caligula to the highest seat of power in Rome "was inevitable and of the Romans' own making" so too has the placement of the current American president in the most powerful seat in the world been done with the electoral blessings of the American people. [35]

Conclusion: Moving Toward a Better Tomorrow

In a just society Malcolm X would have been a senator and Martin Luther King Jr. would have been president. Instead, they were killed. Yet, their deaths reveal a basic truth about historical progress: "History moves slowly and it is unkind to those who try to make it move any faster than it is ready to move." However, today, the greed of the rich and the injustices visited on the people of the world by the powerful require us tomove history. The major task facing the world's people today is to change the nature of the political economy of the global system. While plutocrats never go easy, [36] to move the state and the world's economy away from the rich and powerful, the world's people only need to begin with their refusal to acquiesce to any social order other than one that is founded in true equality and justice. The whole notion of one person being more equal than another has "come and gone" in the world of political ideas. It died in political philosophy during the Enlightenment. Today, for an ever-growing number of people around the world, the notion of economic inequality as a worthwhile, much less moral, economic doctrine has died out as well. Thus, for more and more people around the world, any unequal social arrangement should only exist on the pages of history.

Once the world's people refuse to bow down to the rich and powerful, the only thing this hour in history needs is the simplest of all things-the Truth. If patience is the burden of thoughtful people, then thoughtful people need to patiently shine a light on the truth of the world. In doing so, it will be possible to bring forth the people and ideas that are needed to make a better tomorrow. In fact, the people and ideas that are needed are already emerging today. For example, in the United States, reparations for African Americans to address the cruel legacy of slavery are now being talked about by every major Democratic candidate in the 2020 presidential election. No longer can that atrocity and its many shocking brutalities be ignored. It was a "deal with the devil" that our founding fathers made and one in which the country would eventually reap a bitter harvest (i.e., the Civil War). Today, the long, dark shadow cast by slavery continues to haunt our nation's very soul. For many, a nationwide settlement of that issue is long past due.

"Economic rights" are now being discussed as human rights and merely as a continuation of the New Deal. Today, Establishment Democrats are quite removed from Franklin D. Roosevelt's conception of a "good society" and a return to his politics would be a step in the right direction for everyone in the country, including the rich. Economic rights for the people and the poor would prevent the rich from snatching up too much of the nation's wealth which could lead to social unrest and a diminishing of their class power to proportions that they may not be prepared to accept. Progressive lawmakers and people throughout the United States are taking global warming and climate change more seriously than at any time in the past. A threat to all the world's people, it is one of the most significant issues that our children will face. And, while congress will not move toward impeach of the president (for the time being anyway) there are right now some young, thoughtful women of color in congress that are very much progressive thinkers that seem to have the good of the nation and world in mind as they work within the halls of power in Washington D.C.

Outside of the United States, progressive movements in Europe are confronting a rising tide of extreme right-wing nationalism that pretends to be a kind of stern but still acceptable populism. Not only are these far-right politics on the move in Europe but so too in countries such as the Philippines which is led by an outright murderer and Brazil which is overseen by a neo-fascist. Still, popular movements have made historical strides. For instance, in the most recent European Parliament elections, the Green Party in Finland, France, Ireland, Germany, England, Wales, Portugal, and Belgium won high seat totals with multiple countries seeing the Green Party finish in second place. In fact, according to public opinion polls, in Germany, the Green Party is the most popular party in the whole country. [37] Other forward-looking individuals and groups have created international organizations to advance the concerns of all people of the world. One of those groups, the Progressive International, was specifically created to "transform the global order" and create "global justice" on an international scale. [38] At the same time, however, progressive nations such as Cuba and Venezuela are having their national sovereignty openly disrespected by much of the West and outright threatened with violence by the United States. One wonders how a country such as Cuba, which provides free education kindergarten through graduate school, free health care, and free food and housing to each of its citizens, is a threat to anyone. The fact of the matter is that it is not. Instead, because Cuba and Venezuela have the courage to control their own resources and have chosen to bow down to no one, they are targeted for harassment and destruction by the global ruling classes and the wealthy few.

Whatever the outcome of world history, the present moment in the American experience likely will be remembered as a troubled time. A period where the future of our nation may well hang in the balance. Only time will tell but there is no mistaking that in the last few years there has been a nastiness in the air. A graceless age, when a stupidity has run nearly unconstrained over our republic. In fact, if it is not the many bloody and unconstitutional wars that will come to symbolize our times, then it may just well be possibly the saddest incident to have occurred during this time. That was the day a two-year old girl was put on trial alone. All by herself, she wept heart-breaking but ultimately bitter tears in front of a judge to answer for her crime of coming to the United States-the land of the "tired, the poor, [and] the huddled masses"-to escape poverty and violence in her own. [39] A dream that was once offered to the world but has become a nightmare for an increasing number of people who have acted on the words engraved on the Statue of Liberty.

In empathetic wonderment, our children might look back and ask us, "Why did any of this happen?" Shuffling our feet, we know we will have no good answer for them. But, possibly the only response that we should give them is that all of this occurred because we and our political leaders forgot one of the most important teachings that Christ ever gave us and one that the American president never bothered to learn: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."[40] Christ offered us a world without suffering. We rejected it. With it now clear to them that we had lost our way, our children may once again turn to Ancient Rome to try to understand our times. In looking back, they may well recall the words of the great Roman orator Cicero. Though he was speaking of Ancient Rome, our children may just as well conclude that he was speaking about us when he said, "You see, the Republic, the Senate, dignity dwelt in none of us."[41]

About the Author

Jeremy Cloward, Ph.D. is a political science professor and author living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has taught at the junior college and university level for the past 13 years and is the author of three books and multiple articles that have been published in theOakland Post, the Hampton Institute, withSocialist Worker, Project Censored, and the East Bay Times. His college-level American Politics textbook, Class Power and the Political Economy of the American Political System , is now in its second edition and has been endorsed by the progressive author Michael Parenti, the director of Project Censored, Mickey Huff, and the professor and former central committee member of the Black Panther Party, Phyllis Jackson. The book is currently being marketed to a national audience of political science professors throughout the country. In addition, Dr. Cloward has run for public office on three separate occasions (Congress 2009, 2010, and City Council 2012) and has appeared in a variety of media outlets, including FOX and the Pacifica Radio Network (KPFA). Today, he remains involved in the politics of peace, justice, and equality for all. His website is located at: https://www.jeremycloward.org/.

Notes

[1] For a detailed list of all US wars and interventions abroad see: William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2004).

[2] During the American Civil War, the Confederate Congress passed the so-called "Twenty-Negro Law" as a part of the Second Conscription Act of 1862 which exempted from military service any white man who owned twenty or more slaves on a Confederate planation or who owned two plantations within five miles of each other.

[3] See the discussion about private property and government in James Madison's Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Reported by James Madison (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987), 244.

[4] John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1960), see for example pg. II, Section 3.

[5] See reference to the quote in Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 72.

[6] Eric Zuesse, "Polls: U.S. Is 'The Greatest Threat to Peace in the World Today,'" Global Research, August 9, 2017, https://www.globalresearch.ca/polls-u-s-is-the-greatest-threat-to-peace-in-the-world-today/5603342 .

[7] The United States "base budget" of $700 billion does not include other military spending that clearly involves the military such as appropriations for nuclear weapons, space defense, homeland security, and supplemental spending for the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to name just a few.

[8] For a full discussion of the political economy of the US war on Iraq, who drove the war, and who benefited from the it see Chapter 6 in my Class Power and the Political Economy of the American Political System (Redding, CA: BVT Publishing, 2018).

[9] See for example OpenSecrets.org: Center for Responsive Politics, "Ranked Sectors: 2014" OpenSecrets.org: Center for Responsive Politics, http://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=c&showYear=2014 and OpenSecrets.org: Center for Responsive Politics, "Sector Totals, 2013-2014" OpenSecrets.org: Center for Responsive Politics, http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/ . Note: similar results are located in the top Campaign Contributors to Congress by Sector (2013-2014).

[10] Thomas Jefferson once somewhat famously wrote, "I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies." Whether this is true or not depends on one's perspective. However, what is true is that private banks do have the power to help fund governments that, in turn, can fund standing armies. Standing armies can then open markets for finance capital (and capital, in general) to invest in newly opened markets abroad, which allows corporate interests to accumulate more capital to, among other things, further finance government. This, of course, leads to additional markets being opened by the state in a never-ending cycle of private capital funding the state so the state can open markets and help private capital exploit land, labor, and resources at home and abroad.

[11] Yale Environment 360, "CO2 Concentrations Hit Highest Levels in 3 Million Years," Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, May 14, 2019, https://e360.yale.edu/digest/co2-concentrations-hit-highest-levels-in-3-million-years .

[12] Stephen Hawking, Interview, ABC News, August 16, 2006.

[13] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "Summary for Policymakers of IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C approved by governments," The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, October 8, 2018, https://www.ipcc.ch/2018/10/08/summary-for-policymakers-of-ipcc-special-report-on-global-warming-of-1-5c-approved-by-governments/ .

[14] Aljazeera, One million species to go extinct 'within decades,' Aljazeera, May 6, 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/05/million-species-extinct-decades-190506130910133.html .

[15] Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), "Media Release: Nature's Dangerous Decline 'Unprecedented'; Species Extinction Rates 'Accelerating'," IPBES | Science and policy for people and nature, April/May 2019, https://www.ipbes.net/news/Media-Release-Global-Assessment .

[16] OXFAM Briefing Paper, "WORKING FOR THE FEW: Political capture and economic inequality," OXFAM, January 20, 2014, http://templatelab.com/working-for-the-few-research/

[17] Jason Hickel, "Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn't be more wrong," The Guardian, January 29, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-gates-davos-global-poverty-infographic-neoliberal .

[18] OXFAM Briefing Paper, "WORKING FOR THE FEW: Political capture and economic inequality."

[19] United Nations Human Rights: Office of the High Commissioner, "'Contempt for the poor in US drives cruel policies,' UN expert says," United Nations Human Rights: Office of the High Commissioner , June 4, 2018, https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=23172&LangID=E .

[20] For example, see Associated Press, "Haiti's poor resort to eating mud as prices rise," NBCNEWS.com, January 29, 2008, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/22902512/#.Uw0iGc7wqzw .

[21] The World Food Programme, "What Causes Hunger?," The World Food Programme, November 5, 2013, https://www.wfp.org/stories/what-causes-hunger .

[22] Michael Parenti, "85 Billionaires and the Better Half," Commons Dreams, February 18, 2014, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/02/18/85-billionaires-and-better-half .

[23] See for example: OXFAM International, "Just 8 men own same wealth as half the world," OXFAM International, January 16, 2017, https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/just-8-men-own-same-wealth-half-world .

[24] See for example: Bill and Melinda Gates, "Three Myths on the World's Poor: Bill and Melinda Gates call foreign aid a phenomenal investment that's transforming the world," Wall Street Journal, January 17, 2014, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304149404579324530112590864 .

[25] Corporate personhood, a "legal fiction" created over time by the Supreme Court, has made it so corporations are viewed as "people" in the eyes of the law. In so doing, corporations now have the same rights under the law and Constitution as any other citizen. One of those rights is the right to a freedom of speech. The Court, importantly, has held that the freedom of speech includes the right to "speak" with money in support of political campaigns. The most serious consequence of that conclusion is that corporations can now give unlimited amounts of money to political candidates for their campaigns and being allowed to do so because of the 1st Amendment's free speech clause.

[26] For example, the 107 Congress (2001-2003) passed Public Law 107-16: The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 and Public Law 108-27: The Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 which were a group of tax reductions known as the "Bush-era tax cuts" for the rich and were extended by President Obama. While the tax breaks lowered federal income tax rates for all income earners, they also lowered capital gains taxes and the tax rate on dividends, prevented the elimination of personal exemptions for higher-income taxpayers, prevented the elimination of itemized deductions, and eliminated the estate tax, - all of which were a financial boon to the wealthiest members of US society. Later, President Trump signed off on his own tax breaks for the rich that resulted in the wealthiest 1 percent of the country receiving $1.9 trillion in tax cuts over a ten-year time period.

[27] For instance, Public Law 109-8: The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act passed during the 109th Congress (2005-2007) made it more difficult for the vast majority of the American people to file for bankruptcy under Chapter 7.

[28] Letitia Stein, Susan Cornwell, and Joseph Tanfani, "Inside the progressive movement roiling the Democratic Party," Reuters Investigates, August 23, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-election-progressives/ .

[29] While Kaczynski's crimes are difficult to excuse under almost any decent line of thought, his logic justifying his actions are very difficult to refute. His writings analyzing global society, whether agreed with or not, are illustrative of a truly sharp mind at work. For examples of his thought, see: Theodore J. Kaczynski, Technological Slavery: The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2010) and Theodore John Kaczynski, Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How (Scottsdale, AZ: Fitch & Madison Publishers, 2015).

[30] For an excellent film documentary of the Allende government filmed in the lead up to his downfall which chronicles the Chilean working class's movement toward control of the means of production and political power see Patricio Guzman's, The Battle of Chile (Icarus Films, 2009), DVD.

[31] For the best discussion of the Pinochet Regime and its support by the United States government see Peter Kornbluh's, The Pincohet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New York, NY: The New Press, 2003).

[32] For a complete listing of assassinations and assassination attempts by the CIA, see Appendix III in Blum, Killing Hope, 463-464.

[33] This quote is taken from the back flap of Anthony A. Barrett's Caligula: The Corruption of Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990)

[34] For the whole poem see Virgil, The Aeneid trans. David West (London, UK: Penguin Books, 1990).

[35] Barrett, Caligula: The Corruption of Power, back flap.

[36] For example, see the historical instances of the slave Spartacus leading a slave rebellion against the Roman Republic (73-71 BC); Haitian slaves rising up against their colonial masters during the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804); the working class of France overturning the aristocracy during the French Revolution (1789-1799); workers in Russia overthrowing and executing the fabulously wealthy and autocratic tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, during the Russian Revolution (1917); the movement for Irish statehood organized and led by Michael Collins and Eamon de Valera which included their war for independence against the British (1919-1921); the Cuban people pushing the corrupt US-backed military dictator Bautista from power during the Cuban Revolution (1953-1959); or attempts by the American people to create a more just and equal society throughout their history such as those attempts made by the Black Panther Party in the 1960s and 1970s.

[37] Jochen Bittner, "The Greens Are Germany's Leading Political Party. Wait, What?," The New York Times, June 19, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/opinion/greens-party-germany.html .

[38] See The Progressive International: A Grassroots Movement for Global Justice website located at: https://www.progressive-international.org/ .

[39] Vivian Yee and Miriam Jordan, "Migrant Children in Search of Justice: A Two Year Old's Day in Court," The New York Times, October 8, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/08/us/migrant-children-family-separation-court.html .

[40] Mark 12:30-31

[41] As quoted by Joaquim Fest in his excellent study of Adolf Hitler, entitled Hitler (Orlando, Florida: Harcourt, 1973).

Orientalism and the Cultural Constructions of Modern-Day Mass Tourism

By John Nightengale

Orientalism is the most extreme form of cultural imperialism as it completely restructures the colony culture. Orientalism is arguably one of the most important theories in post-colonial study. This essay will unpack and explain the nuances of the theory first developed by Said in his famous work "Orientalism," published in 1978, then later expanded upon in "Culture and Imperialism," published in 1993. In short, Said sought to explain how, through the relationship between knowledge and power, cultural representation was used to create the discursive binary between the "east" and "west" which placed the west as superior (Gilbert-Moore, 1997). The construction of knowledge was a form of cultural hegemony which facilitated the colonising of the mind, which is argued to be a prerequisite for colonial control (Burney, 2012). While formal colonisation has ended, it is argued that Orientalism is still widely seen in modern time. The second part of the essay will explore how the tourism industry has been plagued with culturally constructed narratives that seek to homogenise host countries through repetitive reduction (Bruner, 2005; Anderson, 2005; Shivani, 2006). By exploring discourses, the binary and otherness present in tourism is akin to that of colonial times (Carrigan, 2011; Bruner, 2005).

Said follows a post-structuralist model in an attempt to dismantle the binary established by imperial discourse; he tries to highlight the power structure that establishes the Occident as superior to the Orient. Said drew upon theorists of his time to construct his theory. One key theorist he drew inspiration from was Foucault; in particular his study of power (Gilbert-Moore, 1997; Lester, 2003). Foucault said that power and knowledge are intrinsically linked in that the creation of knowledge was an exertion of power (Foucault, 1991; Lester, 2003). The "Orient" was constructed through the systematic learning, discovery and practice from the west (Said 2003; Burney, 2012). Here it is seen through an imagined geography, the east was produced through travel writing, novels and poetry, which sought to bring the east into a realm of understanding (Abdul Janmohamed, 1985; Mostafanezhad, 2013). What is important to remember is that only the west was producing knowledge, the east was not able to produce literature and art about the west. This illustrates Foucault's idea that knowledge is power, in which the west has more power and therefore is producing more knowledge, thus directly demonstrating the dominance of the west over the east. The example Said (2003) gives is, Cromer referring to the Orient as "lethargic and suspicious", and "devoid of energy and initiative". This was the only representation that the people in England received of the Orient at this time (Said, 2003). This creation of "false knowledge" along with other examples of literature and art contributes to the social construct of the "east", in which meaning is ascribed onto people and place (Crang, 1998, Ashcroft, 2008). It is seen that the "real east" is reformed into the "discursive east", meaning that the east is now conformed into the imagination of west, in which the "discursive east" will always be the submissive (Moore-Gilbert, 1997).

The second key concept that Said draws from is Foucault's theory of discourse. In discourse, power is both constituted and exercised through the flow of knowledge and representation to produce objects of truth (Moore-Gilbert, 1997; Lester, 2003). Here it is seen that what is the truth, or rather the constructed knowledge, can be linked to who has power, in that, power controls what narratives are formed or blocked (Young, 1995; Bruner, 2005). Rather than the discourse forming and reforming knowledge through passive powers, it is seen that knowledge was first constructed by specialists, often bourgeoisie men, then the knowledge becomes fact and is later reinforced by society (Said, 2016; Lester, 2003). This explains how the view of the Orient as timeless and unchanging was upheld; the idea was produced and reproduced within the Western mind (Crang 1998; Burney, 2012). Western discourse representations of the Orient have been homogenised and totalized reducing the Orient to tropes and stereotypical tropes being produced as "western knowledge" (Moore-Gilbert, 1997). This in term reinforces the binary between the Orient and Occident (Said, 2003).

Orientalism through the construct of knowledge and Orientalist discourse has resulted in the binary between Orient/Occident; creating the contrast of developing/developed, promiscuous/noble (Ashcroft, 2008). Kissinger wrote of binary opposition which viewed the Orient as "lagging" behind due to the Orient retaining a pre-Newtonian view of the world as " internal" whilst the superior Occident views the word as "external" (Kissinger, 1966; Crang 1998; Erikson and Murphy, 2017). Through the production of knowledge through literature, the Occident was placed as dominant over the east, placing the western world at the centre and the Orient in the periphery (Maddox, 2014). Cromer said that Orients "acts, speaks, and thinks in a manner exactly opposite to the European"; this illustrates how the binary was represented at the time (Said, 2003). The process of ordering is said to control all aspects of the discourse (Wodak, 2005). Gramsci adds to this, with the theory of cultural hegemony, which explains how dominant ideologies are controlled by the hierarchal class to maintain control (Lears, 1985, Crang, 2013). This is done by assigning the subordinate the role of subject which in turn creates "docile bodies" which conform to normalisation (Foucault 1998; said, 2003; Woodak, 2005). The creation of the subordinate also removes their ability to speak. This silencing effect is seen by the spread of popular writing of the era which "writes out" the Orient (Aitchison, 2001). In doing so, this reinforces the Orientalist discourse as the "true east" narrative is blocked and western knowledge prevails (Young, 1995).

This cultural hegemony is an extreme case of imperialism which colonised the mind of the Orient. Creating the viewpoint of the west as superior compared to the subordinate and silenced east led to the creation of thought, in both the Orient and Occident, that the east needs to be colonised and controlled (Lears, 1985). It is widely accepted that the process of Orientalism allowed the colonisation of the east. This is expressed by a quote from William Blake "Empire follows art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose" (cited in Said 1993).

Orientalism is seen today in tourism, the power dynamics in the representation of the "east" mimic that seen in colonial times. Before delving into the theory, it is important to acknowledge that tourism in the modern day is laden with power inequalities from its first appearance. Mass tourism was spurred on by neoliberal organisations post-World War Two as a way for welfare states to develop (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2006; Carrigan, 2011). International financial institutes offered exploitative loans in exchange for adopting tourism development strategies (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2006). Britain helped establish the "Atlantic Charter" which sought to develop the Caribbean tourism industry, however with vested interest as the UK traded 50 destroyers for a 99 year lease on seven Commonwealth islands (Carrigan, 2011). The tourism industry is also plagued with a "leakage" in that money is commonly siphoned off from the host state following a similar pattern to colonial times (Carrigan, 2011).

It is seen that tourism seeks to commodify culture by packaging "the other" for consumption by the west (Behdad, 1994; Jamerson, 2017). This commodification of tourism is spurred on by western corporations by the production of knowledge about the host country (Mostafanezhad, 2013). What is important to understand here is that the tourist destinations are always written about, not written by; and in doing so the "native" population is silenced. Using the Caribbean as an example, their image is created through western lenses by western corporations and tourists who define the islands by comparing the differences between "east" and "west" (Shabanirad, 2015). This is done by the tourist's gaze which explains how images and stereotypes of the country are distorted and homogenised by tourists to bring the world of "other" into comprehendible reality, much like Cromer in colonial times (Katan, 2012, Urry and Larsen, 2011). This distorted reality is furthered when portrayed in the media due to repetitive reduction, seen in travel writing such as "Lonely Planet" and review sites such as "TripAdvisor" (Andreasson, 2005; Simpson, 2005). On a larger scale companies reproduce this "distorted reality" through brochure discourse by using the same rhetoric phrases and imagery to sell the destination (Carringan, 2011). Holiday destinations often evoke an image of idyllic landscapes, inscribed with emotions and feelings; this is a result of imagined geographies of the place caused by the culturally constructed narratives (Hottola, 2014). This is a result of advertisements summarising an entire nation's culture into a set of descriptors (Hottola, 2014). In doing so, it plays out a "racist fantasy" in which the "east" is homogenised and given the role of inferior; seen as feminised and backwards in relation to the western world (Carringan, 2011). A prime example of this is Thomas Cook, who advertise "Africa Holidays" as cultural experiences in which you'll be "greeted by tribal elders" and "experience life the way locals have lived for generations" (Thomascook.com). This echoes the narrative that Africa is primitive and backwards, positioned beneath the west.

Many tourists seek an "authentic experience" which Mkono (2012) critiques as upholding the "Eurocentric grand narrative". Seen through Bruners (2005) theory of "questioning gaze" travellers question if constructed sites and performances are true representations of the culture. However, by seeking "authenticity" the tourist is merely projecting their pre-understanding of place (Maddox, 2014; Bruner, 2005). Tourists that search for authenticity uphold an imagined geography of a romantic, unspoilt place which is "frozen in time" and in doing so they "define India according to their own needs" (Korpela, 2010). This upholds a binary between India and the west, which defines India as ascetic compared to the consumerist west (Maddox, 2014). The creation of binary through tourism places the west as the "norm" and defines India in comparison to the west, in that it views Indian culture as a retreat from the normal, hectic western life. In doing so they deny agency of the local population by ignoring their modernity (Philip, 2009; Korpela, 2010; Maddox, 2014).

So far, it has been seen how writing and media have created a binary between the consumerist west and the homogenised east. In order to fully illustrate Orientalism in tourism, it is important to understand how the writing and portrayal of the east affects actions of the host country and the tourist. This can be explained by exploring how narratives have produced a discourse, which in turn gives meaning to space and establishes accepted practices and norms (Bruner, 2005; Carringan, 2011). Firstly, it is seen that cultural hegemony occurs within tourism; host countries often find themselves forced to adopt the culture imposed upon them (Lears, 1985). Looking at Bali, the country is dependent on tourism and therefore upholds the enforced stereotypes (Carrigan, 2011). Secondly, through media, tourists are exposed to the imagined geography of the place, which affects their expectations of the place, which in turn affects how they experience the place (Gregory, 1999). For example, tourists are controlled where they go when they travel within a place. Travel writing "stages" places constructing them as culturally significant and in doing so signposts tourists from sight to sight. (Gregory, 1999)

To conclude, Said's theory of Orientalism highlighted the power structures that create the binaries responsible for positioning the west as dominant over the subaltern east. It was seen that through literature, narratives were created by the Occident about the Orient, which resulted in the creation of "western knowledge" which was imposed upon the Orient through cultural hegemony. Using Said's theory, this essay has highlighted how the same practices used in imperial discourse are being used in modern mass tourism. Through advertising, travel writing and reviews, cultures in host countries have been homogenised and limited to a set of descriptors. It can also be seen that this practice is intrinsically linked with power through the vested interest of IFIs and corporations based in the west. Lastly, it is important to highlight power structures so that they can be dismantled.

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Students, Peasants, and Communism in Colombia: An Interview with Oliver Dodd (Part Two)

By Devon Bowers

This is Part Two of our interview with Oliver Dodd, a PhD student at Nottingham University, where we expand upon his April 2019 article in the online edition of the Morning Star.

What is the current political and economic situation in Colombia?

Since the early 1990s Colombia engaged on a process of neo-liberal restructuring, largely to finance the counter-insurgency war against the powerful Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). In return for economic and military aid, the United States and the International Monetary Fund, demanded neoliberal reforms that entailed economic privatisation, liberalisation of foreign trade, financial deregulation, and reduced tariffs. As a result, Colombia's economic model today is largely extractivist and its capitalist accumulation strategy is dependent on those multinational corporations based in the core of the international political economy.

In terms of production of revenue from exports, Colombia's traditional export - coffee - which in the 1980s produced more than half of the country's export revenue, now represents only around 5% of export revenue. Currently, coal, oil and gas, make up more than 60% of export revenue. These economic changes have led to political changes. The multinational corporations invested in extractivism are overwhelmingly based in the capitalist core. The majority of the profits generated in Colombia's economy are put into the pockets of the finance capitalists, based outside Colombia. Furthermore, relative to other sectors - manufacturing (around 10%), services (around 35%), oil, coal and gas generates significantly higher profits. This trend puts multinational corporations in a stronger economic position vis-à-vis Colombia's declining national bourgeoisie. Nationally based companies are increasingly being bought out by multinational corporations, further extending foreign based influence over Colombia's economy and making the country more vulnerable to social forces organised at world order levels.

The peace accord signed with FARC in 2016 is under severe threat. Paramilitary killings of social activists since the signing of the peace agreement have increased, thousands of FARC combatants have either remobilised or refused to demobilise because of what they perceived as betrayal on the part of FARC's leadership, or the danger of paramilitary killings - more than 85 FARC ex-combatants have now been murdered since November 2016. FARC dissident leaders that have taken the hard-line position of refusing to demobilise basically argue that armed struggle is the only path to transform Colombia's political economy. In short, the 2016 peace accord has not brought peace.

However, I would argue that "peoples war" is no longer an applicable strategy in the historically specific conditions of Colombia today. The overwhelming majority of citizens live in urban areas and many of the insurgent social structures formed in the countryside have become corrupted and bureaucratised. The so-called "revolution in military affairs" (RIMA) has allowed the armed forces, notably in the form of air-power, to increasingly put the leftist insurgents on the defensive. Today satellite technology can be employed to detect guerrillas based in the mountains, let alone the countryside - where peasants, especially the youth, are increasingly departing for the towns and cities. This is not to suggest that guerrilla warfare cannot play any useful role as part of an overarching political strategy, but a military-centric strategy is becoming more difficult to implement effectively. Colombia's state, largely due to Plan Colombia and the military technology and intelligence capabilities it provided, has shown a consistent capacity to target even the most protected and important of guerrilla commanders. Until 2008, not a single member of FARC's 7-person secretariat had been killed, but since then, at least four have been successfully targeted and significant numbers of FARC's and ELN's medium level command have been killed. I know of some highly capable and politically educated leaders within the ELN, who were made "High-Valued-Targets" and very swiftly killed. This suggests to me that RIMA is changing the balance of forces in favour of the Colombian military and its main sponsor - the U.S.

There is also a significant shortage of intellectuals within both FARC dissidents' groups and the ELN, largely because they were successfully targeted by the Colombian military. This means that "militias" - those responsible for recruitment and upholding law and order in rural villages and towns, which are usually organised some distance from the more disciplined and politicised structures of the armed guerrilla units - sometimes tend to act without discipline and bring the organisations into disrepute among the civilian population. There is then, the realistic possibility that following another peace accord, these "conflict entrepreneurs" will continue to function as strictly criminal entities, thus leading to no practical end in the conflict.

ELN's strategy however, as already mentioned, does not entail a "military solution" to the conflict. Armed structures are understood by ELN as permanent, unless the conditions of class struggle within Colombia's periphery change to undermine guerrilla struggle completely - this conception of armed struggle is distinct from the more military-centred strategy of people's war, based on surrounding the cities from the countryside. The ELN's strategy implies that armed force has a utility in class struggle, not that political power will necessarily come through the barrel of a gun. This has been one of the fundamental differences in strategy between ELN and FARC for decades.

Regarding Colombia's trade-union structures, neoliberalism is making it more difficult for the labour movement to organise. On top of having a significant and dispersed informal sector in Colombia, repeated right-wing governments (I include the Santos administration here) have favoured economic growth along neoliberal lines rather than extending the political and economic rights of workers; this has amounted to government policies and a political economy that makes it harder for the trade-unions to organise, in the midst of paramilitary violence. At the same time, recent changes to agricultural economic policies have made it more difficult for peasants to earn a living, thereby increasing displacement and opening up land for capitalist investment. It is important to note that such rural-to-urban migration, of the constant supply of formerly rural labours desperately looking for work in the cities, enables urban based capitalists to benefit from the increased competition for work and therefore to keep wages low.

Even the peace agreement seems to have been conceived, to a large extent, as part of a neoliberal economic growth strategy. By signing the peace accord with FARC, multinational corporations have been able to access territories, wealthy in natural resources, which were previously governed by the FARC. Indeed, a key motivation for the accord, unveiled by the former President, Juan Manuel Santos, was that "A Colombia in peace will attract more investments that will create more and better jobs" - in other words, the neoliberal capitalist accumulation model will be strengthened because there will be no leftist insurgent forces to put pressure on international investors.

Still, the fact that Gustavo Petro placed second in the 2018 presidential elections is significant. The last time a leftist candidate in Colombia's political system challenged for president, he was assassinated - Jorge Gaitán in 1948. As such, we have seen the rise of a left-wing surge in Colombia, like in other countries - Bernie Sanders in the U.S., Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, Podemos and Syriza in Spain and Greece respectfully. The current right-wing president, Iván Duque, who employed populist discourse to get elected, is being unmasked as no different from the establishment. This may create some opening for the left in the next elections, enabling it to open up some political space for the labour movement to organise a fight-back.

In what ways does the US supporting anti-guerilla efforts in Colombia linked to a larger, regional strategy push back against leftist movements in Latin America?

U.S. support for the Colombian state goes back many decades. Colombia borders five countries and, with ten U.S. military bases, permits the U.S. to effectively project its military power into Central and South American countries. Also, Colombia's economy is potentially very balanced, and benefits from several natural resources and has very fertile land for agriculture. There exist the resources to develop powerful industrial and manufacturing sectors, moving away from what is currently an economic strategy of extractivism.

A socialist state in Colombia, supported by a powerful labour movement, could have a transformative impact on Latin America and change the correlation of social class forces in favour of the socialist movement. It would be possible for a socialist government in Colombia to pursue a relatively independent political economic strategy, while focusing on economic and political independence for the region as a whole. The experience of the small and economically impoverished island of socialist Cuba on Latin America's left and labour movement - situated only ninety miles from the U.S - is an example of what a revolutionary state in the much wealthier Colombia could achieve, in terms of potentially shaping the future of the region. In other words, a left-wing or socialist-led Colombia could represent a major defeat for U.S. imperialism.

Additionally, Colombia's capitalist system is difficult to transform constitutionally, and the country boasts of having one of the longest surviving liberal-democratic systems in Latin America, although state terrorism employed against workers and peasants has remained constant throughout the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Historically, the two dominant political parties, the Liberal and Conservative party, solidly represented capitalist interests, and rarely disagreed over fundamental questions relating to economic change. These trends make Colombia a reliable ally for the U.S. in its "backyard".

For these reasons, the Colombian state has been a consistently reliable ally of the U.S. Having only ever had pro-capitalist governments, a free-trade agreement is in place, Colombia's economy is dominated by U.S. multinationals, and the state has loyally followed the U.S. government's policy of open hostility to the so-called "Pink-tide" - the surge of South American based, left-wing, anti-imperialist influence over the last two decades. In its fight against the leftist rebels, Colombia opened up its economy to U.S. corporations in return for economic and military aid. And currently, Colombia is being used as the main proxy to further aggravate the political and economic crisis in Venezuela. The dominant capitalist classes in Colombia will benefit enormously from regime change in Venezuela.

Initially, the U.S. drew on the pretext of combating drugs to justify intervention into Colombia. The U.S. State Department insisted that Plan Colombia, the U.S. military and economic initiative implemented at the start of the 1999-2002 peace negotiations with FARC, was about tackling the drug-trade. In reality, Plan Colombia was employed as a counter-insurgency measure that upgraded and restructured Colombia's armed forces and was used largely to target the leftist rebels, as opposed to the drug-cartels and right-wing paramilitaries. It also led to the major expansion of U.S. military influence in Colombian society, including the building of several U.S. military bases. In other words, the pretext of anti-drug activity, and then anti-guerrilla activity, was exploited by the U.S. to establish a base of political, military and economic influence in a strategically located country of South America.

Where can people learn more about ELN and your own work?

There is a momentous amount of work on the armed conflict and the insurgent groups published in Colombia. Unfortunately, very little of this work has been translated from Spanish into English. This needs to be rectified, and I am surprised that so little effort has been put into this process of translation, as it would allow international audiences to learn about Colombia's complicated history - Colombia is understood as an "outlier" in politics and international relations scholarship. Indeed, the depth of Colombian scholarship on the armed conflict is strong.

Regarding the ELN in the Spanish language, "La Guerrilla Por Dentro" by Jaime Arenas, a former ELN guerrilla gives an insider perspective on the first stages of the movements' formation. Darío Villamizar has also published, in Spanish, one of the key histories of the several insurgent movements in Colombia. Carlos Medina, in addition to other important works on the ELN, has just written a history of ELN's ideas from 1958 to 2018, in Spanish, where he talks about the worker-peasant-student alliance. Carlos Medina's works are very detailed and significant; relatively little has been written on the ELN in any language. I haven't come across a book dedicated to understanding the ELN's trajectory in English, but the journal article by Gruber and Pospisil, entitled "'Ser Eleno': Insurgent identity formation in the ELN", vigorously contests some of the significant misconceptions about the movement.

I am in the first year of my PhD at Nottingham University working on Colombia's 2016 peace agreement with FARC, which analyses the underlying dynamics from a historical materialist perspective. My MA dissertation, slightly modified, was published in the Midlands Historical Review and can be found online. I have also written two journalistic pieces on the ELN in the Morning Star newspaper. I am currently working on a journal article relating to the "political" inside the ELN - challenging the narrative that the ELN has "lost its way" and merely become a criminal entity - based on my five months of ethnographic research in 2015. My blog about armed conflict in Colombia can be found online at http://www.colombianconflict.com

US Puppeteering and the Philosophy of Chavismo: Nicolas Maduro as a Symbol of Venezuelan Sovereignty

By Canyon Ryan

On January 23, 2019, President of the Venezuelan National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, at an opposition rally in Caracas proclaimed himself President of Venezuela. Quickly, the United States (U.S.) and lobbied allies announced their recognition of Guaidó as the legitimate President and denounced the elected president, Nicolás Maduro, as a usurper and dictator.

Before that day, Guaidó was largely an unknown figure to much of Venezuela. Polling prior to Guaidó's self-proclamation suggested approximately 80% of Venezuelans had never even heard of him (Ciccariello-Maher, 2019). Ignoring the absence of such a mandate, as of July 2019, reportedly 54 countries support Guaidó as the interim-President of Venezuela.

As Guaido asked for China's support while painting a picture of a country grappling with "90% food and medical shortages, a population in which 87% live below the poverty line and an inflation which exceeds 2,000,000%," it appeared to Washington and Venezuelan elites that the "Bolivarian Revolution" was on the brink of collapse. Instead, as the last seven months passed so too has Guaidó's legitimacy within Venezuela, the U.S. and the international community.

"The Bolivarian Revolution"

In 1998, famed Venezuelan revolutionary Hugo Chávez won a sweeping electoral victory six years after leading a failed coup attempt. Chávez, an ardent socialist, believed in the utilization of Venezuela's national resources to benefit the country's poorest citizens. This movement would come to be known as "The Bolivarian Revolution", a reference to revolutionary Simón Bolívar, who liberated numerous Latin American countries from the Spanish Empire, including Venezuela.

The Revolution faced its first substantial obstruction in 2002 after a coup that ultimately found Chávez reinstated within 2 days. The coup was led by business lobbies, reactionary trade unions, and a unified political opposition rallying behind Pedro Carmona; all of whom felt that Chávez was acting in an undemocratic manner which also threatened their commercial interests.

Immediately following the coup and during the subsequent military detention of Chávez, the U.S. recognized the Carmona government and attempted to lobby international support for the legitimization of the government which overthrew a President elected with nearly 60% of the vote just two years earlier. Less than two weeks later it was understood that the U.S. had met with the coup plotters and both knew of and supported their ambitions (Vulliamy, 2002). In the end, the coup failed as tens-of-thousands Chávistas took to the streets, flipping the military high command to support the reinstatement of Chávez.

"Chavismo" is the espoused economic and social philosophy of President Chávez who in 1998 inherited a country in which two thirds of the population subsisted on less than $2 a day (Cooper, 2002). In the years following the 2002 coup attempt, Chávez lowered the Gini Coefficient by 54%, reduced poverty from 70.8% (1996) to 21% (2010) and extreme poverty from ~40% to 7.3% (2010), with 20,000,000 benefitting from the anti-poverty programs (Muntaner & Benach & Paez-Victor, 2002). It is for these reasons that Venezuelan elites so much feared and despised the President.

Acquired Economic Crisis

In 2013, Chávez passed away after a two-year battle with cancer. His Vice President at the time Nicolás Maduro, in accordance with the Venezuelan Constitution, held a presidential election within 30 days of a sitting President's death. Maduro won the election, narrowly edging out opposition candidate Henrique Capriles by a 1.5% margin, much less than the 11% victory attained by Chávez over Capriles seven months earlier. Despite having Chávez's public endorsement, Maduro lacked the charisma and connection attained by Chávez after almost 20 years of public admiration. Among the primary polling concerns at the time were a retracting national economy, increasing crime rates, and land ownership rights.

2013 was also a high point for global oil prices, with a barrel of crude selling on the market for $105.87. With the largest oil reserves in the world, Venezuela benefited dramatically during this period of rising prices, and began promoting numerous socialist programs both domestically and abroad. As early as 2006, the Chávez Administration was financing eye surgeries for the poor in Mexico and subsidizing heat for struggling homeowners in the U.S. Approximately 30 countries benefited from Venezuela's assistance in the form of generous debt and bond purchasing, discounted oil sales through the PetroCaribe program, and numerous development programs throughout the overexploited world. These projects were managed while considerably investing in the poor of Venezuela.

However, critics have noted the spending and centralization throughout the Chávez era to be reckless and attuned to economic mismanagement. Toppled with an imposed currency control which overvalued the Venevuelan bolivar and the complex multi-tiered exchange rate system which encouraged corruption through bolivar sales on the black market, the Venezuelan economy had reached a point of extreme insecurity which the Maduro Administration has had difficulties solving.

Accentuating the economic crisis, by 2015 a barrel of crude oil sold for less than $50 on the global market. With a 50% decrease in value, the Maduro Administration faced serious challenges in restoring an economy that was already in recession. Moreover, Venezuela is a single resource economy with 95-99% of its export earnings coming from oil sales, meaning it relies heavily on imports due to the lack of resource and commodity diversity. It is important to note that this is not solely the blame of the Bolivarian Revolution. That Venezuela is a single resource export economy is a problem that has existed since Spanish colonization, and every government since has been tasked with attempting to diversify the national economy while suffering from boom-and-bust cycles attached to the sale of oil. This renders the state fully reliant on oil sales, a product of colonialism and a symptom of the "resource curse". Additionally, the ongoing economic crisis has been heightened due to sanctions waged by the U.S.

In 2006, the U.S. Department of State began barring the sale of new military equipment and spare parts to Venezuela. In 2011, the U.S. placed sanctions against the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA. In 2013, further sanctions were placed against the state-owned firearms manufacturer, CVIM. By 2015, President Obama sanctioned Venezuelan officials and declared ludicrously by Executive Order a "national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security… of the United States posed by… Venezuela." Today, the U.S. Treasury Department has sanctions on 115 Venezuelans and hundreds of visas have been revoked by the U.S. State Department (Seelke & Sullivan, 2019). A 2019 report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research conducted by Mark Weisbrot and Jeffery Sachs found that sanctions imposed by the Trump Administration since August 2017 alone have resulted in the preventable deaths of more than 40,000 Venezeulans and have contributed to the suffering of millions due to restrictions on Venezuela's ability to import food and medicine. With continued sanctions placed on PDVSA in 2019, it is clear the U.S. intends to undernourish the nation.

Since 2013, the Venezuelan economy has contracted by more than 47% (according to the Venezuelan Central Bank) with hyperinflation reaching levels previously unseen. The goal of U.S. sanctions is clearly the polarization of Venezuelan society by a heightening of economic struggle afforded by the general populace. This is a multifaceted attack, including not just the governments of the West and their right-wing sycophants throughout Latin America, but also through disinvestment and deceitful marketing by numerous financial institutions. An example of such can be seen regarding Venezuela's risk-rating by J.P. Morgan Bank in 2017 which was listed at 4,820 points. Whereas Chile, despite having the same debt/GDP ratio as Venezuela, was ranked thirty-eight times lower (Ramonet, 2018). Throughout the years, U.S. sanctions against Venezuela have resulted in the government's inability to send and receive payments in the millions and prevented Venezuela from accessing billions from its own reserves overseas.

Maduro's Continuation of Chavismo

On August 4, 2018, President Maduro survived an assassination attempt after several drones carrying explosives flew toward him during a speech in Caracas. A month later it was reported that U.S. officials had met with military officers involved in the coup several times over the year preceding the attempt (Diamond & Labott & Stracqualursi, 2018). In June 2019, the Associated Press in Caracas reported that Maduro's spokesperson, Jorge Rodríguez, announced that the government had foiled an assassination plot designed by former Venezuelan military and police officers. Blame for this conspiracy was directed by Rodríguez at U.S. allies Colombian President Iván Duque and Chilean President Sebastian Piñera.

Since 2013, Maduro has accused the opposition, the U.S. and their regional subordinates of numerous assassination attempts and coup plots. In tradition with the Bolivarian Revolution, Maduro sees himself as a defender of Venezuela against imperialists intent on exploiting the people and natural resources of Venezuela. Instead of bowing to the pressures of the hegemon, Maduro has been unwavering in his commitment to Chavismo and Venezuelan sovereignty.

In 2016, Bolivarian government social spending amounted to 73% of the national budget while the Venezuelan Great Housing Mission constructed an additions 370,000 homes to be distributed to families living in the barrios, achieving the second lowest homelessness rate in the region (Boothroyd-Rojas, 2017 & Fúnez, 2017). Regarding social advancements, in 2016 Venezuela's Public Ministry announced that transgender people may request a new identification card according to their gender identity. Venezuela's government also founded and financed numerous ministries to advance several minority communities, including the Ministry for Women and Gender Equality, the Centre of African Knowledge, and the Ministry of Popular Power for Indigenous Peoples (Fúnez, 2017)

By the end of 2017, the government had expanded its free healthcare system to cover over 60% of the nation, while increasing the salaries of all doctors working in the public sector by 50% (Fúnez, 2017). In the realm of education, Maduro's government continued the policies of Chávez which have resulted in Venezuela ranking sixth in the world regarding primary education enrollment, with 73% of the population enrolling in secondary education and a literacy rate of 95.4% (Fúnez, 2017). In order to circumvent the banking blockade, the country also launched its own cryptocurrency known as the Petro. Meanwhile, the Local Committees of Supply and Production (CLAP) program expanded to reaching more than four million people, supplying them with government subsidized goods that are otherwise difficult to afford for the impoverished due to economic speculation.

The 2018 presidential election was largely boycotted by a fractured opposition who had requested the U.N. not send international observers so not to legitimize an election they otherwise were likely to lose. Despite the intended boycott not all of the opposition abstained from participating, resulting in a Maduro victory with 67% of the vote.

By the end of the year, Venezuela's Great Housing Mission had constructed over 2.5M dignified homes for distribution to those in need. As a result of this achievement, in May 2019 the U.N. Habitat Assembly recognized Venezuela as a world leader with regard to right-to-housing.

"The Making of Juan Guaido"

Investigative journalist Max Blumenthal, in an article titled "The Making of Juan Guaidó," delineates through an extensive review how Guaidó became a prominent figure of the opposition.

After graduating from Andres Bello Catholic University, a leading private university in Caracas, he enrolled at George Washington University in Washington D.C., where he studied under former International Monetary Fund Executive Director Luis Enrique Berrizbeitia. In 2007, Guaidó and allies led an anti-government rally after Chávez refused to renew the broadcasting license for Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV). The refusal was primarily due to RCTV's role in the 2002 coup, where the station promoted the anti-government rally and then manipulated significant events during the coup (Blumenthal, 2019), quite literally spreading "fake news" to delegitimize the Chávez Administration.

In 2010, Guaidó and others traveled to Mexico for a secret five-day training session directed by "Otpor" (Blumenthal, 2019), an NGO created in Belgrade largely credited with leading removal of President Slobodan Milošević following the 2000 Federal Republic of Yugoslavia elections. Otpor is ostensibly a regime change arm of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) whose reputation has blurred the lines between being a provocative pro-democracy NGO and being a subversive soft-power entity used by foreign governments hostile to alleged autocracies across the world.

Guaidó also participated in the "guarimbas", which were often violent anti-Maduro roadblocks notorious for killing at least 43 people in 2014. Since deleted, that same year Guaidó tweeted a video of himself wearing a helmet and gas mask, surrounded by masked guarimberos who has shut down a highway, proclaiming to be the "resistance" (Blumenthal, 2019). In February 2014, Guaidó joined opposition figure Leopoldo Lopez on stage where they led a crowd of protestors to Attorney General Luisa Ortega Diaz's office which armed gangs later attempted to burn down (Blumenthal, 2019).

Is this what democracy looks like?

NGOs and Disingenuous "Development"

From 2002-2007, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) granted 360 "scholarships" in what amassed to $11,575,509 for social organizations, political parties, and political projects through Development Alternatives Incorporated (DAI), a company contracted by USAID to work in Venezuela (Golinger, 2011). During the December of 2002, DAI paid for numerous radio and television advertisements on behalf of the opposition, calling for a general strike to halt operations until Chávez stepped down (Golinger, 2004).

The "labor rights" branch of the NED, known as the Solidarity Center, had members in Venezuela in 2002 meet with Otto Reich, then Assistant Secretary of Western Hemisphere Affairs, and an individual who was implicated in cooperating with anti-Chávez groups in destabilization campaigns prior to the coup attempt in 2002 (Cox, 2012). The Center also financed unions such as the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers, which organized with the National Business Confederation of Venezuela, a group complicit in working with the opposition and supporting the 2002 coup (Cox, 2012). These revelations emphasize the coercive nature of the NED as their labor rights arm operates with the U.S. Department of State in destabilizing Venezuela by organizing labor against the state.

Opposition parties and organizations have also been financed by USAID, the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute (each U.S. party's branch of the NED), totaling over $7M between 2002-2011 (Golinger, 2011). Between 2013-2014, the NED and USAID collectively sent $14M to opposition parties organizing protests in 2014, of which Guaidó was a participant. In 2013 alone, of the $2.3M sent to Venezuela by the NED, $1.7M was sent directly to opposition parties (Golinger, 2014).

Given the U.S. recognition of the self-proclaimed President of Venezuela Juan Guaidó, it should be clear that preserving democracy is not the intent of President Trump's Administration. Unlike both Mr. Guaidó and Trump, Maduro was elected by a majority of the Venezuelan population to be President of the country, twice. If the U.S. actually cared about the Venezuelan people, it would relinquish the sanctions and send reparations for the havoc it has created.

Instead, the war drum continues to beat. U.S. Senator Marco Rubio in February 2019 tweeted a photo of the corpse of U.S. adversary Muammar Gaddafi as an apparent threat against Maduro (Rahim, 2019). Moreover, the appointment of Elliott Abrams as U.S. Special Envoy to Venezuela should serve as explicit evidence that "democracy and human rights" are not the U.S. goal for Venezuela. Abrams himself has links to the Venezuela 2002 coup attempt, and in 1991 plead guilty to misleading the U.S. Congress following the Nicaraguan Contras funding scandal that engulfed President Reagan's Administration. Abrams also misled the U.S. Senate concerning the El Mozote massacre during the 12-year El Salvador Civil War, a massacre whose perpetrators were funded and trained by the U.S. (Al Jazeera, 2019). Thus, as Guaidó has pledged and John Bolton proclaimed, the goals in Venezuela for the U.S. are the opening of markets, the privatization of state assets and U.S.-owned multinational corporations' access to oil reserves.

In July 2019, the Los Angeles Times reported that a USAID memo sent to Congress noted that the Trump Administration would be diverting over $40M, initially intended for Guatemala and Honduras, to the Guaidó faction in Venezuela. This more than $40M redirection accounts for more than 10% of the allocated $370M for the region. Moreover, it is important to note that just a month earlier, it was reported that the Guaidó faction had spent over $165,000 on luxury goods and personal expenses which had been sent to them in the form of humanitarian aid (Cohen, 2019).

The Conflict is The Contradiction

Guaidó alone is no standout figure. It is said that the day before the self-proclamation, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence personally called Guaidó and asserted U.S. support for his declaration. Many in attendance at the rally were caught off guard, and even fellow stage members showed bewilderment at the announcement. Still, minutes after the announcement the U.S. and lobbied allies legitimized the proclamation.

The conflict for the U.S. is the outright contradiction of a foreign powers' selection and international lobbying of support for a character who proclaimed themselves President without grasping any control of Venezuela. Without the military abandoning the Bolivarian Revolution, Guaidó has the world's attention and nothing to show for it. This has only been highlighted by the forced occupation of the Venezuelan Embassy in the U.S. (where occupiers were evicted by siege) and Costa Rica (which was denounced by the Costa Rican government) by Guaidó appointees. Another example of Guaidó's foreign inabilities is Germany's refusal to recognize Otto Gebauer as an ambassador of Venezuela, instead regarding him a "personal representative of interim president Juan Guaidó".

Meanwhile, the Maduro government remains committed to Venezuelan sovereignty and Chavismo. With the U.S. constantly reminding that "all options are on the table", it appears the truth is that the coup attempt has ultimately failed and the only flex the U.S. is willing to display are twitter threats accompanied by starvation sanctions. What the future holds remains a mystery, but from what the history of Chavismo has shown us, the people of Venezuela are unwilling to submit their independence to the U.S. in exchange for commercial contracts and austerity measures to resurrect the economy. While the country remains in deep struggle, Venezuela at least remains a sovereign Latin American state.

References

Al Jazeera. (2019, February 12). Who is Elliot Abrams, US Special Envoy for Venezuela. Retrieved from https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/02/elliott-abrams-special-envoy-venezuela-190212012146896.html

Blumenthal, M. (2019, January 29). The Making of Juan Guaido: How the U.S. Regime Change Laboratory Created Venezuela's Coup Leader. Retrieved from https://thegrayzone.com/2019/01/29/the-making-of-juan-guaido-how-the-us-regime-change-laboratory-created-venezuelas-coup-leader/

Boothroyd-Rojas, R. (2017, January 16). Venezuela's Maduro Highlights Social Achievements in Annual Address to the Nation. Retrieved from https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/12886

Ciccariello-Maher, G. (2019, January 25). Venezuela: Call It What It Is- A Coup. Retrieved from https://www.thenation.com/article/venezuela-coup-guaido-maduro/

Cohen, D. (2019, June 17). From Coup Leaders to Con Artists: Juan Guaido's Gang Exposed for Massive Humanitarian Aid Fraud. Retrieved from https://thegrayzone.com/2019/06/17/from-coup-leaders-to-con-artistry-juan-guaidos-gang-exposed-for-massive-humanitarian-aid-fraud/

Cooper, M. (2002, September 11). The Coup That Wasn't. Retrieved from https://www.thenation.com/article/coup-wasnt/

Cox, R. W. (2012). Corporate Power and Globalization in US Foreign Policy. London: Routledge

Diamond, J., Labott, E., & Stracqualursi, V. (2018, September 08). US Officials Secretly Met with Venezuelan Military Officers Plotting a Coup Against Maduro. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/08/politics/trump-venezuela-officers-secret-meetings-maduro-coup/index.html

Fúnez, R. (2017, April 13). 4 Gains that Maduro's Venezuela Made that Mainstream Media Ignored. Retrieved from https://www.telesurenglish.net/analysis/4-Gains-Maduros-Venezuela-Made-That-Mainstream-Media-Ignores-20170413-0026.html

Golinger, E. (2004, November). The Adaptable U.S. Intervention Machine in Venezuela. Retrieved from http://www.labornet.org/news/0305/venez.htm

Golinger, E. (2011, February 17). USAID in Bolivia and Venezuela: The Silent Subversion. Retrieved from https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/2600

Golinger, E. (2014, April 25). The Dirty Hand of the National Endowment for Democracy in Venezuela. Retreived from https://www.counterpunch.org/2014/04/25/the-dirty-hand-of-the-national-endowment-for-democracy-in-venezuela/

Guaido, J. (2019, April 14). Why China Should Switch Sides In Venezuela. Retrieved from https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-14/why-china-should-shift-support-to-guaido-in-venezuela

Mutaner, C. & Benach, J. & Paez-Victor, M. (2012, December 14). The Achievements of Hugo Chavez. Retrieved from https://www.counterpunch.org/2012/12/14/the-achievements-of-hugo-chavez/

Norton, B. (2019, January 19). US Coup in Venezuela motivated by Oil and Corporate Interests- Militarist John Bolton spills the beans. Retrieved from https://thegrayzone.com/2019/01/29/us-coup-venezuela-oil-corporate-john-bolton/

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Rahim, Z. (2019, February 25). Venezuela Crisis: Marco Rubio posts image of bloodied Colonel Gaddafi in apparent threat to Maduro . Retrieved from https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/marco-rubio-tweet-muammar-gaddafi-libya-venezuela-nicolas-maduro-a8795071.html

Ramonet, I. (2018, January 2). The 12 Victories of Venezuelan President Maduro in 2017. Retrieved from https://www.telesurenglish.net/opinion/The-12-Victories-of-Venezuelan-President-Maduro-in-2017-20180102-0009.html

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Seelke, C., & Sullivan, M. (2019, July 5). Venezuela: Overview of U.S. Sanctions. Congressional Research Service, 21.

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Weisbrot, M. & Sachs, J. (2019, April). Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela. Center for Economic and Policy Research. Retrieved from http://cepr.net/images/stories/reports/venezuela-sanctions-2019-04.pdf

Decolonial Resistance in Hip Hop: Re-Colonial Resistances, Love, and Wayward Self-Determination

By Joe Hinton

Although many forms of black expressive culture contain elements of political resistance, hip hop is a form that has been recognized by numerous scholars for its unique, complex, and nuanced forms of offering political discourse. As Damon Sajnani notes, the origins of hip hop are inherently political, specifically rooted in the politics of the "decolonization of local urban space". Hip Hop today, the most popular genre in the United States (if not the world), is quite disconnected from these political roots in a radical anti-colonial politic built through creating livelihood out of structure-based psychological pain.

What is the nature of resistance in hip hop, and what do scholars have to say about its current status? Many note that hip hop has been co-opted by a white-controlled market and has been manipulated so as to promote limited narratives of Blackness, many of which are derived from minstrel tropes. Sometimes, these tropes can be manifested as partial resistances to white-supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal settler-colonialism. Sometimes, when they rely on European notions of political resistance that are either inherently capitalistic or statist/nationalist, they reify colonial structures and are thus re-colonial. Sometimes they flip the narrative of oppression or expose it for what it is, as Tricia Rose notes, but do so in a way that constitutes a solid first step to resistance but does not completely answer the question of how one wants to exist and live in a world beyond the reality of this oppression.

In my eyes, the only types of resistant expressive culture that can actually spur Black liberation must create alternative visions that denounce resistances that rely on other closely related forms of oppression and toxic psychologies. Building off the ideas of Cornel West, Zoe Samudzi, and William C. Anderson, these visions must be centered in both collective love and individualist, wayward, and deviant lifestyle choices. By wayward and deviant, I mean prone to reject the boxes imposed by American culture and its depictions of Blackness. I draw on the idea that Black and indigenous people in the United States exist liminally, not as citizens. This means that as the state is functioned to precipitate our extinction and/or suffering and to prevent our full integration into the benefits of society, and that our existence as colonial subjects, regardless of socioeconomic advancement, renders our status perpetually ambiguous and subject to a constantly uncertain chaos and threat of violence that reinforces a spiritual feeling of collective subordination. This chaos can be overcome by a moment of creation and establishment of what the state deprives us of and excludes us from: self-love. Hip Hop originally sought to achieve this, but it has been co-opted by the market and the limited narratives it promotes, with some notable exceptions. Once based in love, and dedicated to the creation of love-based communities, these forms of culture can help spur mobilization against white-supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal settler-colonialism (WSCPSC) to defend ourselves against it and eventually overthrow it; or, more immediately, find a way to create communities that employ social rules and customs that promote Black and indigenous love, rather than relying on the false promises of liberal reformism and partial resistances.

Although it remains true that hip hop has been co-opted by a powerful white media establishment, it also remains true that hip hop is an inherently resistant genre in that it constantly engages with the "politics of having fun," a framework that can be perceived as seemingly apolitical, but is actually quite focused on the psychological effects of socio-political hierarchies. Where songs can be differentiated in their political efficacy is the degree to which they promote a liberational Black politic. As Cornel West notes, a truly liberational Black politic is committed to fighting racism at its root: capitalism. And is also determined to end all associated forms of oppression that result from capitalism and colonialism: homophobia, sexism, ableism, and transphobia. Within hip hop, although the 80s and 90s featured a number of artists for whom the legacy of Black Power reigned eminent, the modern mainstream genre is primarily full of either market-driven resistances, partial resistances, or their associated re-colonial resistances.

Partial resistances vary as to the terms to which they reify colonial resistances, but most do to one extent or another. N.W.A's "Fuck tha Police" emphatically decries the historically biased and anti-Black prosecuting tendencies of the City of Los Angeles quite creatively while also reifying the colonial oppression of gay people by using homophobic slurs. The sexual domination narratives promoted by Cardi B and Nicki Minaj take a step towards a less subordinate position for Black women and do promote positive narratives that Black women can be proud of their sexuality, but also reify the objectification and exploitation of the Black female body by offering limited options for how a famous Black women is to present herself and her body. This is not to say that other options are not presented by other Black females; to do so would be myopic. I am rather emphasizing that the female rappers with the most prominence do not fit these narrow images, coincidentally; they are approved by a white-controlled media elite that has never shied away from aligning Black female exploitation and lucrative profits. In the wake of the death of Nipsey Hussle, an LA rapper known for his generosity and devotion to community uplift, Jay Z exclaimed that Black people should look to gentrify their own neighborhoods before white people can. Given that gentrification is fundamentally aligned with the same ideologies of settler-colonialism and economic exploitation that hip hop was founded on alleviating and eliminating, suggesting such a notion is especially re-colonial. All of these are examples of when artists in hip hop use their platforms to promote the advancement of an oppressed group, but somehow reify a hierarchy that exists to make Black people and Black women suffer.

Then how can hip hop be completely resistant and neither partial nor re-colonial? As Sajnani notes, the diasporic nature of Black nationalism is an effective liberational alternative to the pain of WSPCSC, a nationalism distinct from its European analog. This nationalism has been referred to vaguely by scholars such as Bakari Kitwana, specifically to his conception of a Hip-Hop Generation, and was cited positively by West in his analysis of Morrison's Beloved. Many arguments regarding Black self-determination usually rely on this statist conception. Sajnani's analysis of the Black national bourgeoisie, of which Jay Z is a prominent member, is particularly revealing. He claims that partial resistances are often performed by prominent Blacks as a means to receive compensation from the white cultural gatekeepers while Black exploitation is upheld by the national order. To Sajnani, to support the American Dream is to ignore economic stratification, which in the US is always a racial topic. Black capitalists, especially in hip hop, engage in the rhetoric of the American Dream quite regularly, relying on a misguided bootstraps ideology. But even if Black capitalism can't be a true form of resistance to WSPCSC, can diasporic nationalism constitute a more complete resistance? As Zoé Samudzi and William C. Anderson propose in their powerful novel on the anarchism of Blackness as Black as Resistance,

"attempting to reclaim and repurpose the settler state will not lead to liberation, and it will not provide the kind of urgent material relief so many people desperately need, though electing empathetic officials sometimes can arguably mitigate against harm. Only through a material disruption of these geographies, through the cultivation of Black autonomy, can Black liberation begin to be actualized."

As such, a legitimate response to WSPCSC must not consider the future of Blackness as reliant on a statist solution. Although Sajnani's support of a somewhat re-colonial nationalism, no matter if distinct from European nationalism, is misguided, his emphasis on "resisting the appropriation of Hip Hop and elaborating its original mission" (I would replace appropriation with misappropriation) is quite relevant to establishing a liberatory Black politic through hip hop. What is the next step?

While resistance in Black politics today often calls for criminal justice reform instead of radical restructuring of the industrial-prison complex, 2018 saw some powerful forms of resistance enter the mainstream, most notably Childish Gambino's "This is America." Gambino's Grammy-award-winning song and video effectively criticizes the current state of hip hop and minstrel tropes. As Frank Guan notes, "It's a tribute to the cultural dominance of trap music and a reflection on the ludicrous social logic that made the environment from which trap emerges, the logic where money makes the man, and every black man is a criminal." Gambino's work helped bring a critical element of reflection into the mainstream of pop and hip hop: that the limited, minstrel-reproducing narratives of Blackness in popular culture contribute to past and present forms of social subordination. It is a crucial step towards finding a liberatory politic and is quite close to a complete form of resistance. Where it falls short however is along two fronts: an explicit embrace of a collective love ethic, and a moment of creation that accepts the reality of Black liminality and becomes devoted to a deviant determination of one's self that allows for the complexity of Blackness to live freely and waywardly, away from the psychological boxes imposed on us by WSCPSC.

I have come to learn that hip hop has an extremely high potential for being politically resistant to WSCPSC, but it is going to take a lot of work to return it to what it once accomplished. Very few forms of hip hop are directly engaged with a love ethic nor with an explicitly deviant rejection of WSCPSC based in self-determination. Two legacies of Black expressive culture will serve as my examples for such a cultural politic in this section: Toni Morrison's Beloved, as cited and analyzed by West, and the work of Prince, a genre-less Black artist whose influence on and connections to hip hop are understated. These forms of culture are committed to examining how Black people can create their own worlds under oppression, and even as they strive for radical changes, they are pragmatic and understand that a complete rejection of WSCPSC would constitute a violent revolution. As such, they utilize Black art as a means of peaceful resistance and alleviation of colonial pain, as hip hop once did. West noted that Morrison's Beloved was an active buffer against the pain of Black nihilism derived from WSCPSC, stressing that "Self-love and love of others are both modes toward increasing self-valuation and encouraging political resistance in one's community."

Black literature's emphasis on self-love and reflection must be replicated in hip hop. Prince understood that "Transcending categories however is not synonymous with abandoning ones' roots." After his death, Alicia Garza, a BLM founder noted that he "was from a world where Black was not only beautiful, but it was nuanced and complex and shifting and unapologetic and wise." Prince does not allow the chaos of Blackness (as constructed by WSCPSC) to render him a slave to reifying some form of colonial oppression, rather he recognizes that "it's about being comfortable in an unfixed state while improvising the topography of your life and music as you go along." Such a mindset and perspective are directly derivative of African religious culture. Thus, a liberational politic must be Afrofuturist. It must avoid the categorical labels offered by WSCPSC because of how much they limit us and function to constrict us. Perhaps a contemporary example of such a wayward, liberational politic comes in Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives: Beautiful Experiments, in which she reimagines the deviant and radical lifestyles and love-ethics of early 20th century upper-middle-class Black women. When Black people have the socioeconomic privilege to be able to transcend the limits of WSCPSC's social construction of race using a collective Black love ethic and staying true to the root cause of Black uplift, a promotion of a more plentiful array of types of Black existence can proliferate. And the commodification of Black art can start to dissipate, pushing more and more colonial subjects to reimagine their humanity away from internal colonialism.

This is the future I see for hip hop, one that returns it to its political roots. I understand that the pull of the market is strong, and that hip hop's decolonial future will require some serious changes in cultural discourse. Hip hop must return to its basis as a means of cultural self-defense, of engaging with the politics of having fun in a way that is more cognizant of decolonial motives. Taking down WSCPSC will require both explicit and implicit resistance, most of which will be anti-capitalist. Black expressive culture and its dynamism, specifically with regard to hip hop, have extreme potential for creating radical Black communities in the United States that are neither re-colonial nor based in the European need to monopolize violence, and embrace the duality of Black liminality, the complex nuances of double consciousness, and consider Blackness on one's own determined set of terms.

Notes

Berman, Judy. "'This Is America' 8 Things to Read about Chidish Gambino's New Music Video." New York Times, May 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/arts/music/childish-gambino-this-is-america-roundup.html.

Gordon Williams, James. "Black Muse 4 U: Liminality, Self-Determination, and Racial Uplift in the Music of Prince." Journal of African American Studies, vol. 21, no. 3, Sept. 2017.

Rose, Tricia. Black Noise Rap Music and Black Culture In Contemporary America. Wesleyan University Press, 1994.

Sajnani, Damon. "Hip Hop's Origins as Organic Decolonization." Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society, 2015, https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2015/04/02/hiphops-origins-as-organic-decolonization/ .

Samudzi, Zoe, and William C. Anderson. As Black as Resistance. AK Press, 2018.

Sehgal, Parul. "An Exhilarating Work of History About Daring Adventures in Love." New York Times, Feb. 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/books/wayward-lives-beautiful-experiments-saidiya-hartman.html.

West, Cornel. "Nihilism in Black America." Race Matters, Beacon, 1994.

Black Feminism and the Rap/Hip-Hop Culture: I Don't Want the "D"

By Asha Layne

"I was born to flex (Yes)
Diamonds on my neck
I like boardin' jets, I like mornin' sex (Woo!)
But nothing in this world that I like more than checks (Money)
All I really wanna see is the (Money)
I don't really need the D, I need the (Money)
All a bad bitch need is the (Money)"

- Cardi B

With the advancement of technology, more specifically social media platforms, the plight of women of color has been widely discussed thanks to the Me Too and Say Her Name movements which challenged and revolutionized the thinking of dominant culture. Of profound importance, the inclusion of Black women and women of color in these social movements contested the sweeping generalizations of 'traditional' feminism. This would later lead to a widespread rejection of popular feminism ideologies, thus making way for a new wave of neo non-conservative ideologies on feminism.

This deviation between traditional and non-traditional feminism can be traced back to the Women's Liberation Movement in the late 1960s. During this period, the conditions and concerns of White middle-class women took center stage and addressed issues that inhibited their (White women) ability to live fully free lives rid from patriarchal oppression. This perspective would continue to serve as the backdrop on a series of feminine-related issues such as equal pay, sexual harassment, sexual violence, and violence against women. Not surprisingly, given the US's racially contentious history, it (Women's Liberation Movement) shamelessly ignored the different culturally-significant spaces that Black women (and women of color) occupied, leaving Black feminists to repeat Sojourner Truth's riveting question: "Ain't I a woman?" This essay explores the evolution of Black feminism through the lens of female rappers, who I argue add to the discourse of feminism, and more specifically Black feminism.

As a theoretical construct, feminist theory claims of being woman-centered historically has ignored the narratives and standpoints of women of color. Despite the popular question, "What about the women?" that has long served as the impetus behind the development of feminist theory, the answers to this question have traditionally focused their attention solely on the experiences of White women. Anchoring this sentiment is the emergence of Black feminism and Black feminist thought, which both sought to place the experiences of Black women at the center of its analysis, therefore offering a starkly different knowledge from that of mainstream feminism. According to Collins (2000), Black women in the United States can stimulate a distinctive consciousness concerning their own experiences. Collins, like other Black feminist scholars, understood that this knowledge produced by the narratives of Black women would transform how feminism is defined and understood by Black women (and women of color). Similarly, Kimberle Crenshaw also understood that the experiences of Black women could not be explained by race and gender alone but should also include the intersecting identities that shape their identity as a Black woman. This is best demonstrated by Black women (and women of color) in the rap/hip-hop industry.

Female rappers have (and continue) to take a melodic stance to verbally disseminate information on social issues and struggles that women of color face, such as: white supremacy, sexism, self-esteem, misogyny, patriarchy, sexual harassment, and gender-based violence. One can hear this in the music of both contemporary and non-contemporary female artists, who by applying Collins's theoretical framework share their narrative through standpoint theorizing. Standpoint theorizing is a sociological feminist framework which explains that knowledge of women's experiences is best understood from their social positions in society. In Yo-Yo's 1991 debut hit, You Can't Play with my Yo-Yo she explores what it means to be a woman in a male-dominated environment. She raps:

"If you touch, you livin in a coffin (word to mother)

I'm in the 90s, you're still in the 80s right

I rock the mic, they say I'm not lady like

But I'ma lady, who will pull a stunt though

I kill suckas, and even hit the block

So what you want to do?"

In listening to the words of female rap/hip-hop artists, the audience is able to recognize the nonconventional form of activism which has added to both the discourse of Black feminism and the music industry. In the above lyrics, Yo-Yo also explains that as a female in a male-dominated industry, gender often takes precedence over race and consequently adds to negative experiences Black female MCs in the industry often grapple with. Women of color in the rap/hip-hop industry have inarguably exemplify Collins's concepts of: standpoint theory, outsider-within, and matrix of domination, sidestepping any mention of scholastic sources or prominent experts in the field. One can easily identify these acts of black female activism in the rap/hip-hop industry in the work of contemporary artist, Cardi B. This is particularly well exemplified in Cardi B's debut album, Invasion of Privacy. In her song Be Careful, which explicitly examines infidelity and the double-standard concerns it raises, she raps, "I could've did what you did to me to you a few times. But if I did decide to slide, find a nigga fuck him, suck his dick, you would've been pissed." In Money, Cardi B colorfully explains that money and not a man's penis will meet her needs. She raps, "I got a baby, I need some money, yeah I need cheese for my egg." This album unapologetically proclaims that despite her (un)popular gender non-normative approach that she will be heard and respected regardless of anyone else's opinion. Therefore, demonstrating that, just like her female rap/hip-hop predecessors, she too unconventionally exemplifies black feminist activism.

Patricia Hill Collins's Black Feminist Thought explains that race, gender, and class are oppressive factors that are bound together. In relation to rappers, the commodification of female rappers in the industry and the hypersexual images of Black female rappers speaks to not only this intersection of race, class, and gender but also to the systemic cultural nature of exploitation that is inherent not only to the industry but also within dominant American culture. In both spaces (the industry and American culture), masculinity is directly related to power and violence, and reminds us of the pervasiveness of the White perspective in social institutions. In White-Washing Race, Brown et al. (2003) explains that the White perspective is not the product of salient characteristics, such as skin color, but of culture and experiences. The lyrical narratives shared by female rap/hip-hop artists demonstrates how women of color actively grapple with the many issues, concerns, and questions they experience culturally, socially, and politically.

Is the emergence of the outspoken, gender-bending, highly independent, and sexy female artist a new phenomenon for women of color? Collins highlights how the role of Black women always contradicted the traditional role of women in mainstream society. Collin states, "if women are allegedly passive and fragile, then why are Black women treated as "mules" and assigned heavy cleaning chores" (2000, p.11)? The placement of Black women as 'objects' and 'tools' for production under capitalism is intrinsic to the social, political, and economic arrangements of power in the United States. Black feminism deconstructs the established systems of knowledge and arrangements of power by showing the masculinist bias that frames these arrangements of power from a cultural lens.

The radical changes exhibited in the bodies of work of contemporary female rappers engenders the thesis of Black feminism through frequent displays of gender non-conforming behaviors while embracing the beauty of being uniquely deviant. No longer are women of color minimizing or editing their unique experiences, behaving in gender-conforming ways, or are ashamed of being labelled a 'bitch' for the sake of being accepted by mainstream culture and appeasing their male counterparts. Contemporary Black female rappers, similar to classic rappers such as MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, and Roxeanne Shante, continue to redefine not only gender identity but Black female identity in patriarchal structures.

Both gender identity and Black female identity are socially constructed through interaction and socialization. Following the tenets of symbolic interaction, gender and racial identities emerge out of social interactions which helps to define an individual's self. The formation of self is unique to women of color because of the location and situation they occupy in many faces of oppression. The marginalization, exploitation, and feelings of powerlessness are all too common in the tropes of women of color. Therefore, the gender-social identification of women of color does not examine solely "doing gender" but instead considers key factors that obfuscates women of color from "doing gender."

Women of color in the rap/hip-hop industry continue to demonstrate the spirit of Black feminism through nonconventional methods. Today, Black female artists (and women of color) have changed the way we define women's empowerment. The popularity of female MCs embodying androgenic characteristics through feminine appeal supports the narratives of many women who have mastered the proverbial quote, "think like a man." To condemn the hypersexual behaviors and language used by Black female artists is to ignore the historical truth that Black women (and women of color) were never defined by the traditional standards of being a 'woman.' Black female MCs have and will always continue to redefine what 'doing gender' is from a cultural standpoint, therefore adding to the Black feminism discourse.

Bibliography

B, Cardi. (2018). The invasion of privacy. CD. New York: New York. Atlantic Records.

Brown, Michael K., Carnoy, Martin, Currie, Elliott, Duster, Troy, Oppenheimer, David. B., Schultz, Marjorie, M., and Wellman, David. 2003. White-washing race: The myth of a color-blind society. Berkley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press.

Collins, Patricia Hill. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.

Yo-Yo. (1991). Make way for the Motherlode. CD. New York: New York. EastWest Records America.

The Nature of the Left: On the Question of Human Nature

By Corinne Hummel

There seems to be a shared cynicism among some members of the Left and the ideologues of liberal democracy: that sexism and racism belong to human nature. While the liberal may use this assertion to justify and necessitate the state, the anarchist may hold this assertion alongside a rejection of the state. In either case, the possible organization of society is restricted by the assumption of innate characteristics. It is unscientific to attribute these products of consciousness to biological determinism, and the implication in this attempt to apply positivism to the human lifeworld is cynical; where potential is limited by subjective observations of the anathema. Recognizing that such cynicism is incompatible with scientific socialism, I aim to explore the ideological genealogy of the Left, along with the topic of human nature. Because there have been many contributors to these theories, I will only name those necessary for the purpose of this discussion.

Beginning with Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations was such an apt observation of the activity of economic life that it catalyzed dozens of 19th -century successors in the realm of political and economic philosophy. Smith presented capitalism as moral and natural, and asserted that the state should not interfere in the liberty of the individual in the market. Hegel thereafter presented an ontological wedge between Smith's work and its influence, theorizing that liberty is achieved when the rational and universal principles of the self-determination of the individual become objectified in the laws of the state. Influenced by both Smith and Hegel, Proudhon became the "father of anarchism" as he argued for collective ownership of the means of production and insisted that individuals should have a right to the full product of their individual labor. He imagined a market society constituted of free-associating collectives, with the state reformed into a "regulating society" with the sole purpose of supporting this activity. As an associate of Proudhon, Bakunin rejected the idea of a reformed state, and instead advocated for a syndicalism which would end the state, as he declared the state to be inherently oppressive.

Bakunin's communist contemporary, Karl Marx, developed his theories of social phenomena and political economy through critique of Smith and Hegel. Marx noticed that Smith's depiction of capitalism as "natural" was scientifically unwarranted. Smith's methodology was teleological: he neglected to critically explain how capitalism emerged, as his "invisible hand" was expressly providential. And where Hegel concluded the human experience is decided by our consciousness, Marx added that our consciousness is informed by our material relations, an idea known as "dialectical materialism." Bakunin promoted collective ownership of the means of production, but disagreed with Marx over collective control of the means of production, as he believed that would result in oppressive hierarchies. Bakunin betrays himself in his declaration that Marxist communism would lead to a "parasitic Jewish nation." Marx was deeply critical of Bakunin, and the two were positioned as adversaries. An interesting turn occurred in Italy where Cafiero, a young advocate of Marxism, joined the more popular Bakuninist side, bringing with him significant influence from Marx. In 1880, Cafiero and his associates made a formal declaration that the individual appropriation of the products of individual labor leads to wealth accumulation based on merit, and that the state becomes necessitated and reinforced by this condition of inequality. So, the Italian Bakuninists, influenced by Marx, shifted the ideas of collectivist anarchists toward what became known as anarcho-communism.

Kropotkin, a naturalist, made significant theoretical contributions to anarcho-communism when he published a series of essays in 1890, which were later combined under the title "mutual aid: a factor in evolution." In these works, Kropotkin used examples from the animal kingdom to argue against survival of the fittest. Inspired by Darwin, he used the methodology of evolutionary biology to claim that cooperation is naturally selected for, as a consciousness. This means that anything not considered cooperation, such as violence, is an expression of consciousness belonging to an unfavorable evolution. Kropotkin faults the earliest formations of centralized states for enchanting humanity toward authority. The crux of this theory is that in the presence of hierarchies, biological tendencies for cooperation are suppressed in an alteration of consciousness. Kropotkin stated that it is only when all individuals' needs are met that the individual can be free, creatively, and for all individuals' needs to be met, there must be cooperation. According to his hypothesis, such cooperation prerequisites a higher consciousness. Kropotkin's empiricist methodology, when applied to sociology, was not immune to subjective idealism. He claimed to be logically outside the realm of metaphysics, yet he demonstrated Hegel's one-way dialectic in which consciousness decides existence. His conception of the naturally evolved consciousness presents a very agreeable outlook on the nonviolent potential of humanity, but it becomes overshadowed by a cynicism that collective consciousness cannot transcend its subjective perceptions of hierarchies.

Looking at non-human species to interpret human sociobiology will produce a variety of contradictory examples, until it becomes a pseudoscientific double-edged sword. Our view of ourselves as we see it in the world around us is subject to the most determined of biases. The reactionary cites the behavior of lobsters to justify class society, while the leftist claims that white supremacy is congenital. In a study of apes, all were given a banana except for one, and that one reacted violently. When looking at human history, we see those with accumulated wealth enacting violence, as conditions of perceived resource scarcity threatened the reproduction of wealth. Homo Sapiens have existed for roughly 200,000 years while capitalism has existed for no more than 700 years (including its precursors). Capitalism is distinct from the trading activities of ancient civilizations, just as you would not call primitive nomadic peoples "colonizers." The birth of capitalism is marked by the expropriation of the means of production, which was preceded by wealth accumulation. Natural disasters, presenting resource scarcity, were likely causes of the transferring of the commons into private ownership. In the work of Carl Nicolai Starcke, we learn that the emergence of patriarchy, first instituted within the family, was preceded by the establishment of private property. Patriarchy first emerged in those primitive societies which uniquely had a gendered division of labor in which private property became solely undertaken by men. Property, at this point in history, was the means of production: animals or land necessary for reproducing existence. This particular development depended on geography. In the harsh climate of Northern Europe, primitive societies were more dependent on herding animals than growing crops, and in these cases there was a gendered division of labor for biological reasons. Men came to inherit the herds because pregnant women could not care for the herds. The subordination of women occurred after their separation from the means of production, as it became the private property of men, but the original separation was not itself subordinating. Similarly, slavery in the Roman Empire was not based on race: the accumulation of wealth, requiring reproduction and protection, caused the state apparatus to develop a market for human labor as property. As capitalist production expanded, sexism and racism became ideological constructions, institutionalized in the service of entrenching support for continued expropriation of the means of production. The witch hunts and colonialism appearing in the late 15th century occurred 100 years after feudal crises had developed pre-modern capitalism.

Compelled by the lack of technical rigor in Wealth of Nations, Marx investigated what is unique to capitalism in its influence on human behavior. In addition to wealth accumulation and perceived resource scarcity, he theorizes that there is alienation occurring in the mode of production. The mode of production is the way in which society reproduces its existence: it is the material and social relations of labor. In capitalism, the instruments of labor, and the products of labor, do not belong to the laborer. To understand Marx's theory of alienation requires his concept of "base and superstructure" wherein the base is the mode of production; the relations of which are reproduced into the superstructure as societal norms and institutions. In the capitalist mode of production, the worker is estranged from the value of their labor while the capitalist is estranged from the labor of the value they extract. Performing these mechanistic roles alienates the individual from the self: from rationally knowing the fulfillment of need, as the only need becomes wages or profits. Marx was inspired by Darwin as well, in conceiving of history as a complex, yet quotidian, process of change and the response to change. Alienation is what the individual experiences when reality contradicts the rational motivation of the species-being: when the individual's labor is not for the self-determination of the individual, which is simultaneously unique and universal, as a being of a social species. This alienation is reproduced outwardly because material (social) relations inform consciousness, from which behavior cannot be isolated. In capitalism, the behavioral response precipitates evidence of humanity's spirit, though as a broken one, and the empiricist unjustly casts these behaviors as both irrational and belonging to human nature. It is from this cynical perspective that the ideologues of liberal democracy necessitate the utilitarian state to ensure civilization progresses. But for Marx, the ills of society are products of contractual agreements in which can be no real consent. The norms and institutions of the superstructure reinforce, through violence and ideological mystification, that which produces them.

For Kropotkin, capitalism is a byproduct of the state. For Marx, the state is a reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. Marx understood the historical emergence of the capitalist mode of production as preconditioned by rational responses to perceived resource scarcity in stateless primitive societies. The theories of Marxism and anarcho-communism were developed through distinctly different methodologies. When the mode of reproducing existence is not accounted for as an objective material reality of consciousness, observations will be subject to an idealism in which it is possible to misknow reality. For this reason, agreements found among leftists may only superficially bridge an epistemic divide. Marx said, "Proudhon does not know that all of history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature." He meant that one simply cannot say what is innate: behavior is the response to a changing material reality transmuted by the subjective consciousness. Marx contended that we should consider humanity apart from our conceptions of nature because history cannot be explained in the non-human natural world. Marxism is scientific socialism because of dialectical materialism: a process philosophy which overcomes the limitations of empiricism, rationalism, and subjective idealism. It is a more complete theory of social phenomena. By this method, the institution of science can be understood to be oppressive due to it being ideologically reinforced as a reproduction of the oppression in the base of society. When it is recognized, by the historical application of dialectical materialism, that capitalism is responsible for the environmental plunder of colonialism, it is possible to conclude that our societal conception of "nature" has been white supremacist. I conclude with the suggestion that the cynical perception of "human nature" is the result of ideological mystification producing an epistemic impasse.

"Ideology does not exist in the 'world of ideas' conceived as a 'spiritual world.' Ideology exists in institutions and the practices specific to them. Ideology represents individuals' imaginary relation to their real conditions of existence. Ideology has a material existence. There is no practice whatsoever except by and under an ideology. There is no ideology except by the subject and for the subjects. Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects."

- Louis Althusser