The Hidden Violence of Immigration Bureaucracy

By Daniel Melo

There are obvious forms of violence in the US migration system--the longstanding brutality of Border Patrol; migrant deaths in the desert; the conditions in detention centers. These are all recognizable facets of enforcing borders and immigration restrictions. But there is a subtler, less understood violence that is pervasive in its bureaucracy, one that impacts the many thousands of people who are funneled through it.

The late anthropologist/anarchist scholar David Graeber took a compelling look into the nature of bureaucracy in his book The Utopia of Rules. This went beyond our usual disdain towards the absurdity of bureaucracy to peer inside its heart. There, he found violence. In a series of essays, Graeber lays out how deeply bureaucratized modern life has become, from one’s ability to get a bank transaction performed overseas to obtaining the ability to handle an ill loved one’s affairs, to immigration, to opening a barbershop. For him, this “bureaucratization” of daily life is “the imposition of impersonal rules and regulations . . .” which “can only operate if they are backed up by the threat of force.” Throughout, Graeber hones key point—no matter how innocuous or well-intentioned both regulations and regulators are, they possess significance and weight precisely because they are backed by the real physical force of the state.

Graeber goes on to argue that bureaucracy and its attendant violence have “become so omnipresent that we no longer realize we’re being threatened . . . .” This violence is so thoroughly present that it’s boring; it hardly ever enters our consciousness. He also points out that the creation and sustenance of systemic violence require very little work. In fact, incredible violence can be done to people with almost no affirmative action at all, such as the horrors of solitary confinement.

The violence Graeber identifies is present in our immigration system--preventing human movement, confining people to cages, or throwing them off “our” land. These all require force or the threat of it. The mere existence US immigration law perpetuates violence. Consider the simple example of the harm done to separated families because of visa quotas where the wait can range from years, up to decades. But statutory schemes aside, there is enough violence to go around in the pure administration of the law, independent of its unjust nature. To stretch Graeber’s analysis further--immigration bureaucracy possesses violence beyond the direct application of force on migrant bodies to more subtle, hidden forms of violence.

By way of example, consider the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the least outwardly hostile of the immigration agencies that exist under the Department of Homeland Security. USCIS is the agency charged with “adjudicating requests for immigration benefits.” In practice, this means that it reviews the common kinds of applications and processes for migrants transitioning from one form of immigration status to another, e.g., spousal green card applications, DACA applications, and citizenship, to name a few. Despite this rather innocuous, paper-pushing semblance, USCIS has real power over a migrant’s future. It is the bureaucratic equivalent of Border Patrol in its own right, a gatekeeper to forms of lawful status for many migrants both within and without the US. And in its own way, is just as violent as the officers with guns at the border.

The 18-24 months it takes to process a refugee resettlement case leaves already displaced people in life-threatening precarity. Bureaucratic mix-ups and slowness result in prolonged family separations and government detainment of children at the border. Even delays in the ability to get a work permit present a migrant with the choice of breaking the law and working without authorization or being unable to sustain herself. The same is true of denials. USCIS, under the auspices of the Attorney General, has broad discretion to deny applications, even those that otherwise meet the letter of the law. In many instances where migrants, especially the undocumented, are unable to adjust their status, a denial opens them up to the violence of removal from the country. This is of course separate and apart from how delays and denials perpetuate the precarious nature and violence of living somewhere without status. It recently reached an absurd height when USCIS began rejecting applications (including those for asylum) if every box on the application was not filled in with “N/A,” even when a question was clearly inapplicable or irrelevant to the benefit sought (e.g., a 2-year-old won’t have any children).

To argue that these are not forms of violence is precisely how the system gets away with it—it paints over the real harm inflicted by the system as purely administrative and lacking in either the significance or intensity to amount to real violence. To the contrary, much like solitary confinement or the neglect of a child, these are expressions of violence, just in their least obvious form. They impart real harm to real people and do so on a largely arbitrary basis. To Graeber’s point about the bureaucratization of life, this violence not only escapes our view but the view of almost everyone who interacts with the immigration system. It is both mundane and pervasive thus has lost significance, only jarring us every now and again when we see children in cages or a father and daughter face down in the Rio Grande having drowned in an attempt to cross.

Perhaps what is most troubling about this violence is that it is completely displaced from any one person or even one entity. There is no one to hold directly responsible for it, and in this way, all escape responsibility. Its casualness is both its alibi and its greatest weapon—-to be able to ignore the harm it wreaks on others, its lawful ability to do nothing. As Slavoj Zizek points out in his book on violence—the holocausts that stem from capitalism all seem “just to have happened as the result of an ‘objective’ process, which nobody planned and executed and for which there was no ‘Capitalist Manifesto.’” It is precisely because these systems appear as both “objective” institutions that produce similarly “objective” results that gives them moral and political ground to justify themselves, often as anything but violent.

Despite its perniciousness, there might be hope yet for bureaucracy. Or better said, for the creation of institutions that are accountable for how they affect people’s lives. Even Graeber, an anarchist, readily acknowledges that certain kinds of bureaucracies have done a great deal of good in the world—“European social welfare state, with its free education and universal health care, can just be considered . . . one of the greatest achievements of human civilization.” In addition to his scathing analysis, Graeber also offers up a profound critique of what is “realistic”. Drawing on Marx, Graeber notes that “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” If bureaucracy, particularly the one that lays claim over migrant bodies, is a human construct, it’s time to do it differently.

While Heartening, the Chauvin Verdict Is Still an Outlier

By Matthew John

A pleasant surprise arrived on the annual stoner holiday known simply as 4/20. After a tumultuous year of monumental protests during the deadliest pandemic in recent history, a verdict on the Derek Chauvin case was finally reached. As CNN reported, “Former Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin has been convicted on all charges in the death of George Floyd,” and “faces up to 40 years in prison for second-degree murder, up to 25 years for third-degree murder and up to 10 years for second-degree manslaughter.” 

Understandably, celebrations ensued.

But before the dust had settled, we received heart-wrenching news that another Black American had been killed by police. Sixteen-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant was gunned down by an officer in Columbus, Ohio 30 minutes before the Chauvin verdict was delivered. The celebrations seemed to fizzle out shortly after they began. This tragic incident is not only a microcosm of the larger systemic issue of police violence, but a lesson in the naïveté of expecting “justice” from this system in the first place. 

The ubiquitous phenomenon of American police killing Black people can be historically traced back to the very inception of policing as slave patrols in the antebellum South. Continuing through the Black Codes, Jim Crow, and the War on Drugs, American policing has always maintained a close bond with white supremacy. A ProPublica analysiseven found that young Black males in recent years were 21 times more likely to be shot and killed by the police than their white counterparts.

In fact, 64 Americans were killed by police during the trial of Derek Chauvin alone. While attention is hyper-focused on high profile cases like that of George Floyd, is it easy to forget that American police officers kill at least 1,000 people each year — a body count higher than all annual mass shooters combined. This nationwide massacre is clearly out of control and primarily encompasses an ongoing genocide against Black and Brown people that is consistent with American history more broadly. As many are reluctantly realizing, there is a good chance that this institution cannot be reformed.

While Democratic Party politicians gave disingenuous speeches exploiting the memory of George Floyd, I reflected on the fact that Floyd was killed in a blue state and in a city with a Democratic mayor. I thought about how Democratic president Joe Biden proposed increasing police funding by $300 million and sent the military to Minneapolis to further brutalize and terrorize those who dared to protest this continuous state violence against people of color. This is a systemic issue — not a partisan one. Both parties are complicit. Yet Democrats positioned themselves as the “good guys” and took credit despite upholding literally the same racist policies as Republicans.

Possibly the worst offender was House speaker Nancy Pelosi, who said that George Floyd “sacrificed” himself for the cause of justice. This was an absurd and disgusting remark — Floyd didn’t choose to be murdered. In reality, by convicting him of murder, Derek Chauvin was sacrificed to prop up an unfounded belief in justice within this inherently racist system. And this belief is indeed an extension of the American exceptionalism that is crucial to the ideological survival of this white supremacist, settler-colonial nation on the brink of collapse.

When anyone - especially an agent of “the law” - is filmed conducting a sadistic murder in broad daylight, they should be convicted every single time. The insincere gloating by the political establishment in the wake of the Chauvin verdict reveals precisely how rare anything approaching “justice” is found in the United States. We can show this empirically; between 2005 and early 2019, only 35 killer cops were convicted of a crime (a rate of far less than one percent). Based on these statistics and what we know about the profoundly corrupt culture of American policing, it is clear that the vast majority of violent crimes committed by cops go unpunished.

None of this means we shouldn’t celebrate the Chauvin verdict. We absolutely should. Seeing the Floyd family’s reaction to the news brought tears to my eyes. Although nothing can bring George Floyd back, this outcome is far better than the flagrant dismissal of justice that usually occurs in similar situations. In addition to the prospect of a fraction of justice being served, another heartening aspect of this development is the realization that activism works, that mass movements work, and — as much as the establishment doesn’t want to admit it — that property destruction works. Especially under capitalism, where human need is commodified and private property is valued more than life itself, threatening almighty property is one of the only tactics that catches the attention of the ruling class.

As Frederick Douglass famously said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” Without the massive protest movement (likely the largest in U.S. history) in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, that vicious thug Derek Chauvin would likely still be roaming free in the streets of Minneapolis. While we can recognize the significance of this verdict, we must also recognize that we have a long way to go to organize a multi-racial, working-class movement capable of enacting systemic change. If this is what it took to convict an obvious murderer, imagine what it will take to build the kind of society we want.

South Station (Albany, NY) Occupation Ends in Community Brutalization

By Canyon Ryan

After the murder of Duante Wright in Minneapolis, the same city where the Derek Chauvin trial  was taking place, several protests developed in Albany in the ensuing days. The first march was small, held late Sunday night and sparsely attended. The following Monday night, a crowd of approximately thirty marched down Lark Street and surrounding areas before occupying the five-intersection corner of Madison Avenue and Lark Street. Tuesday, to my knowledge, was quiet. 

But the calm all but subsided in the daylight of Wednesday, April 14, when the Albany Police Department (APD) responded to a gathering of protesters at their South Station with typical unwarranted force. Lieutenant Devin J. Anderson “swatted” a megaphone held by a black woman to the extent that he gouged her teeth into her upper lip; and the police subsequently pepper sprayed everyone in the same proximity, including a 14 year old black girl, before huddling back into the station. 

The protest momentarily fractured before reconvening at the same location with dozens of new people standing in solidarity. With the police in hiding, a safe space developed for organizers and activists alike to commensurate and discuss their dissatisfaction with the rate of progress the U.S. has been making in “police reform” since the George Floyd uprisings of 2020. It was decided days later that organizers associated with the Black Lives Matter movement would occupy the South Station precinct until several demands were met.

First, they called for the termination of Lt. Anderson due to the force he displayed against the freedom fighters that Wednesday. It was also later discovered that Anderson has had multiple legal cases brought against him by the Albany community, including one case in which he and other officers conducted several anal cavity searches before allegedly planting crack on a man. 

The second demand was for Albany Mayor Kathy Sheehan and Chief of Police Eric Hawkins to come to the South Station with press live-streaming and speak directly with the occupiers about their grievances. The significance of the “live” element of this demanded meeting was related to Sheehan and Hawkins releasing edited video to the press of protesters yelling at the police and kicking in the window to the Station’s front door. This edited footage did not include any police provocation, and was used to defend Sheehan’s inappropriate accusation that the April 14 BLM demonstrators were similar to the rioters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 (she later retracted this comparison in a non-apology apology), an assertion Hawkins agreed with. Their third demand was for a database where APD records could be easily accessed.

Six days later, no demands had been met. The City and Chief defended Anderson’s right to the force while painting occupiers as violent. In reality, the occupation was a multi-racial real utopia, where people from all walks of life congregated, much to the dismay of Albany City and their police. Homeless, disabled, Black, white, Native, Latinx and others built controlled fires, developed a tent complex and ate food brought to them by the community. Nightly gatherings took place, occupiers and sympathizers drew on the police station with chalk, heaters were set up-- it was a sincere display of multi-racial solidarity. Collections began for distribution to the homeless and houseless community in Albany, for distribution that Wednesday. But on April 22, around 3pm and before any distribution had begun, the riot geared police moved in. 

Against the people, swarms of City agents attacked a small group of occupiers, dragging them across the cold pavement, beating Black men, women and non-binary persons to the ground before cuffing them and hauling them into the station. 8 people were arrested, the encampment was destroyed with Albany Department of General Services assistance, sidewalks once covered with slogans of popular hopes and disdain for police brutality wiped away, and all gathered goods brought to organizers by the community and distributed to the community were burned by the City goon squad. The police would remain in riot gear, protecting an empty street and sanitized building until after midnight. 

The safe space constructed by the people, for the people, was erased in less than six hours by a police department unwilling to compromise with the people. Beholden to their foundation, in the name of rounding up Black bodies, white supremacy and capitalism, the police brutalized Black people in the street only to stand that same space in the following hours with riot shields as the community gathered around them. In the 30 degree weather, police were treated with shift changes every 30-45 minutes while protesters stood in the cold, warmed only by the solidarity of their community. 

In the end, what remained of our project that day was all but demolished by thugs in uniform protecting a barricaded empty street. A crowd of 80 stood on the opposite side of guardrails established by the police, while shift-changing riot squads of 9-15 stood on the other like Palace guards. The thin blue line of silence permeated the air that night, as the police refused to even as much as acknowledge the affliction and suffering brought to the community by their presence.

Many of those arrested today were back on the frontlines once released. For those detained through the night, we know from their commitment to the struggle that had they been released, they would have physically been there with us too. But we also know that those detained were indeed with our collection that, in deep spiritual solidarity against the forms of oppression seated and financed in our City. We will be back at South Station, to reclaim the streets which are rightfully ours. No amount of second-degree rioting, disorderly conduct and obstruction of governmental administration charges can stop the movement of the people. Scare and smear tactics hold no power nor judgement over our commitment to justice. 

Canyon Ryan is a member of the Socialist Party USA National Committee, the Capital District Socialist Party and Capital District United Left Front.

In Defense of the Revolution: Cuba’s Historic Victory Over Imperialism at Playa Girón

By Steve Lalla

“For progressives and anti-imperialists all over the world, the mention of the Bay of Pigs — known in the Spanish-speaking world as Playa Girón — evokes joy and celebration,” wrote Carmelo Ruiz. “The United States, an empire accustomed to imposing itself even in the farthest corners of the world, could not prevail and enforce its will on an island country 90 miles away from its shores. The empire could be defeated after all.”¹

In mid-April, 1961, the island nation of Cuba repelled a US military invasion at Playa Girón and captured over 1,200 invaders. Cuba’s victory, in self-defense, was a direct result of the people’s popular support for the Revolution, which was not anticipated by the invading army. In fact, the US planners hoped or imagined that the attack would trigger the people to rise up against the Cuban Revolution. Instead, the opposite happened.

The people’s militia

Following the 1959 Revolution, Cuba had armed and trained its people to form a civic-military alliance to defend their land. Cuba faced US attacks from day one of the Revolution — in addition to the all-out military assault at the Bay of Pigs, there were hundreds of documented terrorist attacks, bombings, and assassination attempts from 1959 onwards.

On April 15, 1961, three Cuban airports were bombed by planes flying false Cuban decals that took off from CIA landing strips in Somoza’s Nicaragua, killing eight Cubans. Under the United Nations Geneva Convention, flying a false national flag constitutes the war crime of perfidy.³ The next day Fidel Castro told the people of Cuba to prepare for a full scale invasion, and declared the socialist character of the Cuban Revolution.

On April 17, 1961, about 1,500 troops armed, equipped and trained by the CIA, approved by first Eisenhower and then JFK, invaded the island of Cuba. The ground troops were supported by tanks, artillery, and army jeeps that disembarked from fourteen US army transport planes and five cargo ships, accompanied by a squadron of B-26 bombers.

The invading force was immediately spotted by Cuban fishermen, who alerted the local militia. The people’s militia of Cuba, the National Revolutionary Militia, sprung into action. 200,000 Cuban civilians, armed and trained by the Revolution, rose to defend their homeland, and Fidel came to the front lines to direct the operations of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces.

Within three days the fighting was over, the invading army had been subdued, and over 1,200 invaders had been captured. The invading forces consisted of CIA agents and officers, CIA-trained mercenaries, soldiers and generals from the defeated army of the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, and the sons of rich Cubans who had left the island when their plantations were expropriated by the Revolution.

The lies of imperialism

US State Department records reveal that they planned the attack “in such a manner to avoid any appearance of US intervention,” a tactic that should be recalled when we learn about contemporary military operations — often through the prism of the US media — whether in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, or Venezuela.⁴ US Ambassador to the United Nations Adlai Stevenson actually denied US involvement in the attack when it was first reported. It was planned to appear as a case of bitter in-fighting between Cubans. Like the Romans, the US imperialists always try to create a justification for their murderous wars, so that they never appear to be the aggressor — whether it’s framed as a humanitarian intervention, a defense of democracy or, perhaps the most farcical, as a pre-emptive strike.

Instead of killing all the invaders, or keeping them for years in illegal prisons and torturing them, as the US does at Guantánamo Naval Base, Cuba traded the survivors back to the US for $50 million worth of food, tractors, and medical supplies.

“There can be no discipline without conscience,” Fidel Castro commented. “We sentenced them to pay compensation of $100,000 per prisoner, or alternatively a prison sentence. What we wanted was payment of compensation, not because of any need for money but rather as a recognition by the United States government of the Revolution’s victory — it was almost a kind of moral punishment.” The CIA tried to assassinate Castro during the negotiations.⁵

“Cuban workers and peasants decided more than 60 years ago they would no longer be servants for US imperialism or capitalism,” wrote Zach Farber for Liberation News. “They have been collectively punished for it ever since.”⁶

“The US attempt to invade Cuba at Playa Girón took place at a time when the US imperialists had already caused many tragedies through coups, military interventions and other interference in Latin America and the Caribbean,” wrote Canada’s Marxist-Leninist Communist Party. “Thus, the decisive victory of Cuba over the enemy forces at the Bay of Pigs, regarded as the first defeat of US imperialism in Latin America, had significance not only for Cuba but for all the peoples of the Americas.”⁷

The resistance

“Current and future generations of Cubans will continue on, no matter how great the difficulties may be,” said Fidel Castro during an interview with Ignacio Ramonet. “With ever greater energy, we will face up to our own shortcomings and errors. We will continue to fight. We will continue to resist. We will continue to defeat every imperialist aggression, every lie in their propaganda, every cunning political and diplomatic maneuver.

“We will continue to resist the consequences of the blockade, which will someday be defeated by the dignity of the Cuban people, the solidarity of other nations, and the almost universal opposition of the governments of the world, and also by the growing rejection on the part of the American people of that absurd policy which flagrantly violates their own constitutional rights.

“Just as the imperialists and their pawns suffered the consequences of a Playa Girón multiplied many times over in Angola, the nation that comes to this land to wage war will find itself facing thousands of Quifangondos, Cabindas, Morros de Medundas, Cangambas, Sumbes, Ruacanas, Tchipas, Calueques and Cuito Cuanavales, and defeats such as those dealt to colonialism and apartheid in heroic nations such as Angola, Namibia and South Africa — defeats they’d never imagined would be linked to the history of this small Caribbean nation.”⁸

NOTES

1.      Carmelo Ruiz, “Bay of Pigs, the CIA’s Biggest Fiasco, 55 Years Later,” Telesur English, 16 April 2015.

2.     Chomsky, Noam, “Cuba in the Cross-Hairs: A Near Half-Century of Terror,” from Hegemony or Survival, Holt, 2003.

3.     United Nations “Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 8 June 1977.”

4.     US Department of State, Office of the Historian, “A Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime,” March 16, 1960.

5.     Fidel Castro and Ignacio Ramonet, My Life, Scribner, 2009.

6.     Zach Farber, “60th anniversary of Cuban defeat of U.S. invasion at Playa Girón,” Liberation News, April 14, 2021.

7.     “60th Anniversary of U.S. Defeat at the Bay of Pigs, April 19, 1961: Cuba’s Historic Victory at Playa Girón,” Communist Party of Canada(Marxist-Leninist), April 8, 2021.

8.     Fidel Castro and Ignacio Ramonet, My Life, Scribner, 2009.

The Christian Right and The Spirit of Fascism

By Werner Lange

In his classic text on religion and society, The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism, German sociologist Max Weber forcefully argues that the Protestant Reformation and laissez-faire capitalism share an ideological commonality as well as a geographical and historical one. The work ethic, inherent to all variations of Protestantism, formed a rational moral code which envisions idleness as sinful and industriousness as a categorical duty, even divine calling, for labor and capital alike; time, for both, is money, one in the form of wages and the other in the form of profit. Unlike Marx, Weber myopically failed to see any contradiction, or even conflict, between these two, at least not in the early stages of capitalism. Nevertheless, at the very end of his analysis, Weber gives voice to the possibility of a “mechanized petrification” of both Christianity and capitalism in the future, particularly within the United States.[1] That possibility has become reality.

There is nothing left of the Protestant ethic in the petrified Christian Right of today. In fact, there is nothing ethical about this ossified body of right-wing zealots hell-bent on replacing what’s left of American democracy with a totalitarian theocracy within a Christian iron cage. In both ends and means, the Christian Right manifests a uncanny symmetry with the spirit of fascism marked by an obsession deeply embedded in both to thoroughly cleanse society of perceived filth by any means necessary, and return a contaminated culture to its mythological purity and glory.

“The Return” was even the official name of a massive Christian Right rally on the Mall in Washington D.C. strategically held 40 days before the presidential election of 2020, the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower landing.  This marathon 11-hour event was attended by over 200,000 devotees of the Christian Right, viewed by millions more and addressed by nearly 100 leading Christian fascists and Zionists, including Vice President Mike Pence. Though officially identified as “A National Day of Prayer and Reconciliation”, this marathon 11-hour “sacred assembly” was in reality a religious extension of the 2017 fascist “Unite the Right” rally held in Charlottesville, Virginia.  The overriding message at both events was a strident call for America to cleanse itself of decadence and change its destined trajectory from tragedy to triumph. Setting the ominous tone at this Christian Right rally in late September was the featured speaker “prophet” Jonathan Cahn:

“We are standing at a most critical hour. The hour is late. A great nation is hanging in the balance, and a civilization begun thousands of years ago is hanging in the balance. We’ve witnessed the falling away of that which was founded on the Word of God; we have watched the advancing of darkness, the progression of an agenda that increasingly wars against the ways of God and increasingly threatens the Gospel itself…We’ve come here in repentance for our sins, the sins of the Church, for our nation and then for our world; and for the end-time revival of which the Scriptures speak. We’ve come here because we’ve been called to come here. And we gather because we’ve been appointed to do so. For this is an appointed gathering at the appointed place, at the appointed time by the hand of God.” (The Return USA, the return.org)

The passionate calls for repentance at this Unite the Christian Right assembly were not directed at the many participants and viewers, all of whom likely smugly believed they belong to the saved and sanctified. The demands to repent of social sin (especially emphasized by nearly every speaker, were the “sins” of abortion and socialism) were directed against the infidels, that mass of unsaved liberals infesting society with their secular humanism and ungodly actions. Should voluntary repentance and return to godly ways not be their choice, then the only alternative for the godly and patriotic is to forcibly cleanse society of the ungodly traitors. That is precisely what several terrorists in the January 6 fascist putsch called for:

“Everyone in there [the US Capitol] is a treasonous traitor. Death is the only remedy for what’s in that building” (terrorist Peter Stager,case 1:21-my-57, document 1-1).

“We’re not putting up with this tyrannical rule; if we got to come back and start a revolution and take all of these traitors out, which is what should be done, then we will” (terrorist Damon Beckly, case1:21-mj-60, Affidavit in Support of Criminal Complaint, p.5)

“We’re not going to merge into some globalist, communist system; it will not happen. There will be a lot of bloodshed if it comes down to that, trust me” (terrorist Jon Schaffer, case 1:21-mj-94, Statement of Facts, p. 3)

Among the 75 arrested terrorists identifiable as Christian was Micheal Lopatic of Pennsylvania, a very devout Catholic and former Marine, who also repeatedly called for the execution of key Democratic leaders on a series of social media posts prior to January 6. On the day after the 2020 presidential election, Lopatic posted a “CALL TO ARMS” on his Facebook account which depicted two dead birds identified by him as “Joe and Kamala”. This was followed by more posts depicting dead birds he had killed and named their dead bodies after several prominent elected liberals. On New Year’s Day, he issued another call to arms: ASSEMBLE ON THE CAPITOL JANUARY 6TH, 2021, UNITED WE STAND, GO FORTH AND WE FIGHT” (Motion for Pretrial Detention, case 1:21-cr-35). And fight he did. Among the 7 counts of federal law violations charged against Lopatic were two serious felony offenses. He continually punched an officer of the Metropolitan Police Departments; ripped off the body-worn camera of another; and engaged in other acts of physical violence in and around the US Capitol. So egregious was his behavior that US attorneys concluded “the defendant was involved in some of the most violent assaults on law enforcement officers that occurred on January 6, 2021”, and that he “has demonstrated a tendency toward violence and  willingness to impede and obstruct the right and lawful function of government” (Memorandum in Support of Pretrial Detention”, case 1:21-cr-35)

In stark contrast to these charges, members of his parish, St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Lancaster, presented an entirely different portrait of Lopatic in their 19 letters of support pleading for his pretrial release (Response by Michael Lopatic re Motion for Pretrial Release, case 1:21-cr-35): “He is a man whose heart is ablaze with the love of God”, wrote one parishioner, “A man of character, of deeply held beliefs in the sanctity of life (the supreme issue in our world today), he has not a violent bone in his body”. Another also claimed to “have never known him to be violent our hurtful to anyone”, but does know him “to speak his mind”, especially about defending “life-in-the-womb”. Other parishioners called attention to his service as a church usher, a religious educator for children, and a chaperone for Catholic youth attending annual summer retreats at the highly conservative Franciscan University in Ohio. One physician and fellow parishioner states that Lopatic “loves God very much and wants to do the right thing in God’s eyes”; another flatly states of this terrorist that “He has a  strong faith in God and uses Jesus and the Bible as his compass”. If so, then that compass for this pro-life Christian fascist was surely broken on January 6 and obviously well before. His pretrial release was denied, and he remains incarcerated.

Yet his case is illustrative of the extent to which rabid opponents of abortion rights within the Catholic community have joined their evangelical Protestant counterparts in a fascist crusade. In a revealing January 6 interview broadcast on LifeSiteNews, part of the growing fascist propaganda internet news services, evangelical terrorist Leo Kelly of Iowa, openly admits to violating the law that day, but repeatedly and rhetorically asks “What are you supposed to do?” when the people have been betrayed and the election stolen: “At some point there’s enough illegal behavior and there’s enough crimes against the Constitution being committed by elected officials, so what are you supposed to do? Nobody in the courts will listen or take a look at the evidence”. Kelly was among the gang which invaded the US Senate Chambers and joined in a bizarre prayer which “consecrated it to Jesus” and made “an appeal to heaven”, which for him, was “the ultimate statement of where we are with this movement”. He concluded this 7-minute interview by declaring, in true evangelical form: “I’m redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ; there’s no judgement that stands against me. God will judge us” (man who entered Capitol tells his story, LifeSiteNews, January 6, 2021).

The “blood of Jesus” figured prominently in the mindset of other Christian terrorists arrested for their assaults on January 6. Joshua Blanks of Alabama said he was led by the “Spirit of God” to invade the US Capitol and that he “wanted to get inside the building so I could plead he blood of Jesus over it”. Once inside the Senate Chamber, he praised the name of Jesus on the Senate floor, adding that was “God’s goal ( al.com, 1/24/21; 1/28/21). Another Christian fascist, Michael Sparks of Kentucky, claims to be the first one to enter the US Capitol through a broken window. At his booking, he wore a T-shirt prominently displaying the word “Armor of God” and citing Ephesians 6:11 (Statement of Facts, case 1:21-cr-87). Sparks is a member of the Franklin Crossroads Baptist Church in Cecila, a  Southern Baptist congregation, which states as its mission a commitment “to reaching people through the blood of Christ”.

One of the more popular hymns within evangelical circles is “What Can Wash Away My Sin” with the repeated refrain of “Nothing but the Blood of Jesus”. As such, this hymn and host of biblical passages (e.g. 1 John 1:7) upon which it relies for authority, simply echo a plea for purity, a cleansing. However, when that refrain is weaponized into a prayer of “pleading the blood of Jesus”, there is a qualitative shift in meaning and purpose, one in full harmony with the fascist obsession for power. As one megachurch evangelical pastor (Pleading the Blood, jackhayford.org) expressed it: “Pleading the blood of Jesus is a heaven-given response that grants us a license to stand in dominion over the works of hell.”  For Christian fascists “works of hell” is synonymous with all forms and expressions of liberalism or any other descendant of  The Enlightenment. On January 6, pleading the blood of Jesus in and over the US Capitol was the functional equivalent of pleading for the blood of all there and beyond whom the Christian fascists label traitors.

None other than the most grotesquely dressed miscreant in that fascist mob, the fake shaman Jacob Angeli, gave voice to this function in his evocative evangelical prayer delivered by a bullhorn from the Senate Chamber dais after he had bellowed out some animalistic cries from the gallery. In one of the most bizarre scenes in Congressional history, this heavily tattooed self-described QAnon shaman, fervently led his fellow fascists in the Senate Chamber in a weaponized prayer of thanksgiving while Congressional members themselves were held in protective captivity in floors below.:

“Jesus Christ! We invoke your name! Amen! Thank you, Heavenly Father for bringing us this opportunity…[paused to take off his horns and skull cap as others removed their caps and reverently bowed heads; closed eyes; or raised both arms]

Thank you, Heavenly Father, for this opportunity to stand up for our God-given unalienable rights. Thank you, Heavenly Father, for granting the inspiration needed to allow us in this building; to allow us to exercise our rights; to allow us to send a message to all the tyrants, communists, and globalists that this is not their nation; that we will not allow America, the American way, the United States of America to go down.

Thank you, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent Creator God for filling the chamber with your white light of harmony. Thank you for filling this chamber with patriots that love you and that love Christ. Thank you, divine omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent Creator God for blessing each and everyone of us here and now. Thank you for surrounding us with the divine white light of love, protection, peace and harmony.

Thank you for allowing the United States of America to be reborn. Thank you for allowing us to get rid of the communists, the globalists and the traitors in our government. We love you! In Christ’s holy name we pray! Amen![2]

There is, of course, nothing shamanistic about this prayer. It comes straight out of the evangelical playbook, and there is nothing authentic about the acclaimed shamanism of its deliverer. Angeli is a fraud. In fact, the entire MAGA mob was marked by pervasive fraud. All were faux patriots; many were faux Christians; and at least two were faux Jews affiliated with the Messianic Jewish Alliance of America. No Muslims or members of Eastern faith traditions are known to have participated in the domestic terrorism of January 6, or even stood among the tens of thousands who attended Trump’s Save America Rally on the ellipse.

Christian fascists and fascists without any religious affiliation, exclusively white and mostly male, monopolized this utter disgrace. Fortunately, they do not constitute anywhere near a majority in our increasingly diversified society. Nevertheless, the Christian Right and the Spirit of Fascism, a marriage forged in hell, remains a potent force with a divorce nowhere in sight. Given the largely anemic status of the American Left, the most we can currently hope for is that this diabolical union is childless in the short run, and then rendered totally impotent culturally and politically in the fullness of time.

Notes

[1] Weber, Max The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism, Dover Publications, 2003,p.182

[2] “A Reporter’s Footage from Inside the Capitol Siege”, The New Yorker, Jan. 17, 2021

American Antipodes: Tales of Discord and Unity

By Jason Hirthler

A few weeks ago an image surfaced on social media. It featured three convergent triangles, their central nexus including parts of all three. Each triangle represented a prominent characteristic of what the right call, “Mask Nazis.” The first triangle represented the virtue signaler aspect of this group. Millions of social selfies feature individuals with their masks over their mouths, or lately their arms bandaged after their vaccine shot. The second triangle represented the patronizing element of the group, when they indicate they are “more informed and intelligent” than you. The final triangle represented the martyrdom mentality of the group, in which they claimed to be masking and vaccinating on your behalf, not theirs.

The Backstory

It is admittedly an amorphous and inexact thing to use the word, “right” to describe the community of people that would like the above diagram, versus the community of those who would revile it. But more than ever in modern memory the sides have been starkly divided. It was partially initiated by the Gingrich ‘revolution’ in the late 90s when Republicans adopted an attitude of intransigence and noncompliance toward their Democratic colleagues, an attitude sparked largely by a deep-seated antipathy and animus for Bill Clinton. Clinton had used his ‘triangulation’ model to successfully appropriate Republican policy positions and claim them as his own. This was part of Clinton’s effort to penetrate the deep-pocketed donor class that has previously been the province of the conservative right. It worked and Clinton shifted the Democrats away from a party that at least plausibly represented the working class toward one that served monied constituencies and retained only a patina of pathos for empty-handed workers. This led to the Republican revolt.

The presidency of George Bush further divided a once-collegial Congress and its national segments of popular support. The 2000 election scandal, 9/11, the Iraq War, Afghanistan, the 2004 election, climate change, the collapse of the housing market all provided blistering talking points for liberals and conservatives as they blamed one another for these traumatizing events.

The presidency of Barack Obama further polarized the left from right, when shrieking Tea Party zealots, in an eerie foretaste of resistance liberals, clamored for their guns, sure that the Hawaiian-born Obama was a closet Marxist Muslim scheming to infect America with theocratic socialism. But it was the election of Donald Trump that delivered the hammer blow to any thoughts of reconciliation. The Covid19 pandemic that followed at the end of the Trump era gave the citizenry fuel to continue the partisan bickering once Trump had been ejected from the Oval Office, to the delight of 80 million, the fury of 75 million, and the frustrated resignation of the rest. 

Now, Joe Biden has assumed the mantle of power, and opened his presidency by supposedly dashing off 72 revisions to Trump’s egregious policies. It’s all enough to convince even the most cursory observer that the left and the right are eternal enemies.

Perceptions of Fascism and Mutual Complicity

Searching Google’s text corpora through its Ngram Viewer reveals that the usage of the word ‘facism’ has seen a 100 percent rise this century in American English. This will surprise few, but questions of what fascism is and who embodies it will immediately trigger quarreling between left and right. For the liberal and left sides of the spectrum (they are not the same), Donald Trump is the de facto embodiment of modern fascism. For the right and libertarian side of the spectrum (they are not the same), fascism is better represented by censorious tech monopolies and the global public health apparatus that has led the battle against the coronavirus.

Could both sides have a point? Not if you ask either side. A recent poster on leftist Twitter warned of the dangers of dramatically dichotomizing the left/right ideological divide and argued that neither side had a monopoly on truth. Many readers liked a reply that dismissively claimed that “yeah, no, the right is categorically wrong on [just] about everything.”

But might it be true that neoliberalism, a class-based project to dismantle representative government, as described by David Harvey, is fascist at its core and animites Trump Republicans but alo Biden Democrats?

An article by Joshua Briond published by the Hampton Institute makes the interesting observation that, “The misunderstanding of fascism begins with the deliberate political positioning of [neo]liberalism as in opposition or an alternative to the fascist order.” This false opposition expects to see an older, imagined fascist order (principally Nazism or Italian fascism with its telltale nationalistic trappings) rather than what some describe as a corporate fascist order that exists now in less visibly overt fashion.

As Briond continues, “It has never been more apparent that liberal democrats are the stabilizers and upkeepers of fascist rule--who exist to provide an illusion of “opposition” to the material actualities and consequences of liberal democracy, western capital(ism), and the white power structure at-large--while actively upholding the neoliberal fascist order and inhibiting even the slightest possibilities of progress. Left radicals, or anyone who has divested from bourgeois electoralism, are constantly punched down on and condescended to for daring to demand more than mild concessions (“reforms” that’ll just be poked, prodded, weakened and rendered obsolete the moment the next Republican gets into office) and milquetoast, uninspiring, career-imperialist Democrat candidates.”

“The White liberal differs from the white conservative only in one way: the liberal is more deceitful than the conservative. The liberal is more hypocritical than the conservative. Both want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro’s friend and benefactor. And by winning the friendship, allegiance, and support of the Negro, the white liberal is able to use the Negro as a pawn or tool in this political ‘football game’ that is constantly raging between the white liberals and white conservatives.”

-        Malcolm X

Briond here unmasks the quiet complicity of liberals in the stabilizing of corporate fascism. This is partly owing to the fact that Boomer liberals, a huge contingent of the political active, see the values they sometimes bravely supported in the tumult of the Sixties--anti-racism, anti-war, anti-establishment--have been enshrined or otherwise spun by the establishment, cleverly enough to convince most liberals that their original war has been won. After all, we’ve had a black president, the #MeToo movement has outed countless misogynists in positions of power, gay rights are further along than we’d ever have imagined before Stonewall, and a new generation of Social Justice Warriors are manning the barricades of bigotry by the day.

Yet look at the subtlety with which an imperial capitalist establishment has incorporated these elements. Racism is alive and well. Blacks have a penny in a jar for every dollar in the calf-skinned wallet of a white man. Obama was only elected by internalizing the hegemonic ideals of establishment ideology. Jennifer Matsui notes how the #MeToo movement diverts attention from institutional foundations of sexism and retrains our focus on individual cases, which can be profitably resolved without addressing the larger structural barriers to equality of the sexes. Indeed, gays have made progress, but they are embraced by a corporate world that merely sees another wallet to mine. It makes no difference to WalMart whether the man or woman in the checkout line is LGBTQ+ or a racist cis homophobe. A dollar is a dollar.

What we see here is that the imperial establishment will actively co-opt any value set that does not meaningfully threaten its bottom line. If profits are unaffected, or if new revenue streams can be viably pioneered, a popular or trending movement will be absorbed by the corporate facist establishment for just that purpose.

Obscure and Abjure

This co-optation is mirrored in the identitarian politics that fuel the left-right divide and consume so much activist fuel. In the drafts for a lecture series that cultural theorist Mark Fisher was to give before his suicide in 2017, he unearthed the sinister root of the left-right war: it buried class as the bedrock subjugation on which all other forms of oppression were built.

“In disarticulating class from the identitarian struggles of the day, capitalism no longer appeared to be the enemy. We were, instead, all too prone to impotently turning on one another.”

He anticipated the lynch mob mentality of social media whose current dimensions Fisher himself might find unimaginable: “As individuals squabble over who has the most privilege on Twitter, for instance, turning on each other, the true enemy — capitalism itself — is left completely off the hook.”

This regrettable disarticulation of class leads well-intentioned citizens on left and right to battle over identity gains that, while often majestic and necessary, will doubtless founder on the shores of economic inequality. They do not cut into the profit potential of the monolithic imperial system that underpinned the identitarian subjection in the first place.

Undervalued, Overlooked

Briond returns to drive home this point about liberal complicity even as the state undermines the communities it campaigns on behalf of: “The fact that so much state-sanctioned violence, political repression, mishandling and neglect of the most marginalized--especially incarcerated, immigrant, and houseless populations--in the face of COVID-19, an ongoing housing crisis, unemployment, and economic turmoil, is happening in “liberal” cities and cities led by Democrats nationwide, should very much inform our understanding of the situation at hand.”

It is no small thing to point out that liberals typically have what appears to be a naive faith that the government cares about them, prioritizes their health above profits, that Big Pharma does the same (at least in times of crises), and that their cherished mainstream media would not knowingly deceive them. This despite the volumes of evidence that the government and media have wittingly lied to and misled populations for decades. (See Taking the Risk Out of Democracy and Manufacturing Consent for foundational works on media bias in favor of corporate interests.)

This almost surreal and childlike trust in the good intentions of government is reminiscent of Josef K., in Franz Kafka’s The Trial, who when arrested without apparent cause is relieved to finally have an opportunity to address himself to the chief inspector, fully confident this is a reasonable man with whom he will have a reasonable conversation, quickly resolving the misunderstanding of his arrest. The conversation quickly reveals to K. the confounding absurdity of the apparatus in which he is ensnared.

One might suspect this naive faith is the consequence of, as journalist Cory Moringstar has said, the monetization of left-liberal activism since the untutored riot of the Sixties. After which capital rightly surmised that activism ought not to be suppressed but co-opted. Hence the explosion of NGOs and their role as a kind of para-state reifying the conditions of the corporate state. Liberals have too much skin in the game to meaningfully resist. A rhetoric of empathy eases them into compliance.

The Invisible Horizon

Add to this domestic squall the almost incomprehensibly vast horizon of foreign aggressions perpetrated by a U.S. establishment whether led by Democrats or Republicans. Hence a scenario arises with Donald Trump repeating conjuring nationalistic and racist tropes reminiscent of the great fascist scourges of the 20th century, while at the same time the lockdown regimes cheered on by liberals and perpetrated by western governments in the name of public health have come to mirror characteristics of what one might call ‘public health fascism’ or ‘medical tyranny.’ In a further irony, Trump appeared to express a desire to continue to promote imperial hegemony and capitalist exploitation through the less public apparatus of drone war and special forces, much like Democrats have done.

“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

-        Abraham Lincoln, debate with Stephen Douglas, Sept. 18, 1858

End Games

If both left and right have been in some sense co-opted by the subtle ideology of the neoliberal establishment, is there not now reason to at least temporarily shelve the policy disputes that animate their hatred of one another, in the service of a collective effort to deny the realization of an authoritarian plutocracy as described above? Set aside the horizontal perspective of a left-right war and consider the world from the verticality of a top-down class war, that missing ingredient Fisher perceptively identified.

Yet the human urge to dichotomize and demonize is almost uncontrollable in our modern moment. Each side sees the other as a herd of rule breakers: conservatives break all the pandemic rules established to keep people safe; but in obeying these rules, liberals trash the bill of rights. In spite of, or amplified by, the relentless efforts of advertisers to sound social rallying cries meant to bring people together (while simultaneously opening their wallets), there now exists a continental divide between two halves of the country. It is a yawning crevice not likely to be mended by an American grit Bruce Springsteen Jeep commercial claiming that “the very soil we stand on is common ground,” as though sophomoric platitudes penned by 25-year old copywriters will heal us (but we can dream). Efforts like these only illuminate the abyss.

Violating the Myth

This is this collective void—a void of collective spirit—that Fisher laments. He argues that perhaps the ultimate subjugated group is “group consciousness,” that prevents the collective from seeing the totality of the system at large—capitalism—while at the same time being too divided to propose a full-scale replacement system.

As part of Fisher’s solution, he proposed “implementing a counterlibido to capitalist desire — a postcapitalist desire.” He was principally interested, “in the ways that radical political messages could be smuggled into collective consciousness through popular culture.” Considering that popular culture is where huge swathes of common opinion tend to coalesce around cultural figures and trends, it is an interesting proposition. After all, one simply can’t compete at the level of invective--the assembled armories of the mainstream media are too plentiful, ranged too far and wide, and are too able to actively suppress counter-narratives. And artificial cultural tropes spawned by Madison Avenue only salt the wound.

But what if Michael Jackson had been a communist? What if Elvis had befriended Castro? What if more films smuggled into the cinema the anti-consumerist manifesto of Fight Club? Could a graphic novel whose hero was a BIPOC socialist gain traction? One would expect the blind avarice of corporate capitalism to allow these ideas so long as the product produced significant return on investment. A recent graphic novel called The Ministry of Truth mines the deep vein of discontent with American media-propagated mythologies. It proposes that belief has more to do with reality than fact, a theme that is both comical and somehow true. It makes one think of how much more effective fiction might be than invective in a post-truth world.

Such works are at least potentially profitable avenues of discovery, their potential guided by their profit. (You see how even the language is co-opted.)

Paradoxically it seems to be the hidden factor of class that inhibits social cohesion around a narrative of collective uplift. As author John Steppling (frustratedly) noted on his excellent podcast Aesthetic Resistance, propaganda cuts across class lines. Workers are often hugely skeptical of MSM storylines. Haute bourgeoisie, white, liberal, educated professionals tend to buy the official line uncritically. A large up-from-below shift in consciousness, from individuated consumer desire to a potentially militant desire for collective prosperity, would doubtless frighten the haute bourgeoisie and elite capital into the kind of concessions obtained in the New Deal era. It has often struck me as not categorically necessary to take power--and that often wielding power beyond the official precincts is not a bad place to be. To be pitted against overwhelming odds is also of course the root scenario of great fiction.

Someone whose name I’ve forgotten once perceptively noted that communism out of power is galvanized by a collective vision that has a clear enemy that must be toppled for that vision to be realized. Once they’ve taken power, the original force of will continues for a time and produces great positive change, but as one generation slides into the next, the militancy and urgency of that original class consciousness bleeds out, lacerated by the very surplus it distributed. The material lived experience of the next generations is simply different than the original generation. The revolutionary urgency fades as a kind of bureaucratic and defensive mentality ascends. What is gained must be defended rather than gained.

One sees the same dynamic at work in capitalist societies. Small fledgling entrepreneurial businesses, always a few weeks away from running out of money, produce tremendous innovations in different industries and roar into market share and wealth on the backs of their inventions. But once they are market leaders, their entire attitude changes: they become principally interested in defending and growing market share, not through innovation, but through the mass dissemination of their original invention. They begin to act as border guards, patrolling the limits of their empire, ready to acquire and absorb any entrepreneurial challengers to their dominance. They become the staid, status-quo establishment they once sought to overthrow.

It is the same with politics. The principled antiwar activists and civil rights fighters from the Sixties made inroads into the national consciousness and won concessions from the establishment, but were then absorbed into it, undergoing a transformation that eventually spat out those longhairs and militant marchers as comfortable liberals who merely rehearsed a well-memorized lexicon of labor-friendly rhetoric, while the machinery of exploitation they once abhorred marches on under cover of the co-opted language of progressivism.

And so, staying out of power is perhaps a way to avoid the corruptions of power and retain the power of first principles, a persistent vital threat to authority, which must ultimately acknowledge that its power is, at best, nominal.

In that light, a bottom-up class consciousness aiming at collective prosperity could isolate the fake partisanship of the neoliberal duopoly as a permanent enemy of the people, exerting a permanent pressure and threat against it that would force the kinds of vast concessions necessary for it retain even a semblance of power. It would have to be a permanent threat in a way that taking power undoes. And perhaps that class consciousness is best transfused into the popular mind through scripts rather than screeds, drawn stories instead of funded studies. And best perpetuated by a marginal class far from the precincts of power, not the “rogue” vehicles sold to bourgeois families but rogue narrators wildly at odds with the fictions pumped out of the imperium. Apolitical and peripheral—a strange place to pen an origin story of revolution. But maybe not so strange in a cultural wasteland overrun with mainstream half-truth.

After all, until the war of the top against the bottom is recognized and the diversionary spectacle of right-left combat is set aside, we will continue on a horizontal plane, never climbing in metrics of prosperity or equality. Only by recognizing the ladder of prosperity has been kicked away—supposedly for our benefit—will we begin to invoke the “great weapon” of mass dissent, which is the hinge point of an awakening world.

Jason Hirthler is a writer, social critic, and veteran of the media industry. He has published widely on the progressive left including at Dissident Voice, The Greanville Post, and CounterPunch. His latest essay collection is The Conquest of Reality.

Critical Race Theory: John McWhorter Gets it Wrong…Again

By Christopher Viscuso

Columbia University scholar of Linguistics, John McWhorter, was recently featured on MSNBC commentator, Chris Hayes’ podcast, Why is This Happening? to discuss freedom of speech and to debate its boundaries. The pair begin by conceding that “freedom of speech” is more an ideal than a rigid principle. Whether through etiquette or the evolution of debate, some topics are either beyond the pale of polite conversation or are settled matters. McWhorter uses genocide and women’s suffrage, respectively, as examples in this regard.

But the conversation quickly polarizes around the degree to which speech is currently being limited. McWhorter argues that this is mainly being carried out “by a certain contingent of people,” across the academic, political, and popular spectrum, effectively circumscribing discourse to such an extent that “it’s beginning to choke out what most societies would consider any kind of sensible, or thriving, artistic, moral, or intellectual culture.” Hayes then attempts to shore up the conversation with nuance by organizing the debate into a bifurcated set of categories: delimitations of who or what is welcome to be discussed in written media or college campuses on the one hand; and “should someone face employment sanction for a Facebook post” on the other. Conceding initially, McWhorter then reverts to hysterics, which characterize a great deal of his contribution to this discussion, claiming vaguely that American society is being “told by a certain cadre of these people” that this supposed expansion of “that which we may not say” is being instituted by a rule of fear. “This truly frightening kind of cultural development,” claims McWhorter, enforces a sort of conformity across American society and culture, supposedly coercing the lion’s share of the American public through the fear of being called “racist” on Twitter.

In his more eccentric moments, McWhorter analogizes this situation he sees sweeping the nation to the “Great Terror” following the French Revolution. (To be fair, McWhorter does catch himself several times in this regard. But it happens too often to be incidental.) Without a certain degree of context, you’d think McWhorter was referring to the Red Scare under the McCarthyites or the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s. Instead, in lieu of any hard data suggesting that so-called “Cancel Culture” has manifested into some totalitarian tyranny reminiscent of Nazi book-burnings, McWhorter, like many of his reactionary compatriots, resorts to a (small) series of the most miniscule of anecdotes to make his point. For example, he points to a rather obscure case from the University of Illinois, Chicago, Law School, wherein Professor Jason Kilborn was suspended, McWhorter claims, for an exam question that included a heavily redacted use of a racial slur. While the Black Law Student Association (BLSA) of the University indeed submitted a petition to Dean Darby Dickerson and Chancellor Michael Amiridis regarding the redacted word’s inclusion on the exam, Kilborn was in fact suspended for comments made in jest in a Zoom meeting with a member of the BLSA about the petition. Kilborn stated “I suspect she’s afraid if I saw the horrible things said about me in that letter I would become homicidal.”

McWhorter’s other examples are equally singular, with little to no context provided to substantiate his claim that this is somehow a “truly frightening kind of cultural development,” as part of “this racial reckoning,” seizing the nation.

Now, I do agree that activists’ efforts against entrenched, structural racism could be put to better use elsewhere to alleviate its material outcomes. And I certainly agree that in many cases, such as that demonstrated by McWhorter here, the more rarefied, toxic forms that so-called “Cancel Culture” may take can be ceased upon by reactionary, fearmongering commentators to project anti-racism as a dangerous behemoth destroying the country to retain their own control over the culture. I certainly do not agree that the material conditions that racism produces can be separated from the racist attitudes of individuals that allow its structural forms to persist. Hayes, to his credit, makes this point to McWhorter during the discussion, though McWhorter responds, rather condescendingly, by claiming that African Americans, presumably African American intellectuals, are just now beginning to expect a level of historical literacy of their white interlocuters. Which leads us to the crux of my frustration with McWhorter.

Never minding his argument that the expectation of a basic literacy of racism in this country is somehow tantamount to a national “reeducation program,” McWhorter’s Trumpian detraction of Critical Race Theory (CTR) is perhaps even more disconcerting than his commentary on speech and so-called “Cancel Culture.” And, like Trump, his attacks seem to be based on a misunderstanding of what the term even means. To McWhorter, prior to the protests that erupted around the killing of George Floyd in the Summer of 2020, CRT had been a “fringe school of thought” within academia whose “proponents” seized the “opportunity” of the protests to project their agenda. This is a level of alarmism unbecoming of an Ivy League scholar. And it’s incorrect.

CTR is, as it has always been, an analytical tool used to observe the power dynamics within race relations between different groups. Though its original iteration applied specifically to law, its application has spread across a range of academic disciplines, including, but not limited to, Criminal Justice, History, and Sociology. Its fundamental premises are (1) race is not a natural, biologically meaningful feature of physiologically distinct human subgroups; (2) race is therefore a socially constructed category historically and contemporarily utilized for the oppression and subordination of people of color; (3) racism is thus endemic to American culture and society, and a common experience among people of color; (4) the racial hierarchy upheld by American culture and society is typically unaffected, or reenforced, by attempts to improve the legal status of subordinated and oppressed peoples; (5) following the thesis of intersectionality, no one individual of color may be sufficiently identified by their membership in any one subgroup; and (6) the sufferers of oppression constitute uniquely situated communicators of the effects of their oppression, whether in a court of law or otherwise.

Beyond a commitment to challenging racism and discrimination within the law and other economic and social structures, CRT holds no ideologically partisan allegiances; the application of CRT in scholarship may lead to left- or right-wing conclusions, depending on the orientation of the scholar. However, detractors of CRT typically come from the right end of the spectrum. (McWhorter does not self-identify as a conservative, though he has worked as a Senior Fellow at the conservative think tank, the Manhattan Institute, since 2003.) Despite myriad Orwellian attempts to prohibit or delegitimize it, CRT has provided a theoretical framework for countless scholars across academia for several decades now. And, to the chagrin of McWhorter and others, it will remain a persistent tool against racial oppression for the foreseeable future.

Automation Represents the Second — Not ‘Fourth’ — Industrial Revolution: Just as the First Necessitated Capitalism, the Second Necessitates Socialism

By Ted Reese

Republished from the author’s blog.

Humans have longed to be free from toil. The Greek poet Antipater, a contemporary of the Roman statesman Cicero, welcomed the invention of the water mill, which worked “without labour or effort”, as the foundation of a “Golden Age” and the liberator of slaves.

Now in the epoch of late-stage capitalism, after a long and painful evolutionary road, the possibility of a ‘post-work’ world — with the ongoing development of robotic machinery, artificial intelligence (AI) and other forms of increasingly sophisticated automation — seems like a tangible reality. Decades of relatively small, quantitive innovations (with computing power, for example, tending to double every two years) have led up to a point now promising huge qualitative technological leaps.

At the same time, the global workforce has been increasingly ‘deindustrialised’ — moved from manufacturing to services. The proportion of manufacturing workers in the total workforce in the US fell from 26.4% in 1970 to 8.51% in 2018.[2] Even Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa have been deindustrialising in the past decade, from a much lower starting point than Asia.[3] Whereas industrialisation peaked in western European countries at income levels of around $14,000, India and many Sub-Saharan African countries appear to have reached their peak manufacturing employment at income levels of $700 (both at 1990 levels).[4]

As McKinsey Global Institute Director James Manyika said in June 2017: “Find a factory anywhere in the world [our emphasis] built in the past five years — not many people work there.”

The ‘fourth’ industrial revolution?

The bourgeois (capitalist) narrative trumpets the automation revolution as the ‘fourth’ industrial revolution.[5] Is this accurate?

The evolution of production is a process of developing man’s mastery over nature, of harnessing nature to serve our needs. New technologies give rise to new needs. For centuries — comprising the primitive communal, slave-owning and feudal systems — manual labour determined the technological basis of society. As the continual improvements and specialisations of the implements of labour reached their limits and slavery and feudalism became fetters (restraints) on the further development of the productive forces (technology and humans) as a whole, mechanisation (machine-aided production) necessarily replaced manual labour. Man was no longer the source of power which wielded the implements of labour.

Consolidating capitalist relations of production, this was the first industrial revolution — it marked a radical change in the technological mode of production, i.e. the mode of combining man and technology. Where man had controlled and wielded the inanimate elements of work, machines now dictated the inputs of man and relieved him as, in Marx’s words, “chief actor”;[6] but, in creating a division of labour, did not free him. “The hand tool makes the worker independent — posits him as proprietor. Machinery — as fixed capital — posits him as dependent, posits him as appropriated.”[7]

Dominant versions of history tell the story that — since it was the most obvious contrast between machine production and the handicrafts and ordinary manufacture of small ‘cottage industry’ workshops — the upgrade of the steam engine made by Scottish engineer James Watt around 1775 was the fundamental catalyst of the first industrial revolution. By extension, it was considered the primary factor behind the rise of British capitalism and the ensuing industrial and economic dominance of its Empire. All thanks to the supposed individual genius of Watt (or was it his ‘Britishness’?).

This is an example of idealism, the theory that man’s ideas or ever-improving rationality determine the course of history. Marx’s method of dialectical materialism — that history is driven by ongoing conflict or interaction between material and social forces — enables the understanding of history per se, rather than individual versions of it. (Indeed, it also explains man’s ever-improving rationality.) That it was Watt who made this innovation is merely a ‘historical accident’ — if he had never been born someone else would have realised this inevitable evolutionary development.

Behind this ‘accident’ lay the driving necessity to develop machinery and liberate industry from the confines imposed by nature in terms of a power source. The development of steam power removed the reliance on water power and therefore enabled industry to be moved to other locations more freely. With steam power, the primary factor became access to coal, the source of the energy needed to generate steam, which in turn enabled greater access to coal. With the development of electrical power, industry was further liberated, and has therefore invariably moved to wherever the cheapest labour can be found.

The origins of the steam engine can actually be traced back to the ancient Greek mathematician Hero of Alexandria. Within a system of slavery, though, it could not be utilised. Marx therefore argues:

“The steam-engine itself, such as it was at its invention during the manufacturing period at the close of the 17th century, and such as it continued to be down to 1780, did not give rise to any industrial revolution. It was, on the contrary, the invention of machines that made a revolution in the form of steam engines necessary. As soon as man, instead of working on the object of labour with a tool, becomes merely the motive power of a machine, it is purely accidental that the motive power happens to be clothed in the form of human muscles; wind, water or steam could just as well take man’s place.”[8]

In his 1967 book Era of Man or Robot? The Sociological Problems of the Technical Revolution, Russian Soviet philosopher Genrikh Volkov writes that what made an industrial revolution for Marx

“pivoted on finding the correct methodological approach. His examination focused on changes in the joint working mechanism and the combination of the inanimate and human elements of the process of production. Whether the machine is driven by an animal, a man or steam, Marx showed, is immaterial. The source of power, being part of the machine, only serves the system of working machines.”[9]

What is defined as the second industrial revolution by bourgeois scholars was therefore merely the ongoing development of the first. Taking place in the decades before World War I, it saw the growth of existing industries and establishment of new ones, with electric power enabling ever-greater mass production. Major technological advances included the telephone, light bulb, phonograph and the internal combustion engine.

The ongoing digital revolution — with the emergence of digital record-keeping, the personal computer, the internet, and other forms of information and communications technology — is considered to be the third industrial revolution. This is, perhaps, more arguable. The instruments described certainly amplify man’s mental capacity. But the digital revolution is a technological revolution and actually part of the automation revolution; not an industrial revolution by itself:

“Mechanisation begins with the transference to technology of basic physical working functions, while automation begins when the basic ‘mental’ functions in a technological process actually materialise into machines. This becomes possible with the appearance in production of supervising, controlling or programming cybernetical installations.”[10]

The productivity of machines is slowed down by the physiological limits of human bodies, and so automation becomes necessary; man is increasingly excluded from direct production and now works alongside fully mechanised machines, calling forth a radical change in the man-technology relationship. As Marx said of automation:

“Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself.”[11]

This therefore means that capitalism “works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production,”[12] says Marx, since capital’s exploitation of human labour is the source of profit and exchange-value (the worker keeps less value than they create, with the surplus value appropriated by the capitalist and realised as profit through commodity sales).

The point of automation, therefore, says Volkov,

“should be to remove the contradiction between the inanimate and human elements, between man and machine, to break the shackle that made man and machine a single working mechanism, to act as Hercules setting Prometheus free to perform his great deeds. Potentially, automation can enable man to become Man with a capital letter, and the machine to become Machine in the full sense of the word. Freedom for man’s development is, at the same time, freedom for technological progress.”[13]

Defining automation

In Automation and Social Progress (1956), English socialist Sam Lilley defined automation provisionally as “the introduction or use of highly automatic machinery or processes which largely eliminate human labour and detailed human control”.[14]

The term is of course applied to a very broad field ranging from semi-automatic machinery to automatic factories. These are qualitatively different notions and so must be understood carefully. Volkov writes:

“Semi-automatic technology (semi-automatic machine-tools and lines, so-called cyclic automatons) represents a transitional form from ordinary to automatic machines. In this form, ‘automation’ is usually affected by mechanical means without, as a rule, recourse to cybernetical devices. The worker is still directly included in the process, which he supplements with his nervous system, intellect and, partly, muscular energy (loading and unloading of machines). At this stage, the new technology does not yet constitute automation proper and lacks its most characteristic features. As a matter of fact, semi-automatic technology stretches to the limit the adverse aspects of mechanisation by simplifying things still more, robbing working operations of all their creative content and contributing to their further fragmentation.”[15]

Automation proper can therefore be subdivided into three stages:

1. Initial or partial automation (separate machine-tools fitted with programme control, separate cybernetically controlled automatic lines). Here, the worker has relative freedom of action. They are included in the process only in so far as their duties include the overall supervision of operations, maintenance and adjustment of the machines.

2. Developed automation, e.g., automatic factories equipped with overall electronic control of all production processes, regulation of equipment, loading and unloading, transportation of materials, semi-finished and finished products. In this stage of automation the worker takes no direct part in the production process.

3. Full automation, which ensures automatic operation of all sections of production, from planning to delivery of finished products, including choice of optimum conditions, conversion to a new type of product, and auto-planning in accordance with a set programme. The planning of production as a whole and the overall control of its operation are also to a considerable extent transferred to automatic installations. “Automation of this kind is equivalent to automatic production on the scale of the entire society,” says Volkov. “Here, not only the labour of workers, but that of technicians and, to a considerable extent, of engineers as well, is excluded from the direct technological process. This does not mean, of course, that such work disappears altogether. It is only shifted to another sphere, becomes more creative and closer related to scientific work.”[16]

Base and superstructure

Under capitalism in the first part of the 21st century, we are still a fair way from achieving a singular fully automated system of production (The production process includes the transport of commodities to the point of sale/consumption, so workers who transport commodities (such as Deliveroo and other courier drivers) and check-out/till-point workers add value to a commodity. Drones, autonomous vehicles and self-serving tills are therefore automating the last stage of production.) That does not mean we are not moving relatively rapidly towards that outcome or witnessing an industrial revolution. McKinsey and Co expects “the near-complete automation of existing job activities” somewhere between 2060 and 2100, with the “most technologically optimistic” scenario putting the date at 2045.[17]

The first industrial revolution began before and necessitated the rise of capitalism (the printing press being the first generalised example of machine-aided mass production), just as the second begins before and necessitates the rise of socialism.

Marx recognised that the technological-economic base of a society determines its political and class superstructure. (Although the two of course interact and influence each other, the former dominates.) An industrial revolution has far-reaching consequences that go beyond the framework of technology and even beyond that of material production.

The first affected the character of labour (manual to mechanised); social structure (artisan and peasant turning into worker/proletarian);[18] the correlation of economic branches (agriculture being supplanted by industry); and, finally, the political and economic field (capitalist relations superseding feudal relations). Volkov spells out the most characteristic features of the second industrial revolution.

1) The production of material wealth has a tendency to turn into fully automated production “on a society-wide scale”. The second industrial revolution therefore “marks the completion of the establishment of industry”. At first, large-scale machine industry had a relatively limited area of diffusion, having taken the place of handicrafts and ordinary manufacture. But with the second industrial revolution, “industrialisation tends to spread also to the whole of agriculture, beginning with mechanisation, followed by comprehensive mechanisation and, eventually, by automation. Industrialisation is spreading to house-building, distribution, the community services (eg public catering) and even intellectual, scientific work. In this way, industry becomes the universal form of producing material wealth.”

2) While the first industrial revolution was local in character, being limited to a few developed European countries, the second industrial revolution “tends to involve all the countries of the world” as newly industrialising countries begin by installing the most up-to-date industrial equipment involving comprehensive mechanisation and automation. “This presents features of the first and second industrial revolutions at one and the same time. Consequently, the second industrial revolution is global in character, laying the groundwork for a subsequent economic and social integration of nations.”[19] (Our emphasis .)

3) The modern industrial revolution leads to substantial structural changes in the various spheres of social activity. Because of the ever-decreasing need for manpower for material production, scientific production increases both quantitatively and qualitatively and tends to assume priority over the direct production of material wealth. “Hence, science is the helmsman of the modern industrial revolution.”[20]

4) The dominant feature of the automation revolution concerns its social implications. As we know, the first industrial revolution led to the consolidation of capitalist exploitation. Large-scale industry spelt wholesale ruin for artisans and peasants, longer working hours, intensification of labour and narrow specialisation (the breaking down of the production process into a series of repetitive, monotonous tasks). In contrast, the modern industrial revolution in the socialist nations “leads to a shortening of working hours, an easing of labour, a modification of its nature (work becoming more creative and free), and to the elimination of the essential distinctions between town and countryside, and between mental and manual labour. While yielding the industrial basis for an abundance of material wealth and to distribution according to need, it also opens up possibilities for unlimited spiritual improvement of man’s personality.”

Volkov adds:

“The second industrial revolution resolves the contradiction between the machines and those who operate them, i.e. the contradiction within the joint working mechanism. By completing the automation of production, it paves the way for the implementation of the principles of socialist humanism in society. Hence, the very logic of the second industrial revolution strengthens man’s personality and humanism.

“In capitalist countries, however, this logic and the above-mentioned features of the second industrial revolution contradict the very essence of the relations of exploitation. All the same, mechanised labour gives way to automation, the antithesis between mental and physical labour tends to disappear. And the cultural and technical standard of the workers tends to rise. Substantial changes also occur in the social structure and in the relation between the various economic branches. In other words, many of the essential elements of an industrial revolution are distinctly on hand.

“The fundamental difference between the revolution in capitalist countries and its counterpart in the socialist states consists in its leading to the breakdown, [our emphasis] instead of the consolidation, of the existing relations under the conditions of the private ownership of the means of production. The modern industrial revolution has strained to the utmost all the contradictions of capitalism…. It does not reform capitalism. Instead, it creates the material preconditions for a social revolution and paves the way for the eventual replacement of capitalist relations of production by communist relations.”[21]

The automation revolution cannot be consummated under capitalism — socialism must be established to finish what capitalism started.[22]

The technological determinists who see automation as the ‘fourth’ industrial revolution do not put the development of technology in its proper socio-historical context, but instead in isolation from the human component of the productive forces. They fail to see “the genuine dialectics [interactions] of the forces and relations of production, [and] deny the inverse influence of the relations of production on the productive forces and the development of science and technology”.[23]

Recap

To summarise: over many centuries, manual labour determined the technological basis of society. The technological mode of production, the mode of combining inanimate and human elements, was subjective.

The next stage, paved by the specialisation of implements in manufacture, began when the main working function — control of partial implements — of the ‘living mechanism’, the worker, transferred to the mechanical mechanism, the machine. From human-inanimate, the working mechanism became inanimate-human. The technological mode of production became objective and labour became mechanised. This is then the first industrial revolution.

Finally, the third historical stage in technological development is ushered in by automation. The working mechanism becomes fully technical and the mode of combining man and technology becomes free and labour itself is automated. This then is the second industrial revolution.

Marxists therefore reject the bourgeois definition that posits the automation revolution as the fourth industrial revolution.

Towards a Single Automatic System

The maturity of technology that socialism will inherit in the 21st century means that the problems of planning associated with the 20th century Soviet Union will be much easier to overcome. (Indeed, in hindsight it is arguable that the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 proved to be somewhat ‘premature’, given that the Bolsheviks thought capitalism was entering its final crisis at that time.)[24] Thanks to contemporary computing power, ‘big data’ and stock coding, the dominant ‘command and control’ military style planning that overlooked the finer details is no longer necessary.

As Volkov writes:

“Let us anticipate the future and suppose that it has attained its zenith and that its characteristic features… have reached full development. We shall then have a society with fully automated production of material wealth, ensuring abundance. Such production will form a Single Automatic System which, for the sake of maximum efficiency, will incorporate all the branches of industry and agriculture, centrally controlled according to a single plan.

“From the social point of view, this will be a single society, because there will no longer be any workers or peasants previously associated solely with physical labour, and because the distinction between mental and manual labour, and between town and countryside, will have vanished. Creative work incorporating intellectual, emotional and manual activities will predominate. The life of society will be governed by the laws of free, instead of working, time, and so on.”[25]

The direction of history towards turning world productivity into a Single Automatic System shows that the final stage of socialism before the higher stage of communism is a de facto single world state. To get there each nation-state obviously needs to become socialist, with its own governing structure and centrally planned system working towards full automation in that country. A Communist International would be required to oversee development and trade between each socialist state — making sure, for one thing, that the plan incentivises the sharing of technologies and material wealth (including human resources) — which would act with the same semi-autonomy in relation to the International as a region of a country does to its central government or a state to federal level (or a local soviet to its regional soviet, and so on).

As this system develops, the Single Automatic System and a de facto one-state world would come into being, with borders being rejected as fetters on productivity — there being no transfer of ownership when it comes to trade in a socialist political union, anyway — and individual nation-states withering away in all but regional name.

We can see then that, whereas capitalism in the long run has a historically centralising tendency, socialism in the long run has a historically decentralising tendency. This then is the path to a borderless, stateless world, not the fantasy anarchist one, which, with its desire to introduce federations of fully autonomous communes, would effectively introduce new borders and undermine internationalism. The necessary aim of communism is to unite — to un-divide — the working class and humanity as a whole.

Conclusion

The essential point that must be grasped about automation is that it is abolishing the source of profit and exchange-value, i.e. capital’s exploitation of commodity-producing labour. This process is not reversible. Innovation and the tendency for machinery to grow relative to labour continues throughout history, under any mode of production. Under capitalism, the process is driven by the needs of capital accumulation.

Commodity-producers must continually expand production to overcome the inherent contradiction contained in the commodity: it is both a use-value, a utility; and an exchange-value, containing surplus value and sold for profit. The quicker and more abundantly commodities are made, the less labour, exchange-value and therefore profit tends to be contained in each commodity, compelling the capitalist to expand production yet further, only to continually intensify the contradiction. All production under capitalism is governed by this, the law of (exchange-)value.

This contradiction is also expressed in an overaccumulation of capital (a surplus that cannot be (re)invested profitably, resulting also in the equivalent surplus labour (unemployment)) and a contraction in economic output. This is at the same time an underproduction in surplus value. The necessary reaction for capital is to expand and cheapen the labour base and raise its productivity through innovation, only to increase the underproduction of surplus value in the long-run, since the amount machinery and capital employed tends to rise relative to the total surplus-value-producing labour employed.

Commodity-producers continually have to attract greater investment to turn a profit. As a company gets bigger, though, its costs get larger and more unsustainable, and so greater profits need to be generated than before (hence the dominant tendency towards the ever-greater monopolisation of industry, for economies of scale (efficiency)).

Since wages eat into thinning profit margins, expenditure on wages must be slashed. Robots do not need toilet/rest/lunch breaks, sick or holiday pay, and are therefore much more productive and cheaper to employ. (There is no such thing as ‘technological unemployment’, though; people go unemployed when capital can no longer afford to employ them (so socialism, capable of permanent full employment, would take advantage of automated production by training and employing far more scientists, doctors, teachers, etc). Even police and soldiers, who do not produce surplus value and are therefore paid out of the surplus produced by commodity-producing workers, are increasingly being replaced by surveillance technology and autonomous weapons, since one effect of shrinking profit margins is shrinking government tax bases, at least in relative terms per capita.)

Innovation is necessary to continually raise the productivity of labour, to meet the demands of accumulation — only the size of the ever-expanding total capital eventually becomes too large for the ever-dwindling pool of surplus-value-producing labour to renew and expand. The underproduction of surplus value becomes insurmountable. The system comes up against a historical limit of accumulation and breaks down into barbarism, necessitating socialist revolution.[26] Indeed, interest,[27] GDP and general profit rates have all trended historically towards zero,[28] along with commodity prices.[29]

As with previous modes of production, the contradictions between the productive forces (the means of production) and the productive relations (the ownership of production) are being driven into irreconcilable conflict by sheer historical force. While this contradiction has always been expressed under capitalism by the private appropriation of the products of collective, socialised labour, it is now increasingly expressed by automated labour and a diminishing source of profit, tending ever-closer towards the self-abolition of the law of value.

Just as capitalism matured in the womb of feudalism through the concentration of industry, socialism has matured in the womb of capitalism through the further concentration and monopolisation of industry and the deindustrialisation, servicisation, automation and digitalisation of labour. The new technological-economic base demands a new, applicable superstructure; ie public ownership of the means of production; an all-socialist state (a people’s democratic republic); centrally planned production on a break-even basis; and the replacement of money by digital (non-transferable) vouchers pegged to labour time.

Indeed, fiat money is becoming more and more worthless — pound sterling having lost more than 99.5% of its purchasing power during its lifetime, for example. Worldwide hyperinflation is already on the horizon.[30]

The age-old arguments about which system works better, capitalism or socialism, are quite redundant — the answer has of course always been socialism, but the point that now has to be stressed is that, for the first time, socialism is becoming an economic necessity.

As Volkov concludes:

“As the mass of exploited manual workers decreases due to scientific and technological progress, particularly automation, the mass of exploited intellectual workers, i.e. white collar employees, engineers and scientists [who increasingly contribute to commodity production] also increases in reverse proportion (or even more rapidly)…[31]

“Capitalism in the age of automation increasingly turns the majority of the population into proletarians and, in doing so, creates all economic, social and political prerequisites for the system’s downfall.”[32]

Ted Reese is author of Socialism or Extinction: Climate, Automation and War in the Final Capitalist Breakdown.

Dynamics of Celebrity Activism: How Idolizing Our Movement Leaders Exacerbates Systemic Burnout and Deters Work Towards Collective Liberation

(Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images)

By Aiko Fukuchi

“We really need to stop putting people on pedestals. It is harmful and dehumanizes all involved. Putting someone on a pedestal is not caring for them. It is not love. You can love, admire, adore, learn from, or follow the leadership of someone without putting them on a pedestal. Putting people on pedestals is part of the binary of how we categorize people into “good” and “bad”. They are two sides of the same coin and they contribute to our collective inability to understand, identify and respond to harm. We demonize people or we put them on pedestals. As we work to be free of a culture of punishment/revenge, we also have to confront the other side. We have to acknowledge celebrity culture and how it stretches well beyond formal celebrities and into our movements, organizations, groups, relationships -- just as punishment does. A punitive culture teaches us we have to be “good” or “bad”. It erases away our humanity: our human complexities and contradictions; our human capacity for growth, change and transformation, our human capacity for both harm and love.” - Mia Mingus (IG)

After a few years of working for non-profits that not only de-prioritized care or rest, but rewarded overwork and lack of boundaries, I crashed. At that point, responses to unaddressed trauma and burn out had expanded into frequent panic attacks and migraines, dangerous weight loss, and rashes developing under my eyes and on my chest among other symptoms. Looking back at that time now, almost two years later, I can see I was operating from a place of survival. 

I’m writing this as someone who’s experience of burn out was severely exacerbated by a broader culture that centers individualist and competitive action, deeply rooted in capitalist value systems. As a result of participating in these systems, I had internalized the harmful idea that the large majority, if not entirety, of my worth was grounded in my ability to be both productive and available. Moving beyond my own individual experience of burn out, after conversations with close friends and comrades who shared similar experiences, it is apparent that the values of celebrity culture (individualism, idolization, dehumanization) are also present in many current and recent social justice movements in the United States, and that this is exacerbating systemic issues of burn out and unaccountable leadership, and is ultimately deferring our efforts towards collective liberation. I hope people take away from this piece is a critique of cultures and practices around leadership that progressive and left-leaning movements are maintaining, not a cancelation of individual leaders themselves. I hope it will help us to reflect on our collective role in transforming harmful and outdated movement practices and cultures, which we are all responsible for.

To first lay some groundwork, mainstream celebrity culture is rooted in violent and oppressive systems, and perpetuates falsehoods that argue human connection and value is most efficiently achieved and effectively experienced through commodified goods, individual success, and popularity. While this line of thinking clearly goes against the values within social justice movements, they are still present in many of our spaces. In this piece, I’m specifically referring to dynamics within social justice movements in the United States. It is not meant to focus on mainstream celebrities. Rather, it explores how we, as social justice movements, recreate value systems and dynamics of celebrity culture in the ways we idolize leaders in our movements. 

I see the dynamics between large social movements and their leaders manifesting a certain category of leadership I’ve recently been referring to as the ‘celebrity activist’; a leader who is idolized, placed on a pedestal, and generally engaged with through an ideology of individualism. This is not to be confused or conflated with ‘activist celebrities’, or mainstream celebrities (pop stars, actors, etc.) who act philanthropically or use their social media audiences as a platform to speak to social issues. Before and while I was burning out, whether or not I was willing to admit it, I frequently perceived the accomplishments of certain individual leaders as purely individual efforts and achievement. I admired their ability to financially sustain themselves from their work before celebrating their contributions to principled struggle, and I was often more focused on their personal lifestyle choices rather than their commitment to liberation. Often unknowingly, I was contributing to this larger dynamic propped up by this ‘celebrity culture’ mentality. In doing so, I was simultaneously detaching myself and the leaders I idolized from our respective humanity, which I will speak to more directly later on. 

Social media has severely exacerbated blurred these lines of relation, easily dissolving the separation between people’s actions and analysis, and their personalities and style, and in this way, we can easily lose our sense of clarity around what we are valuing in someone’s work. When the main outcome we are looking for in our leaders a social justice version of the same entertainment, inspiration, and endorphin rush we find by following mainstream celebrities and their lives, we are limiting everyone involved while increasing avenues for potential harm. And while I support leadership that is accountable and structured according to collective need, I question if and how successfully our current leadership culture fosters this, when we are more readily willing to follow someone based on their charisma, rather than their relationship to the movement and critical analysis. 

Social media has served as a vehicle for our movements to connect, build, communicate, and show up for one another. It has also served as a place to present leaders and their impacts (current and historic) through a lens of individualism. After all, social media is programmed to de-center collective efforts, and hyper-fixate on individual achievements. We’re all aware that when we view someone’s accomplishments on social media, we don’t see the years of trying, failing, struggling, and compiling small scale victories to get to the flashier results social media is made to uplift. We don’t see the communities that came together to move something forward, the organizations that trained people, offering them initial frameworks to understand the context of their work.

When we don’t see the principled and discipled collective actions many of our leaders engaged in prior to becoming well-known, which significantly contributed to the sharpness of their analysis, the impact of their actions, and the consistency and longevity of their participation in anti-oppressive struggles, we paint a picture that our leader somehow became this way on their own, overnight. This often leaves us as followers believing that we somehow have to find a way to become, reinvent, or evolve ourselves into the movement leaders we admire all on our own; No frameworks, no guidance, no rest, and no mistakes.

What does this look like?

We can begin to see clearly the ways that celebrity culture, idolization and individualism impact how we value ourselves, our comrades, and less visible leaders when we reflect on how we discuss and relate to many of our most visible movement leaders. One way I see us doing this is by placing leaders and individuals in our movements on pedestals, ascribing excessive weight and value to their opinions, disproportionately rewarding one person’s efforts in a collaborative project or process, and applying unobtainable expectations to them and their work. It leads to a shift from thinking of someone as a valuable part of a larger, collective movement, into idealizing their efforts, personal lives, personalities, and relationships, thinking of them as the individualized personification of an entire social movement. Additionally, when we consider how we relate to someone and their work we can ask ourselves whether we are seeking to replicate or replace the role someone holds, or motivated to expand, adopt, and build alongside an area of work, value, or practice.

Once we make this shift in thinking, our perception transitions from engaging with someone as a movement leader into viewing them as a ‘celebrity activist’. This shift can look like adopting someone’s specific style, brand of swagger, or personal interests without first reflecting on whether we personally identify with these things. This can also look like believing a celebrity activist’s analysis and beliefs to be irrefutable as well as universally applicable and relevant. We see these forms of engagement lead to fragmented relationships, uncoordinated movements, and the formation of social cliques. Not only this, but in these idealized perceptions of individuals, we often disconnect from the reality that even in their greatness, our leaders (now celebrities) still hold the potential to cause harm as we all do. And when we disconnect from this reality, we increasing the potential for future harm they are involved in to go unaccounted for, excused, or brushed aside.

Which leaders we do and do not select into celebrity status is connected also to visibility and absolutely intertwined with oppressive structures. The process by which our movements transition leaders into celebrity revolutionaries is heavily based on race, skin tone, ability status, immigration status, English-speaking capability, income and gender presentation, prioritizing cis-gendered people. Applying these same practices of adoration in celebrity culture to movement leaders, especially when this is how we determine who we place on top to receive the most resources and the attention, recreates the same value systems our movements resist. 

Why is this Happening? 

There are a lot of reasons why celebrity culture and individualism are so present in our movements. Three factors seem to be: 1) capitalist funding models, 2) uninspiring non-profits, and 3) experiencing personal, physical, emotional, or spiritual overwhelm. These three reasons often feed into and perpetuate one another. 

The mainstream funding model in the U.S is steeped in capitalist notions, assigning those with resources the authority to define (in a social context) who is and is not important expressed by what work, people, and locations receives funding and other resource support. This model prioritizes the opinions of white folks, charity-based models, quantitative, “measurable” outcomes, and success framed through an individualistic narrative, while sewing distrust in grassroots efforts and devaluing Black and brown leadership, collective action, long-term investment, and relational, qualitative achievements. This issue is defined and analyzed thoroughly in the report, “12 Recommendations for Detroit Funders”, put together by Allied Media Projects and the current Design Team of the Transforming Power Fund, a community-led fund that, through practice, is creating a template to address some of the funding issues named above. 

The United States mainstream funding model is inherently misaligned with the vision our movements are fighting for. It pushes non-profits to compromise on their goals and ability to remain genuinely accountable to the communities they are working with, and present themselves as “independent, innovative, and visionary” while also presenting as measurable and palatable. It tends to fracture our movements by creating a culture that rewards aggressive competition, under-recognizes collaboration, and glorifies suffering for the sake of productivity through lack of self-care and rest, neglecting personal boundaries, and undervaluing community care practices, facilitating burn out, often leading to further harm. 

This pressure and relationship to funding often plays a significant factor in the development of an organization’s culture, heavily influencing who non-profits hold themselves accountable to. This frequently results in uninspired theories of change, and contributing to the rise of individualist "celebrity" narratives around leaders.  I’ve lost count of friends and fellow movement collaborators who have abruptly left positions at social justice-oriented non-profits, exhausted from navigating harm, enduring violence, having their opinions, contributions, or ideas go unvalued, unacknowledged or claimed by bosses, or simply working hard and feeling no sense that they are making a difference. Many non-profits don’t elect leadership or have clear, effective structures to keep us aligned with community-defined vision and goals and remove or take other accountability measures when they fail or cause harm. Our lack in stronger organizations and structures to support organizing for collective vision leads to a tendency towards individualistic activism.

Many organizations are gradually degrading, their initial visions and goals diluted and redirected under the weight of funder demands while their detachment from communities they claim to invest in expands. Many organizations are also functioning under leadership structures that are not elected or clear, and do not offer safe ways to challenge decisions made by directors and other organizational leads whose main work relationships are usually with funders and other organizational leads. It requires continuous and committed effort to maintain collective decision-making and accountability systems, and existing in a social and economic structures that work against this generally leaves these efforts un or under-funded. This puts them in a precarious position where they’re generally the first items to be deprioritized when organizations find themselves lacking in resources (time, funding, capacity), which is frequent and common. And when we don’t or can’t prioritize maintaining collective structures, it becomes all but impossible to not focus on individuals. Rather than confronting the structural issues our work faces, we offload those contradictions onto specific organizations. When those organizations inevitably fail to live up to our expectations, we revert to celebrating specific individuals who we see embodying our values. This tends to fracture our movements, creating a culture that rewards individualism and aggressive competition and under-recognizes collaboration. This structure glorifies the productivity of individual organizers, pushing them to neglect self-care, rest, reflection, personal boundaries, and to undervalue community care practices, ultimately facilitating burn out and often leading to further harm.

These conditions exacerbate systemic and wide-spread experiences of overwhelm. Speaking from personal experience and drawing from conversations I’ve had with a few trusted comrades, when organizers are working with less than we need, running on fumes while facing problems bigger than all of us, it is often difficult to accept our own limitations. This pushes us further into individualist thought. We want to believe we can accomplish more than we can, because we feel a sense of urgency that we need to accomplish more than we can in order for any of our efforts to have value. Worse yet, we may even start to feel as though proving our commitment to a social issue, or to our community’s wellness requires us to suffer for our work, that celebrating or experiencing joy or fun is somehow a betrayal to our community, an idea is articulated in Trauma Stewardship, by Laura Van Dernoot Lipsky and Connie Burk. In my case, this urgent feeling that I needed to always to do more for anything else I did to matter, of refusing experiences of joy, was how I was operating for a long time before I was more or less forced to slow down, ask a few people for help, and clarify, first for myself then for everyone else, what I did, and mostly what I did not have to offer at that moment. 

In order for me to accommodate this sense of urgency, I often ended up cutting out parts of my life my well-being really needed me to prioritize. From conversation with friends, and what I’ve experienced and witnessed, what we cut out often includes investing in personal relationships, acting in solidarity with movements that our work does not center, and contributing to community care in spaces we inhabit. It can also look like de-prioritizing building our own analysis of the issues and vision towards liberation, an exciting, gratifying part of social justice movements. It can feel like just another huge, never-ending task on a long continually growing to-do list. 

When we’re in this mental place, it can feel easier to align ourselves with someone else’s vision and framework that feels similar to our own. It can feel comforting to believe that even if we cannot be the super human we think we need to be in order to contribute valuably, at least someone else out there can; that one person’s vision is the only one we need in order to achieve collective liberation. 

Engaging in another person’s work in this way can impact us in a few key ways. One way is a disinvestment in one’s own capabilities and potential. When we mainly value our work by how visible it is to another person, or how others’ view our work in relation to someone else’s, it becomes easy to lose touch with ourselves, making it difficult for us to identify and trust our own experiences, and capabilities. We will try to apply solutions that may have worked in well in their specific situational, geographic, or cultural context without considering why applying it to our situation may lead to a different outcome or require some adjusting and rebuilding in order to succeed. It also distracts us from our focus on collective goals and needs, deceiving us into thinking we are focusing on collective needs in moments when we’re really focusing on receiving approval.

On the flip side, this way of engaging in someone’s work or analysis also places far too much weight and expectation on what any one person or one groups’ framework can reasonably accomplish. As Mingus states in her quote found above, this pushes us back into binary thinking. Either a person or their analysis is absolutely flawless and applicable in every situation, leaving no reason to question or challenge, explore otherwise, or develop our own thought, or it is flawed and therefore not worth engaging in. Binary thinking makes it even easier for us to perpetuate idealizing and idolizing our certain leaders while we discard and disavow others, leaving little wiggle room between the two. And while I think it makes sense to listen and learn from clear, accountable leadership, I think this also means learning with leadership, actively engaging by questioning, challenging, contributing, and building.

What are some of the impacts?

So, what effect does this designation of ‘celebrity activist’ have on our ability to both hold leaders accountable and grasp their humanity? In the past, as I was beginning to notice my patterns of thought that viewed movement leaders through a binary lens, and relating to them through practices found in celebrity culture, I also noticed myself disengaging from uncomfortable, or unpredictable elements of their humanity. I saw them as unquestionable, unable to make mistakes or have short comings, and sometimes, I even started to see them as unable to cause harm or enact violence. Allowing space for the potential of certain leaders to cause harm left me feeling vulnerable, conflicted, and defensive. So, to protect myself, consciously or not, I left this space out.  

I’m sharing this from my personal perspective, but this train of thought is something I see in many social and progressive movements today. It may be convenient for a while, giving us a fabricated sense of security, but I fear as we continue to collectively refuse to hold these uncomfortable truths, and include them in the image we build of our leaders ultimately, we are opening gaps for potential harm to go unacknowledged, and are creating opportunities for our communities to disempower, silence, and neglect those speaking out against harm caused by our leaders. As I've delved into these issues, I found a great resource in the book ‘Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement’ edited by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi-Piepzna-Samarasinha which shares occurrences of this harm as well as instances of transformative community response. In the same moment, we also expand the potential for our leaders to experience harm and isolation themselves.

Our movements have experienced this over and over. We avoid holding leadership accountable, or even acknowledge violence or abusive they’ve committed for fear it will destabilize our movements. It’s easy for us to support #metoo advocates and survivors of abuse until it interferes with our campaign plans, our community events, our organizational structure. This is the point at which most of us become silent or look in another direction. Our willingness as individuals, organizations, and entire movements to look past violence is often determined by the race, skin tone, ability status, income, immigration status, English-speaking ability, and gender presentation placing Black and brown, disabled, undocumented, non-english-speaking, low-income, trans women and femmes in our movements at the bottom. On the flip side, when we do choose to address harm, our response often results in simply banishing someone from movements and community spaces with no potential to transform and restore relationships or repair harm, which is rarely transformative or revolutionary.

Finally, losing sight of understanding our leaders as fellow human beings also means disconnection from their need for rest, joy, care, and community, their limits and their boundaries. It also isolates leaders from their communities and makes it difficult for us (their communities, neighbors, friends, and families) to see when they are struggling and offer care. This can look like expecting our leaders to always be available, always be working, to conflate our leaders with their work, to view them as incomplete without it. It can look like us applauding our leaders for not caring for themselves, for not taking breaks, for suffering, a capitalist, ableist perspective on productivity that reverberates out into our movements and communities.

We begin to equate having a lack of boundaries with proving our commitment to struggle. I have alluded to this throughout the piece, but when there is no space for care, there is no space for children, parents, illness, and disability. And I wonder, how revolutionary can our movements truly be if there is no space for those of us who are living in the context of these conditions and identities?

In addition to everything named here, applying celebrity culture to our movement spaces weighs heavily on how much and if we value care, healing, and other under-recognized and historically-feminized work including logistics planning, cleaning and space-creating, etc. When all of us are aspiring to be the most visible and charismatic leaders of a movement, we tend to see behind-the-scenes work, tedious, time and energy-consuming tasks like logistics planning as stepping stones on our ways to greatness, and not as independently valuable. 

This shows up when we don’t give ourselves a reasonable timeline or enough resources to coordinate logistics for an event, expecting it to “just work itself out”, when we do not communicate effectively with those leading behind-the-scenes efforts, but give them a round of applause during the closing remarks of a conference. It also doesn’t allow movement members to play to their strong suits. Not everyone needs to have charisma, and not everyone wants to or can be at the front of a room. Let’s invest in people finding the work that feels good to them, rather than pushing them to fill a role that is convenient for us, but doesn’t work for them. Let’s invest in building movements that support the needs and value the participation of parents, low and minimum-wage workers, people who rely on public transportation, and people with disabilities.

I do not want to see us move into a way of relating which is defined by potential for harm. I want to see us hold ourselves and our leader in the full potential of each others’ humanity, something I do not see us doing when we place individuals on pedestals, refusing to hold space for potential mistakes, let-downs, and harm we all of the potential to cause. Disengaging from our leaders’ humanity also means disengaging from their ability to change, evolve, and transform. Once again pushing us into binary thought of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people, it creates an opening for mainstream narratives that attempt to justify violent institutions including militarized police forces, and prisons, arguing that there are people who belong there, when we know this isn’t the case.  

Moving Forward

This piece isn’t about scolding ourselves for our flaws; it’s meant to help identify our shortcomings and adjusting to strengthen ourselves and our movements as we move forward. It is an offering to strengthen where we are unsteady, and build on where we are succeeding within many of our social justice movements and spaces. The goal of it is not to criticize our movement leaders or tear down our movements. Rather, it is to critique an aspect of our movement culture; how we treat our leaders, the pedestals we build to place them on, and the ways this impacts our relationships to ourselves, each other, and our movements. What I’m asking in this piece is for movement leaders, not movement celebrities. We do not need celebrities who we idolize or idealize, who we don’t feel comfortable questioning, who we don’t feel safe challenging. We need leaders who guide, facilitate, initiate, coordinate, listen, commit, clarify, and follow-through. We also cannot transform how our movements and the leaders within them relate to one another through individual response or action. Changing our movements will require collective investment and responses to build egalitarian, democratic structures.

Our movement leaders offer critical analysis, historic context, tools, and practices that strengthen our efforts. They also model tenderness, fierceness, and tenacity to achieve healing for their communities and realize solutions that will bring us to a liberatory future. They deserve our attention, respect, and engagement, but they deserve to experience this in a way that is not disengaged from their humanity, or the humanity of those supporting and engaging them. 

As community members and the people who make up these movements, we deserve to be organizing in a culture that is prioritizing our well-being not just as long-term goal of “eventually”, or “maybe when this next event ends”, but as we are moving together now. 

Through the current pandemic, many grassroots efforts are already redirecting their attention and actions, placing the focus on mutual aid and building spaces and practices that facilitate connection and trust; We are developing stronger clarity of collective values, and an unwillingness to bend in our practices or leave any of our comrades behind. We are weeding out unsustainable results disguised as solutions, and encouraging each other to envision futures that are breath-taking and irresistible before they are reasonable or palatable to discouraging perspectives or oppressive forces. I am excited for us to continue this work. 

Though I’m sure there are many more, next steps I am envisioning right now begin with investing in relationships with our peers, in deepening our personal visions for what liberation might look like, in studying the organizational and collective contexts under which many of our most dynamic movement leaders developed their thought and action, in joining and actively participating in local organizations and community groups, and learning how to be in conflict with each other, to disagree with one another without expanding violence towards each other, to learn how to respond to harm with compassionate accountability.

I believe we are already more in sync than we think, and as we continue to build, this connection will only deepen as it already has been for decades. As I continue untangling these oppressive thought patterns in my own mind, I hope to be a part of future conversations where we are not tearing ourselves apart, but instead are challenging ourselves to further untangle our practices from the systems we’re fighting and weave a stronger cloth on our own. I want to see us reject individualist, celebrity culture, and lean into exploring what collectively-led and community-defined liberation might look like for all of us.

The ideas I’m sharing here are grounded in stories, practices, and frameworks rooted in the transformative justice and disability justice frameworks, and from what I’ve learned following the work of the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, Transform Harm, Project NIA, API CHAYA, Emergent Strategy Ideation, Detroit Safety Team, Detroit Represent!, and so many others. They also come out of personal experience with social dynamics I’ve witnessed, been impacted by, and been a participant of that I believe would strengthen our social justice movements to change. Thank you to the Michigan Student Power Network for giving me a space to unfold and explore these thoughts. Thank you to the many friends and comrades who have engaged in vulnerable conversation with me around these ideas. In particular, I would like to acknowledge and express my appreciations for Sariah Metcalfe, Ian Matchett, Teiana McGahey and Owolabi Aboyade for your support, input, and collaboration, and for being continuous thought partners with me in a struggle towards liberation.

Additional Resources:

·         Pod-mapping — Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective

·         Leaders Need to Build Peer Accountability — Cathy Dang-Santa Anna

·         Beyond Survival — Edited by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

·         12 Recommendations TPF — part of a process led by Allied Media Projects & Detroit People’s Platform

·         Dreaming Accountability — Mia Mingus

·         Hacking the Syllabus; critical solidarities — Scott Kurashige with adrienne maree brown

·         How We Get Free Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective Edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

·         Suicidal Ideation 2.0 — Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

·         Mariame Kaba: Everything Worthwhile is Done with Other People — Eve L. Ewing (interview with Mariame Kaba)

·         Trauma Stewardship — Laura Van Dernoot Lipsky and Connie Burk

·         Leaders Need to Build Peer Accountability — Cathy Dang-Santa Anna

Aiko Fukuchi is a queer, Japanese American writer, community organizer living in Detroit, Michigan. Their organizing efforts have focused on gender justice, labor, environmental justice. They are currently part of a collective living project, Brick & Mortar Collective, as well as a creative disability justice collective, Relentless Bodies. Their writing focuses on topics including gender-based violence, environmental justice, and connections between grief (personal and collective) and our ever-expanding experiences of intimacy.

The Commercialization of Music: How Rock Lost Its Roll

By John Mac Ghlionn

For years now, the world of hip hop has received a lot of attention. From Kendrick Lamar’s lessons on humility, to Cardi B’s damp nether regions, to Lil Nas X’s molestation of Satan, hip hop is very much alive.

The same, sadly, can’t be said for the world of rock. It’s thirty years since the release of two of the finest rock albums ever created: The Black Album, Metallica’s magnum opus, and Nevermind, Nirvana’s work of existential art. In fact, 1991 was very much rock’s year. Pearl Jam released Ten, another thoroughly exceptional album; U2 released Achtung Baby; R.E.M released Out of Time; and Dinosaur Jr. released Green Mind.

Fans of rock were spoiled for choice.

Thirty years on, rock music is on life support, or maybe it’s dead. Who knows? A more gifted writer would surely insert a joke involving Schrodinger’s cat, but we have more pressing matters to discuss.

What happened to rock music? Well, to answer that question, one needs to ask another question: what are the ingredients needed to make great rock music?

Originality is a must.

Sadly, musicians are no longer awarded for originality. Today, as I have written elsewhere, an artist is more likely to be judged on the quality of their video, rather than the quality of their music.  Quality music takes time to write. Could the likes of “Sad but True” and “Nothing Else Matters,” two of the finest rock songs ever written, thrive in today’s market?

Perhaps, but I have my doubts, and these doubts are justified.

This is the attention economy, and our attention spans continue to shrink dramatically. To truly appreciate the artistry of a band like Metallica requires dedication and commitment. Most importantly, it requires a level of deep concentration. No distractions, just you and the band. Interestingly, songs are now well over a minute shorter in duration than they were two decades ago.

Furthermore, rock music requires an element of roguishness. The history of rock is replete with stories of musicians doing the wildest of things. Mötley Crue, Black Sabbath, Guns N Roses, to name just three bands, had reputations that preceded them, and these reputations, along with the music, helped cement their legacies.

Now, though, a “bad” reputation is no longer desirable, nor is it permissible. In March of this year, Mumford & Sons’ Winston Marshall announced that he would be stepping away from the band. Why? The banjoist praised a book authored by Andy Ngo, a controversial cultural commentator.

Today’s culture is tame and lame, and that’s a genuine shame.

However, there is also another factor at play, and it involves a dilution of authenticity. Let me explain.

In the world of rock, 1994 was the year things really started to change.  A handful of multinational companies took control of the music industry. Interestingly, the likes of Sony and EMD, two of the biggest players in the music industry, also had very close ties with the movie industry. All of a sudden, suit and tie executives were using different metrics to judge music.

In the animal kingdom, mutualism describes a type of mutually beneficial relationship between organisms of different species. By the mid-90s, mutualism was an integral part of the entertainment industry, with music and movies, and to a lesser extent TV, engaged in a symbiotic, commercially driven romance.

In 1995, Batman Forever became the highest grossing movie of the year. Of all the song’s to feature on the movie’s soundtrack, U2’s Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me was by far the most popular. Though it’s a fantastic song in its own right, it blurs the line between pop-rock and pure rock. Nevertheless, the success of the movie helped the song, and vice versa. This was commercial mutualism in its purest form. Movies and music had always enjoyed a relationship, but now they were inextricably linked.

However, what was good for profit wasn’t necessarily good for authentic artistry. The mid 90s, I argue, was when authentic artistry began to wither away.

It’s important to remember that moves like Mission Impossible (1996) and Independence Day (1996) were made with an international audience in mind.

This explains why soundtracks had a manufactured, generic sound. Nuance, the very thing that bands like Metallica and Pearl Jam prided themselves on, was rendered redundant. As music is a cultural carrier of sorts, it became much easier to sell movies with “safe” soundtracks.

The mid 90s also saw the explosion of manufactured pop groups; The Backstreet Boys, N-Sync, and The Spice Girls started to dominate the musical landscape. At the same time, the dilution of rock music continued. Bands like Sum 41 and Good Charlotte arrived on the scene, and it wasn’t long before they, along with Blink-182 and Green Day, became the representatives of rock. The unkempt rock stars of the late 80’s and early 90’s were replaced by young men who could have easily formed boybands of their own.

Yes, genuine rockers still existed, but the purification process was in full effect. A band like System of a Down, as popular as they were (and still are), simply couldn’t compete with Maroon 5. This was the age of colorful clothing, rollerblading, and Tamagotchis. Such inanity was incompatible with angst ridden lyrics. It became far more profitable to sing about generic things like “hooking-up” and finding “the one.” Why be serious when you could be silly?

Shows like Friends and The Fresh Prince of Bel Air dominated the airwaves, and movies like Dumb and Dumber and Happy Gilmore lit up cinema screens around the world. This was silly-season, and in many ways a negation of the early 90s, when the rawness of rock music truly resonated.

The erosion of rock music’s authenticity carried on from there. With the arrival of Snowpatrol and Nickelback, rock came in the form of catchy, radio-friendly tunes. Then, in 2005, with the creation of YouTube, the commercialization of music was complete. Videos now mattered just as much, if not more, than the music itself.

Some 15 years later, what are we left with?

Whatever it is, it’s nothing like 1991. Of course, rock music can still be found, but it’s a pale reflection of what it once was. If in doubt, just ask Winston Marshall, a man who had the audacity to read a book.