Racism on College Campuses: Understanding It and How to Fight Back

By Collin Chambers

“Racism is a fundamental characteristic of monopoly capitalism”

- George L. Jackson, 1971

White supremacy and settler colonialism have always undergirded US society from its very origins and foundations. Since the election of Trump in 2016, however, the systems of white supremacy and settler colonialism have taken off their “progressive neoliberal” (Fraser 2017) masks. This is evident through the increasing blatant acts of white nationalism and hate crimes. For instance, the rate and frequency of hate crimes on college campuses continue to rise (Bauer-Wolf 2019). To give a recent concrete and on-going example, towards the end of the Fall 2019 semester Syracuse University campus went through “two weeks of hate” as one student put it (McMahon 2019). In a 13-day period, there were 12 acts of racist hate-crimes. This series of racist graffiti has emboldened white supremacists on campus, which has recently culminated in a white nationalist manifesto being “airdropped” to individuals at a university library, the same one shared by the gunman in the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand. The Syracuse University Administration claims this is a myth, but it is a proven fact that the white supremacist manifesto was circulated and viewed within a Greek-life online platform/blog. 

In direct response to these events a POC-led group emerged. #NotAgainSU occupied the Barnes Center, a brand-new $50 million student/gym/wellness center for seven days and seven nights. Though it is a self-described “nameless and faceless” group, there is group of around 15 students who can be characterized as the leadership. From my understanding, and from discussions with those more enmeshed in the group, two-thirds of the 15 can be classified as more liberal and rooted in identity politics, and thus understand racism from this lens. I think the dominance of the more liberal-minded is shown through the list of 18 demands that the group wants met by the administration. I highlight the leadership because the leadership of any organization, group, or movement plays the determining role in characterizing the type of politics the organization has. The theoretical-political framework used to understand oppressions based on identity, like race, determines the politics and effectiveness in challenging/overthrowing structures of power. I do not intend for the essay to be a sectarian/outsider critique of #NotAgainSU—when there are direct actions/spontaneous protest against reactionary structures of power a revolutionary must participate despite any political-ideological limitations to the action/protest. I simply wish to offer what I think is the most efficient (i.e., most revolutionary) theoretical-political framework to deploy to understand racism in contemporary global capitalism. How we understand the world shapes how we act upon it. Identity politics is limiting in the sense that is “an integral part of the dominant ideology; it makes opposition impossible” (Haider 2018, 40). Identity politics needs to be left behind. Below, I offer my thoughts on what type of politics and strategy is necessary to productively fight against racism. 

Following the Geographer, Raju Das (2012), I do indeed privilege class in this analysis, but “do so in a manner in which race and gender are taken very seriously.” Class is, as Das says, “the dominant social relation” (Das 2012, 31), it cuts across all forms of social difference. Thus, in relation to the question of race, an anti-racist working-class politics and strategy needs to be developed and perpetuated. In this essay I argue in order to struggle against the structures of racism there needs to be an anti-racist working-class politic that is global in scope. This means centering imperialism. I emphasize imperialism because all imperialist wars are predicated and justified through racialized logics (both ideological and economical). Imperialist war and racism are inherently linked—one cannot exist without the other (see Du Bois 1933). As Andrea Smith (2012, 69) says nicely: “For the system of white supremacy to stay in place, the United States must always be at war.” I will first do this—though unpopular it may be in our post-structural times—by re-emphasizing the centrality of class. Then, I will offer a brief historical materialist understanding of racism in the age of imperialism (I do indeed argue that imperialism still exists, but that we are in a new unipolar era). Additionally, going against much “post-colonial” thought I emphasize the need to use the nation-state as a form of sovereignty that can fight against racism. With this understanding of racism, I will argue that Asad Haider’s (2018, 111) idea of “insurgent universalism,” which says: “I fight for my own liberation precisely because I fight for that of the stranger,” is a useful strategy/method to fight racism. 

Re-centering Class to Fight Racism

The current political economic situation necessitates for a return to more traditional conceptions of class. Living and growing up in a social formation dominated by the capitalist mode of production, we are not taught or trained to think in class terms i.e., to have class consciousness. If class is mentioned at all it is usually deployed to point out an individual’s identity and status i.e., in the non-Marxist sense. Class is typically thought of as either based on income or status/identity i.e., if someone is blue collared or white collared. It is a common misconception to think of class as just another identity that exists along the different axes and vectors of oppression. In popular parlance, when one talks about a working-class identity one commonly conceives of a white male with a hardhat working on the construction site. While a white male in a hardhat is indeed within the working class, this view is problematic in two senses. First, it ignores how labor/the working class has increasingly been feminized and racialized (Sanmiguel-Valderrama 2007). Secondly, by treating “the working-class” as just another identity alongside gender and race is faulty from a Marxist perspective which sees class as one’s objective relationship to the means of production (see Heideman 2019 for more on all of this). This objective conception of class simply means that on one side there exists the capitalist class which owns and controls the means of production, and on the other side the working class who own nothing but their ability to work and who work within a workplace that is controlled and dominated by the capitalist class. Class from this perspective is understood as a social relation of power (Zweig 2005). 

Obviously, in the capitalist mode of production, capitalists have a lot of “power to” (Glassman 2003). Capital has the power to appropriate surplus product, dictate what is produced within the production process and how, and by what pace. However, as Glassman (2003, 682) points out nicely, “[c]apitalists are not the only actors who can exercise ‘power to.’ Workers, though less empowered than capitalists because of their specific positions within processes of surplus value production and appropriation, also possess structural power in their collective ability to provide or withhold labor.” The inert power workers have exists at all times, even in eras of global working-class defeat and retreat, workers can shut the production and labor process down. In relation to the question of racism, the working class can use their power to fight racism through their latent power and ability to stop the production process. In order to end “extra-economic”-based oppressions the power of capital must be struggled against by with the latent power the working-class has (Heideman 2019; Wood 2002). For example, stopping production (i.e., striking) can be deployed as a method to fight against racism, sexism, heteronormativity, etc. 

Raju Das (2012, 31) lays out clearly the power class analysis and a class perspective can provide for social movements: 

Class analysis necessarily says that: class is the most important cause, and condition for, major global problems…and that workers and semi-proletarians who suffer from these problems have the power to fundamentally transcend the system to solve these problems. Class analysis includes in it the idea of the possibility and the necessity of abolition of class and its replacement with optimal direct-democratic control on the part of the proletariat and semi-proletarian workers over society’s resources and political affairs, at local, national and global scale. Class is about power, which is rooted in the control over productive forces including labor. Class analysis articulates and performs this power.

As the reader can see, Marxists point out the objective nature of class out at nauseam (e.g., Foley 2018; Heideman 2019), but they have done so within the confines of the nation-state scale of the United States and tend to ignore or downplay global scale race relations, in particular the race relations involved in contemporary imperialism. 

A Historical Materialist Understanding of Racism in the Age of Imperialism

Even within the anti-Marxist early 2000s Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2002) argued that we still need the historical materialist method to understand racism. Historical materialism is Marx’s method of understanding historical and contemporary social formations. This method seeks to explicate what is historically specific about a dominant mode of production within a particular social formation (Ollman 1993). It is a common misconception that Marx ignored race, gender and other forms of oppression, but this is certainly false especially if one examines his more historical work (see Anderson 2010 79-114 for Marx’s writings on race, slavery, and US Civil War). A mode of production can be briefly defined as the “complex unity” (Althusser 2014) between the productive forces (i.e., means of production and labor-power) and relations of production, which Bettelheim (1975, 55) defines as a “system of positions assigned to agents of production in relation to the principal means of production.” Non-economistic Marxists like Lenin, Mao, etc., emphasize that the relations of production play the determining role in shaping the mode of production (Althusser 2014). On top of the mode of production arises a political and cultural superstructure that works in dialectical relation/tension with the economic base (mode of production). Social change occurs do this dialectical relation with the economic base (see Marx 1979). This historical materialist method allows us to see the historically specific form racism takes on in particular modes of production, and even within different forms of the capitalist mode of production. Understanding the specific forms racism takes in particular historical is essential if one wants to successfully struggle against racism. Ellen Meiksins Wood (2002, 282) points out that 

Capitalism will always have a working class, and it will always produce underclasses, whatever their extra-economic identity. It can adopt to changing conditions by changing the meaning of race and ethnicity, so that one group can displace another at the bottom of the ladder (as Hispanic groups have in some cases replaced African-Americans); or the boundaries of racial categories can, if necessary, be redrawn.

This othered “underclass” that Wood points to can exist on many different scales and not just within the nation-state scale of the Unites States. In the era of imperialism and global capitalism, the underclass are the oppressed nationalities who are struggling for self-determination against the global imperialist class camp (i.e., the US, Europe, and Japan). This will be explored more below. First, I must lay out how to understand racism as a historical materialist i.e., how it functions within the “complex social whole” (McNally 2017). 

In Black Marxism Cedric Robinson (1983) critiqued Eurocentric Marxists for ignoring the Black Radical Tradition, and for not paying close enough attention to how logics of racism structures capitalism itself. Robinson emphasizes that ideas of race and otherness is culturally ingrained in European Civilization itself and thus precedes the development of the capitalist mode of production and in turn structures it. However, the form racism changes within different modes of production. Racism adapts “to the political and material exigencies of the moment” as Robinson (1983, 66) himself says. Thus, we must understand the “political and material exigencies” of the unipolar imperialist era (Becker and Puryear 2015). To help through this the relations of production need be thought of in a non-economistic way. The relations of production are traditionally thought of as class relations (see above). However, in order to think of race as being integral to the social whole of the capitalist mode of production is to consider race relations as being a component of the relations of production that help reproduce capitalist relations of exploitation and oppression on an extended scale (see also Bhattacharya 2017).  When the capitalist mode of emerges on the historical scene it emerges in an already existing racialized European social formation. At first it incorporates the existing racial relations and ideologies, but as the capitalist mode of production becomes the dominant mode of production in the social formation it totally transforms them to serve the interest of capitalist relations of exploitation and oppression because capital is “coercive relation” and bends all social relations to its will (Marx 1990, 425). Capitalism and the new race relations/ideologies that develop become inseparable from each other and cannot function without each other (see also McNally 2017). Understanding racism (and also sexism, heteronormativity, etc) as existing within the relations of production themselves allows one to understand the “distributions of power throughout a structure” along different forms of oppression such as race. (Gilmore 2002, 17). 

In order to explicate this historical-materialist view we turn to W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois (1933) is able to show clearly the particular form racial relations of production take on in the monopoly/imperialist era of the capitalist mode of production. Here he lays out two material factors that produce and reproduce racism within the white labor movement during this particular form of the capitalist mode of production (monopoly/imperialist). Firstly, he talks about the development of a labor aristocracy that began to emerge in the monopoly era of capitalism and through the class struggle itself. In this era, Du Bois (1933, 6) says that “a new class of technical engineers and managers has arisen forming a working-class aristocracy” who “have deposits in savable banks and small holdings in stocks and bonds.” These kind of investments and material vested interests in the capitalist system give rise to “capitalistic ideology” which is ingrained in the heads labor aristocracy. Du Bois (1933, 6-7) says that these “engineers and the saving better-paid workers form a new petty bourgeois class, whose interests are bound up with those of the capitalists and antagonistic to those of common labor.” This labor aristocracy is a direct consequence of monopoly/imperialist phase of capitalism.

Secondly, in the era of monopoly capitalism (i.e., imperialism) we see “the extension of the world market” through “imperial expanding industry” which has produced a “world-wide new proletariat of colored workers.” The capitalists are able to bribe “the white worker by high wages, visions of wealth and opportunity” to fight militarily, politically, and economically against colored workers across the world, i.e., to serve the interests of the imperialist-capitalist class. As Du Bois (1933, 7) says: “Soldiers and sailors from the white workers are used to keep ‘darkies’ in their ‘places.’ Imperialist war and racism are inseparable and are two sides of the same coin and are produced and reproduced by global imperialist class camp. The othered underclass in the monopoly/imperialist era of capitalism is indeed the oppressed nationalities across the world (and within the US) who are constantly targeted by the global imperialist class camp. To make this more concrete, the police departments that terrorize, murder, and target people of color in the US purchase weapon surpluses from the US military! This displays clearly a direct connection between people of color within the US nation-state and oppresses nationalities that US imperialism oppresses. 

Marx and Engels (1978, 474, my emphasis) say in the Manifesto: “The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with clash antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.” Thinking about racism in this sense, as being a part of the relations of production helps us see that racism is an integral part in reproducing the capitalist system as a whole. Racism has been so completely transformed and integrated by the capitalist mode of production that one cannot imagine ending racism without struggling against the capitalist system. Mao said: “Racism is a product of colonialism and imperialism. Only by overthrowing the capitalist class and destroying colonialism and imperialism [can complete emancipation be won]” (quoted in Kelley 2008, 100-101) Additionally, because “[w]age-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers,” racism plays a fundamental role in maintaining the class power of capital by continuing to divide workers along racial lines (Marx and Engels 1978, 483). At least for me, it is clear that racism does not just exist in air in the superstructure but is produced and reproduced in the mode of production itself. If the structural and root causes of racism are superseded, then overtime—through more political struggle—so will all micro-forms of racism (e.g., racist language).

The Nation-State still matters! Imperialism still exists!

From many different theoretical frameworks/positions the nation-state is seen as inherently problematic for being racist and perpetuating settler colonialism (e.g., A. Smith 2012; Anthias 2018). “Post-colonial” scholars who emphasize decolonization argue that decolonization is impossible within the confines of the nation-state as it is a colonial European invention. Even scholars focused on solving climate change are critical and skeptical of the nation-state in regards to creating a global post-carbon energy regime, and for obvious and important reasons (see Mann and Wainwright 2019). Additionally, many argue that imperialism, understood from the Leninist tradition, no longer exists in the contemporary post-Soviet world. For example, Hardt and Negri (2000, 9), who many draw from, say: 

we think it is important to note that what used to be conflict or competition among several imperialist powers has in important respects been replaced by the idea of a single power that overdetermines them all, structures them in a unitary way, and treats them under one common notion of right that is decidedly postcolonial and postimperialist. This is really the point of departure for our study of Empire: a new notion of right, or rather, a new inscription of authority.

This is only half correct. We are indeed living in world where there is no longer the type of inter-imperialist rivalry that characterized the WWI and WWII eras, but that does not mean in any sense that we are living in a “postimperialist” world where the nation-state no longer matters. Rather, we are currently just in a new phase of imperialism, namely a unipolar era of imperialism (see Becker and Puryear 2015), in which the United States is the global hegemonic leader. Since the collapse of the former USSR, the United States has become the hegemonic leader on a global scale. In this era every newly independent nationalist country has to play by the rules that the United States has set through so-called international political-economic apparatuses. Countries have to try to arise in a global political economic system dominated by the interests of the United States. This creates serious limits for what specific countries can do. Cuba, for example, has chosen to maintain its socialist political economic system at the continued expense of the embargo enforced by the US. Evo Morales was just overthrown by a coup that was funded and supported by the United States for being a leader who does not want to play by the rules that the United States enforces through different “international” political/economic apparatuses. The development of the UN, NATO, EU, etc., does not mark an end of nation-state rule and “toward a new notion of global order.” The UN is an “international” organization that, in the last instance, represents and perpetuates the interests of the US, western Europe, and Japan. 

Nation-states still matter for global capital. The rules and regulations needed for continued capital accumulation are largely enforced by nation-states themselves, not a decentralized Empire. In addition, the nation-state still matters in regard to resisting imperialism and racism, especially in the imperial core of the United States. Nation-states and the apparatuses of nation-states can be seized and used for successfully struggling against imperialism and racism. The faulty idea that we are living in a decentralized global Empire makes it seem that capitalism so ubiquitous and penetrating it cannot be directly opposed, that there are no alternatives. 

Kelley and Betsy (2008) in a chapter titled “Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution” shows how oppressed nations constructed political solidarity with each other that functioned on an international scale, but was also made possible because one oppressed nation was able to take power on the nation-state scale, and used the power gained from doing so to spread anti-racist working-class power outside its own nation-state. In the 1960s the Black Nationalist movement in the United States had close political-ideological ties with the Chinese Communist Party, and Mao Zedong and other Maoists more specifically. It is commonly known that the Black Panthers would sell Mao’s book of quotations i.e., “the little red book” to fund themselves, but this is only the surface appearance of the connection Maoists in China had with the Black Panthers and groups like Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM). As Kelley and Betsy (2008, 103) point out, Maoism was not exported from China to the Black Nationalist movement. Rather, “[m]ost black radicals of the late 1950s and early 1960s discovered China by way of anti- colonial struggles in Africa and the Cuban revolution.” The example of national liberation/communist struggles taking state power on the nation-scale inspired oppressed nationalities within the United States. Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought provided the theoretical foundations on which to view nationalism relatively. Nationalism from the oppressor nation is reactionary, but nationalism from oppressed nations is revolutionary and necessary. Revolutionary nationalism of an oppressed nation is “proletarian in content, national in form” as Harry Haywood (1978) says. In fact, the RAM argued that black nationalism “‘is really internationalism.’ Only by demolishing white nationalism and white power can liberation be achieved for everyone. Not only will national boundaries be eliminated with the ‘‘dictatorship of the Black Underclass,’’ but ‘‘the need for nationalism in its aggressive form will be eliminated’’ (Kelley and Betsy 2008, 115-116). 

Conclusion: Towards an Anti-Racist Working-Class Strategy

Asad Haider (2018, 61) tells the story about Harry Haywood’s critique of the CPUSA as it became increasingly conservative in the post-World War II years. Throughout the first half of the 20th century the CPUSA was at the forefront of anti-racist/black liberation struggles both politically and theoretically (see Kelley 2002). However, as the CPUSA became more conservative, the Party “distanced itself from the project of black liberation,” and white chauvinism increased within the Party. Haider (2018, 61) points out that the Party had previously been able to combat white chauvinism and racism effectively “through mass antiracist organizing: by joining different people and disparate demands in a common struggle.” After this practice ceased, the “party launched what Haywood called a ‘phony war against white chauvinism’…In Haywood’s analysis, this phony war only ended up strengthening the foundations of white chauvinism, now uprooted from its structural foundations and seen a free-floating set of ideas” (Haider 2018, 61). Harry Haywood argued that a better strategy to fight white chauvinism in the party is to reaffirm the “division of labor among communists in relation to the national question. This division of labor, long ago established in our party and the international communist movement, places main responsibility for combatting white chauvinism on the white comrades, with Blacks having main responsibility for combating narrow nationalist deviations” (Haywood quoted in Haider 2018, 61-62). 

A “phony war” (i.e., one that plays into the logics of the dominant ideology and structures) against racism must be avoided. Given what has been said above, the strategy I propose to fight racism, imperialism, and capitalism is to perpetuate what Asad Haider (2018, 108-114) calls “insurgent universalism.” Insurgent universalism “says we are not passive victims but active agents of a politics that demands freedom for everyone” (Haider 2018, 109). It is a universality that “necessarily confronts and opposes capitalism” (Haider 2018, 113). It is a universality that “is created and recreated in the act of insurgency, which does not demand emancipation solely for those who share my identity but for everyone; it says no one will be enslaved” (Haider 2018, 113). The working class can use its power within the realm of production to not only struggle against capital in the economic sense, but also against all “extra-economic” oppressions that exist within the global imperialist-capitalist social whole. We need to fight for the strangers who are being targeted by the global imperialist class camp. We may not know “the other” that is being targeted by US imperialism, we may even have some preconceived notions of that “other” through the media ideological state apparatus (e.g., demonization), however, and despite this we must principally be against any form of US intervention in sovereign nations. Being anti-racist means being anti-imperialist at the same time! Self-determination for all oppressed nationalities!

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The Miseducation of the US Left: Bernie Sanders, Social Democracy, and Left Chauvinism

By Joshua Briond

I first learned about socialism in 2015. To this day I remember exactly how it happened: I was tweeting about the prospects of the presidential election and a mutual asked me, “have you heard about Bernie Sanders?” At the time, I hadn’t. Shocked when she heard this, she told me that “his principles remind me a lot of yours, I think you’d like him.” Then, another mutual of mine cut in on our conversation and said the exact words: “ew, he’s a socialist.” At the time I didn’t know what the word “socialism” meant, so I decided to do some research in order not to respond ignorantly. What I found in my quick Google search was the following definition: “A political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.” Alongside that basic premise is, from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This sort of language resonated with me immediately. I couldn’t understand how anyone could possibly be against an ideological framework that empowers and centers working-class people. 

From a five-minute Google search Bernie Sanders had earned my vote. Everything I read about him just made me like him more. He was everything. Consistent. Progressive. Genuine. He even marched with the late great Martin Luther King Jr. Inspiring! At that time, Bernie seemed to represent an alternative to the bourgeois (wealthy, privileged) establishment politics that I had always resented, even when I lacked the language to sufficiently articulate my distaste for it. After this point, I became fascinated with the tendencies and ideology of socialism, but also angered by the fact I had only just learned of it. Why did we not learn this in school? I continued reading and studying—specifically from Black and brown revolutionaries and theorists—and as a result, became more radicalized. My reading pushed me to the point where I found myself imagining a world and movement beyond the coercive nature of Western electoral politics and the stifling ideology of the ‘lesser of two evils.’ Such an ideology, that is so historically prevalent in the United States, in which we’ve seen in the past century or two have not achieved many, if any, gains for marginalized people. It was during this intensive period of reading and study that I began to connect the dots to what we’re seeing happening in our modern socio-political moment to historical events of the past.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but rather individuals and classes repeat history. Especially when subjects (disguised as “citizens”) of historical violence are ignorant of historical precedents, wilfully or unknowingly, which take the form of tactics cyclically used by our subjectors. I believe we’re in one of those moments where everything we’re seeing has quite literally happened before, and if we’re not careful—if we’re not meticulous and militant in our approach to addressing our material actualities, we will be bamboozled into accepting less than not only what we deserve, but less than what we NEED for survival; and all in the name of short term “progress.”

The socio-political moment we find ourselves in reminds me a lot of what I have studied about the Great Depression of the 1930s and its aftermath in which the rejection of capitalism had become increasingly common, socially acceptable, and a threat to the American social, political, and economic order. Much like the 1930s, capitalism’s contradictions and racialized violence have once again become too blatant to disguise. During that era, membership in socialist and communist parties in the US soared; however, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (commonly known as FDR) appeals to the left barred attempts at achieving a sustainable third party or revolutionary left-wing ideological movement. FDR was incredibly skilled at (mis)appropriating radical language in order to deliberately co-opt the rhetoric and demands of radical left-wing oppositional organizations, parties, and individuals who fought for greater freedom and self-determination of working peoples.

Similar to what occurred with FDR and the New Deal coalition during the 1930s, the likes of Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are attempting to inaugurate a renewed movement of “progressive” Democrats. While this is championed by many as something worthy of celebration—as “progress,” what we are seeing in real time is the liberalization and hollowing out of terms like “abolition,” “resistance,” and “revolution,” amongst others. What this amounts to is a deliberate means of (mis)appropriating and ultimately watering down radical language and movements. Sanders et al, have mastered this sleight of hand in a way not seen in decades. Lamentably, this has successfully fooled many Americans into thinking he, and others, are in fact, radicals and/or socialists.

“Progressive” politicians wield words, slogans, and even ideologies, widely associated with the radical tradition—especially the Black radical tradition, when in actuality all they want is what has already been achieved by most wealthy “developed” countries; a gentleman's reformation of the inherently oppressive institutions that they claim to be against. Given that, exactly how radical can what they are proposing be?

Millions of Americans prefer social democracy, but of course, this really just means welfare state policies to improve material conditions, such as: universal healthcare, cheap and/or free education, etc—without much of an understanding of where the money will come from to fund these domestic advances, beyond simply through “taxes.” Sanders often draws comparisons between the type of political economy he and many of his supporters want with Nordic countries. But rarely is it mentioned that Bernie’s beloved Nordic countries, that he seeks to mimic, not only have a wide ranging Nazi movements on the rise, eerily similar to the US, but their ostensibly nice mix of capitalism and socialism, as its commonly and erroneously described, is becoming increasingly more traditionally capitalist, by the hour; as well as the fact that this welfare state model is sustained through colonial legacies and imperialist endeavours of oppressing, destabilizing, pillaging, and bombing people in oppressed, third-world, and global-south countries. Why are all the nations that Bernie Sanders seeks to imitate in the US majority white and imperialist when there are nations, such as Cuba and China, who’ve statistically achieved equal, and even greater material gains—especially for their most marginalized populations—without the pillaging of non-white countries?

Social democracy and western conception(s) of democratic socialism, like all forms of liberalism, seek to preserve capitalism under the guise of “lessening” or “reforming” its structural violences, are truly just materializations of anti-communism, with a perpetuation of cold-war tactics in which the task is to further prevent radical upheaval from subjects of colonial, imperialist, and capitalist rule. 

Even the new wing of Democratic Party progressives’ advocation of the Green New Deal legislation that aims to “address climate change” was stolen from the Green Party and stripped of its anti-imperialist and anti-militarization elements. It also still seeks to prioritize profit and markets—despite the ecological demand for radical change pending human induced climate extinction—in typical white supremacist, capitalist, and imperialist Democrat Party fashion—which more than anything should tell us all we need to know about the modern green movements in the West, those of which do not prioritized the eradication of capitalism, neo-colonialism, and imperialism. All western economies are sustained through immense financial and technological surplus amassed through serial racialized exploitation, as evidenced by the most recent military coup d’état in socialist Bolivia, ousting the socialist administration, disguised as being “pro-democracy”—which is really just a materialization of modern colonialism and further indigenous genocide. It’s no secret that Bolivia’s lithium reserves, a chemical element that’ll be used to propel the United States’  “green capitalism” pipe dreams and idealizations, and President Evo Morales’ intention to industrialize and nationalize this valuable commodity, led to his unjust militaristic political demise at the hands of the US—which Bernie, amongst other “progressive” democrats only rhetorically and seemingly reluctantly condemned. 

Though he was violently anti-Semitic and ideologically fascistic in multiple ways, FDR is almost universally recognized as the United States’ most left-wing president; which says more of the inherently right-wing nature of the American political stratosphere, historically and presently, than any political ideology FDR aligned himself with. Bernie Sanders, to me, is the modern Franklin D. Roosevelt, or at least they represent the same thing, historically, in the face of capitalist contradictions being on full display. Though far better on race than FDR, Bernie’s continued failures on the issues of race and foreign policy/imperialism cannot be denied or ignored. Whether if it’s in regard to addressing Black people and the question of reparations, being an unapologetic liberal Zionist, or calling democratically-elected indigenous socialist leader(s) and governments, such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro, “dictator(ships)” and “authoritarian,” both of which are heavily racialized terms with imperialist connotations and are only ever used to describe non-white countries and leaders who do not subscribe to Western notions of “democracy” or bow down to the demands of the West. It’s no secret that Bernie Sanders, or any “liberal” or “progressive” politician, wouldn’t dare call the United States of America a “dictator(ship)” and/or “authoritarian,” despite it being one. So how does the US manage to maintain its legitimacy as a “democracy” and “beacon of hope and freedom,” when it terrorizes, imprisons, and kills its political dissidents—both domestically and abroad—incarcerates more people than entire countries combined, and is by far the greatest violator of human rights the world has ever seen?

It’s very easy to be ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ on most domestic social issues, as the modern progressive movement has shown. Where a person starts exposing their self and their true ideologies is when they express how they truly feel about non-western and non-white leaders and countries who’ve been deemed ‘enemy’ states by the US ruling class, as a means of warmongering. This has been demonstrated clearly by Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who’ve directly contributed to the demonization of non-white and non-western countries under imperialist attack, as a means of separating themselves from the Other, as well as these countries’ conceptions and materializations of socialism (authentic economic democracy)—as well as pledging their loyalty to the American hegemony. The level of western chauvinism that has remained unchecked, as a result of Sanders’ rise and role in the miseducation of the left, clearly displays the reality in which democratic socialism—which is largely misunderstood in the west as an extension of social democracy and “welfare statism.” The miseducation of the left has, by no mistake, led to a “left-wing” movement that is motivated and intrigued by the prospects of maintaining the settler-colonial and imperialist project that is the United States and its colonies, while granting its citizens healthcare, education, and greenifying consumption, with its blood dollars that are attained off the backs of colonized and oppressed people in the global South. 

One of the more common materializations of left-wing chauvinism is when it comes to issues of war and imperialism. Bernie Sanders and his supporters, as a result of his mass influence, take the form of their reinforcing imperialist narratives regarding oppressed countries and leaders, under the guise of “nuance.” However, this materializes as inaction and complacency from those in the imperial core in the face of imperialist, settler-colonial, and capitalist violence—which ultimately leads to an acceptance of western intervention in oppressed countries. And then, for the sake of maintaining legitimacy as self-proclaimed “radicals” and/or “leftists,” left-wing chauvinists argue, contradictorily, that in spite of their ideological alignment to these imperialist narratives—used to justify the racialized terrorizing and destabilization of these countries—intervention should somehow still be opposed. We’ve witnessed this in regard to the dominant rhetoric surrounding the DPRK and Kim Jong Un, China and the CPC/Xi Jinping, Syria and Bashar al-Assad, Venezuela and Presidents Chavez and Maduro, or more recently, Bolivia and President Morales, etc. 

It is interesting that Sanders supporters are capable of recognizing mainstream media’s biases and contemptuousness toward Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ilhan Omar, and other new “left-wing” and “progressive” Democrats—which is fueled by Cold War and McCarthyist tactics and hysteria—even though, ideologically, they are not actual socialists. But will look to and reference these same mainstream media outlets for their information on non-white, non-western leaders and countries—countries who actually have socialist leaders, governments, and economies and/or are subject to US imperialist aggression. The connection and contradiction that should easily be recognized is this: if the US media is going this far to delegitimize politicians, who are at best liberal reformists and/or social democrats and basically of the same fundamental political alignment as the US ruling class, imagine how far it will go to demonize and delegitimize actual socialist leaders and countries who represent a legitimate threat to global capitalism, western imperialism and hegemony.

What has become increasingly evident to me over the last few years, specifically, is how much Bernie Sanders’ rise and the modern popularity of social democracy masking itself as [democratic] socialism—though effective in moving millions of people away from centrism and establishment politics and rule—has created a moment of opportunism, careerism, and political punditry masking itself as radical organizing and activism. A moment whose primary role is not just funnelling people back into the arms of the Democratic Party; but also miseducating the masses regarding what socialism actually entails, beyond welfare-state policies and electoralism. There’s been so much talk about the “mainstreaming of socialism” while the whitewashing and watering down of the ideals inherent within a socialist politic remains deliberate as a means of delegitimizing and co-opting the actualities of what building socialism would actually entail. Socialism is not something that can be implemented through policy or mixed in with capitalism. Bernie knows this—especially in countries where every four to eight years another regressive and backward Republican or Democrat will arise and strip away all the “gains” and reforms, as per usual. That route will always fail because the two theoretical frameworks and ideologies of socialism + capitalism/imperialism are in direct and intrinsic contradiction with one another, as we are seeing within Northern Europe. 

I have pondered on the question—especially considering the outcome of the 2016 election, in which Clinton’s emails were leaked and it was proven the DNC and Hillary Clinton collaborated on the rigging of the election against him—“why won’t Sanders just run as an independent?” But I’ve come to the realization that it's because he’s not an independent. He’s a Democrat, and he’s very much interested in maintaining the interests of the imperialist and capitalist Democratic Party—regardless of how violent they continue to be—but also, maintaining the Democratic Party’s (and the two-party system’s) illegitimate and unjust rule. FDR, too, wanted to transfer the Democratic Party into an ideologically progressive party and sought the help of socialist and communist parties—much like Sanders has done with organizations like DSA. They recognized that radical organizations and individuals needed to feel a part of his political entourage in order to preserve the interests of American capitalism through the Democratic Party. 

FDR succeeded in his role of delegitimizing and co-opting the revolutionary left-wing movement of his time, during arguably the most quintessential and crucial socio-political moment since World War I.  The result of this co-optation: Communist Parties saw a drastic decline in support during the 1940 elections. And after getting elected, FDR explicitly ignored the struggles and concerns from the groups and constituencies that were instrumental in getting him [re]elected, and instead collaborated with the conservative wing of the capitalist ruling class. Consequently, the US emerged from the Great Depression as the most anti-socialist and criminally capitalist country in the world.

Undeniably, Bernie Sanders has been targeted with red-scare tactics by elements of the US ruling class and its media. In 2019, we’re still seeing these same tactics being used against him—with the liberal, ruling-class media as the culprit—that were used in the 2016 election. Democrats are going to do everything in their power to prevent even the slightest glimpse of “progressivism” in their party, even if it means sliding further into fascism—which is an indictment of the mediocrity and ineptitude of their party leadership, as the self-proclaimed party of the people. FDR noticed in the 1930s the best route to preserving capitalism is providing citizens in the imperialist core (US) with crumbs of loot gained through colonial and capitalist exploitation and rule throughout the world, as a means of keeping them complicit in their subjugation—making their material conditions comfortable enough to prevent social upheaval, or in other words: revolution.

Regardless of who you’re voting for in the 2020 presidential election, your vote will inevitably be casted for the next global terrorist-in-chief. The next president—whether domestically “progressive” or not—like all presidents, both past and present, is going to cast racialized terror on oppressed and colonized people everywhere. But my goal here isn’t to discourage individuals from voting. I’m simply uninterested in that. My job is to provide the facts and highlight the historical precedence as it relates to the critical socio-political moment we find ourselves in. The progressives, often white, who peddle harmfully held sentiments such as “we just need to elect Bernie, because he’s the best we’ve got and revolution isn’t possible right now” are no different than the white moderates who told us to “wait our turn” in the 1960s – those who Martin Luther King, Jr. and James Baldwin warned us about. 

Much like FDR, whether deliberately or not, Bernie Sanders’ movement, or “political revolution,” as he describes it, is here to preserve capitalism and imperialism, by any means necessary.

The Ballot and the Bullet: Building Socialism in ‘America’s Backyard’

By Matthew Dolezal

When faced with momentous external challenges — be they Spanish colonialism, American imperialism, or devastating hurricanes — the Cuban people have consistently risen to the occasion. In response to ongoing internal challenges, the popular new Cuban constitution (which took effect in April) entrenches the solid Marxist-Leninist foundation of the island’s socialist state while updating the 1976 constitution to better reflect the modern post-Cold War period.

Under the new constitution, each presidential term is five years, with a limit of two consecutive terms in office for those who serve. In addition, the role of Head of State is divided between the president and the newly established office of prime minister.

Other new rights and policies include the presumption of innocence in criminal cases, the right to legal counsel, and the (heavily regulated) use of private property and foreign investment to stimulate the economy (particularly to offset the revenue lost as a result of the continued U.S. blockade).

Despite the many exciting modernizations articulated by this fresh new document, much remains the same. Cuba’s Communist Party is still in only political party legally allowed to operate, and the state continues to control the land and means of production. The news media cannot be privatized, and, according to the new Magna Carta, Cuba will never return to the exploitative, pre-revolutionary capitalist system.

Bourgeois historians and pundits often glibly frame successful socialist governments as “authoritarian.” But from a materialist perspective, the vanguard party serves to protect the achievements of the proletarian revolution — including universal healthcare, education, housing, subsidized food, and land reform — from reactionary and imperialist threats (such as the CIA-backed coup Ernesto “Che” Guevara witnessed in Guatemala prior to the Cuban Revolution). In addition to the Communist Party’s general success, apologists for Western capitalism now have to grapple with the fact that significant democratic processes are occurring within Cuba’s one-party system.

The process to draft a new constitution began in August of 2018 and included the input of millions of Cuban citizens. Assemblies throughout the island were established, and thousands of “standard proposals” were debated for three months. In all, the old constitution faced 760 modifications. The proposed constitution was then featured in a referendum that took place on February 24, 2019. With massive voter turnout, the new constitution was easily passed when more than 85% voted “yes.”

Based on the long-standing solidarity between Cuba and its Latin American ally Venezuela, this recent constitutional process undertaken by the Caribbean nation may have been inspired by Venezuela’s ongoing Bolivarian Revolution. After the 1998 election of the popular Venezuelan revolutionary Hugo Chávez, the formerly discarded masses were not only lifted out of poverty, but politically empowered through a nation-wide upsurge in grassroots democracy.

As historian Greg Grandin wrote in 2013,

“Chávez’s social base was diverse and heterodox, what social scientists in the 1990s began to celebrate as ‘new social movements,’ distinct from established trade unions and peasant organizations vertically linked to — and subordinated to — political parties or populist leaders: neighborhood councils; urban and rural homesteaders, feminists, gay and lesbian rights organizations, economic justice activists, environmental coalitions; breakaway unions and the like. It’s these organizations, in Venezuela and elsewhere throughout the region, that have over the last few decades done heroic work in democratizing society, in giving citizens venues to survive the extremes of neoliberalism and to fight against further depredations, turning Latin America into one of the last global bastion of the Enlightenment left.”

Shortly after Chávez was inaugurated, Venezuelan citizens voted to replace their 1961 constitution with a new document that “expanded the rights of all Venezuelans, formally recognized the rights and privileges of historically marginalized groups, reorganized government institutions and powers, and highlighted the government’s responsibility in working towards participatory democracy and social justice.” This Bolivarian constitution includes mechanisms by which the document can be revised by the people through nation-wide participatory democracy. In 2007, for example, a series of constitutional reforms were debated for 47 days at more than 9,000 public events before a referendum finally took place.

At the height of the American civil rights movement, charismatic black liberation leader Malcolm X issued a powerful ultimatum — “the ballot or the bullet” — in his famous 1964 speech. The metaphor of the proverbial “ballot” and “bullet” can be useful in recognizing both the political and the physical dimensions of socialist struggle. A historical example of these two seemingly disparate themes merging was the short-lived alliance between Chile (“the ballot”) and Cuba (“the bullet”) in the early 1970s, iconically symbolized when revolutionary leader Fidel Castro gifted a personalized AK-47 to democratically-elected socialist president Salvador Allende.

But movements do not have to choose between these two options exclusively. Broadly speaking, Venezuela’s revolution emerged through the ballot box and was later protected through armed defense, whereas Cuba’s revolution was itself an armed struggle that would later evolve through ballot initiatives and grassroots democracy.

The ongoing Cuban and Venezuelan revolutions are impressive enough by themselves, but the material conditions they arose from and the hardships they have endured make them utterly awe-inspiring. Unfortunately, socialism doesn’t develop in a vacuum. It doesn’t grow in a petri dish. Building international socialism brings with it the baggage of constant imperialist assaults aimed at exploiting labor and extracting resources on behalf of global capital.

Now a spectre is haunting Washington — the spectre of the Monroe Doctrine. In its belligerent re-imagining of the 19th century foreign policy staple, the Trump administration has demonized and attacked the sovereignty of both Cuba and Venezuela. In conjunction with a new round of economic sanctions against the so-called “troika of tyranny”, former National Security Advisor and Bush-era war criminal John Bolton claimed last April that the “Monroe Doctrine is alive and well.”

Bolton also announced that the U.S. would reintroduce the Helms-Burton Act — a 1996 law that allows American citizens to file claims related to properties that were nationalized after the Cuban Revolution. However, as Dr. Arturo Lopez-Levy opined, “It is not the United States government’s responsibility or place to force the […] Cuban government to prioritize compensating Cuban right-wing exiles over demands for other reparations, such as for slavery or any of the many other abuses committed in Cuban history before or after 1959.” Furthermore, as author Saul Landau observed, “By 1991, […] the Castro government had settled claims with most of the nations whose properties it had confiscated and offered terms to U.S. companies as well.”

In addition, the Trump administration began restricting U.S. travel to the island in June and revived the half-century-long economic blockade that was briefly loosened under the Obama administration. These Cold War-inspired policies are certainly draconian, but it seems the American regime’s primary target is Cuba’s oil-rich ally across the Caribbean Sea. As John Bolton himself admitted, “It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.”

After winning the Venezuelan presidential election in May of 2018, Nicolás Maduro was sworn in on January 10, 2019 to begin his second term in office. Then, on January 22, Juan Guaidó — a man whom 81% of Venezuelans had never heard of — suddenly declared himself “interim president.” Although Guaidó did not run in any presidential election, American politicians and pundits quickly praised this brazen U.S.-backed coup attempt, some even insisting “this is our backyard!” Washington’s latest regime-change effort in the Bolivarian Republic has thus far failed, but the Trump administration’s brutal economic sanctions have killed an estimated 40,000 Venezuelans in just one year.

Despite this rampant imperialism, there have been notable solidarity efforts — both between Cuba and Venezuela as well as internationally. However, in its overall capacity for both relevant material analysis and tangible solidarity, the American Left has gone astray. Steve Stiffler contends that the U.S. Left’s failure to properly frame Chavismo allowed right-wing propaganda to gain control of the narrative. This defeat in the realm of discourse led not only to the empowerment of far-right forces on the ground in Venezuela, but to a diminishment of the socialist support from within the empire that was once reliable.

An indispensable historical model we should look to for guidance is the Venceremos Brigade. In 1969, a group of young American radicals volunteered their manual labor to assist with Cuba’s sugar harvest in the wake of the crippling U.S. embargo. This primary delegation to the island included 216 brigadistas who helped cut sugar cane for six weeks. Since then, the Venceremos (“we shall overcome”) Brigade spearheaded solidarity efforts between Americans and Cubans, bringing in more than 10,000 people to engage in agricultural work, construction, and other projects. Former brigadista Diana Block recently recounted, “I had traveled to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade in 1977. At that time many radical U.S. political organizations looked to Cuba, and other global anti-colonial struggles, for inspiration and direction. Following Cuba’s lead, international solidarity was recognized as a key organizing principle.”

During my brief trip to Havana last summer I toured Museo de la Revolución, which was still a work in progress. A sizable mural of Fidel speaking to a crowd rested against a banister as workers on scaffolds renovated the neighboring room. After examining the intriguing exhibits, I browsed the items in the gift shop and came across a concise booklet entitled Notes on Che Guevara’s Ideas on Pedagogy by Linda Martí, Ph.D. In it, Martí emphasized the role of a humanistic philosophy in socialist society:

“Is humanism present in every daily decision made by every citizen of our country? Is this concept of a humanist conscience the basis of every analysis made of services, production, or education? Collectivism, as a new personality trait and an expression of humanism in interpersonal relations, was the object of study, inquiry, and experimentation of Che’s theory and praxis.”

Humanism — in an internationalist sense — can motivate the more privileged Western leftists among us to stand in solidarity with independent socialist projects of the Global South and denounce the neo-colonialist tendencies of the ruling classes. Our struggle, after all, is global. Whether utilizing the ballot, the bullet, or both, we should work toward the liberation of all people and consign Eurocentric rubbish like the Monroe Doctrine to the dustbin of history.

How Many Types of "Good" Capitalism Are There?

By Shawgi Tell

It is no secret that capitalism has been in trouble for some time. This outmoded economic system constantly increases tragedies and inequalities of all kinds and cannot extricate itself from the perpetual crisis it finds itself in. It is thus no surprise that in the recent period many writers have produced books and articles that discuss alternatives to capitalism.

It is also unsurprising that, in an attempt to prettify, legitimize, and extend the life of this transient economic system, many capital-centered thinkers have put forward various types of “good” capitalisms to disinform the polity. These include:

1. accountable capitalism

2. managed capitalism

3. ethical capitalism

4. progressive capitalism

5. conscious capitalism

6. friendly capitalism

7. people’s capitalism

8. regulated capitalism

9. stable capitalism

10. fair Capitalism

11. sustainable capitalism

12. inclusive capitalism

In reality, these are oxymorons, irrational conceptions, false dichotomies, and apologies for the status quo. They are an attempt to portray capitalism as something other than capitalism - as something desirable and worth preserving. Such descriptors reveal an aversion to theory.

While capitalism has evolved and changed over time, it has always been about major owners of capital exploiting labor-power to maximize profit as fast as possible for themselves, resulting in economic and political power becoming more concentrated in the hands of fewer people. This is what is at the base of the capitalist mode of production. Capitalists cannot accumulate capital without exploiting labor-power, which is the only source of new value. Redistributing profits is not possible without new value produced in the productive sector, simply because what is not produced cannot be distributed.

While capitalists constantly invent new ways to counter the law of the falling rate of profit, there are no new economic models of capitalism per se. The laws of value, accumulation, and profitability all stand; they have not disappeared. Greater monopolization of economic sectors, more “financialization,” casino capitalism, disaster capitalism, and the rise of the so-called “rentier” economy are not new forms of capitalism as such, but direct products of the fundamental contradiction of capitalism between social production and private ownership. “Financialization,” irrational stock market speculations, printing phantom money, and toxic and exotic financial instruments that bear no relationship to the productive sector of the economy are natural expressions of capitalism at a particular stage of economic development, not aberrations or anomalies.

The aforementioned oxymorons and false dichotomies are largely ideological devices which strive to hide the fact that capitalism as a system is exhausted and cannot be “reset,” “renewed,” or “improved.” 

As the end draws nearer for capitalism, irrationalism, disinformation, parasitism, violence, and all manner of treachery will intensify. In futile attempts to save capitalism, bizarre ideas and arguments will increase. Twisted logic and absurd statements is all the ruling elite can offer in the final and highest stage of capitalism. The rich are compelled by inexorable circumstances to continue escalating disinformation about capitalism so as to convince people that there is no alternative to this outdated system that cannot provide for the needs of the people. Indeed, major owners of capital and their political and media representatives work hard every day to persuade everyone that, while capitalism is rotten in many ways, it is still “the best” history has to offer humanity. They want everyone to believe that capitalism is the only future for humanity. This is why it is easier for capitalists to imagine the end of the world than it is for them to imagine the end of capitalism. A good example of this retrogressive tendency is the work of  Branko Milanovic, a leading “expert” on inequality. Milanovic was a former chief economist at the World Bank. He recognizes that capitalism has serious problems but believes that the task at hand is to “improve” capitalism and make it “sustainable.” Milanovic has no interest in an alternative to capitalism and believes one does not exist.

To be sure, global, national, and local private interests are not going to cede power voluntarily and support an alternative to capitalism. They are not going to suddenly become enlightened and embrace democracy and affirm the rights of all, including the right of the working class and people to reorient the economy to serve society and the people. This is not how things work in class-divided societies filled with many forms of violence, chaos, and vicious rivalries. The rich are concerned only with their narrow egocentric financial interests, no matter the cost to society and the environment. They are opposed to a pro-social agenda that fosters social consciousness, unleashes the human factor, modernizes the human personality, and humanizes the natural and social environment.

In this dangerous context that keeps deteriorating, the working class and people need to become more vigilant, organized, and pro-active in order to fend off present and future attacks on their rights. The working class and people must use well-established methods, as well as new and creative ways to deprive the rich of the power to deprive everyone else of their rights. 

A society made up of an empowered polity directing the economy and all the affairs of society is urgently needed, a historical necessity. Decision-making power must not rest with the financial oligarchy if society is to move forward and human rights are to be affirmed. Major owners of capital are unfit to rule and care only about their own narrow economic interests.

The working class and people are not interested in this or that type of capitalism. It is not about “bad” capitalism versus “good” capitalism. The working class and people are the negation of this anachronistic economic system. 

People want and need an alternative to capitalism, an alternative to perpetual crisis and instability. At home and abroad, capitalism is certainly working for some people, but not the majority. The need for change that favors the people will intensify as a massive amount of social wealth and power becomes even more concentrated in the hands of a tiny ruling elite. History is demanding new pro-social, human-centered relations free of exploitation and injustice. 

Shawgi Tell, Ph.D., is author of the book, Charter School Report Card. He can be reached at stell5@naz.edu 

The Meditation Ethic and the Spirit of "Inclusive Capitalism"

By James Richard Marra

In the United States, capitalism is becoming "mindful." Meditating corporate CEOs, capitalist think tanks, research institutions, and government ally to champion a burgeoning “mindfulness” industry and a new social conception of what it means to live and work under finance-monopoly capitalism (FMC). Increasingly, large domestic and globalized businesses, mainly in the finance, technology, and electronics (FTE) sector of the “Knowledge Economy” (KE) are introducing employer-sponsored employee meditation programs (EMPs). These programs work in synergy with putatively healthful and productive work environments, and within the wider social context of an emerging “socially conscious” capitalist regime.[1]

The business plans of individual enterprises as well of the EMP industry extend beyond the microeconomic to the entire FTE sector and the FMC society as a whole. The institutional network within the capitalist social “superstructure” supports these efforts, and thereby the profitability of businesses, markets, and the mindfulness industry. For example, innovative technology developed within universities fosters start-ups that establish deep penetration into related markets. Walter W. Powell and Kaisa Snellman indicate that

This trend repeats itself on a global scale, as the founding of new firms occurs in a limited number of regions with access to leading research institutions, venture capital, and an abundant pool of educated labor (Owen-Smith et al. 2002).[2]

Combined, these institutions help businesses most profitably implement EMPs. They also help identify specific and favored sets of cognitive skills that can be used as metrics for recruiting, maintaining, and advancing the most valuable group of workers. These laborers represent the “hard core” of FTE labor power, whose technical prowess commands capitalist interest.

Yet, these workers endure increasingly afflictive work environments created by the modes of production FTE businesses. These businesses need to respond to competition resulting from the rapid introduction of new products, and technological innovation; so work is “fast paced.” Profitability demands feed heavy productivity goals, translating into workers working harder, and over longer periods. They do so while accepting increasing responsibilities driven by workforce consolidations and reductions, and “flexible” working hours. Peter S. Goodman, Executive Business and Global News Editor at The Huffington Post, points out that flexible work hours create an environment where, "No one counts how many hours people sit at their desks." At Google, some workers endure 80-hour workweeks.[3] At Amazon, “They overwork you and you’re like a number to them. During peak season and Prime season, they give you 60 hours a week. In July, I had Prime week and worked 60 hours. The same day I worked overtime, I got into a bad car accident because I was falling asleep behind the wheel.”[4]

Productive work within the FTE is intense, its volume considerable, involving complex technical tasks and management processes. Research correlates persistent physical, psychological, and social problems among workers laboring within such debilitating workplace environments. These conditions create psychological and behavioral dispositions that negatively affect productivity. Workers exhibit a lack of empathy, impatience, emotional control, and task engagement, as well as a commitment to business goals and loyalty to the employer. Low worker morale can lead to behaviors that weaken collaboration, communication, leadership, creativity, accountability, and judgment. They can also increase absenteeism, employee turnover, while corrupting business and ethical judgments. The federal government’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that “productivity losses related to personal and family health problems cost U.S. employers $1,685 per employee per year, or $225.8 billion annually.”

Consider as an example of this systemic workplace toxicity, the wage system under which many millennials work. FTE workers receive wages and benefits, Marx's "variable capital" payments. Because EMPs are an investment in employee skills and wellness, and not in the means of production, business owners pay for EMPs, applying capital, and accounting it to some benefit (like “wellness”) or wage category (like a bonus). The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) establishes wage structure rules. The US Labor Department Most considers most FTE workers as “exempt” from overtime wages. These include executive management, administrators, professional, and computer roles.

The FLSA salary protocol provides businesses with a profitable mechanism by which owners can allow workers to meditate during the working day, without incurring a potential business risk involving overtime payments. Workers can meditate at work all they wish, as long as they meet production requirements, and manifest corresponding workforce performance dispositions. With exempt compensation, the functional significance of the length of the working day as a determinant of productivity is lost. The concept of the “working day” is replaced by the “contract period,” and removed from the capitalist lexicon of exempt labor. 

The result is that the range of practicable solutions to the debilitating effects of expanding working days is constrained. For example, the range of potential improvements to the workplace environment identified by Mattke, Schnyer, and Van Busum include only those that require a modification of employee behavior, and not other aspects of the mode of production, such as the length of the working day. Nowhere in the paper do the authors mention such concepts as "the working day," "exempt," "salaried," or "hourly." They employ the word "capital" exclusively with reference to human capital management: "Our senior management is committed to health promotion as an important investment in human capital.”[5] When identifying changes to the working environment, the study offers strategies that "range from changes to the working environment, such as providing healthy food options in the cafeteria, to comprehensive interventions that support employees in adopting and sustaining healthy lifestyles."[6] 

Nevertheless, businesses remain sensitive to the negative production implications of worker debilitation. They are also aware of the human capital value of offering a mindfulness program as part of their wellness and self-fulfillment benefits. Thus, employers address a potential production problem, while also providing value added to the employee. The millennial workforce appreciates of value of mental focus to work success, a recognition gained from their educational experience. These meditating workers generally testify that they feel a greater sense of “empowerment,” by acquiring mental tools to help relieve anxiety, stress, and disinterestedness. 

Denise Parris is recognizes the need to align millennial socialization with the current mode of production. Her work ethic recognizes that “helping others is not self-sacrifice but self-fulfillment,”[7] and seeks to impress upon business owners an appreciation of the productive value of servant leadership, and motivate them to implement EMPs. In this way, industry experts advise businesses on how to leverage the socialization of a favored class of workers to design and promote their EMPs, which promise expanded productivity.[8] 

The metaphysics, theory, science, ethos, promises, and expectations surrounding EMPs have their critics. William Little, writing for The Guardian, criticizes selective causality and evidentiary cherry picking within EMP marketing. He suggests, echoing Marx and Engels, that workplace meditation may represent an “opiate” that desensitizes the worker from the symptoms of the toxic workplace.[9] 

Some scientific studies regarding EMPs suggest prudence regarding claims of positive affects of workplace meditation. As M. Goyal, S. Singh, and E.M.S. Sibinga conclude from a study of 41 meditation programs that “the mantra meditation programs do not appear to improve any of the psychological stress and well-being outcomes we examined, but the strength of this evidence varies from low to insufficient.[10] Behavioral scientists Kathleen D. Vohs and Andrew C. Hafenbrack, writing for the The New York Times, illuminate a puzzling contradiction: 

“A central technique of mindfulness meditation, after all, is to accept things as they are. Yet companies want their employees to be motivated. And the very notion of motivation — striving to obtain a more desirable future — implies some degree of discontentment with the present, which seems at odds with a psychological exercise that instills equanimity and a sense of calm.”[11]

Critics point to the preliminary and inconclusive evidence that some workplace meditation advocates claim corroborates the effectiveness of mindfulness in achieving favored cognitive skills.[12] 

Kim reports that, “Mindfulness training can also run counter to a corporation’s goals. An article published by the journal Industrial and Organizational Psychology in 2015 suggests that because mindfulness encourages employees to act in line with their values and interests, it may elicit behaviors that are not in the best interests of organizational performance.”[13] A 2017 report from the National Center for Complementary Health and Integrative Health suggests that the fine-tuning of meditative practices accomplished within EMPs may contribute little to their success. Researchers analyzing the prevalence and patterns of use of three meditation types concluded that the "use of meditation may be more about the type of person practicing than about the specific type of meditation practiced...."[14]

Some studies indicate that meditation might not be as effective as previously expected. While some FTE workers enjoy their work and workplaces, many who are offered EMPs view their work as nothing more self-actualizing than a paycheck. These workers experience little, if any, enjoyment or self-fulfillment in their productivity. Since the technology they employ in production is the business owner's private property, workers experience a lack of control over their work, and view their labor as simply a meaningless job. The resulting weakening of labor power contributes to an existential "torment" among workers; what Marx calls “alienation.” 

The potential that workers might shift from applying their meditation to practical wellness and cognitive skills enhancement to deeper philosophical insight is reflected in an analysis by Robert Wright, author of the book Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment.[15]

Nonetheless, the average mindfulness meditator is closer to the ancient contemplative tradition, and to transformative insights, than you might think. Though things like stress reduction or grappling with melancholy or remorse or self-loathing may seem “therapeutic,” they are organically connected to the very roots of Buddhist philosophy. What starts out as a meditation practice with modest aims can easily, and very naturally, go deeper. There is a kind of slippery slope from stress reduction to profound spiritual exploration and radical philosophical reorientation, and many people, even in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, are further down that slope than they realize.[16]

If Robert Wright is correct, then Raytheon is at risk of creating worker disillusionment if their meditation brings them to moral realizations that are at odds with corporate profit.[17]

As we have seen, there are implications within the capitalist global superstructure as well. Writing for The Guardian, Dr. Nafeez Ahmed, an international security journalist and academic, suggest an artful side to the altruistic pronouncements of the Coalition for Inclusive Capitalism (CIC). Reporting on the Henry Jackson Society's 2014 Conference on Inclusive Capitalism, which inspired the EPIC report, Ahmed summarizes the purpose of the event.

While the self-reflective recognition by global capitalism's leaders that business-as-usual cannot continue is welcome, sadly the event represented less a meaningful shift of direction than a barely transparent effort to rehabilitate a parasitical economic system on the brink of facing a global uprising.[18]

EMPs may carry significant inductive business risks. If EMPs fail to deliver, the wasted capital investment in training results from a misunderstanding of the available evidence and the causality of workplace meditation. Business owners multiply this risk when they take biased explanations of workplace toxicity seriously (like that of Mattke, Schnyer, and Van Busum). However, even where EMPs fail, businesses can still ameliorate inductive business risk. This is because EMPs can still function to identify, hire, and retain (through the use of a wellness performance metrics) those workers who possess valued natural cognitive abilities; and thus bolster a company's the inclusive branding that can increase its market share.

Rebecca Stoner appreciates an impact upon worker socialization. Stoner reviews Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism by John Patrick Leary,[19] a book critical of the capitalist semantic project, and offers a Marxist interpretation of Leary's account. Capitalist keywords (including some of those cited in this study) represent “a set of ubiquitous modern terms, drawn from the corporate world and the business press, that...promulgate values friendly to corporations...over those friendly to human beings....When we understand and deploy such language to describe our own lives, we’re seen as good workers; when we fail to do so, we’re implicitly threatened with economic obsolescence.[20] [My italics] 

This threat is proudly announced within the reconstructed semantic of inclusive capitalism.

...[T]here’s the “moral vocabulary of late capitalism,” which often uses words with older, religious meanings; Leary cites a nineteenth-century poem that refers to Jesus as a “thought leader.” These moral values, Leary says, are generally taken to be indistinguishable from economic ones. “Passion,” for example, is prized for its value to your boss: if you love what you do, you’ll work harder and demand less compensation.[21]

Replacing “Jesus” the Song of God with Jesus the thought “leader” defines away (or “rationalizes”) much of the hard-core metaphysical and ethical orientations that underpin traditional meditation practice. This provides businesses with a new ethical use value aligned with a millennial socialization that is at least disillusioned with traditional religion. Businesses then offer this use value, an ethical ethos, to workers, directing it towards cajoling workers, and then controlling their ethical and productive dispositions in a way that keeps them working at maximum capacity. 

I use the word “rationalize” in order to highlight Weber’s analysis of the process of rationalization that he claims removed the Protestant ethic from the economic and social aspects of an emerging capitalism. Work conceived as a spiritual calling evolves into labor as a function of profit.

At present under our individualistic political, legal, and economic institutions, with the forms of organization and general structure which are particular to our economic order, this spirit of capitalism might be understandable, purely as a result of adaptation. The capitalistic system so needs this devotion to the calling of making money, it is an attitude toward material goods which is so well suited to that system, so intimately bound up with the conditions of survival in the economic struggle for existence, that there can to-day no longer be any question of a necessary connection of that acquisitive manner of life with any single Weltanschauung. In fact, it no longer needs the support of any religious forces, and feels the attempts of religion to influence economic life...to be as much an unjustified interference as its regulation by the State. In such circumstances men’s commercial and social interests do tend to determine their opinions and attitudes.[22]

Similarly, EMPs significantly circumscribe the meditation training offered to workers in ways that not only maximize their effect within an encompassing system of capitalist production, but also appeal to a secular millennial worldview. EMP meditation practice does not center on expanding the spirituality of workers in order avoid business risks associated with realizations emerging from deeper insight meditation. Rather, it aims to calm and focus the mind, a goal that aligns with the millennial wellness and self-fulfillment ethos. It also reflects the millennial appreciation of the value of mental focus to work success, a recognition gained from their educational experience. Meditating workers generally testify that they feel a greater sense of “empowerment,” by acquiring mental tools to help relieve anxiety, stress, and disinterestedness. For many workers, EMPs provide appreciated healthful use values.

It is not surprising that the EMP industry deconstructs the traditional ethical, religious, and semantic orientation of meditation, re-conceptualizing it as a productive and self-actualizing mindfulness ethos. By doing do, capitalism can gradually transform (through social engineering and scientific management technology, for example) the external social semantic of its preferred workforce into one whose ethical hard core is aligned with inclusive capitalism. Thus, capitalism appropriates the externality represented by the consciousnesses of workers, including their natural cognitive abilities and dispositions and language, for the purposes of increasing labor power, and to rebrand itself as inclusive, and therefore potentially profitable. Together, these synergies represent the systemic tendency of capitalism to expand into new resource and market externalities, unexploited or underexploited. EMPs intend to assist productive and organizational requirements by exploiting one such externality: the cognitive abilities and behavioral dispositions of skilled workers. By doing so, EMPs promulgate a reconstructed and inclusive mindfulness ethos for workers that businesses employ internally to maintain its productive system, and expand their sales. 

The synergizing of productive capabilities along with branding and marketing efforts manifests an interpenetration of production and sales that typifies FMC.[23] Thus, the mindfulness industry exploits both the millennial worker desire for self-actualization (“success”) and the need of capitalism to accumulate to aligning a program of worker socialization with new technical modes of production, while simultaneously advancing business-marketing efforts.

This ethos is institutionalized in the operational semantics and metrics developed by the CIC, a marketing metrics that measures and advertises “intangible” capital. For example, significant intangible capital consists in a highly motivated workforce keen on developing individualized worker professional development plans. Since employers value self-motivation directed toward the advancement of productive skills, EMPs, beyond the directly productive, help businesses identify and retain workers with that favored workplace behavioral disposition. They do this by helping human capital management develop performance metrics for individual workers that are used to identify this favored workplace behavior, and provide a basis for appropriate compensation and potential advancement.

As FTE businesses realize the potential risks engendered within a toxic workplace, the mindfulness industry predictably blossoms. Meditation rooms, beautifully landscaped outdoor walking paths, and yoga training become as common as data models, spreadsheets, and project plans. If metrics indicate that meditation is “successful” in the sense explained by the CIC, companies can communicate their capacity for profitability to customers and investors with reference to specialized “human value levers” (like “Occupational health and wellbeing” - including meditation).

More evidence is required to verify the “successes” of EMPs. Certainly, people of good conscience wish others well, and hope that meditation practice will continue to have a positive impact on people’s lives. Even if EMPs do not deliver spiritually or behaviorally, businesses can engineer their programs to work synergistically with human capital management to enhance productivity. Businesses do this through worker acquisition and retention efforts that appeal to valued workers through offering EMPs. They also promote sales and investment by using value levers as advised by the inclusive business consortiums. Through the application of ergonomics, operational innovation, and advanced scientific management technology, capitalists can accomplish this without altering their empowering class apparatus of capitalism, and potentially maintain maximized accumulation.

To its credit, capital remains resilient and adaptive in its rebranding efforts, and for good business reasons. Nevertheless, as Ahmed reminds us, consortiums like the CIC might remain an “event” representing “less a meaningful shift of direction than a barely transparent effort to rehabilitate a parasitical economic system on the brink of facing a global uprising.”

Notes

[1] The terms “socially conscious” and “inclusive” are used synonymously within the theory, practice, and marketing of the new capitalist social consciousness. This study will use “inclusive,” as used by supporters participating in the “Embankment Project for Inclusive Capitalism,” which is examined below.

[2] Walter W. Powell and Kaisa Snellman, “The Knowledge Economy,” Annual Review of

Sociology 30 (2004): 17.

[3] Peter S. Goodman, "Why Companies Are Turning To Meditation And Yoga To Boost The Bottom Line," Huffpost, April 1, 2015, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/11/mindfulness-capitalism_n_3572952.html. (accessed February 11, 2019).

[4] Michael Sainato, “’We are not Robots’: Amazon warehouse employees push to unionize,” The Guardian, January 1, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/01/amazon-fulfillment-center-warehouse-employees-union-new-york-minnesota. (accessed April 27, 2019).

[5] Soeren Mattke, Christopher Schnyer, and Kristin R. Van Busum 30.

[6] Ibid., 3.

[7] "Denise Parrish," Price College of Business, http://www.ou.edu/price/entecdev/people/denise-parris. (accessed April 17, 2019).

[8] In this latter regard, Peter Temin’s hypothesis regarding the rise of a global “Dual Economy” as a manifestation of the emergence of the FTE sector provides a rich source of theoretical and empirical considerations regarding evolving and emerging sub-class distinctions within the working class.

[9] William Little, “Mindfulness courses at work? This should have us all in a rage,” The Guardian, Jan 31, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/31/

mindfulness-work-employers-meditation. (accessed February 25, 2019). Powell and Snellman: “Are these new practices intended to remake the organization of work to produce shared gains, or to increase productivity by increasing work output while the associated gains are skimmed off by those at the top of the (flatter) hierarchy?” (op. cit. 210)

[10] M. Goyal, S. Singh, and E.M.S. Sibinga, "Meditation Programs for Psychological Stress and Well-Being," Comparative Effectiveness Reviews, 124, January 2014, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK180104/#discussion.s9. (accessed April 7, 2019).

[11] Kathleen D. Vohs and Andrew C. Hafenbrack, “Hey Boss, You Don’t Want Your Employees to Meditate,” The New York Times, June 14, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/

2018/06/14/opinion/sunday/meditation-productivity-work-mindfulness.html. (accessed November 3, 2018).

[12] Pandit Dasa and David Brendel, “Does Mindfulness Training Have Business Benefits?”

[13] Hannah H, Kim, “Issue: The Meditation Industry” (January 29, 2018), Sage businessresearcher, 6.

[14] National Center for Complementary Health and Integrative Health, Meditators and Nonmeditators Differ on Demographic Factors, Health Behaviors, Health Status, and Health Care Access, New Analysis Shows.

[15] Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017).

[16] Robert Wright, "Is Mindfulness Meditation A Capitalist Tool Or A Path To Enlightenment? Yes," Wired, August 12, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2017/08/the-science-and-philosophy-of-mindfulness-meditation/. (accessed May 8, 2019).

[17] "...the bulk of this war’s civilian casualties have come from the Saudi-led coalition’s technological superiority and exclusive domination of the air. In the process, coalition airstrikes have left a trail of material evidence in their wake, including the remains of many Raytheon-manufactured systems.” Jefferson Morley, "Raytheon’s profits boom alongside civilian deaths in Yemen," Salon, June 27, 2018, https://www.salon.com/2018/06/27/raytheons-profits-boom-alongside-civilian-deaths-in-yemen_partner/. (accessed February 28, 2019).

[18] Nafeez Ahmed, op. cit.

[19] John Patrick Leary, Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2019)

[20] Rebecca Stoner, "The language of capitalism isn’t just annoying, it’s dangerous," MR online, December 21, 2018, https://mronline.org/2018/12/21/the-language-of-capitalism-isnt-just-annoying-its-dangerous/. (accessed December 26, 2018).

[21] Stoner, op. cit.

[22] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1992): 72.

[23] For this and other features of FMC, see John Bellamy Foster, “The Ecology of Marxian Political Economy,” Monthly Review, 63, no. 4 (September 2011): 1 - 16.

The War on Poverty in Austin, Texas

By Camille Euritt

Austin, Texas recently undertook a policy change, the reversal of bans on behaviors which affected the homeless population, that has great potential for ending the costly cycle of incarcerating and disenfranchising the homeless with tickets for living in public places. Unfortunately, the individuals opposing the change focus on their aversion towards poverty rather than on any benefits for the homeless under their “decriminalization.” The recommendation of this brief if for the calculation of an exact estimate on affordable housing which would end Austin’s homeless problem, the utilization of outreach workers as first responders, and the formation of a task force in city government on ending homelessness.  

The War on Poverty in Austin, Texas

Despite the stigma of undeservingness towards the visibly homeless, no one wants the abject poverty of an unsheltered existence for themselves or loved ones. Yet, city codes on public spaces effectively criminalize the indigent for their socioeconomic status. Considering homelessness a choice is unreasonable, because homelessness results in lowered life expectancy, increases the risk of criminal victimization, and contributes to worsened symptoms of mental illness (Henwood et al., 2015). Unfortunately, the rising cost of living, stagnating wages, and the disappearance of affordable housing for low-income people all contribute to the financial instability positioning many individuals on the verge of losing their housing (Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, 2019). In addition to economic conditions, family violence, mental illness, and job loss are all evidenced as reasons for loss of permanent housing (Henry et al., 2018). The reality is that the criminalization of homelessness does not increase the welfare of men and women in need, but further disenfranchises individuals whose circumstances leave them with no choice but violating municipal law. 

Policy Landscape

The decriminalization of homelessness in Austin, Texas in 2019 made the welfare of the community members in extreme poverty more visible which is uncomfortable and fearful for many people. Concerns about homelessness’ adverse effects on business and tourism are the impetus for those opposing the reversal of the city’s ban on sitting, lying down, and camping in public (Goard, 2019). Ortiz, Dick and Rankin (2015) also posit that a fear of responsibility for the welfare of others when the obvious nature of their need is so visible undergirds the laws on public spaces and marginalized groups. Furthermore, a social innovator employed by the city of Austin noted that the backlash toward the repeal is a result of the offense many people feel when sensing homelessness as a violation of the norms on public space (D. Cullota, personal communication, October 22, 2019). Additionally, Homes Not Handcuff’s lead organizer, the advocacy group which campaigned for decriminalization, Chris Harris, spoke about how widespread public disapproval influenced policing behaviors to an even greater degree than the new policy (Goard, 2019; personal communication, October 19, 2019). Accordingly, the actions and inactions of police exacerbated the backlash against the city’s new position on homelessness. For example, Harris described how police now neglect enforcing even legitimate sanctions against the homeless like public urination and intoxication, often responding to concerned citizens to the tune of “blame it on the city council.” 

These attitudes at the local level are analogous with a statement from President Trump on homelessness in West Coast cities: “We have people living in our best highways, our best streets, our best entrances to buildings, where people in those buildings pay tremendous taxes” (Bittle, 2019). Subsequently, Texas’ governor proposed a “sweep” of homeless camps in Austin dependent upon what action the city takes in responding to complaints. Both the attitude of the elected officials and incensed locals in Austin indicate the desire for the removal of the homeless, because homelessness affronts the status quo and housed people do not consider the homeless equal members of the community.    

Political scientist Stone (2011) presents a framework on policy that contrasts the different political ideologies in conflict on any issue as fundamentally different perspectives about the means of reaching the five major goals of all policy: equitability, efficiency, public security, liberty, and welfare. One’s position is either underscored by an approach that every person’s opportunity is equal in a free market and therefore civic intervention is unnecessary for public welfare or that there are social determinants of quality of life that necessitate intentionally providing opportunities for the disenfranchised. Opponents of the city’s “No sit, lie, and camp” ban reversal have claimed that homelessness is a choice which justifies the existence of the criminalization laws, because homeless individuals had the freedom of choosing from alternatives, but preferred the transient lifestyle (D. Cullota, personal communication, October 22, 2019). Analysis of Stone’s framework on political thinking is useful in this case, because the “equal opportunity” ideology underscores this emphasis on “choice” while the recognition of systemic causes of homelessness like poverty and mental illness lend support for treating the issue as a common problem concerning all in the community.     

Policy Implementation

The Supreme Court once ruled that homeless criminalization’s first predecessor, Vagrancy Laws or prohibitions on transient behaviors during the colonial period, violated peoples’ rights to freedom from “cruel and unusual punishment,” because sanctioning a homeless person’s public existence is the same as punishing individuals for their socioeconomic status, a complex circumstance not totally in personal control. Furthermore, the justices ruled that these laws gave policing authorities too much discretion in enforcement to the point where citizens could not realistically comply thereby delimiting the right to “due process” (Ortiz, Dick, & Rankin, 2015). The modern form of Vagrancy Laws, which criminalize the homeless, have become more specific which has generally distanced regulation further from the obvious unconstitutionality of the preceding era while maintaining the same discriminatory effects. However, a recent ruling in the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the constitutional rights of homeless men and women in Western states and negated many of the criminalization ordinances in city codes influencing the policy making in Austin (D. Cullota, personal communication, October 22, 2019; Egelko & Fagan, 2018).          

Recommendation

The city should determine the exact amount of affordable housing needed to end homelessness in Austin. Studies have shown that the cost of housing is less to taxpayers than the cost of the emergency services and incarceration of the chronically homeless (Chalmers McLaughlin, 2011). Besides, definitive city action may mitigate the public’s strong feelings of outrage. Secondly, outreach workers rather than police are the first responders to all matters of the homeless. These workers will have the benefit of crisis intervention training as well as expertise in directing individuals towards services. Also, utilizing an alternative to police helps diversion from the criminal justice system. Finally, Austin should create a task force to end homelessness. Currently, there is only one position on homelessness with the city and a task force is a best practice of problem-solving in city governments (D. Cullota, personal communication, October 22, 2019). 

Conclusion

The fact of the matter is that neither visible homelessness nor displacement under criminalization is the best solution for society. Regardless of a homeless individual’s complicity in their status as a displaced person, there is a shortage of more than 800 beds in Austin’s emergency shelters which leaves this many without even the option of a nonpublic setting. Besides, ticketing the homeless creates criminal records preventing an exit from homelessness further exacerbating the issue (Herrera, 2018). Clearly, the unfortunate fate of the many visible homeless necessitates a greater tolerance as well the legal protection providing a better outcome for society’s most vulnerable. 

Recommended Resources

Bauman, T., Rosen, J., Tars, E., Foscarinis, M., & Fernandea, J. (2014). No safe place: the criminalization of homelessness in US cities. National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty.

Henry, M., Mahathey, A., Morrill, T., Robinson, A., Shivji, A., & Watt, R. (2018). The 2018 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress, part 1: Point-in-time estimates of homelessness. Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Herrera, N. A. (2018). Homes not handcuffs: How Austin criminalizes homelessness. Austin, TX: Grassroots Leadership. 

Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. (2019). The state of the nation’s housing: 2019. Retrieved from https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Harvard_JCHS_State_of_the_Nations_Housing_2019.pdf

National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. (2018, July). Scoring points: How ending the criminalization of homelessness can increase HUD funding in your community. Washington, DC: Author. 

National Low Income Housing Coalition. (2019). Out of reach. Washington, DC: Author

References

Bauman, T., Rosen, J., Tars, E., Foscarinis, M., & Fernandea, J. (2014). No safe place: the criminalization of homelessness in US cities. National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty.

Bittle, J. (2019, September 18). Trump’s plan to solve homelessness is horrifying. The Nation. Retrieved from http://www.thenation.com

Chalmers McLaughlin, T. (2011). Using common themes: Cost-effectiveness of permanent supported housing for people with mental illness. Research on Social Work Practice, 21(4), 404-411.

Egelko, B. & Fagan, F. (2018, September 5). Homelessness ruling: Sleeping on streets can’t be a crime when on shelters are available. Governing. Retrieved from http://www.governing.com 

Goard, A. (2019, July 1). Starting Monday, homeless people will be able to sleep on city sidewalks. KXAN. Retrieved from http://www.kxan.com

Henry, M., Mahathey, A., Morrill, T., Robinson, A., Shivji, A., & Watt, R. (2018). The 2018 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress, part 1: Point-in-time estimates of homelessness. Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Henwood, B.F., Wenzel, S.L., Mangano, P.F., Hombs, M.,Padgett, D.K., Byrne, B., Rice, E., & Uretsky, M.C. (January 2015). The Challenge of Ending Homelessness. Grand Challenges for Social Work Initiative, Working Paper No. 9, 1-22, American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare.

Herrera, N. A. (2018). Homes not handcuffs: How Austin criminalizes homelessness. Austin, TX: Grassroots Leadership. 

Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. (2019). The state of the nation’s housing: 2019. Retrieved from https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Harvard_JCHS_State_of_the_Nations_Housing_2019.pdf

Lurie, K., Schuster, B., & Rankin, S. (2015). Discrimination at the Margins: The Intersectionality of Homelessness & Other Marginalized Groups. Available at SSRN 2602532. 

Ortiz, J., Dick, M., & Rankin, S. (2015). The Wrong Side of History: A Comparison of Modern and Historical Criminalization Laws. Available at SSRN 2602533.

Stone, D. (2011). Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making. (3rd ed.). New York: Norton.

How Quebec’s Nationalist Movement Became the Spearhead of Racist Militancy

By Andre-Philippe Dore

Once at the vanguard of social justice struggles in Québec, the nationalist tendency is now one of the strongest components of the racist right-wing in the province. It has almost completely abandoned the fight for political and economic emancipation to concentrate on cultural politics, fighting against immigration, liberty of religion and other topics also cherished by the fascist right. While some would easily condemn nationalism in itself, going back into the history of Québec's fight for independence seems necessary to understand how Québec's liberation movement transformed itself into the reactionary force it is today.

Québec's independence struggle goes back to an old tradition of anti-British revolts like the Patriotes' rebellion of 1837-1838 or pamphleteers' writings from the early 1900s. Its golden age was situated in the 60s and 70s when groups of many horizons - from conservatives to communists - led the struggle up to a referendum in 1980 - which wasn't victorious.

The large array of pro-sovereignty groups was definitely left-leaning : at the far-left was the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ), which had a complicated and utterly action-packed history. With ties to the Black Panthers, Algerian revolutionaries and Palestinian freedom fighters, the FLQ relied on guerrilla tactics - robbing banks, kidnapping government members and blowing up many symbols of British imperialism. Also in the left hemisphere was the Rassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale which sometimes quoted Ho Chi Minh, used the term "socialist" without shame and fought side-by-side with unions against the Anglo-Canadian bourgeoisie. Less well-known were other left-wing groups like the Action socialiste pour l'indépendance du Québec, Québec's Socialist Party or Andrée Ferretti's Front de libération populaire, all influenced by Marxist writers such as Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi.

However, there where other groups that did not want to be associated with the left-wing of the movement, for example the Alliance Laurentienne - a catholic party of intellectuals - or Gilles Grégoire's Ralliement national - a populist party formed by proponents of the social credit theory and dissidents of the Rassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale who did not want to be involved with a party ran by an agnostic, leftist homosexual. TheRalliement national would finally merge with the Mouvement souveraineté-association - a newly formed group with René Lévesque as its leader. Lévesque - a young rising star in left reformist politics - had just left the Liberal Party because its establishment refused to back Québec's plea for independence. He then went on to create the Parti Québécois (PQ) in 1968.

This new party would be the main vehicle for the official and electoral struggle for Québec's sovereignty. Even though Lévesque's point of view on the national question was pretty moderate as he favored the negotiation of a new deal with Canada's government instead of seceding right away - many members of the radical left joined the Parti Québécois. Formerly living in clandestinity because of its involvement with the FLQ, Pierre Vallières publicly joined the side of Lévesque's legal struggle, as Pierre Bourgault - leader of the Rassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale - already did, enjoining the 14 000 members of his party to do the same. For many intellectuals and activists, the Crise d'octobre - which saw the Canadian army invade the streets of Québec and jail almost anyone who actively supported Québec's independence- was a traumatic event, leading them to abandon radical militancy and join social-democrat struggles. Groups who advocated armed struggle for national liberation began to disappear as their members joined either anti-secession Maoist groups like En lutte! - led by the former FLQ member Charles Gagnon - or reformist parties and unions.

The PQ went from a marginal party - as he won only 7 seats during the election of 1970 - to forming the government in 1976. This electoral victory led to a referendum in 1980 which resulted in a win for the federalists since 59% of the voters chose the No option. The referendum question illustrated well the moderate turn of nationalist politics, as it was a nuanced and hesitating text. Against the left-leaning wing of the party, led by Jacques Parizeau - who had been throughout his life both sympathizer of a communist party and banker - opposed it, Lévesque and his party asked the following :

''Le Gouvernement du Québec a fait connaître sa proposition d'en arriver, avec le reste du Canada, à une nouvelle entente fondée sur le principe de l'égalité des peuples ; cette entente permettrait au Québec d'acquérir le pouvoir exclusif de faire ses lois, de percevoir ses impôts et d'établir ses relations extérieures, ce qui est la souveraineté, et, en même temps, de maintenir avec le Canada une association économique comportant l'utilisation de la même monnaie ; aucun changement de statut politique résultant de ces négociations ne sera réalisé sans l'accord de la population lors d'un autre référendum ; en conséquence, accordez-vous au Gouvernement du Québec le mandat de négocier l'entente proposée entre le Québec et le Canada ?"

Although the main voice for the nationalist camp in Québec's media was the PQ's , many initiatives were carried by other supporters of the Yes option. The referendum campaign saw the implication of members of the Communist Party of Québec, of the Combat socialiste's Trotskyists and other far-left activists. Another part of the left opposed that option however, for example the Nouveau Parti démocratique du Québec - a marginal social-democrat party who supported the unity of Canada.

After the defeat of the Yes option, René Lévesque and Claude Morin, an informant for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, proposed what they named « Beau risque ». This would lead the PQ to support the Canadian Progressive Conservative Party - who proposed a mix of free market and conservatism - since its leader Brian Mulroney promised to amend the Canadian constitution to give Québec a special status in it. Québec as a matter of fact never signed the Canadian constitution since it was forced upon the province by an agreement between all the other provinces' premiers, the Canadian premier Pierre-Elliot Trudeau, the British House of Commons and the Queen of England. Many members of the PQ - including progressive MPs like Jacques Parizeau, Camille Laurin and Louise Harel - left the party. The void created by this exodus gave the right wing of the party a more prominent role. Overtly capitalist and anti-union individuals like Lucien Bouchard came to be public figures of the nationalist struggle, leading to the creation of the Bloc Québécois which participated in federal elections as the main representative of the nationalist forces. While advocating left-leaning ideas from time to time to allure their remaining left-leaning base, the Bloc's staff was mostly composed of right-wing activists that were formerly members of the Canadian Liberal Party and the Progressive Conservative Party.

With an even more moderate Lévesque apace with the right-wing Bouchard, the nationalist side never went to propose a deal to the federal government that would satisfy Québec's population and the other provinces'. Instead, the PQ went on to rule as a candid provincial government, even importing capitalist repression tactics usually withheld as the party was said to have a « préjugé favorable envers les travailleurs » (a favorable bias toward workingmen). As 1982 began, Lévesque's government cut in social programs, tried to lower the salaries of the state employees and went at war with unions, as it voted laws to forbid certain strikes that were supported by a large part of the population. Lévesque would retire in 1985 to see Jacques Parizeau make his comeback and take his place 2 years later. The new leadership of the PQ then refocused the party around its raison d'être : to liberate Québec from the colonialist state of Canada.

Parizeau worked with his new ally, Lucien Bouchard, until the 1995 referendum, which resulted in a victory for the No option with 50,58% of the vote. Parizeau - as promised - retired after this defeat and left the gate open for Bouchard to take the leadership of the PQ. Bouchard, as he became the new Premier of Québec, shamelessly favored right-wing policies by imposing austerity measures : he took stances against unions, reduced the growth of the minimum wage and allowed his friend Paul Desmarais to concentrate even more the media outlets of the province. Nowadays, Bouchard is still a zealot of capitalism. He often accused the Quebecers of not working enough while he - since 2011 - had been a lobbyist for an oil consortium, an advisor for the highest paid physicians in the province and a negotiator for a paper company on behalf of the government (he was paid half a million for this last job).

As he went on with his plan to put Québec's independence on the back burner and concentrate on reducing the state spending by 10%, left-wing nationalists, socialists, feminists and alter-globalization militants formed groups that would later merge to create Québec solidaire - a left electoral party who supports Québec's emancipation from Canada. The PQ's change of reign in the 2000s would not rehabilitate the party for these numerous activists who disliked the politics of Lucien Bouchard just as much as those of his successor Bernard Landry - a bourgeois par excellence who became Premier in 2001. Leftists fled the party throughout the decade, while those staying in the organization claimed that other parties were only there to ruin the cause of Québec's liberation since they divided the nationalist vote.

It took up until 2012 for the PQ to be reelected with 31.95% of the popular vote. The student strike which lasted well over 100 days earlier that year permitted Pauline Marois to become Premier, as she supported the student cause and promised to cancel the tuition fees hike that caused the strike in the forst place. However, when she betrayed her electorate by indexing the tuition fees, kneeling before the mining industry and selling the Anticosti Island to a gas company, Marois' support diminished drastically. Bernard Drainville - her minister of « Democratic Institutions and Active Citizenship » - found the inspiration to wave the false flag of an Islamic menace, reminiscing the 2008 rise of the populist right-wing formation, the Action démocratique du Québec, who then almost won its election with this precise tactic. These straw man politics were to allow the PQ a gain of support from a right electorate normally voting for federalist parties while the young citizens turned toward the inclusive Québec solidaire.

Drainville proposed a « Charter of Québec Values » or, in other words, a law that regulates where and when people - especially Muslims - can wear religious symbols or pieces of clothing that cover the head (with the exception of small Christian crosses). Many supporters of this law - that never passed - would later be members of neo-fascist or anti-immigration groups like La Meute,Storm Alliance or the Fédération des Québécois de souche. Among those was also the young Alexandre Bissonnette, a right-wing supporter of Drainville who would kill 7 people at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Québec City in 2017. Despite that draft law which secured them numerous racist allies, the PQ lost 24 seats in the 2014 elections since it had lost the support of non-bureaucratic unions, students, radical nationalists, POCs, Indigenous people, ecologists and feminists. On an obvious decline, the PQ continued to try to appeal to an afraid population by using a xenophobic rhetoric carried by Jean-François Lisée - a then-communist now-chauvinist who would become leader of the PQ in 2016.

During that Charter episode, most of Québec's media (possessed mainly by two companies) went on to unofficially, but conspicuously, endorse an anti-Islam line. The student strike being over, columnists like Richard Martineau, Lise Ravary or Christian Rioux had to find another scapegoat. An already marginalized population like the Muslims was an easy target for racist groups fueled by media propaganda. Pig heads were dropped in front of mosques and hidjab-wearing women were harassed, but many media defended these hate crimes by repeatedly claiming they were only bad taste jokes. Indeed, the hate crimes against the Black and Muslim population in Québec rose from 2014 and onwards according to Statistics Canada.

Having dropped the idea of Québec's independence to prioritize its populist anti-immigration turn, the PQ lost its members to a more openly xenophobic and capitalistic formation: the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) - a party formed by conservatives with the ex-PQ minister François Legault as its head. In 2018, the CAQ formed a majority government and imposed Bill 21 on June 14 2019, which forbids teachers and many other state employees to wear religious symbols.

Still relying on its racist discourse, the PQ is nowadays the only opposition party that supports this law - regardless of the fact that their popularity is radically going down since they began to employ this approach. Now with only 9 seats, making it the fourth party in importance, the PQ is on his deathbed. Instead of defending nationalism by working to build the country of Québec, it has aligned with far-right groups' political narrative. For them, the State must defend the population against ethnic diversity and Islam. However, because of the many disguises the xenophobic movements have put on these discriminatory practices - invoking laicity, Québec values and other ideological euphemisms - it took years for antifascist and antiracist groups to gain some legitimacy in the struggle against discriminatory law projects.

Instead, it was mostly moderate humanist groups that fought against these laws, leaving to the radicals the fight against overtly fascist organizations like Atalante Québec. These days, however, groups from a large spectrum of the left are allying to resist against Bill 21 and the Legault government. They are less and less afraid to point out mainstream right-wingers as racists. As the years go by, it is more and more difficult for ethnic nationalists to legitimate their movement since Quebecers have been fed their « we're not racists, but… » rhetoric to a point it cannot ingest more without taking a stance toward either chauvinism or internationalism.

Québec's situation is not bright with the CAQ in power and neo-fascist groups growing influence in the streets, but now there are counter-movements organizing. On June 19, Montreal activists proclaimed the beginning of a hunger strike to protest Bill 21. In Québec City, an anti-Bill 21 coalition was formed on the initiative of muslim women, students and other feminists. Against the media-fueled xenophobia put forward by the government, a small but significative spectrum of the population is now determined to pinpoint the fact that the nationalist movement in the province is no more a progressive-looking and liberty monger set of forces, but a proper conservative anti-immigration movement.

Pacifying the Moral Economies of Poverty in an Era of Mass Supervision: An Interview with Brendan McQuade

By Nick Walrath

Dr. Brendan McQuade is an Assistant Professor of Criminology at the University of Southern Maine. His work centers on the study of police power, abolitionist politics, pacification, and the critique of security. McQuade's first book Pacifying the Homeland - Intelligence and Mass Supervision, released through UC Press, provides an in-depth look into the secretive, often poorly-understood world of intelligence fusion via a radical critique of the discourse that informs and guides the culture and ideology of security-what he terms the "prose of pacification." McQuade's overarching point is that pacification as both process and theory involves not only instances of brute force including tear gas and the bludgeon of the police baton on the one hand and softer tactics such as "negotiated management" of protest on the other, but also draws upon a specialized discourse of depoliticizing language. This terminology -including security advice such as "If you see something, say something," "Report suspicious activity," "We are all on duty," and "Be vigilant"- seeks the consent and participation of the pacified in the own subjugation as well as in the hunting of the enemies of capital. I thank Dr. McQuade for his thorough responses to my questions regarding the contemporary landscape of political policing, mass incarceration, the politics and ideology of security, and the logic that guides and informs its never-ending police-wars of accumulation.

What is the critique of security and what are the key concepts of this discourse?

The critique of security is an effort to understand and write about security without being subsumed by security. We often talk about security as if it was an unassailable good. Who doesn't want to be secure? How could anyone possible have a problem with security? But the problem isn't so much what "security" promises but how it packages that problem. If we buy into the premise of "security," then we accept the idea that the world is dangerous … that crime and terrorism are real threats. It's then a logical step to say we need some entity-the state-to protect us by providing this magical entity called "security."

When we talk about security, we often to forget to ask why people are driven to the violence we call crime or terrorism. Rather than accepting these assumptions, my goal was to examine how a particular security practices emerged and with what effects. Rather than assuming that security is good and asking how it can be more effective or more sensitive to the limits of law, I sought to examine what "threats" are being targeted and whose "security" they preserve. While security discourses rest on assumption of risk and mutual hostility (a war of one against all, waged among both individuals and nations), the critique of security invites to us consider what relations produce these conflicts and how they have been managed.

Here, I build on the work a group of scholars, the anti-security collective organized by Mark Neocleous and George Rigakos. One the key concepts we use is pacification. The basic idea here is that capitalism is an order of insecurity-"all that is solid melts to air"-that demands a politics of security. Instead of talking about security as transcendental good, we view it as an ideological claim articulated within particular types of societies, capitalist societies. To avoid the trap of security, we talk about pacification. The turbulence and conflict created by capitalism must be pacified. This isn't just the work of repressing rebellions and resistance of those on the losing end of capitalist society polarizations of wealth and power. It's more subtle work of continually reproducing capitalist social relations. In other words, the work pacification entails consent and participation as much as it connotes coercion and repression.

One the key mechanisms of pacification is policing. We usually think of policing as the police, the uniformed men that enforce law and order. However, the actual history of the police idea is something different. Policing was a pre-disciplinary discourse that united English liberals and Continental philosophers in a shared discussion about how to build strong states and wealthy societies. It was one of the most important concerns of political theory and philosophy in the early modern period, the time between the Renaissance and the French Revolution. At this time, policing meant a comprehensive science of social order that tried to cover all of life, from the minutiae of personal behavior to the loftiest affairs of state. By end of the 19th century, however, the meaning of "police" contracted to the police, the uniformed officers "enforcing the law." This narrowed meaning reflected the growing influence of liberalism, in which the individual and the market supplanted the sovereign and the state as the theoretical wellspring of social order. These philosophical shifts masked capital's reliance on the state to fabricate social relations, but it did not end the structural necessity of such work. In this context, police science gave way to criminology, public health, urban planning, and various other administrative discourses, which sought to regulate different domains of life in a manner consonant with the class biases of the old "police science." In this sense, the different genres of social policy are also and always police discourses.

Many Marxists have made similar points, though they have not connected it all back to to the deeper history of policing. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis in Schooling in Capitalist America, for example, detail what they call the "correspondence principle" where the nature of social interaction and individual rewards in public schools mirror the workplace. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, in Regulating the Poor likewise, conclude that social welfare policy regulates the labor market. Public benefits expand during economic crisis to dampen working class militancy and contract during times of economic expansion to cheapen the cost of labor. Howard Waitzkin in The Second Sickness analyzes healthcare from the same perspective. He shows access to healthcare expands and contracts with the ebb and flow of popular unrest, creates capitalist markets through public subsidies, and depoliticizes politics of health with an individual approach to health and reductionist biomedical paradigm. In other words, your teacher is cop. Your social worker is a cop. Your doctor is a cop.

For this reason, I use the term the prose of pacification. As I mentioned earlier, pacification isn't just about physical violence. It's also about popular participation in the politics of security. This is what the prose of pacification is all about. We're constantly told every day to participate in the politics of security. It's not just ham-fisted campaigns like "if you see something, say something." It's also the buying into that idea of security. It's the culture and ideology of security: the belief that the world is dangerous and the state is here to protect us from ourselves and others. This idea totally pervades popular culture and political discourse so that it can be hard to even acknowledge it, let alone think past it. The prose of pacification is my attempt to name this aspect of the problem. There's a huge body of ideas that constitute security cultures. It's the rituals of bureaucratic compliance: the documents created to administer us from cradle to grave. It's the lyrical exaltation of security in popular culture and political discourse. It's the internalization of the politics of fear that cause many of us to greet each other with fear and distrust or lend our energies to the police wars against our official enemies: so-called criminals, terrorists, illegals, delinquent youth, and whatever else.

You studied two fusion centers for this book -New Jersey's Regional Operations Intelligence Center (ROIC) and the New York State Intelligence Center (NYSIC). How has the prose of pacification been essential in guiding their mission, but first, what exactly are fusion centers? What work do they -or do they not- perform and how have they shaped the criminal legal system including policing?

As a general concept, fusion centers are interagency intelligence hubs. Intelligence analysts at fusion centers "fuse" together disparate pieces of information in order to provide useful analysis for state managers. Much of the data comes from government records, chiefly data from the criminal legal system but also from other entities like the DMV or social service agencies. This information will be supplemented by the records of private data brokers, social media, and other forms of "open source intelligence." New technologies like automated license plate readers, and facial recognition also create new forms of data that are often accessible to or managed by fusion center staff.

Fusion center analysts will analyze and combine this data in all sorts of ways. Often times, it can be simple case support, analysts will perform basic searches for police investigators who call into the fusion center to get more information about suspect: address, criminal histories, known family members and friends. This is fusion centers as Google for cops. Sometimes, case support is more technical. With specialized software, analysts can take wiretap data-unintelligible and interminably long lists of phone calls-and turn it into a pattern of use, and, from there, a social network analysis. They can transform cumbersome masses of data, such as geospatial data drawn from police files, the census, and other public records, into useful information like "predictive" heat maps to anticipate where the next shooting is likely to occur. Sometimes analysts will work with police teams for weeks and months as part of longer term investigation. For these projects, fusion center analysts will complete multiple rounds of data analysis and may even get deeply involved in intelligence collection. I'm not just talking about trolling social media platforms or working on wiretaps either. Some fusion center personnel are involved the collection of what's called "human intelligence" or the information that's obtained by working with informants or interrogating persons of interest. This is fusion centers as an outsourced intelligence division, a little CIA or NSA on call for the cops.

At the same time, it's important not to overhype fusion centers. They bring together all this data but how it is all used? No doubt, all of it isn't used. Fusion center analysts complained to me that their police supervisors didn't make full use of their capabilities. A lot people on receiving end of fusion center products claim that a lot the intelligence produced isn't that useful. "Intelligence spam" is term that I heard from quite a few interviewees. There's also a lot of liberal hand wringing about data retention, concerns that fusion centers are holding on too much information for too long.

At the end of the day, understanding what a given fusion center is an empirical question that requires investigation. Each fusion center has their own mission, which orients their work. The term "fusion center" is associated with what's called "the National Network of Fusion Centers" recognized by DHS. There are 79 of these fusion centers. The first were set up for counterterrorism, although their mission quickly broadened out to an "all crimes, all threats, all hazards orientation." These fusion centers will do counterterrorism analysis and all hazards preparedness in addition to criminal intelligence work. There's another set of fusion centers created in the 1990s for the drug war-the 32 investigative support centers set up under the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Program. There's even older interagency intelligence centers like the DEA's El Paso Intelligence Center and the six multistate Regional Intelligence Sharing Centers administered by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which date back to the 1970s. All of these fusion centers sit in their own little political space of interagency coordination and conflict. There's a phrase in the fusion center community: "if you've seen a fusion center, you've seen a fusion center." Each one has their own dynamics. Some might be doing very aggressive criminal intelligence work, supercharging the drug war with high tech surveillance and intelligence analysis. Others might be spamming state and local officials with counterterrorism intelligence of limited value.

How have fusion centers changed the criminal legal system? The first important point to know is that fusion centers aren't just a story about DHS and the war on terror. What we can retroactively call the institutionalization of intelligence fusion is part of much longer larger story of change in policing, the criminal legal system, and political economy. Fusion centers are part of the same general punitive turn in the criminal legal system that we associate with the war on drugs and mass incarceration. Scholars like Reuben Miller have started to talk about "mass supervision," as a complementary set of legal, policing, and administrative arrangements that developed alongside mass incarceration and manages "problem populations"-the poor, racial, religious, and sexual minorities, formerly incarcerated and otherwise criminalized people-outside of the prison. I argue that intelligence fusion is now the center of gravity of mass supervision. The varied fusion centers pull policing, community supervision, and the courts together in shared project to pacify criminalized surplus populations. Mass supervision has become more important in the recent period bookended by the Dot Com Crash of 2001 and the Great Recession of 2008. Meanwhile, mass incarceration is now viewed as too expensive. Prison populations are contracting, but we're not getting a return to any rehabilitative ethos of punishment. Instead, we get more massive supervision, a police - and surveillance - intensive form of control turns disinvested communities into open air prisons. The change is not just limited to how the state manages surplus populations.

The rise of intelligence fusion is also part of new pattern of administration. Intelligence fusion subjects police agencies to a new form of workplace discipline, the same systems of statistical management and algorithmic decision making that increasingly manage labor across sectors. Rank and file cops are now chasing numbers and trying to meet quotas. Investigators are increasingly the human link in automated networks of surveillance and data analysis. It's the era of "big data policing." Things have changed in some real and significant ways. Still, these changes are institutionally and politically mediated. We're not living in 1984 ¸ even though we now have the technical capacities to make Big Brother look quaint. To understand exactly how these changes institutionally and politically mediated, I consider the institutionalization of intelligence fusion in relation on-going processes of state formation and related shifts in political economy.

I see fusion centers as part of what the Greek Marxist Nicos Poulantzas called authoritarian statism. By this he means new type of state and practice of administration that curtails formal liberties, expands the executive, and creates special bodies that make the decisions outside of democratic channels. Fusion centers are part of this trend in the general sense that they're a product of this post-9/11 security surge that restricts the freedoms that ostensibly provide liberal democracies their legitimacy. In so doing, they also expand the powers of executive bodies like the police departments. Fusion centers are also an example of authoritarian statism in the sense that they take political power away from popular control. Fusion centers are a product of a distinct era of public policy formation, where efficiency is considered to be more important than the standardization. The key policies that shape fusion centers are not binding regulations written by legislators or agency heads. They were drafted as "recommendations" and "baseline capabilities" in large working groups of "stakeholders," including the police professional associations.

These changes in the state are, of course, grounded in wider shifts in political economy. Here, the basic argument is that globalization and financialization have decisively shifted power to global capital at the expense not just of the working class, but also at the expense of the state itself and other segments of capital. In this hyper competitive economy, where money moves quickly and everyone competes in a global economy, it's hard to have a welfare state, the type of strong state that can both protect less competitive sectors of capital and provide a good bargain with workers. Instead, the hegemonic compact shifts toward coercion and more disciplinary aspects of security take over. Under authoritarian statism, we get more prisons and cops and less "social security" measures like investments in welfare, public health, and education. Pacifying the Homeland situates the institutionalization of intelligence fusion in relation to these trends. From the 1970s to the 2000s, authoritarian statism consolidated, in large part, through the punitive turn in criminal justice that produced what we now call mass incarceration. One of my claims -the balance of police strategies to administer population has shifted away from incarceration and more toward surveillance and intelligence-led policing- I'd like to think this passing development, a morbid stage as authoritarian statism withers and dies and we build a new type of economy and society. Whether it's the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning, however, is a matter of politics.

The recourse to privacy is a common argument and familiar appeal within liberal discourse to not only ostensibly combat the ramifications of surveillance technologies' tendency to mission creep beyond their stated intent and purpose, but to reign in the way these objects and practices strengthen the edifice of authoritarian statism. However, the parameters of the private sphere have always been shifted and made malleable to the requirements of capital [as well as police]. In your book, Pacifying the Homeland, you make very clear the point that, as part of liberal ideology, privacy functions as pacification. Would you elaborate upon this critique?

Privacy is an insufficient response to concerns about surveillance and police power. Scholars of surveillance often focus narrowly on the implementation of privacy policies and their inadequacy. Civil libertarians assert privacy as a universal right that can be defend against the encroachment of outside parties. They position "the right to privacy" or "the state" as independent entities that stand apart from the social relations and political processes that, historically, created them and still imbue them with meaning.

This way of thinking turns historically specific social relations and the ideas that animate them into abstract "things." "Privacy" is not a natural condition that is always and already in opposition to "the public." Instead, "privacy" is a particular claim made within a particular context: 16th century liberal theory. A concession that the consolidating administrative state made to "the public," privacy has no essential essence. Instead, its boundaries set and reset by the state.

Rather than a basis of resistance, privacy is a tool of regulation: privacy as pacification. In a social world already governed by the commodity form and wage relation, privacy reinforces the very divisions between people that make capital accumulation and its security regimes possible. Privacy promises a life of individuals who live apart and choose to do so. Since we lack access to the means to any autonomous means of subsistence, we're coerced into selling our labor and buying our lives back at price that we don't set. Ideas of like privacy are part of a liberal ideology that tell us this is a natural and desirable state of affairs.

For this reason, privacy, as sole or even primary means of defense against surveillance and police power, is a politically counterproductive. Consider the stance of the premier civil liberties organization, the ACLU, toward fusion centers. In 2008, they identified a series of problems with fusion centers-ambiguous lines of authority, private sector and military participation, and wholesale datamining and excessive secrecy. They recommended that US Congress and state legislatures work to increase oversight of fusion centers, regulate the flow of information between fusion centers and the private sector, clarify "how and when" military personnel can collect intelligence for law enforcement purposes, and strengthen open records laws. The ACLU did not demand an end to these problematic practices. Instead, they sought to regulate and, thus, codify them. Challenging intelligence fusion on these terms will, at best, produce limited public oversight (an ACLU representative on the fusion center's executive board) and some modest restrictions on intelligence gathering (three month retention periods for certain kinds of data), which would only be contravened in exceptional circumstances (an emergency warrant or administrative subpoena).

Getting back to intelligence fusion. In what manner has it shaped a key ritual of the police power, the power of the manhunt in capturing, documenting, and dominating the enemies of capital? Who are these enemies, or "terror identities," that garner the most attention from intelligence analysts?

The order of capital is predicated on the imposition of the necessity of a particular kind of work, work for the wage. In a capitalist economy, you're not offered a great job. Instead, you're denied access to the means of subsistence and forced to find some way to survive. The first proletarians resisted the imposition of work. They clung to the last vestiges of the feudal economy or tried to find some way to survive beyond submitting to new regime of labor. For their refusal to work, they were criminalized as vagabonds and forced to labor through by a series of state interventions that Marx famously described as "grotesquely terroristic laws" that imposed "the discipline necessary for the system of wage-labour."

In other words, capital was formed through a manhunt for pliant laborers and it was the police powers of the state that organized this hunt. It's not just manhunts against vagabonds in this early moment. It's the witch hunts in both Europe and Americas that Silva Federici wrote about, the slave trade (and the attempts to re-capture runaways and destroy maroon societies) and the lynch mobs and pogroms that historically have kept marginalized groups at the bottom of different societies. It's the perpetual police-war against "the criminal element." Today, the newest enemies are so-called terrorist, migrants, and refugees.

In many ways, intelligence fusion just puts a high-tech gloss over this old conflict. The main target of fusion centers are poor people, just like the main target of policing remains poor people. Plain and simple. Intelligence fusion is not about fighting terrorism, whatever that even means, and it's only about combating drugs insofar as the so-called "war on drugs" is just the contemporary manifestation of capital's police-war against labor. As a project of police power, intelligence fusion is about terrorizing the population into accepting the conditions of wage labor. This is the main claim of Pacifying the Homeland. The book details the particulars of today's intelligence-led manhunts: compliance checks, warrants weeps, chronic offender initiatives, and saturation patrols. All of these are police operations that begin with intelligence analysis and end with teams of police hunting the population that lives of the borders of the formal and informal economies and bounces back and forth between sites of imprisonment and disinvested, hyper-policed communities.

The poor may be the main subject of intelligence fusion but they're not the only ones. Fusion centers are mixed up in political policing but not in the way that many people imagine. Fusion centers aren't the center of a new COINTELPRO, an aggressive and centrally coordinated crackdown on dissent. The attack on dissent in the US today is no were near what happened in the 1960s and 1970s and it's not possible for someone to step in and play the role of a 21st century J. Edgar Hoover.

Of course, there is political policing happening the US today. The book traces the evolution of political policing. It starts with this new concern with "terrorism" that first became salient not after 9/11 but in the 1980s. The opening act was the FBI's creation of the Joint Terrorist Task Forces to go after the ultra-left splinters of the mass movements of the long 1960s, the urban guerilla movements like May 19th communist organization. Also immediately, the JTTFs targeted non-violent movements like the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, Witness for Peace, and AIDs Coalition to Unleash Power. In the 1990s, the big concern was eco-terrorists. In the last two decades, more "terror identities" have proliferated: anarchist extremists, black identity extremists and the like.

Most of what's happening is surveillance and reporting. There haven't been too many examples of active counter-subversion, where infiltrators sow discord and do everything they can to destroy movements and organizations. There have dramatic confrontations like the crackdown on Occupy and the showdown at Standing Rock, but even these are organized through different means. Rather than J. Edgar Hoover's centrally directed countersubversion campaign, we have a complicated patchwork. Political policing operates through overlapping interagency intelligence networks, including the DHS-recognized National Network of Fusion Centers. This decentralized model is more permeable to local political pressures. Indeed, private interests-not politicians or government officials-appear to have been the leading actors during the crackdown on Occupy and the showdown over the Dakota Access Pipeline. In many other cases, secrecy and organizational complexity complicate a clear parsing of events and actors. This decentralized system produces diverse outcomes. It is also harder to expose and redress than the highly centralized COINTELPRO program and, as a more supple system, may be a more effective means to pacify class struggle.

In any case, what we often talk about as "political policing" only targets the self-conscious mobilization of a class-for-itself, the efforts of organized movements. Intelligence fusion-and police power in general-also attends to less explicit manifestations of class struggle: the ill-understood and often illegible survival strategies of disarticulated segments of the working class. These practices are usually dismissed as the moral failings of the "criminal element." The varied genres of the prose of pacification code it as "crime" or "the street economy." Sometimes, it explodes as a "riot." Here, we find the surplus populations who are not (fully) incorporated within capitalist social relations, the structurally excluded people whose needs and desires cannot be (fully) satisfied within the constraints of capitalist social relations. This social space is privileged domain of police power, where the state's role in producing and maintaining the most basic social relations that define capitalism are laid bare. I think this is one of central contradiction of capitalist civilization and I try to discuss and develop in terms a dialectic between police power and moral economies of poverty.

Would you elaborate upon this central contradiction of capital that exists between the police power and the moral economies of poverty it targets under the aegis of the war on drugs? What is the moral economy of poverty and what does this tension illustrate about not only state formation, but the state's active engagement in the (re)production of the working class?

I use the concept of moral economy to try to understand "crime" without reproducing the class biases of security. I ended up here to make sense of the war on drugs. From the outside and from a certain class position, the drug trade might looks like pathological violence that is so harmful to poor communities. Today, the illegal trade in drugs is huge business that provides real incomes for a lot people. This means there are entire communities where the drug trade is tacitly accommodated because it's understood as some of the best work available. The book opens with the example of Camden, NJ, a city where a third of population lives below the poverty line and, at one point, there was one open air drug market for every 440 residents. The violence of drug trade, paradoxically, produces a particular kind of social order, it's a moral economy of poverty. A lot of Camden residents don't like but many still recognize that the drug trade helps keep the city afloat.

The moral economies are dialectically related to police power. The prose of pacification codes the unauthorized violence of moral economies as pathological violence-"bad neighborhoods filled with bad people"-and invites a security response. As always, the politics of security erases the history that produced problem. Scholars have long established that segregation and discrimination first and later the uneven impacts of deindustrialization and welfare state retrenchment produced the de-facto apartheid boundaries of American city but we ignore all that and reduce it down to a simple problem for the cops and courts to manage. The police can't resolve these social problems but that's not the point. Instead, the current police-war against them provides legitimacy to police-"they're protecting us from violent drug traffickers"-and organizes how the state administers the working class.

The war on drugs is a mechanism to regulate and tax criminalized labor in an era where inequality is increasing and huge swaths of population participate in informal economies. Asset forfeiture laws allow police to tax these illicit economies. Money and property seized in criminal investigations can be expropriated by police agencies. For example, police in New York State, from 1990 to 2010, seized nearly $244 million in cash alone and distributed over $88 million of these assets to police agencies. In some jurisdictions, the conflict of interest generated by this for-profit policing is blatant. In New York's Nassau County, the intelligence center, the Lead Development Center (LDC), sits under the Asset Forfeiture and Intelligence Unit of the Nassau County Police. The LDC operates at no budgetary cost for the department. It is funded exclusively through asset seizures and grants. This is an extreme example but it underscores the role drug operations play in regulating a criminalized market that cannot be suppressed.

The deeper issue here, however, is a structural one: the administration of particular form of the working class. The war on drugs isn't about stopping drugs. It's about regulating criminalized labor. We have all these people who are involved in the accumulation of capital and circulation of goods but it's happening outside of legal channels. When the police arrest people for drugs they impose legal forms of subjectivity on surplus populations that are weakly connected to formal labor markets. Historically, the recognition of organized labor pacified the working class by incorporating them within capitalist states. This administrative subsumption of labor is one the primary ways state administration continually (re)produces capitalist social relations. Policing accomplishes this same process for the criminalized workers of the drug economy. Instead of subsuming legal labor within the confines of "labor law," it envelopes criminalized labor within the "drug war." Police surveillance and intelligence gathering track the drug trade and identify its key players. Arrest and prosecution imposes legal subjectivities on both individual and collective actors: people involved in the drug economy and the "criminal conspiracies" they create. The prohibition of drugs creates a caste of criminalized labor that policing regulates and taxes. Cumulatively, these efforts pacify class struggle by dividing the working class into a profaned "criminal element" and "decent" people.

Returning to your comments on the extent of contemporary political policing -or lack thereof- through intelligence fusion, can you speak to any scenarios where fusion center staff took a noninterventionist, hands-off approach toward a political movement and/or protest in conflict with local law enforcement?

During Occupy, some fusion centers did want anything to do with monitoring the protest. They viewed it as political speech and steered clear. During fight over Dakota Access Pipeline, some local law enforcement agencies wouldn't arrest people for trespassing, which bothered the private sector company that had been hired to crush the protests. The reasons for these incidents, and several others which the book also details, is a shift in the nature of political policing.

After the exposure of COINTELPRO and Watergate, there were investigations and some reforms. The investigations paradoxically re-legitimized security agencies by demonstrating their apparent accountability, while simultaneously allowing controversial practices to continue by covering them with a patina of legality. The result was a seemingly limited version of human rights compliant political policing, a strategy that endeavors to protect political rights and facilitate peaceful protest, while still combating "extremism."

As I mentioned earlier, we don't see the aggressive infiltration and active countersubversion that characterized COINTELPRO. However, we do see wholesale surveillance and intelligence gathering, including the use of informants (who often work to entrap people in manufactured terrorism plots). I fear all of this may be more subtle and effective mode of political policing. Instead heavy headed repression-the whip of the counterrevolution that polarizes and escalates the struggle-we have a more subtle repression-accommodation dialectic. A certain amount of protest is allowed and even encouraged. The police are here to help you exercise your rights and weed out the troublemakers who may be planning more militant action that can be criminalized as terrorism or violence.

Just by way of an anecdote: In 2017, Los Angeles Police Department was revealed to have spied on the anti-Trump group Refuse Fascism with an informant attending meetings ostensibly to gather intelligence that would tip authorities off to any upcoming freeway shutdowns. No violent, far-right groups were spied on by LAPD during this time. Granted, we know little to the extent of fusion center involvement in this particular instance, but it wouldn't surprise me given the numerous cases of law enforcement collaborating with neo-Nazis and white nationalist types.

Have fusion centers taken the threat of far-right violence seriously (given that the FBI seems more predisposed to spy on Black Lives Matter, "Black Identity Extremists," anarchists and other leftist persuasions than neo-Nazis)? How aware and/or vigilant are they of this threat in the age of Trump and a resurgent white nationalism?

This is a difficult question to answer because events are still unfolding and information is spotty. I think there is an important political struggle happening within the security apparatus over the status of white supremacists and other extreme right formations. My sense is that the liberal reformers-the professionalizers, people who want "better" policing-are losing power to fascists or proto-fascists-the people who to hunt for enemies.

Before we get into the specifics of any example, however, it should go without saying that the police are the police. They're the physical embodiment of the state's monopoly on violence. As an institution, there's a baseline conservativism that's ingrained in the police. In more conventional sociological terms, they're a hierarchy-reinforcing institution. We should never expect the police to be anything but enemies of the project revolutionary social transformation. It should never surprise us when the individual police officers or whole departments become surveillance and disrupt social movements. It should never surprise us when individual officers or departments conspire with individuals or groups on the extreme right. These are expected.

At the same time, the specificities of how these dynamics occur matter tremendously. We can't just string together the crimes of the state and assume that it all means that it's a seamless machinery of oppression and that is ready to squelch all political challenges. We're talking about many headed administrative apparatus that's often beset by organizational pathologies and riven by internal conflicts. How the state really operates and this more specific question about the position of the security apparatus toward the extreme right is tremendously very important because it gets at two important points: a theoretical one about the nature of state apparatus and political one about the strategic alignment of power. What's at stake is our understanding of social power and change and how assess the political opportunities of the moment. That said, there are two dynamics that explain much of what we're seeing: the constraints of human rights compliant political policing, and the internal struggle within state around the far right and their efforts to infiltrate the security apparatus.

First, human right's compliant political policing. This what liberals and politics of privacy and legality gets you. If we look at policing in relation to the rest of security apparatus and not just prisons, then, we see that the period of mass incarceration is also this post-Watergate, post-Vietnam period, where liberal professionalizes sought to legitimate the security apparatus through reform. This reform current extended into policing with measures like the Handschu guidelines, which constrained political policing in New York City. Later, it became generalized as response to police brutality in the 1990s, when the DOJ began taking over police departments and overseeing reforms to eliminate racial profiling and police brutality. It continues with calls for procedural reforms and technocratic solutions like body cameras. A lot of the people involved may be earnest and some of these policy changes may blunt some of the sharper edges of oppression but they're structural effect is to reaffirm the legitimacy of the state security and preserve its power and discretion.

So let's get into specifics, human rights compliant political policing, as a general rule, treats all political activity the same, regardless of its content. White supremacists advocating genocide and an ethnostate have the same rights to freedom of speech and assembly as leftist calling for a borderless world and a transition to socialism. This ethos is entrenched in police agencies. It was even put forward as official policy, when I observed a Fusion Liaison Officer training conducted by one of the senior managers at New Jersey's fusion center. The section of the training on civil liberties demonstrated showed a high degree of self-awareness. The officer explained many of the concerns with fusion centers, citing the 2007 ACLU report on the subject. He then discussed how the fusion center dealt with large protest actions. He referenced their monitoring of Occupy to show how limited reporting for situational awareness and officer safety was appropriate but anything more would have violated constitutional rights and ROIC's privacy policy. He also brought up a 2011 Neo-Nazi rally in Trenton as an example. While the trooper presented Occupy in a neutral tone, he described Neo-Nazis as "scum" and "the worst people you can possibly imagine." However, he noted that their protest was permitted and, even though the rally was advocating odious positions, the fusion center could only take the same limited measures they took toward Occupy. With both examples, the intended point was that investigation required a "nexus" to crime or terrorism.

This dynamic provides perspective on recent clashes between Antifascists and far right groups. When left counter-protesters disrupt a white supremacist rally, this registers as an attack on white supremacists right of assembly. After all, the title of the controversial intelligence report on "anarchist extremists" released days before the infamous Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville was "Domestic Terrorist Violence at Lawfully Permitted White Supremacists Rallies Likely to Continue." In short, humans compliant political policing is real. It's a different form of CONTELPRO-era countersubversion and it can help explain why police tolerated both Occupy encampments and Neo-Nazi rallies.

At the same time, there is also a political struggle within the state around the far-right. Throughout the Obama Administration, the status of far-right movements as domestic terrorists was point of bitter controversy. In April 2009, DHS predicted an increase in far-right violence and identified four causes: prolonged economic downturn, the election of a Black president, renewed debates over gun control and the return of military veterans to civilian life. The report was leaked to the press and right-wing media had a field day. Eventually, then-DHS secretary Janet Napolitano shut down the unit that produced the report, leaving DHS with no analysts focusing on the far-right. Primary author of report eventually went public. Some Congressional Representatives pressured the Obama Administration to do more and they threw some money at counter-radicalization but did not re-commit DHS to reporting on the far right. As expected, the Trump Administration quickly rolled back this half measure.

That said, DHS-the federal agency-has no or at least very few analysts reporting on the far right but the fusion centers, which are run by state and local law enforcement, still are reporting on neo-Nazis, White Supremacists and other far right groups. The FBI is also still actively investigating the far right. There's lots of documents that journalist have obtained through FIOA that show this and the book gets into some of these examples and finer detail.

What these episodes underscore, however, is that there is a real battle happening within the state over the meaning of "domestic terrorism." There's plenty of people in law enforcement who want and are going after the far right but there's probably just as many or even more that sympathize with the far right. In 2006, the FBI produced an internal intelligence assessment document concerning the far-right's attempts to infiltrate police agencies and influence officers. While almost nothing is known about the FBI's efforts to address this issue, it is apparently a cause of some concern.

The limitations of human rights compliant political policing and efforts of the far-right to infiltrate law enforcement cast an ominous shadow over the violence in Charlottesville and similar clashes. Although there is no evidence that white supremacist infiltrated the Charlottesville Police or the Virginia State Police, the lead agency at the Virginia Fusion Center, an independent review of the response to the Unite the Right Rally by a former federal attorney shows that police downplayed the white supremacist threat. The report documents several intelligence analyses received by the Charlottesville Police that predicted violence from far-right militants. It also provides some anecdotes of individual law enforcement officers downplaying the threat from the far-right and positioning left counter-protestors as more problematic.

These battles are important because help us understand the political dynamics of our moment. To return to an earlier point, the implication for our understanding of the state is that the state is arena of this struggle but it's not the agent of the struggle in any direct and simple way. The institutional condensation of political power. It's continually reshaped by struggles within and outside the state apparatus to define policy and distribute resources. It's also shaped by larger forces, as I tried to explain in my comments on authoritarian statism and globalization. In short, the state is neither a thing to be seized nor smashed. It's an institutional condensation of power to approached, politically, at the level of strategy. This returns me to my other point about the strategic alignment of power. These battles of over status of white supremacists within the security apparatus and related questions of police collaboration with far-right groups speaks to wider political process. The balance of social forces since the 1970s-call it neoliberalism, the carceral state, whatever-is clearly unraveling. There's a three-way fight going on right now between the collapsing neoliberal center, the fascist right and the nascent left. We need to think about the security apparatus, we confront hard questions. The left position isn't to demand the police go after the fascists. Both the police and the fascists need to be defeated politically.

To conclude, one overarching imperative I noticed while reading your book -one the key struggles abolitionists must surmount- is to abolish not only the police, but the police power. How might we challenge a purposefully vague, capillary, patriarchal power that occupies nearly every nook and cranny of the state and that permeates the broader society down to the level of individual subjectivity?

To come up with solutions, it necessary to understand the specific nature of the problem and Pacifying the Homeland is my effort to name some the very particular problems of our times. You're right that one of the main problems the book names is police power. It's not just the police, the bodies of armed men in squad cars and frisking black and brown people on street corners. It's the way the police powers of the state administer our lives in ways to the benefit of capital. I think taking this expanded concept of police power expands the horizon of abolitionist politics.

Consider the divest-reinvest strategy toward abolition that came out The Vision for Black Lives policy report and was endorsed by the Democratic Socialist of America. Divesting from the police and the military and reinvesting in education and social services sounds great but I think it could be easily co-opted. Reinvest into what exactly? Social services as they currently exist? Shrink the armed uniformed police and expand soft social police? While such efforts certainly would make a meaningful difference in the lives of those most victimized by police, it would hardly challenge the rule of capital and the modern state. Instead, abolishing police power requires rethinking "social services" on terms that explicitly challenge the basic social relations that police power, in its myriad forms, maintains: private property, the commodity form, and the wage relation. In other words, the positive project of abolition would require a "reinvestment" in care and reconstruction the commons.

From this perspective, Medicare for All should be advanced as an abolitionist demand. By de-commodifying healthcare and transforming into a universal public good it could be part of reinvigorated social democratic commons Left organizations could organize political power to redirect resources from police, prisons, and the security apparatus and reinvestment in a series of socialist programs, a "common" decency that should afforded to all by virtue of their inalienable humanity: universal right to cradle-to-grave care (universal healthcare, free education, etc.), and basic right to life (housing, a job or basic income guarantee).

The horizons of what we could call "abolition socialism" could also help confront other difficult questions that historically have plagued socialist movements. The reconstitution of the commons would also require requires a reckoning with histories of colonial violence and dispossession. Capital emerged through the disproportionate destruction of particular cultures. It created hierarchy of peoples. The modern capitalist world-system created through various the projects of policing and pacification is also and always racial capitalism. In other words, a meaningfully abolishing police power and recreating the commons would also require addressing historic injustices that divided the global working class into mutually antagonistic nations and races. In this way, reparations for slavery, for colonial dispossession, and for unequal North-South relations can be thought of as necessary part of both the transition to socialism and abolition of police power.

“The Neoliberal Project Is Alive But Has Lost Its Legitimacy”: An Interview with David Harvey

By Jipson John and Jitheesh P. M.

British scholar David Harvey is one of the most renowned Marxist scholars in the world today. His course on Karl Marx's Capital is highly popular and has even been turned into a series on YouTube. Harvey is known for his support of student activism, community and labour movements.

In an interview with The Wire, he talks about the problems arising out of the neo-liberal project, the resulting surge of populist politics and right-wing movements. He also talks about the relevance of Marx's critique of capitalism in the present context and the threat to labour from automation.

The interview has been edited slightly for style and clarity.

Could you trace the origin of neo-liberalism? What were the structural reasons for its emergence?

The idealist interpretation of liberalism rests on a utopian vision of a world of individual freedom and liberty for all guaranteed by an economy based on private property rights, self-regulating free markets and free trade, designed to foster technological progress and rising labour productivity to satisfy the wants and needs of all.

In liberal theory, the role of the state is minimal (a "night-watchman" state with laissez faire policies). In neo-liberalism it is accepted that the state play an active role in promoting technological changes and endless capital accumulation through the promotion of commodification and monetisation of everything along with the formation of powerful institutions (such as Central Banks and the International Monetary Fund) and the rebuilding of mental conceptions of the world in favor of neoliberal freedoms.

These liberal and neo-liberal utopian visions have long been critiqued as inadequate because as Marx so clearly shows in practice, they both support a world in which the rich get richer at the expense of the well-being and exploited labour of the mass of the population.

Keynesian policies and the redistributive state after 1945 proposed an alternative utopian vision that rested on the increasing empowerment of the working classes without challenging the power of private property. In the 1970s, a counter-revolutionary movement arose in Europe and the Americas organised by the large corporations and the capitalist classes to overthrow the Keynesian system and to replace it with a neo-liberal model (along with all its ideological baggage) as a means for the capitalist class to recuperate its waning economic strength and its fading political power.

This is what [Margaret] Thatcher, [Ronald] Reagan, [Augusto] Pinochet, the Argentinian generals etc did throughout the 1980s. It is continuing today. The result has been rising economic and political inequality and increasing environmental degradation across the globe.

You describe accumulation by dispossession as one of the most important characteristics of neoliberalism. How does it work and what are its structural consequences?

Capital can accumulate in two ways. Labour can be exploited in production to create the surplus value that lies at the basis of the profit appropriated by capital. Capital can also accumulate by thievery, robbery, usury, commercial cheating and scams of all sorts.

In the theory of primitive accumulation, Marx points out how so much of the original accumulation of capital was based on such practices. These practices continue but have now been supplemented by a mass of new strategies.

In the foreclosure crisis in the USA of 2007-8 maybe 6-7 million people lost the asset values of their homes while Wall Street bonuses soared. Speculation in asset values (land and property for example) provides a non-productive avenue for accumulation.

Bankruptcy moves by major corporations (e.g. airlines) deprives employees of their pension and heath care rights. Monopoly pricing in pharmaceuticals, in telecommunications, in health care insurance in the USA provide lucrative avenues for profiteering. Increasing extraction of wealth through indebtedness is evident. Rentier extractions based on accumulation by dispossession (e.g. acquiring land or mineral resources illegally or at cut rates) have become more common because the rising mass of global capital is finding increasing difficulty in procuring productive uses for surplus capital.

Even during Marx's time, there were several critiques of capitalism. How do you differentiate Marx's critique from these strands?

Many of the critiques of capitalism were based on moral categories (evil and greedy capitalists versus impoverished and badly treated workers or more recently, environmentally callous capitalists versus the ecologists). Marx's critique is systemic. Moral and ethical objections remain, but Marx treats them as secondary to the systemic problem of why and how to replace the capitalist mode of production and its disastrous laws of motion by some other way of meeting human wants and needs.

Do you think capitalism has reached a dead end, especially in context of the 2008 crisis? Can capital recover?

Capital is not at a dead end. The neo-liberal project is alive and well. Jair Bolsanaro, recently elected in Brazil, proposes to repeat what Pinochet did in Chile after 1973.

The problem is that neo-liberalism no longer commands the consent of the mass of the population. It has lost its legitimacy. I already pointed out in The Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005) that neo-liberalism could not survive without entering into an alliance with state authoritarianism. It now is moving towards an alliance with neo-fascism, because as we see from all the protest movements around the world, everyone now sees neo-liberalism is about lining the pockets of the rich at the expense of the people (this was not so evident in the 1980s and early 1990s).

Marx believed that capitalism would die out due to its internal contradictions. You don't agree with this. Why?

Marx sometimes makes it seem as if capital is destined to self-destruct. But in most instances, he looks on crises as moments of reconstruction for capital rather than of collapse. "[C]rises are never more than momentary, violent solutions for the existing contradictions, violent eruptions that re-establish the balance that has been disturbed," as he says in Volume 3 of Capital.

Where he does see capital ending, it is because of a class movement. I believe my position is in agreement with Marx. Capitalism will not end of its own accord. It will have to be pushed, overthrown, abolished. I disagree with those who think all we have to do is wait for it to self-destruct. That is not, in my view, Marx's position.

You consistently argue that Marx talked not just about value at the production level but also the arena of realisation. Could you elaborate this in the present context?

In the first chapter of Capital, Marx recognises that value is created in production and realised in the market. If there is no market, then there is no value. So value is dependent upon the contradictory unity between production and realisation. Realisation depends upon the wants, needs and desires of a population backed by the ability to pay.

The history of capitalism has been about the production of new wants, needs and desires (e.g. consumerism of various sorts and the production of daily forms of life to which we must conform in order to live reasonably such as automobiles and suburban living). I now teach an audience where everyone has a cell phone (which did not exist twenty years ago). To live in most US cities, you need an automobile which pollutes.

Marxists have paid a lot of attention to production, but have neglected issues of realisation. In my view, it is the contradictory unity of the two (which Marx mentions as crucial but does not elaborate upon) that should be the focus of our attention. Extraction and appropriation of value (often via dispossession) at the point of realisation is a political focus of struggle as are the qualities of daily life.

German socio-economist Wolfgang Streeck has identified five problems of capitalism in his How will Capitalism End. Instead, you identified 17 contradictions, not problems, of contemporary capitalism. What is the difference between problems and contradictions regarding the crisis of capitalism?

Problems have solutions. Contradictions do not: they always remain latent. They can only be managed and as Marx points out, crises arise when antagonisms are heightened into absolute contradictions. The contradiction between productive forces and social relations cannot be solved. It will always be with us. The contradiction between production and realisation will always be with us, etc.

I listed seventeen contradictions in order to emphasise that crises can arise in many different ways and that we need to develop a theory of crises which understands their multiple sources so we can get away from the "single bullet" theory that too often haunts Marxist thinking.

Under capitalism, automation causes significant job loss all over the world. Even the World Bank has raised concerns regarding automation. What is the challenge of automation under capitalism? What effect will it have on working class politics?

The parallel with automation in manufacturing and AI in services is useful. In manufacturing, labour was disempowered by tech change. Plus, offshoring with tech change is much more important. But manufacturing did not disappear. It continued to expand in different ways (e.g. fast food restaurants that produce hamburgers rather than factories that produce automobiles).

We will see much the same thing in services (we check ourselves in or out in supermarkets and airlines now). The left lost the battle against automation in manufacturing and is in danger of repeating its dismal record in services. We should welcome AI in services and promote it, but try to find a path towards a socialist alternative. AI will create new jobs as well as displace some. We need to adapt to that.

What do you mean by 'new imperialism'? What is its basic characteristic? How is it qualitatively different from classical imperialism?

I called it "the new imperiliasm" since it was an explicit theory advanced by the neo-conservatives in the US in the run up to the Iraq war. I wanted to critique that, not to get back to Lenin's theory, but to point out that the neo-liberal world order was sucking out value in all kinds of ways from all manner of places (e.g. through commodity chains). This was, of course, the topic of Brief History of Neoliberalism, which followed on from The New Imperialism. The two books should be read together.

There is an argument and belief, even among left intellectuals in the West, that the global south delinking from globalisation will result in a return to pre-modernity. What is your take on this? What should constitute the development agenda of the global south?

I think the idea of a total delinking would be disastrous. But I think selective delinking and the search for autonomous regionalities though bioregionalism is a good idea. The idea is to build alternative geographies of interrelations, but the global perspective (e.g. on global warming) is critical.

Study on cities is one of your areas of interest. You analyse cities as spaces of surplus appropriation. How does this work, especially in the context of neo-liberal cities? What is the importance of the right to city?

Urbanisation and capital accumulation go hand in hand and that is one of the aspects of Marxist thought that has been historically underdeveloped. Now half of the world's populations live in cities. So questions of daily life in environments constructed for purposes of capital accumulation is a big issue and a source of contradiction and conflict. This is emphasised politically by the pursuit of the right to the city: e.g. class struggle in and over the qualities of urban life. Many of the major social movements in recent decades have been over such questions (e.g Gezi Park in Istanbul).

Your condition of post-modernity looks into its material base. On a philosophical level, what is the larger influence of post-modernism on social life? What about the idea of post-truth?

Like many other broad-based, and to some degree incoherent cultural movements, the post-modern turn created positive openings along with absurdities and retrogressive impacts. I liked the fact that it opened up perspectivism and emphasized space, but I could see no reason why this would be antagonistic to Marxism, since in my own work, I emphasize how to integrate space, geographies and perspectivism into Marxism.

At the end of the day, as Eagleton pointed out at the time, the movement went too far in seeing "no difference between truth, authority and rhetorical seductiveness" such that "he who has the smoothest tongue and the raciest story has the power." It "junked history, refused argumentation, aestheticized politics and staked all on the charisma of those who told the stories." Donald Trump is a product of this post-modern excess.

In the initial stage, we thought internet as the great liberating force. But over the course of time, big monopolies emerged, profiting from the digital space. Cases like Cambridge Analytica reveal how personal data is being manipulated by these monopolies. What is the danger it poses? How to liberate internet as a public utility?

There is no such thing as a good and emancipatory technology that cannot be co-opted and perverted into a power of capital. And so it is in this case.

How do you locate the emergence of Donald Trump? How can the rise of populism in different parts of the world be addressed?

He is a post-modern president of universal alienation.

Does the growing popularity of Bernie Sanders and Jermy Corbyn in the U.S. and UK elections respectively make you hopeful? Were they just election mobilisations? What should be the form and content of present day socialist politics?

There is a big difference between mobilisation and organisation. Only now, we are beginning to see elements on the left that see that building an organisation is crucial to gaining and holding political power.

In the British case, the rise of momentum alongside a resurgence of party building provides hopeful signs, as does the manifesto for bringing key elements of the economy into the public domain (which is different from nationalisation) as a political strategy. But the problem is that many in the parliamentary Labour party are as yet unsupportive. As yet, we do not see enough of this sort of thing in the U.S.

There is surge of right-wing politics across the world. The latest is example is the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Is the world moving towards fascism, similar to the 1930s and 40s? What is the political economy behind the sudden rise of ultra right-wing politicians like Bolsonaro in a Latin American country which was famous for left politics?

Alienation produced by neo-liberalism managed by the Workers Party, coupled with widespread corruption, produces a mass base prone to be exploited by neo-fascist delusions. The left failed to organise and now has to do so in the face of repressions.

Your course on Marx and Marxism has been very popular worldwide. How relevant is Marxism today? What do you think are Marx's contributions?

Marx wrote the beginnings of a stunningly perceptive analysis of how capital works as a mode of production. Capital was developed in Marx's time in only one minor part of the world. But it is now everywhere, so Marx's analysis is far more relevant now than it was in his time. Everyone who studies Marx carefully recognises this, which in some ways, explains why political power is so desperate to repress this mode of thought.

There exist significant despair and dissatisfaction among the common masses under neo-liberal capitalism. Where does the hope for a better world lie? What sustains your hope?

In spite of all the attempts at repression, people are increasingly seeing that there is something wrong with not only neo-liberalism, but also capitalism. It plainly does not and cannot deliver on it promises and the need for some other form of political-economic organisation is becoming ever more obvious.

This interview originally appeared at The Wire .

India's Dowry System and Social Reproduction Theory

By Valerie Reynoso

The practice of paying dowries is rooted in ancient tradition. It began as a Hindu religious requirement in the Manusmriti, a text from around 1500 BC that dictated the way of life and laws for Hindus. Ancient Hindus would gift each other during a wedding as a cultural requirement. Fathers were obligated to gift expensive clothes and jewelry to their daughters and to gift a cow and a bull to the family of the bride. When a woman moved in with her husband, she was provided with money, jewelry and property to secure her financial independence after marriage.[1] Over time, the dowry system has developed into a fully-formed, patriarchal, capitalist mechanism in which Indian women are reduced to being socially-reproductive providers.

In modern-day India, dowry has shifted from financial independence for brides to a system of groom prices in which women have virtually no control over their finances within a marriage. Dowry prices are negotiated verbally between the families of the groom and the bride. The settled price is paid to the family of the groom once married; however, there is often further demand for more money once the bride moves in with the husband. When these new demands are not met, it can have fatal consequences for the bride. [2].

The social reproduction and commodification of women's bodies, as well as the enforcement of private property under capitalism, has resulted in women being rendered as tools for patriarchal exploitation. Social reproduction refers to the work that goes into producing workers who then have their labor exploited in the name of capitalism by the upper class. Social reproduction relates to feminism and gender power dynamics because women are socialized to carry the burden of housework, childcare, and socially reproducing their husbands who then go off to work. In the case of the dowry system and the Indian women subject to it, this dynamic is further intensified due to the demands for dowry and increased patriarchal violence when this demand is not met. Social reproduction theory is the understanding of the "production of goods and services and the production of life are part of one integrated process."[3] It is a historical-materialist analysis which builds on the premise that race, gender, and class oppressions are connected and occur simultaneously under capitalism. This theory explores the relationship between oppression and exploitation.

These oppressive systems have turned dowry culture from one rooted in ancestral tradition where women are socioeconomically uplifted to one where women are socioeconomically exploited, abused, and killed in the name of money and patriarchy. This deviation of the connotation dowry has also signifies how gender is informed by organizational violence, through which the submission of underclass women is maintained by means of financial, physical and psychological abuse. Indian women are seen as assets to elevate the hierarchical status of the men they marry through the forced provision of dowry.

The Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961 outlawed people from demanding or giving dowry as a pre-condition for marriage. Section 498a of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) states that any female death within the first seven years of a marriage will be automatically concluded to have been a result of dowry harassment. Section 304b IPC refers to cruelty against brides. These laws were designated preventative measures but they have evidently not been effective in implementation, as it is difficult for many dowry victims to make time to go to court in order to get help. [4]

According to the National Crime Records Bureau of India, 8,233 dowry deaths were reported in 2012, a rate that equals one victim every 60 minutes. This statistic does not include unreported dowry deaths, since women are discouraged from reporting abuses. Some ways women are abused in demands for dowry is by being blackmailed, beaten, burned alive, threats of having their children taken away, and murder. The National Crime Records Bureau also reported that police throughout India have charged around 93% of accused in dowry deaths and only 34% of them have resulted in convictions. In 2017 the Hindustan Times reported that there had been 15 dowry deaths in the capital of India alone between 2012-2017, but none of these cases resulted in conviction. There are approximately 27 million total pending cases in the Indian legal system, which delays the dowry cases of women even up to 20 years[5]

It is considered a stigma for women to return to their parents' home after marriage. Social norms enforce the "sanctity" of marriage along with a lack of financial independence, all of which prevent rural women from telling the truth about abuses over dowry. Many survivors of burnings are coerced to lie and say it was an accident or attempted suicide out of fear of further abuses by their husbands.[6]

Under the current Dowry system, women are seen as a burden to their families. It is common for families to save money for the future marriages of their daughters from birth, such as taking out loans, selling land, and going in debt in order to save for the daughter's dowry. Infanticides are rampant given that many girls are killed at birth because of the financial burden of dowry. Other families also perform sex-selective abortions if the baby is determined to be a girl. For girls who are not aborted or killed at birth, they typically live a life of poor nutrition, abuse, and illiteracy in rural areas of India particularly. Girls are starved in preference of their brothers and are also discouraged from pursuing an education because they are usually married off at a very young age in order for the family to collect, give, and solicit dowry. As a result, girls become financially dependent on their husbands at a young age. Even when doctors note that the burn patterns on women do not match their claims of self-infliction, they are not expected to report it and usually do not. In court, doctors are only asked to say whether or not the woman was fully conscious and able to make a statement to the police. Sometimes police harass women who report dowry abuse and discourage the women from reporting. [7]

The repression of women and girls under the current dowry system represents the relationship between the processes of producing human labor power and the processes of producing value, as indicated by the concepts defined by social reproduction theory.[8] Indian girls living a life of abuse and negligence, for the direct material benefit of their male counterparts, is similar to how capitalists need human labor power in order to extract profit from the value production they do not produce themselves .[9] Indian women are the bearers of the labor power it takes in order to socially reproduce financially dependent men, such that Indian girls are starved and denied education and job opportunities in the name of dowry, so that boys may take advantage of these instead. The dowry system provides Indian men with socioeconomic power that is derived from the physical exploitation of Indian women, who are controlled by financial subordination and sexist gender roles that limit them to the home. This cycle of social reproduction is continued when Indian girls are married off by their families to a husband to whom they will owe a life of servitude and financial dependence. Seeing that marrying off Indian girls at a young age is driven by the collection and solicitation of dowry, their bodies are being commodified as a vessel through which their families can accumulate capital. This happens until the woman is severely abused or murdered when demands for more dowry can no longer be satisfied.

Moreover, the price of dowry varies per one's socioeconomic status. Underclass grooms typically demand smaller dowries but it is still a financial burden for poor families who do not have the means of paying it. Parents will raise money for the dowry by selling land or going bankrupt after the marriage. Lower castes of India, such as the Dalit, obtain money for their daughters' weddings by leasing their sons into bonded labor. Many cotton farmers who have committed suicide in large numbers due to failing crops also did so due to the increased price of dowry, which also increased their debt to unmanageable levels. [10]

Solutions for the human rights epidemic surged by the current dowry system have been posed. In 2006, web entrepreneur Satya Naresh had created the first dowry-free matrimonial site in India and in 12 years only 5,399 men had registered. Naresh stated that not many people have registered for it due to greed - in many cases, even when a man does not want a dowry his parents will still want it and force him to undergo it. World Bank lead economist Dr. Vijayendra Rao stated that a substantial shift in gender norms is required in order to end dowry violence, such as reducing gender discrimination, and increasing female education and socioeconomic independence, in addition to further legal reforms[11].

Ultimately, dowry is a means of enacting socially reproduced violence against women in India through socioeconomic repression and misogyny. The elimination of socioeconomic disparities and gendered oppression, as well as a structural challenge to capitalist modes of production, are needed. This is the only path where Indian women may enjoy equal rights and protection.

Notes

[1] "A Broken Promise; Dowry Violence In India," Pulitzer Center, February 9th, 2019, https://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/broken-promise-dowry-violence-india

[2] Ibid.

[3] Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (London, UK: Pluto Press, 2017).

[4] Ibid.

[5] "'Death by dowry' claim by bereaved family in India, The Guardian, accessed February 9th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jul/18/death-by-dowry-claim-by-bereaved-family-in-india

[6] "A Broken Promise; Dowry Violence In India," Pulitzer Center, February 9th, 2019, https://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/broken-promise-dowry-violence-india

[7] Ibid.

[8] Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (London, UK: Pluto Press, 2017).

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] "'Death by dowry' claim by bereaved family in India, The Guardian, accessed February 9th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jul/18/death-by-dowry-claim-by-bereaved-family-in-india