Refinancing the Climate Crisis: The Disaster Politics of Climate Change and Datafication of Capital

By Julius Alexander McGee

As the climate crisis escalates, the contradictions of the nation-state as both a facilitator and regulator of capital become increasingly apparent. The increase of natural disasters sparked by global warming have produced civil unrest and calls for change to our current social structures. These calls for change include a Green New Deal; divestment from fossil fuel industries; and a redistribution of wealth, all of which threaten the existing mechanism of capital accumulation. In response, the state has turned to the disaster capitalist playbook, turning the risk of civil unrest into new modalities of capital accumulation that maintain the status quo. This includes the creation of new low carbon markets that recapitulate pre-existing modalities of capital accumulation[1]. Recent attempts by nation-states to mitigate global warming through the creation of low carbon markets reveal how the climate crisis is being used to facilitate the expansion of capital into markets of data accumulation. This expansion is characterized by a process where data is created, collected, and circulated to generate wealth. Specifically, data extracted from low carbon technology to improve operational efficiencies ultimately functions to increase overall energy demand, as vast quantities of electricity are necessary to store data on computer servers. Such processes, unfortunately, of course, serve to undermine climate mitigation efforts. Further, the datafication of capital enhances surveillance technology that is used to disenfranchise Black and Brown communities through enhanced policing. Police departments around the United States as well as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (also known as ICE) are using data to target communities that are left most vulnerable by the unrest of the climate crisis[2]. Meanwhile, lithium, an alkali metal essential to many low-carbon technologies is mined at the expense of indigenous communities in South America in response to increased demand for electric vehicles (henceforth EVs) and large-scale batteries required to store deployable renewable energy. Simply put, these outcomes reveal the racial character of economic development and the tendency for capital to maintain the settler colonial project that established capitalism as a system of social organization. 

The automobile industry and widespread electrification were each established in the United States by dispossessing Black, Brown, and indigenous communities. The automobile industry thrived in the United States after the states demolished Black owned businesses and homes to build highways, and electrification was used to dispossess Black farmers of their wealth[3]. Moreover, the fossil fuels used to power automobiles and electricity are extracted on land dispossessed from indigenous people[4]. Indeed, it is increasingly clear that the continual dispossession and disenfranchisement of Black, Brown, and indigenous communities the world over is the true engine of capital accumulation. Specifically, by maintaining the historical expropriation of populations outside the terrain of capitalist production such that processes of uneven development favoring privileged Westerners might continue even in the face of socio-ecological instability. This paper intends to demonstrate how state policies aimed at creating low carbon markets are positioned as a reactionary force under disaster capitalism, which create new modalities of capital accumulation. I illustrate some of the key functions of this emergent phenomenon by examining the relationship between state sponsored low carbon markets and big data — a dynamic interplay that, despite appearances, fosters further dependence on fossil fuels through the dispossession of Black, Brown and indigenous communities around the world. 

First, I explore the crisis that facilitated the datafication of capital -- the dot-com bubble burst of the early 2000s. Second, I explore the implications of the crisis that facilitated the creation of low carbon markets -- the crisis of the fossil economy. Third, I examine how low carbon markets perpetuate the datafication of capital such that data supplants fossil fuels as an organizing structure of the system of capitalism. I conclude by exploring how the internal dynamics of capitalism as a system are maintained through the combination of these two wings of the high technology sector.      

The dot-com bubble burst and the rise of data as capital 

In the neoliberal era, modalities of capital accumulation that emerge in the wake of social, economic, and ecological crises (be they actual or perceived), facilitate the redistribution of wealth from poor to rich through combined and uneven development[5]. Abstractly, this usually means new capital is created for the wealthy to own, new revenue streams are created to preserve the status of the middle class (that simultaneously undermine their stability), and new mechanisms of extraction are created that target/create the dispossessed -- this is what Naomi Klein refers to as “disaster capitalism”. In essence, disaster capitalism recapitulates the dynamics of capital accumulation in response to crises by passing down the risk from the wealthy to the poor. 

In response to the dot-com bubble burst of 2000 as well as the events of September 11th, the Federal Reserve (the central banking system of the United States) continuously lowered interest rates for banks to help the United States’ economy emerge from a recession[6]. This created new capital in the form of AAA-rated mortgage-backed securities, because banks were incentivized to lend in order to generate new revenue from interest on loans[7]. Specifically, banks relied on individual home mortgages as a revenue stream by passing the Federal Reserve’s lower interest rates down to middle class homeowners who could take out cash from their homes through mortgage refinancing or cash-out refinancing to counteract stagnating wages. The federal reserve lowered interest to 1% in 2003, where it stayed for a year. In that time, inflation jumped from 1.9% to 3.3%. However, this proved to be extremely volatile due to lending practices that targeted Black and Brown communities in the United States with predatory loans. The subsequent Great Recession of 2008, disproportionately decimated wealth within Black and Brown communities through housing foreclosures, which redistributed wealth upwards, widening the racial wealth gap[8]. As Wang says, “these loans were not designed to offer a path to homeownership for Black and Brown borrowers; they were a way of converting risk into a source of revenue, with loans designed such that borrowers would ultimately be dispossessed of their homes”[9]. The transfer of capital from the productive sphere into the financial sector of the economy resulted in the financialization of capital via dispossession, breathing new life into the system through the construction of a new frontier for capital.  

The dot-com bubble burst of the early 2000s was a crisis created by failed attempts to transform the technology of the internet into capital. Internet companies during this time absorbed surplus from other markets through investments but failed to turn a profit, creating a crisis that was solved through finance capital and the transfer of risk from wealthy to poor. In the 1990s and early 2000s, internet companies merged with media corporations to create a new frontier for capital based on the increasing popularity of the internet. For example, the America Online (AOL) Time Warner merger, seen as the largest failed merger in history[10], represented a merger of the largest internet subscription company and one of the largest media corporations in the United States. However, this merger failed after dial-up internet was supplanted by broadband -- a much faster and more efficient way to use the internet. Broadband connections, which allowed for continuous use of the internet, helped usher in the Web 2.0 era. Unlike its predecessor, Web 2.0 is defined by internet companies, such as Google, whose value derives in part from its ability to manage large databases that are continuously produced by internet users[11]. Investments in internet technology in the form of data, as opposed to software tools such as internet browsers (e.g., Netscape), transforms data into a modality of capital accumulation akin to fossil fuels. Data, like fossil fuels, supplants pre-existing modalities of capital accumulation by refining their ability to produce a surplus. Thus, whereas the dot-com bubble burst was produced because the internet could not turn a profit after absorbing the surplus of other markets, Web 2.0 is defined by its ability to enhance the surplus produced by other markets by refining their mechanisms of capital accumulation. In the proceeding section I explore how fossil fuels as capital are based on the continued oppression of Black, Brown, and indigenous communities in order to demonstrate how data is supplanting fossil fuels as capital.

Fossil fuels and the cycle of dispossession

Fossil fuels have been an emergent feature of capital accumulation since they were first tied to human and land expropriation at the start of the industrial revolution in Great Britain. Factory owners in British towns used coal to power the steam engines that manufacture textiles from cotton, which was picked by enslaved Africans on land stolen from indigenous peoples. This tethered the consumption and production of coal to the expropriation of enslaved Africans and indigenous ecologies. As a result, coal, alongside enslaved Africans and indigenous ecosystems, became capital -- a resource that could be converted into surplus. Eventually, the steam engine gave the industrial bourgeoisie primacy over the plantation system that preceded it. Coal became the central driver of capital accumulation, which has borne an unsustainable system rife with contradictions. The natural economy, once based on human and land expropriation, gave way to the fossil economy, which uses fossil fuels to extract profit from human and ecological systems. 

Prior to the “industrial revolution” the contradictions of human and land expropriation were apparent in the multitude of slave revolts across the West Indies; in San Domingo, Jamaica, Barbados, etc. These rebellions were not simply slave revolts, they were outgrowths of the contradictions of the plantation system, which were apparent from the time they were established. As Ozuna writes, “centuries of sustained subversive activity prompted colonial authorities to rethink their relationship to the enslaved, and oftentimes, make concessions to preserve the body politic of coloniality”[12]. That is, the fossil economy emerged as a way to avert the crisis of the plantation system.   

The ability to manufacture cotton into textiles at an accelerating rate through the consistent use of coal, which was abundant on the island of Great Britain, became the precedent for colonial expansion in the United States, as well as the slave trade. Thus, human and land expropriation were fused to fossil fuel production and consumption. To put it succinctly, the fossil economy is an outgrowth of the plantation system, which automizes labor to efficiently accumulate capital. In supplanting the “natural economy” coal, and eventually petroleum, became emergent forms of capital accumulation that shifted the apparent contradictions of human and land expropriation.  

 The fossil economy has never transcended the contradictions embedded in human and land expropriation. The climate crisis consolidates the dialectical tension of fossil fuel production and the expropriation of humans, land, and human relationships with land. Likewise, the inability of nation-states to address the climate crisis is embedded in an unwillingness by ruling classes to address the core contradictions of capital accumulation. To address the climate crisis in a socially and ecologically sustainable way these contradictions must also be addressed. The climate crisis can be averted without addressing the contradictions of human and land expropriation, but such attempts will cost more in human life and ecological longevity by recapitulating human and land expropriation through the construction of new modalities of capital accumulation. In the same way that coal enabled the industrial bourgeoisie to expand capital accumulation while deepening its contradictions in centuries prior, data will recapitulate capitalism today. 

Low carbon markets as disaster capitalism

Low carbon markets, such as cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, and consumer tax rebates are market-based, regulatory, environmental policies that seek to disincentivize environmental degradation by establishing a competitive market for low carbon technology to compete with fossil fuel-based markets. The logic of these policies is to encourage fossil fuel companies to pay for the future ecological cost of their markets and to use the funds obtained from these policies to establish new markets that can replace fossil fuels. 

In the case of cap and trade (perhaps the most widely used strategy), a central authority allocates and sells permits to companies that emit CO2, which allows them to emit a predetermined amount of CO2 within a given period. Companies can buy and sell credits to emit CO2 on an open market, allowing companies that reduce emissions to profit from companies’ that do not. This approach was first established over thirty years ago in the United States to phase out lead in gasoline, and sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants that resulted in acid rain[13]. In 2003, the European Union adopted a cap-and-trade approach to CO2 emissions to reach emission reduction goals established during the Kyoto Protocol. Since then, more than 40 governments have adopted cap-and-trade policies aimed at reducing CO2 emissions while introducing minimal disruption to dominant economic processes[14]. 

If we accept the reality that fossil fuels were used to stave off the crisis of the plantation system and maintain capital accumulation via expropriation of human and ecological processes, then it points to the possibility that any new energy source created to maintain capitalism as a system will recapitulate the human and ecological expropriation that is foundational to the system. Thus, economic policies that facilitate the construction of low carbon markets, and that do not question the emergent character of fossil fuels under capitalism, invariably create new frontiers for capital accumulation. Opening such frontiers has been a primary role of the state under capitalism. 

The abolition of enslavement by nation-states across the capitalist system aided in efforts to stave off the crisis of the plantation economy by alleviating the political and ecological tension the slave trade created. Nonetheless, many nation-states continued to expropriate formerly enslaved Africans by forcing them into labor conditions that were conducive to the overarching dynamics of capitalism[15]. Further, other forms of expropriation (e.g., the coolie trade) in newly established colonies within Southeast Asia were made possible by and undergirded the technology produced via the fossil economy. Thus, similar to how capitalism recapitulated its internal dynamics following abolition, it recapitulates its internal dynamics in its efforts to transition off of fossil fuels.   

 This plays into what Naomi Klein termed the politics of disaster capitalism[16]. Under the impetus of averting a climate catastrophe, climate mitigation policies allow industries to profit from the perceived disasters that will be caused by the climate crisis. While the climate crisis is no doubt a real threat to life on this planet, the new orchestrators of disaster capitalism have successfully commodified climate change in perception and solution. The perception is commodified through the implicit narrative that the market is the only solution to a crisis of its own making. Sustainable energy companies, like Tesla Motors, suggest that they have proved “doubters” wrong by producing electric vehicles that perform better than their gasoline counterparts, implying that the only obstacle in the way of addressing the vehicle market’s contribution to the climate crisis is the vehicles themselves. This feeds into the tautological logic used to commodify the solution, which assumes that the market simply needs to reduce CO2 emissions and, because electric vehicles are less CO2 intensive than their gasoline counterparts, they result in less CO2 emissions overall. Nonetheless, because the market operates under the logic of capital accumulation, companies that profit from the disaster playbook are incentivized to create more capital with their surplus, and companies create this surplus capital through datafication.           

The datafication of capital

Data operating as capital has three fundamental components that allow it to operate as a distinct form of capital that is dialectically bound to broader systems of exchange. (1) As capital, data is valuable and value-creating; (2) data collection has a pervasive, powerful influence over how businesses and governments behave; (3) data systems are rife with relations of inequity, extraction, and exploitation[17]. Like other forms of capital, data’s value derives from its ability to create a market irrespective of its utility. The creation of data hinges on its potential to generate future profits, and not on its immediate usefulness. As such, the goal of this section is to establish how data is transformed into capital, not how it is used by any particular firm or institution.  

The disaster politics of the climate crisis are similar in character to the tactics used by Wall Street financiers in the wake of financial crises. However, in addition to using crises as a launching pad for capitalist plunder, the orchestrators of the disaster politics of the climate crisis take advantage of the groundwork laid by finance capital. This is best exemplified in the ascendency of Elon Musk, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who rose to prominence through an unregulated data-driven financial tool, and subsequently became one of the world’s richest people, in part through his companies’ ability to transform the shock of the climate crisis into an endless opportunity for data capital accumulation.

In 1999 Musk co-founded X.com, one of the first online payment systems. It later merged with Confinity Inc. to become PayPal, which is one of the largest online payment platforms in the world today. Similar to other tech companies from Silicon Valley, such as Uber, PayPal functions as a deregulated variant of a pre-existing market. Musk and others recognized the “inefficiency” of checks and money orders used to process online transactions. Online payment platforms bypassed regulations applied to banks when processing payments and led to these inefficiencies; PayPal created a new payment system that regulated itself based on data instead of bureaucracy. 

In many respects PayPal is a digital bank whose main activity is in data instead of finance. PayPal claims that the data it collects is used to increase the security of its transaction, allowing money transfers to occur faster and with more convenience[18]. PayPal obtains its revenue through processing customer transactions and value-added services, such as capital loans. Online payment platforms such as PayPal are increasingly blurring the lines between retail and investment banking, again. For example, the loans that PayPal distributes to businesses are based on PayPal transactions, which are enhanced by PayPal’s data collection techniques. Thus, instead of accumulating wealth from financial instruments, PayPal accumulates wealth from the data it obtains from transactions, which it uses to finance more businesses and expand the number of consumer transactions it processes. This reality on its own has numerous implications for the climate crisis, as data centers, which store data at an exponential rate, rely on fossil fuel energy to operate[19] -- a fact that we will return to later. 

Online payment platforms have also become the shadow benefactors of financial deregulations. For example, the repeal of Obama-era financial regulations in 2016 (installed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis) that required financial institutions to disclose fees and protections against fraudulent charges benefited online payment platforms who were also subject to these regulations until 2016[20]. Here one can see the interest of data and finance aligning around market deregulation. As Sadowski writes, “Like finance, data is now governed as an engine of growth. If financial firms are free to shuttle capital from country to country, then similarly technology corporations must also be free to store and sell data wherever they want.” This is an expansion of the neoliberal project that began decades ago. 

Data, like finance, is being used as a transnational modality of capital accumulation that transforms the role of the nation-state in relation to capital. Similar to how the state became a “lender of last resort, responsible for providing liquidity at short notice”[21] to encourage finance capital, the nation-state is facilitating the rise of data capital through tax-credits, rebates, and cap and trade. To be clear, at the end of the day the state is merely supporting long standing markets of capital accumulation, such as transportation and electricity, by aiding their efforts to create capital from data. Moreover, the state’s encouragement of data capital’s accumulation is increasingly occurring under the veneer of efforts to mitigate global warming.    

Bitcoin’s legacy of expropriation and the climate crisis

After his departure from PayPal Elon Musk founded Tesla, an electric vehicle and clean energy company, in 2003. As a company, Tesla manufactures and sells electric cars, battery energy storage systems, solar panels, and solar roof tiles. However, Tesla’s profits derive from more than just the sale of its products. For example, in the first quarter of 2021 the bulk of Tesla’s profits came from the sales of emissions credits to other automakers, and sale of its bitcoin holdings[22]. This represents the new reality created through the disaster politics of the climate crisis, which merges financial speculation and data capital. 

Carbon credits sold by Tesla to other auto manufacturers, who would otherwise incur fines, allow Tesla to profit from environmental degradation. This is the goal of policies such as cap and trade, as Tesla is profiting from the production and consumption of its low-carbon commodities, which in theory should facilitate the rise of low-carbon markets at the expense of fossil fuel-intensive companies. In addition to cap and trade policies, Tesla benefits from a number of tax credits and rebates that exist across the United States and European Union to encourage growth in low carbon energy markets[23]. Similar to the way cap and trade is meant to incentivize low-carbon technology, the logic of tax credits and rebates is to encourage both producers and consumers to adopt cleaner energy practices as an alternative to fossil fuels by reducing the cost of implementation, and increasing overall capital accumulated from low carbon technology. In theory, this should progress the consumption of less CO2 intensive commodities at the expense of CO2 intensive commodities. However, by using a portion of these profits to buy bitcoin, Tesla is expanding its holdings through the speculative value of Bitcoin, which derives from the ongoing exchange of Bitcoins and the vast stores of energy used to validate these transactions, produce and distribute the currency, and store its data. 

Bitcoin is a popular cryptocurrency, the value of which is determined by a decentralized database known as a blockchain. This is distinct from the valuation of fiat currency, which is typically an outcome of inflation rates and the internal working of a central bank. The data that determines Bitcoin’s value encapsulates the supply and demand of Bitcoin on the market (the same as fiat currencies), competing cryptocurrencies, and the rewards issued to bitcoin miners for verifying transactions to the blockchain. Instead of storing its data in a central location, the data used to verify Bitcoin transactions is stored on multiple interconnected computers around the world. Each time a transaction using Bitcoin occurs, an equation is generated to be solved by a computer in order to confirm the validity of the transaction. The transaction is then stored permanently on data storage devices in 1MB chunks of transactional information. The completed block is then appended to previously existing ones, creating a chain of data that stores the history of all Bitcoin transactions. In effect the Bitcoin blockchain contains the entire history of all transactions that have ever occurred through Bitcoin, and this blockchain is repeated across every data storage device, or node, that composes the Bitcoin blockchain network. Thus, every time a block is completed and chained to the previous blocks, the solution is distributed to every node in the network where the block’s authenticity (the solution to the equation) is verified, and subsequently stored.

As blocks are added to the chain, which verify new transactions through the solution of a complex mathematical equation, new Bitcoin are produced. The equations are structured to identify a 64-digit hexadecimal number called a “hash.” The difficulty of the equations is determined by the confirmed block data in the Bitcoin network. The difficulty of the equation is adjusted every 2 weeks to keep the average time between each block at 10 minutes[24]. “Miners,” those who solve the equations and thereby verify the transactions that make up each block are rewarded for this work with Bitcoin, making it a lucrative market activity in and of itself. Thus, miners are in competition with one another to create new blocks; the more computing power the higher likelihood of successfully earning more coins. Because computers need electricity to function, and more computationally intensive tasks require more electricity, the process of creating new Bitcoin is very energy intensive. A study published in the journal Nature Climate Change in 2018[25] warned that due to its high electricity demands and increasing usage, Bitcoin mining could put the world over the two-degree Celsius tipping point, which would lead to an irreversible climate catastrophe. 

The decentralized structure of blockchains grants Bitcoin users a level of anonymity that is not accessible through traditional currency. Further, as data-based currency is not regulated as traditional currencies are, Bitcoin transfers can be cheaper than a traditional bank’s transactions.  As a result, many Bitcoin transactions are money transfers that benefit from anonymity and “cheapness.” Because Bitcoin’s value is determined in part by the number of transactions, companies, such as Tesla, that trade Bitcoin for profit derive surplus from how Bitcoin is used. This has numerous implications as to how datafication is deriving surplus from the disenfranchisement of Black and Brown communities. 

The climate crisis has created an impetus for the data-based currency, Bitcoin. For example, migrants from the nation-states of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua are increasingly using Bitcoin for remittances[26]. Remittances are funds sent as gifts to friends and relatives across national borders. They comprise more than 20% of El Salvador and Honduras’ GDP, and nearly 15% of Nicaragua and Guatemala’s GDP, as of 2020[27]. Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua have been ravaged by a five-year long climate change-induced drought, which reduced crop yields from corn and beans -- food staples in the region[28]. The recent drought coupled with oppressive government regimes that were supported by the United States’ neoliberal policies are themselves indirect drivers of these currency transfers–– resulting in large-scale migration out of these regions and into relatively stable and wealthy nation-states, such as the United States (where they will be exploited either in ICE detention centers, prisons, jails, or other low-paid wage labor most frequently available to migrants).[29].  

Bitcoin has become an increasingly popular form of currency to send remittances through because (like PayPal) it is cheaper, more efficient, and subject to less regulation than most banks[30]. In early 2021, El Salvador made headlines by announcing that Bitcoin would become a legal currency[31]. The logic behind this move is that Bitcoin will make it easier for people who do not have access to a bank to transfer money back to El Salvador.  Here we see an explicit example of how the politics of disaster capitalism facilitate the construction of new frontiers that recapitulate the environmental harm (e.g. climate change through increased use of fossil fuels) and generate surplus from the climate crisis. Specifically, patterns of migration onset by climate change and U.S. policy create space for new financial tools, such as Bitcoin to fill. The carbon intensity of Bitcoin recapitulates the environmental harm that is partially responsible for mass migration.

Data, renewable energy, and the expropriation of Black and indigenous peoples

Tesla’s investment in Bitcoin demonstrates how low carbon markets recapitulate the internal dynamics of the fossil economy, deriving surplus from the legacy of human expropriation and exasperating the climate crisis. In addition to creating capital from data in the form of Bitcoin, electric vehicle companies like Tesla also create their own data. For decades, automobile producers and rideshare companies have been increasing the data they collect from drivers in an effort to profit from an emerging data market. Everything from speed, breaking habits, vehicle position, and music preferences are collected from individual vehicles and sold to various interests[32]. 

Electric vehicles like Teslas collect and store far more data than their predecessors, and the amount of data collected grows with every new product line. This is due to the ever more complicated hardware and software that comes stock on new vehicles. Specifically, new vehicles are equipped with internal cameras that are capable of capturing video of drivers who use autopilot[33], the reaction of drivers just before a crash, as well as infrared technology to identify a driver’s eye movements or head position[34]. New vehicles also connect directly to smartphones, allowing third parties to collect data on a driver’s travel and driving habits. Further, states are beginning to put forth laws that require automakers to include driver monitoring systems, increasing the pace at which data is extracted from vehicles. For example, driver monitoring systems will be a part of the requirements for Europe’s Euro NCAP automotive safety program as of 2023[35]. All of this increases the demand for data centers to store new data collected from vehicles as well as the propensity for data to operate as capital. 

While a large portion of the data is sold to third parties such as insurance companies who can use data to determine rates, repair shops that can use data to assist mechanics, and automakers who use data to improve their products, vehicle data is also being used to expand the police state. Companies like Berla Corporation are working with police departments to extract data collected from vehicles, which can be used to surveil the population[36]. Through third parties, police departments are able to access data from smartphones that have been linked with vehicles, giving them access to anything from text messages to GPS location[37]. Considering the broader structure of the police state, this data can be used to expand the scope, scale, and authority of an institutionally racist organization, furthering the dispossession of Black and Brown communities. 

New policies implemented by the state, such as the United States’ proposed 1 trillion dollar infrastructure plan[38], include incentives to increase the consumption of electric vehicles, accelerating the number of vehicles that can extract data from drivers. While the goal of these incentives is to increase adoption of electric vehicles to mitigate climate change, the vehicle market will also benefit from the new data collecting techniques embedded in electric vehicles, which will exponentiate the data stored in centers. Moreover, most electric vehicles are still far more expensive than gasoline vehicles, making them only accessible to the middle or upper classes. Thus, efforts to encourage consumption, such as tax rebates to consumers, results in combined and uneven development as middle-class consumers increase their long-term savings while poor people are left out. Moreover, in the past cap and trade has resulted in higher gasoline prices, which means those left out may also absorb the cost of these policies on the petroleum industry[39].  

The apparent silver lining in all of this is the rise of renewable electricity, which could theoretically reduce the amount of fossil fuels used to capture and store data. Crypto currencies and the data collected from an evolving vehicle fleet could theoretically, then, grow without deepening the climate crisis as long as they rely on renewable sources of electricity. Nonetheless, when it comes to capital, there is nothing new under the sun. The climate crisis itself is an outgrowth of the continuous dispossession of the natural economy. Fossil fuels are merely an energy source that aids in this process. The ability to transcend ecological boundaries has facilitated the slow death of populations around the world since before the widespread use of fossil fuels. The first sugar plantations were erected in Madeira and the Canary Islands, to help the Genoese outcompete their Venetian rivals in the European sugar market at the expense of the indigenous life dependent on these islands. Capital’s maturation has been on an ongoing journey of death and destruction. While tracing this legacy is beyond the scope of this paper, suffice it to say that we are currently at a crossroads in the narrative of capital. The disaster politics of the climate crisis and data capital have created a new frontier in the lithium mines of Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. These mines exist on indigenous land, which belongs to the Atacama people.      

Renewable electricity, such as that drawn from wind and solar power, as well as EVs require large lithium batteries to store the energy they use[40]. Lithium, a major component in all of these batteries, is currently being mined at the expense of indigenous people. The Lickanantay who live in the Atacama salt flat of northern Chile, consider the water and brine of this land as sacred[41]. As a result of lithium mining, the Atacama water table is losing an estimated 1,750-1,950 liters per second[42], depleting the sacred resource of Lickanantay people. Moreover, it has been argued that the increased demand for lithium mining has led to a recapitulation of the old neoliberal playbook - military coups. Specifically, the 2019 ousting of then president Evo Morales in Bolivia has been called a coup d'etat against indigenous people in Bolivia[43] in favor of lithium mining interests. 

Conclusion

These recent developments bring us full circle as we can now see the outcome of the disaster capitalist playbook. The state responds to a crisis that it has aided and abetted by creating a new frontier - the low carbon market. The crisis is not global warming per se, rather, the civil unrest that the climate crisis creates. This unrest is addressed through the commodification of both the perception and solution to climate change - e.g. sustainable products such as EVs. The widespread consumption of low carbon technology results in combined and uneven development, allowing the middle class to reduce the long-term cost of travel and electricity at the expense of the underclass who absorb the cost of “environmentally sustainable” technology by becoming more surveilled and incurring the added costs borne by the fossil fuel industry due to its shrinking market share. The widespread consumption of low carbon technology facilitates and accelerates the datafication of capital, expanding the demand for energy within capitalist markets. As of now this demand has been met by fossil fuel interests who have become the benefactors of data capital's need for cheap energy. Nonetheless, as the renewable energy market expands, the need for lithium, located on indigenous land will encourage the further dispossession of indigenous ecologies. In the end, the natural resources needed to produce EVs and the data they gather are a new lease for capital; a new loan for endless dispossession; a refinancing of the climate crisis.                

Notes

[1] Sadowski, Jathan. “When data is capital: Datafication, accumulation, and extraction.” Big Data & Society 6, no. 1 (2019):

[2] Rani Molla “Law enforcement is now buying cellphone location data from marketers” February 7, 2020.

[3] Eric. The folklore of the freeway: Race and revolt in the modernist city. U of Minnesota Press, 2014.

[4] Simpson, Michael. “Fossil urbanism: fossil fuel flows, settler colonial circulations, and the production of carbon cities.” Urban Geography (2020): 1-22.

[5] Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Verso Trade, 2018.

[6] Kimberly Amadeo “Fed Funds Rate History: Its Highs, Lows, and Charts” September 24 2021

[7] Celi, Chris, “Redefining Capitalism: The Changing Role of the Federal Reserve throughout the Financial Crisis (2006–2010)”. Inquiry Journal. No. 3 (2011)

[8] Rakesh Kochhar and Richard Fry “Wealth inequality has widened along racial, ethnic lines since end of Great Recession” December 12th, 2014

[9] Wang, Jackie. Carceral Capitalism. Vol. 21. MIT Press, 2018.

[10] Rita Gunther McGrath “15 years later, lessons from the failed AOL-Time Warner merger” January 10, 2015.

[11] Tim O’Reilly “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software” No. 4578 2007.

[12] Ana Ozuna. “Rebellion and Anti-colonial Struggle in Hispaniola: From Indigenous Agitators to African Rebels.” Journal of Pan African Studies 11, no. 7 2018: 77-96.

[13] Richard Conniff “The Political History of Cap and Trade” Smithsonian Magazine August, 2009;

[14] Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich “These Countries Have Prices on Carbon. Are They Working?” The New York Times April 2, 2019.

[15] Sherwood, Marika, and Christian Hogsbjerg. "After Abolition: Britain and the Slave Trade since 1807." African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter 11, no. 1 (2008).

[16] Klein, Naomi. The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. Macmillan, 2007.

[17] Sadowski, Jathan. “When data is capital: Datafication, accumulation, and extraction.” Big Data & Society 6, no. 1 (2019):

[18] Adam Dillon. “How Paypal Turns Customer Data into Smoother Safer Commerce” Forbes May 6th 2019.

[19] Tom Bawden. “Global warming: Data centres to consume three times as much energy in next decade, experts warn” The Independent. January 23rd 216.

[20] Matthew Zeitlin “Venmo Could Be A Big Winner As Obama-Era Financial Rules Are Scrapped” Buzzfeed February 28th 2017.

[21] Foster, John Bellamy. "The financialization of capitalism." Monthly review 58, no. 11 (2007): 1-12.

[22] Jay Ramey “Tesla Made More Money Selling Credits and Bitcoin Than Cars” Auto Week April 27th 2021

[23] https://www.tesla.com/support/incentives accessed 8/9/2021

[24] https://www.blockchain.com/charts/difficulty accessed 8/11/2021

[25] Mora, Camilo, Randi L. Rollins, Katie Taladay, Michael B. Kantar, Mason K. Chock, Mio Shimada, and Erik C. Franklin. “Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2 C.” Nature Climate Change 8, no. 11 (2018): 931-933.

[26] Enrique Dans. “Bitcoin And Latin American Economies: Danger Or Opportunity?” Forbes July 14, 2021

[27] World Bank Developmentl Indicators https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.TRF.PWKR.DT.GD.ZS?locations=SV accessed 8/13/2021

[28] Jeff Masters “Fifth Straight Year of Central American Drought Helping Drive Migration” Scientific American December 23, 2019

[29] Michael D McDonald. “Climate Change Has Central Americans Fleeing to the U.S.” Bloomberg Businessweek June 8, 2021

[30] Roya Wolverson. “Bitcoin is wooing the millions of workers who send their earnings abroad” Quartz Africa March 26, 2021

[31] Mitchell Clark “Bitcoin will soon be an official currency in El Salvador” The Verge June 9, 2021

[32] Matt Bubbers. “What kind of data is my new car collecting about me? Nearly everything it can, apparently” The Globe and Mail January 15, 2020

[33]  Fred Lambert. “Tesla has opened the floodgates of Autopilot data gathering”. Electrek June 14, 2017

[34] Keith Barry. “Tesla's In-Car Cameras Raise Privacy Concerns” Consumer Reports March 2021.

[35] Euro NCAP. “In Pursuit of Vision Zero”  https://cdn.euroncap.com/media/30700/euroncap-roadmap-2025-v4.pdf accessed 08/3/2021

[36] Mitchell Clark. “Your car may be recording more data than you know” The Verge December 28, 2020.

[37] Sam Biddle. “Your Car is Spying on you, and a CBP Contract shows the Risks” The Intercept, May 3, 2021.

[38] Niraj Chokshi. “Biden’s Push for Electric Cars: $174 Billion, 10 Years and a Bit of Luck” The New York Times March 31, 2021.

[39] Mac Taylor. “Letter to Honorable Tom Lackey” https://lao.ca.gov/reports/2016/3438/LAO-letter-Tom-Lackey-040716.pdf accessed 8/22/2021

[40] Xu, Chengjian, Qiang Dai, Linda Gaines, Mingming Hu, Arnold Tukker, and Bernhard Steubing. “Future material demand for automotive lithium-based batteries.” Communications Materials 1, no. 1 (2020): 1-10.

[41] Amrouche, S. Ould, Djamila Rekioua, Toufik Rekioua, and Seddik Bacha. "Overview of energy storage in renewable energy systems." International journal of hydrogen energy 41, no. 45 2016.

[42] By Ben Heubl. “Lithium firms depleting vital water supplies in Chile, analysis suggests” Engineering and Technology August 21, 2019.

[43] Kinga Harasim. “Bolivia’s lithium coup” Latin America Bureau October 7, 2021.

The Decarceral Possibilities of Political Education

By John Kamaal Sunjata

We must confront the carceral structures mechanistically embedded in our methods of education. Unfortunately, school as a social formation reflects the deeper, carceral logics animating the racial capitalist state. Therefore, we must take an abolitionist approach to education that subverts its institutional patterning—the acquiescence of our collective will, the subordination of our critical faculties, and the total indoctrination of the masses for the purposes of status-quo reproduction. The current style of education (re)fabricates racial capitalist social relations and extends the racial-coloniality of white supremacy. Part of revolutionary political education then must cultivate an environment wherein educators are not mere fonts of carceral authority, but authoritative fulcrums in the invention of decarcerated learning. The student is not an object where “knowledge” is deposited, rather both the student and educator are subjects in the process of learning. Paulo Friere identified the banking model of education, the one we are most intimately familiar with, in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and advocated for what he called the “problem-posing method.” Learning is the process where we gather useful data and construct information in reflective participation and reflexive equilibrium with material reality. Knowledge is the result of this dynamic feedback, a culmination of exertions where we engage our critical faculties and weigh numerous rationales against material reality; material reality itself is an active participant in the process of knowledge-creation. The individualized struggle against the obstacles of intellectualism becomes a shared, collectivized struggle when all concerned parties are partnered together in pitched, dialectical motion as its functionaries.

Education must not be an exercise in the domination of the vulnerable, but an exercise in the liberation of the oppressed. We don’t want to reproduce carceral forms, we want learning environments where freedom flourishes edenistically. The dominant convention supports racial capitalism, racial-colonialism, and white supremacism; the dominant convention is ultimately the state of ordinary and extraordinary oppressions due to the machinations of political economy. If we endeavor to overturn the dominant convention, we must design the learning environments where revolutionaries are created. For education to be a force that produces revolutionaries, we must curate intellectual creativity, curiosity, and critique. Collapsing the relationship of carceral authority that educators hold over students is crucial to creating a shared struggle, and a shared struggle is crucial for mutual respect. As such, mutual respect only springs forth once unjustified hierarchies are directly confronted and vigorously resisted. The natural advantage the educator tends to hold above the student is intellectual experience in the form of crystalized and fluid knowledge. However, despite this, there is still space for shared struggle to occur.

Shared struggle is a necessary and sufficient condition for liberation for, as Chairman Fred Hampton once said, “If [we] dare to struggle, [we] dare to win. If [we] dare not struggle, then…[we] don't deserve to win.” Shared struggle is only possible in the presence of opposition. Opposition always presents a reactionary resistance inversely related to any new sociopolitical currents. Reactionary resistance cannot be overcome without a greater revolutionary opposition or an escalation in the level of shared struggle. So, shared struggle itself is necessary for dramatic ruptures from dominant convention. Protracted relationships of mutual respect transform into relationships of true solidarity. When an educator engages in an abolitionist politic, they will develop true solidarity with their students. When the educator is in true solidarity with their students, their institutional authorities will be utilized to protect the students from the carceral logics of schooling. The educator in democratic consultation with the students will develop ethical and sensible ways to solve interpersonal conflicts without soliciting any part of the carceral state.

An epistemic dialogue is the set of relations dialectically forged between educator–students and student–educators as subjects in learning through the shared struggle within an educational environment, inherited or developed. The communities within the sphere are affected by these dynamics as the subjects engage their material realities based upon new discoveries. True solidarity directly engages everyone with the epistemic dialogue required to collectively transform our material realities. The interactions that take place within the epistemic dialogue can be regarded as epistemic discourses. When we develop our capacities to critically approach epistemic discourses, we are equipping ourselves with tactics and strategies to subvert the dominant convention that defines our current epistemic dialogue. Our capacities are bolstered by sharpening our reflective participation and reflexive equilibrium.

Reflexive equilibrium requires we balance theory against intuitive convictions; develop general principles of ideas alongside their moral judgments, and balance ethical statements with opposing or antagonistic ethical concepts against the moral conceptions undergirding the general principles motivating so-called “common sense.” We must consider the logical corollaries of every decision and anticipate the decisions that our decisions may make. In short, we think, learn, and adjust accordingly through an interactive process.

We must also hone our reflective participation, or our investigation of phenomenon from our experiments and reflecting upon generated insights. Without an abundance of active reflection, in the presence of passive participation, people will default on the side of the dominant capitalist–imperialist paradigm. Counterrevolutionary forces will (re)create what we currently have: a society of pawns. Hence, it is the responsibility of educators and students to prefigure the ecosystem conducive for producing revolutionaries.

The World-Historic Shift Labor Undergoes in Hegel's Philosophy

By Carlos Garrido

Republished from Midwestern Marx.

For most of civilization physical labor, that labor which creates a tangible object, has been seen as an unfortunate task done merely for the sake of acquiring the necessaries of life. The Greeks and Romans in large part relegated this sort of work to slaves. The Middle Ages tell stories of kings, philosophers, theologians, and priests, but not of workers. And the capitalist era, from early mercantilism to modern imperialism, thrives insofar as it has labor to exploit, labor it can reduce to a commodity, labor whose activity and product can be stripped from the laborer. Today most people’s relation to their work is dull at best, a source of life drainage at worst. As a reaction, even many ‘left-wing’ theoretical spaces continue in the tradition of viewing work as an unfortunate necessity – one whose conditions might be improvable, but which is itself not fruitful. It only exists because people need the products it can create.

Although painted with a broad stroke, the history of the greatest minds in Europe has been one which sniffs at the activities for which their abstract mind games depended on. However, can labor be thought of as something done for purposes not limited to those of consumption? Can labor be fruitful and meaningful in itself? In G.W.F. Hegel, for the first time in a prominent western theorist, the response is YES! In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Right one can see what I have elsewhere called a “world-historic shift” in how labor is conceived: from labor as an unfortunate necessity, towards labor as a valuable expression of creative activity which constitutes a moment of liberation. [1]

In the famed lord and bondsman section of his 1907 Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel describes the encounter of two self-consciousnesses with each other, an event plagued with a mutual desire for recognition. After a series of ambiguous supersessions between the two consciousnesses, this encounter leads to a life and death struggle, for “only through staking one’s life is freedom won.”[2] Realizing that “death is the natural negation of consciousness,”[3] for he who is dead cannot think and he who requires recognition for self-consciousness that is in and for itself cannot get it from a dead man, this infantile skirmish ends with one submitting to the other. This submission gives rise to the lord and bondsman, the former who posits himself as “pure self-conscious” and the latter as “merely immediate consciousness, or consciousness in the form of thinghood.” [4]

Although the lord is described as the “pure, essential action in this relation”, because what the “lord does to the other he also does to himself,” the recognition he receives from the bondsman is “one-sided and unequal,” i.e., in the relationship’s reduction of the bondsman to thinghood, his status as independent consciousness is negated and thus unable to afford the recognition necessary for the lord to be certain of his being for-self.[5] Simply put, in sex that you pay for you cannot affirm yourself as a good lover. Hegel concludes that “just as lordship showed that its essential nature is the reverse of what it wants to be, so too servitude in its consummation will really turn into the opposite of what it immediately is… it will withdraw into itself and be transformed into a truly independent consciousness.”[6]

How can Hegel affirm the slave as the one with the potential for ‘truly independent consciousness’? Hegel states that “through work, however, the bondsman becomes conscious of what he truly is.”[7] He continues,

Work forms and shapes the thing. The negative relation to the object becomes its form and something permanent, because it is precisely for the worker that the object has independence. This negative middle term or the formative activity is at the same time the individuality or pure being-for-self of consciousness which now, in the work outside of it, acquires an element of permanence. It is in this way, therefore, that consciousness, qua worker, comes to see in the independent being [of the object] its own independence.

Hence, although his immediate condition is as a slave, his externalization (or objectification for Marxists), although at first appearing as an alien force independent of the bondsman, eventually shows itself as his creation. Through observing the independence of his self-otherization into the object he can, to play with the language of Hegel's Science of Logic, absolutely recoil back into himself and reinstate his initial condition but in a higher form – as true self-consciousness.

Approximately thirteen years after the publication of the Phenomenology, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right reintroduces the liberatory role of labor, albeit without the imaginative and captivating language used in the lord and bondsman moment of spirit’s unfolding. When addressing certain philosophers’ romanticized theories of a ‘state of nature’ where man’s needs were such that the “accidents of nature directly assured to him” enough to subsist, Hegel condemns this view’s inability to see that there is a “moment of liberation intrinsic to work.” [8] For Hegel, this utopianism fails to see that work is meaningful in itself. Yes, its object satisfies needs, cravings, etc., but this satisfactory power of the object is what the French call jouissance, a sort of surplus enjoyment. The objects of labor are valuable [9]; they can fill empty stomachs, warm bodies, provide aesthetic enjoyment, and so on, but the laboring activity which the object presupposes can be valuable as well.

Unlike the traditional views of labor before him, for Hegel the first moment of value in labor is not the object, but the work itself. Work itself is meaningful and valuable because it consists of a dedication of “my time…, my being, my universal activity and actuality, [and] my personality,” [10] into creating, with the “raw materials directly supplied by nature,” [11] that upon which the human community sustains itself. For Hegel, the object labor creates is not simply an independent alien entity, instead, Hegel sees that the object “derives its destiny and soul from [the worker’s] will,” [12] the worker ensouls his object.

Hence, for Hegel the result of labor is 1) the liberating sense of growth, meaning, and flourishing it can provide the laborer and 2) the consumptive growth it brings the consumer (who could, naturally, be the same person). Although this historical-shift is praiseworthy, there are, of course, certain contradictions which ensue from Hegel’s attempt to both: 1) sustain a critique of chattel slavery grounded in his view of labor’s totalizing inalienability, while also sustaining 2) a defense for wage-slavery, grounded in his acceptance of labor’s alienation “for a specific period.” [13]

In my essay, “A World-Historic Shift: Hegel, Marx, and Labour” [14] I further explore how these contradictions arise and how Marx and Engels, by immanently taking Hegel to his logical and practical conclusions, sublate the contradictions Hegel encounters. For now, I simply urge the reader to recognize that this anarchistic disdain of work is not a part of the Marxist tradition. Starting from Hegel, but better formulated in Marx and Engels, labor is humanity’s unique life-activity – it allows one to transform nature consciously and collaboratively in accordance with human needs and aesthetic sensibilities. We must not universalize and fixate the wretchedness of alienated work under capitalism with work in general; for work, when done in a non-exploitative setting, can be the most fruitful and meaningful thing a human can do. In fact, I would argue the few but meaningful moments we do encounter under capitalism are those in which labor takes place in a setting which overflows (albeit never fully) the exploitative logic of capital – e.g., home craft projects, sports, revolutionary militancy, parenting, etc.

Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American graduate student and instructor in philosophy at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. His research focuses include Marxism, Hegel, and early 19th century American socialism. His academic work has appeared in Critical Sociology, The Journal of American Socialist Studies, and Peace, Land, and Bread. Along with various editors from The Journal of American Socialist Studies, Carlos is currently working on a serial anthology of American socialism. His popular theoretical and political work has appeared in Monthly Review Online, CovertAction Magazine, The International Magazine, The Marx-Engels Institute of Peru, Countercurrents, Janata Weekly, Hampton Institute, Orinoco Tribune, Workers Today, Delinking, and in Midwestern Marx, which he co-founded and where he serves as an editorial board member. As a political analyst with a focus on Latin America (esp. Cuba) he has been interviewed by Russia Today and has appeared in dozens of radio interviews in the US and around the world.


References

[1] The article I am referring to is “A World-Historic Shift: Hegel, Marx, and Labor,” which is set to appear in the fifth issue of Peace, Land, and Bread.
[2] Hegel, Georg. Phenomenology of Spirit. (Oxford, 1997), p. 114.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., 115.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., 117.
[7] Ibid., 118.
[8] Hegel, Georg. Philosophy of Right. (Oxford, 1978), p. 128.
[9] To be clear, I am referring to Value as Use-Value here.
[10] Ibid., 54.
[11] Ibid., 129.
[12] Ibid., 41.
[13] Ibid., 54.
[14] See note [i]

Against Enclosure: The Commonwealth Men

[Pieter Bruegel the Elder : The Harvesters (oil painting from 1565)]

By Ian Angus

Republished from Climate & Capitalism.

“I must needs threaten everlasting damnation unto them, whether they be gentlemen or whatsoever they be, which never cease to join house to house, and land to land, as though they alone ought to purchase and inhabit the earth.”

—Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1550[1]

“Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!”

—Karl Marx, 1867[2]

The privatization of land has been justly described as “perhaps the weirdest of all undertakings of our ancestors.”[3]

Enclosure — the transformation of common resources into private property — was a fundamental feature of the rise of capitalism in early modern England. It involved not only new ways of using the land, but also, as both cause and effect, new ways of thinking about it.

The idea that individuals could claim exclusive ownership of parts of nature on which all humans depend was very weird indeed. Contrary to the oft-expressed view that greed is inherent in human nature, the shift from commons-based to private-profit-based farming was not accepted easily — in fact, it was denounced and resisted as an assault of the laws of God and the needs of humanity.

Henry VIII died in 1547, succeeded as king by Edward VI, then only nine years old. For the next six years, actual political power rested with a regency council, headed by the Duke of Somerset until 1549, and by the Duke of Northumberland from late 1549 until Edward’s death in 1553.

Somerset and Northumberland were strong protestants who wanted the English church to move farther from catholic doctrine and practices than Henry had allowed. To promote that, the law outlawing heresy was repealed and censorship was relaxed, beginning a period that has been called “the first great era in the history of English public discussion.”[4]

Liberal protestants took advantage of that opening to campaign vigorously, not just for religious reform, but against sin and corruption in society at large, particularly the erosion of traditional economic values. Their powerful condemnations of greedy landlords and merchants circulated both as books and sermons addressed to the wealthy, and as inexpensive pamphlets and broadsides that were sold in city streets.

They don’t seem to have acted as an organized group, but their speeches and writings clearly reveal the presence of a strong current of anti-capitalist opinion in England in the mid-1500s. Because they focused on the common weal — common good — historians have labelled them the commonwealth men.

Cormorants and greedy gulls

R.H. Tawney’s 1926 book Religion and the Rise of Capitalism remains the best account of the complex connections between social and religious criticism in Tudor England.

“It was an age in which the popular hatred of the encloser and the engrosser found a natural ally in religious sentiment, schooled, as it was, in a tradition which had taught that the greed of gain was a deadly sin, and that the plea of economic self-interest did not mitigate the verdict, but aggravated the offence.

“In England, as on the Continent, doctrinal radicalism marched hand in hand with social conservatism. The most scathing attack on social disorders came, not from the partisans of the old religion, but from divines on the left wing of the Protestant party, who saw in economic individualism but another expression of the laxity and licence which had degraded the purity of religion, and who understood by reformation a return to the moral austerity of the primitive Church, no less than to its government and doctrine.”[5]

The great sin they condemned was covetousness — the desire to accumulate ever more wealth. Hugh Latimer, the most popular preacher of the day, condemned landlords’ greed in general, and enclosure in particular, in a sermon preached before the King and other worthies.

“You landlords, you rent-raisers, I may say you step-lords, you unnatural lords, you have for your possessions yearly too much. For what here before went for twenty or forty pound by year, (which is an honest portion to be had gratis in one lordship of another man’s sweat and labour) now is let for fifty or an hundred pound by year. … Too much, which these rich men have, causes such dearth, that poor men, which live of their labour, cannot with the sweat of their face have a living …

“These graziers, enclosers and rent-raisers, are hinderers of the King’s honour. For where as have been a great many householders and inhabitants there is now but a shepherd and his dog.”[6]

Those views found support in the country’s top ruling circles. The Book of Private Prayer, prepared by Archbishop Cranmer and other officials of the established church in 1553, included a prayer “For Landlords.”

“We heartily pray Thee to send Thy Holy Spirit into the hearts of those that possess the grounds and pastures of the earth, that they remembering themselves to be Thy tenants may not rack nor stretch out the rents of their lands, nor yet take unreasonable fines. … Give them grace also … that they … may be content with that which is sufficient and not join house to house and land to land, to the impoverishment of others, but so behave themselves in letting out their lands, tenements and pastures that after this life they may be received into everlasting dwelling places.”[7]

One of the most vehement critics of greed and exploitation was the London-based printer and poet Robert Crowley, who offered this explanation for the 1549 peasant rebellions.

“If I should demand of the poor man of the country what thing he thinks to be the cause of Sedition, I know his answer. He would tell me that the great farmers, the graziers, the rich butchers, the men of law, the merchants, the gentlemen, the knights, the lords, and I can not tell who; men that have no name because they are doers of all things that any gain hangs upon. Men without conscience. Men utterly devoid of God’s fear. Yea, men that live as though there were no God at all! Men that would have all in their own hands; men that would leave nothing for others; men that would be alone on the earth; men that be never satisfied.

“Cormorants, greedy gulls; yea, men that would eat up men, women, & children, are the causes of Sedition! They take our houses over our heads, they buy our lands out of our hands, they raise our rents, they levy great (yea unreasonable) fines, they enclose our commons! No custom, no law or statute can keep them from oppressing us in such sort, that we know not which way to turn so as to live.”[8]

Condemning “lease mongers that cancel leases on land in order to lease it again for double or triple the rent,” Crowley argued that landlords should “consider themselves to be but stewards, and not Lords over their possessions.”

“But so long as this persuasion sticks in their minds — ‘It is my own; who shall stop me from doing as I like with my own as I wish?’ — it shall not be possible to have any redress at all. For if I may do with my own as I wish, then I may suffer my brother, his wife, and his children toil in the street, unless he will give me more rent for my house than he shall ever be able to pay. Then may I take his goods for that he owes me, and keep his body in prison, turning out his wife and children to perish, if God will not move some man’s heart to pity them, and yet keep my coffers full of gold and silver.”[9]

Back to the feudal

While no one can doubt the sincerity of their criticism of the rich, the commonwealth men were also “united in denouncing the rebels, whose sin could never be justified even if their grievances could.”[10]

The Archbishop of Canterbury, whose denunciation of wealth accumulation is quoted at the beginning of this article, also, in the same sermon, condemned “unlawful assemblies and tumults,” and people who “confound all things upsy down with seditious uproars and unquietness.” “God in his scriptures expressly forbids all private revenging, and had made this order in commonwealths, that there should be kings and governors to whom he has willed all men to be subject and obedient.”[11]

Speaking of the 1549 rebellions, Latimer declared that “all ireful, rebellious persons, all quarrelers and wranglers, all blood-shedders, do the will of the devil, and not God’s will.” Disobedience to one’s superiors was a major sin, even if the superiors were themselves violating God’s laws. “What laws soever they make as concerning outward things we ought to obey, and in no wise to rebel, although they be never so hard, noisome and hurtful.”[12]

Immediately after condemning landlords as cormorants and greedy gulls, Crowley told the 1549 rebels that they had been misled by the devil: “to revenge wrongs is, in a subject, to take an usurp the office of a king, and, consequently, the office of God.” The poor should suffer in silence, awaiting royal or divine intervention.

Like the nineteenth century “feudal socialists” who Marx and Engels criticized three centuries later, the commonwealth men were literally reactionary — they wanted “to roll back the wheel of history.” “From the ills of present-day society this group draws the conclusion that feudal and patriarchal society should be restored because it was free from these ills.”[13]

As historian Michael Bush says, the commonwealth men “showed concern for the poor, but accepted the need for poverty.”

“Without exception they subscribed to the traditional ideal of the state as a body politic in which every social group had its place, function and desert. … They pleaded with rulers to reform society, and proposed various means, but not by changing its structure. Their thinking was paternalistic and conservative. Although they censured the nobility, it was for malpractices, not for being ruling class.”[14]

English protestant reformers in the mid-1500s “inherited the social idea of medieval Christianity pretty much in its entirety,” so their views were “especially antithetical to the acquisitive spirit that animated the emerging society of capitalism.”[15]

In the 1500s, Tawney wrote, “the new economic realities came into sharp collision with the social theory inherited from the Middle Ages.”[16] What shocked and frightened the commonwealth men was not just poverty, but the growth of a worldview that repudiated “the principles by which alone, as it seemed, human society is distinguished from a pack of wolves.”

“That creed was that the individual is absolute master of his own, and, within the limits set by positive law, may exploit it with a single eye to his pecuniary advantage, unrestrained by any obligation to postpone his own profit to the well-being of his neighbours, or to give account of his actions to a higher authority.”

The wolf-pack creed they were fighting, Tawney commented ironically, was “the theory of property which was later to be accepted by all civilized communities.”[17]

A Losing Battle

The commonwealth men were eloquent and persuasive, but they were fighting a losing battle. The aristocrats who owned most of England’s farmland and controlled the government could tolerate public criticism and ineffective laws, but not anything that actually threatened their wealth and power. They blamed the 1549 rebellions on the critics, and quickly ousted the Duke of Somerset, the only member of the regency council who seemed to favor enforcing the anti-enclosure laws.

What remained of the commonwealth campaign collapsed after 1553, when the catholic Mary Tudor became queen and launched a vicious reign  of terror against protestants. Some 300 “heretics,” including Hugh Latimer and Thomas Cranmer, were burned at the stake, and hundreds more fled to protestant countries on the continent.

Capitalist practices already had a strong foothold in the countryside in the 1540s, and they spread rapidly in the rest of the century, without regard to what Christian preachers might say. “Forms of economic behavior which had appeared novel and aberrant in the 1540s were becoming normalized virtually to the point of being taken for granted.”[18]

For landowners who wanted to preserve their estates, that shift wasn’t a choice. It was forced on them by changes beyond their control.

“Between the beginning of the sixteenth century and 1640 prices, particularly of foodstuffs, rose approximately sixfold. … [This] put an unusual premium on energy and adaptability and turned conservatism from a force making for stability into a quick way to economic disaster. Landed families which stuck to the old ways, left rents as they were, and continued to grant long leases soon found themselves trapped between static incomes and rising prices.”[19]

As a result, the trends that Latimer and his co-thinkers opposed actually accelerated, and their vision of a reborn feudal paternalism was replaced in ruling class thought by what historian C.B. MacPherson calls “possessive individualism” — the view that society is a collection of market relations between people who have an absolute right to do as they wish with their property.[20] That view has remained central to all variants of capitalist ideology, down to the present.

Parliament never passed another anti-enclosure bill after 1597, and the Stuart kings who succeeded the Tudors in 1603 only gave lip-service to protecting the poor from enclosure. “Commissions were issued from time to time for the discovery of offenders, but their crimes were pardoned on payment of a money fine. The punishment of enclosers had degenerated into a revenue-raising device and little else.”[21]

As Christopher Hill writes, in the century before the English Revolution, ruling class attitudes toward the land changed radically. “No government after 1640 seriously tried either to prevent enclosures, or even to make money by fining enclosers.”[22]

But only the rich had decided that land privatization was a good idea. The poor continued to resist that weird undertaking, and for some, the objective now was communism.

To be continued …

Notes

I have modernized spelling, and occasionally grammar and vocabulary, in quotations from 16th and 17th century authors.

[1] Thomas Cranmer, “A Sermon on Rebellion,” The Works of Thomas Cranmer, ed. John Edmund Cox (Cambridge University Press, 1846), 196. The date 1550 is approximate.

[2] Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, (Penguin Books, 1976), 742.

[3] Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Beacon Press, 2001), 178.

[4] Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Duke University Press, 1965), xiii.

[5] Richard H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: A Historical Study (Angelico Press, 2021 [1926]), 140-41.

[6] Hugh Latimer, “The First Sermon Preached before King Edward, March 8, 1549,” Sermons by Hugh Latimer, (Christian Classics Ethereal Library)

[7] Quoted in Thomas Edward Scruton, Commons and Common Fields (Batoche Books, 2003 [1887]), 81-2.

[8] Robert Crowley, “The Way to Wealth,” The Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. J.M. Cowper, (Kegan Paul Trench Trubner & Co., 1872), 132-3.

[9] Robert Crowley, “An information and petition against the oppressors of the poor commons of this realm,” The Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. J.M. Cowper, (Kegan Paul Trench Trubner & Co., 1872), 162, 157.

[10] Catharine Davies, A Religion of the Word: The Defence of the Reformation in the Reign of Edward VI (Manchester Univ. Press, 2002), 159.

[11] Thomas Cranmer, “A Sermon on Rebellion,” The Works of Thomas Cranmer, ed. John Edmund Cox (Cambridge University Press, 1846), 192, 193

[12] Hugh Latimer, “The Fourth Sermon upon the Lord’s Prayer (1552)” Sermons by Hugh Latimer, (Christian Classics Ethereal Library) https://ccel.org/ccel/latimer/sermons/

[13] Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 6, (International Publishers, 1976) 494, 355.

[14] M. L. Bush, The Government Policy of Protector Somerset (Edward Arnold, 1975), 61.

[15] Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance (Duke University Press, 1965), 248.

[16] Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 135.

[17] Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 146-7.

[18] Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (Yale University Press, 2000), 202.

[19] Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford University Press, 1965), 188, 189-90.

[20] C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford University Press, 1962).

[21] Joan Thirsk, “Enclosing and Engrossing, 1500-1640,” in Agricultural Change: Policy and Practice 1500-1750, ed. Joan Thirsk (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 67.

[22] Christopher Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), 51.

To End the Rule of Capital, We Must End the Rule of White Supremacy: Revisiting the Work of Noel Ignatiev and Theodore Allen

By Jaime Caro-Morente

“The greatest ideological barrier to the achievement of the proletarian class consciousness, solidarity and political action is now, and has been, white chauvinism.”

-Noel Ignatiev

This phrase that remains relevant was written by Noel Ignatiev in 1966-1967 in his pamphlet “White Blindspot.” Due to the capitalist systemic crisis of 2008 and the awareness that racism is still strong in the US, with help from the Black Lives Matter movement, we find ourselves in a new protest cycle. Although this cycle differs from others that have existed in the US: at the beginning of the 20th century, it was a movement for labor rights and socialism, in the 60s for the emancipation of all human beings from the modern categories of race and gender. This new protest cycle is the crystallization of the idea that neither of the these things that have been fought for in the past have been achieved: there are no meaningful labor rights to speak of, just as there is no emancipation from the oppressive nature of white supremacy (race), patriarchy (sex/gender), and capitalism (class), because the only system capable of remedying each — socialism — has still not been realized.

Ignatiev once proclaimed, “traditionally the Negro people, for very real reasons, have carried forward the demands of the entire working class.” We are at a time when again, there are various theoreticians who think about race and gender, trying to deconstruct and dissolve them. But they always emphasize this deconstruction “of the otherness”, as if deconstructing the otherness could eliminate oppression. We must go further, we have to deconstruct and reduce to ashes the system that had produced that otherness, in this case, White Supremacy and whiteness.

“Thanks” to the Alt-Right interpretation of identity politics: they themselves have assumed they are one more identity. That implies that they interpret their ontologically oppressive position as equal to the oppressed identities, just because the latter are recognized as legally equal to the first by law, even though those laws do not establish a radical equality among them. But the Alt-Right proposal to take whiteness into account as one more identity opens up a world of enormous political possibilities, since it can be easier to deconstruct because “it is an identity and the ones that hold the white privilege see themselves as an identity.”

In the 1960s, both Ignatiev and the independent scholar, Allen, were already studying whiteness and White Supremacy with the hope of being able to destroy it, understanding that only in this way could be achieved a real conscious and combative working class. They both knew, and so they left it written, that whiteness and its associated White Supremacy was an artefact, a device, invented to divide the working class. Whitenesss has a class inception, that is, giving some privilege to a portion of the working class to divide it. Nowadays there are many academics who maintain the interpretation of the history of the United States as a country whose revolutionary history is almost non-existent because the category of race and gender “divided” the US working class, that is: the existence of blacks and women as collectives “with unique demands” divided the working class. Ignatiev and Allen flipped this argument: rather, what divided the working class, and continues to divide it, is (the invention of) the white race.

Allen dedicated almost forty years of his life to chronicle the invention of the white race, and doing so in his book The invention of the white race, he opened with a controversial phrase: “When the Africans arrived at America, there were no whites there.” According to Allen's studies, during the colonial history of the United States, once the colonists realized that the Virginian land was not full of gold as the lands conquered by the Hispanic Empire, they had to decide how to make this land attractive to Europeans and manage to populate it — hence, conquer it. Since the entire expedition almost died in the first year in the very first colony in North America (at Chesapeake, not Plymouth), they had to use indentured servants contracts to bring Europeans and Africans to these lands. Along with these contracts, the discovery of tobacco was what marked the history of the United States and its “special institution.” This monoculture was what enriched the colony, since all the workers were enslaved for a period of time, little by little, in a class struggle, it was tried that this slavery would become for life. The Bacon´s Rebellion, according to Allen, was the final struggle between one class that was driven to slavery against the one that wanted to enslave it. At this time, the class that fought for their liberation was made up of both Europeans and Africans, with no distinction of origin or skin. At the end of this rebellion, the first laws appeared with the term "white,” and the white race was created based on a skin color that will always provide privileges to divide the class without property.

Ignatiev is more political than Allen, and in his work White Blindspot, written in the heat of the Black Liberation movements, he finally flipped all the racist arguments of the whites in the communist parties against these movements of black nationalism such as the Black Panther Party. Ignatiev's main teaching is clear: “only by destroying white supremacism and the white race can solidarity and unity of the working class be achieved.” And the destruction of white supremacism cannot be achieved only by supporting the black liberation movements; it is achieved if the white bodies renounce their privileges, become traitors of their race, and end up destroying it since it is an invention in which sustained privileges on skin-color divide the working class. This statement was polemic in his time, instead of the fashionable argument that the black liberation movement and black nationalism were dividing the working class, the Ignatiev argument says: the white race is an invention, it was invented in order to divide the working class, so the only thing that can divide the working class is the white race, not the black liberation movement.

White Blindspot suggests that White Supremacy is also an artefact that disciplines white bodies. Although whiteness has given to the white bodies privileges as freedom to spend money and leisure of time as they wish without social restrictions for two centuries. Whiteness disciplines these bodies since, although there are white workers who are exploited proletarians and victims of capitalism and the "Law and Industry system," they see themselves as something more than a “simple proletarian.” Ignatiev, paraphrasing Marx, said: “They have more to lose than their chains; they have also to “lose” their white-skin privileges; the perquisites that separate them from the rest of the working class, that act as the base material for the split in the ranks of labor.”

And, of course, this discipline of the white bodies operates in the class struggle, making the white people within the communist and socialist movements say that there are "parallel struggles" to the “working-class one” that divides the workers and disorients them in the real fight that to bury capitalism. Ignatiev rejected this idea of the "parallel struggle" saying that there are no white workers fighting for socialism and black workers fighting for more jobs, housing, and full political rights. There is no distinction in the fights of both collectives. This is a fallacy since "it is not correct to reduce the demands of the Negro liberation movement to more jobs, housing, and full political rights — these are demands of ALL workers.” Here Ignatiev points out that the main demands of the black liberation movements are and have been for centuries, the ending of the white supremacy. And, of course, this demand does not concern only black people, since the struggle against white supremacy affects the entire working class, being the spearhead that would destroy one of the main pillars of capitalism — that of the social control of the working class, which is exercised through whiteness, endowing part of the working class with privileges, which although they cannot fully materialize into freedom because the capitalist system prevents it — to have leisure of time, or spend money on whatever you want, you first have to have that money and capitalism is a system that condemns the majority of the population to a false freedom, which cannot be exercise without money, making the white worker fear "losing something more than their chains."

It is time to recover the writings of theorists like Ignatiev and Allen, mixing them with those of the Black Liberation Movements and the spirit of the rainbow coalition of Fred Hampton, to draw a better future in which there is no oppression, and where human emancipation will be total, burying capitalism and modernity with all its oppressions.

We have to remember that nowadays the most serious terrorist threat is that of white supremacism and the extreme-right connected with the Alt-Right. The Black Liberation Movements and the US 68´s movement inspired philosophers who built the Critical Theory that deconstructed social relations which created the category of race and gender. Now that the Alt-Right and white supremacism are more threatened than ever (and they feel that way), we must continue to deconstruct and destroy whiteness and White Supremacism, including within the ranks of the left and of any movement that aspires to destroy capitalism. Because capitalism cannot be destroyed if whiteness and white supremacism are not removed from the struggle.

In response to criticism of their work, which stated that they “exaggerate the negro question,” Allen contended: “the centrality is the “white question” since white supremacy and white-skin privilege have historically frustrated the struggle for democracy, progress, and socialism in the US,” ultimately reaffirming that, “I venture to state that socialism cannot be built successfully in any country where the workers oppose it – and workers who want to preserve their white-skin privilege do not want socialism.”

Neoliberalism and the Crisis of Higher Education

By Beth Mintz

Republished from Marxist Sociology blog.

I recently published an article in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology that uses the “student as customer” to help understand why college is so expensive. I explore three factors that contribute to high costs:  1) contemporary understandings of education as a private, rather than a public, good; 2) the ways that schools are funded; and 3) the “marketization” of higher ed.  These processes produce students who are customers, but it is important to point out that this change is rooted in a set of neoliberal assumptions that frame the way that we think about, organize, and fund education, rather than any fundamental change in young people.

Neoliberalism is the dominant ideology of this historical moment. It includes a belief in the following:  the efficiency of the free market and the deregulation and privatization of the public sector that markets require; tax reduction; abandoning the welfare state; and replacing the notion of the public good with a personal responsibility for one’s own welfare.  It has informed public policy in every Democratic and Republican administration since the Reagan years, and it currently structures much of our economic and political lives. This includes the university, where it has shaped institutional practice and individual action.

Neoliberal thought considers higher education a financial investment for students, and it assumes that colleges and universities should compete for customers, just like any other sector. These beliefs have laid the foundation for formal higher educational policy and internal institutional procedure. They have not made the academy more efficient, however, but instead have contributed to the runaway expenses that we see today.

In the United States, ideas about the funding of education turn on whether it is considered a public good; that is, whether the whole community benefits from an educated population, or if it is an investment made by the individual, yielding a return in the form of future earnings. In recent years, the latter vision, that of a private good, has gained ascendancy and this has had a profound impact on financing. It helps explain why so much need-based financial aid takes the form of loans rather than grants, and why public colleges and universities are being systematically defunded.

Moreover, although theorists have long argued that schools reproduce the class system, the victory of the neoliberal agenda has intensified the role of education in solidifying advantage. That colleges and universities survive on those who can pay the bills translates into the structural requirement of privileging the affluent, with the needs of many low and middle-income students ignored.  It also has a profound effect on student behavior as education becomes a commodity to be used for competitive advantage in the labor market, turning students into customers to be pursued.

To attract students in a highly competitive environment, colleges and universities invest in all sorts of things to distinguish themselves from other institutions. The way markets work, however, everyone adopts successful practices, and this means that many very expensive innovations eventually become commonplace. This includes the fancy dorms, dining halls and cutting-edge classrooms so common on campuses these days. Indeed, academia has gone on a multi-decade building spree, often financed by long-term borrowing. Between 2002 and 2012, interest payments almost doubled, growing from  $6 billion to $11 billion for four-year (nonprofit) schools. The University of Colorado, for example, owed approximately $1.5 billion in 2019, with 3.6.% of its annual operating budget going towards debt servicing.

Expanded student services are also common recruitment vehicles, and although they do not typically require large capital outlays, they fuel the growth of administrators. Defined narrowly, about 8.4% of spending in private (nonprofit) four-year institutions and 4.9% for comparable publics is on student services. This contributes to the decline in instructional spending as a percentage of total expenses in both the public and private (non-profit) sectors which, in 2017-2018, accounted for 27% and 31%  of four-year schools’ budgets, respectively.  Add to this nearly a half a billion dollars spent on advertising each year, and the role of competition and marketization in tuition escalation becomes clearer.

Among upper middle-class families, prestige has become the centerpiece of college aspirations. When education is viewed as a vehicle for competitive advantage in a labor market – as a private good – and attending a prestigious school is believed to distinguish one from the large pool of competitors, students pursue prestige as a rational strategy for investment maximization.

Colleges and universities understand this well, and, thus, increasing one’s prestige rankings is a central part of many a recruitment strategy.  Indeed, this explains the attention that schools pay to the U. S. New and World Report lists. Attentive institutions have figured out ways to raise their scores and a very common — and expensive – tactic is tuition discounting, where merit scholarships are offered to high achieving customers who would contribute to a school’s selectivity profile. Over time, this practice has spread through academia, so much so that few students now pay full freight. On average, private nonprofits collected  55% of published figures in 2018, with nearly 82% of undergraduates receiving discounts.

Public universities, particularly flagships, use merit aid to recruit academically successful out-of-state students, who contribute to institutional prestige and – theoretically — also counter decreases in state funding by paying higher tuition rates than state residents. But, here again, once everyone has incorporated an innovation, it becomes less effective in distinguishing an institution from its competitors, while the practice remains.  Preliminary research  has found this approach is so pervasive, and the competition so intense, that it may lower total tuition revenue, suggesting that state universities have become particularly vulnerable to the market failure of tuition discounting.

Moreover, merit money privileges the wealthy; it has grown at the expense of need-based scholarships and it goes predominately to upper income students, with awards tending to increase with income levels. This has led to  decreases in the proportion of low income and minority undergraduates in college in general, with public sector schools especially hard hit.

Neoliberalism, the dominant ideology of this historical moment, has contributed to the rise of the “student as customer” with costly ramifications. The contemporary view of education as a private-good, for example, justifies the massive underfunding of higher education and helps explain why we are transferring its cost from the community to the individual. Given the belief in the power of the market, the non-profit world now follows the logic of the private sector, with colleges and universities developing institutional practices to help survive marketization and privatization. Dependence on students who can afford to pay the bills explains many of the strategies that have been widely adopted, but instead of providing advantage in the competition for revenue, they have created very expensive necessities. This contributes to skyrocketing tuition, while affecting the class and racial/ethnic composition of contemporary campuses. When compared to the conventional wisdom of trust the market, then, the conclusion is that corporatization and marketization are important drivers in tuition cost escalation.

Beth Mintz is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Vermont.  Her research interests include occupational segregation, corporate structure, gender, and health care.

To read more, see: Beth Mintz. “Neoliberalism and the Crisis in Higher Education: The Cost of Ideology” in The American Journal of Economic and Sociology 2021.

[Image by Kevin Dooley via Flicker (CC BY 2.0)]

Record Numbers of U.S. Workers Are Quitting and Striking

[Photograph: Evert Nelson/AP]

By Sonali Kolhatkar

Republished from Socialist Project.

On September 14, a young woman in Louisiana named Beth McGrath posted a selfie Facebook video of herself working at Walmart. Her body language shows a nervous energy as she works up the courage to speak on the intercom and announces her resignation to shoppers. “Everyone here is overworked and underpaid,” she begins, before going on to call out specific managers for inappropriate and abusive behavior. “I hope you don’t speak to your families the way you speak to us,” she said before ending with “f**k this job!”

Perhaps McGrath was inspired by Shana Ragland in Lubbock, Texas, who nearly a year ago carried out a similarly public resignation in a TikTok video that she posted from the Walmart store where she worked. Ragland’s complaints were similar to McGrath’s as she accused managers of constantly disparaging workers. “I hope you don’t talk to your daughters the way you talk to me,” she said over the store intercom before signing off with, “F**k the managers, f**k this company.”

The viral resignations of these two young women are bookending a year of volatility in the American workforce that economists have branded the Great Resignation. Women in particular are seen as leading the trend.

The Great Resignation

The seriousness of the situation was confirmed by the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics report showing that a record 2.9 percent of the workforce quit their jobs in August, which is equivalent to 4.3 million resignations.

If such a high rate of resignations were occurring at a time when jobs were plentiful, it might be seen as a sign of a booming economy where workers have their pick of offers. But the same labor report showed that job openings have also declined, suggesting that something else is going on. A new Harris Poll of people with employment found that more than half of workers want to leave their jobs. Many cite uncaring employers and a lack of scheduling flexibility as reasons for wanting to quit. In other words, millions of American workers have simply had enough.

So serious is the labor market upheaval that Jack Kelly, senior contributor to Forbes.com, a pro-corporate news outlet, has defined the trend as, “a sort of workers’ revolution and uprising against bad bosses and tone-deaf companies that refuse to pay well and take advantage of their staff.” In what might be a reference to viral videos like those of McGrath, Ragland, and the growing trend of #QuitMyJob posts, Kelly goes on to say, “The quitters are making a powerful, positive and self-affirming statement saying that they won’t take the abusive behavior any longer.”

Still, some advisers suggest countering the worker rage with “bonding exercises” such as “Gratitude sharing,” and games. Others suggest increasing trust between workers and bosses or “exercis[ing] empathetic curiosity” with employees. But such superficial approaches entirely miss the point.

The resignations ought to be viewed hand in hand with another powerful current that many economists are ignoring: a growing willingness by unionized workers to go on strike.

The Great Strikes

Film crews may soon halt work as 60,000 members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) announced an upcoming national strike. About 10,000 employees of John Deere, who are represented by the United Auto Workers, are also preparing to strike after rejecting a new contract. Kaiser Permanente is facing a potential strike from 24,000 of its nurses and other health care workers in Western states over poor pay and labor conditions. And about 1,400 Kellogg workers in Nebraska, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Tennessee are already striking over poor pay and benefits.

The announced strikes are coming so thick and fast that former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich has dubbed the situation “an unofficial general strike.”

Yet union representation remains extremely low across the United States – the result of decades of concerted corporate-led efforts to undermine the bargaining power of workers. Today only about 12 percent of workers are in a union.

The number of strikes and of striking workers might be far higher if more workers were unionized. Non-union workers like McGrath and Ragland hired by historically anti-union companies like Walmart might have been able to organize their fellow workers instead of resorting to individual resignations. While viral social media posts of quitting are impactful in driving the conversation around worker dissatisfaction, they have little direct bearing on the lives of the workers and the colleagues they leave behind.

One example of how union organizing made a concrete difference to working conditions is a new contract that 7,000 drug store workers at Rite Aid and CVS stores in Los Angeles just ratified. The United Food and Commercial Workers Local 770 negotiated a nearly 10 percent pay raise for workers as well as improved benefits and safety standards.

And when companies don’t comply, workers have more leverage when acting as a collective bargaining unit than as individuals. Take Nabisco workers who went on strike in five states this summer. Mondelez International, Nabisco’s parent company, saw record profits during the pandemic with surging sales of its snack foods. So flush was the company with cash that it compensated its CEO with a whopping $16.8 million annual pay and spent $1.5 billion on stock buybacks earlier this year. Meanwhile, the average worker salary was an appallingly low $31,000 a year. Many Nabisco jobs were sent across the border to Mexico, where the company was able to further drive down labor costs.

After weeks on the picket line, striking Nabisco workers, represented by the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union, returned to work having won modest retroactive raises of 2.25 percent, $5,000 bonuses and increased employer contributions to their retirement plans. The company, which reported a 12 percent increase in revenue earlier this year, can well afford this and more.

Taken together with mass resignations, such worker strikes reveal a deep dissatisfaction with the nature of American work that has been decades in the making. Corporate America has enjoyed a stranglehold over policy, spending its profits on lobbying the government to ensure even greater profits at the expense of workers’ rights. At the same time, the power of unions has fallen – a trend directly linked to increased economic inequality.

Corporations and Legislation

But now, as workers are flexing their power, corporate America is worried.

In the wake of these strikes and resignations, lawmakers are actively trying to strengthen existing federal labor laws. Business groups are lobbying Democrats to weaken pro-labor measures included in the Build Back Better Act that is being debated in Congress.

Currently, corporate employers can violate labor laws with little consequence as the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) lacks the authority to fine offenders. But Democrats want to give the NLRB the authority to impose fines of $50,000 to $100,000 against companies who violate federal labor laws. Also included in the Build Back Better Act is an increase in fines against employers that violate Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards.

The Coalition for a Democratic Workplace, which is a business lobby group that wants anything but democracy in the workplace, is deeply concerned about these proposed changes and sent a letter to lawmakers to that effect.

It remains to be seen if corporate lobbyists will succeed this time around at keeping labor laws toothless. But as workers continue to quit their jobs, and as strikes among unionized workers grow, employers ignore the warning signs of rage and frustration at their peril.

There Is No Substantive Economic Recovery In Sight: Capitalism and Its State Are Running Out of Tricks

Pictured: A Maricopa County constable escorts a family out of their apartment after serving an eviction order for non-payment on Sept. 30 in Phoenix. [John Moore / Getty Images]

By Shawgi Tell

One of the fundamental economic laws under capitalism is for wealth to become more concentrated in fewer hands over time, which in turn leads to more political power in fewer hands, which means that the majority have even less political and economic power over time. Monopoly in economics means monopoly in politics. It is the opposite of an inclusive, democratic, modern, healthy society. This retrogressive feature intrinsic to capitalism has been over-documented in thousands of reports and articles from hundreds of sources across the political and ideological spectrum over the last few decades. It is well-known, for example, that a handful of people own most of the wealth in the U.S. and most members of Congress are millionaires. This leaves out more than 95% of people. Not surprisingly, “policy makers” have consistently failed to reverse these antisocial trends inherent to an obsolete system.

At the same time, with no sense of irony and with no fidelity to science, news headlines from around the world continue to scream that the economy in many countries and regions is doing great and that more economic recovery and growth depend almost entirely, if not entirely, on vaccinating everyone (multiple times). In other words, once everyone is vaccinated, we will see really good economic times, everything will be amazing, and we won’t have too much to worry about. Extremely irrational and irresponsible statements and claims of all kinds continue to be made in the most dogmatic and frenzied way by the mainstream press at home and abroad in a desperate attempt to divert attention from the deep economic crisis continually unfolding nationally and internationally. Dozens of countries are experiencing profound economic problems.

While billions of vaccination shots have already been administered worldwide, and millions more are administered every day (with and without people’s consent), humanity continues to confront many major intractable economic problems caused by the internal dynamics of an outdated economic system.

A snapshot:

1.      More rapid and intense inflation everywhere

2.      Major supply chain disruptions and distortions everywhere

3.      Shortages of many products

4.      “Shortages” of workers in many sectors worldwide

5.      Shortened and inconsistent hours of operation at thousands of businesses

6.      Falling value of the U.S. dollar and other fiat currencies

7.      Growing stagflation

8.      Millions of businesses permanently disappeared

9.      More income and wealth inequality

10.  High dismal levels of unemployment, under-employment, and worker burnout

11.  Growing health insurance costs

12.  Unending fear, anxiety, and hysteria around endless covid strains

13.  More scattered panic buying

14.  The stock market climbing while the real economy declines (highly inflated asset valuations in the stock market)

15.  Spectacular economic failures like Lehman Brothers (in the U.S. 13 years ago) and Evergrande (in China in 2021)

16.  All kinds of debt increasing at all levels

17.  Central banks around the world printing trillions in fiat currencies non-stop and still lots of bad economic news

18.  And a whole host of other harsh economic realities often invisible to the eye and rarely reported on that tell a much more tragic story of an economy that cannot provide for the needs of the people

The list goes on and on. More nauseating data appears every day. Economic hardship, which takes on many tangible and intangible forms, is wreaking havoc on the majority at home and abroad. There is no real and substantive economic improvement. It is hard to see a bright, stable, prosperous, peaceful future for millions under such conditions, which is why many, if not most, people do not have a good feeling about what lies ahead and have little faith in the rich, their politicians, and “representative democracy.” It is no surprise that President Joe Biden’s approval rating is low and keeps falling.

What will the rich and their political and media representatives say and do when most people are vaccinated, everyone else has natural immunity, and the economy is still failing? What will the rich do when economic failure cannot be blamed on bacteria or viruses? To be sure, the legitimacy crisis will further deepen and outmoded liberal institutions of governance will become even more obsolete and more incapable of sorting out today’s serious problems. “Representative democracy” will become more discredited and more illusions about the “social contract” will be shattered. In this context, talk of “New Deals” for this and “New Deals” for that won’t solve anything in a meaningful way either because these “New Deals” are nothing more than an expansion of state-organized corruption to pay the rich, mainly through “public-private-partnerships.” This is already being spun in a way that will fool the gullible. Many are actively ignoring how such high-sounding “reforms” are actually pay-the-rich schemes that increase inequality and exacerbate a whole host of other problems.

It is not in the interest of the rich to see different covid strains and scares disappear because these strains and scares provide a convenient cover and scapegoat for economic problems rooted in the profound contradictions of an outmoded economic system over-ripe for a new direction, aim, and control. It is easier to claim that the economy is intractably lousy because of covid and covid-related restrictions than to admit that the economy is continually failing due to the intrinsic built-in nature, operation, and logic of capital itself.

There is no way forward while economic and political power remain dominated by the rich. The only way out of the economic crisis is by vesting power in workers, the people who actually produce the wealth that society depends on. The rich and their outmoded system are a drag on everyone and are not needed in any way; they are a major obstacle to the progress of society; they add no value to anything and are unable and unwilling to lead the society out of its deepening all-sided crisis.

There is an alternative to current obsolete arrangements and only the people themselves, armed with a new independent outlook, politics, and thinking can usher it in. Economic problems, health problems, and 50 other lingering problems are not going to be solved so long as the polity remains marginalized and disempowered by the rich and their capital-centered arrangements and institutions. New and fresh thinking and consciousness are needed at this time. A new and more powerful human-centered outlook is needed to guide humanity forward.

Human consciousness and resiliency are being severely tested at this time, and the results have been harsh and tragic in many ways for so many. We are experiencing a major test of the ability of the human species to bring into being what is missing, that is, to overcome the neoliberal destruction of time, space, and the fabric of society so as to unleash the power of human productive forces to usher in a much more advanced society where time-space relations accelerate in favor of the entire polity. There is an alternative to the anachronistic status quo.

Shawgi Tell, PhD, is author of the book “Charter School Report Card.” His main research interests include charter schools, neoliberal education policy, privatization and political economy. He can be reached at stell5@naz.edu.

A Critique of Western Marxism's Purity Fetish

By Carlos Garrido

Republished from Midwestern Marx.

Western Marxism suffers largely from the same symptom as Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby – each’s fixation on perfection and purity leaves perpetually unfulfilled all that it claims to desire. On one hand, Jay seeks a return to the purity of his first encounter with Daisy, and in the impossibility of this return to purity, the actual potential for a relationship is lost. On the other hand, western Marxists seek a pure form of socialism, but in the impossibility of such a purity arising, they lose the potential to actuate or defend any socialist revolution. The purity of each is met with the reality that reality itself is never pure – it always contains mistakes, negations, breaks and splits.

Jay Gatsby cannot officially reestablish himself with Daisy insofar as she admits to having loved Tom Buchanan – her husband – during the intermediate time before she re-connects with Jay. This imperfection, this negation of purity, is unacceptable – Daisy must tell Tom she never loved him to reestablish the purity of their first encounter. With no purity, there can be no relationship.

Similarly, for Western Marxists the triumphant socialist experiments of the 20th and 21st century, in their mistakes and ‘totalitarianisms’, desecrate the purity in the holiness of their conception of socialism. The USSR must be rejected, the Spanish civil war upheld; Cuban socialism must be condemned, but the 1959 revolution praised; Allende and Sankara are idols, Fidel and Kim Il-Sung tyrants, etc. What has died in purity can be supported, what has had to grapple with the mistakes and pressures that arise out of the complexities and contradictions of building socialism in the imperialist phase of capitalism, that must be denied.

As was diagnosed by Brazilian communist Jones Manoel’s essay, ‘Western Marxism Loves Purity and Martyrdom, But Not Real Revolution’,  western Marxists’ fetishization of purity, failures, and resistance as an end in itself creates “a kind of narcissistic orgasm of defeat and purity”. Comrade Manoel rightly points out the fact that western “Marxism preserves the purity of theory to the detriment of the fact that it has never produced a revolution anywhere on the face of the Earth”. Western Marxists celebrate the emergence of a revolutionary movement; but, when this revolutionary movement is triumphant in taking power, and hence faced with making the difficult decisions the concrete reality of imperialism, a national bourgeoisie, economic backwardness, etc. force it into, the western Marxists flea with shouts of betrayal! For the western Marxists, all practical deviation from their purity is seen as a betrayal of the revolution, and thus, the cries of ‘state capitalism’ and ‘authoritarianism’ emerge.

Manoel, reflecting on the work of the late Domenico Losurdo’s Western Marxism, does a superb job in providing the meat for this thesis. Nonetheless, he (as well as Losurdo) conceives of this theoretical lapse as being “smuggled in as contraband from Christianity”. I will argue that although Christian mysticism may be present here, the root of the rot is not Christian contraband, but western metaphysics (which precedes Christian mysticism itself). The root, in essence, is found in the fixated categories that have permeated western philosophy; in the general conception that Truth is in the unchanging, in the permanent, in substance; and only indirectly in the mystical forms these have taken under the Christian tradition. The diagnosis Engels gave reductive Marxists in 1890 applies to today’s western Marxists  – “what all these gentlemen lack is dialectics”.

Parmenides Contra Heraclitus

Whereas Manoel and Losurdo see the root of this purity fixation in Christianity, it is in the classical Greek debates on the question of change – taking place 500 years or so before Christ – where this fixation emerges. It will be necessary to paint with a broad stroke the history of philosophy to explain this thesis.

The Heraclitan philosophy of universal flux, which posits that “everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed”, would lose its battle against the Parmenidean philosophy of permanence.[1] Parmenides, who held that foolish is the mind who thinks “that everything is in a state of movement and countermovement”, would dominate the conceptions of truth in the ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary world.[2] Although various aspects of Heraclitus’ thought would become influential in scattered minds, the dialectical aspect of his thought would never be centered by any philosophical era.

Plato, as the next best dialectician of the ancient world, attempted a reconciliation of Parmenides and Heraclitus. In the realm of Forms, the Parmenidean philosophy of permanence would reign; in the physical realm, the Heraclitan philosophy of flux would. In his Phaedo, Plato would note that the realm of the physical world is changing and composed of concrete opposites in an interpenetrative, i.e., dialectical, relationship to one another. In the realm of the “unchanging forms”, however, “essential opposites will never… admit of generation into or out of one another”.[3] Truth, ultimately, is in the realm of the Forms, where “purity, eternity, immortality, and unchangeableness” reign.[4] Hence, although attempting to provide a synthesis of Parmenides’ and Heraclitus’ philosophy of permanence and change, the philosophy of purity and fixation found in Parmenides dominates Plato’s conception of the realm of the really real, that is, the realm of Forms or Idea.  

Aristotle, a student of Plato, would move a step further away from the Heraclitan philosophy of flux. In Aristotle we have a metaphysical system which considers the law of non-contradiction the most primary principle – “the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect”.[5] In addition, in Aristotle we have the development of the world’s first logical system, an impressive feat, but nonetheless composed of abstract fixated categories completely indifferent to content. The fixation found in the logic would mirror the fixation and purity with which the eidos (essence) of things would be treated. Forms, although not existing in a separate realm as in Plato, nonetheless exist with the same rigidity. The thinking of essences, that is, the thinking of what makes a species, a type of thing, the type of thing it is, would remain in the realm of science within this fixated Aristotelian framework. Although the 16th century’s scientific revolution begins to tear away the Aristotelianism which dominated the prevalent scholastic philosophy, only with the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species would Aristotelian essentialism be dealt its decisive blow. This essentialism, undeniably, is an inheritance of the Parmenidean philosophy of permanence.

The philosophy of Plato, in the form of Neo-Platonists like Plotinus, would be incredibly influential in the formation of Christian thought – especially in Augustine of Hippo. Christianity would remain with a Platonic philosophical foundation up until the 12th-13th century’s rediscovery of Aristotle and the synthetization of his philosophy with Christian doctrine via Thomas Aquinas. Centuries later the protestant reformation’s rejection of Aristotelianism would mark the return of Plato to the Christian scene. All in all, the Christianity which Manoel and Losurdo see as the root of the fetishization of purity in every moment of its unfolding presupposes Greek philosophy. It is fair, then, to go beyond Christianity and ask the critical question – “what is presupposed here”? : what we find is that in every instance, whether mediated through Plato or Aristotle, there is a Parmenidean epistemic and ontological fixation which posits the eternal and unchanging as synonymous with truth, and the perishable and corporeal as synonymous with false.

Hegel Contra Parmenides

The spirit of the Heraclitan dialectic will be rekindled by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who argued philosophy came to finally see “land” with Heraclitus. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel says that “there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic”[6]. It is in Heraclitus, Hegel argues, where we “see the perfection of knowledge so far as it has gone”; for, Heraclitus “understands the absolute as just this process of the dialectic”.[7] Heraclitus’ dialectics understood, as Hegel notes, that “truth only is as the unity of distinct opposites and, indeed, of the pure opposition of being and non-being”.[8] This unity of pure being and non-being is the starting point for Hegel’s Science of Logic. Here, he argues:

[Pure] being, the indeterminate immediate, is in fact nothing, and neither more nor less than nothing… Pure being and nothing are, therefore, the same. What is truth is neither being nor nothing, but that being – does not pass over but has passed over – into nothing, and nothing into being.[9]

Insofar as being exists in a condition of purity, it is indistinguishable from nothingness. Being must take the risk of facing and tarrying with its opposite in order to be. Being only takes place within the impurity present in the oscillation and mediation from being and non-being, that is, being only takes place when sublated into becoming qua determinate being, as “coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be”.[10] This is why, in his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel understands that “Substance is being which is in truth Subject”.[11] Substance, whose purity holds the crowning jewel of Truth for western philosophy, can be only insofar as it is “self-othering” itself.[12] Like Spirit, Substance, must look the “negative in the face, and tarry with it”.[13] Only insofar as something can self-otherize itself, which is to say, only insofar as a thing can immanently provide a negation for itself and desecrate its purity by wrestling with the impure, can conditions for the possibility of it actually being arise. Hence, the “truth of being” is “characterized as Becoming”; truth is won “only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself”.[14] Purity, the “[shrinking] from death [to] keep itself untouched by devastation”, is lifeless.[15] Jay cannot be with Daisy insofar as he wishes to retain the relationship in purity. Western Marxists will never build socialism, or find a socialism to support, insofar as they expect socialism to arise in the pure forms in which it exists in their heads.

The Paradox of Western Marxists

Having shifted our focus from Christianity to the purity fixated epistemology-ontology of western philosophy, we can now see the fundamental paradox in Western Marxism: on the one hand, in hopes of differentiating themselves from the ‘positivistic’ and ‘mechanistic’ Marxism that arose in the Soviet Union it seeks to return to Hegel in their fight against ‘orthodox dogma’; on the other hand, although producing phenomenal works on Hegel and dialectics, Western Marxist’s interpretive lens for looking at the world remains with a Parmenidean rigidity and Aristotelian form of binary thinking. Western Marxists, although claiming to be the ones who rekindle the spirit of Hegel into Marxism, are the least bit dialectical when it comes to analysis of the concrete world.

They are unable to understand, as Hegel did, the necessary role apparent ‘failures’ play as a moment in the unfolding of truth. For Hegel, that which is seen as ‘false’ is part of “the process of distinguishing in general” and constitutes an “essential moment” of Truth.[16] The bud (one of Hegel’s favorite examples which consistently reappears in his work) is not proven ‘false’ when the blossom arises. Instead, Hegel notes, each sustains a “mutual necessity” as “moments of an organic unity”.[17] Socialism is not ‘betrayed’ when it, encountering the external and internal pressures of imperialism and a national bourgeois class, is forced to take more so-called ‘authoritarian’ positions to protect the revolution. Socialism is not ‘betrayed’ or transformed into ‘state capitalism’ (in the derogatory, non-Leninist sense) when faced with a backwards economy it takes the risk of tarrying with its opposite and engages a process of opening up to foreign capital to develop its productive forces.

The ‘authoritarian’ moment, or the moment of ‘opening up to foreign capital’, are not the absolute negation of socialism – as western Marxists would have you believe – but the partial negation, that is, the sublation of the idealistic conceptions of a socialist purity. These two moments present themselves where they appear as the historically necessary negations needed to develop socialism. A less ‘authoritarian’ treatment of the Batista goons after the Cuban revolution would have opened the window for imperialism and national counter-revolutionary forces to overthrow the popular revolution. A China which would not have taken the frightening risk of opening up would not have been able to lift 800 million out of poverty (eradicating extreme poverty) and be the beacon of socialist construction and anti-imperialist resistance in the world today.

Hegel understood that every leap towards a qualitatively new stage required a long process, consisting of various moments of ‘failures’ and ‘successes’, for this new stage to mature into its new shape. Using for Spirit the metaphor of a child he says,

But just as the first breath drawn by a child after its long, quiet nourishment breaks the gradualness of merely quantitative growth-there is a qualitative leap, and the child is born-so likewise the Spirit in its formation matures slowly and quietly into its new shape, dissolving bit by bit the structure of its previous world, whose tottering state is only hinted at by isolated symptoms.[18]

Western Marxists ignore the necessity of the process. They expect socialism, as a qualitatively new stage of human history, to exist immediately in the pure form they conceived of in their minds. They expect a child to act like a grown up and find themselves angered when the child is unable to recite Shakespeare and solve algebraic equations. They forget to contextualize whatever deficiencies they might observe within the embryonic stage the global movement towards socialism is in. They forget the world is still dominated by capitalist imperialism and expect the pockets of socialist resistance to be purely cleansed from the corrupting influence of the old world. They forget, as Marx noted in his Critique of the Gotha Program, that socialist society exists “as it emerges from capitalist society which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges”.[19]

Where is Hegel, in concrete analysis, for these Western Marxists? The answer is simple, he is dead. But Hegel does not die without a revenge, they too are dead in the eyes of Hegel. Their anti-dialectical lens of interpreting the material world in general, and the struggle for socialism in specific, leaves them in the lifeless position Hegel called Dogmatism. For Hegel,

Dogmatism as a way of thinking, whether in ordinary knowing or in the study of philosophy, is nothing else but the opinion that the True consists in a proposition which is a fixed result, or which is immediately known.[20]

Western Marxist dogmatist fetishize binaries, the immediate (either intuitive or empirical), and the pure. To them, something is either socialism (if it is pure) or not-socialism (if it is impure). They cannot grapple, in practice at least, with the concept of becoming, that is, with the reality of the construction of socialism. Socialism must be constructed, it is an active enterprise emersed necessarily in a world riddled by imperialist pressures, contradictions, and violence – both active and passive. Western Marxist will write splendid critiques of positivism’s fetish of the ‘fact’, but in their own practical analysis of socialist construction in the world they too castrate facts from the factors that allowed them to exist.

Hence Žižek, the most prominent Hegelian Marxists today, couches his anti-dialectical bourgeois critiques of socialism in Cuba (as well as China and pretty much every other socialist experiment) within a reified analysis that strips the Cuban reality from its context. It ignores the historical pressures of being a small island 90 miles away from the world’s largest empire; an empire which has spent the last 60+ years using a plethora of techniques – from internationally condemned blockades, to chemical attacks, terrorist fundings, and 600+ CIA led attempts on Fidel’s life – to overthrow the Cuban revolution. Only in ignoring this context and how it emerges can Žižek come to the purist and anti-dialectical conclusion that the revolution failed and that the daily life of Cubans is reducible to “inertia, misery, escapism in drugs, in sex, [and] pleasures”.

The Panacea to the Fetishes of Western Marxism

In sum, expanding upon the analysis of comrade Manoel, it can be seen that the purity fetish, and the subsequent infatuation with failed experiments and struggles which, although never achieving the conquest of power, stayed ‘pure’, can be traced back to a Parmenidean conception of Truth as Unchanging Permanence which has permeated, in different forms, all throughout the various moments of western philosophy’s history.

This interpretive phenomenon may be referred to as an intellectual rot because; 1) at some point, it might have been a fresh fruit, a genuine truth in a particular moment; 2) like all fruits which are not consumed, they outlive their moment of ripeness and rot. Hence, the various forms the Parmenidean conception of Truth took throughout the various moments it permeated might have been justified for those moments, but today, after achieving a proper scientific understanding of the dialectical movement in nature, species, human social formation and thought, Parmenidean purity has been overthrown – it has spoiled, and this death fertilizes the soil for dialectical self-consciousness.

Although all theorists are still class subjects, bound to the material and ideological conditioning of their class and geographical standpoint (in relation to imperialism specifically) – the panacea for Western Marxists’ purity fetish is dialectics. Dialectics must not be limited simply to the theoretical realm in which they engage with it. If it stays in this pure realm, it will suffer the same fate socialism has for them – nothingness, absolute negation. Dialectical logic must be brought beyond the textbook and used as the interpretive framework with which we analyze the world in general, and the construction of socialism in specific. Only then will Western Marxism gain the possibility of being something more than a ‘radical’ niche of Western academia, focused only on aesthetics and other trivialities where purity can be sustained without risk of desecration.   

Notes

[1] Wheelwright, Phillip. The Presocratics. (The Odyssey Press, 1975). pp. 70.

[2] Ibid., pp. 97.

[3] Plato. “Phaedo” in The Harvard Classics. (P.F. Collier & Son Corporation, 1937). pp. 70, 90.

[4] Ibid., pp. 71.

[5] Aristotle. “Metaphysics” In The Basic Works of Aristotle. (The Modern Library, 2001)., pp. 736.

[6] Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Lectures on the History of Philosophy Vol I. (K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Company, 1892)., pp. 278.

[7] Ibid., pp. 282, 278.

[8] Ibid., pp. 282.

[9] Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Science of Logic. § 132-134.

[10] Ibid., § 187

[11] Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. (Oxford University Press, 1977)., pp. 10.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid., pp. 19.

[14] Hegel’s Lectures pp. 283 and Phenomenology pp. 19.

[15] Phenomenology., pp. 19.

[16] Ibid., pp. 23.

[17] Ibid., pp. 2.

[18] Ibid., pp. 6.

[19] Marx, Karl. “Critique of the Gotha Program” In Robert C. Tucker’s The Marx-Engels Reader. (W.W. Norton and Company, 1978)., pp. 529.

[20] Phenomenology., pp. 23.

American Fascism: The Men, the Money, and the Myth

By J. Richard Marra

On May Day 2016, well before the election of Donald J. Trump, the Boston Globe published, "'Never forget,' the world said of the Holocaust. But the world is forgetting."[1] In it, Jeff Jacoby worries about its implications for a world experiencing a resurgence of violent right wing political extremism. For American Marxists, the timing may seem ironic. On the day of global celebration for the working class, they are reminded of both the horrors of fascism and their duty to unceasingly oppose it.

Marxist and other commentators appreciate the toxicity of fascism. However, their explanations regarding its features, organization, and operations differ. Each has enriched our understanding, while also introducing a disconcerting complexity and diversity. Accordingly, anti-fascists should aim at simplicity when considering historical fascism and Trump's 'neofascism."

The libertarian commentator George Will understands:[2]

So many excitable Americans are hurling accusations of fascism, there might be more definitions of "fascism" than there are actual fascists. Fascism, one of the 20th century’s fighting faiths, has only faint echoes in 21st-century America’s political regression.

Furthermore, there are problems regarding recognizing fascism and justifying claims about specific political regimes. James P. Cannon recognized this in 1954 with reference to Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy: [3]

Those who would judge specific American forms of fascism too formalistically by the European pattern, arbitrarily limit capitalist aggression against the workers’ movement in two forms:

They see the democratic form by which the workers are suppressed through strictly legal measures in accordance with the law and the Constitution—such as the Taft-Hartley Law, formal indictments and prosecutions for specific violations of existing statutes, etc....

On the other side they see the illegal, unofficial forms of violence practiced by “stormtroopers” and similar shirted hooligans outside the forms of law, as in Italy and Germany. This is characterised as fascist.

This kind of illegal violence under the outward forms of law has a distinctive American flavour; and it is especially favoured by a section of the ruling class which has very little respect for its own laws....This is, in fact, an important element of the specific form which American fascism will take....

Depending on one's perspective, contemporary fascism might appear nowhere, or anywhere. It is nowhere in the sense that Hitler and Mussolini are dead; and America's immigrant detention camps aren't as horrific as Auschwitz. Yet, it can emerge anywhere because capitalism is everywhere, and capitalism is its necessary and structural accomplice.[4] Given the right theorizing, many current capitalist regimes can exhibit fascist characteristics. For Will, fascism can occur anywhere because truculence toward liberal institutions and manners is common in social climates of political polarization and arrogance.

Three methodological problems contribute to the confusion. Consider, first, Lawrence Britt's[5] list of the identifying characteristics of fascism. Its items accurately capture salient features and establish a domain of likely candidate governments. Unfortunately, they don't supply an explanation regarding how any of these, or all of these, characteristics structurally realize the fascist form of governance. Lacking context, lists of attributes can become scattered and unwieldy, and fail to account for time-sensitive social and political contingencies, as Cannon anticipates. In addition, methodologies, and the theories supporting them, evolve over time. Although their theoretical "hard core" remains resistant, subordinate features may change. This may lead to reevaluations of the fascist-ness of political regimes. Finally, although Marxism, unlike capitalism, is fundamentally opposed to fascism, both are nevertheless liable to analytical bias. Will's commitment to capitalism prevents him from even mentioning it. He strips contemporary fascism of its theoretical and historical significance, dismissing it as merely a problem regarding hostile personalities.

To avoid these problems, this account will keep largely to operational matters, focusing on structures and functions. Parsimony is exercised in establishing necessary and sufficient characteristics, and explaining such features will help us introduce context. To do so, it proposes three fundamental structural components: Governance, economy, and ideology. Following Brecht and Lund, it suggests that capitalism plays a central role in the emergence and operations of fascism. However, unlike some Marxists, this analysis stops short of characterizing fascism as an extreme form of capitalism. Accumulation remains the prime purpose of the capitalist modes of production employed within fascism. Nevertheless, capitalists must routinely acquiesce to state requirements, which conveniently include protecting and advancing profitability. Both capitalists and fascists are keenly aware that workers, unions, and communists can negatively affect accumulation and the capitalist state. This mutual need is addressed by managing unprofitable class conflict through the establishment of state-run "corporations."

The Three Characteristics of Historical Fascism

When taken together, the following three necessary characteristics, involving both structural and ideological (especially nationalistic and religious) components, sufficiently define fascism.

1. Governance: Unitary and authoritarian national state controlled by a despotic "Leader."

2. Economy: State control of the economy through a system of sector-based corporations comprised of capitalist enterprises and labor.

3. Ideology: Traditionalist mythology justifying an exclusive moral exceptionalism in governmental affairs imported from 20th-century Futurism.

The key to recognizing fascism lies in appreciating how these characteristics synergize into a unique system of governance. With this in mind, let us now examine each more deeply.

Governance: The Leader Principle

The fascist state functions according to the "Leader Principle."[6] The "Leader" (aka Der Fuhrer, Il Duce) is the single sovereign authority over the state and its people. He/she stands atop a hierarchy of sub-leaders that govern the state's political and bureaucratic organizations. All sub-leaders pledge total obedience to all superiors, but always and primarily to the Leader. The fascist leader is not merely a person, but the ultimate manifestation of a state dynamically driven by its moral "will." In this way, the leader and the state are structurally and functionally identified. Mussolini writes, "the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State...." For Mussolini and Hitler, those consciousnesses, wills, personalities, and morality are theirs.

Economy: The "Third Way"

The leader dictates the structure and operations of the second necessary feature of fascism, an economic system called the "The Third Way." To understand the Third Way, let's compare how capitalists, communists, and fascists manage the class struggle that Mussolini denies.

Capitalists are attentive to class struggle, especially when it interferes with profits. They know that profit comes from their private ownership of the means of production and exploitation of labor. They understand that class struggle between owners and workers is a fact of capitalist social life. Capitalists understand that every rise in workers’ standards of living — living wages, pensions, healthful working conditions — are not only costly, but are costs that directly subtract from their profits. Thus, since workers will naturally demand such benefits, capitalists work continuously to weaken the political power of workers and unions.

For communists, class struggle is a symptom of capitalist social relations; yet they recognize that it is also a tool for working-class liberation. Their aim is to eliminate private control of the forces of production, while relocating ownership across the entire society. "Come the revolution," society will become classless. With the end of class struggle, a democratic economy is established that serves collective economic planning, and the physical and psychological well-being of workers.

Fascists place the needs of the state over all other national constituencies, including both capitalists and workers. This requires minimizing conflict between these two classes. To do this, fascists merge capitalist enterprises and unions into corporations, pairing them according to distinct economic sectors. Each corporation represents a sector of the economy wherein capitalists and labor are collectively bureaucratized, with all power vested in a state governed by an authoritarian leader.

The fascist leader principle is a relatively simple structural and operational conception, which any authoritarian state, fascist or otherwise, can implement. However, fascism couches the principle within a worldview that rejects the ideological foundations of both impotent liberal democracy and Marx's materialist sociology. [7]

...the liberal State is not that of a directing force, guiding the play and development, both material and spiritual, of a collective body, but merely a force limited to the function of recording results...the Fascist State is itself conscious and has itself a will and a personality -- thus it may be called the "ethic" State....

...Fascism [is] the complete opposite of…Marxian Socialism, the materialist conception of history of human civilization can be explained simply through the conflict of interests among the various social groups and by the change and development in the means and instruments of production...if the economic conception of history be denied, according to which theory men are no more than puppets, carried to and fro by the waves of chance, while the real directing forces are quite out of their control, it follows that the existence of an unchangeable and unchanging class-war is also denied - the natural progeny of the economic conception of history. And above all Fascism denies that class-war can be the preponderant force in the transformation of society....

To summarize, the ultimate aim of capitalism is to end class struggle by subjugating the working class. The ultimate aim of communism is to end class struggle by eliminating the capitalist class. The ultimate aim of fascism is to corporatize the capitalist class and eliminate a collectivized working class through the formation of an absolutely supreme leader and state.

Ideology: The Nasty Superman

Fascism has three ideological pillars. The first concerns mythology. Mussolini's fascism is nothing without a myth:

We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, it is passion. It is not necessary that it shall be a reality. It is a reality by the fact that it is a good, a hope, a faith, that it is courage. Our myth is the Nation, our myth is the greatness of the Nation! And to this myth, to this grandeur, that we wish to translate into a complete reality, we subordinate all the rest.[8]

The existential conception of fascism lies in an identification of a heroic people with its leader and national mythology. Consider the two fascist "philosophers" Alfred Rosenberg and Julius Evola. Rosenberg served as the Nazi Party's Commissar for the Supervision of Intellectual and Ideological Education between1933 to 1945. Among his "scholarly" accomplishments is "The Myth of the Twentieth Century,"[9] a uniquely turgid and mind-numbing justification of Nazi anti-Semitism and Aryanism. Julius Evola, one of the founders of 20th-century traditionalism, enjoyed a continuing relationship with Hitler, high-ranking Nazis, and Mussolini. He took Rosenberg's work seriously enough to critique it his "The Racist Conception of History."[10] With Mussolini, myth and tradition join: "Tradition certainly is one of the greatest spiritual forces of a people, inasmuch as it is a successive and constant creation of their soul."[11]

The second foundation of fascism involves not bigotry but nastiness, its truculence finding its roots early 20th-century futurism. Evola enjoyed a brief artistic and philosophical relationship with Filippo Marinetti's Futurist Movement. This connection is important because it exposes the second, and little remembered, ideological foundation of fascism.

Futurism speaks: [12]

...we shall extol aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the double-quick step, the somersault, the box on the ear, the fisticuff.

We wish to destroy the museum, the libraries, to fight against moralism, feminism and all opportunistic and utilitarian malignancy.

We wish to glorify War - the only health giver of the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive arm of the Anarchist, the beautiful ideas that kill, and contempt for woman.

This political grandiloquence finds translation in five of Britt's characteristics: distain for human rights, scapegoating, hostility toward intellectuals and artists, militarism, and sexism. These attitudes and behaviors are not Trump's alone. These come from Marinetti's Futurist Aristocracy (1923), edited by the Italian Futurist Nanni Leone Castelli. Marinetti influenced Mussolini, a person many worldwide view as the epitome of the aggressive and spontaneous futurist hero.

Mussolini the futurist:[13]

The Fascist accepts life and loves it, knowing nothing of and despising suicide: he rather conceives of life as duty and struggle and conquest....

[Fascism]... repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism....war [sic] alone brings up to their highest tension all human energies and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it.

Fascism wants man to be active and to engage in action with all his energies....[14]

For fascists, traditionalism and futurism are tools for cultural atonement, redemption, and political power. The cultural historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke[15] appreciates Evola's and Trump's ideological poison. Fascism:

 ...speaks directly to those who reject absolutely the leveling world of democracy, capitalism, multi-racialism and technology...[Traditionalists] acute sense of cultural chaos can find powerful relief in his ideal of total renewal.

It is not surprising that Steve Bannon, an Evola enthusiast and Trump's past political advisor, boasts, "I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment."[16] Bannon's Lenin isn't a Marxist, but he is a futurist.

Fascism's third necessary ideological feature is a moral "exclusive exceptionalism" in public policy and international relations, particularly justified by its traditionalist mythology. The fascist state claims the exclusive moral right to do what it wishes: no individual, group, or other nation can assert the same right.[17] Antonio Salazar, a former Portuguese prime minister and authoritarian corporatist, explains: [18]

The fascist dictatorship tends towards a pagan Caesarism, towards a state that knows no limits of a legal or moral order, which marches towards its goal without meeting complications or obstacles.

And for Adolph Hitler: [19]

It's a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command - and I'll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad....

The Three Characteristics of American Fascism

Governance: The Fascist Presidency

Since the Civil War, America has enjoyed reasonably stable governance. It's democratic republic, separation of powers, and presidential term limits constrain the rise of tyranny. Capitalism is thoroughly imbedded in its politics, ideology, culture, and religion. It's culture celebrates freedom, democracy, multiculturalism, personal individualism, and egalitarianism; suitably framed in a comforting mythology. It's religious doctrines profess kindness, compassion, and equality among persons.

Taken together, these blessings provide Americans with a deep sense of self-identity and exceptionalism. They also offer few prospects for the rise of a hell bent authoritarian Fuhrer. Yet, for opportunists like Donald Trump, the 2016 election provided just the right circumstances for a heroic self-actualization.

Trump's fascist handler Steve Bannon has a plan. It begins by peddling a well-known TV reality superstar and billionaire entrepreneur as a national hero for the 21st century. He is marketed as a blessed, unconventional, and unrelenting savior. His operatives then inject him into a rapaciously neoliberal capitalist party. That party seizes the opportunity to both deflect growing criticism from disgruntled workers still suffering from the 2008 capitalist crisis and a ballooning wealth gap, while simultaneously safeguarding capitalist profits. Republican spin masters publicly celebrate him in their corporate media, offering him a shot at the Presidency.

Once this leader controls the executive branch, and the Republican Party takes control of the Senate and the Supreme Court, an American fascism will command absolute political authority. It can control national production and labor policy, thus removing class struggle from the political equation. This tactic takes advantage of an increasing centralization of power in the executive branch.[20] This situation is significantly different from the weak power structure at the top of the unstable Weimar Republic in 1930s Germany. Trump will exercise his authority, claiming the exclusive right to do what he wishes, and remain unaccountable. Since this impulsive and aggressive fascist leader is the incarnation of the state, all governmental policy and functions obediently follow suit. Anything or anyone getting in the way will be eliminated.

Trump is a worthy inheritor of Mussolini's political persona. His distain for human rights, scapegoating, sexism, hostility toward intellectuals, and militarism is indisputable. His immigration policy, islamophobia and racism, glorification of sexual molestation, anti-science rhetoric, and massive defense spending all herald a potential American Fuhrer.

Economy and Ideology: Steve Bannon’s 'Third-Way'[21]

Steve Bannon's fascism maximizes the operational efficiency of its governance, and coincidently the profitability of capitalism, through their fusion with the ideology of White-supremacist Christianity. The leader commands a Third Way that subjugates capitalist enterprises and labor under his control through corporations, in order to ameliorate class conflict. Capitalists in this new theo-economic state[22] will enjoy growing profits as before, as workers endure neoliberal social and labor policy that reduces their political presence. Workers will live insecure existences living on subsistence wages, fearing illness, and defaulting on their college loans. They will work more hours, save little, and receive fewer benefits.

In contrast to historical fascism, the American form benefits from an enduring capitalist program to weaken labor. Trump is elected on a day when worker participation in unions is historically low.[23] The Taft-Hartley Act, and the damage done through its original anti-communist provision, continues to block mass revolutionary efforts by workers. There are few mass demonstrations and street battles like those in Germany and Italy during the early decades of the 20th century.[24] More recently, the Supreme Court Citizen's United and "right to work" rulings impair union fund raising and organizing. Trump's truculence toward both organized labor and Wall Street is consistent with a politic that abhors class struggle.

All of this comes with Bannon's traditionalism and Judeo-Christian ethos: [25]

...look at the leaders of capitalism at that time [late 19th- through the 20th-centuries], when capitalism was I believe at its highest flower and spreading its benefits to most of mankind, almost all of those capitalists were strong believers in the Judeo-Christian West. They were either active participants in the [their] faith,...the underpinnings of their beliefs was manifested in the work they did. And I think that’s incredibly important and something that would really become unmoored....I don’t believe that our forefathers had that same belief.

...[S]hould we put a cap on wealth creation and distribution? It’s something that should be at the heart of every Christian that is a capitalist — “What is the purpose of whatever I’m doing with this wealth? What is the purpose of what I’m doing with the ability that God has given us, that divine providence has given us to actually be a creator of jobs and a creator of wealth?"

Bannon imagines America as a restored Judeo-Christian and capitalist nation with Trump as its leader. He revives and consecrates Americans as a new saintly and capitalist volk. The leader leads, and capitalists and workers reap the benefits. Value added: Everyone achieves salvation and immortality, as they are actualized in the form of the fascist state. For Bannon, "What Trump represents is a restoration — a restoration of true American capitalism and a revolution against state-sponsored socialism.[26] This restoration carries the Cross, is wrapped in the American flag, and struts to the tune of a uniquely garish form of exclusive exceptionalism. MAGA emerges as a pathologically narcissistic demon in the form of Trump's exclusive exceptionalism:

They say I have the most loyal people — did you ever see that? Where I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters. It’s like incredible.[27]

Conclusion

George Will places the intersection of futurism and fascism within the broader context of European Enlightenment:[28]

Fascism fancied itself as modernity armed — science translated into machines, especially airplanes, and pure energy restlessly seeking things to smash. Actually, it was a recoil against Enlightenment individualism: the idea that good societies allow reasoning, rights-bearing people to define for themselves the worthy life.

George Will correctly distinguishes "Trumpism" as a populist fad from communism as a political doctrine:[29]

Communism had a revolutionary doctrine; fascism was more a mood than a doctrine. It was a stance of undifferentiated truculence toward the institutions and manners of liberal democracy.

Trumpism...is a mood masquerading as a doctrine, an entertainment genre based on contempt for its bellowing audiences. Fascism was and is more interesting.

Fascism is interesting precisely because it offers a compelling doctrine, a powerful system of governance, and is doggedly persistent over time and space. But, it's also rare. Unfortunately, small samples resist generalization. Cultural, geographic, and historical variables make comparisons difficult. While Marxists understand that the boom-and-bust cycles of capitalism can lead to fascism, they don't often synchronize with other potent proto-fascist interventions. Fascism requires a unique convergence of causes and conditions. Economically, a major crisis of capitalism, significant economic distress among workers, a burgeoning wealth gap, and strong anti-union sentiments and policies prevails. There is a social climate of fear and hostility regarding vivid internal and external threats; citizens distrust distant and detached governance. They are mesmerized by a nativist and nationalist mythology energized by mythic traditions and beliefs. The spark that ignites the inferno of fascism comes as a uniquely clever and hell-bent futurist demagogue.

It is astonishing that an otherwise intelligent species would establish such profligate stupidity, wastefulness, and destructiveness as a system of governance. But it is here and continues to threaten humanity. History begs that we never forget what fascism represents, what it does, and what it takes to remove it from our presence.

Notes

[1] Jeff Jacoby, "'Never Forget,' the world said of the Holocaust. But the world is forgetting," Boston Globe, May 1, 2016, https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/04/30/never-forget-world-said-holocaust-but-world-forgetting/59cUqLNFxylkW7BDuRPgNK/story.html (accessed June 5, 2021).

[2] George Will, "The difference between Trumpism and fascism," The Washington Post, July 10, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-difference-between-trumpism-and-fascism/2020/07/09/377ae76e-c208-11ea-9fdd-b7ac6b051dc8_story.html (accessed June 8, 2021).

[3] James P. Cannon, "Fascism and the Workers' Movement," Marxist Internet Archive, Original publication March - April, 1954, The Militant, https://www.marxists.org/archive/cannon/works/1954/mar/15.htm. (accessed June 23, 2021).

[4] See Bertholt Brecht, "Fascism is the True Face of Capitalism," Off Guardian, Original publication 1935, https://off-guardian.org/2018/12/01/fascism-is-the-true-face-of-capitalism/. (accessed June 23, 2021). Ernest Lund, "Fascism Is a Product of Capitalism," Marxist Internet Archive, Original publication Labor Action September 27, 1943. https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/erber/1943/09/fascism.htm. (accessed June 23, 2021).

[5] Lawrence Britt, "The 14 Characteristics of Fascism," Free Inquiry Magazine, 2003, https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.pdf (accessed June 5, 2021). See also umair, "Are Americans (Really) So Dumb They Don't Know Fascism When They See It?," Eudiamonia, April 6, 2019. https://eand.co/are-americans-really-so-dumb-they-dont-know-fascism-when-they-see-it-34cae64efa72 (accessed May 29, 2021).

[6]  "Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression," A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust, Florida Center for Instructional Technology, 2005, http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/resource/document/DOCNAC3.htm.

[7] Benito Mussolini, "What is Fascism?," Marxist Internet Archive, Reference Archive, Original publication 1932, Italian Encyclopedia, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mussolini/works/fascism.htm. (accessed September 4, 2021).

[8] Franklin Le Van Baumer, ed., Main Currents of Western Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 748.

[9] Alfred Rosenberg, "The Myth of the Twentieth Century," Internet Archive, Original publication 1930,  https://archive.org/details/the-myth-of-the-20th-century-alfred-rosenberg/mode/2up (accessed September 4, 2021).

[10] Andrew Joyce, "Review: Julius Evola's 'Myth of the Blood: The Genesis of Racialism,'" Occidental Observer, September 18, 2018, https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2018/09/18/review-the-myth-of-the-blood-the-genesis-of-racialism/ (accessed June 9, 2021).

[11] Benito Mussolini, "The Doctrine of Fascism (1932)," World Future Fund, http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Germany/mussolini.htm (accessed September 10, 2021).

[12] N. L. Castelli, ed., Futurist Aristocracy (Rome: Prampolini, 1923).

[13] Le Van Baumer, op. cit.

[14] Mussolini, "The Doctrine of Fascism (1932)."

[15] Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2001).

[16] Seth Millstein, "13 Quotes From Steve Bannon That Show The Toxic Worldview He Took To The White House," Bustle, August 18, 2017,

https://www.bustle.com/p/13-steve-bannon-quotes-that-paint-a-diabolical-worldview-he-took-to-the-white-house-77612  (accessed May 24. 2021).

[17] Charles L. Stevenson, "Value-Judgments: Their Implicit Generality," in Ethical Theory in the last quarter of the twentieth century, ed. Norman E. Bowie (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 13 - 37.

[18] "Corporatism," Wikipedia, Wikipedia Foundation, August 30, 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism.

[19] Louis Paul Lochner, What About Germany? (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1943), 11–12.

[20] "The Concept of the Imperial Presidency," UKEssays, May 16, 2017,  https://www.ukessays.com/essays/politics/the-concept-of-the-imperial-presidency-politics-essay.php (accessed September 6, 2021).

[21] Here, I allude to the fascist self-branding of being fundamentally opposed to both capitalism and socialism, offering a third way of social organization. See Roger Eatwell, "The Oxford Dictionary of Political Ideologies," Oxford Handbooks Online, edited by Michael Freeden and Marc Stears, December 2013,

https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199585977.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199585977-e-009 (accessed September 6, 2021).

[22] Jennifer A. Quigley, Divine Accounting: Theo-Economics in Early Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021).

[23] U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2016 Union Membership In The United States, https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2016/union-membership-in-the-united-states/pdf/union-membership-in-the-united-states.pdf. (accessed September 6, 2021).

[24] Mack Harden, "What is Taft-Hartley and Why Is It Bad?," Emergency Workplace Organizing, April 5, 2021, https://workerorganizing.org/what-is-taft-hartley-and-why-is-it-bad-1291/. (accessed September 6, 2021).

[25] J. Lester Feder, "This Is How Steve Bannon Sees The Entire World," November 16, 2016, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/lesterfeder/this-is-how-steve-bannon-sees-the-entire-world (accessed June 8, 2021).

[26] James Hohmann, "The Daily 202: Bannon will be the id, Priebus the super-ego in Trump’s White House," The Washington Post, November 14, 2016,

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2016/11/14/daily-202-bannon-will-be-the-id-priebus-the-super-ego-in-trump-s-white-house/58292237e9b69b6085905df2/ (accessed May 31, 2021).

[27] Katie Reilly, "Donald Trump Says He 'Could Shoot Somebody' and Not Lose Voters," Time, January 23, 2016,

https://time.com/4191598/donald-trump-says-he-could-shoot-somebody-and-not-lose-voters/ (accessed May 21, 2021).

[28] Will, op. cit.

[29] Ibid.