Capitalism and Mental Health

By David Matthews

Originally published at Monthly Review.

A mental-health crisis is sweeping the globe. Recent estimates by the World Health Organization suggest that more than three hundred million people suffer from depression worldwide. Furthermore, twenty-three million are said to experience symptoms of schizophrenia, while approximately eight hundred thousand individuals commit suicide each year.1 Within the monopoly-capitalist nations, mental-health disorders are the leading cause of life expectancy decline behind cardiovascular disease and cancer.2 In the European Union, 27.0 percent of the adult population between the ages of eighteen and sixty-five are said to have experienced mental-health complications.3 Moreover, in England alone, the predominance of poor mental health has gradually increased over the last two decades. The most recent National Health Service Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey illustrates that in 2014, 17.5 percent of the population over the age of sixteen suffered from varying forms of depression or anxiety, compared to 14.1 percent in 1993. Additionally, the number of individuals whose experiences were severe enough to warrant intervention rose from 6.9 percent to 9.3 percent.4

In capitalist society, biological explanations dominate understandings of mental health, infusing professional practice and public awareness. Emblematic of this is the theory of chemical imbalances in the brain—focusing on the operation of neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine—which has gripped popular and academic consciousness despite remaining largely unsupported.5 Moreover, reflecting the popularity of genetic reductionism within the biological sciences, there has been an effort to identify genetic abnormalities as another cause of mental-health disorders.6 Nonetheless, explanations based on genomics have also failed to generate conclusive evidence.7 While potentially offering illuminating insights into poor mental well-being in specific cases, biological interpretations are far from sufficient on their own. What is abundantly clear is the existence of significant social patterns that elucidate the impossibility of reducing poor mental health to biological determinism.8

The intimate relationship between mental health and social conditions has largely been obscured, with societal causes interpreted within a bio-medical framework and shrouded with scientific terminology. Diagnoses frequently begin and end with the individual, identifying bioessentialist causes at the expense of examining social factors. However, the social, political, and economic organization of society must be recognized as a significant contributor to people’s mental health, with certain social structures being more advantageous to the emergence of mental well-being than others. As the basis on which society’s superstructural formation is erected, capitalism is a major determinant of poor mental health. As the Marxist professor of social work and social policy Iain Ferguson has argued, “it is the economic and political system under which we live—capitalism—which is responsible for the enormously high levels of mental-health problems which we see in the world today.” The alleviation of mental distress is only possible “in a society without exploitation and oppression.”9

In what follows, I briefly sketch the state of mental health in advanced capitalism, using Britain as an example and utilizing the psychoanalytical framework of Marxist Erich Fromm, which emphasizes that all humans have certain needs that must be fulfilled in order to ensure optimal mental health. Supporting Ferguson’s assertion, I argue that capitalism is crucial to determining the experience and prevalence of mental well-being, as its operations are incompatible with true human need. This sketch will include a depiction of the politically conscious movement of users of mental-health services that has emerged in Britain in recent years to challenge biological explanations of poor mental health and to call for locating inequality and capitalism at the heart of the problem.

Mental Health and Monopoly Capitalism

In the final chapters of Monopoly Capital, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy made explicit the consequences of monopoly capitalism for psychological well-being, arguing that the system fails “to provide the foundations of a society capable of promoting the healthy and happy development of its members.”10 Exemplifying the widespread irrationality of monopoly capitalism, they illustrated its degrading nature. It is only for a fortunate minority that work can be considered pleasurable, while for the majority it is a thoroughly unsatisfactory experience. Attempting to avoid work at all costs, leisure frequently fails to offer any consolation, as it is also rendered meaningless. Rather than being an opportunity to fulfill passions, Baran and Sweezy argued that leisure has become largely synonymous with idleness. The desire to do nothing is reflected in popular culture, with books, television, and films inducing a state of passive enjoyment rather than demanding intellectual energies.11 The purpose of both work and leisure, they claimed, largely coalesces around increasing consumption. No longer consumed for their use, consumer goods have become established markers of social prestige, with consumption as a means to express an individual’s social position. Consumerism, however, ultimately breeds dissatisfaction as the desire to substitute old products for new ones turns maintaining one’s position in society into a relentless pursuit of an unobtainable standard. “While fulfilling the basic needs of survival,” Baran and Sweezy argued, both work and consumption “increasingly lose their inner content and meaning.”12 The result is a society characterized by emptiness and degradation. With little likelihood of the working class instigating revolutionary action, the potential reality is a continuation of the “present process of decay, with the contradictions between the compulsions of the system and the elementary needs of human nature becoming ever more insupportable,” resulting in “the spread of increasingly severe psychic disorders.”13 In the current era of monopoly capitalism, this contradiction remains as salient as ever. Modern monopoly-capitalist society continues to be characterized by an incompatibility between, on the one hand, capitalism’s ruthless pursuit of profit and, on the other, the essential needs of people. As a result, the conditions required for optimum mental health are violently undermined, with monopoly-capitalist society plagued by neuroses and more severe mental-health problems.

Erich Fromm: Mental Health and Human Nature

Baran and Sweezy’s understanding of the relationship between monopoly capitalism and the individual was significantly influenced by psychoanalysis. For one, they made references to the centrality of latent energies such as libidinous drives and the need for their gratification. Moreover, they accepted the Freudian notion that social order requires the repression of libidinal energies and their sublimation for socially acceptable purposes.14 Baran himself wrote on psychoanalysis. He had been associated with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in the early 1930s and was directly influenced by the work of Eric Fromm and Herbert Marcuse.15 It is within this broad framework that a theory of mental health can be identified in Baran and Sweezy’s analysis, with the contradictions between capitalism and human need expressing themselves chiefly through the repression of human energies. It was Fromm, most notably, who was to develop a unique Marxist psychoanalytical position that remains relevant to understanding mental health in the current era of monopoly capitalism. And it was from this that Baran, in particular, was to draw.16

While making explicit the importance of Sigmund Freud, Fromm acknowledged his greater debt to Karl Marx, considering him the preeminent intellectual.17 Accepting the Freudian premise of the unconscious and the repression and modification of unconscious drives, Fromm nonetheless recognized the failure of orthodox Freudianism to integrate a deeper sociological understanding of the individual into its analysis. Turning to Marxism, he constructed a theory of the individual whose consciousness is shaped by the organization of capitalism, with unconscious drives repressed or directed toward acceptable social behavior. While Marx never produced a formal psychology, Fromm considered that the foundations of one resided in the concept of alienation.18 For Marx, alienation was an illustration of capitalism’s mortifying physical and mental impact on humans.19 At its heart, it demonstrates the estrangement people feel from both themselves and the world around them, including fellow humans. Alienation’s specific value for understanding mental health lies in illustrating the distinction that emerges under capitalism between human existence and essence. For Marx, capitalism separates individuals from their essence as a consequence of their existence. This principle permeated Fromm’s psychoanalytic framework, which maintained that, under capitalism, humans become divorced from their own nature.

Human nature, Marx argued, consists of dual qualities and we “must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch.”20 There are needs that are fixed, such as hunger and sexual desires, and then there are relative desires that originate from the historical and cultural organization of society.21 Inspired by Marx, Fromm argued that human nature is inherent in all individuals, but that its visible manifestation is largely dependent on the social context. It is untenable to assume “man’s mental constitution is a blank piece of paper, on which society and culture write their text, and which has no intrinsic quality of its own.… The real problem is to infer the core common to the whole human race from the innumerable manifestations of human nature.”22 Fromm recognized the importance of basic biological needs, such as hunger, sleep, and sexual desires, as constituting aspects of human nature that must be satisfied before all else.23 Nonetheless, as humans evolved, they eventually reached a point of transcendence, from the animal to the uniquely human.24 As humans found it increasingly easier to satisfy their basic biological needs, largely as a result of their mastery over nature, the urgency of their satisfaction gradually became less important, with the evolutionary process allowing for the development of more complex intellectual and emotional capacities.25 As such, an individual’s most significant drives were no longer rooted in biology, but in the human condition.26

Considering it imperative to construct an understanding of human nature against which mental health could be evaluated, Fromm identified five central characteristics of the human condition. The first is relatedness. Aware of being alone in the world, humans strenuously endeavor to establish ties of unity. Without this, it is intolerable to exist as an individual.27 Second, the dominance of humans over nature allows for an easier satisfaction of biological needs and for the emergence of human aptitudes, contributing to the development of creativity. Humans developed the ability to express a creative intelligence, transforming this into a core human characteristic that requires fulfillment.28 Third, humans, psychologically, require rootedness and a sense of belonging. With birth severing ties of natural belonging, individuals constantly pursue rootedness to feel at one with the world. For Fromm, a genuine sense of belonging could only be achieved in a society built on solidarity.29 Fourth, humans crucially desire and develop a sense of identity. All individuals must establish a sense of self and an awareness of being a specific person.30 Fifth, it is psychologically necessary for humans to develop a framework through which to make sense of the world and their own experiences.31

Representing what Fromm argued to be a universal human nature, the satisfaction of these drives is essential for optimum mental well-being. As he contended, “mental health is achieved if man develops into full maturity according to the characteristics and laws of human nature. Mental illness consists in the failure of such development.”32 Rejecting a psychoanalytical understanding that emphasizes the satisfaction of the libido and other biological drives, mental health, he claimed, is inherently associated with the satisfaction of needs considered uniquely human. Under capitalism, however, the full satisfaction of the human psyche is thwarted. For Fromm, the origins of poor mental health are located in the mode of production and the corresponding political and social structures, whose organization impedes the full satisfaction of innate human desires.33 The effects of this on mental health, Fromm argued, are that “if one of the basic necessities has found no fulfillment, insanity is the result; if it is satisfied but in an unsatisfactory way…neurosis…is the consequence.”34

Work and Creative Repression

Like Marx, Fromm asserted that the instinctual desire to be creative had the greatest chance of satisfaction through work. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx strenuously argued that labor should be a fulfilling experience, allowing individuals to be freely expressive, both physically and intellectually. Workers should be able to relate to the products of their labor as meaningful expressions of their essence and inner creativity. Labor under capitalism, however, is an alienating experience that estranges individuals from its process. Alienated labor, Marx contended, is when “labour is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being…therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind.”35 Under capitalism, great efforts are made to ensure human energy is channeled into labor, even though it is often miserable and tedious.36 Rather than satisfying the need to express creativity, it frequently represses it through the monotonous and grueling obligation of wage labor.37

In Britain, there is widespread dissatisfaction with work. One recent survey of employees conducted in early 2018 estimated that 47 percent would consider looking for a new job during the coming year. Of the reasons given, a paucity of opportunities for career advancement was prominent, along with not enjoying work and employees feeling like they do not make a difference.38 These reasons begin to illustrate an entrenched alienation from the labor process. Many people experience work as having little meaning and little opportunity for personal fulfillment and expression.

From such evidence, a claim can be made that in Britain—as in many monopoly-capitalist nations—a substantial portion of the labor force feels disconnected from their work and does not consider it a creative experience. For Fromm, the realization of creative needs are essential to being mentally healthy. Having been endowed with reason and imagination, humans cannot exist as passive beings, but must act as creators.39 Nevertheless, it is clear that work under capitalism does not achieve this. Considerable evidence suggests that far from being beneficial to mental health, work is actually detrimental to it. Although the exact figures are likely to remain unknown due to the intangibility of such experiences, it can be inferred that, for many members of the labor force, it is commonplace for work to provoke general unhappiness, dissatisfaction, and despondency. Moreover, more severe mental-health conditions, such as stress, depression, and anxiety, are increasingly emerging as the consequences of discontentment at work. In 2017–18, such conditions constituted 44 percent of all work-related ill health in Britain, and 57 percent of all workdays lost to ill health.40 An additional study in 2017 estimated that 60 percent of British employees had suffered work-related poor mental health in the past year, with depression and anxiety being some of the most common manifestations.41

Rather than a source of enjoyment, the nature and organization of work under capitalism clearly does not act as a satisfactory means to fulfill an individual’s creativity. As Baran and Sweezy argued, “the worker can find no satisfaction in what his efforts accomplish.”42 Instead, work alienates individuals from a fundamental aspect of their nature and, in so doing, stimulates the emergence of varying negative states of mental health. With around half of the labor force in Britain having experienced work-related mental-health issues, and many more likely feeling a general sense of despondency, there exists what Fromm termed a socially patterned defect.43 It is no exaggeration to argue that the deterioration of mental well-being is a standard response to wage labor in monopoly-capitalist societies. Negative feelings become commonplace and, to varying degrees, are acknowledged as normal reactions to work. With the exception of severe mental-health disorders, many forms of mental distress that develop in response are taken for granted and not considered legitimate problems. As such, the degradation of mental well-being is normalized.

Meaningful Association and Loneliness

For Fromm, there existed an inherent relationship between positive mental health, meaningful personal relationships in the form of both love and friendship, and expressions of solidarity. Acutely aware of their “aloneness” in the world, individuals attempt to escape the psychological prison of isolation.44 Nonetheless, the operation of capitalism is such that it frequently prevents the satisfactory fulfillment of this need. The inadequacy of social relationships within monopoly-capitalist societies was identified by Baran and Sweezy. They argued a frivolity had descended over much social interaction, as it became typified by superficial conversation and a falsity of pleasantness. The emotional commitments required for friendship and the intellectual efforts needed for conversation were made largely absent as social interaction became increasingly about acquaintances and small talk.45 Contemporary monopoly capitalism is no exception. While difficulties in measuring its existence and nature abound, arguably one the most widespread neuroses to plague present-day capitalism is loneliness. It is increasingly considered a major public-health concern, perhaps most symbolically evident with the establishment of a Minister for Loneliness in 2018 by the British government.

As a neurosis, loneliness has debilitating consequences. Individuals may resort to alcohol and drug abuse to numb their misery, while persistent experience increases blood pressure and stress, as well as negatively impacts cardiovascular and immune-system functioning.46 A mental-health condition in its own right, loneliness exacerbates additional mental-health problems and is often the root cause of depression.47 In 2017, it was estimated that 13 percent of individuals in Britain had no close friends, with a further 17 percent having average- to poor-quality friendships. Moreover, 45 percent claimed to have felt lonely at least once in the previous two weeks, with 18 percent frequently feeling lonely. Although a close, loving relationship acts as a barrier to loneliness, 47 percent of people living with a partner reported feeling lonely at least some of the time and 16 percent often.48 Reflecting the dominant scientific constructs of mental health, recent efforts have been made to identify genetic causes of loneliness, with environmental conditions said to exacerbate an individual’s predisposition to it.49 However, even the most biologically deterministic analyses concede that social circumstances are important to its development. Nonetheless, few studies attempt to seriously illustrate the extent to which capitalism is a contributing factor.

Individualism has always reigned supreme as a principle upon which the ideal capitalist society is constructed. Individual effort, self-reliance, and independence are endorsed as the hallmarks of capitalism. As understood today, the notion of the individual has its origins in the feudal mode of production, and its emphasis on greater collectivist methods of labor—such as within the family or village—being surrendered to the compulsion of individuals, who have to be free to sell their labor power on the market. Prior to capitalism, life was conducted more as part of a wider social group, while the transition to capitalism developed and allowed for the emergence of the isolated, private individual and the nuclear, increasingly privatized family.50 Fromm contended that the promotion and celebration of the virtues of the individual means that members of society feel more alone under capitalism than under previous modes of production.51 Capitalism’s exaltation of the individual is made further apparent by its potent opposition to the ideals of collectivism and solidarity, and preference and incentive for competition. Individuals, it is said, must compete with each other on a general basis to enhance their personal development. More specifically, competition is, economically, one of the bases on which the market operates and, ideologically, corresponds to the widespread belief that, to be successful, one must compete with others for scarce resources. The consequence of competition is that it divides and isolates individuals. Other members of society are not considered as sources of support, but rather obstacles to personal advancement. Ties of social unity are therefore greatly weakened. Thus, loneliness is embedded within the structure of any capitalist society as an inevitable outcome of its value system.

Not only is loneliness integral to capitalist ideology, it is also exacerbated by the very functioning of capitalism as a system. As a result of capitalism’s inexorable drive for self-expansion, the growth of production is one of its elementary characteristics. Having become an axiomatic notion, rarely is the idea of expanded production challenged. The human cost of this is crippling as work takes precedence over investing in social relationships. Furthermore, neoliberal reforms have left many workers with progressively more precarious jobs and less protections, guaranteed benefits, and hours of employment—all of which have only aggravated loneliness. Amplifying the proletarianization of the labor force, with ever-more workers existing in a state of insecurity and experiencing increased exploitation, the centrality of work has become greater as the threat of not having a job, or being unable to secure an adequate standard of living, has become a reality for many in a “flexible” labor market.52 Individuals have no choice but to devote more time to work at the expense of establishing meaningful relationships.

The growing attention given to work can be illustrated in relation to working practices. Despite the fact that the average length of the working week increased in Britain following the financial crisis of 2007–09, the broader picture over the last two decades has officially been one of decline. Part-time workers, however, have witnessed the number of hours they work increase, along with the number of part-time jobs. Additionally, between 2010 and 2015, there was a 15 percent rise in the number of full-time members of the labor force working more than forty-eight hours per week (the legal limit; additional hours must be agreed upon by employer and employee).53 Furthermore, in 2016, one employee survey illustrated that 27 percent worked longer than they would like, negatively impacting their physical and mental health, and 31 percent felt that their work interfered with their personal life.54 Significantly, loneliness is not just a feature of life outside of work, but a common experience during work. In 2014, it was estimated that 42 percent of British employees did not consider any coworker to be a close friend, and many felt isolated in the workplace.

Greater engagement in productive activities at the expense of personal relationships has been labeled the “cult of busyness” by psychiatrists Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz.55 While they accurately identify this trend, they nonetheless evaluate it in terms of workers freely choosing such a life. This elides any serious criticisms of capitalism and the reality that the cult of busyness has largely been an outcome of the economic system’s inherent need for self-expansion. Furthermore, Olds and Schwartz fail to accept the trend as a reflection of the structural organization of the labor market, which makes more work a necessity instead of a choice. The avoidance of loneliness and the search for meaningful relationships are fundamental human desires, but capitalism suppresses their satisfactory fulfillment, along with the opportunities to form common bonds of love and friendship, and to work and live in solidarity. In response, as Baran and Sweezy argued, the fear of being alone drives people to seek some of the least fulfilling social relationships, which ultimately result in feelings of greater dissatisfaction.56

Materialism and the Search for Identity and Creativity

For monopoly capitalism, consumption is a vital method of surplus absorption. In the era of competitive capitalism, Marx could not foresee how the sales effort would evolve both quantitatively and qualitatively to become as important for economic growth as it has.57 Advertising, product differentiation, planned obsolescence, and consumer credit are all essential means of stimulating consumer demand. At the same time, there is no shortage of individuals willing to consume. Alongside the acceptance of work, Fromm identified the desire to consume as an integral characteristic of life under capitalism, arguing it was a significant example of the uses to which human energies are directed to support the economy.58

With consumer goods valued for their conspicuity rather than their intended function, people have gone from consuming use values to symbolic values. The decision to engage in popular culture and purchase a type of automobile, brand of clothing, or technological equipment, among other goods, is frequently based on what the product is supposed to convey about the consumer. Frequently, consumerism constitutes the principal method through which individuals can construct a personal identity. People are emotionally invested in the meanings associated with consumer goods, in the hope that whatever intangible qualities items are said to possess will be passed on to them through ownership. Under monopoly capitalism, consumerism is more about consuming ideas and less about satisfying inherent biological and psychological needs. Fromm contended that “consumption should be a concrete human act in which our senses, bodily needs, our aesthetic taste…are involved: the act of consumption should be a meaningful…experience. In our culture, there is little of that. Consuming is essentially the satisfaction of artificially stimulated phantasies.”59

The need for identity and creative fulfillment encourages an insatiable appetite to consume. Each purchase, however, regularly fails to live up to its promise. Rarely is satisfaction truly achieved through consumption, because what is being consumed is an artificial idea rather than a product that imbues our existence with meaning. In this process, consumerism as a form of alienation becomes evident. Instead of consuming a product designed to satisfy inherent needs, consumer goods exemplify their synthetic nature via their manufactured meanings and symbolisms, which are designed to stimulate and satisfy a preplanned response and need.60 Any identity a person may desire, or feel they have obtained, from consuming a product, as well as any form of creativity invoked by a consumer good or item of popular culture, is false.

Rather than cultivating joy, the affluence of the monopoly-capitalist nations has bred a general widespread dissatisfaction as high value is placed on amassing possessions. While consumerism as a value exists in all capitalist societies, in those of greater inequality—with Britain displaying wider wealth disparities than most—the desire to consume and acquire greatly contributes to the emergence of neuroses, as the effort to maintain social status and emulate those at the top of society becomes an immense strain. The impact of this has been demonstrated within British families in recent years. In 2007, UNICEF identified Britain as having the lowest level of child well-being out of twenty-one of the most affluent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development nations. In response, an analysis of British families was conducted in 2011 comparing them to those in Spain and Sweden, countries that ranked in the top five for child well-being.61

Of the three nations, the culture of consumerism was greatest in Britain, as it was prevalent among all families regardless of affluence. British parents were considered more materialistic than their Spanish and Swedish counterparts and behaved accordingly toward their children. They purchased the most up-to-date, branded consumer goods, largely because they thought it would ensure their child’s status among their peers. This was a value shared by the children themselves, with many accepting that social prestige was based on ownership of branded consumer goods, which, evidence suggests, contributed to arising worry and anxiety, especially for children from poorer households who recognized their disadvantage. While a compulsion to purchase new goods continuously for themselves and their children was identified among British parents, many nonetheless also felt the psychological strain of attempting to maintain a materialistic lifestyle and caved to such pressures. Across all three countries, children identified the needs for their own well-being as consisting of quality time spent with parents and friends, and opportunities to indulge their creativity, especially through outdoor activities. Despite this, the research showed that, in Britain, many were not having such needs satisfied. Parents struggled to spend enough time with their children due to work commitments and often prevented them from participating in outdoor activities due to safety concerns. Subsequently, parents compensated for this with consumer goods, which largely failed to meet their children’s needs. As such, the needs of British children to form and partake in meaningful relationships and act creatively were repressed, and efforts to satisfy these needs through consumerism failed to bring them happiness.

Resistance as Class Struggle

While not denying the existence of biological causes, the structural organization of society must be recognized as having serious repercussions on people’s mental health. Monopoly capitalism functions to prevent many from experiencing mental well-being. Yet, despite this, the medical model continues to dominate, reinforcing an individualistic conception of mental health and obscuring the detrimental effects of the present mode of production. This oppresses users of mental-health services by subordinating them to the judgment of medical professionals. The medical model also encourages the suspension and curtailment of individuals’ civil rights if they experience mental distress, including by legitimizing the infringement of their voluntary action and excluding them from decision-making. For those who suffer mental distress, life under capitalism is frequently characterized by oppression and discrimination.

Aware of their oppressed status, users and survivors of mental-health services are now challenging the ideological dominance of the medical model and its obfuscation of capitalism’s psychological impact. Furthermore, they are increasingly coalescing around and putting forward as an alternative the need to accept the Marxist-inspired social model of mental health. The social model of disability identifies capitalism as instrumental to the construction of the category of disability, defined as impairments that exclude people from the labor market. Adopting a broadly materialist perspective, a social model of mental health addresses material disadvantage, oppression, and political exclusion as significant causes of mental illness.

In 2017 in Britain, the mental-health action group National Survivor User Network unequivocally rejected the medical model and planted social justice at the heart of its campaign. As part of its call for a social approach to mental health, the group explicitly denounces neoliberalism, arguing that austerity and cuts to social security have contributed to the increasing prevalence of individuals who suffer from poor mental health as well as to the exacerbation of existing mental-health issues among the population. Recognizing social inequality as a contributor to the emergence of poor mental health, National Survivor User Network proposes that the challenge posed by mental-health service users should be part of a wider indictment of the general inequality in society, arguing that “austerity measures, damaging economic policies, social discrimination and structural inequalities are causing harm to people. We need to challenge this as part of a broader social justice agenda.”62 Furthermore, the action group Recovery in the Bin positions itself and the wider mental-health movement within the class struggle, pushing for a social model that recognizes capitalism as a significant determinant of poor mental health. Moreover, representing ethnic minorities, Kindred Minds vigorously campaigns on an understanding that mental distress is less a result of biological characteristics and more a consequence of social problems such as racism, sexism, and economic inequality “pathologised as mental illness.”63 For Kindred Minds, the catalyst for deteriorating mental health is oppression and discrimination, with ethnic minorities having to suffer greater levels of social and economic inequality and prejudice.

Capitalism can never offer the conditions most conducive to achieving mental health. Oppression, exploitation, and inequality greatly repress the true realization of what it means to be human. Opposing the brutality of capitalism’s impact on mental well-being must be central to the class struggle as the fight for socialism is never just one for increased material equality, but also for humanity and a society in which all human needs, including psychological ones, are satisfied. All members of society are affected by the inhumane nature of capitalism, but, slowly and determinedly, the fight is being led most explicitly by the most oppressed and exploited. The challenge posed must be viewed as part of the wider class struggle, as being one front of many in the fight for social justice, economic equality, dignity, and respect.

David Matthews is a lecturer in sociology and social policy at Coleg Llandrillo, Wales, and the leader of its degree program in health and social care.

Notes

1. ↩ World Health Organization, Fact Sheets on Mental Health (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2017), http://who.int.

2. ↩ World Health Organization, Data and Resources (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2017), http://euro.who.int/en.

3. ↩ World Health Organization, Data and Resources.

4. ↩ Sally McManus, Paul Bebbington, Rachel Jenkins, and Traolach Brugha, Mental Health and Wellbeing in England: Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey 2014 (Leeds: NHS Digital, 2016).

5. ↩ Brett J. Deacon and Dean McKay, “The Biomedical Model of Psychological Problems: A Call for Critical Dialogue,” Behavior Therapist 38, no. 7 (2015): 231–35. Pharmaceutical companies who have identified it as a market opportunity have been the primary beneficiaries of this approach, exemplified by the proliferation of anti-depressants as illustrated by Brett J. Deacon and Grayson L. Baird, “The Chemical Imbalance Explanation of Depression: Reducing Blame at what Cost?,” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 28, no. 4 (2009): 415–35.

6. ↩ As exemplified by Jordan W. Smoller et al., “Identification of Risk Loci with Shared Effects on Five Major Psychiatric Disorders: A Genome-Wide Analysis,” Lancet 381, no. 9875 (2013): 1371–79. In this study, five of the most common mental-health disorders, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression, were associated with genetic variations.

7. ↩ Deacon and McKay, “The Biomedical Model of Psychological Problems,” 233.

8. ↩ Social class is one of the most significant indicators of mental health, as evidenced by research within the social sciences dating back to the earlier part of the twentieth century. The first most notable study of this kind is Robert E. L. Farris and Henry W. Dunham, Mental Disorders in Urban Areas (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1939), which identified higher rates of mental disorders in the poorest districts of Chicago. This was followed by, among others in both Britain and the United States, August B. Hollingshead and Frederick C. Redlich, Social Class and Mental Illness (New York: John Wiley, 1958); Leo Srole, Thomas S. Langer, Stanley T. Michael, Marvin K. Opler, and Thomas A. C. Rennie, Mental Health in the Metropolis: The Midtown Manhattan Study (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962); and John J. Schwab, Roger A. Bell, George J. Warheit, and Ruby B. Schwab, Social Order and Mental Health: The Florida Health Study (New York: Brunner-Mazel, 1979).

9. ↩ Iain Ferguson, Politics of the Mind: Marxism and Mental Distress (London: Bookmarks, 2017), 15–16.

10. ↩ Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), 285.

11. ↩ Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 346–47.

12. ↩ Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 346.

13. ↩ Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 364.

14. ↩ Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 354–55.

15. ↩ Paul A. Baran, The Longer View (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 92–111; Paul M. Sweezy, “Paul A. Baran: A Personal Memoir,” in Paul A. Baran: A Collective Portrait (New York: Monthly Review Press, 32–33. The unpublished chapter of Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital, entitled “The Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society II,” drafted by Baran, had included an extensive section on mental health. That chapter, however, was not included in the book because it was still unfinished at the time of Baran’s death. Nevertheless, some elements of the mental-health argument were interspersed in other parts of the book. When “The Quality of Monopoly Capitalism II” was finally published in Monthly Review in 2013, almost sixty years after it was drafted by Baran, the section on mental health was excluded due to its incomplete character. See Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, “The Quality of Monopoly Capitalist Society: Culture and Communications” Monthly Review 65, no. 3 (July–August 2013): 43–64. It is worth noting that the treatment of mental health in Monopoly Capital did not go unnoticed and was subject to criticism by Robert Heilbroner in a review in the New York Review of Books, to which Sweezy responded in a letter, defending their analysis in this regard. See Robert Heilbroner, Between Capitalism and Socialism (New York: Vintage, 1970), 237–46; Paul M. Sweezy, “Monopoly Capital” (letter), New York Review of Books, July 7, 1966, 26.

16. ↩ The influence of Fromm is evident in Baran’s work and correspondence. He studied Fromm’s The Sane Society, together with Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization and One Dimensional Man (in manuscript form). He was undoubtedly familiar with the wider body of work by both thinkers. While Baran was not in complete agreement with the details of Marcuse’s analyses, he openly acknowledged the importance and significance of his work, identifying Eros and Civilization as having great relevance to U.S. society and recognizing a psychoanalytical analysis as vital to understanding monopoly-capitalist society. See Nicholas Baran and John Bellamy Foster, The Age of Monopoly Capital: Selected Correspondence of Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, 1949–1964 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017), 127, 131. See also the “Baran-Marcuse Correspondence,” Monthly Review Foundation, https://monthlyreview.org.

17. ↩ Erich Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Freud and Marx (London: Continuum, 2009), 7.

18. ↩ Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, 35.

19. ↩ Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in a Capitalist Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 131.

20. ↩ Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (1867; repr. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), 571.

21. ↩ Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 23–24.

22. ↩ Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (London, Routledge, 2002), 13.

23. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 65.

24. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 22.

25. ↩ Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, 27.

26. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 27.

27. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 28–35.

28. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 35–36.

29. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 37–59.

30. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 59–61.

31. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 61–64

32. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 14.

33. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 76.

34. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 66.

35. ↩ Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1932; repr. Radford, Virginia: Wilder Publications, 2011).

36. ↩ Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, 63.

37. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 173.

38. ↩ Investors in People, Job Exodus Trends: 2018 Employee Sentiment Poll (London: Investors in People, 2018), http://investorsinpeople.com.

39. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 35.

40. ↩ Health and Safety Executive, Work Related Stress, Depression or Anxiety Statistics in Great Britain, 2018 (Bootle, UK: Health and Safety Executive, 2018), 3, http://hse.gov.uk.

41. ↩ Business in the Community, Mental Health at Work Report 2017 (London: Business in the Community, 2017), http://bitc.org.uk.

42. ↩ Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 345.

43. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 15.

44. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 29.

45. ↩ Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 347–48.

46. ↩ Jo Griffin, The Lonely Society? (London: Mental Health Foundation, 2010), 6–7.

47. ↩ Griffin, The Lonely Society?, 4

48. ↩ David Marjoribanks and Anna Darnell Bradley, You’re Not Alone: The Quality of the UK’s Social Relationships (Doncaster: Relate, 2017), 17–18.

49. ↩ Luc Goossens, Eeske van Roekel, Maaike Verhagen, John T. Cacioppo, Stephanie Cacioppo, Marlies Maes, and Dorret I. Boomsma, “The Genetics of Loneliness: Linking Evolutionary Theory to Genome-Wide Genetics, Epigenetics, and Social Science,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 10, no 2 (2015): 213–26.

50. ↩ Michael Oliver, The Politics of Disablement (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Press, 1990); Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life (London: Pluto Press, 1976).

51. ↩ Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, 93.

52. ↩ See Ricardo Antunes, “The New Service Proletariat,” Monthly Review 69, no. 11 (April 2018): 23–29, for an analysis of the evolving insecurity of labor markets within the advanced capitalist nations and the hardening of proletarian divisions.

53. ↩ Trade Union Congress, “15 Per Cent Increase in People Working More than 48 Hours a Week Risks a Return to ‘Burnout Britain’, Warns TUC,” September 9, 2015; Josie Cox, “British Employees are Working More Overtime than Ever Before—Often for No Extra Money,” Independent, March 2, 2017.

54. ↩ David Marjoribanks, A Labour of Love—or Labour Versus Love?: Our Relationships at Work; Relationships and Work (Doncaster: Relate, 2016).

55. ↩ Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz, The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009).

56. ↩ Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 347–48.

57. ↩ Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 115.

58. ↩ Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, 63.

59. ↩ Fromm, The Sane Society, 129-130.

60. ↩ Robert Bocock, Consumption (London: Routledge, 2001), 51.

61. ↩ United Nations Children’s Fund, Innocenti Report Card 7: Child Poverty in Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries (Florence: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, 2007), http://unicef-irc.org.

62. ↩ National Survivor User Network, NSUN Manifesto 2017: Our Voice, Our Vision, Our Values, (London: National Survivor User Network, 2017), http://nsun.org.uk.

63. ↩ Raza Griffiths, A Call for Social Justice: Creating Fairer Policy and Practice for Mental Health Service Users from Black and Minority Ethnic Communities (London: Kindred Minds, 2018).

The Nakba Generation and the Makings of Palestinian Revolution

By Abdel Razzaq Takriti

The Palestinian revolution was created by the men and women who lived through the experience of the Nakba (the Catastrophe). These revolutionaries identified themselves as ‘The Nakba Generation’, and their world can be understood only in light of this foundational event. As with all collective tragedies the Nakba can be approached in a number of ways. Most commonly it is defined in terms of the number of people uprooted from their homes; the forcible expulsion and dispossession of 750,000-950,000 Palestinians; the violent expropriation of 78% of their native lands by recently arrived European Jewish settlers; the death of more than 12,000 Palestinians over 1947 and 1948 along with the injury of tens of thousands; the massacre of hundreds of villagers and townspeople in nearly three dozen localities.

Yet these numbers do not capture the meaning of the Nakba, which is better grasped through the now thousands of oral narratives and memoirs of the period that have been recorded, filmed, written down, and published. Each highlights the seminal nature of the event, and the Nakba’s overwhelming impact upon the lives of those who experienced it. Amongst these histories there is a specificity to revolutionary recollections. These do not only describe the moments of individual and collective destruction of home and society; they allow us to understand the centrality of the experience of dispossession to the formation of Palestinian revolutionary consciousness.

The first accounts here are by Salah Khalaf (Abu Iyad) and George Habash (Al-Hakeem), two young men who went on to become leading revolutionaries. Their recollections give us a sense of their secondary socialisation prior to the Nakba. Both figures were involved in anti-colonial activities as school students in Jaffa and Lydd respectively, and their engagement took the shape of occasional mobilisations within resistance structures that had existed in Palestine during the late British Mandate period. In the case of Abu Iyad, this is seen in his participation in the Ashbāl (Lion Cubs) section of the al-Najjada organisation, a type of patriotic boy scouts’ activity. As for Habash it was reflected through his participation in school strikes and national demonstrations. More significantly, both accounts illustrate that a national tragedy, affecting an entire people, was witnessed and experienced at an extremely intimate level. Neither Khalaf nor Habash heard of these events through the radio, a newspaper, or even a parent, grandparent or other relative: they lived through the unfolding collective disaster themselves.

The factual record of the Nakba is growing rapidly, and researchers are unearthing atrocities whose memory had hitherto been overlooked. These moments of profound national loss altered the lives of a large number of future Palestinian leaders and cadres. One example is the Tantura massacre, during which dozens of inhabitants from the village were slaughtered. ʿAbd al-Razzaq al-Yahya, a young cadet from this village (and a future commander of the Palestine Liberation Army) gives his account here. His memories reflect the anguish and concern he experienced as he learnt of the massacre while receiving military training in Syria, and the profound marks it left on his family and himself.

One of those mentioned in this source is ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Husayni, who lost his life during the battle for Palestine. Such iconic figures were revered on both a national and a broader Arab scale, and had a stature that can be seen in any macro-historical account. However, the experience of the Nakba can also be approached most usefully micro-historically. At a grassroots level, memories of resistance were connected to local as well as national experiences. Most fighters (especially in rural districts) did not publish memoirs, but their accounts circulated orally, creatizing the foundation for a growing literature of local Palestinian histories. A typical example is the discussion of the village of Hamama in the ͑Asqalan district authored by a son of the village. Such sources provide a rich description of the lives of rural men and women that would otherwise be overlooked, recording the resistance of those that fought and lived, as well as the names of those that died.

A recurring theme in such accounts is the imagination and ingenuity of fighters in devising methods of resistance in the face of superior Zionist strength and inadequate Arab army support. One such description, of the defense of Salamah village, describes the benefits of shifting political organisation for the defense of a town from its notables to the youth, through elections. For many future revolutionaries growing up in the refugee camps of the 1950s, these stories of fighters from their own villages had a deep influence on their worldviews and future choices. Equally influential was a sense of the political and military helplessness that surrounded the experience of dispossession. Palestinians lacked adequate organisations, weapons, or training to confront the scale of the military assault waged against their them. This predicament created the impetus for more organised future revolutionary involvement, one that could provide a concrete means to reverse their dispossession from their homes.

The absence of powerful and effective organisations on the eve of the Nakba was due to a variety of factors. Most important was (and as noted by Abu Iyad), the wholesale destruction of organised political activity by the British colonial power during the 1936-39 Palestinian revolt, critically weakening Palestinian capacity for resistance in 1948. Yet there was widespread resistance: as the memoirs of Ahmad al-Yamani (Abu Mahir) show, huge effort was exerted on local levels to withstand the existential crisis then faced by Palestinians. Abu Mahir, for instance, drew on his experience as a trade union organiser and working class activist to establish local committees in the Galilee district surrounding his village Suhmata. This initiative eventually collapsed through an overpowering military conquest, and ultimately the inhabitants of the district were all forced out of Palestine. Before they were expelled, some were thrown into forced labour camps, as described here, or coerced into acting as servants for Zionist fighters.

The urban notable leadership did not possess either material or military backing to prevent this national destruction, nor did they have the political capacities to represent their people, or preserve their country intact. The most ambitious of their political initiatives, in the immediate aftermath of the Nakba, was the All-Palestine Government, whose founding declaration is presented here. The government was established on 22 September 1948, at a time when the Nakba was still unfolding. Although its official capital was Jerusalem, its actual headquarters were in Gaza before moving (under Egyptian pressure) to Cairo. Its President (Haj Amin al-Husayni), Prime Minister (Ahmad Hilmi ʿAbd al-Baqi Pasha), and the cabinet were made up of ministers all drawn from urban notable backgrounds.

In theory this institution (recognised by the Arab League states except Jordan) had a mandate that extended over the entirety of Palestine. However, by the end of the war the state of Israel had just been established over 78% of the British Mandate Palestine’s territory; the remaining 22% of the country was now referred to as “the West Bank and Gaza Strip”. Those Palestinians remaining in territories lost in 1948 were subjected to strict Israeli military rule and martial law, while the West Bank was annexed by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Only a very small corner of Palestine, the Gaza Strip, was theoretically under the domain of the All-Palestine Government. Even there however, political, military, and financial control was firmly held by the Egyptian administration. So, by the end of the 1948 war, Palestine was erased from the political map.

Under such extreme conditions of external colonial and regional domination, the All-Palestine government proved unable to advance their people’s cause. The core demand of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and lands was completely rejected by the new Israeli state. A tiny number of refugees smuggled themselves back into their country, including political figures affiliated with the Communist Party such as Emile Habibi and Emile Touma. They became prominent leaders within the ranks of Palestinians who remained within the boundaries of the newly established Israeli state.

The political and humanitarian outcomes of the 1948 War created major transformations in regional political thought, as Arab intellectuals began to grapple with the outcome of the war and its cataclysmic implications. Amongst the most significant texts to emerge was The Meaning of Disaster (Maʿana al-Nakba). This classic text, published in August 1948, was written by Constantine Zurayk, a Syrian professor at the American University of Beirut (AUB), and one of the foremost Arab intellectual figures of the mid 20th century. It was here that the word “Nakba” was first used as a description of the series of events of 1947 to 1948 in Palestine. These events were not only catastrophic for the Palestinians, wrote Zurayk, but for the Arabs as a whole. In his estimation, the catastrophe was caused by the absence of a modern political structure that could liberate the Arab world from foreign dominance and control. Therefore, reversing the Nakba required Arab political and territorial unity, as well as economic and social modernisation. This great transformation, in Zurayk’s conception, could only come about through a young revolutionary elite that possessed a modernising social and political outlook and impeccable moral credentials. From the perspective of Palestinian revolutionary history, perhaps the most important passages here pertain to the critical step this elite must undertake, which was to “organise and unify itself into well-knit parties and organisations.”

The theory of revolutionary transformation articulated by Zurayk belongs to the well established vanguardist tradition in modern political thought. What is most relevant to the generation of the Nakba is its immense impact on the Arab political scene. One of the book’s immediate and direct effects was the establishment of a group that eventually took the name the Movement of Arab Nationalists (MAN) in Beirut. The next reading is from the memoirs of one of its founders, Ahmad al-Khatib, who was a Kuwaiti medical student in 1948. Al-Khatib was part of a circle of students from various Arab countries, including George Habash, Wadiʿ Haddad, and Hani al-Hindi, all closely connected to Zurayk, and highly influenced by The Meaning of Disaster. Giving a sense of the intellectual development of this group, al-Khatib’s memoirs show how the aim of reversing the Nakba propelled him and his comrades to seek the transformation of the Arab political reality by creating a clandestine network operating across the region. Al-Khatib established the Kuwaiti branch of this network, which was soon to become the most important political movement in that country, and a firm base for pan-Arab popular action towards the liberation of Palestine.

Al-Khatib was part of a generation that understood the cause of Palestine as belonging to them as much as it belonged to the Palestinian people. However, his experience of the Nakba was more direct than most. His time as a medical volunteer in ʿAin al-Hilweh refugee camp for Palestinians in the south of Lebanon filled him with frustration with “the Zionists, the countries that supported them, and the Arab parties and countries that failed the Palestinians.” This frustration provided the impetus to chart a path influenced by the legacy of the previous generation of Palestinian revolutionaries. Along with George Habash and Wadiʿ Haddad, al-Khatib would regularly visit an injured old fighter, Ibrahim Abu Dayya. Abu Dayya taught them patriotic songs and shared his vast experience of armed struggle in great detail. He had participated in the 1936 revolt, but had really gained fame and distinction during the 1948 war, when he was a leading military commander with a famous victory at the battle of Surif. Severely wounded after being hit with seven bullets during a successful attack on Ramat Rahil, he eventually ended up in the AUB hospital in Beirut. On the news of his death in March 1952, he was eulogised in the recently established newspaper al-Thaʾar, the earliest publication of the Movement of Arab Nationalists. Here, the young generation of revolutionaries vowed, in his memory, to revive the struggle, drawing on his rich historical legacy.

While prominent fighters like Abu Dayya were remembered by name, ordinary people involved in the struggle for Palestine lived on in collective forms such as literature. Their experiences were reconstructed in the works of revolutionary authors such as Samira Azzam, who experienced the Nakba as a 20-year-old young woman and became active in the Palestine Liberation Front-Path of Return group in the 1960s. Her short story Bread of Sacrifice (1960) approaches the Nakba from the standpoint of Palestinian urban resistance. Set on the eve of the fall of Haifa, April 22 1948, the story is underscored by romantic motifs, and culminates in a tragic ending. Yet tragedy here signals an on-going grievance that is a source of renewed mobilisation. Significantly, this mobilisation draws upon the contributions of women as well as men. As Azzam’s heroine Suʿad makes clear, confronting the Nakba was a natural and essential human need experienced regardless of gender, and challenging patriarchal authority was the first step towards women’s participation in the revolutionary struggle to return home.

Beyond its defining impact on Palestinian and Arab grassroots political movements, the Nakba also shaped the experience of a generation of Arab leaders who assumed power through revolutionary action in the 1950s. Many had participated in the Palestine War, fighting in their countries’ armies following the Arab declaration of war in May 1948. The most prominent of these was Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose time in Palestine influenced the future course of the Palestinian revolution; his approach to the cause, his understanding of it, and his sympathy with it cannot be viewed in isolation from his experience of the Nakba, as seen in his memoirs. For members of his generation, this event was a defining moment that had altered the fate of the region for decades to come.

Republished from The Palestinian Revolution, a bilingual Arabic/English online learning resource that explores Palestinian revolutionary practice and thought from the Nakba of 1948, to the siege of Beirut in 1982

Sources

1. Iyad, Abu (Salah Khalaf). My Home, My Land: A Narrative of the Palestinian Struggle, New York: Times Books, 1981 (pp. 3-12).

2. Habash, George. al-Thawriyun La Yamutun Abadan. Beirut: Dar Al-Saqi, 2009 (pp.27-30).

3. Al-Yahya, ʿAbd al-Razzaq. Bayn al-ʿAskariya wa-l-Siyasiya. Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2006 (pp. 39-44).

4. Abu ʿAwda, Ali. Qariyat Hammama: Tarikh wa Turath wa Ansab. Gaza: Samir Mansour Library, 2015 (pp. 582-599).

5. al-Yamani, Ahmad Husayn Tajrubati Maʿa al-Ayyam. Damascus: Dar Canaan, 2004. (pp. 153-174 & 193-205).

6. Declarations of the All-Palestine Government, September – October 1948 in Documents on Palestine Volume II: 1948-1973, Jerusalem: The Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs, 2007.

7. Zurayk, Constantine, The Meaning of the Disaster. Beirut: Khayat's College Book Cooperative, 1956 (pp. 2-3, 34-37 & 42-45).

8. al-Khatib, Ahmad. Kuwait: Min Al-Imara Ila al-Dawla, Dhakariyat al-ʿAmal al-Watani wa-l-Qawmi. Beirut: The Arab Cultural Center, 2007 (pp. 72-83).

9. “Ibrahim Abu Dayya” [Obituary]. Al-Tha’r (Beirut), Thursday 20 November 1953 (p. 8).

10. ʿAzzām, Samīra. Khobz Al-Fida’i. Beirut: Dar al-Awda, 1956.

11. League of Arab States. Arab League Declaration of War. Damascus, 15 May 1948.

12. Abdel Nasser, Gamal. “Memoirs of the First Palestine War, Part I”. Akher Sa’a (Cairo), April 1955.

13. Photographs of Lydda and Jaffa before 1948. Library of Congress.

Sorry to Bother You with Twelve Theses on Boots Riley's "Sorry to Bother You": Lessons for the Left

By Bryant William Sculos

Originally published in 2019 in Class, Race and Corporate Power.

1.   Films thus far have merely interpreted the world; the point however is to change it….

This would be more appropriate as thesis eleven, but it is a crucial starting point for what follows. No matter how radical, no matter how popular, a critical film is, a film by itself, not even one as prescient and valuable as Sorry to Bother You is, is enough to change the world. Not that anyone would suggest that it could be, but radical films can serve important purposes in the struggle against capitalism and various forms of oppression. A good radical film can inspire and even simply entertain those engaged in struggle—or those thinking about becoming more active. Sorry to Bother You will not change the world, but it can be an important basis for motivation, critical conversation, and necessary enjoyment for those in struggling to do just that.

2.   Tactics should always be informed by an organized strategy.

Sorry to Bother You highlights the difference between pure subversive tactics and an organized strategy for resistance. In the film there is a group of anarchist-types, of what size or of what degree of organization the audience never sees, whose primary role in the film is to highlight the impotence of pure tactics (in this film, this amounts to clever vandalism) disconnected from a coherent strategy for organized opposition. Juxtaposed to these tactics we see the hard work of organizing a workplace and an eventual strike. While the strike may not have heralded the end of capitalism, the audience bears witness to the clear difference in results (including both the response of the capitalist class and their police force as well as the ability of the strike to bring new layers of people into struggle).

3.   As important as the superiority of tactics informed by an organized strategy is, it is perhaps as important how those on the left address their internal disagreements about strategies and tactics.

There is a subtle scene between Squeeze (the labor activist attempting to organize the workers at the telemarketing firm, played by Steven Yeun) and Detroit (perhaps the best radical feminist of color ever seen in a popular US film, played superbly by Tessa Thompson). Squeeze becomes aware that Detroit is part of the anarchist group doing the anticapitalist vandalism and instead of criticizing Detroit’s tactics, Squeeze takes the opportunity to appreciate that they are both on the same side of the struggle. This solidaristic interaction serves as the basis to build deeper, more active solidarity in the future (some of which we see later in the film). It is often difficult for those on the left to ignore or at least put aside disagreements over tactics and strategy, and sometimes it is important that the Left not leave disagreements unaddressed, but Sorry to Bother You provides some insight into how the Left can deal with internal, and interpersonal, disagreements in ways that do not further alienate us from one another. After all, the Left needs all the comrades it can get. What makes someone a comrade is a contentious issue to be sure, but it is an important one that the Left should continue to reflect on.

4.   Solidarity across identities is crucial.

Perhaps one of the most obvious—though no less important—lessons from Sorry to Bother You, with its awesome diverse cast and characters, is that class has colors and genders and a variety of other identities that come with their own unique oppressions that condition the experience of class in diverse ways. Not only does the film illuminate the intersections of racism and capitalism (the “white voices” are the stuff of film legend here), but we also see cross-racial, cross-gender, and even cross- (fictional) species solidarity. If Sorry to Bother You does one thing well (and it does way more than just one thing well), it is expressing the importance of building this kind of intersectional solidarity, as well as how the variable experiences of class can be navigated without chauvinism or exclusion. While the treatment of non-fictional racial and gender solidarity is powerful in its own right, Boots Riley’s use of the (for now…) fictional equisapiens drives the point home. Ending the exploitation of some group at the expense of others can never be an acceptable Left position.

5.   Art can be radical, but not all subversive art is radical, at least not on its own.

Detroit, in addition to her day job as a sign twirler and then as a telemarketer, is an artist. Beyond the politics of Sorry to Bother You, the film also delves into the difficulty of being a subversive artist within the confines of capitalism, which demands that all art be commodifiable in order to be of any value. Despite Detroit’s best efforts to resist this pressure, we see her engage in a powerful and uncomfortable piece of performance art where her audience is asked to throw things at her, including broken electronics and blood-filled balloons. The scene is a bit of a parody of ostensibly “radical” art that is consumed by a primarily bourgeois audience. Subversive art that challenges the commodity-form can itself become commodified, but it can still be useful as a foundation to challenge artistic norms and social conventions, break down the barrier between performer and audience. However, even at its best there is no guarantee that anything will fundamentally change because of these dissensual elements. Sorry to Bother You is a better example of what radical, subversive art can be than the artistic performances it portrays—though neither one is the basis for revolutionary activity. While the critical theorists and postmodernists of the late twentieth century are right to emphasize the importance of aesthetics in radical politics and resist the temptation, embodied most noticeably in socialist realism, to use art strictly instrumentally, art disconnected from organized struggle is bound to be as ineffective as any tactic disconnected from organized struggle. Sorry to Bother You does not provide a clear alternative, but it does provide a powerful basis to think through the question of how art can relate to radical politics, and radical politics to art, effectively.

6.   Material conditions are shaped by ideological conditions, which in turn affect our psychologies.

As the protagonist Cassius “Cash” Green (portrayed by Lakeith Stanfield with incredible complexity and skill to make the audience cringe in every instance they are supposed to) moves up the ladder at the telemarketing company, after living in poverty for years, his perspective on poverty and the plight of workers shifts in perverse but predictable directions. Consciousness is never one-to-one with class position, something that is perhaps still too obvious for the Left to effectively grapple with, but the radical beauty of Sorry to Bother You is how well Boots Riley is able to show how consciousness changes as wealth (though not always identical to class position) increases. Capitalism as a whole dehumanizes even those who benefit from it, though workers and the poor and oppressed should have little patience or sympathy for those who benefit unequally from the exploitation they reproduce. As difficult as it is, it is important to remember this, that even as capitalists and the defenders of capitalism come to personify the evils of capitalism, they too are driven by the heinous psycho-social incentives of the system. While this is, in itself, important to be cognizant of, it is more important to be aware of the process through which this happens to middle class people, and even workers fortunate enough to escape the dregs of poverty wages.

7.   Contacting your elected officials is not nearly enough and can actually be demoralizing and demobilizing.

One of the best scenes in the film, enhanced by the speed with which is begins and ends, is when Cash decides to make public the genetic alteration plans of Steve Lift (CEO of the Amazon-like WorryFree, played by Armie Hammer). Cash goes on an absurd reality TV show and various news programs to tell the world about the equisapien experiments and implores people to contact their elected officials. The montage ends with WorryFree’s stock rising and the general public excited about the new technological developments. Nothing changes. The lesson here is that Cash was relying on the representatives of the system that encourages the kinds of perversity that Steve Lift represents to solve the problem. Cash encouraged people to place their hope in decrepit politicians. The audience experiences the results too quickly. The montage is powerful as it stands, but it is worth questioning whether the full range of critical points here might be lost on even a well-focused self-reflective audience (though I noticed so perhaps I’m the one being too cynical). Cash placed his hope in the automatic negative reactions of people—people who have been conditioned by capitalism to view all technological developments as progressive and liberating—to resist those changes. Back in the real world, while there are some instances where outrage may seem (or even actually be) more or less automatic, there is often unseen or unacknowledged organizing and propagandistic work being done to produce an effective public reaction. The best recent example of this is from the 2017 airport protests/occupations in reaction to President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban. While some of the people showed up at the airports spontaneously, there were also a number of left-wing groups, of diverse politics, working to make these actions effective. It is likely we would not have witnessed the positive results we saw from these actions had it not been for the quick, organized work of activists on the ground. And yet, it all appeared rather spontaneous.

8.  The truth is not enough, and it will not set us free. Truth is not irrelevant, but it is not enough for the Left simply to be “right.”

Related to thesis 7, Cash relies on his exposing the truth to the world to be the catalyst for widespread resistance to the practices of WorryFree. Mind you, this is all taking place in a world where all of the other dehumanizing practices of WorryFree, such as: lifetime contracts for workers, with all room and board provided but without pay, are deemed acceptable. Why would artificially producing human-horse hybrid workers be any different? While there is a vital educational role for the Left to play in providing the factual basis for the need for organized resistance and building an alternative to racist, patriarchal, imperialist capitalism, these facts are not enough. Facts can be interpreted in various ways and perverted by the mouthpieces of capitalism, often most egregiously by the ostensibly liberal vanguard of “progressive” capitalism. The Left needs to not only be “right” but it also needs to provide deeper context and present viable options to pursue. Put differently, in addition to having the truth on its side, the Left needs to be persuasive.

9.   Automation is complicated and likely will not take the forms or have the effects the public are often led to believe it will have.

The world has been browbeaten into thinking that the worst consequences of increased automation in the twenty-first century will be mass unemployment. Sorry to Bother You, believe it or not, provides a glimpse at one more realistic alternative—as well as a basis for a more honest look at the effects of automation. First, as we have seen throughout the history of capitalism, workers themselves, both physically and psychologically, are made into automatons. Second, the worst consequences of automation is not joblessness but deskilling. Part of the automation of human beings is the decreased cognitive and creative labor that more and more jobs will require or allow. Companies, whether it is WorryFree or Amazon, would much prefer the less expensive route of encouraging society, primarily through culture and schooling, to produce less thoughtful, more compliant workers, rather than spend huge sums of money on automation technologies that could become obsolete within a few years. Automation technology under capitalism is expensive. On the flipside, people under capitalism have been made to be quite inexpensive. Maybe we all will not be turned into human-horse hybrids, but given the trajectory of undemocratic automatic in the early years of the twenty-first century, we will not likely be looking at a Jetsons-esque lifestyle for everyone. People will likely continue to be subjected to intense pressures to physically, psychologically, and chemically alter themselves in order to acquire even slightly higher wages.

10.  People, especially workers within capitalism, are willing to accept very little money or benefits in exchange for their labor and even their lives.

Capitalist exploitation and oppressions degrade people. Capitalist ideology convinces people that they are merely worth whatever some boss is willing to pay them—and they are fortunate to have what little they have. After all, there are plenty of people with less. This reality puts impoverished workers in a terrible situation when bosses try to buy them off to undermine labor organizing or threaten a worker with firing for talking about politics at work. This reality is also part of the root cause of conservative labor union practices, which often sacrifice anything beyond moderate gains in wages and benefits for worker compliance. The promise of a more lavish lifestyle, new clothes and a new car (or really just a car that is reliable) is what motivates Cash to sell-out. Scabs may indeed be the scum of the Earth from a labor organizing perspective (and there’s no reason to think otherwise), but they are motivated by the very same things that motivate workers to sell their labor for a wage in the first place. So really, besides the immediacy of the betrayal, what is the difference between a scab and worker who refuses to join their union or a worker who does not vote to support a strike? The results and the motivations are fundamentally identical. This is not a defense of scabbing (as if such a defense were actually possible), but it is a lesson that needs to be learned. Capitalist ideology is extremely powerful, and it compels us all in various ways to become subjects of our exploitation and the exploitation of others. Scabs and other types of non-class-conscious workers are as much a product of capitalism as the credit card is.

11.  Sorry to bother—and even betray—you, but apologies and forgiveness matter.

Even after Cash betrays his fellow-workers and friends by crossing their picket lines multiple times, once he realizes his grave error and is determined to join them in struggle, his friends forgive him. They accept his apology. The apology does not change what Cash did, but it reflects his commitment to doing the right things moving forward. This might be one of the hardest lessons for the Left to learn from this movie. How does one forgive someone who has betrayed them, especially when it was not just a friendship that was betrayed but an entire movement? However, put differently, how can the Left ever be successful moving forward without the capacity to forgive and work alongside those who have actively worked against the Left in their past? Where is the place for former liberals (or even former conservatives or reactionaries)? Where is the place for former scabs? Sorry to Bother You argues that despite the awfulness of one’s past positions and actions, the answer to these two preceding questions is: among the Left. Very few people are born into radical politics, and almost no one holds the right views from the start, and so people need time to learn and grow. Sometimes it is a very longtime filled with egregious beliefs and behaviors—but if the Left is to ever be effective, it will be populated mainly by these kinds of people.[1]

12.  The first win (or loss) is only a beginning…

Sorry to Bother You ends with a victory of sorts. A small one. Without spoiling too much, the lesson here is that strikes, whether successful or not, can only ever be the start of a revolutionary movement. Same for protests. Protests in and of themselves are not going to bring down a government or a political-economic system. Strikes will not either. There is plenty of debate on the Left about whether a mass general strike could do that, but even with something as powerful as a general strike (which is really only practically imaginable with preliminary strikes and protests preceding it) it would be unlikely on its own to replace capitalism with socialism (or whatever your preferred label for a democratic, egalitarian form of postcapitalism is). Revolutionary transformation is not something that can be won or lost overnight, with one victory—nor can it be lost with one loss, by one strike that fails or never happens, by one protest that has low turnout or fails to motivate further actions. Hope is crucial, but it must be tempered by a realistic pessimism regarding the struggle ahead. There will be many loses and hopefully many more wins—but the struggle continues. Even if capitalism were successfully dismantled, what replaces it will also be an object of struggle, one that will require that we learn as much as we can from all the struggles that precedes it.

Bryant William Sculos, Ph.D. is Visiting Assistant Professor of global politics and theory at Worcester State University. He was formerly a Mellon-Sawyer postdoctoral fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and 2019 Summer Fellow at the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry at the New School for Social Research. Bryant is the Politics of Culture section editor for the open-access journal Class, Race and Corporate Power and contributing editor for the Hampton Institute. Beyond his work for the aforementioned outlets, his work has also appeared in New Politics, Dissident Voice, Truthout, Constellations, Capitalism, Communication, & Critique (tripleC), New Political Science, and Public Seminar. He is also the co-editor (with Prof. Mary Caputi) of Teaching Marx & Critical Theory in the 21st Century (Brill, 2019; paperback forthcoming July 2020 with Haymarket Books).

Notes

[1] Although she was writing about how socialists should deal with liberals at Women’s Marches, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s writings served as crucial inspiration for this point. See: “Don’t Shame the First Steps of a Resistance” in Socialist Worker, Jan. 24, 2017. Available online at: https://socialistworker.org/2017/01/24/dont-shame-the-first-steps-of-a-resistance.

Never Forget the Real MLK

As our state-sponsored celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. commences, let’s not forget some important facts about this great man:

1. He was against the Vietnam War during a time when many Americans were not. Decades later, this view against the war has developed into a mainstream narrative, but in the 1960s, those who spoke out and marched against it (students, Civil Rights leaders) and refused to serve (Muhammad Ali) were beaten, hosed down, killed, and jailed. He would undoubtedly be railing against the US imperialist state and its perpetual war machine today

2. He condemned issues like poverty, inequality, and racism as systemic ills, not merely individual shortcomings. To this day, such broad analyses (those touching on capitalism and white supremacy) are rejected and disregarded by most as “fringe” or “too radical.” In this way, Dr. King would still be viewed as “too radical” by the current mainstream media (the same folks who whitewash and co-opt his legacy, and then celebrate this watered-down version of the man).

3. He was hated and despised by a majority of white America. In 1966, he had a 63 percent negative poll rating. He had rocks thrown at his head and was routinely spat on during marches. This hatred still exists today. Simply turn on TV stations or radio shows or peruse social media comments to see how black liberation movements are ridiculed, loathed, and detested by the thousands. Nazis and white supremacists are marching in US streets and congregating on social media. There is no doubt that Dr. King would be on the front lines of current movements; and, therefore, would still take the brunt of this hatred, ignorance, and disrespect - even today.

4. He was considered to be “an enemy of the state” by various government agencies. The FBI tapped his phone calls, blacklisted him as a “suspected Communist,” and sent anonymous letters demeaning him and encouraging him to commit suicide. Various levels of the government, from the FBI to the Memphis Police Dept, have been found to have some involvement in his death.

5. He initiated the “Poor People’s Campaign” and put forth an economic and social bill of rights that espoused “a national responsibility to provide work for all.” Dr. King advocated for a jobs guarantee and would end unemployment by requiring the government to provide jobs to anyone who could not find one. The bill of rights also included “the right of every citizen to a minimum income," regardless of whether they are employed. Today, these proposals would be laughed at by media pundits, and he would be written off as "crazy" by many of the same folks who pretend to celebrate him.

6. He supported the Planned Parenthood Federation and believed that things like “family planning and contraception” should be fully funded by the government – ideas that are despised by modern conservatives who have no shame in calling on their whitewashed version of Dr. King’s legacy to use for their own agendas.

Celebrating Dr. King’s life and role in the struggle is important, but learning and considering the real man and his real ideas is even more crucial in a time that still needs them.

Let’s celebrate Dr. King for who he really was: a radical people’s champion who confronted the power structure, faced down the defenders of this structure, challenged capitalism, challenged poverty, challenged white supremacy, challenged militarism and war, and challenged the status quo that engulfs all of these elements – a status quo that still exists. A status quo that now shamelessly co-opts his legacy for its own use.

Never Forget.

The Attention Industry: From Marketing and Advertising to Mass Media

By Marcus Kahn

When CocaCola flashes a vibrant video clip of a family clinking bottles, what are they doing? How about a car commercial with a movie star that talks more about the feeling of driving the car than its reliability? Or the targeted advertisements on the sidebar on your Facebook page? Are these corporations trying to inform you by presenting logically structured information? The obvious answer is “Of course not. They’re selling you something.” The more sinister, but equally accurate wording argues that the advertiser is trying to manipulate your decision-making paradigm by strategically feeding you sensory data.

The attention industry is tolerated by most Americans, largely because we don’t have a choice. We were all raised on commercials, and it’s gotten to the point where we forget we have a right to cognitive autonomy. If you talk to your parents, they are sure to have a trove of old jingles from companies that no longer exist, and a few especially catchy ones from companies that still do. The mental process that associates a jingle with a feeling is the same one that keeps the Pledge of Allegiance in your head after all these years, and fills your belly with warmth when you hear the Star Spangled Banner. Advertising seems different than propaganda because it’s coming from so many sources, rather than one clear institutional distributor, but the mechanisms are the same. Strategically expose a viewer or reader to certain information in order to guide the formation of their beliefs and actions. And the implications of this practice extend far beyond your T.V. screen.

Manufacturing Consent

In Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky explicate the development and aims of the public relations (advertising) industry and link it to the increasing sophistication of political propaganda distribution in the 20th century.

Advertisers create uninformed consumers who make irrational decisions, contravening one of the fundamental principles of market economics (that economic decisions are driven by informed consumers behaving rationally). For instance, if CocaCola was trying to inform a rational consumer, they would talk about the health implications of their product and the features that distinguish their product from that of their competitors. Instead they surround their product with image and rhetoric, generating an abstraction that can be widely disseminated. If Lincoln Motors was trying to appeal to your logical side, they’d feature an ‘expert’ or a series of statistics that prove a Lincoln sedan is a superior investment. But they don’t. Instead Matthew McConaughey says sexy things in sexy ways, and people are seduced into their purchase.

In the same vein, mainstream media outlets create an uninformed electorate who makes irrational decisions. Take Fox News. On the establishment left it is commonly understood that Fox News uses sensationalism, intense selectivity, and slant to alter their viewership’s perception of current events and policy. It is also understood to a lesser degree that these viewers support administrations and consequently policies that don’t support their best interests. Tax reform comes to mind as the most obvious example. The liberal intellectual class also perceives the establishment right as serving the interests of large multinational corporations, traditionally identifying oil companies and military contractors, but more recently the pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. Fox fights tooth and nail to divert attention away from these issues to focus on such pressing matters as the almost hysterical defense of perceived American culture and values.

But there is little self-reflection on the part of the liberal intellectual class as to the sensationalism, intense selectivity, and slant used to divert their attention away from pressing issues. These issues, if addressed in policy and action, would threaten the primacy of the corporations who consume and hoard disproportionate amounts of resources and also guide policy and decision making.

The evidence is on the front page of mainstream newspapers every day. Or rather it isn’t. Climate change doesn’t get nearly the coverage it deserves. A recent article in the L.A. Times even cited an academic who argued for the reversibility of the trend, though overwhelming scholarship suggests its disastrous inevitability. Many large corporations would have to undergo expensive overhauls or be abandoned altogether in order to contend with the restrictions of radical climate policy, and the minimal and slanted coverage even in a supposedly left-leaning periodical like the Los Angeles Times is reflective of an attempt to divert public attention away from a pressing issue.

Wealth inequality as a structural flaw inherent to capitalism is never supported in print, and presidential candidates who advocate for a radical departure from the doctrinal status quo are given minimal coverage and dismissed as idealistic, ineffective, or worse. On the other hand, corporate executives who have accumulated obscene amounts of capital are often painted as societal leaders and their opinions are given weight and legitimacy, though their interests differ radically from the vast majority of the publication’s readership. A recent article in the Washington Post, titled “A wealth tax isn’t the best way to tax the rich” questioned the effectiveness of establishing a wealth tax on the grounds that it would be hard to value assets and that it would encounter constitutional opposition. Despite the more fundamental questions surrounding the construction of the U.S. constitution and the landed interests it was meant to promote, there is a more obvious problem with this analysis. If it’s so easy to value my assets and tax me, why aren’t their preexisting mechanisms in place to value and tax the wealthiest members of our society?

The media’s coverage of American aggression abroad is a topic that Chomsky has covered extensively in numerous books and lectures. Much like wealth inequality and climate change, American aggression is portrayed with remarkable similarity across the limited political spectrum of the mainstream media. To take a particularly egregious example, during and after the American attack on Vietnam, the mainstream media portrayed the ‘mission’ as a tactical blunder undertaken with the best intentions, a sincere but poorly executed attempt to spread democracy. However the public and internal records paint a dire picture, where the ‘war’ itself amounted to genocide and was preceeded by nearly a decade of U.S. backed terrorism and repression. American policy consistently ignored the peace sought on both sides of the developing conflict, prioritizing an ultimate ‘victory’ which involved Vietnam’s complete submission to the political and economic dictates of the United States.

American war crimes and international violations are studiously ignored across the board, whether they take place in POW camps during World War II, in bombings over the skies of Indochina, coups and military operations sponsored by the U.S. in Central America, and the list goes on. Covert operations and military aid to oppressive autocratic regimes that were often propped up by the U.S. in the first place are given little to no space or critical evaluation. And the very reasonable American public opinions on such trivial matters as military spending and military interventionism is ignored. The mainstream media’s coverage of foreign affairs generates the sort of patriotic fervor and conditioned fear that blinds Americans to the human and financial costs of warfare and aggression abroad. In the current climate as in years past, fear of Russian and Chinese state and economic power is often the subject of intense journalistic focus, greasing the wheels for the ceaseless operation of the military-industrial complex as it is justified in print and on the air over and over again.

The consistency among corporately-owned news outlets that claim vast political differences cannot be overemphasized. Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model provide a convincing framework for explaining this phenomenon. The network of associations that define media ownership and stewardship of these corporate outlets sheds further light on the complex interplay of power that exists at the top of the corporate world.

Media Ownership and Stewardship

Explicit ownership of a news outlet no longer has sole explanatory power in analyzing how a media outlet behaves. Arthur O. Sulzberger may have some say in what is published in the New York Times, but there is a dense network of corporate relationships that bolsters the institution and guides its decision making. Each mainstream media outlet is not only owned by an individual, family or parent corporation, but also advised by a group of representatives from some of the largest corporations in the American lexicon.

The Sulzberger family has owned the New York Times since 1896, which should send up some red flags. But The New York Times Company Board of Directors also has members associated with McDonald’s, Verizon, Nike, Facebook, Expedia, Etsy, Sony, Pandora, as well as a visiting professor of Rhetoric and the Art of Public Persuasion at the University of Oxford.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon owns the Washington Post. You’ll find board members associated with General Motors, Xerox, Johnson and Johnson, Berkshire Hathaway, a $70bn investment-fund, a large insurance company, and SurveyMonkey.com, which I imagine is capable of gathering massive amounts of data on public opinion.

The Los Angeles Times is owned by Patrick Soon-Shiong, the president of SoftBank investment fund, which nets $32bn in sales every year and is a virtual god in the world of tech investment. I couldn’t find a board of directors for the Los Angeles Times online.

I won’t bother looking into Fox. Everyone knows how that will turn out.

The mechanisms used to manipulate public opinion have gotten infinitely more sophisticated since William Randolph Hearst’s time, though control of the mainstream media today is similarly plutocratic. In the age of big data, the aim and ability to manipulate public opinion should come across as a terrifying feature of the American public discourse. Take Facebook, for example. It is clear how much power even a foreign government can have on American public opinion, regardless of whether or not Trump actively contributed to the Russian misinformation effort. I shudder to think about the powerful effect corporations and other powerful institutions will have on the outcome of this election using the mainstream media.

Conclusion

In the same way that advertisers manufacture the desire for their product by feeding you sensory data, corporately owned news outlets manufacture consent for harmful government policies by publishing information strategically. What’s scarier than the monopolistic bent of marketing-heavy corporations is the transformation of corporate-political propaganda into a hard science. Poll after poll, study after study, has helped to refine the art of public persuasion. This might not seem relevant during a contentious presidential election. Just mute the TV during commercials, right? But the science under development in the public relations industry has always shared close ties with corporate power, and by connection media and politics.

There doesn’t need to be a grand conspiracy. There doesn’t have to be a dark room full of whispered commands. But there is an identifiable pattern of power and influence that permeates the mainstream media; a pattern that can be reframed as a centuries-long marketing campaign to suit the interests of a global class of plutocrats.

Corporations donate to election campaigns for the same reason they place representatives on the boards of major media outlets. They want control over policy and control over public opinion. And though there are a lot of different organizations competing for this privileged access to media and governmental influence, their interests are often aligned. They cooperate across the limited political spectrum of American media to temper rising racial and class awareness.

Though it is subtle, you can identify it with the right questions. Why does the mainstream media only cover a social movement like the Civil Rights Movement and the resistance to the Vietnam War, or more recently the Black Lives Matter or #MeToo movements when they become too powerful to ignore? Why isn’t economic inequality, nuclear proliferation, racial inequality, or climate change the front page story every day, when they’re clearly the most dire threats to the vast majority of people in the short and long-term? Advocating strongly for these issues goes against the best interests and likely the nature of a small yet powerful class of business super-elites. They cooperate to varying degrees on key issues producing a remarkable degree of consistency across the spectrum, from the New York Times to Fox News.

Lessons of Rojava and Histories of Abolition

By Brendan McQuade

Originally published at Marxist sociology blog.

The Rojava Revolution is one of the most important revolutionary struggle of recent years. In the context of civil war and great power intrigue, the Kurdish movement evolved into a multi-ethnic and non-sectarian autonomous administration that governs approximately two million people in Northeastern Syria. These liberated areas have produced important experiments in direct democracy, cooperative and ecological development, and community self-defense and conflict resolution.

The Revolution is also the liberatory counterpoint to the Islamic State. In 2014 and 2015, Rojava’s militias received international attention for breaking the Islamic State’s siege of the city of Kobani and creating an evacuation corridor for some 50,000 Yazidis who were fleeing the Islamic State. Given the Syrian Civil War is also a climate conflict, the great political question of the 21st century may well be the socialism of Rojava or the barbarism of the Islamic State.

It’s no surprise the Rojava Revolution has been a point of inspiration for radicals across the world and, particularly, abolitionists and others on the libertarian-left. In their manifesto, Burn Down the American Plantation, the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement, an anarchist organization with chapters in Philadelphia, New York Chicago, New Haven, and California’s Inland Empire, considers Rojava to be a blueprint for organization elsewhere: “The Rojava Revolution, the anti-state revolution in northern Syria, provides us with a successful example of the strategies of organization and resistance we need to apply in the US today.”

It’s also no surprise that the Rojava Revolution may soon be over. The revolution developed in a power vacuum created when Assad government unilaterally withdrew from the Kurdish regions in Northeast Syria to focus on the developing civil war in Western Syria. The United States made a pragmatic alliance with Rojava during the campaign against the Islamic State but what that support meant going forward was never clear. Turkey, Syria’s neighbor to the north, is keen to both see Assad out and the Kurdish movement crushed. Between Turkey and the Trump administration, it was only a matter of time before the precarious balance of political forces shifted against Rojava. In October 2019, the US withdrew troops from Syria, clearing the way for Turkish invasion. This threat, in turn, forced Rojava to reconcile with Damascus for short term survival. What this means for the future of the Revolution is far from clear but it’s hard to feel encouraged.

What does this tragedy mean for our understanding of political struggle today? Does the seeming twilight of the Rojava Revolution mean that it is just another failed one? The Rojava Revolution could not defend itself against the state. It’s unclear how similar strategies could prevail in the United States, where the openings for the type of democratic autonomy seen Rojava are much smaller (or perhaps fundamentally different).

These questions, I contend, can only be answered if we confront them on the level of political strategy and opportunity, rather than political philosophy and identity. Abolitionists and anti-authoritarians are right to be inspired by example of Rojava but translating the lessons of the Revolution to a wildly different political context like the United States is no simple task. To better understand the Rojava Revolution, I return to the fundamentals of historical materialism. My recent article published Social Justice, “Histories of Abolition, Critiques of Security,” considers Rojava in relation to the debates abolition in the nascent US left: the rejection of abolition as fanciful and its defense as an area of non-reformist reformism in the struggle for 21st century socialism and strategy of insurrection. The impasse between a rejection of abolition and the tired revolution/reform binary can be resolved by returning to fundamentals of historical materialism, and particularly, W.E.B. Du Bois’ analysis of “abolition democracy” in his seminal work, Black Reconstruction.

Histories of Abolition

Abolition democracy refers to the social forces that led the “Reconstruction of Democracy” after the Civil War. It was revolutionary experiment made possible, first, by the direct action of black workers, a General Strike, and, later, advanced through continual mobilization (including armed self-defense) and the non-reformist reforms of Radical Reconstruction. While the antislavery struggle provided the political content of abolition democracy, this revolutionary project existed in precarious conditions, the temporary alignment of black workers, middle class abolitionists represented in Congress by the Radical Republicans, and, eventually, northern industrialists and poor southern whites. It was a revolutionary moment that was never fully consolidated and, as result, its gains were rolled back.

Despite this seeming failure, the moment held a deeper significance that middle class Abolitionists (and many subsequent scholars) largely missed. Abolition democracy challenged the fundamental class relations upon which historical capitalism stood: a racially stratified global division of labor, which, starting the in the sixteenth century, tied Europe, West Africa, and the Americas together in a capitalist world-economy. Black workers were the most devalued and exploited laborers, what Du Bois called “the foundation stone not only of Southern social structure but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-scale.”

By striking at the root of global capitalism, the American Civil War that produced the cataclysm and change that created the possibility for radical change. This possibility was lost because the Abolitionists never confronted capital and the labor movement never embraced abolition. When politics shifted, the temporary class alliances that enabled radical reconstruction gave way to what Du Bois called a “counter-revolution” or “dictatorship of property.”

On a more general level, Du Bois establishes the need to understand abolition in relation to the (1) social relations and (2) historical processes that define a particular historical moment, while also considering (3) social movement clusters that were contesting these relations of forces. In Black Reconstruction, then, Du Bois analyzes the abolition democracy in relation (1) the class composition of the antebellum United States, (2) the consolidation of an industrial economy, and (3) the interaction of the budding labor movement with the anti-slavery actions of black workers and Abolitionists.

In this way, Black Reconstruction offers a different understanding of abolition, beyond the tired revolution-reform binary. As an analytic and organizing concept, abolition democracy becomes the liberatory politics embedded within struggles of historically-specific mobilizations of popular forces. It is the struggle for freedom from violent regulation and subjectification. Du Bois shows that it is organically tied up with the related fights to secure conditions for social reproduction, distribute the social product, shape shared institutions, and set collective priorities. In other words, abolition—or socialism, for that matter—is not a political program we can define in the abstract and implement. It is a process of liberation tied to broader clusters of emancipatory movements as they emerge and exist within specific historical moments. The question, then, is not revolution or reform but who is fighting for abolition—or socialism—what does that even mean in the contemporary United States and what will it take to win.

Du Bois provides a historical materialist understanding of abolition as interplay of disruptive direct action and incremental change within a historically informed understanding of a particular social struggle. This holistic approach highlights the specific social relations that constitute the exploitative and oppressive social formations in which we live. In this way, Du Bois can provide the necessary perspective to ask what kind of interventions could be “non-reformist,” while also creating space to understand direct action and insurrection in terms of political strategy, rather than philosophy.

Abolition, Socialism and Political Strategy

This approach undermines some of the common slogans made about nature of structural violence today. Mass incarceration is not the New Jim Crow nor is it a direct a simple outgrowth of slavery. What Angela Davis terms “the prison of slavery and the slavery of prison” are different arrangements. Slavery, convict leasing, and Jim Crow were systems to marshal and mobilize labor. Mass incarceration is a system to warehouse surplus populations. These differences, moreover, speak to tremendous structural transformations in the world-economy and the American state. If we want to be politically effective, we, unlike abolitionists of the 1860s, must appreciate the specificities of our moment.

This means acknowledging that, as Julia Sudbury does, “the slavery-prison analogy tends to erase the presence of non-black prisoners.” It means recognizing that an exclusive focus on anti-black racism threatens to dismiss the experiences of Latinx and indigenous people with imprisonment, policing, and state violence. It means admitting that the incarceration rate for white people in the United States, while much lower than that of historically marginalized groups, is still grotesque in comparison with the rest of the world. In the words of Angela Davis, it means understanding that the prison “has become a receptacle for all those human beings who bear the inheritance of the failure to create abolition democracy in the aftermath of slavery,” while also recognizing that “this inheritance is not only born by black prisoners, but by poor Latino, Native American, Asian and white prisoners.” It means it thinking about revolutionary strategy in way that appreciates the historical forces that create our moment, without being unthinkingly tied to anachronistic ideas and strategies that today may be ineffective.

Most importantly, this perspective allows us to situate powerful moments of revolutionary breakthrough in their historical context and derive the appropriate conclusions from them. In this regard, we should not dismiss the way Burn Down the American Plantation highlights the experience of Rojava Revolution. Rather, we should understand the social processes and social relations that surround this important event, namely the collapse of the state during Syria Civil War and the trajectory of the Kurdish Movement.

Contextualizing the Rojava Revolution in this manner is not the same as dismissing its relevance. Instead, it allows us to usefully interpret its lessons from the vantage point of particular time and place. Recognizing that the Rojava Revolution took place amidst civil war and state collapse raises doubts about the applicability of the model in areas where the state is strong. Burn Down the American Plantation advocates “placing self-defense at the center of our revolutionary movement” and calls on existing anti-fascist groups and cop watches to model themselves on the self-defense forces of Rojava Revolution. Specifically, the manifesto calls on these organizations to “Develop…the capacity to begin launching offensive actions against fascists and the regime.” This advocacy for armed insurrection is misguided. It fails to appreciate the conditions that made Rojava possible, while also neglecting to mention the awesome coercive powers of the American state and the weakness of the nascent American left.

Moreover, contextualizing Rojava gives us the possibility of translating the lessons of the Revolution into our context. The continually high numbers of “police involved shootings” in the United States, the breakthrough of white supremacist movements, the escalating confrontations at protests, and mounting incidents of political violence all underscore the urgent need to community self-defense in this political moment. This is need is structural as evinced by the recent emergence of armed left formations in the United States like the Socialist Relief Association and the Red Guards of the Party for Socialism and Liberation that joined older groups like Red Neck Revolt.

More generally, there is a budding muncipalist movement in the United States that, in part, draws on some of the same intellectual currents that also inform Rojava. In this United States, this movement is best exemplified by Jackson-Kush Plan associated with Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and Cooperation Jackson. The plan has three pillars building cooperative economy, creating participatory structures at the city level, networking progressive political leaders. Moreover, this electoral road to libertarian socialism at the city level has already delivered some concrete results. In 2013, Jackson, Mississippi elected Mayor Chokwe Lumumba, who campaigned on the promises of to implement the Jackson Plan. Although Lumumba died less than year into office, his son, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, successfully won the mayoral race in June 2017. Already, the new administration pursuing an economic development strategy based around promoting cooperative businesses and putting in place a participatory process, empowering popular assemblies organized by to develop a budget proposal/

Notably, however, Chokwe Antar Lumumba’s young administration has been remarkably conventional when it comes to criminal justice. While the Mayor Lumumba has repeatedly drawn the link between crime and poverty, he’s also pledged to be “tough on crime.” Moreover, the new administration has maintained conventional police force and made no moves toward instituting community control of the police. Here, in a city where political power is held by radical administration, the self-defense experiments of the Rojava Revolution may make an instructive example, albeit not a simple blueprint. If grassroots alternatives to police existed in Jackson, could it pressure Lumumba to adopt more radical positions like community control of police or—better—disband the police department and replace it with community controlled self-defense forces and restorative justice bodies? The point here is not outline a political platform or provide a detailed analysis of contemporary attempts to create municipal socialism in Jackson but rather to demonstrate the way the holistic and historical conception of abolition advanced by Du Bois expands our expands our political parameters, allowing us to both make sense our current conditions and relate them to other powerful instances of abolitionist organizing.

Taken together, this approach to abolition allows us to both learn for the past and appreciate how previous struggles shaped the specificities of the present moment. If abolition can be usefully described as the liberatory politics immanent within the historically specific social struggles, one should be able to find abolitionist tendencies, abolitionist demands, abolitionist practices, and abolitionist institutions in most emancipatory movements. This approach can allow us to consider these moments relationally and learn the historical lessons of other moments of “abolition democracy.” This is how we learn what it takes to get free.

Brendan McQuade is an assistant professor at University of Southern Maine and author of Pacifying the Homeland. This commentary is adapted from a longer article published in Social Justice.

A Modest Proposal for Socialist Revolution

By Chris Wright

At this point in history, two things are clear. First, Marx was right that capitalism is torn by too many “contradictions” to be sustainable indefinitely as a global economic system. In its terminal period, which we’re entering now (and which we can predict will last generations, because a global economic order doesn’t vanish in a decade or two), it will be afflicted by so many popular uprisings—on the left and the right—so many economic, political, and ecological crises causing so much turmoil and dislocation, that only a permanent and worldwide fascism would be able to save it. But fascism, by its murderous and ultra-nationalistic nature, can be neither permanent nor continuously enforced worldwide. Even just in the United States, the governmental structure is too vast and federated, there are too many thousands of relatively independent political jurisdictions, for a truly fascist regime to be consolidated nationwide, in every nook and cranny of the country. Fascism, or neo-fascism, is only a temporary and partial solution for the ruling class.

Second, the original Marxist predictions of how a transition to a new society would play out are wrong and outdated. Some Marxists still continue to think in terms of the old formulations, but they’re a hundred years behind the times. It is no longer helpful (it never was, really) to proclaim that a “dictatorship of the proletariat” will “smash the state” and reconstruct society through initiatives that magically transform an authoritarian, bureaucratic, exploitative economy into an emancipatory, democratic one of dispersed power. The conceptual and empirical problems with this orthodox view are overwhelming, as I’ve explained in this book (chapters 4 and 6). As if the leaders of a popular movement that, miraculously, managed to overcome the monopoly over military force of a ruling class in an advanced capitalist country and took over the government (whether electorally or through an insurrection) would, by means of conscious aforethought, be able to transcend the “dialectical contradictions” and massive complexity of society to straightforwardly rebuild the economy from the ground up, all while successfully fending off the attacks and sabotage of the capitalist class! The story is so idealistic it’s incredible any Marxists can believe it (or some variant of it).

Some leftist writers have argued, rightly, against an insurrectionary approach to revolution in a core capitalist nation, using the words of Kautsky and other old Marxists to make their point. But it isn’t necessary to follow this general practice of endlessly poring over the works of Kautsky, Bernstein, Luxemburg, Lenin, and others who wrote in a dramatically different political economy than the present. It can be useful to familiarize oneself with hundred-year-old debates, but ultimately the real desideratum is just some critical common sense. We don’t need pretentious academic exercises that conclude in some such statement of truisms as the following (from an article by Stephen Maher and Rafael Khachaturian):

“What is certain is that waging a struggle within and against the state demands that we build new forms of democratic participation and working class organization with the goal of breaking definitively with capitalist production relations and forms of political authority. This process will occur in fits and starts… Navigating between a reflexive anti-statism and the fallacy of attempting to “occupy” state institutions without transforming them is undoubtedly challenging. But only in this way can we advance beyond the past shortcomings of both dual power and social democratic approaches to the capitalist state.”

Pure truism, which it wasn’t necessary to write a long essay to support. So let’s shun elitist jargon and academic insularity, instead using the democratic capacity of reason that’s available to everyone.

The social democratic (or “democratic socialist”) approach to revolution is favored by the Jacobin school of thought: elect socialists to office and build a social democratic state such as envisioned by Bernie Sanders—but don’t rest content with such a state. Keep agitating for more radical reforms—don’t let the capitalist class erode popular gains, but instead keep building on them—until at last genuine socialism is realized.

I’ve criticized the Jacobin vision elsewhere. It’s a lovely dream, but it’s over-optimistic. The social democratic stage of history, premised on industrial unionism and limited capital mobility, is over. It’s a key lesson of Marxism itself that we can’t return to the past, to conditions that no longer exist; we can’t resurrect previous social formations after they have succumbed to the ruthless, globalizing, atomizing logic of capital.

Suppose Bernie Sanders is elected this year (which itself would be remarkable, given the hostility of the entire ruling class). Will he be able to enact Medicare for All, free higher education, a Green New Deal, safe and secure housing for all, “workplace democracy,” or any other of his most ambitious goals? It’s highly unlikely. He’ll have to deal with a Congress full of Republicans and conservative Democrats, a conservative judiciary, a passionately obstructionist capitalist class, hostile state governments, a white supremacist electoral insurgency, etc. Only after purging Congress of the large majority of its centrists and conservatives would Sanders’ social democratic dreams be achievable—and such a purge is well-nigh unimaginable in the next ten or twenty years. Conservatives’ long march to their current ascendancy took fifty years, and they had enormous resources and existed in a sympathetic political economy. It’s hard to imagine that socialists will have much better luck.

Meanwhile, civilization will be succumbing to the catastrophic effects of climate change and ecological destruction. It is unlikely that an expansive social democracy on an international scale will be forthcoming in these conditions.

So, if both insurrection and social democracy are apparently hopeless, what is left? Realistically, only the path I lay out in my above-linked book.[1] Marx was right that a new society can be erected only on the basis of new production relations. Democratic, cooperative, egalitarian relations of production cannot be implanted by fiat from the commanding heights of national governments. They have to emerge over time, over decades and generations, as the old society declines and collapses. The analogy with the transition from feudalism to capitalism is far from perfect (not least given the incredible length of time that earlier transition took), but it’s at least more suggestive than metaphorical, utopian slogans about “smashing the state” are. Through democratic initiative, allied with gradual changes in state policy as leftists are elected to office and the state is threatened by social disruption, new modes of production and distribution will emerge locally, interstitially, and eventually in the mainstream.

The historical logic of this long process, including why the state and ruling class will be forced to tolerate and aid the gradual growth of a “solidarity economy” (as a necessary concession to the masses), is discussed in the book. The left will grow in strength as repeated economic crises thin the ranks of the hyper-elite and destroy large amounts of wealth; the emerging “cooperative” and socialized institutions of economic and social life will, as they spread, contribute further to the resources and the victories of popular movements. Incrementally, as society is consumed by ecological crisis and neo-fascism proves unable to suppress social movements everywhere in the world, one can expect that the left will take over national states and remake social relations in alliance with these democratic movements.

Such predictions assume, of course, that civilization will not utterly collapse and descend into a post-apocalyptic nightmare. This is a possibility. But the only realistic alternative is the one I’m sketching.

Ironically, this “gradualist” model of revolution (which, incidentally, has little in common with Eduard Bernstein’s gradualism) is more consistent with the premises of historical materialism than are idealistic notions of socialists sweepingly taking over the state whether through elections or armed uprisings. At the end of the long process of transformation, socialists will indeed have taken complete control of national governments; and from this perch they’ll be able to carry the social revolution to its fruition, finalizing and politically consolidating all the changes that have taken place. But this end-goal is probably a hundred or more years in the future, because worldwide transitions between modes of production don’t happen quickly.

Again, one might recall the European transition from feudalism to capitalism: in country after country, the bourgeoisie couldn’t assume full control of the state until the liberal capitalist economy had already made significant inroads against feudalism and absolutism. Something similar will surely apply to a transition out of capitalism. It is a very Marxist point (however rarely it’s been made) to argue that the final conquest of political power must be grounded in the prior semi-conquest of economic power. You need colossal material resources to overthrow, even if “gradually,” an old ruling class.

What are the implications for activism of these ideas? In brief, activists must take the long view and not be cast into despair by, for instance, the inevitable failures of a potential Sanders presidency. There’s a role for every variety of activism, from electoral to union-building; and we shouldn’t have disdain for the activism that seeks to construct new institutions like public banks, municipal enterprises, cooperatives (worker, consumer, housing, financial, etc.), and other non-capitalist institutions we can hardly foresee at the moment. It’s all part of creating a “counter-hegemony” to erode the legitimacy of capitalism, present viable alternatives to it, and hasten its demise.

Meanwhile, the activism that seeks whatever limited “social democratic” gains are possible will remain essential, to improve the lives of people in the present. While full-fledged social democracy in a capitalist context is no longer in the cards, legislation to protect and expand limited social rights is.

Anyway, in the twenty-first century, it’s time Marxists stopped living in the shadow of the Russian Revolution. Let’s think creatively and without illusions about how to build post-capitalist institutions, never forgetting that the ultimate goal, as ever, is to take over the state.

Notes

[1] Being an outgrowth of my Master’s thesis, the book over-emphasizes worker cooperatives. It does, however, answer the usual Marxist objections to cooperatives as a component of social revolution.

Zimbabwe's Political, Social, and Economic Prospects: 2019 in Review

By Mafa Kwanisai Mafa

Political landscape

After the 2018 harmonized elections which gave the ZANU PF party the mandate to rule, President Emmerson Mnangagwa appealed to all political party Presidents who contested in the elections to come together in a national dialogue and find a way to stop the toxic political polarization which continues to divide the Zimbabwean nation. Another reason for the national dialogue was to provide a viable platform for contributing towards lasting solutions to the challenges that confront the country. All the 19 political parties accepted the President’s invitation to Political Actors Dialogue (POLAD) and the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) refused on the basis that they don’t recognize the Presidency of Emmerson Mnangagwa.

They claim that Mnangagwa is an outcome of a rigged election despite the fact that they were deemed free and fair by many international observers and also by the Constitutional Court of Zimbabwe. A southern Africa bloc, Southern Africa Development Commission (SADC) is in support of the POLAD platform created by the government of Zimbabwe and support a full inclusive dialogue. Former South African President Thabo Mbeki who brokered the Global Political Agreement (2008) before was in the country towards year end to bring all stakeholders to the table and consult. President Thabo Mbeki is pushing for talks to end economic crisis. Mbeki held marathon meetings with the protagonists in Harare as well as other political, civic society, and church leaders. The opposition MDC says it is committed to “real dialogue” to solve the political and economic morass in the country and will not be part of President’s Mnangagwa’s POLAD platform.

The opposition, in cahoots with their international allies through foreign embassies and civil society groups, are escalating their efforts to topple the government of Emmerson Mnangagwa. These organizations are fighting in the opposition corner by supporting and funding the MDC destabilization agenda. The same organizations have been urging USA and EU to maintain the illegal economic sanctions on Zimbabwe, citing alleged human rights violations by the government and security services. The MDC opposition leadership has been on the whirlwind tour in western capitals asking for more sanctions to put pressure on the Zimbabwean government.

Economic Situation

Zimbabwe is in the throes of its economic decay in a decade characterized by acute shortages of cash, medicine, fuel and rolling power cuts of up to 20 hours a day. Inflation skyrocketed to 481.5% in November 2019, in the process eroding salaries and decimating pensions. Zimbabwe is also grappling with price increases which are changing every day. In the interim, salaries have remained depressed, with consumer spending severely curtailed. Zimbabwe economic morass constitutes one of the biggest threats to ZANU PF's continued hold on power. United Nations expert Hilal Elver, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food, noted that Zimbabwe is on the brink of starvation, a crisis that has been compounded by hyperinflation, poverty, natural disasters and economic sanctions. The ZANU PF Central Committee report of 2019 noted that the most latent security threat that has great consequences is the unstable economy, which is largely propelled by the parallel market (black market). Formal trading prices are determined by the parallel market exchange rate, which has been sharply rising on a daily basis. Prices of all commodities and services have followed suit to unsustainable levels.

The report admitted that most people are failing to make ends meet, so poverty levels are rising very much throughout the year. As a result anger is brewing among the citizens while there is loss of confidence on the direction the economy is taking. In January a steep hike in fuel prices led to violent demonstrations across the country which the army and police ruthlessly put down. The human rights groups estimated that about 17 people were shot down with live ammunition by the security forces during the three days protests.

Zimbabwe is suffering from massive power cuts which has brought a number of businesses to a standstill. The power utility in 2019 went on to increase tariffs by 320%. The increase in tariffs was meant to solve the power crisis in the country but failed dismally with some businesses bearing the brunt as they lost productive hours.

Economic Sanctions and the Regime change agenda

This is a sad chapter in Zimbabwe's recent history which marked the beginning of a well-organized, meticulously coordinated and generously funded campaign of economic sabotage and misinformation designed to mislead both the Zimbabwean population as well as the international community with the ultimate aim of overthrowing the elected government. Activists are being trained in foreign lands by intelligence forces on how to organize and apply strategies to undermine the government and its economic policies. This is meant to render the country ungovernable and incite the population to revolt and overthrow a legitimate government.

October 25, 2019 was declared a national holiday in Zimbabwe for people to march against western sanctions. Sanctions are causing more harm as they have affected people, companies, and schools. Zimbabwe has for the past two decades failed to access lines of credit from IMF and the World Bank. Some banks in the country are restricted from trading with international financial institutions. Under the USA Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act, American companies are not allowed to deal with Zimbabwe entities on the sanctions list. Some companies associated with the state have had their money intercepted and blocked when they attempt to do business with international institutions. Companies are finding it difficult to move money into the country because banks can be fined for dealing with sanctioned countries.

In April 2019, the USA fined the Standard Chartered Bank US$18 million for dealing with a sanctioned country. Many companies have been forced to close shop or to scale down their operations. This has led to a loss of jobs. Many international investors are shying away from investing in the country.

In the past two decades, various opposition leaders from the MDC party have been consistently calling for and instating on the maintenance of the illegal economic sanctions with the aim of regime change. SADC set October 25, 2019, as the SADC day against Zimbabwe sanctions which marks the start of a sustained call for the unconditional lifting of sanctions against Zimbabwe through various activities.

There is an organization based in Belgrade called Centre for Applied Non Violent Action and Strategies (CANVAS) which is clandestinely training antigovernment activists with strong umbilical links to the Zimbabwean main opposition MDC. Its mission is to layout the groundwork for civil unrest. Srdja Popovic is the founder and executive director of this organization. He is based in Belgrade, Serbia and his job is to foment revolutions in countries such as Sudan, Swaziland (Eswathini), Venezuela, Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Burma, Vietnam, Belarus, Syria, Somalia, and Zimbabwe. Most of the activists which were arrested in Zimbabwe in the aftermath of the January 14 and 16, 2019 violent protests and charged with treason and subversion received their training in Czech Republic and the Maldives. Their training involves organizing mass protests, the use of small arms, and counter intelligence. Most of the organizations which are engaged in these nefarious and subversive activities to topple the government of Zimbabwe are also funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), an American private and nonprofit organization which focuses on “strengthening democratic institutions.”

CANVAS was founded in 2003 by Srdja Popovic and Ivan Marovic and ever since it has been training antigovernment activists in Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Iran, Lebanon, Tibet, Ukraine, and Venezuela. Srdja Popovic was one of the key founders and organisers of the Serbian nonviolence revolution group called Otpor! Otpor! Campaign which toppled the Serbian President Slobodan Milosovic in October 2000. CANVAS has been successful in most countries mentioned in fomenting uprisings save for Swaziland, Belarus, and Zimbabwe, which are still enjoying some peace. Foreign organizations are coordinating workshops and trainings in the country, the region, and overseas to topple the Zimbabwe government.

Austerity and the International Monetary Fund

Zimbabwe launched its austerity measures under the Transitional Stabilization Programme (TSP) in October 2018 when it was presenting the 2019 national budget. The time frame of the programme is scheduled to run from October 2018 to December 2020. The purpose of the austerity measures are meant to implement cost cutting measures, and to reduce the public sector wage bill. In addition to that, austerity reforms are aimed at increasing tax revenues by introducing the unpopular 2 % Intermediated Monetary Transfer (IMT) tax, restructuring the civil service and the privatization of ailing state enterprises and parastatals. These reforms are meant to bring about fiscal balances in the public sector. These reforms are meant to reduce government spending, increase tax revenues or to achieve both. The International Monetary Fund is keeping an eye on these reforms through a Staff Monitored Programme which covers a period from May 2019 to March 2020. These measures are very unpopular with the masses as they have proved to be anti-developmental, self-defeating, and have an adverse effects on the toiling working class.

The civil service has been affected by the austerity measures in terms of salaries which are now pegged at less than US$30 a month. Persistent threats of strikes and demonstrations have crippled important sectors such as health, education and even provision of documents such as passports. These austerity reforms shrink economic growth and cripple public service delivery. From past experiences IMF is unlikely to offer any bailout to the Zimbabwe economy, which means the country will have to lift itself out of any economic slowdown caused by the austerity measures. Critics of austerity measures fear that the reforms are acting as a double edged knife that leads to economic recession, job cuts, and company closures whilst failing to tackle runaway government expenditure. Its most likely that history is going to repeat itself, cognizant of the 1990 Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) which left the economy worse off, further marginalizing the poor and vulnerable groups.

The impact of austerity measures are likely to widen the already high income inequality gap in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is worsening social suffering as the government cuts social spending by 62%. Low income households are the most affected through expenditure cuts on social protection programmes which are mend for the children, elderly and the disabled and beneficiaries of Basic Education Assistance Programme (BEAM) and health facilities. In the current budget the government prioritized Defense and Home Affairs. The impact of taxation policy on distribution and equality is so glaring. Big companies are being offered several investment incentives under the 2019 national budget, the citizens under distress of the additional 7c and 6.5c per litre of diesel, petrol and paraffin. Implications of the 2c on Intermediated Money Transfer above Zimbabwe $10 are similar. This shows the repressiveness of the Zimbabwe tax system, where the poor contribute more than the rich.

By experimenting with TPS the government is repeating the mistakes of 1990 under ESAP and it’s expecting different outcomes. The commercialization and privatization policy is being smuggled into the fiscal policy under the government mantra of “Zimbabwe is open for business.” The Transitional Stabilization Programme, just like the previous Economic Structural Adjustment Programme, is affecting the economic opportunities for the urban middle income and the working class while marginalizing the poor further, especially women and children. The combination of privatization with the proposed labour market reforms under the Special Economic Zones, further exposes labour to exploitation. The Public Private Partnerships model in public hospitals has led to segregation and deepening inequality between the haves and have nots.

The austerity measures have failed to stabilize the economic situation as the cost of living has increased to extreme levels. The ever increasing prices of basic commodities has become a breeding ground for more poverty and vulnerability amongst the masses. The persistent hard economic situation is reversing and derailing some of the progressive plans the government has put in place to attain the UN sustainable development goals. The Zimbabwean government is a signatory to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the 2020 Agenda and it is committed to ensure that no poverty or hunger exists by 2030. It looks like there is no reprieve for the masses as fuel prices are continuing to rise due to the weakness of the Zimbabwean dollar against the US dollar and other foreign currencies.

The Zimbabwe government must come up with socialist policies that ensure that all citizens afford to live a dignified lifestyle. The economic hardship are causing moral decadence and erosion of social norms and values. The urban areas are becoming dangerous as incidents of robberies and prostitution are on the increase as well as reports of drug abuse amongst the youths. By intruding the TPS government is trying to please the IMF because since 2016 the government has been implementing the IMF staff monitored programmes.

Social services

Upon attainment of independence in 1980, Zimbabwe experimented with Socialism as it pursued a free primary school education and primary health care policies. This contributed to the high literacy levels which the country boasts as the highest in Africa, but the withdrawal of government support as recommended by ESAP climaxed in the introduction of school fees and user fess even in government hospitals. This had serious repercussions on women and children, as this contributed to gender inequality as parents were forced to prioritize educating the boy child at the expense of a girl child. Child mortality heightened as expecting mothers could not afford the hospital fees. These reforms mainly target social services, and even now in Zimbabwe it is the social services that are bearing the brunt of the austerity measures. Under the TPS, the government has removed fuel and electricity subsidies and this has caused the skyrocketing of prices of basic commodities and services.

The removal of subsidies are greatly affecting the companies on production as many companies are closing shop because it’s now difficult to sustain operations using diesel and petrol power generation. Inflation is rising at an alarming speed and the living standards, life expectancy, and economic production are plummeting. These hardships are causing increase in inequality, disaffection and exclusion. Opposition to the ruling class is deepening each day. The government economic crisis is becoming more pronounced, with a mounting foreign debt, declining experts and urban strife due to increased food prices, unemployment, the rising cost of living and brain drain. Many educated Zimbabweans are leaving the country for the foreign countries where they are being subjected to xenophobic attacks and precarious labour and exploitation.

The government under the direction of TPS intends to privatize some parastatals. With the high levels of corruption in Zimbabwe it is likely that these companies will be sold to acolytes, fronts and elites. This could be reminiscent of what happened in Russia in the 1990s, a period that gave rise to the oligarchs who stripped Russia of its gas and oil resources leading to the emergency of overnight billionaires. The Russian ultra-rich, such as Chelsea Soccer Club owner Roman Abramovich, amassed wealth during the economic and social turmoil that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the introduction of the free market economy. Oligarchs are monopolistic by nature. These are the pitfalls of privatization.

Greece is a good example of a country which experimented with austerity measures. In 2010, Athens imploded after its Parliament voted and approved the draconic austerity measures which they thought would unlock 120 billon Euros of emergency loans for the debt stricken country to avoid insolvency. Up to this day Greece is feeling the negative effects of austerity measures nine years later. The Greece story is a good example of how negative and cruel the austerity measures could be. The experimenting with TSP will leave most of the Zimbabwean population in dire straits. The public expenditure cuts, linked with this year’s drought and the effects of Cyclone Idai, will leave many people destitute. Pro-poor and socialist policies are the only way that is going to redeem the toiling masses and bring social development. The government vision of an upper middle class by 2030 under its slogan Vision 2020 remains a pie in the sky, influenced by western imperialist privatization efforts. The reality for most Zimbabweans is an economy that is regressing at an unprecedented rate.

Drought and Climate Change

Zimbabwe is grappling with a nationwide drought that h” The government vision of an upper middle class by 2030 under its slogan Vision 2020 remains a pie in the sky as the economy is regressing at a faster, unprecedented rate.

Drought and Climate Change

Zimbabwe is grappling with a nationwide drought that has depleted dams, cutting output by hydro power generation at Kariba dam. The has caused harvests to fail as most crops are wilting and this has prompted the government to appeal for US$464 million in aid to stave off famine. These prolonged droughts, dry spells, and heat waves are a result of climate change. Most major cities in Zimbabwe are rationing water in an effort to stretch the water supplies. The world over more than 2 billion people live in countries experiencing high water stress and the UN has warned that the problem is set to worsen with demand expected to grow as much as 30% by 2050. A combination of drought and economic meltdown are pushing Zimbabwe to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe. In the rural areas, 5.5 million farmers are struggling to find food. In urban areas, the inflation rate of 480% is forcing the poor families to survive on just one meal a day. The crisis is being made worse by a formal unemployment rate of 90% and also by an indebted government that is struggling to provide basic services, perennial shortages of fuel and foreign currency, and regular 20-hours daily power cuts.

Zimbabwe is marching towards unprecedented food insecurity levels in its history, the 2018/19 was the driest season in 40 years and these are the signs of climate change. Approximately 8 million Zimbabweans are now dependent on food from the World Food Programme and other donor agencies from western countries. Water and electricity are in short supply and basic health services close to collapse. The rising inflation has made the imported food in the shops unaffordable to many.

Zimbabwe was also ravaged by Cyclone Idai which devastated the eastern parts of the country leaving 259 people dead and thousands displaced. The storm caused destructive winds and heavy precipitation causing riverine and flash floods, deaths, and destruction of property and infrastructure. According to official figures, 250,000 people were affected by the cyclone. The forecast was done two months before the cyclone struck but authorities were “caught off guard.”

Trade Unionism, Picketing and Demonstrations

As the nation is falling in a deeper economic abyss, trade unions have come under spotlight and clashes with the government and business over the working conditions are increasing. The Zimbabwean working class is dwindling with 10% employment rate. The working class in Zimbabwe is starving, failing to pay rent, and has no access to health care. The purpose of trade unions among other things are to negotiate for living wages and better working conditions, regulating relations between workers and the employer, taking collective action to enforce the terms of collective bargain, raising new demands on behalf of its members, and helping to settle grievances.

Trade unionism in Zimbabwe has been hijacked by politicians and no longer serves the interests of the working class. The Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) came into existence on 28 February 1981, after joining of six unions, namely African Trade Union Congress (ACTU), the National African Trade Union Congress (NACTU), Trade Union Congress of Zimbabwe (TUCZ), United Trade Unions of Zimbabwe (UTUZ), Zimbabwe Federation of Labour (ZFL) and the Zimbabwe Trade Union Congress (ZTUC). These unions came together to form the now Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions. The ZCTU is now being used by the western governments as a tool for the regime change agenda which saw it becoming a bedrock of the opposition party, the Movement of Democratic Change (MDC) which was formed and launched in September 1999.

The birth of the Movement of Democratic Change (MDC) on September 12, 1999 was the genesis of the ZCTU participation in politics. This unwarranted meddling in politics has left the working class poorer. Trade unionism in Zimbabwe has become a stepping stone for individuals to gain political power at the expense of the poor working class whom they claim to represent. The unions are failing to address the working class needs yet they must be the voice of the working class. Majority of the working class in Zimbabwe are being subjected to exploitation, unions must negotiate for higher living salaries, and jobs must be dignified and productive with adequate social protection. The unions have been captured by western government forces seeking to topple the government so that they can exploit the natural resources freely. Currently, Zimbabwe is reeling from the economic sanctions wrought by illegal economic sanctions imposed by USA and EU. The ZCTU must join calls and demand the lifting of the sanctions that are severely affecting its membership. The current crisis in Zimbabwe is exacerbated by the disputed 30 July 2018 elections, economic collapse, high prices and cash shortages, high unemployment, and public health crisis. The local authorities in major cities are failing to provide adequate clean water to residents and even basics such as regular garbage collections have been delayed.

Company closure and the slowing down of production in most sectors of the economy has led to a decline of trade union membership, and those that are still working are earning very low wages. Most workers are now in the informal sectors such as vending. Factory shells in the light and heavy industrial sites in major cities are deserted. Manufacturing and industrialization has stagnated and been replaced by importation of finished goods from neighboring countries.

Zimbabwe currency collapsed in 2009 which led to the adoption of the US dollar as legal tender but the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe lacked the foreign currency reserves to meet this obligation. Prices of basic commodities have risen dramatically and the purchasing power has been eroded. In January 2019, the country’s 305,000 civil servants gave notice to strike after they were paid in the local currency which is called the bond note instead of the US dollars. During that same period the government raised fuel prices by over 200%, which made Zimbabwe fuel to be the most expensive in the world. The following day, the ZCTU called a three-day general strike, which was supported by many civil society organizations. Many people joined this nationwide strike because of widespread anger over economic decay but there was massive looting and property destruction. This provoked a brutal crackdown by the security forces, and the government shut down the internet to prevent social media coordination of the demonstrators.

Between the period of 1996 and 1999, George Linke of the Danish Trade Union Council came to Zimbabwe with an agenda to transform the ZCTU into a political party. Part of his mission was to identify other groups in the country which were to join the proposed new political formation. This party was to spearhead the regime-change agenda. The transformation of the ZCTU as a political formation brought together employers, workers, students, and former white farmers. This new party was also formed as a response to a government resolution to designated 1,500 white-owned farms for expropriation and the increased emphasis on black empowerment and the draft constitution which would enable the government to acquire white-owned farms compulsorily without compensation. The ZCTU allowed itself to be transformed into a political party so that it can serve the interests of the former white farmers and western capital. Labour unions are being funded by the arms of the US government through conduits such as the National Endowment for Democracy, International Republican Institute, and National Democratic Institute, which have nothing to do with strengthening workers’ rights and everything to do with toppling governments.

In September 2019 the Zimbabwe health care system became shambolic, characterized by an acute shortage of drugs and an indefinite industrial action by doctors over salaries. The country’s public hospitals, already beset by a myriad of challenges, degenerated into death traps after doctors embarked on a strike that is still ongoing. In response, the government dismissed 448 doctors while it pursued disciplinary action against 1,000 others.

Also in August, Zimbabwe was hit by another wave of protests, which saw the security forces brutally squashing the demonstrations. The ZANU PF ruling party and the main opposition party MDC both feel the way forward and out of this economic crisis is to impose neoliberal austerity measures against the working class and the poor. The right-wing organizations that are currently pushing for social dialogue are fronts of the imperialist countries and are funded by them.

Demands

The Zimbabwe working class are demanding a living wage and pensions.

Workers are demanding that never again should they allow the workers’ struggle and trade unions to be hijacked by politicians.

Workers demand the immediate stoppage of harassment of street vendors who are trying to make a living to support their families.

Workers stand against the government mantra of “Zimbabwe Is Open for Business” as this is tantamount to selling the country to imperialist investors.

No to privatization of government companies, as this will benefit the elite connected to the government who will buy the company for a song.

The rich, which include huge mining companies, multinational corporations and foreign investors, must be taxed more to finance developmental interests of the poor

The only way forward is to smash the system of capitalism which breeds wars, poverty, and misery and replace it with Socialism. This can only be achieved by building an International Workers Socialist Revolutionary Party. This is the time as capitalism is in deep crisis globally.

Aluta Continua!

The author may be contacted at cdemafa@gmail.com

Ending the Epoch of Exploitation: Pantherism and Dialectical Materialism in the 21st Century

By Chairman Shaka Zulu

Lots of people aren’t familiar with the term “bourgeoisie” or for that matter with thinking in terms of the different classes—even though we live in a class-based society. Moreover, we live in an epoch of history that is based upon class exploitation and class dictatorship. In this “Epoch of Exploitation,” there have been different ages each with their own distinctive class structures based upon the relationship each class had to the mode and means of production.

These can basically be defined as: Slavery, Feudalism, and Capitalism. In each of these periods, there was an exploiting ruling class, an exploited laboring class, and a middle class. Under slavery, there were Freemen as well as Slaves and Slave Owners. These might even be slave traders or hired men of the slave owners.

Under Feudalism, the lower class were the Serfs or poor peasants, and the ruling class were the landed nobility, the Lords, and Ladies. The middle class were the Burgers or Bourgeoisie, who lived in independent towns or burgs, which were centers of trade and manufacturing. These “freemen,” who governed their towns more or less democratically, waged a struggle with the Lords to maintain their independence and this culminated in a wave of Liberal Bourgeois Democratic Revolutions that overthrew Feudalism and replaced kingdoms with republics.

The bourgeoisie became the new ruling class and the petty bourgeoisie (little capitalists) became the new middle class, and a new class--the Proletariat—the urban wage workers and the poor peasants were the lower class. As the Industrial Revolution took off, the bourgeoisie got richer and the petty bourgeoisie more numerous, while the proletariat were formed into industrial armies to serve in the struggle with Nature to extract raw materials like coal and iron ore and transform them into steel and goods of all type.

In this Bourgeois Era, the bourgeoisie reconstructed society in their own image and interest. Under this Bourgeois Class Dictatorship, the state exists to maintain the inequality of the class relations and protect the property and interests of the ownership classes. Bourgeois Democracy is basically a charade to mask over the reality of class dictatorship. The masses may get to vote, but the ruling class calls the tune. Money talks and the government obeys.

The charade is for the benefit of the Petty Bourgeoisie who are the voters and hopers that the government can be made to serve their class interests. The dream that they will one day climb into the upper class and share in the privilege and opulence motivates them to subordinate their own class interests to those of the bourgeoisie. A greater challenge to the bourgeois class dictatorship is getting the working class to adopt its world view and politics that clearly do not serve their interests.

This is where the middle class are of use, and where some proletarians find their niche and a point of entry into the petty bourgeoisie as promoters of bourgeois ideology and politics. I’m talking about all manner of jobs and positions from union boss to preacher and news commentator to teacher. These hacks and hucksters sell us the illusion that this is the best of all possible systems and all is right with the world so long as we do as we are told.

They serve the ruling class by playing the game of “divide and rule” and throwing water on any sparks of resistance. They feed the masses disinformation and “fake news” and feed people’s idealism and false hopes to prevent them from identifying and thinking about their true class interests.

The job of our Party is to help the masses cut through this BS and to arm the people with an understanding of revolutionary science on which our political-ideological line is based. We call this Pantherism, and it is based on application of revolutionary science—dialectical materialism—to the concrete conditions we face in the 21st Century.

We make no bones about it, we are revolutionary socialists determined to bring the Epoch of Exploitation to and end and empower the common people. In other words to advance the evolution of human society to Communism.

DARE TO STRUGGLE DARE TO WIN… ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

Shaka Zulu is chairman of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party's prison chapter.

How the Rich Plan to Rule a Burning Planet

By James Plested

Originally published at Red Flag News. Republished from Monthly Review.

The climate crisis isn’t a future we must fight to avoid. It’s an already unfolding reality. It’s the intensification of extreme weather–cyclones, storms and floods, droughts and deadly heat waves. It’s burning forests in Australia, the Amazon, Indonesia, Siberia, Canada and California. It’s melting ice caps, receding glaciers and rising seas. It’s ecosystem devastation and crop failures. It’s the scarcity of resources spreading hunger and thirst. It’s lives and communities destroyed, and millions forced to flee.

This crisis is escalating at a terrifying rate. Every year, new temperature records are set. Every day, new disasters are reported. In Australia, we’re living through a summer of dust and fire. Hot winds from the desert are sweeping up dirt from the parched landscape and covering towns and cities hundreds and thousands of kilometres away. Creeks and riverbeds are being baked dry. Our cities are shrouded in smoke from fires burning for weeks on end, while on the hottest and windiest days the flames grow, devouring everything in their path.

Do our rulers–the political leaders and corporate elites who, behind the facade of democracy, make all the important decisions about what happens in our society–understand the danger we face? On the surface they appear unconcerned. In September, after millions of school students participated in the global climate strike and Greta Thunberg gave her “How dare you!” speech at the United Nations, prime minister Scott Morrison responded by cautioning “against raising the anxieties of children”. And when, in November, hundreds of homes were destroyed and four people killed by bushfires in New South Wales and Queensland, he told the ABC there was “no evidence” that Australia’s emissions had any role in it and that “we’re doing our bit” to tackle climate change.

Is Morrison stupid? Somewhere along the line it appears his words have become unmoored from reality, and are now simply free-floating signifiers, spinning out of control in a void of unreason. As the empirical evidence of the devastation being caused by climate change in Australia and around the world mounts, so too does the gulf between this reality and the rhetoric of conservative coal-fondlers like Morrison grow into a seemingly unbridgeable chasm.

But something is wrong with this picture. To believe that someone in Morrison’s position could genuinely be ignorant of the dangers of climate change is itself to give up on reason. The prime minister of Australia is among the most well-briefed people on the planet, with thousands of staff at his beck and call to update him on the latest developments in climate science or any other field he may wish to get his head around.The only rational explanation is that Morrison and his like are aware of the dangers posed by climate change but are choosing to act as though they’re not.

On first appearances, this might seem like a fundamentally irrational standpoint. It would be more accurate, however, to describe it as evil.Morrison is smart enough to see that any genuine effort to tackle the climate crisis would involve a challenge to the system of free market capitalism that he has made his life’s mission to serve. And he has chosen to defend the system. Morrison and others among the global political and business elite have made a choice to build a future in which capitalism survives, even if it brings destruction on an unimaginable scale.

They are like angels of death, happy to watch the world burn, and millions burn with it, if they can preserve for themselves the heavenly realm of a system that has brought them untold riches. This is language that Morrison, an evangelical Christian, should understand. What might be harder for him to grasp is that he’s on the wrong side.

When seen from this perspective, everything becomes clearer. In the face of the climate crisis, the main priority of the global ruling class and its political servants is to batten down the hatches. Publicly, they’re telling school kids not to worry about the future. Behind the scenes, however–in the cabinet offices, boardrooms, mansions and military high commands–they’re hard at work, planning for a future in which they can maintain their power and privilege amid the chaos and destruction of the burning world around them.

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We’re not, as some in the environment movement argue, “all in this together”. There are many ways in which the wealthy minority at the top of society are already protected from the worst climate change impacts. Big corporations can afford to spend millions on mitigating climate change risks–ensuring their assets are protected so they can keep their business running even during a major disaster. Businesses and wealthy individuals can also protect themselves by taking out insurance policies that will pay out if their property is damaged in a flood, fire or other climate-related disaster.

The rich are also protected from climate change on a more day to day level. They tend to live in the leafiest suburbs, in large, climate-controlled houses. They have shorter commutes to work, where, again, they’re most often to be found in the most comfortable, air-conditioned buildings. They’re not the ones working on farms or construction sites, in factories or warehouses–struggling with the increasing frequency of summer heatwaves. They’re not the ones living in houses with no air conditioning, sweating their way through stifling summer nights. They have pools and manicured lawns and can afford their own large water tanks to keep their gardens green in the hot, dry summer months.

What about in the most extreme scenarios, where what we might call the “natural defences” enjoyed by the wealthy are bound to fail? What happens when the firestorms bear down on their country retreats or rising seas threaten their beach houses? Money, it turns out, goes a long way. In November 2018, for instance, when large areas of California were engulfed in flames, and more than 100 people burned to death, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian hired their own private firefighting crew to save their US$50 million Calabasas mansion.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the city’s wealthiest residents evacuated well in advance and hired a private army of security guards from companies such as Blackwater to protect their homes and possessions from the mass of poor, mainly Black residents who were left behind. Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill went to the city in the aftermath of the hurricane and witnessed first-hand the highly militarised and racialised nature of the response. One security contractor, hired by a local businessman, told Scahill his team had been fired on by “Black gangbangers”, in response to which the contractors “unleashed a barrage of bullets in the general direction of the alleged shooters … ‘After that, all I heard was moaning and screaming, and the shooting stopped. That was it. Enough said’”.

In the event of disaster, the response of the rich hasn’t been to work with others to ensure the collective security of all those affected. It has been to use all resources at their disposal to protect themselves and their property. And increasingly, as in New Orleans, this protection has come in the form of armed violence directed at those less well off–people whose desperation, they fear, could turn them into a threat.

The most forward thinking of the super-rich are aware that we’re heading toward a future of ecological and social break-down. And they’re keen to keep ahead of the curve by investing today in the things they’ll need to survive. Writing in the Guardian in 2018, media theorist and futurist Douglas Rushkoff related his experience of being paid half his annual salary to speak at “a super-deluxe private resort … on the subject of ‘the future of technology’”. He was expecting a room full of investment bankers. When he arrived, however, he was introduced to “five super-wealthy guys … from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world”. Rushkoff wrote:

After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own … Which region will be less affected by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? … Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked: ‘How do I maintain authority over my security force after the Event?’

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr Robot hack that takes everything down … They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for survival.

There’s a reason these conversations go on only behind closed doors. If your plan is to allow the world to spiral towards mass death and destruction while you retreat to a bunker in the south island of New Zealand or some other isolated area to live out your days in comfort, protected by armed guards whose loyalty you maintain by threat of death, you’re unlikely to win much in the way of public support. Better to keep the militarised bunker thing on the low-down and keep people thinking that “we’re all in this together” and if we just install solar panels, recycle more, ride to work and so on we’ll somehow turn it all around and march arm in arm towards a happy and sustainable future.

The rich don’t have to depend only on themselves. Their most powerful, and well-armed, protector is the capitalist state, which they can rely on to advance their interests even when those may conflict with the imperative to preserve some semblance of civilisation. This is where people like Morrison come in. They’re the ones who have been delegated the task, as Karl Marx put it in the Communist Manifesto, of “managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”. In the context of climate change, this means taking the steps necessary to ensure the continued ability of the capitalist class to profit even if the world may be unravelling into ecological breakdown and social chaos.

There are three main ways in which Australia and other world powers are working toward this. First, they’re building their military might–spending billions of dollars on ensuring they have the best means of destruction at their disposal to help project their power in an increasingly unstable world. Second, they’re building walls and brutal detention regimes to make sure borders can be crossed only by those deemed necessary to the requirements of profit making. Third, they’re enhancing their repressive apparatus by passing anti-protest laws and expanding and granting new powers to the police and security agencies to help crush dissent at home.

Military strategists have been awake to the implications of climate change for a long time. As early as 2003, in a report commissioned by the Pentagon, U.S. researchers Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall argued that “violence and disruption stemming from the stresses created by abrupt changes in the climate pose a different type of threat to national security than we are accustomed to today. Military confrontation may be triggered by a desperate need for natural resources such as energy, food, and water rather than conflicts over ideology, religion, or national honor. The shifting motivation for confrontation would alter which countries are most vulnerable and the existing warning signs of security threats”.

More recently, a 2015 U.S. Department of Defense memorandum to Congress argued: “Climate change is an urgent and growing threat to our national security, contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows, and conflicts over basic resources such as food and water. These impacts are already occurring, and the scope, scale and intensity of these impacts are projected to increase over time”.

The Australian military has also been preparing for an increasingly unstable geopolitical environment driven in part by the impact of climate change. The 2009 Defence White Paper included a section, “New Security Concerns: Climate Change and Resource Scarcity”, which pointed to the vulnerabilities of many countries in our region. The paper was explicit in linking these to a possible increase in “threats inimical to our interests” and suggested that military capabilities would need to be strengthened accordingly. A 2018 Senate inquiry into the implications of climate change for “national security” drew similar conclusions.

Although discussions about military preparedness are often pitched in terms of the need for increased development assistance, disaster relief and so on, the practice of the U.S., Australian and other military powers over the past few decades leaves little room for doubt as to what their role will be. When they’re not invading countries on the other side of the world–killing hundreds of thousands, reducing cities to rubble and imprisoning and torturing anyone who opposes them–to secure access to fossil fuels, they’re acting as the enforcers of capitalist interests closer to home.

The response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 is again a good example. When troops from the U.S. National Guard joined the army of private contractors sent to establish “security” amid the death and destruction of the hurricane’s aftermath, the Army Times described their role as quashing “the insurgency in the city”. The paper quoted brigadier general Gary Jones as saying, “This place is going to look like Little Somalia. We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control”. A similar dynamic was at work in Australia when, in 2007, the Howard government sent troops to establish “order” in remote Indigenous communities as part of the racist Northern Territory Intervention.

The idea that the military could be a force for good in the context of environmental catastrophe and social breakdown is laughable. Whatever the rhetoric, the role of the military is to secure the interests of a nation’s capitalist class amid the competitive global scramble for resources and markets. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman had it right when he argued in 1999: “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist–McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps”. The military are gangsters for capitalism. And in the future, they’re likely to double down on savagery.

The next way in which the world’s most powerful capitalist states are preparing for climate catastrophe is by massively increasing what’s euphemistically called “border security”. In 2019, Germany celebrated 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event supposedly ushering in a new age of freedom and democracy. In the decades since, however, European countries have built around 1,000 kilometres of new border walls and fences–six times the length of that hated symbol of totalitarianism in Berlin. Most have been constructed since 2015, when millions of Syrians were forced to flee and seek sanctuary in Europe amid a brutal civil war that was triggered in part, at least, by climate change.

A 2018 report by the World Bank, Groundswell–Preparing for Internal Climate Migration, found that just three regions (Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South-East Asia) could generate 143 million climate migrants by 2050. Australia’s immediate neighbourhood will be affected severely, with several Pacific island nations forecast to disappear completely under rising seas. Already, in response to the relatively small numbers of refugees who have managed to reach Australia by boat in the past few decades, the Australian government has established one of the world’s most barbarous detention regimes. Other governments are now following suit.

So far, the measures discussed have been those primarily directed outwards by states seeking to defend the interests of their capitalist class in the international sphere. This is in part designed to create an “us and them” mentality within the domestic population. In Australia, this has been a staple of both Labor and Liberal governments for decades–the idea that the outside world is dangerous, full of terrorists and other bad people whom we should trust the government to protect us from. In the context of growing global instability associated with climate change, we can expect governments everywhere to double down on these xenophobic scare campaigns.

This should be resisted at every step. Not only for the sake of those “others”–civilians in Afghanistan, refugees imprisoned on Manus Island and so on–whose lives the government is destroying in the name of our security. But also because the racist fear of the outsider promoted by our governments is designed in large part to draw our attention away from the increasingly direct and open war being waged against the “others” within.

In the years since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, Western governments have expanded and strengthened the state’s repressive apparatus. Today we’re seeing, as many predicted, how the crackdown on basic freedoms carried out in the name of the “war on terror” has created a new normal in which anyone opposing the government’s agenda becomes a target. Environmental protesters, and anyone else standing up against the destructive neoliberal order, are now firmly in their sights.

In the U.S., the battle to halt the construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline provides the most extreme example to date. In November 2016, the Native American blockade at Standing Rock was broken up by a police operation so heavily militarised that it looked like something out of the invasion of Iraq. In sub-zero temperatures, blockaders were attacked with water cannons, tear gas, rubber bullets and concussion grenades. Hundreds were injured and many hospitalised. Two women who were involved in the blockade and who later vandalised the pipeline are now facing charges under which they could be jailed for up to 110 years.

In Australia, we’ve seen those protesting peacefully outside the International Resources and Mining Conference in Melbourne face an unusual level of police violence and mass arrests. In Queensland, the state Labor government has passed new laws targeting environmental activists. In early December, three members of Extinction Rebellion were jailed when a magistrate refused them bail–something without precedent for charges related to acts of non-violent civil disobedience.

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Perhaps nothing provides a better metaphor for the future our leaders are steering us towards than a picture, taken during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, of the New York city skyline shrouded in the darkness of a blackout–all except one building, which remained lit up like a Christmas tree. That building was the headquarters of global banking giant Goldman Sachs, where, protected by a mountain of sandbags and using a back-up generator, the company was able to keep the lights on and the profits flowing even while the city was inundated by a three-metre storm surge and hospitals, schools, the subway and most other services were forced to close.

If you imagine this picture as the world, and the Goldman Sachs building as the gilded realm inhabited by the world’s super-rich and the political class that serve them, all you’d need to add is some heavily armed guards around the building and you’d get a pretty good sense of what’s ahead.Our rulers’ apparent lack of concern about climate change is a ruse. They hope that, if they can just head off dissent for long enough, they will succeed in building this future, brick by brutal brick, and there will be nothing the rest of us can do about it.

We need to fight for something different: a system in which our economy isn’t just a destructive machine grinding up human and natural resources to create mega-profits for the rich. One in which the productive life of society is managed collectively by those who do all the work, and where decisions are made not in the interests of private profit, but in the interests of human need. We need socialism–and the fight for it is the great challenge of our generation. At stake is nothing less than the world itself.