Joe Biden and the ‘Passive Revolution’

[Artwork from the Tempest Collective]

By Ashton Rome

Though it appears that Biden has pulled off a revival of centrism amid an 'organic crisis', his honeymoon period will be short-lived as there is a crisis of legitimacy of the ideas, institutions, and coalitions that undergird U.S. neoliberal capitalism. During moments like this, the ruling class may attempt what Gramsci called a 'passive revolution' — implementing symbolic or limited change from above without fundamentally transforming social relations — in order to restore its hegemony and stave off challenges to its position within society. A key part of this process is the co-optation of demands from below, paying lip service to the goals of leading figures of the underclasses (organic intellectuals) while keeping the underclasses in a subordinate position. Passive revolutions have successfully been implemented many times throughout U.S. history. Learning to recognize the features of the strategy will help the left determine tactics to circumvent it and build our forces.

For some figures and groups on the left, Biden's victory and the Democrats' tenuous control of both houses provide the socialist movement with unique opportunities. According to journalist Zeeshan Aleem, socialists could ride into office on the coattails of Biden and the anti-Trump mood and be positioned to enact “policies that protect the poor and communities of color.”

Others believe that there is an ongoing "civil war" in the Party between its insurgent progressive wing and the neoliberal establishment and that the expansion of the Squad may open divisions further. Since the Democrats hold the Presidency and both Houses, the Party may have little excuse in the eyes of their social movement allies and working-class base not to implement a progressive agenda like universal health care. If they fail to deliver, so the argument goes, they will face their wrath. These socialists believe that the contradiction between the ‘Wall Street’ and social movement and working class of the Democratic Party base will also be on full display and play themselves out for ordinary people and be amiable conditions for winning people to independent politics.

Passive Revolution

But these optimistic scenarios are simplistic – all too similar to previous certainties about the collapse of capitalism. Within the socialist tradition, this optimism was embodied in the 1st and 2nd Internationals. Both saw socialist revolution as the inevitable consequence of capitalism's economic structure and the unfolding of contradictions at the heart of the system. For them, the unfolding of these contradictions would result in left political consciousness leading to socialist political power. Though decades of capitalist crisis and revival since the early 20th century have tempered these beliefs, they still exist for some on the left who, fail to take into account how even during periods of organic crisis, the ruling class can resist or prevent opposition.

During this period of organic crisis, the key challenge for the elites is to address parts of the crisis that constrain their ability to reap profit while containing popular demands and counter-hegemonic movements. Whether cyclical or organic, crises have a resetting characteristic to them, often spurring innovation and reducing the tendency towards overaccumulation. They can also lead to the development of more ‘appropriate’ ruling coalitions and forms of social control and governance. Organic crises, which occur at all levels of society – economic, social, political and ideological – demand the construction of new practices and ‘norms.’

This was the case in the crisis periods of 1929 and 1945, and in the transition from Fordism and Keynesianism to neoliberalism beginning in the late 60’s and early 1970s. The crisis of representation and morbid symptoms caused by organic crises cannot be sufficiently managed through different modes of regulation. Though the capitalist class retains its leading position in society, it does not have the underclass's active consent, leading to a long interregnum.

Organic Intellectuals and Civil Society

In the United States today, the ruling class precisely sees Biden as the last hope for neoliberalism because of his decades in office and because of the support he has from the leadership of labor and social movements leadership who will attempt to negotiate bargains and discipline their constituencies to stay within the constraints imposed by the crisis.

But how does the ruling class legitimize Biden, who represents a system in crisis? Gramsci argued that hegemony needs the active support of civil society actors, or what Gramsci called “organic intellectuals," for the ruling conditions to be seen as natural and the ideas connected to them to be diffused throughout society. Organic intellectuals are the members of society that defend and promote the ruling class's interests within civil society.

A passive revolution involves a temporary dominance of political society (legislatures, the judicial system, coercive apparatuses) over civil society (NGOs, trade unions, chambers of commerce, etc.). Because of the trust that ordinary people have in some nominally reformist nonprofits, union leaders, and liberal politicians, civil society is an essential part of the ruling class strategy for keeping power while its hegemony is in tatters.

Gramsci used the term trasformismo—“transformism”—to describe the scenario where the subaltern's leadership is co-opted. This occurs while the movement is kept in a subordinate position and the ruling elite attempts to forge a resolution without popular challenges from below. Therefore, a passive revolution is a restoration of class power which new forms of governance and representation done in a more or less ‘peaceful’ way. Significantly, passive revolutions recognize that the subaltern does not have the organization and leadership to resolve the crisis on the basis of a transformation of the system. It is mainly preventative in effect.

Nationalism (with a 'woke' redemptive script) is essential in this period because it allows the elite to identify its own interests as the interests of the whole and depoliticize questions of economic and political aims. Organic intellectuals can help popularize these narratives. The seeming ‘popular frontism’ against Trump, fascism and the far right is an example of this. The anti-fascism of Biden consists of forces nominally against Trump - from George W. Bush era establishment Republicans to social democratic politicians, tasked with ‘restoring American values.' Most importantly, its discourse leaves untouched questions of the conditions that brought Trumpism in the first place. Or when questions do come up about those conditions, organic intellectuals argue that they are meant for a later day -  after the right is defeated.

A History of Passive Revolutions in the U.S.

The ruling class has responded to various crises through passive revolutions: the Great Depression, the end of the Golden Age of Capitalism and after the 2007/8 crisis.

In response to the Great Depression, the existence of the Soviet Union, and the organizing efforts by socialist and communist activists, FDR and a section of the ruling class attempted a ‘revolution from above.’ The Democratic Party opened its ranks and built what came to be known as the “New Deal Coalition” - a coalition primarily of northern and midwestern industrial workers and their unions and white southern farmers. As the Democratic Party took up some of the demands from the left, labor dramatically increased donations to them and bolstered affinity to the Party. This ended up curtailing a serious attempt to push forward the organization of the working class by building a labor party like those were developing in Europe. For example, FDR took up demands to regulate child labor, and grant pension benefits and legal union rights from the Socialist and Progressive Party platforms. The result were new practices in management like Fordism, welfare systems and a more regulated capitalism.

The passive revolution helped bring about the ‘Golden Era of Capitalism’ from 1945 to the early 1970s, which was challenged significantly by the Black Power movements. The Black Power movements, which linked themselves to the national liberation movements in the peripheries, helped discredit U.S. capitalism and shift the balance of forces to the left during the late 1960s and early 70s. The U.S. ruling class initiated a two-part response: COINTELPRO, the War on Drugs, and mass incarceration (the stick) and black capitalism and integralist policies to appease the aspiration of the black middle class of the movement (the carrot). The latter resulted in more “black faces in high places” and funding for nonprofits below. The liberal, middle-class elements of the movement popularized a framework for analyzing ‘progressive’ attitudes towards racial justice that linked demographic representation in media, television and politics with social justice and political parity. Systemic critiques like socialism that sought to address class, race, and gender inequality were replaced by representative politics and diversity practices.

As Mario Candeias demonstrated in “Organic Crisis and Capitalist Transformation,” the transition to neoliberalism included the integration of trade unions and their political representatives into the project while keeping the subaltern in a subordinate position: “The first transnational wave of the neoliberal transformations weakened the power of workers, trade unions, social movements and Social Democracy; the second wave integrated their representatives into a social-democratic-neoliberal power bloc…; the third wave was an authoritarian turn, both with regard to international and to internal relations. The consensus faded away, but yet there is no visible alternative.”

The 2007/8 Crisis, the second crisis of the 21st Century, brought with it a period of polarization and radicalization through which we are still living. It also brought an end to a decades-long passive revolution that utilized politics of representation and funding for nonprofits to quell social movements. The radicalization of this crisis period was expressed in Occupy and the Black Lives Matter movement of which the latter included wings that saw the link between neoliberalism and the prison industrial complex. Some saw the need for prison abolition, which was a demand given a wider hearing during the subsequent BLM wave last summer.

As Chris Harris and William Robinson showed, a section of the black community voted for Obama to help end the economic disfranchisement and mass incarceration politics pushed during the  neoliberal period. The liberal ruling class saw Obama as an opportunity to contain the popular anger at the political establishment after the economic crisis and someone who could restore faith in neoliberalism and U.S. hegemony abroad. This was important, as in Europe the anti-austerity protests were leading to splits in establishment parties and the development of new political parties like SYRIZA and Podemos. When challenges to his neoliberal politics emerged, he used the coercive state to disciple them but particularly with BLM opened the ranks of the Party to the movement as well as corporate foundation funding.

Some Thoughts on a Left Political Strategy

Gramsci's concept of the passive revolution is important because it shows how opportune conditions for the growth of the forces of revolutionary socialism can come to pass unfulfilled or how leaders of revolutionary movements can be co-opted into the project of restoration of capitalist rule. Passive revolutions and the reforms granted in the course of them don’t just imply a weak ruling hegemony but also a weak subaltern movement.

This is an important starting point for understanding the challenges socialists face today as they attempt to help to rebuild mass organizations and labor unions and help to increase the militancy and combativeness of the working class in order to challenge capitalist rule. Understanding the challenges socialists face as well as the opportunities and openings is integral to developing a political program, slogans, and strategy to guide a counterhegemonic movement from its current consciousness, militancy and levels of organization to the left’s ultimate goal and historic vision. In order for counter-hegemonic movements to succeed they need organization, ideology and action.

Though the left faces favorable circumstances in terms of a crisis of legitimacy, the uptick of class struggle from 2018-19 was short-lived; though we have seen dramatic increases in the membership of independent political organizations like Democratic Socialist of America (DSA), the electoral successes of left Democrats and the rightward drift of the Republican Party has popularized lesser-evilism and the realignment strategy within the Democratic Party. This does not mean that leftists outside of DSA should orient away from the organization. DSA after all is where a lot of the debates about independent politics and socialist strategy are happening on the left. We must acknowledge that there is an ongoing process to co-opt the 'Squad' and make DSA a trend within the Democratic Party. The continued leadership and lack of left challenges to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer may suggest that the process is farther along.

An understanding of the ongoing Passive Revolution shows that we have to rebuild the working class's political organization and utilize united front style politics to expose ‘organic intellectuals’. The ability for the subaltern classes to successfully challenge the capitalist hegemony depend on their ability develop new political practices that challenge and don’t reproduce capitalist social relations. Institutions like an independent political party are crucial towards this end since they can help organize and unite the subaltern classes in common struggle.

It is crucial that socialists orient towards and join the spontaneous protests that will arise during this crisis, but our tasks within them cannot be restricted to merely attending protests and/or cheering them on. It is important that socialists help develop democratic spaces within them to allow ordinary people to determine its course and goals instead of by reformist leaders at the top. As well, socialists can find ways of adding to those debates by showing whether particular political tactics will help win the movement’s goals. This can be done by bringing to the movement lessons from historical counterhegemonic struggles and an assessment of the immediate impacts of tactics. Socialists can help radicalize them further by developing links between seemingly disparate issues like the environmental and housing crises by showing how capitalism is the root. Crucially socialists can warn movements of attempts by the ruling class to contain protests by taking up its demands and co-opting its leaders.

Challenging organic intellectuals are crucial because although the passive revolution has temporarily calmed a section of the subaltern classes, many are not won over. Organic crises necessarily involve a de-legitimacy of establishment figures and institutions (crisis of legitimacy). Though this can provide openings for the left it does allow right wing authoritarian populists like Trump to claim to speak for the interests of the “forgotten” against a “corrupt political establishment”.  Socialists have to acknowledge the ongoing threat of the populist right in this period, especially since the conditions that brought Trump and his ilk into prominence still exist.

The George Floyd protests in the summer and the siege at the capital in January presents an opportunity for the left that will be crucial as we enter a period of struggle once the ‘Biden Honeymoon’ ends. The siege reminded the masses of the threat posed by the far right and that racism is still a powerful organizing principle of which the police and other elements of the coercive state have a key role in upholding.

The radical wings of the George Floyd inspired protests re-popularized powerful anti-capitalist abolitionist critiques that can help provide the basis for a new ‘common sense’ and unite subaltern classes in common struggle in the coming period. Critiques that see mass incarceration and militarization of policing in neighborhoods and at national borders as a way for the ruling class to handle the increased surplus labor, inequality and political polarization that neoliberalism have a powerful explanatory and unifying quality.

But as we have seen, capitalism has proven to be an adaptive and resilient system and we have to aware of its successes at countering our movements if we are to be successful.

How Black Student Civic Agency Impacted the 2020 Elections

By Asha Layne

The years of Trumpism have been marked by relentless assaults on facts and evidence based science leaving an indelible memory on the minds of all Americans. In the final months of his presidency, Trump’s futile efforts along with other Republicans, to cancel out the votes of many Americans, specifically Black voters, in many Democratic states was representative of voter disenfranchisement. True to form, one of his most outrageously alarming act of voting misinformation, was when the former president encouraged his supporters to commit voter fraud, by suggesting that voters should send in a mail-in ballot and to vote in person. When that failed, Trump and his allies quickly began targeting voting ballots with largely Black voter populations in a desperate attempt to discredit Joe Biden’s presidential win. Recently, former Trump lawyer and staunch ally, Mr. Rudy Giuliani was handed a defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems accusing him of spreading false claims about the company’s handling of the November 2020 elections. In keeping up with the barrage of viral misinformation and right wing voting conspiracies, we must not overlook the civic agency of young Black student voters that prevented Trump from retaining power despite his unprecedented attempts to disenfranchise Black voters.

In November, Black voters showed up to the polls in record numbers in response to the former President’s appalling, yet unsurprising attempts of racial division and voting suppression, the COVID pandemic, and a nationwide call for racial justice after the death of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. According to exit poll data, Black voters overwhelmingly voted Democratic and with a surge in turnout among young people of all races. Research conducted by Tufts University, Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), reported that Black youths played a critical role in the 2020 election especially in key swing and voter suppression states like Georgia where 90% of young Black youth voted for Joe Biden. In the same report, data also showed that young Black women strongly supported the President-elect Joe Biden by voting slightly higher at 90% compared to 84% for young Black men. This data reflects the significance of Black students who fall under two categories: the Black vote and student vote.

Black student civic agency is nothing new, it has a deep rich history that affirms the tradition Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) play in politics. Historically, HBCUs became known as sites for political activism during a time when White supremacist ideologies prevented Black students from entering White college institutions and mainstream society. These educational institutions would also serve as sites for political activism and agency as tools of empowerment. HBCUs held and still today, possess the unique advantage in increasing political activity among young Black people. Civic engagement and HBCUs have played a critical role in American democracy and democratic politics.

HBCU representation in politics can be traced back to the Civil Rights Movement of the twentieth century at which this political process produced prominent leaders of that time who lead Black students in political agency activities like sit-ins, boycotts, and voter registration drives that would help shape the legacy of HBCUs for generations to come. What this 2020 election have shown the country is that HBCUs are not only leading institutions of higher educations but the producers of political stalwarts for the Democratic Party such as Spelman alum Stacey Abrams, Morehouse College alum Raphael Warnock, and Howard alum and Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris.

The November elections confuted the misconceptions that Black students and Blacks do not vote. The truth is, young Black voter agency propelled the now President, Joe Biden to the White House and Democratic Georgia Senators Jon Osoff and Ralphael Warnock to the Senate affirming the significance of young Black voters. More than ever young Black students at HBCU campuses have become more civically engaged as a result of Trumpism, racial injustice, the pandemic, and desperate need for change. Despite the United States’ long history of voter suppression of people of color, the recent events during the tenure of former President Donald J. Trump will not only empower young voters to critically think but to continue the fight against injustices.

The Secular Prosperity Gospel of the Texas Energy Crisis

By Peter Fousek

The situation currently facing millions of people across the South Central United States is surreal. Caught in an unexpected onslaught of vehemently wintery weather, many have found themselves without power, and as a result without heat, while temperatures continue to plummet. Even more shocking than these circumstances themselves is the fact that a significant number of the power outages were caused not by the storm, but were instead implemented by utility managers in response to fluctuating natural gas prices. In Texas, when power was restored, it was accompanied by exorbitant surge pricing. This situation represents the latest in a long and devastating history of the free market failing to protect working class people from the effects of disaster while at the same time allowing those with financial means to turn a profit off of catastrophic circumstance. Both of those outcomes are necessary products of our socioeconomic system, the suffering of the many demanded to ensure the satisfaction of the few.

The basic premise of market fundamentalism, as a system of belief, is that greed is good. The official, normative morality of market-based society exists to rationalize that singularly hypocritical notion. In the same way that Joel Osteen and his fellow grifters preach that their ill-begotten wealth is a reward for their righteousness, that official morality strives to justify excessive affluence.  It works to convince us that both the billionaire and the homeless person have somehow earned their lot in life; that they deserve their respective state of decadence or deprivation. If not for a moral system that considers gluttony a virtue, the two could not coexist. How could we endure a social structure in which the wealthiest 1% of our nation hoards 30.4% ($34.2 trillion) of all private wealth ($10,426,829 per person, on average) while the bottom 50% collectively have only 1.9% ($2.1 trillion, or $12,805 per person)? How could we sleep at night knowing that nearly 1 in 4 households have experienced food insecurity this year, that 40 million face potential eviction, that unemployment and poverty rates have skyrocketed, all while the wealth of U.S. billionaires has increased more than 40% ($1.1 trillion) since March? In short, how could we manage to utterly debase the very essence of human life while viewing wealth itself as sacred, with the power to sanctify its possessors? Examples of opulence juxtaposed against a backdrop of despair are all too common in the United States today, and provide copious evidence of the tragically influential power possessed by the secular prosperity gospel.

Two articles published in the past week illustrate the consequences inflicted by that corrupt morality. On the 11th, CNBC contributor Sam Dogen wrote a piece entitled “Millionaire who bought a home at 26 regrets paying off his mortgage early”. This article recounts, with a shocking lack of self-awareness, the author’s experience of life as a young freelance consultant with a multi-million-dollar net worth, six-figure passive income, and fully paid-off home. Most strikingly out of touch in this humble brag of an editorial is the author’s assertion that, in retrospect, he deeply regrets not only having paid off his mortgage, but also his subsequent trip to Yosemite and Angkor Wat with his wife. His regret has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he spent his “hard-earned” wealth on self-serving pursuits instead of using it to assist the countless people suffering around the world—people, for instance, with entirely curable diseases that will nonetheless kill them since they cannot afford treatment. No, our friend Mr. Dogen is unwilling to engage in such humanitarian remorse, incapable of repenting for actions that he does not perceive as wrong. Rather, he regrets only the fact that his spending was not self-serving enough!

The author laments the fact that, by securing the freedom of home ownership, he lost the motivation to continue improving his finances as aggressively as before. He started working 20-hour weeks rather than 60, thereby “loosing out on $20,000 of monthly income”. That he considers it a loss to spend time with his wife while they can still enjoy their youth; that the experience of culture and natural beauty is, to him, something wasteful and burdensome, is emblematic of the secular prosperity gospel’s most insidious effects. In the author’s psychology we witness the conceptual commodification of human life itself. In his view, people, not the least of them himself, are no more than instruments of production. By his logic, that is good which compels the individual to a greater degree of productivity. In producing more, the individual benefits by elevating her moral standing, understood to correlate directly with her productive output. Her moral standing is elevated because her increased productive output is seen as beneficial to society, in a conceptual framework where social good is defined as capital accumulation. Moreover, the capitalist market system provides a quantitative measure of the individual’s productivity (and thus, of her moral worth). That metric, of course, is the dollar.

In this manner, injustice and inequity find excuse and validation. Fear of the suffering that accompanies poverty under a capitalist mode of production provides an important social “good” in the same way that fear of eternal hellfire did in eras past: it coerces the individual to embrace their role within an unjust social order, that they might tread its exploitative waters and keep their head above its deadly waves. However, capitalism and divine right are fundamentally different ideologies; the former evolved to hold a far more tangible grasp over its subjects than the latter ever did. The power of the “divinely endowed” ruling order stemmed from its subjects’ belief in the official morality and the otherworldly consequences thereof, and so the subjects had to be cajoled into that belief to imbue the ruling order with authority. Under the rule of capital, material conditions force the individual to subscribe to the official morality under threat of homelessness and starvation, whether they believe in its righteousness or not. Viewed as nothing more than a productive commodity, the individual must produce for the sake of the “social good”. If she does so with sufficient vigor and skill, her moral righteousness will be rewarded with wealth and correspondingly with freedom. Conversely, if she lacks the freedom to enjoy even the basic necessities of life, her failure to produce enough is at fault.

This leads us to the second illustrative headline: “Record cold brings a windfall for small U.S. natural gas producers”. This article, published on the 14th, describes how natural gas prices “have surged more than 4,000% in two days,” a trend which has provided suppliers “$600,000 to $700,000 a day” in revenue, “up from just a few thousand dollars a day normally”. The author, Rachel Adams-Heard, describes this surge as a positive, a well-deserved return on investment for the industrious businesspeople who, having taken the risk of acquiring an asset, secured both legal and moral right to reap its gains. She makes no mention of the appalling extortion required to make those profits possible. But we understand that the firms in question make their money, whether $5,000 or $500,000 per day, by providing a commodity (natural gas) to their customers in exchange for a fee. The most significant of these customers are the utility companies, who pay for the privilege to make use of that commodity and internalize its cost into the price at which they sell their utility (electricity, heat) to customers of their own. Due to the extraordinary weather currently gripping the nation, the initial commodity and corresponding utilities have become crucial to the health and safety of those second-degree customers, who are presented with the cruel choice between paying exorbitant rates or being left to face the cold. But that choice is only available to those with both the means to pay the surge prices, and homes in areas where service has not been cut. Many do not even have those scant prerequisites: millions are without power, thousands are sleeping in their cars, others have died from exposure.

All this because the market, despite the near-perfect efficiency alleged by its staunch supporters, is unable to allocate for and address this unexpected disaster. Rather, the market is unwilling to allocate appropriately, since doing so would require the natural gas suppliers to take a loss. This is clearly the case in Texas: utility companies cut massive swaths of customers off from the grid expressly to avoid paying the inflated gas prices driven up by demand in response to the storm. Under normal circumstances, the fees that these firms charge their customers are capped to limit the degree of their exploitation—electricity is a public utility, after all.  Given those price caps and the increased cost of gas, the utility firms would have had to pay more for the gas required to run their powerplants than they would be able to make up by charging their customers for power usage. In response to this dilemma, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT, a nonprofit tasked by the Public Utility Commission with managing “90% of the state’s electric load”) issued an emergency order allowing electricity suppliers to charge consumers enough to internalize their elevated costs, price cap be damned, forcing the public to bear the entire burden imposed by increased market demand. This is blatant extortion: the people are made to pay obscene amounts for a public utility under threat of the bitter cold. It is only via this shakedown, this racket, this criminal abuse, that those diligent oilmen celebrated by Ms. Adams-Heard are able to make their sudden gains.

The examples illustrated in these articles are just a few recent symptoms of a longstanding, institutional, ideologically mediated system of injustice. We have seen countless others over the past year. The U.S. has left its pandemic response in the hands of the market, a practice which has resulted in the wealthiest nation in the world facing the highest death count of any country. The Lancet Commission reports that about 40% of those U.S. COVID deaths could have been avoided, if not for the right-wing conspiratorial politicization of the virus and the implementation of policies foregrounding the protection of the economy (read: stock market) at the direct expense of public health. The rich have become astronomically richer thanks to trillion-dollar tax-cuts and deadly re-openings, the former funded by the liquidation of social welfare programs and the latter funded by the liquidation of working-class lives. Already limited social safety nets have been cut despite the unprecedented difficulties now facing us, for the benefit of those who possess more than they could ever dream of spending, their fortunes built over years of exploitation.

This social order, which pursues the ends of a small minority at the expense of the working majority, could not possibly maintain its existence through force alone. It requires the power of official morality, of the secular prosperity gospel which preaches that wealth, as productivity incarnate, is the manifestation of social value. That logic, which implicitly declares that the poor are worthy of their disenfranchisement and destitution, is responsible for the terrible repercussions that we now see. Such despicable “morality,” and the consequences that follow, are inevitable in a system that considers the individual not as a person, but as a totality of needs. Under such a system, the other is not a fellow member of the community to be treated with compassion, not a neighbor to be loved, but rather a commodity, a tool to be used in the satisfaction of one’s own selfish desire. As long as human life is treated as an object to be bought and sold, the principle of the “sacredness of human life” remains a hypocritical lie, intended only to trick the oppressed into consenting to their subjugation.

The Tragedy of the American Carceral System

By Aneesh Gogineni

On January 31st, 1865, abolitionists countrywide celebrated as the 13th amendment narrowly passed in the 39th Congress of the United States. Taught in American schooling systems through a very whitewashed, watered-downed version of history, most Americans view the 13th as the ultimate blow to slavery set us on track to the illusion in which we live now, where conditions seem equal for all on the surface level. Similarly, many Americans believe that legal segregation stopped after the Civil Rights act. However, both of these conclusions indirectly forwarded to the population by American schooling are far from the truth.

The 13th amendment provided a loophole to maintain and mask the subjugation deemed necessary by capitalism to exploit labor and prevent class solidarity by removing any perception of a problem with capitalism but rather shifting it to criminals. Section 1 of the text of the 13th amendment reads, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The text rules slavery and involuntary servitude illegal in all instances EXCEPT that of punishment for convicted criminals. In this new era of Reconstruction, white capitalists needed a new method of legal subjugation of black people to distract white workers and continue implicit racial biases. And thus, the Prison Industrial Complex was born.

Since its inception, the Prison Industrial Complex has not served to protect our communities but rather has served to protect property and subjugate minority populations. Through the Jim Crow era, the prison industrial complex did what it does best — incarcerate large populations of black people. However, heading into the 1970s and 80’s as policies were becoming more progressive, prison populations globally and domestically were dropping. Crime rates and the need for law enforcement/imprisonment were very low. Incomes arguably the worst president of the 20th century — Ronald Reagan. As Reagan introduced trickle-down economics and the drug war, prisons were built in California although the crime rates were dropping. As Reagan criminalized marijuana, crack cocaine, and all drug “abuse”, he was able to drastically alter our incarceration rates. Through methods like supporting the Contras, a far-right drug organization stopping socialist change in Nicaragua through having them SELL DRUGS TO BLACK COMMUNITIES IN LA. This is one example of the true impact of the War on Drugs. It justified Reagan and the CIA intervening throughout Latin America, exploiting the resources and labor of workers in the Global South, and then incarcerating millions of black people in the US. Through laws like the 3 strikes law, America was able to justify its mass incarceration of predominantly black people and low-income workers throughout the US.

The 13th amendment has allowed slavery and Jim Crow to manifest themselves within the prison industrial complex. Prisoners work for hours a day with almost no pay. They live in horrible conditions and have no true education or rehabilitation. They have no true chance of re-entering society with a second chance. Reminiscent of Jim Crow, released felons cannot vote, don’t have access to the same housing benefits, job benefits, unemployment, etc. This essentially screws them over and incentivizes them to commit more crimes. Therefore, the US has the highest reincarceration rate in the world, nearing 50%. This has become an industry (thus the label “Prison Industrial Complex” as a critique of the system). With private prison corporations like CoreCivic (formerly the CCA) teaming up with the Drug Enforcement Administration to imprison black people, these corporations have capital incentive to imprison people. This results in tragedies like judges being paid to sentence black teens to longer sentences so that the corporations can make money. The problem extends farther than just carcerality, but also within our capitalist systems that lead to inevitable exploitation of workers subjugated in these conditions. This system justifies these carceral systems within the US.

This rotten system has evolved and maintained its dominance through “acts of purity.” By enacting superficial police and prison reform like body cameras, this reform has justified and legitimized the system without attacking the true roots of the system. Thus, we must aim for more radical means to infiltrate/abolish the system than simple reform. Abolitionist justice involves more than attacking carceral systems head-on, but rather dealing with the root cause of this very problem. Through wealth redistribution, education, and programs like AdvancePeace or CureViolence, Abolitionists must engage in these radical means as a method to reach ultimate abolition of these systems. Social programs and services must also happen simultaneously as abolition as a means of empowering the workers of the world to reach the ultimate end goal of communism/socialism.

Notes

For more information and in-depth analysis on issues of carcerality, these two books are wonderful sources.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of ColorBlindness— by Michelle Alexander.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e0185311e0373308494e5b6/t/5e0833e3afc7590ba079bbb4/1577595881870/the_new_jim_crow.pdf

Are Prisons Obsolete — by Angela Davis

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/angela-y-davis-are-prisons-obsolete.pdf

Marx’s Pedagogies Then and Now: Inquiry and Presentation

Pictured: The Cuban Literacy Brigades exemplify Marxist pedagogies as they play out inside and outside of classrooms.

By Derek R. Ford

Republished from Liberation School.

Ask any teacher in any setting, and they’ll tell you there’s no “formula” or “recipe” for education. Despite what corporate charter movements assert—like Teach for America’s “I do, you do, we do” rote learning—teaching is always dependent on relationships, trust, respect, and a host of other elements—and all of these can change day to day. Teaching on a Monday after a big fight broke out at a weekend party is different than teaching on a Wednesday when things have settled down a bit. Teaching in a pandemic is markedly different from teaching before one. These are just a few examples of the limitless and unpredictable forces that shape the educational experience.

As any communist organizer knows, Marxist pedagogy is not a matter of merely explaining or convincing, of coming up with the right wording, question, presentation, speech, or reading. These are educational tactics rather than pedagogies, which refer to specific ways, modes, or logics of education. Marxist pedagogy is contingent on a multitude of factors: the dominant political ideology at the time (is it intensely anti-communist or more open?), the consciousness of students as individuals or a collective (are they coming from a liberal issue-based organization or a strand of the movement?), the autonomy we’re allowed in particular settings (is it an after school club at a public/private school, community meeting, or a Party office?). And of course, there are other factors like different skills, personalities, time commitments, and relations between amongst teachers and students.

While teaching is unpredictable and contingent, for Marxist revolutionaries there’s a wealth of pedagogical content—theories that have been put into practice and whose practice has in turned informed the theories—to rely on. The previous installments of this series focused on Brazilian educator Paolo Freire and Lenin, on the use, misuse, and potential of “growth mindset,” and on the revolutionary educational theory of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky. In this article, we look at Marx’s own pedagogical practice.

Prerequisite: Marxist pedagogy presumes competence

Before delving into Marx’s thoughts on pedagogy, it helps to dispel a dominant myth about Marx and Marxism: that it’s predicated on the “enlightened” revolutionary teaching the “ignorant” masses. Nowhere do Marx’s (or Engels’) texts even hint at this notion, and neither are their hints in the main documents of the Marxist tradition. For example, one of Lenin’s main gripes with the economists who focused on trade-union consciousness was that their assumption that workers could only understand their immediate situation. It was also one of Marx and Engels’ main critiques of the reformism of the Social Democratic Party in Germany. As Marx and (primarily or wholly) Engels wrote in an 1879 letter for internal circulation amongst some SDP leaders:

“As for ourselves, there is, considering all our antecedents, only one course open to us. For almost 40 years we have emphasised that the class struggle is the immediate motive force of history and, in particular, that the class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat is the great lever of modern social revolution; hence we cannot possibly co-operate with men who seek to eliminate that class struggle from the movement. At the founding of the International we expressly formulated the battle cry: The emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself…. Hence we cannot co-operate with men who say openly that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves, and must first be emancipated from above by philanthropic members of the upper and lower middle classes” [1].

What Marx and Engels are saying here is that we should always presume competence (a point central to the field of critical disability studies). This doesn’t mean that we should presume that the capitalist system sets everyone up for success. Quite the contrary: the system sets the masses up for poverty. What presuming competence does mean, however, is that we should assume by default that everyone we come into contact with has the capacity and potential for transforming their consciousness and ideas, habits and actions, political beliefs and commitments.

Presuming competence also puts the onus on the educator, the revolutionary, the organizer, and the organization insofar as it means that if the student isn’t “getting it” then the problem lies with us. Too often educators displace our own incompetence onto students. For example, I’ve heard many teachers speak with pride about how many Cs, Ds, and Fs they give. When approached through the Marxist assumption, however, we see that “bad grades” are not due to any innate inability but to a complex of factors, including our own teaching.

Marx’s pedagogies: Inquiry and presentation

Although Marx considered education at various points, he didn’t write about pedagogy. He does, however, make an important remark that is pedagogical in nature in the afterword to the second German edition of the first volume of Capital. Here Marx distinguishes the Forschung from the Darstellung, or the process of research from the method of presentation. He is responding to an assessment of Capital that appeared in an 1872 edition of the European Messenger based in St. Petersburg. The assessment focuses on Marx’s method of presentation and commends Marx for showing the laws of capitalism and of social transformation.

Marx claims this the review is ultimately an affirmation of his anti-Hegelian dialectic, but before clarifying his dialectic, he briefly notes the necessary differences between inquiry and articulation, or research and presentation, a difference that is not just political or philosophical, but pedagogical in nature: “Of course,” Marx writes,

“the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connexion. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori [or self-evident] construction” [2].

Marx is describing two different pedagogies—or educational processes–here. The first, the method of inquiry or research, is one that examines material in all of its nuances and relationships, tracing out the different lineages, past, present, and future potential forms of development, and how they each are interdependent on others.  

Researching is a process that entails wandering around, looking for connections, thinking you’re onto something and then following it to a dead end, generating ideas, getting lost in the archives (whether they be in a library or on the internet), and so on. When researching, you have a goal in mind but the end doesn’t totally dictate everything you do. Marx researched to understand the inner logics and dynamics of capital, how these came to be, what impact they had and might have on the world, and how the contradictions can be seized during the class struggle. But this goal wasn’t always at the forefront of his mind. What we might read as “digressions” in his work are often the reality that the end goal had to be suspended at moments for research to continue. In fact, a lot of what we consider “distraction” or “procrastination” in schooling might actually be profound moments of researching.

Research, however, can’t last forever, especially for revolutionaries. At the same time, only once you’ve researched can you begin presenting your findings. Presentation takes a totally different pedagogical form. It begins with a pre-determined end in mind that guides the demonstration such that it begins with the most elementary conceptual building blocks and proceeds linearly in a developmental manner toward the end goal. Whereas researching is about means, presentation is about ends: the ends structure everything that comes before. This is why Marx, in Capital, often casts aside the historical beginnings of capitalism and leaves it to the very end, in the last part where we finally learn that it was through slavery, colonialism, legal and extralegal theft, individual and state violence, repression, and so on that capitalism came to be. But he doesn’t begin here because he doesn’t want us to 1) think this is the complete and global story of how capital came to me; 2) think it’s not going on today; and 3) because he simply wants us to understand the inner logic of capitalism and its intrinsic contradictions as it was most fully developed in England, all while giving the mainstream political-economists a fair reading.

Politics and examples of Marx’s pedagogies

While research and presentation are pedagogical ways of engaging with Marxist education, they are also political. Because presentation is guided by a pre-determined end, it tends to reinforce the world as it exists. It is only because I know what x looks like in advance that I can judge a student’s development toward knowing or becoming x. This is why research is a potentially oppositional logic: it’s impossible to grade or measure one’s progress researching. It might be that the next day after you watch some obscure YouTube video or find some odd social media page that you finally complete the research and produce something new. The problem is not with presentation per se, but rather its dominance today in capitalism. This is why Marx’s method of research is so crucial. It insists on both communist inquiry and communist presentation.

Again, even though Marx never wrote about pedagogy, his body of work provides us with potent examples of how he put them into practice. Two works in particular illuminate Marx’s pedagogies in action: the Grundrisse and volume one of Capital.

The Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (rough draft) consists of a series of notes written in the frantic days of 1857-1858. They’re a collection of 8 notebooks published first in 1939 in the Soviet Union and made available in Europe and the U.S. during the 1960s-1970s. Never intended for publication, they’re a series of research notes, or traces of Marx’s studying, which Eric Hobsbawm says, were “written in a sort of private intel­lectual shorthand which is sometimes impenetrable, in the form of rough notes interspersed with asides which, however clear they may have been to Marx, are often ambiguous to us.” As a result, “anyone who has tried to translate the manuscript or even to study and interpret it, will know that it is sometimes quite impossible to put the meaning of some sibylline passage beyond all reason­able doubt” [3].

The Grundrisse notebooks are quite different from the first volume of Capital, Marx’s real magnum opus, the only volume published (and translated and republished) during Marx’s lifetime. The Grundrisse is almost pure research (because they were notes Marx wasn’t trying to present to others), while Capital is almost pure presentation (because it was meant to articulate the inner workings of capital to others).

For two distinct positions on these works, consider Louis Althusser and Antonio Negri. The former wrote that Capital is the only book “by which Marx has to be judged” [4]. It’s the “mature” Marx, clearly broken from his Hegelian roots (which still inflect the Grundrisse) and any mention of humanism. Althusser, however, a lifelong member of the French Communist Party, was intervening in debates over “humanism” that he saw as diluting or abandoning the class struggle. Instead of proletarians versus the bourgeoisie, the colonizers versus the colonized, it was “humans;” a non-class category bereft of an enemy against which to struggle.

On the other side, Antonio Negri reads the Grundrisse as a political text, a more Marxist text than Capital because of its “incredible openness.” Capital, according to Negri, is not only fragmentary but closed, determinate, and objective, a book where antagonisms are resolved dialectically, foreclosing the forceful rupture that communist revolution requires. Interestingly, Althusser invited Negri to give a series of lectures on the Grundrisse in Paris in 1978, which served as the basis for his book, Marx beyond Marx. Negri doesn’t dismiss Capital, of course, but insists that the book only represents one aspect of Marxism. The Grundrisse is an endless unfolding of research and antagonism. Capital, on the contrary, is more limited precisely because of its “categorical presentation” [5]. In essence, the Grundrisse is more open because it’s a series of notebooks in which Marx discovers something and presents it, which brings forth a new antagonism, which then births a new determination of content to research. They were idiomatic writings in which Marx was wandering around, discovering new elements and presenting new hypotheses.

For Althusser, it’s precisely because Marx’s presentation is so elegant, clear, and compelling that Capital represents his highest work of thought. However, he recommends different ways of reading it, primarily by leaving the first three (and most difficult) chapters for the end. What you have in Capital is a pedagogy of presentation that begins with something simple and obvious (the commodity), and then goes deeper and deeper until we see that this “trivial” appearing thing is an active crystallization of a series of ongoing struggles, like those between and within classes and the state that play out differently over history, that assume different forms (like technology and machinery), and so on. But first we have to understand the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value, the role of money, and so on, before any of this makes sense.

Research and Presentation in Capital and the Grundrisse

Yet Marx’s distinction between research/presentation isn’t hard and fast; it’s not even as firmly delineated as Althusser and Negri insist. Marx sought to understand, articulate, learn, and relay the precise logics of capital, its contradictions, and how the working class has and can seize on these contradictions to institute the revolutionary transition to communism. At the same time, he knew he couldn’t complete this project because no one can fully delineate capitalism so long as it exists, as capital is by definition a dynamic social relation. This is one aspect of capital that Marx and Engels’ marveled at in the Manifesto of the Communist Party:

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind” [6].

Indeed, when one reads the various outlines that Marx presented for Capital in the Grundrisse and elsewhere, it’s clear that Marx was taking on a project he knew he could never finish. He wanted to write volumes on the state, the world market, foreign trade, wages, the history of theory, and more. Even in the first volume of Capital, we see traces of Marx’s interminable studying in the various places he notes an absolutely crucial point—one we must understand—only to move on by acknowledging he can’t address it here and it will have to wait until later: until he’s studied some more. Sometimes, like when he brings up credit and rent in volume 1, he does return to them in volume 3. But other times he never does; he never found the time for more research.

The writings of Marx, Engels, and other Marxists still explain the workings of capitalism today because they get at the fundamental dynamics and contradictions and the tasks of revolution, the ones that remain the same as long as capital exists—even if they change their form here and there, or even if they take on different weight at different moments. And even though Marx couldn’t—and never claimed to—predict how capital would develop after his death, they remain fundamental cornerstones for not only revolutionary critique and analysis, but most importantly for revolutionary action. This is because, first, Marx’s exposition did get at the core unalterable dynamics of capital and, second, because Marxism develops by returning to research and studying, to inquiry, to tracing new lineages, discovering what Marx didn’t write about because of the research available to him, the moral or social standards at the time, the (many) times he was not in good health or financial circumstances, or the transformations he couldn’t totally foresee.

Marx’s own turns between inquiry and presentation were dictated not only by his health but by the ups and downs of the market and, most significantly, by the workers’ movement. After the failure of the 1848 bourgeois-democratic revolutions, after which Marx was exiled to England, he didn’t see the prospect of another revolutionary situation on the horizon and thus began his study of political-economy in earnest. With the capitalist crisis of the mid 1850s, he was forced to speed up his research. When the Paris Commune erupted on March 18, 1871, he left his work on Capital to write about that. After the first volume of Capital was published, the other two major works he wrote before he died were The Civil War in France (1871) on the Paris Commune and the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875)–which wasn’t published until after Marx’s death but that circulated widely amongst the newly-formed Social Democratic Party. Marx even pushed the publication of the second volume of Capital back because he was waiting to see how the European and U.S. economic crisis of 1873 would turn out.

Research and presentation in Capital

Both books, however, represent different ways Marx engaged these distinct pedagogical processes. Consider, for example, the chapter in Capital on the working-day, where Marx announces that “between equal rights force decides” [7]. Up until this point, Marx has taken bourgeois political theory at face value, but here the reality of the struggle forces a leap so that the struggle for a “normal” working day is just that: a struggle between two antagonistic class forces. The chapter presents a narrative of the struggle in England throughout the 19th century, one that’s filled with contradictory alliances and betrayals, advances and defeats. It’s a struggle waged not by individuals but by collectives: capitalists and workers together through the mediation of the state. Moreover, in a footnote he acknowledges the role that Protestant ideology played in the process “by changing almost all the traditional holidays into workdays” and later the role of the anti-slavery struggle in the U.S. [8]. There’s nothing predictable or deterministic about any of this; and this is what we affirm when we say that class struggle is the motor of capitalism and the motor of revolutionary transformation.

Another example of the importance of research and inquiry within the largely linear presentation of Capital is the very last chapter, chapter 33. This chapter is concerned with Wakefield’s theory of colonialism. It’s a rather dry and short chapter. What’s interesting is that it follows from Marx’s most succinct narrative of revolutionary transformation in the previous chapter on the “historical tendency of capitalist accumulation.” In this penultimate chapter, Marx turns away from the historical empirical inquiry and presents a clear and concise dialectical and historical materialist analysis of the tendency of capitalist accumulation and how the contradictions of capitalism might result in particular revolutionary paths.

Marx begins chapter 32 with the scattered private property of individuals in petty manufacture, handicraft, and peasant labor. Together, these prevent the concentration of means of production, division of labor, and cooperation of labor (social labor), the formation of the collective laborer (the antagonistic subject), and so remains locked within the production and circulation of use-values.

Halfway through this first paragraph, Marx notes that “at a certain stage of development,” these property relations create “the material agencies for its own dissolution,” producing “new passions” that “the old social organization” prevents [9]. Individual private property is annihilated by capital and, through theft, colonialism, slavery, repression, and so on, centralized and concentrated by capital. At the same time, this produces the collective laborer and a social process of work that develops a universal (although not undifferentiated) social worker. As capital concentrates the means of production and the proletarian class, the latter’s rebellious nature grows. Capital is now a fetter on production:

The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with and under it. Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated [10].

He ends the chapter with a speculation on the relative violence of both revolutionary processes. The centralization and concentration of capital was “incomparably more protracted, violent and difficult than the transformation of capitalistic private property… into socialized property” [11]. The former entailed the dispossession, theft, and exploitation of the many by the few, while the latter might entail the expropriation of the few by the many.

Rather than an empirical prophesy, however, it’s an articulation of contradictions; there’s nothing indicating a mechanical or deterministic prediction.

This is supported by the fact that, after this revolutionary clarion call to expropriate the expropriators, Marx then turns to a rather dull and uninspiring examination of Ebbon Wakefield’s theory of colonialism. Here he appreciates Wakefield’s theory for its honesty. Wakefield doesn’t try to hide the violence of colonialism or exploitation through notions of equal and free rights. He explicitly acknowledged the need for dispossession. Marx ends volume one by reminding us again that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation are based on expropriation, colonialism, genocide, and slavery. I read this as a return to research and to the antagonistic class forces that animate Marxist theory and practice. Ending with chapter 33, I think, implicitly tells us that the contradictions of capitalism—which can’t be solved within capitalism—can be pushed back and transformed through colonialism and imperialism. It’s an opening to return to studying, to inquiry.

The dialectic in chapter 32 may seem teleological and closed, but the brief exposition in chapter 33 undoes that. There are no guarantees, no objective determinants divorced from subjective differences or the class struggle.

Marx’s pedagogies in action

Marxist pedagogy is a never-ending alteration between inquiry and presentation. There’s no determinism, no mechanistic causality, no chronological and predictable unfolding of struggle. The entire project of Capital ends with a few dozen lines and then silence: an opening for study and inquiry. This opening, however, isn’t sufficient in itself, for the class struggle also needs to explain concepts, categories, tactics, strategies, and analysis. The key for Marx and for Marxist pedagogy is to keep these in tension, yet the tension will change depending on a host of circumstances.

Marx’s distinction between inquiry and presentation, are not irreconcilable opposites but dialectically related pedagogies. After all, one can’t study a text without first having learned to read. At the same time, learning to read is filled with moments of study. The first is clearer, so I’ll give an example of the latter from my own childhood. I remember learning that “rose” signaled not only a red and thorny flower but also the past tense of rise, and that a ruler referred not only to our main measuring device in school but also to a king, queen, or czar—and later to a state of class domination. I came to learn these are homonyms, or words that share the same spelling but different meanings. Even so, I’ve always found homonyms fascinating educational models that show how even within the developmental process of learning we can make room for inquiry.

An interesting historical example that highlights these divergent pedagogies and their implications for organizing comes from the split between the socialist and communist parties in the 1920s and how the Socialist and Communist Parties organized their youth groups. The Socialist Party believed that cadre had to present radical ideas to children so that children could join the struggle later, when they were older. The Communist Party, on the other hand, believed that children were political actors and agents in the here and now, and brought together inquiry and presentation. As Paul Mishler writes in Raising Reds:

“Rather than being simply educational institutions, controlled by parents and local party organizations, the Communist children’s groups were to be political organizations, fully integrated into the political structure of the party. Communist children’s groups would thus encourage children to engage in political as well as educational activity, and these groups would be separate from direct parental influence… ‘We are not only preparing the child for future participation in the class struggle;–we are leading the child in the class struggle now!” [12].

The Socialist Party maintained that children needed presentation before they could engage in their own action and inquiry, while the Communist Party, following Marx’s pedagogies, engaged children in presentation and inquiry through action. The learned and researched, not only in classrooms and study groups but in the streets as well.

We don’t need to turn to history to see the importance of keeping Marx’s distinct pedagogies in play, however, Consider how, in many organizing meetings, the logic of presentation dominates. I’m not referring to speeches or reading articles, but to the domination of the end goal and, more specifically, an end goal that has to be realizable and “winnable.” This shuts down the process of inquiry and, more specifically, revolutionary inquiry, by keeping us trapped in what we can win without overthrowing capitalism. It keeps us trapped within the present, unable to see beyond it.

As an alternative, we could start with the end goal of the total revolutionary transformation and restructuring of society. This isn’t winnable by any action, protest, campaign, etc., and so the end goal is there, but suspended; it’s not clear how exactly it unfolds. When we start here, with this goal in mind, we open ourselves up to the process of research that Marx held so dear and without which we wouldn’t have Marxism, let alone the Marxist theoretical and practical history on which we draw.

The key point is that Marx left us not only distinct yet dialectically related educational processes; he also offered us examples of navigating between the two, as well as the various factors that shape what ones we engage. It’s not that presentation or inquiry comes first or second, and it’s not that one is good and the other bad. The communist organizer, leader, or teacher has to deploy both depending on different external and class or site-specific contingencies. Sometimes learning must take precedence, and studying must be presented. At other times, studying must take precedence, we must be free to imagine alternatives, get lost in the possibilities, reach our dead ends, and open up inquiry to a new presentation and then to a new inquiry.

This might be what, in part, separates dogmatic Marxists from those who take it as a living, breathing document. The economists, for example, only learned Marx, while those who have made revolutions, or tried to, have engaged Marxism as an infinite well of studying.

Derek R. Ford is assistant professor of education studies at DePauw University and chair of the Education Department at the Hampton Institute. He’s written four monographs, the latest of which is Inhuman educations: Jean-François Lyotard, pedagogy, thought (Brill, 2021). More information can be found at www.derekrford.com

References

[1] Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1979). Marx and Engels to August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Wilhelm Bracke and others (circular letter), trans. P. Ross & B. Ross. In Gerasimenko, S., Kalinina, Y., & Vladimirova, A. (Eds.). (1991). Marx and Engels collected works (vol. 45), pp. 394-408. New York: International Publishers, p. 408, emphasis added.

[2] Marx, K. (1867/1967). Capital: A critique of political economy (vol. 1), trans. by Samuel Moore. New York: International Publishers, p. 28.

[3] Hobsbawm, E.J. (1964). Introduction, in K. Marx, Pre-capitalist economic foundations, ed. E.J. Hobsbawm, trans. Jack Cohen (pp. 9-65). New York: International Publishers, p. 10.

[4] Althusser, L. (1971). Lenin and philosophy and other essays, trans. B. Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, p. 70.

[5] Negri, A. (1991). Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, trans. H. Cleaver, M. Ryan, and M. Viano. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, p. 9; 12. Negri was a leading theoretician and organizer of the “autonomous” school that participated in the Italian Civil War in the 1960s-70s before being falsely arrested in 1979 for kidnapping the former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro of the Christian Democratic Party. He was later exonerated, but was still facing 30 years in prison. Yet in 1983, he was elected to Parliament and used Parliamentary immunity to escape to France to continue researching and organizing. He only returned to Italy in 1997 to serve out his remaining (and bargained-down) 13 years to raise awareness of the political prisoners still being held behind bars. While in prison, he co-wrote the (in)famous book Empire with Michael Hardt.

[6] Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1848). The manifesto of the Communist Party,  In R.C. Tucker (Ed.). (1978). The Marx-Engels reader, 2nd. ed. New York: W.W. Norton, p. 476.

[7] Marx, Capital, p. 225.

[8] Ibid., p. 262 f2.

[9] Ibid., p. 714.

[10] Ibid., p. 715

[11] Ibid.

[12] Mishler, P. (1999). Raising reds: The Young Pioneers, radical summer camps, and communist political culture in the United States. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 31.

Miguel Cardona: More of the Same Neoliberal Education?

Picture © Devin Leith-Yessian

By Brandon Edwards-Schuth and Brad J. Porfilio

A collective sigh of relief and hope has been commonplace on Facebook from fellow educators and P-20 school leaders recently who have, rightly so, been disgusted with the Trump administration and then education secretary, Betsy DeVos. It has been a tumultuous four years filled with white supremacy, a neglected pandemic which the wealthy got richer from, multiple supreme court nominations of conservative judges who will impact generations to come, and so much else. On top of that, DeVos dedicated her tenure to “advance God’s Kingdom” through school reforms in favor of school choice vouchers for “greater Kingdom gain,” largely doing more to destroy public education with an intensifying of neoliberalism, i.e. privatize everything because ‘the free market’ is better than the state at providing social entitlements, such as education, to its citizens.

While a new administration and education secretary (especially someone that’s actually a teacher) is far better than Trump and DeVos, it’s actually a really low bar that’s been set. In doing so, we fear that many are too easy to welcome in Cardona without really considering his educational policies and who is involved, which we feel is largely a continuation of the neoliberal capitalist status quo in the U.S educational system that predates (though continued through) DeVos. To really understand the very likely trajectory of a future Cardona tenure as Secretary of Education under President Biden, we have to briefly go back and see the historical context building up to today.

The Obama Administration under the leadership of the 9th and 10th Secretary of  Education, Arnie Duncan (2009-2016) and John B. King (2016-2017), changed the direction of educational policy formation in the United States, as the Obama Administration “for the first time pressured states in a sustained way to undertake systemic change in their education systems and held them accountable for the academic performance of their students” (1). To the dismay of some teachers, parents, school administrators, and scholars, the Obama Administration’s agenda for education was designed to promote the corporate ascendancy over the United States educational system, instead of providing the vision and resources necessary to eliminate social inequalities and institutional forms of oppression, such as racism, ableism, classism, and cis-heteronormativity, which are truly responsible for educational disparities in the United States. For instance, in securing Arnie Duncan for the position of Secretary of Education, Obama secured a corporate cheerleader who supported market-based educational policies during his over seven-year tenure as CEO of Chicago Public Schools, such as increasing standardized testing, opening for-profit charter schools, and eliminating an elected school board in favor of Chicago Board of Education, which consisted of Chicago’s wealthy and powerful. One of the Obama Administration’s quintessential mandates that ceded corporate control over the US education system was Race to the Top (RTTP) a $4.35 billion dollar “competitive incentive program” launched in June of  2009. With many U.S. states grappling from a lack of resources for schools from the so-called “Great Recession,” 46 state governments applied for needed resources in exchange for supporting corporate-driven educational mandates, “including charter schools, college and career-ready standards and evaluations of teachers using student test scores.” Numerous CEOs and philanthropists used RTTP to increase revenue, to gain notoriety for allegedly providing additional opportunities for the most vulnerable students, and to control teaching and learning within K-12 educational institutions. For instance, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation became involved in educating leaders to support the charter school industry across the county, the Walton Foundation spent millions of dollars to expand charter schools; and Pearson incorporated created textbooks, test-prep materials and high-stakes tests to reap an economic windfall for arbitrating whether teachers and school officials are effectively educating children.

The Obama Administration also increased the likelihood that specific states would receive support under RTTP if they adopted a “common set of K-12 standards,” which were internationally benchmarked and that prepared students for colleges and careers. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) became situated within the high-stakes testing climate, as specific assessments that were linked to CCSS became the chief barometer of whether teachers, schools, and districts were effectively educating children. CCSS in a test-polluted educational context had a debilitating impact on schools. They were responsible for teachers and leaders losing jobs, narrowing the curriculum to merely content on examinations, and educators losing the autonomy to create learning experiences designed to spark students’ creativity and intellectual curiosity. During Obama’s last year in office, John B. King Jr., did little to squelch market-driven educational approach to improving teaching and learning in the U.S. educational system. Instead, he just followed the same neoliberal path when he was New York State’s education commissioner from 2011-2014, King continued to support testing and accountability policies as a panacea for improving education as well as dismissing parents, students, schools and community organizers who believed opting-out of taking high-stakes test was vital to supporting their children’s intellectual and social development and to support teachers’ professional judgement to evaluate student learning and development. Near the end of Obama’s end in the Whitehouse, King attempted to appease those who criticized Obama’s top-down, corporate agenda for education by offering states grants to offer students “a well-rounded education and to provide additional social support to support mental care for students.” In the end, however, market-driven educational policy formations based on the ideals of accountability, competition, profit-motive and rugged individualism came to dominate how schools function in the United States.

Under the Trump Administration, Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, had rolled back the federal government from playing a dominant role in the US educational system. However, she utilized an already strong corporate-base within educational agencies at the state and local levels to strongly pushed her libertarian “school choice” agenda through hundreds of millions of financial aid to various charter schools (including organizations aimed at opening new ones) and unaccredited for-profit schools, while at the same time attempting to cut $17.6 million in federal funding for the Special Olympics. DeVos has also capitalized on the COVID-19 pandemic to hasten the privatization of public education; even ending her tenure with giving more than a million dollars to a soccer club with no prior educational experience to startup a charter school. DeVos’s tenure was largely dominated by diverting enormous quantities of financial aid away from public schools and into private hands, which although not new, was done with such explicit intensity and excess that it was seen as repulsive.

This brings us to today, where Joe Biden’s candidate for Education Secretary, Miguel Cardona, is set to be heard by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on February 3rd, 2021. Son of parents who moved from Puerto Rico and whose father, Cardona Sr., was a police officer, Cardona is a former teacher, the youngest principal in the state’s history, and assistant superintendent for teaching and learning (2015-2019), and commissioner of education since 2019 in Meriden, Connecticut. While his teaching experience gives important merit, Cardona’s positions on educational policies have been largely a mystery to those in Washington D.C., though that is part of why he was chosen.

Historian of education and educational policy analyst, Diane Ravitch, in a Democracy Now! interview suggested that he was chosen by the Biden Administration for particularly “being non-controversial,” a particularly strategic move. Unlike Biden’s runner up choice, Leslie Fenwick, who has been a vocal opponent of charter schools and more, Cardona is seen as a non-controversial, safe pick who also hasn’t been clear on being for or against charter schools. This puts Cardona in a space where he can more fluidly appeal to most people across the political spectrum, so long as he does not support initiatives that challenge the hegemony of corporate practices, policies, and  social imaginary over the United States’ educational system. We see this when, during his educational administrative positions in Connecticut, Cardona “renewed every charter that was due and has not approved any additional schools for the legislature to consider opening.”  Furthermore, as an educator and Assistant Superintendent for Teaching and Learning, Cardona supported educational initiatives afforded minoritized learners additional access to educational opportunities, such as the ability to attend advanced-level courses, to attend “full-day kindergarten and offer more vulnerable children access to high-quality preschool,” without challenging the common-state standards and standardized tests, let alone unjust social formations, including racism and poverty, which are inhibiting the educational performance of BIPOC and other minoritized learners. It’s not hard to imagine the Biden Administration guide by Cordona’s leadership might not further the DeVos agenda, but at the same time probably won’t reverse course on the privatization of public education.

Cardona also gave a recent interview on Connecticut Public Radio’s Where We Live Podcast where he was open about some of his stances on education policies. Cardona’s comments make it clear he believes providing access to education is the chief lever for improving the quality of life of minoritized groups in U.S. society. For instance, he feels providing students additional opportunities to attend college and provide them “other career pathways'' will allow students to attain the “American Dream.” Clearly, Cordona is correct providing additional access to educational opportunities for BIPOC and other minoritized students may allow some to transcend their class status; yet, his belief in education access as a societal equalizer is misguided as it does not acknowledge how structures impediments, including unemployment, the dominance of low-paid service jobs, poverty, and lack of affordable housing, leave most citizens, even those who hold advanced degrees, from achieving the “American Dream.” Cardona also holds a similar perspective related to reopening schools in the midst of the global pandemic. He believes reopening schools is vital for the academic success of Black, Latino, and low-income children; but he overlooks larger structural conditions that inhibit students from low-income and racialized communities to succeed in schools, irrespective if they are physically open, including having to bear the brunt of more of their family members die and suffer from COVID. Another important consideration for reopening schools in the midst of the pandemic is if the schools that are reopened will continue to put the health and safety of children and communities at risk only to ensure the United States’ educational system will continue to support the interest of the political and economic elite over the well-being of working-class people. Perhaps, schools should only reopen if they are firmly committed to support the goals of border dissent movements, such as Black Lives Matter and Indigenous and environmental rights movements, which are committed to overturning systems of knowledge, structures, and institutions responsible for human suffering and environmental degradation. We also echo what Associate Professor of Urban and Multicultural Education in the Educational Studies Department at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, Brian Lozenski had said: “Otherwise, the reward of ‘safety’ is not worth the risk of perpetuating injustice.”

As educators ourselves, we hope that Cardona surprises us all by foregoing the neoliberal status quo and instead genuinely enact critical and progressive educational policies and emancipator pedagogies. Cardona ought to lift the mandate on standardized testing at least during this pandemic, but ideally indefinitely to combat the dominance of corporatism over the US educational system. Things like canceling student debt/free education at the very least, is long overdue in the fight for equity. Even further, implementing critical education rooted in decolonizing, abolitionist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and defunding the police (just to name a few) are some of the necessary components of an education aimed at genuine social justice that we ought to be demanding. For all the educators, scholars and leaders out there who are quick to accept Cardona as a beacon of hope and change, we urge skepticism and honesty. Cardona is certainly far more preferable to DeVos, but he was strategically chosen by the Biden Administration to not shake up the corporate ascendency over education and society too much. 

Notes

1. McGuinn, P. (2016). From no child left behind to the every student succeeds act: Federalism and the education legacy of the Obama administration. Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 46(3), 392-415.

Brandon Edwards-Schuth (He/They) is an educator, activist, and doctoral candidate in the Cultural Studies and Social Thought in Education program at Washington State University. b.edwards-schuth@wsu.edu

Brad J. Porfilio (He/Him) is the Director of the Ed.D. Leadership Program and Professor at San Jose State University. Porfilio16@aol.com

How the Media Legitimizes Gentrification

By Noah Streng

Republished from Michigan Specter.

If you’ve ever seen an episode of HGTV’s Good Bones or any other “house-flipping” show, you’ll know that like all reality TV shows they depict dramatized situations as a way of increasing the stakes and encouraging viewers to keep watching. However, when watching these types of shows, it is important to recognize what narratives they are promoting. Whose voices and stories do they center? What underlying assumptions are left unchallenged?

In the strange world of reality TV, there’s an entire genre dedicated to “home improvement” where wealthy individuals will buy homes in “rundown neighborhoods’’ and “make them beautiful again” (all while making a significant profit for themselves, of course). These shows like to promote the idea that the house-flippers are courageous underdogs venturing into an uncharted and dangerous land to save target homes from the scary, filthy people who live in them. Euphemisms like “up and coming” and “transitional” are often used to describe low-income, minority neighborhoods starved for investment.

In a dramatic scene from an episode of HGTV’s Good Bones, the gentrifiers are seen “scouting” a house that they bought and breaking through a window because the doors of the house are locked — a sign that people have been staying there. The scene depicts the gentrifiers as being frightened by the possibility of encountering a squatter and being disgusted by the house’s “filth.” However, what’s never asked or included in these shows is questioning why the person living in that house needed to squat in the first place.

Did the state fail to provide them affordable housing? Are they suffering from a mental health issue and lack insurance? Did they get evicted from their former home? Instead of analyzing the root causes of this person’s housing insecurity and seeking to address it, the squatter is demonized as singularly responsible for their failures. Not only that, but the content of these characterizations is highly racialized, contributing to the white supremacist and colonial themes of the show.

These shows almost never consider the perspective of the tenants evicted by gentrifiers who rip their apartments out from under them. In some cases, there will be depictions of scary, drugged-up squatters who are illegally occupying the gentrifiers’ new passion project. In an article titled ‘We Bought a Crack House,’ house-flippers Catherine Jheon and Julian Humphreys detail their “brave” story of buying a house for $560,000 and encountering the tenants — whose home had just been sold by their landlord without consent — still living in the house when they arrive. Some of the home’s residents are experiencing problems with drug addiction, and are even caught by the gentrifiers using crack in an upstairs room.

What’s not mentioned here is how poverty, and these people’s recent condemnation to homelessness by their landlord, may have influenced their decision to use drugs to cope with the immense hardships they face. When Jheon and Humphreys ask the former tenants to leave the home so that they can start renovating, the tenants refuse, citing that they have nowhere else to go and that this is their rightful home. Jheon writes about her frustration with this, as every day she can’t renovate the home is money lost. In the end, she and Humphreys bribe one of the tenants to leave the house and call the police to forcibly remove the rest of them.

This is a classic example of how law and the media intersect to legitimize the violence of colonization and gentrification which continues in our cities today. The poor are demonized and gentrifiers are portrayed as innocent white saviors who are just trying to make a living — but they are doing so by displacing poor, housing insecure black and brown people. The police advance these projects of colonization by using their monopoly on violence to aid gentrifiers in their mission of displacing community residents so that their house can be fixed up and eventually sold to a rich white family.

While seeming innocent on their face, these shows can have devastating effects on the lives of the millions of people in the United States who experience housing insecurity. Not only do these television networks make money off of stories of tragic displacement of poor people, but they frame these stories in a way that valorizes gentrifiers and legitimizes a landlord’s right to hoard property and force destitute people into homelessness. Oftentimes, the excuse that gentrifiers will use when evicting tenants is “it’s our house now.” However, this statement is highly ideological and reinforces the social dynamic between property owners and the property-less in our capitalist society.

Who controls housing is not something that is natural or written in the stars. It is a power arrangement forged by the deliberate decisions of actors within an economic system that prioritizes profit over human life. House-flipping shows are just one part of the larger media trend of legitimizing societal oppression.

TV companies make political decisions when they choose to only highlight the voices of landlords, realtors, and house-flippers over tenants and the housing insecure. The depiction of low-income, predominately black people as filthy, dangerous, and lazy — rather than victims of a violent, exploitative, and racist economic system — feeds into the narrative that gentrification is good for society at large. How the media depicts people’s interactions with the law and frames which laws are just has real consequences. When the media chooses to center the story of the colonizer over the colonized, it legitimizes the displacement, land theft, and systemic impoverishment that millions of people face every day.

Decolonizing the American Mind: A Review of Matt Sedillo's "Mowing Leaves of Grass"

By Jon Jeter

Had Amiri Baraka been born 50 years later to a Chicano family in Southern California rather than a black family in Newark, he would’ve been Matt Sedillo. 

Present in the work of both poets –the late icon and the relative ingenue respectively –is the rhythmic mixture, una mezcla, of the street, and minds sharpened, like swords, by struggle, and self-enlightenment.

This is not to suggest that Sedillo’s poetry is all fire and brimstone. Like Baraka before him, Sedillo infuses his poetry with a certain knowing, or playfulness, befitting an outsider who is in on the joke, and has seen through the illogic of a handful of Europeans “discovering” 90 million indigenous people. The white settler’s arrogance produces both amusement and blinding, righteous, anger. 

And so it is that Sedillo’s second book of poetry, Mowing Leaves of Grass, reads like a criminal indictment handed up by, well, a poet. In the book’s first poem, entitled Pilgrim, he writes:

See, I come from struggle

And if my story offends you

That is only ‘cause you made the mistake of seeking your

reflection

In my self-portrai

In one of the book’s shorter poems, Pedagogy of the Oppressor, it is made abundantly clear that Sedillo’s poetry is, at its core, an attempt to decolonize the American mind:

And when they read  

They read in conquest 

And when they thought 

They thought of process 

And when they wrote  

Again and again  

It was the word progress 

And when they spoke  

A festival of bayonets 

Impaled the audience  

Line the children  

It’s getting late November  

Teach them Pilgrim  

Teach them Indian  

Speak of gratitude  

Speak of friendship 

Of all the usual suspects perp-walked by Mowing Leaves of Grass, however, the kingpin is Walt Whitman, whose storied 1855 book of poems, Leaves of Grass, is the inspiration of Sedillo’s book title. Widely regarded by ivory-towered elites as the greatest book of poetry in the history of the Republic –or the genre’s Huck Finn – Leaves of Grass is considered a siren song, calling for a young and yearning nation of castoffs and cut-ups to unite in the democratic experiment that is America. 

Sedillo, however, makes no claim to the mantle of poet-laureate but rather dissident laureate, and he finds Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, like the nation itself,  wanting, and in need of a reappraisal. Why, he seems to ask in Mowing Leaves of Grass, is Whitman so fawned over and feted when he fails to account for the suffering, the despair, or the rivers of blood spilled by Native Americans, and blacks, in the making of the nation?

In his poem titled “Oh Say,” Sedillo remixes stanzas from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass,  lyrics to the anthems Star-Spangled Banner and America the Beautiful, and the dirge popularized by Billie Holliday, Strange Fruit.

So we were bound 

To keep singing 

Oh captain 

My captain 

Drunk on blood anthems Blind patriots 

Raised flags 

And fallen veterans 

The myths 

The hymns 

The bitterness 

Of fairy tales 

Best woven into song 

From the dawn’s 

Early light 

To twilight’s last gleaming From Plymouth Rock 

To Dred Scott 

From smallpox 

To church bomb 

From black bodies 

Swinging in the summer breeze To the endless blood 

Of countless wounded knees Old glory 

We are born 

Witness 

To the sins of your soil 

Oh pioneer

I’ve never heard Sedillo recite his poetry live but I am told by those who have that he is electric, inhabiting the words, owning the room,  spitting fire and truth much as Baraka did in his day, but to a rapid-fire, staccato, hip-hop beat rather than Baraka’s jazzy cadence. The writer Greg Palast calls him the best political poet in America, and while I’m not in any position to agree or disagree, I can say that his poems leave me feeling ennobled, and less alone in the world.

Sedillo’s voice is defiant, irreverent, even wrathful, but his metier is championing the cause of the unwashed, and the unloved, be they Chicanos, African Americans, Indonesian sweatshop workers, or Palestinians. And the irony is that what shines through in Mowing the Leaves, more than anything is not of a poet seething at the injustice of it all, but besotted with the people. From his poem, Once:

I have this dream

Every so often

Of people

Beyond borders and prisons

Gathered in the distance

Telling tales of a time

When women feared the evening

When communities were punished by color

And grown men hunted children

Hardly able to believe

People once lived this way

Jon Jeter is a former Washington Post correspondent and the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People and the co-author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Bright Nights and Dark Days in Obama’s Postracial America.

"We Are Entering a New Totalitarian Era": An Interview with Ajamu Baraka

By Ann Garrison

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

In this interview for Pacifica Radio’s series on “Covid, Race, and Democracy,” Ajamu Baraka warns of a new era of totalitarian neoliberalism.

Ann Garrison: On January 20, we saw Joe Biden carry on about “unity” behind seven-foot fences topped with razor wire and 25,000 plus National Guard troops deployed . One friend of mine said that this pointed to an irony deficiency. Is there anything you'd like to say about it? 

Ajamu Baraka: Well, I think it is ironic, but it's quite understandable that the kinds of activities that the US has been involved in promoting and supporting globally—undermining democracies, subverting states, undermining and destroying any semblance of the rule of law—have basically come back to haunt them. You have a militant movement in the US partially inspired by the inability of the state and the system to address their material interests and to look at their concerns regarding their own understanding of democracy and its deficiencies. They feel like they lack space to articulate those views, and they’ve decided to engage in militant actions to make sure that their voices are heard, and they believe that they are upholding democracy.

And their experience with the state made them feel justified in advancing their concerns about democracy in violent forms. The state has demonstrated to them that the way you defend democracy is through state violence. So they were taking their defense into their own hands and bringing it right back to the center of empire. Some of us call that blowback. 

AG: For the past four years, liberals on the coasts have excoriated the white working class in the middle of the country, whom they perceive to be deplorable Trump supporters. Do you think that this is helpful? 

AB: No. Not only is it not helpful, it is inaccurate and it has helped to create the narrative that many of these forces have embraced; that is the centerpiece of their grievances. They believe that liberals and the liberal order have not addressed their needs, their interests. They believe that the economic elites are only out for themselves and that therefore they needed to rally behind Trump, a billionaire who claimed that he understood their interests and would fight for them because nobody else was.

So this characterization of them as deplorables, and as either Nazis or Nazi-like, is not only not helpful but also contradictory in the sense that those folks who level those charges still have not been able to explain why the Trump presidency happened.

For example, some nine million people who voted for Trump in 2016 had voted for Barack Obama in 2012. Liberals can't explain why, after four years of constant anti-Trump rhetoric, the Trump forces expanded their ranks by another 11 million voters. So this is something in play that's a little bit more sophisticated than these people just being deplorables or Nazis. And that something has to be interrogated. It has to be extracted. It has to be understood if you're going to have a politics to counter it. And right now the liberals have not understood where these elements are coming from because they have basically painted those 75 million people as a monolith of deplorables.

The neoliberals have constructed a politics that is going to result in a continuation of the same conditions, politically and economically, that created what they pretend to be most opposed to—the Trump movement. So this is the failure of imagination, the failure of critical analysis, the embracing of illusions that has characterized much of the politics in the US for a couple of decades now. And we see the consequences of that with us every day. 

AG: In the 48 hours after Biden became president, Israel bombed Syria, killing a family of four, a US convoy of trucks crossed into Syria to steal oil yet again, a double suicide bombing in Baghdad killed 32 people and Foreign Affairs, the journal of the US Council on Foreign Relations, published a piece with the headline “Th e  M yth of a  R esponsible  W ithdrawal from Afghanistan ,” which said, “the Biden administration should accept that there is no feasible middle way for a responsible withdrawal.” What do you think is next? 

AB: The continuation of policies that have resulted in the US being bogged down in Afghanistan for two decades, policies that will ensure that the wars that the US is involved in will continue. There will be a continuation of the commitment to US global full-spectrum dominance. In other words, violence is still at the center of the neoliberal project. And they intend to reintroduce that instrument under the Biden administration.

There were reports leading up to the election that Democratic Party-associated elements were secretly suggesting to the Afghan authorities that they would not have to worry about a peace process being executed once Joe Biden came to power. And they made the argument using some of the same terms and framework that we saw in that article in Foreign Affairs, that the US had a responsibility to remain in Afghanistan. And so they will fully prepare to undermine whatever progress was made for extracting US forces from that territory.

So we're not surprised to see the kind of elements that Biden has brought to his administration. These people were part of the Obama Administration, and they are committed to the US national security strategy, which is attempting to maintain US global hegemony using the instrument that they believe they are dependent on now, which is in fact global violence. 

AG: Yesterday, I signed a petition to Twitter to restore @real Donald Trump , the Twitter account of the 45th president of the United States. I didn't share the petition on my social media pages because I didn't want to have to fend off a lot of cancel culture, but I had enough faith in Pacifica to think I wouldn't get kicked off the air for sharing it in the broadcast version of this conversation. What do you think of Twitter’s suspension of Trump and 70,000  more accounts that they said were linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory? 

AB: I think it was quite troubling. I understand the disgust, the revulsion people have to Donald Trump. We know who Donald Trump is. He's a sociopath, he's a white supremacist. He’s despicable, but Donald Trump is, in fact, America. Donald Trump represents the kind of attitude and the kinds of values that made the US settler state what it is today.

So, this notion on the part of the liberals that he is some kind of aberration is completely ridiculous. In fact, it's ahistorical, but because of the disgust and because of the very serious legitimation crisis the US is facing, and the concern that neoliberal politicians have with the possibility of a return of Donald Trump, they have used the incident on January 6th as their opportunity to not only target Donald Trump as a person, but to target his “movement,” to undermine an above ground, legal political tendency, a tendency that generated 75 million votes.

If they can move against Donald Trump and make a connection between his speech and what occurred on January 6 in order to justify a permanent ban on someone who was the President of the United States with 88 million followers, then arbitrarily take down these other accounts that they say are “conspiratorial,” and if people then cheer because they hate Donald Trump, we are seeing a monumental mistake being made by liberals who think that this state is their friend, and that this state will get rid of Donald Trump, but somehow be able to maintain a commitment to civil liberties.

No, they are in fact conditioning the public to accept the constraints of civil liberties, or to have faith in private capitalist entities to determine what is acceptable speech and information that can be disseminated.

I believe they are, in essence, setting up the kind of dystopia that we see in science fiction movies, where you have corporate interests that have a complete and total control over every aspect of our lives. And of course, complete and total control over the ideals that are disseminated in those kinds of totalitarian society.

So, this is a quite troubling and even more troubling because so many people don't recognize that it’s dangerous. But it's quite slick because, like you said, you don't want to share your petition because you know people would go crazy if you said in public that you believe that Donald Trump's rights have been violated. So, this is a quite dangerous moment because what we see, in my opinion, is the hegemony of irrationality.

AG: Neoliberal militarists are comparing the Capital Riot to 9/11 and using it to justify the further militarization of Washington DC and Biden's domestic terrorism bill . At the same time, he has appointed infamous militarist Susan Rice to a new position, Director of Domestic Policy. Who do you think will become domestic targets during the Biden-Harris years? 

AB: Anyone who is involved in oppositional politics, including those elements that are part of the Black Lives Matter movement, and anyone else who questions US colonial policies. Anyone who will advance sharp analysis of the capitalist state, who will question some of its dominant ideals, who might even suggest that police forces should be withdrawn from certain neighborhoods. And anyone who would advocate better relations with the so-called adversaries of the US, like the Chinese and the Russians.

There’s no telling what is going to be seen as acceptable speech and political practice because we are entering a new totalitarian era. So I think anybody who is in opposition to the hegemony of the neoliberal project is at some point over the next few years going to experience the heavy hand of the state.

Let me just say this about the state that we've been talking about. People say that these Big Tech entities—Twitter, Facebook, Google, YouTube, etcetera—are private corporations, and that therefore they have no obligation to protect free speech rights: We need to make a correction. These entities are of course private, but the essence of neoliberalism is the spinning off of elements of the state that are public to private entities. So what we have with these Big Tech companies is, in fact, the spinning off of the function of speech monitoring and massive surveillance to these private companies.

These companies are in fact, from my point of view, part of the ideological state apparatus. They are part of the state, just like the private corporate media is part of the state. So we have to expand our understanding of what we refer to as the state. 

AG: A lot of people are frightened, particularly Black, Brown, and Jewish people, and most likely Asians now given all the bipartisan China-bashing underway. People, especially in these communities, have good reason to be frightened. And a lot of people are using the word fascist as they have for the past four years. But you've warned that neoliberal fascism will also get worse. Could you tell us what you mean by neoliberal fascism? 

AB: Well, first let me say that it's quite understandable, and we should be quite concerned about some of the more hardcore elements that we associate with the traditional right, who are quite capable and seem to be committed to using various methods to advance their political project. We saw some of those elements in the Capitol on January 6. So it's understandable that we be concerned with that, but I've been warning people also that we should be more concerned with the neoliberal elements that control the state and did even during the time that Donald Trump was occupying the executive branch. We have to remind ourselves, or at least come to the understanding, that neoliberalism is a right-wing ideology. It is a right-wing set of policies, including privatization, deregulation, globalization, so-called free trade, austerity, and reductions in government spending, all to empower the private sector and diminish the public sector. Neoliberalism has to be connected to its essence, which is neoliberal capitalism.

The turn to neoliberalism was born out of an act of violence. A neoliberal capitalist project was imposed on the people of Chile after the assault and the overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973. So this is a right-wing, violent phenomenon. Okay? Now it's been able to dress itself up in the garb of state respectability, but it is a rightist tendency. And so that right-wing, neoliberal, totalitarian element is the element that is now constricting the range of acceptable political activity. They are the ones that re-introduced McCarthyism, McCarthyism 2.0. They are the ones that are now moving to smash this political opposition in the form of the Trump movement. They are the  ones that have allowed the FBI to create first, the Black identity extremist category to target us and to modify that with another term but the same objective—to target and undermine Black radical political opposition. So I've been making the argument that while we have been watching the theatrics of Donald Trump, the neoliberal state has been systematically conditioning the people to accept a new kind of totalitarianism. We've always had totalitarianism, but this is a new kind that will, they believe, ensure the continuation of their dominance. 

And I'm suggesting to people that, even though we hate Donald Trump and the traditional right, we are in a position now where we have to defend their traditional bourgeois rights as well as our own, and not allow the acceptable space of political, ideological opposition to be reduced.

We know that the state will reconcile with the right. Their real opposition and the basis for a potential cross class united front is opposition to socialists and communists, those of us on the left. And we on the left we are the real targets of this settler political state. So we've been trying to warn people to be vigilant and not allow themselves to be manipulated by these very powerful forces. And it's very difficult because they control all of the major means of communications and thought dissemination. But we've got to, to the extent that we can, present an alternative perspective so that we can build the kind of opposition we have to build if we're going to survive this critical period. 

AG: So it sounds like you think there's more we can do than duck and cover. 

AB: We have to. Those of us who have been part of the Black Liberation Movement, we have survived because we have resisted, and we also have survived because we know that we have been through the worst. You see, this thing referred to as fascism is nothing new for us, a colonized people, people who have been enslaved. It has typically been called fascism only when white people do certain things to other white people.

When the Nazis were studying, how they were going to construct laws in Germany, they were studying the apartheid system in the US. The Germans practiced building concentration camps in their murderous assault on the territory today referred to as Namibia. So it's when these policies of brutality, of systematic violence, of rape, when they are moved from the periphery, from the colonial periphery to the Global North, that's when they become Hitlerist, the ultimate expression of violence. 

King Leopold II in the Congo? That’s written off. It's not something that’s important, even though 10 million African people lost their lives. And we don't quantify the level of irrational violence, but we do say that we have an experience with this kind of irrational violence. And so we know we have to resist. And so we know that Donald Trump is not the worst US president. We know that things can in fact get worse. And what we do and have done is to prepare our forces, to resist, and to try to provide leadership to other resistors. Because we know even though it will get more difficult, we know that we are still on the right side of history. And there are enough people of conscience in this country who believe that we can build a new, better world. We believe that once we can organize ourselves, even though it may be difficult for a while, we have a real possibility of not only surviving, but also transforming this backward society.

Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC). He is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and contributing columnist for Counterpunch. He was recently awarded the US Peace Memorial 2019 Peace Prize and the Serena Shim award for uncompromised integrity in journalism.

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize  for promoting peace through her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes Region. Please help support her work on Patreo n . She can be reached on Twitter @AnnGarrison  and at ann(at)anngarrison(dot)com.

We Have To Stop Valorizing Black Cops

By Mary Retta

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

The purpose of policing—to jail and kill Black folks—remains the same regardless of the officers’ race. 

Policing in America is facing a PR crisis. Following the May 25th murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, the term “defund the police” has become a rallying cry for thousands across the country. Six months later, however, America has not defunded its police force––and in fact, has in some cases taken steps to give police departments even more money. Instead, police forces across America have taken an insidious approach: painting their departments in blackface.

After the January 6th Trump riot at the Capitol building , Yoganda Pittman, a Black woman, was named the new Chief of Capitol Police. Her appointment followed the resignation of former Chief Steven Sund and the arrest and firing of several white police officers who were found to be in attendance at the MAGA riot. Pittman’s appointment appeased many liberals who falsely believe that allowing Black folks to infiltrate or run law enforcement agencies will lead to higher levels of safety for Black Americans. The termination of several officers  who took part in the riot has convinced many that we are one step closer to “reforming” the police by weeding out the racist, bad apples within the department. 

This is a nice narrative, but a false one; in order to understand why, we must look at the history of policing in this country. Modern policing in America was originally created as a replacement for America’s slave patrol system wherein squadrons made up of white volunteers were empowered to use vigilante tactics to enforce laws related to slavery. These “enforcers” were in charge of locating and returning enslaved people who had escaped, crushing uprisings led by enslaved people, and punishing enslaved workers who were found or believed to have violated plantation rules. After slavery was legally abolished in 1865, America created its modern police force to do the exact thing under a different name: maintain the white supremacist hierarchy that is necessary under racial capitalism. The purpose of policing––to jail and kill Black folks––remains the same regardless of the officers’ race. 

Liberal media has also contributed to the recent valorization of Black cops. In the days after the January 6th riot, many news outlets aggressively pushed a story about Eugene Goodman, a Black capitol police officer who led several rioters away from the Congress people’s hiding places while being chased by a white supremacist mob. Several news outlets published testimonials of Black police officers disclosing instances of racism within the department. A January 14th article in ProPublica  notes that over 250 Black cops have sued the department for racism since 2001: some Black cops have alleged that white officers used racial slurs or hung nooses in Black officer’s lockers, and one Black cop even claimed he heard a white officer say, “Obama monkey, go back to Africa.” 

These white officers’ racism is unsurprising, and I am not denying any of these claims. But focusing on these singular, isolated moments of racism wherein white cops are painted as cruel and Black cops are the sympathetic victims grossly oversimplifies the narrative of structural racism that modern American policing was built upon. After hearing these slurs that they were allegedly so disgusted by, these Black cops still intentionally chose to put on their badge, don their guns, and work alongside these white police officers who insulted and demeaned them, laboring under a violent system with the sole purpose of harming and terrorizing Black and low-income communities. Similarly, while Goodman’s actions most likely saved many lives during the riot, we cannot allow one moment of decency to erase centuries of racist violence. 

The great Zora Neale Hurston once said: “All my skinfolk ain’t kinfolk.” Her words ring ever true today, and these Black police officers are an excellent example of why. It’s tempting to believe that putting Black folks on the force will solve racial violence, but this is a liberal myth we must break free of. Allowing Black people into inherently racist systems does not make those systems better, safer, or more equitable: a quick look at many Black folks in power today, such as Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Lori Lightfoot, and Keisha Lance Bottoms immediately prove this to be the case. Everyone supporting racial capitalism must be scrutinized and held accountable, regardless of their identity. We cannot on the one hand say that ‘all cops are bastards’ and then suddenly feel sympathy when those cops are not white. If we want to defund and abolish the police, we must resist the narrative that Black cops have anything to offer us.