Liberal Democracy: The Bedfellow of Fascism

[Pictured: US Senator John Mccain on stage with Ukrainian neo-Nazi Oleh Tyahnybok back in 2013]

By Erica Caines

Republished from Hood Communist.

Antifascism, as a politic and concept, has grown more appealing in the last 6 years because of the rise of right-wing authoritarianism domestically and globally rooted in patriarchy and ongoing (settler) colonialism. Nonetheless, there remains much confusion about fascism. Earlier this month, I was a featured panelist for a roundtable discussion with the editors of For Antifascist Futures: Against the Violence of Imperial Crisis and author of On Microfascism: Gender War and Death at the Red Emma’s bookstore in Baltimore. It was a compelling cultural and political exploration wherein we engaged the feminist and anticolonial dimensions of antifascism with readers and has since led me to deeper exploration of fascism’s historical relationship to liberal democracy, in the context of this current political and pop culture infused moment. 

African revolutionaries like George Padmore, W.E.B Dubois, Walter Rodney, and most famously Aime Cesaire, have all declared that fascism was only ever considered a new phenomenon when it touched Europe, but it always existed within colonial practices applied in the colonies. As historian Allan ES Lumba acknowledges in the essay “Left Alone with the Colony,” featured in the book AntiFascist Futures:Against the Violence of Imperial Crisis 

“Fascism is not a neat category of political ideology but rather a historical reaction to recurring threat of revolutionary decolonization and the chronic instability of a geopolitical system structured around capitalist empires.” (pg. 72)

I found this particularly useful in helping to gauge the contemporary mainstream usage of fascism which has led many to believe that it’s a thing of the past, and we are simply witnessing a reemergence rather than a continuation.

When George Jackson advised in 1970 that we “settle our quarrels” because “fascism was already here,” it was with the astute understanding that the ongoing decolonization movements happening in the US and abroad were creating a crisis for the white world. Fascism, which emerged in Europe inspired by movements in the US like Jim Crow, did not break from the totalitarian logic and practice of European colonialism. Understanding ourselves as a colonized people within the US (politically, economically, and socially), we can understand that our lives are dictated by the authoritarian policies of a ruling class of a settler colony. The US has always been fascist from inception.

Yet, the US has been able to skirt its history and fascist foundation with its flippant use of “democracy”. Declaring itself as the one true beacon of democracy, “the shining city on the hill”, the US continues to play footsie with fascism in spite of its rhetoric on “human rights”. Liberal democracy breeds fascism, as it is the best ideology and state formation for providing legitimacy to capitalist dictatorship— an unbridled power of capital. Glancing upon the history of the European colonial project, one can clearly see that in all of the colonial empires, workers were provided with forms of “democratic participation” while the colonial empires simultaneously imposed fascism as governance. This should resonate with the current “democratic processes” that exist under this settler colony.

Since the 2020 election cycle began, “fascism” took on a plethora of new meanings, none of which actually accessed the ongoing material conditions surrounding the rise of fascism outside of the Republican Party. In fact, one could easily conclude that “fascists” and “republican” were interchangeable words if they paid close enough attention to the elections. But they are not. The confusion around fascism, weaponized by liberals to drive people to the voting polls, has disallowed any inspection of the primary role the Democratic Party (with its neoliberal, populist, and austerity police state policies) has played by sheltering and coddling this current iteration of fascism. 

AntiFascist Futures opens with an essay by anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj entitled “The Banality of Knowledge” that provides a great intervention in understanding the direct connections between never-ending wars and the continuation and expansion of of fascism particularly pertaining to truth and lies:

“While I recognize the ubiquity, significance, and political power of patently false claims, I want to explore a different configuration of a post-truth world––of knowledge and power––that also operates today. What if the lie, or for that matter, the secret is not the only way to undermine the power of “facts”? How else are (significant, foundational even) “factual truths,” the kinds of truths that exist in the domain of human action and are “political by nature,” rendered politically inconsequential? Given the now widely accepted aphorism that knowledge is power, in actual practice (how) does “knowing” inform politics?” (pg 24)

When we review what has been told to us about the US/EU/NATO proxy war in Ukraine, including the more than $60 billion spent to arm Azov Battelion, Ukrainian National Guard of nazis, the struggle over historical and political facts and truths becomes alarmingly revealing. Many have and continue to approach the US/EU/NATO proxy war in Ukraine as some new phenomena, while having overlooked or disregarded the 2014 coup and the 8 years-long civil war between Ukraine and the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. As such, they have dismissed the fascist elements of the Ukrainian government itself, the Azov Battellion training nazis globally (from Brazil to Charlottesville), and the United States and its allies instigating Russia over its recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics as independent states for the possibility of NATO expansion. None of this is insignificant. There has been a cost for the lies told to American citizens in order for the US to continue to garner support for its attempts to expand NATO and its own imperialist, hegemonic goals.

Mainstream media, a long arm of the state, has continued to deny the 2014 coup as well as the existence of nazis in Ukraine, going so far as to even show Ukrainian soldiers with nazi regalia on national TV. And while the Democratic Party is sounding the alarms about the “loss of democracy” with January 6th trials and another push to “vote out fascism”, they ironically continue to fund and arm nazis in Ukraine to “save democracy.” These lies, that have intentionally caused political and historical confusion, have created the space for fascism to not only grow more organized but increasingly more normalized. We are witnessing iterations of fascism play out in the contentious and close election in Brazil, for example; it can be seen in the liberal embrace of the recent appointment in Italy reinstating Mussolini’s party; even the assassination attempt of the Vice President of Argentina can be traced to a growing fascist movement.  

Instead of addressing the global impact of this lie, mainstream discourse has found ways to focus on individuals. Whether the reckless antics of a head of state or the rantings of a manic African petty bourgeois celebrity, mainstream liberal discourse has chosen to lean into liberal individualism as “analysis.” This, of course, disconnects the hate-filled rhetoric from the ruling class (which politicians and celebrities alike are subservient to) that sympathizes with fascism. This is not about individuals, however, this is about a system that continuously emboldens individuals, who then become organized; what does it mean to rail against this when we are not organized to take power? 

Public discourse prioritizing a good/bad false dichotomy has resulted in surface level conversations about antiBlackness and antisemitism that ignore the function of US imperialism that doesn’t give a damn about the African or the Jew, which is identified through these attempts to continuously expand NATO. How can one attempt to have serious discussions about antisemitism while voting for a party that continues to arm nazis, who have played an integral role in a worldwide upsurge of fascism? Are people expected to ignore the US (and Ukraine’s) vote against the UN General Assembly’s resolution condemning Nazism, neo-Nazism and all forms of racism? How does one contend with attempts to have serious discussions about antiBlackness while never challenging the expansion of AFRICOM, in spite of the uprisings in the Sahel and The Horn? Are people expected to look favorably upon the Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act (HR 7311) which threatens to punish African nations for not supporting a proxy war? Does the latest efforts of western occupation of Haiti being led by the U.S. signal concern for Black lives? 

Neoliberalism and fascism are representatives of two distinct structures or expressions of the same underlying class rule and yet, contemporarily, the rise of fascism in the west is a very real response to the ravages of neoliberalism. What does that mean for the African? Liberal bourgeois democracy, historically and contemporarily, plays a role in the expansion and assertion of fascism. Until we are organized to not only recognize but understand who and what our enemies are and take power, the “discourse” will continue to launder our rage into a far more critical position than we are finding ourselves in now. 

Erica Caines is a poet, writer and organizer in Baltimore and the DMV. She is an organizing committee member of the anti war coalition, the Black Alliance For Peace as well as an outreach member of the Black centered Ujima People’s Progress Party. Caines founded Liberation Through Reading in 2017 as a way to provide Black children with books that represent them and created the extension, a book club entitled Liberation Through Reading BC, to strengthen political education online and in our communities.

Songs About Che

By Louis Brehony

Republished from Monthly Review.

Commodification of the iconic image of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara has failed to dim the revolutionary light that burned on after his CIA assassination on 9 October 1967. Heralded worldwide by liberation fighters, activists and working classes as the heroic guerrilla of the Cuban revolution, a leader of its first socialist government and a relentless Marxist thinker, Che became a central figure of leftist culture in Latin America and beyond. Embedding his principles of duty and aspiration to fight for the future, school children under Cuban socialism pledge daily, “Pioneers for Communism, we will be like Che.” In Hasta Siempre, Commandante, Cuban songwriter Carlos Puebla (1917-89) prophesied:

Your revolutionary love is taking you to new places,

where they await the strength of your arms in liberation.[1]

These words would be sung and translated worldwide, while musicians pledging to carry Che’s torch wrote their own songs to his life, death and the struggles he would inspire in future. From Havana to Santiago, Cairo to Bethlehem, singing about Che Guevara has unsettled elites, ruffled bourgeois feathers and kindled the flame of revolutionary tradition.

Written by Puebla in 1965, as Che parted Cuba to take part in revolutionary movements in Africa and Latin America, Hasta Siempre was, according to its author, “a song of farewell, not death,” and musical representation of Che’s relationship to Fidel Castro. Reading out Che’s parting letter to the Cuban people at the Chaplin Theatre in Havana, Fidel delivered the words written months earlier with characteristic poeticism:

I carry to new battlefronts the faith that you taught me, the revolutionary spirit of my people, the feeling of fulfilling the most sacred of duties: to fight against imperialism wherever it may be. [2]

The audience was in raptures and Puebla, once a target of the pre-revolution Batista regime, [3] was moved to pick up his guitar: “On the unforgettable night when Fidel read out Che’s farewell letter—that same night I wrote the song, Hasta Siempre, Comandante.” [4]

Over the years Hasta Siempre would be emblematic of a society building from the ashes of colonial exploitation and imperialist domination, and came to be sung by Cubans at revolutionary mobilizations, concerts, social occasions, and even at international sporting events. The simplicity of its bolero composition and clarity of identification with the revolutionary movement made Hasta Siempre a grassroots hit with many outside the country. In the Costa-Gavras film State of Siege (1972), Uruguayan police hunting Tupamaros guerrillas fail to silence student loudspeakers while the song blares out proudly during a demonstration. Dozens of cover versions span Buena Vista Social Club, jazz versions by Charlie Haden and Robert Wyatt, French leftist band Zebda and Venezuelan vocalist Soledad Bravo. A pop version recorded by Nathalie Cardone hit number 2 in the mainstream French charts in 1997, helping her to sell over 750,000 albums in the country alone.

Hasta Siempre would not be the only song Carlos Puebla would dedicate to Che. In Lo Eterno, the singer ascends the martyred guerrilla into immortality:

How you were more than a man

A light and example

You will live forever

In the heart of the people.

To Žižek, the words of Puebla wrap Che in Christian mythology, as a “sacred figure where the “normal” criteria of actual achievements no longer matter”. Distanced from Cuban socialism, which Žižek virulently opposes, [5] Che “had to die a miserable death in order to become the cult figure that he is.” [6] Yet those who embraced Che in life and death did so with awareness of the “actual achievements” that his journey of sacrifice and commitment enabled, not least in Cuba. Recorded in 1968, Silvio Rodríguez’ Fusil Contra Fusil (Rifle Against Rifle) predicted that, “All of the Third World will tell of his pain,” through the armed, anti-colonial struggle, with Che’s name collectivized for humanity.

That this process had begun before Che’s martyrdom was evident in 1967’s El Aparecido (The Apparition), as Chilean songwriter Victor Jara (1932-73) captured the relentlessness of a CIA-led manhunt for Che while he remained free among the socialist fighters in the Bolivian mountains. The song, which encapsulated renewed pride in indigenous instruments by Latin American progressives, features a breathless chorus of “córrele, córrele, córrela,” or “run, run, run,” while the overwhelming odds of Che’s mission are starkly put:

Over his head circle,

ravens with talons of gold

How he has been crucified

by the fury of the powerful.

Son of rebellion

he is pursued by battalions.

Because he offers life

they want his death. [7]

In a sign of how Che’s position would divide revolutionaries from social democrats, the song led Jara into criticism from the Chilean Communist Party, angered by emphasis on armed struggle over what it saw as the democratic road to socialism. Decades on from his own torture and murder at the hands of the Pinochet coup, Jara’s works remain popular.

With comparable status to Jara in another key region of anti-imperialist struggle, Egyptian resistance singer Sheikh Imam (1918-1995) was frequently pictured wearing Che Guevara insignia while he played oud and sang an intensely political repertoire. With lyricist Ahmed Fu’ad Negm (1929-2013), Imam offered stinging critiques of a supposedly postcolonial society. Coming both in the wake of Che’s murder and of the June 1967 defeat of Nasser’s Arab alliance by Zionist colonization, their song Gifara Mat (Guevara’s Dead) was dirge-like:

Guevara died, Guevara’s dead, on the radio that’s what they said.

On the street that’s all the news, and in the mosques and in the pews. [8]

The Imam-Negm alliance upset the balance for those apparently committed to keeping radical politics out of Egyptian music. Among these, composer Sayyed Mikkawi hit out at Imam’s stated commitment to “the path of revolution” as an “artist of the people,” asking whether the embrace of Guevara meant that Egypt had “abandoned its own heroes.” [9] Sheikh Imam had attacked the bourgeois pageantry of Mikkawi’s socialite existence and famously lived an austere life among the working class.

Sheikh Imam would be a direct influence on a new generation of Egyptian musical revolutionaries and appeared regularly in the 1980s household of a young Hazem Shaheen, [10] later to become a leading oud virtuoso and songwriter. During the period of struggle against the Mubarak dictatorship, Shaheen’s Iskanderella group took on Guevarist symbolism; Sheikh Imam covers were central to their development. They would sing Nagm’s lyrics a half-century after their composition:

So my dear slaves, here is the lesson. Guevara’s cry is always the same and your choices are but one.

There’s nothing for you to do, but to declaim, prepare for war or be done.

With the reemergence of the Palestinian revolution after 1967, many children in refugee camps in Lebanon and Gaza were adorned with the Arabized name “Gifara,” alongside other names referencing steadfastness and liberation. Speaking to Lena Meari, a former PFLP leader remembered that, “We were fascinated with the Guevarian path and it affected our thinking.” [11] Palestinians would sing for Che too. Among the Palestinian songs to Che included re-writing of national liberation anthems like Bektob Ismik Ya Biladi (I Write Your Name, My Country), with melodies set to new lyrics on Che and sung by communists in Bethlehem, and vocalist Amal Murkus’ Thawri ka-Che Guevara (Revolutionary, As Che Guevara), based on Puebla’s Hasta Siempre. 

This tradition continued with new, 21st Century intifadas. In 2002, Manhal al-Falastini and the Baladna group [12] of Lebanon-based Palestinian refugee musicians sang the lyrics of martyred fighter Abu Ali Talal, in Ughniyat Gifara (Guevara song):

Write your name, Guevara

with a red rose

Its body will become yours, Guevara

and make a revolution.

Following the mass uprising across Palestine in May 2021, the figure of Che appeared in Sawtoka Ya Shaabi (Your Voice, My People), a Palestinianized arrangement of Italian workers’ anthem Bella Ciao, by Palestinian artist Sanaa Moussa. In the song, the cry of patria o muerte, or “homeland or death,” appears between verses of My People Are Alive, by Palestinian poet Samih al-Qasim.

Che was a constant presence in the performing activism of Turkish revolutionary band Grup Yorum, whose vocalists sang Puebla’s Hasta Siempre with both Spanish and Turkish poetry. Before the banning of the group’s performances in 2016 and imprisonment of its members by the Erdoğan government, the musicians played concerts to tens of thousands of mostly leftist supporters. Among those who had sung for Che, leading members Helin Bölek and Ibrahim Gökçek were martyred in death fasts in April and May 2020 respectively. Intensifying repression for their commitment to socialist politics, the prosecution of Grup Yorum had been accompanied by right wing commentators suggesting that their fans’ wearing of Che Guevara-inspired clothing was proof of the musicians’ support for “terrorism.”

In the flash points of struggle against oppression and exploitation, Che remains present. Both a tenacious, enduring voice for the oppressed, and a reminder of the depths to which imperialism and reaction will sink to silence it. As in the songs and music of bygone and living revolutions, singing brings people together in common melody in the fight for a new future. Che once wrote,

The basic clay of our work is the youth; we place our hope in it and prepare it to take the banner from our hands. [13]

Carlos Puebla—Lo Eterno
https://youtu.be/7gXiYuGkNXg

Silvio Rodriguez—Fusil Contra Fusil
https://youtu.be/yEWO3lR99QQ

Sheikh Imam—Gifara Mat
https://youtu.be/tqnyhP7N0rs

Grup Yorum—Hasta Siempre
https://youtu.be/O3FmmnJX-VE

Notes

1. Translation taken from Aviva Chomsky, A History of the Cuban Revolution (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p121.

2. Che Guevara, “Farewell letter to Fidel Castro”, 1 April 1965. Marxist Internet Archive.

3. Robin D. Moore, Music & Revolution (University of California Press, 2006), p53.

4. Sue Steward, Musica!: The Rhythm of Latin America, (Diane Pub Co, 1999), p81.

5. Slavoj Žižek, “Slavoj Žižek on Castro’s death,” 27 November 2016. Author website.

6. Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed, (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), p180.

7. Translation by Aliki Andris-Michalaros for the Inti Illimani 2 album, La Nueva Canción Chilena, 1974.

8. Lyric translation by Elliot Colla.

9. Andrew Simon, Media of the Masses, (Stanford University Press, 2022), p143.

10. Conversation with the author, 20 June 2022.

11. Lena Meari, “Reading Che in Colonized Palestina,” NACLA Report on the Americas, 50:1, 49-55, 2018.

12. Not to be confused with the Jordan-based Palestinian band of the same name.

13. Che Guevara, “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” March 1965. Marxist Internet Archive.

Anti-Ableist Teaching Strategies and Disability Life Photography

[Cover Photo: Steve Darby. Licensed under Creative Commons 2.0.]

By Sarah Pfohl

The following text is from an invited talk shared at ‘Currents’, the 2022 Midwest Society for Photographic Education (MWSPE) Regional Conference in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA on Friday, October 7, 2022.    

Welcome, folks. Thanks very much for being here this afternoon and to the conference organizers for creating space for these ideas and the artistic and pedagogical work I’m making inspired by ideas about ability, legibility, and representation. 

I’m a proudly dis/abled, chronically ill artist and teacher and about 15 years ago, as a graduate student studying education, I came into contact with ideas from disability liberation that completely turned inside out my thinking about myself as a sick person. Over time, these ideas have become foundational to me as both an artist and a teacher. I’ll share a few of those ideas with you, offer some ways you might bring them into your own work with people (in teaching or beyond), if you don’t already, and then talk about the photographic work I’ve been making inspired by the anti-ableist movement that is disability liberation. I’ll move in a couple different directions — teaching, theory, identity, artistic work. In my body-mind, life, and work, it’s all intertwined.

A few final contextualizing notes by way of introduction: 

First, notes on language. In this talk, I’ll refer to ableism, which is oppression based on real or perceived aspects of a person or group’s ability. The language I’ll use throughout this talk is specific and intentional, it may sometimes meet you as surprising. Next, I’ll draw ideas from lots of different arenas of thinking and action including disability studies, disability rights, and disability justice. This talk will provide a really quick, condensed introduction to a few pieces of a huge, rich terrain. I’m skating across the surface, please check out the resource guide for more information, if you’re so inclined, or reach out, I’m happy to chat further. 

I’m one person among so many within the disability community. Data estimate 1 in 4 U.S. adults under the of 65 manages a diagnosis. In other words, the disability community is huge, there are almost certainly disabled people in your midst, whether you realize it or not. The community encompasses billions of people worldwide. I’ll speak here through the lens of my own experiences and on behalf of myself, not on behalf of an entire group of incredibly diverse of people. 

Finally, a ‘why should you care’ note. Taken as a whole, the concepts I offer here mean to invite, increase, and normalize meaningful participation in our world from a huge group of individuals positioned as less than, a huge group of individuals whose separation from the non-disabled world is deeply rationalized, dominantly framed as humane, and in many cases currently legal. Disabled people deserve humane treatment, full participation, and have incredibly valuable perspectives and knowledge to contribute to our world. 

Anti-ableist teaching strategies 

First, I’ll cover three concepts in contemporary disability liberation that might be of use in teaching and learning contexts and beyond. I’ll define each one, or, in one case, paired set, and then talk a little bit about practical implications.

I’ll talk first about the intertwined concepts of the medical model of disability and the social model of disability.

The medical model and social model construct disability in 2 diametrically opposed ways, in particular they locate the origins of disability in 2 very different places. Taken together, the medical and social models can point toward ways in which contexts disable people.

Image source: FutureLearn (n. d.). Models of Disability. [cartoon]. Inclusive Education: Essential Knowledge for Success – Queensland University of Technology. https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/inclusive-education

Accessed via https://inclusiveeducation123.wordpress.com/2020/03/30/breaking-barriers/ on September 15, 2022.

The image above embodies one traditional way of introducing the medical and social models. We see in the center of the image a frowning person using a mobility assistive device (the crutch) and a prosthetic next to a step. On the left-hand side of the image, a medical professional says, “Your impairment is a problem we need to fix.” This speech bubble is labeled as ‘medical model’ On the right-hand side of the image a person using a wheelchair says in reference to the step, “This barrier is a problem we need to fix.” The speech bubble there is labeled as ‘social model’. A few things I want to activate your attention toward in this little cartoon:

Within the medical model perspective, we see disability defined as an impairement—through this it is referred to in deficit-centric, negative terms. This positioning of disability as a limitation, a disorder, a disadvantage is a key characteristic of the medical model. Additionally in the medical model perspective, disability is defined as a condition rooted within an individual, it’s a problem, located first and foremost within a person. By extension, the diagnosed person becomes the problem, especially if they can’t be “fixed”.

The social model perspective provides a counterpoint arguing that disability is not always and only located within the individual, rather it is socially agreed upon and produced out of the interaction between people and the world around them. Within the context of the social model of disability, inflexible, rigid, beliefs, attitudes, and physical structures produce what we call disability through the pathological unwillingness of those forces to shift or change such that they may accommodate a wider range of human diversity.

The social model doesn’t position the disabled person as a problem or as in need of fixing. Rather, it provides a perspective that normalizes human difference as a fact of human life, rather than pathologizing certain ways of being in favor of upholding existing, oftentimes-ableist social norms.

In dominant culture the medical model is normative, you probably have extensive experience with it just by being alive in the world, while the social model of disability reframes thinking and conversations about ability fundamentally. For the purposes of teaching, the paired models provide a number of possibly useful implications:

• Remember that there are a growing number of disabled people who view disability as a part of their identity that connects them to a rich, important, diverse culture with an exciting history and future. Disability pride is a real thing.

• Expect diversity in conceptualizing your teaching. Folks interested in realizing more ability-inclusive teaching moves might check out the Universal Design for Learning framework for suggestions. UDL encourages educators to provide multiple pathways into content engagement alongside multiple means of content representation and learning expression. Within a teaching context, flexibility can be a powerful anti-ableist teaching move. 

• Be thoughtful about the elements of your teaching practice designed to socialize students into an existing normative framework. If you are socializing students toward something, what is the lineage behind that something? I bring this up because when I’ve led PD on these topics previously, one of the most common pieces of push back I get is — but it’s my job to socialize my students even if that’s ability exclusive. Some teachers resist the social model lens because part of their mission is conforming their students into productivity relative to the existing social order. You might be mindful of this, as it can be ability-exclusive given the intense ableism present in our existing social order.  

A few critical notes here:

• The social model of disability, when present in public discourse, is poorly understood and often completely misconstrued. I strongly encourage you not to Google it, because the results bear little relation to the actuality of the concept. Check out the Rethinking Disability book I cite on the resource guide (see below for guide) for reliable information if you want to learn more.

• The social model doesn’t argue against medical intervention. It is not saying that one should stop going to the doctor or that medical support is a bad thing. It does argue that disability-related expertise can be located in many places, within and beyond medical practitioners.

• Finally, the social model doesn’t argue that disabled people must embrace, love, be happy about being disabled. It does challenge the idea that disability is always and only a negative thing, but doesn’t prescribe the feelings disabled people “should” have about themselves.

I’ll close this section with 2 quotes from disability liberation heroes that underscore the value of shifts in thinking connected to the social model construction of disability (both quotes pulled from this NYTimes article).

The first is from disability rights activist Judy Heumann: “The way society thinks about disability needs to evolve, as too many people view disability as something to loathe or fear. By changing that mentality, by recognizing how disabled people enrich our communities, we can all be empowered to make sure disabled people are included.”

The second is from disability justice activist, writer, author, and founder and director of the Disability Visibility Project, Alice Wong: “We [disabled people] should not have to assimilate to a standard of “normal” to gain acceptance.”

The next concept I wanted to bring into the room is much narrower in scope—I wanted to talk about presuming competence as a mindset and lens. I first encountered this concept in Kathleen Collins’ great book Ability Profiling and School Failure: One Child’s Struggle to Be Seen as Competent.

The simple yet revolutionary argument embedded within presuming competence is that disabled people have capacity. Disabled people are often always and only framed around what they can’t do, especially educationally, and the list of can’t dos becomes the center column of that individual’s identity for others. We see this happen educationally especially when the terms of someone’s accommodation rub up against the teaching norms already in place in a particular instructor’s teaching and learning context/teaching practice. Years ago, I worked with an art history professor who very emphatically didn’t allow students to have screens of any kind in their classes but received, during the first week of school, an accommodation letter from a student indicating that they required the use of a laptop for note-taking during class meetings. Of course, an ADA accommodation is a legally-binding document and violating the terms of an accommodation is a violation of the student’s federally-mandated civil rights under the ADA. The student became “the student who can’t write their own notes by hand” and instead of finding a creative solution the professor pushed the student out of the class. They told the student to either stop using the screen or sit in the back of the classroom so that they didn’t “distract” their peers with the screen. The student dropped the class in response. 

Disabled people can do a lot of things! We carry so much capacity. Finding creative ways to align existing circumstances with an individual’s existing capacities to in turn promote more full participation can produce more ability-based inclusion for all. An argument for teaching from disability liberation is to keep the learning goals the same, but increase the pathways toward them. A couple years ago I worked with a sculpture professor who had a project that included chop saw use. He knew several incoming students would not be able to use the chop saw as it was installed in the wood shop. In conversation, it turned out that the primary project learning goal was centered around creating a modular object, so in that particular case increasing the number of materials with which students could work, allowing students to work with both wood and paper, increased accessibility while maintaining the project objectives. 

The last concept that I want to talk about is language associated with disability. Here the literature has a couple different suggestions. The first suggestion has to do with ability-related identifiers people use. Here’s a list of preferred ability-identifiers of some of my friends: 

disabled, dis/abled, Disabled, sick, crip, Mad, neurodivergent, chronically ill, ability non-normative, disabled person, person with a disability, physically ill, mentally ill, Sick

Which ones are right? There are no monolithically correct identifiers that I know of at this time. 

Don’t most of these words mean the same thing? No, they don’t. Disability as an identity and cultural category is incredibly diverse, one person’s relationship to a particular identifier may be totally different than another person’s relationship to the same word. 

Here’s what I can offer: People’s identifiers are highly specific and personal, use the language offered by individuals as they offer it. In the same way that you wouldn’t correct a student on the spelling of their name or pronoun use, don’t correct someone’s ability-related identifiers—accept what they tell you. Different identifiers do connect to different movements and spheres of thinking within disability liberation. Assume people use the language with which they identify themselves intentionally and honor it. SLIDE

In my own case, I use dis/abled and chronically ill. I use the word disabled to name the social conditions under which I live my life. What I mean by that is that I live in a world that constantly, tens of times each day, reminds me that I don’t belong here and I should normalize or get out because the diversity I embody isn’t important.

I write dis/abled with a back slash between dis and abled to connect myself back explicitly back to disability studies. Dis/abled is how some folks in disability studies write disabled to underscore the socially constructed nature of disability at a formal, linguistic level and that resonates for me, so I use it. Disability studies is also where I first encountered ideas that fundamentally reframed my thinking about ability and illness, so my use of a term anchored there as an identifier does honor to others’ works and points toward my affiliations. 

I say ‘chronically ill’ to hold up and foreground my biological reality as a person engaged in the constant labor and care associated with managing multiple, incurable diagnoses. 

And all of these will grow and change as the movement grows and changes, which is a beautiful thing.

Second, relative to disability-related language I wanted to be sure to identify the distinction between person-first and identity-first language. Many folks have heard of person-first language as it pertains to ability. To summarize, the idea is that one says ‘individual with a disability’ or ‘person with [insert diagnosis]’ foregrounding the person first and ability status second, rather than the inverse—foregrounding the ability status first and the person second. Folks who prescribe to person-first linguistic patterns argue that by naming first the individual, the individual becomes less defined by their ability status. 

Identity-first language turns that around and argues that linguistically foregrounding ability-related identity by saying ‘disabled person’ promotes disability pride and de-stigmatizes oftentimes-negative preconceptions of the word disabled. Some proponents of identity-first language also argue that in using that language pattern they name disabled people’s life experiences as they more truly are—an ableist world reminds disabled people that they do not belong. A common argument against person-first language from a disabled person is, “I’ll use person-first language when I start getting treated like a person.” As you may have noticed, I’m using identity-first language throughout this presentation.

For a long time person-first language (person with a disability) was far more common and that linguistic norm is very present in many fields, especially medical and educational spheres. It isn’t a bad approach, especially if you’re non-disabled and talking about disability or you find yourself in the position of having to choose one or the other. In those moments, person-first works great. 

However, if you encounter someone, like a student, who is disabled and uses identity-first language honor that. Again, use the identifiers someone supplies you and assume identifiers used are used intentionally. Resist the urge to teach a disabled person who identifies as a disabled person about person-first language.

The final perspective from the intersections between language and ability I wanted to offer into this space is an invitation to use and model anti-ableist language. 

Ableist slurs are quite common and often used unintentionally. They might emerge as language patterns that position a diagnosis category or way of being in general in a negative light or from a deficit standpoint. A few examples and how they would be corrected: 

• I was engaged in a blind struggle to move forward. — I was engaged in a careless struggle to move forward. 

• He’s stuck in a wheelchair. — He uses a wheelchair.

• That’s a lame excuse. — That’s an inadequate excuse.

It seems subtle, but it’s a big deal. I find that more and more of my students know this content and read the world around them, looking for mentors and allyship, informed by the subtle hints provided by the gatekeepers in their lives. Lots of disabled young people in higher education don’t and won’t disclose but need help and actively decreasing ableist slur use helps vulnerable students find folks who can provide critical support. Again, the tip of a huge iceberg but a brief outline of ideas I’ve come into contact with that have been useful to me as a teacher.

As I mentioned, statistically 1 in 4 U.S. adults under the age of 65 fall into the category of disabled. Which would mean, if, for example, you’re a teacher in higher education, that in a class of 20 students you should statistically receive 5 accommodation letters. Of course, there are many reasons people don’t self-identify formally through disability services. I share these numbers to underscore that ability-related non-normativity may be far more present in the spaces within which you move than you realize. These ideas, aimed at promoting the humanity and humane treatment of people historically treated terribly (Google ‘Willowbrook’ for more information) can have a big impact even if you think they might not pertain to you.

Imaging what’s wrong with me

I’ll shift now to the artistic work I’ve been making precipitated by the ideas I just shared and start with some facts about my body. 

The primary biological diagnosis with which I was born is currently called osteogenesis imperfecta, abbreviated as OI. As a diagnosis category, OI is characterized by the OI Foundation, the primary US-based advocacy body associated with it, as “complicated, variable, and rare” in appearance. Statistically, worldwide, around 1 in every 15,000-20,000 people lives with osteogenesis imperfecta. Within the context of my own life, I’ve never knowingly met in person someone else with OI. 

With OI, which is incurable, I have less of a particular protein in my body than deemed medically normal and within that, the smaller amount of that protein I do have is designated, in medical terms, as “qualitatively abnormal”, which is one of the many fun things I get to hear medical professionals I’ve just met call me—“qualitatively abnormal”. 

More specifically, parts of my body—my bones, heart, lungs, eyes, and ears—work differently than most other people’s. My bones break, sometimes for little or no discernible reason. I’ve broken bones in my legs, arms, hands, feet, fingers, and toes, I’ve fractured my pelvis, my skull, and both clavicles. I can have trouble with the mechanics of my body, my ability to walk ebbs and flows.

I also manage now OI’s offshoots and degenerative progressions, as a diagnosis it proliferates over time. I manage Deaf gain (referred to as hearing loss in hearing culture), early-onset osteoporosis, anxiety, depression. So that’s a brief description of the nature of my body-mind from a medicalized, biological, diagnosis-label perspective.

I share this not in an attempt to evoke sympathy or pity, but to outline what counts as normal within the context of my own experience. As a site, my body requires constant management and care. I share information also to cure any deniers—I don’t usually read as disabled and chronically ill, it’s common for people to question me on that, so specifics and disclosing can help build my credibly. 

As a dis/abled, chronically ill artist coming into contact with ideas from disability liberation, I started to wonder what implications they might have for my artistic work. As I worked to shift my consciousness away from medical model thinking and toward social model interpretations of the world around me, I began to notice and become more critical of the negative representational tropes associated with illness and disability that permeated the world around me. Experiences of disability are incredibly diverse but, due to ableism, the visual language commonly associated with disability was narrow and unimaginative.

As I started to photograph toward my own representation of disability, I wanted to visually push back against these norms. A question I started to chew on often was, “Can I make a representation of disability that feels true to my lived experience, that doesn’t include the body, and that goes beyond the common, deficit-centric narrative?”

I looked around for some inspiration. I started to notice also that the representations of disability that presented the most complex, nuanced portraits of diagnosis management and ability non-normative life were first-person. By ‘first-person’ I mean they were crafted by an individual with first-hand experience of diagnosis management. I had been reading within the field of disability life writing, an approach to writing that argues for the value of diverse narratives about disability written by disabled people, and started to look for examples of disability life photography. 

Through the lens of the social model of disability, a disabled person is positioned as the primary expert on their own life and body-mind. A disabled person is, through the social model lens, a knowledgeable authority on what it is to be sick. This social model perspective overturns dominant medical model thinking which locates disability-related expertise in basically anyone expect the disabled individual. For example, it’s quite common for a medical professional’s perspective on an illness they have never experienced to be held in higher regard than the perspective of an individual in medical care literally experiencing that particular illness; an insidious norm that extends historical positioning of the disabled person as helpless and wholly reliant when in reality, of course, the person who knows the most about a particular body is the one living within it.

Within photography, I came into contact with work by artists like Jaklin Romine, Megan Bent, Sara J. Winston, and Frances Bukovsky. I gained so much inspiration from this work, and it really gave me the steam and permission I needed to believe first-person ability-related representations were both critical and far more rare than ideal.

With a bit of visual footing, I moved forward. As a diagnosis management strategy, I am prescribed daily walks. I walk often in a forested, public park near my home in Indianapolis and I began to take my camera with me and photograph botanical forms during my walk.

I work very intuitively and started to photograph in the forest without any particular ambition for the images in mind. Strategically, I did want to photograph while walking to combine two necessary tasks in my life—these prescribed walks, as required by my doctor, and producing artistic work, as required by my job and spirit.

Being disabled and chronically ill, my time is structured toward preserving my life in a very specific, calculated way. I spend a lot of time on diagnosis management and care each day, stewarding my body, and then far more time dealing with the MIC, the medical industrial complex—spending my precious time engaged in tasks like the following: on the phone with healthcare providers, driving to appointments, engaged in appointments, on the phone with co-pay programs and my health insurance, trying to recover emotionally from the ups and downs of medical news and receiving surprise medical bills to the tune of thousands of dollars. 

Folding diagnosis management and making together, pairing 2 things I had to do, helped me feel more in control of my time and body. I also wanted to take a demand from and limitation of my diagnosed body, it’s need for these walks, and reframe it as a generative space by building photographing into the ritual practice of care rooted in these walks. 

As I reviewed the work I made in the park, I found myself most drawn to the blurry, indistinct backgrounds in the images and I began to lean into that. Again and again, as I looked through the photographs, paying closer attention to the blurred out components over the sharp ones the phrase, “That looks like me.” popped unbidden into my mind. Over time, the phrase grew into a conviction and I’ve found that for me, one of the most important parts of growing into an artist has been learning to take seriously and interrogate the weird, unexplainable truths my body-mind unbidden offers. 

As I investigated my identification with blurry botanical forms, I realized my photographs contained visual continuities with the medical imagining I encountered in my daily life. They looked like microscopic versions of medical evidence related to my diagnoses. 

They looked like x-ray enlargements, the thready-ness of bone, the haziness of tissue. 

Over the course of my life as a multiply-diagnosed person I have likely been medically- and diagnostically-imaged more than I have been photographed for memory’s sake. Put another way, I think there are probably more representations of me in the form of diagnostic evidence like x-rays than there are pictures of me traveling, with friends, at parties, etc. This isn’t to say I don’t go out, it is to underline that my experience as patient in medical settings is extensive and life-long.

I found tremendous power in creating my own weird version of diagnostic-ish imagery. I can’t underline that enough. After years as subject to medicalized imaging practices, for the first time I was the person making the x-ray, taking the scan, in effect pressing the shutter release from within my radiation-protected bubble rather than the individual lying prone and covered with lead on a cold plastic table while a device circled my body as it emitted a series of beeps.

Osteogenesis imperfecta model no. 45

Visually, I think of the work as messy, a resolved but wild tangle that flickers between clarity and ambiguity. Born into a body that carries multiple non-visible diagnoses, my external appearance and my internal reality rarely coincide, especially within the world of the general public imagination. In other words, I don’t look like one of the most foundational aspects of who and what I am, I pass for fine but am pretty sick, and that tends to trip people up. I continued to think into that phrase, “That looks like me.” and realized the flora I trained my lens toward and then intentionally rendered out through the camera as disorienting, messy thickets punctuated by moments of clarity aligned with the illegibility foundational to my lived experience of non-visible illness.

On one hand, I can say my visible appearance misdirects, a symbol for lived experiences I have never known and will never know. My external body feels like a costume that doesn’t fit or a deception. On the other hand, common ideas of what disability looks like bear very little relationship to the hugely diverse ways in which disability actually presents. Though this, I become clear in flashes.

Osteogenesis imperfecta model no. 97

Being read and socially positioned as non-disabled is, of course, at times a privilege but in some circumstances can be incredibly dangerous. My life has been put in danger many times because people assumed I wasn’t sick and ascribed abilities to me I didn’t have or expected performance from me I could not provide. In these moments of illegibility my choice is disclosure or danger.

Additionally, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve disclosed in an attempt to pull myself out of danger but have been denied (literally told things like “That’s not possible.”, “No, you don’t.”) because I don’t live up to someone else’s version of what a disabled person looks like. It’s this strange struggle to be seen and I found image-making processes that I could use to render visually these feelings. The anti-ableist teaching implications here are to two-fold: 1) trust what people tell you about their circumstances, even if they don’t/can’t provide medical documentation, 2) don’t forget that interior and exterior circumstances don’t always align

Osteogenesis imperfecta model no. 76

I started to think of the work as my body without my body, as non-traditional self-portraits. A piece of useful context here is that I grew up in rural New York, 2 miles outside of a village of about 650 people. I spent my first 18 years surrounded by far more plants and trees than people and, this isn’t a joke, my first best friends were the wild grasses and greenery around my parents’ house. That, within the context of this particular body of work, I’ve located botanical forms as a stand-in for my innermost physical realities and psychological experiences aligns with the deep flora connections I witnessed and cultivated within the rural culture I know best.

I don’t prescribe to the medical model idea of disability as a monolithically bad thing. Like many folks in the disability liberation community, I wouldn’t take a cure were I offered one, and I locate some of the aspects of my personality that have become the most valuable to me as originating in and inseparable from my lived experiences as a disabled person. My incurable body is my superpower and in spite of powerful, oftentimes-eugenic societal messages to the contrary it has never served me to believe I’m less-than, that there’s something “wrong with me” because of the diagnoses I manage. I wanted to make a representation of disability that contained moments of beauty to honor the power and value of disability as I know it.

Osteogenesis imperfecta model no. 5

The last framing note I’ll share relative to this on-going work—many disabled, chronically ill people maintain a dossier of critical medical information. This dossier might include hundreds of pages of content like care information and instructions, health insurance documents (if one has health insurance), diagnoses, or emergency information. My dossier is a 3-inch, blue, 3-ring binder that I take with me to medical facilities to prove myself and direct my care, especially in emergency situations. Because the primary diagnosis I manage is rare and medical professionals are taught that common diagnoses are common (when you hear hooves think horses, not zebras) I often have to tell the people taking care of me what to do. Sometimes, I am the first person with OI a medical professional I’m working with has ever met in person.

Osteogenesis imperfecta model no. 55

Taken together the images in this ongoing project operate as a slant dossier. They are my models of my lived experiences of rare, non-visible diagnoses. They are evidence of my internal genetic reality as I imagine it models of my social experiences of sickness in a deeply ableist world. Sometimes I wonder what would happen it I could take my pictures to a medical professional and be like, “Here, this is my version of what’s wrong with me. Diagnosis this.” Finally, I will just mention quickly, my idea right now is for the project to include, in its final form, 206 individual images, one for each bone in most adult human bodies.

Sarah Pfohl is a dis/abled, chronically ill artist and teacher, currently serving as Assistant Professor of Photography and Art Education Coordinator in the Department of Art & Design at the University of Indianapolis. You can read more about her and her work here.

Resource guide

Some very good books:

Rethinking disability: A disability studies approach to inclusive practices, Jan W. Valle and David J. Connor, 2019 (2nd ed.), Routledge (disability studies)

Any text by Eli Clare. A great starting point: Brilliant imperfection: Grappling with cure, Eli Clare, 2017, Duke University Press (disability justice)

Being Heumann: An unrepentant memoir of a disability rights activist, Judith Heumann with Kristen Joiner, 2021, Beacon Press (disability rights)

Disability visibility: First-person stories from the twenty-first century, Alice Wong (Ed.), 2020, Knopf Doubleday (disability justice)

Academic ableism: Disability and higher education, Jay Timothy Dolmage, 2017, University of Michigan Press (disability studies)

Ability profiling and school failure: One child’s struggle to be seen as competent, Kathleen M. Collins, 2012 (2nd ed.), Routledge (disability studies)

Disability and difference in global contexts: Enabling a transformative body politic, Nirmala Erevelles, 2011, Palgrave Macmillian

What can a body do? How we meet the built world, Sara Hendren, 2020, Riverhead Books

Academic journal articles:

Collins, K. & Ferri, B. (2016). Literacy education and disability studies:

Reenvisioning struggling students. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy,

60(1), 7-12.

Ferri, B. A. & Connor, D. J. (2005). Tools of exclusion: Race, disability, and

(re)segregated education. Teachers College Record, 107(3), 453-74.

Netflix: Special, Crip Camp

YouTube:

Mia Mingus, opening keynote, 2018 Disability Intersectionality Summit

Substack:

CripNews by Kevin Gotkin

Instructional strategy:

Universal Design for Learning

Marx, Ecology, and Politics: An Interview with Dr. Derek Wall

By Devon Bowers

This is the transcript of a recent email interview I did with Dr. Derek Wall where we discuss, in greater depth, his article entitled “Imperialism is the Arsonist: Marxism’s Contribution to Ecological Literatures and Struggles,” about Marx’s contribution to ecological thought, where current socialist governments are acting regarding the environment, and how EcoMarxists interact with electoral politics.

Devon: Where does this idea that Marx can be applied to the environment originate from? Kind of, if you can, give me sort of a history of Marxist thought being applied to the environment.

Derek: The ‘idea that Marx can be applied to the environment’ I think it comes from Marx and Engels. While both wrote a huge amount, within their vast output of they produced numerous statements of environmental concern. Engels, for example, wrote The Condition of the English Working Class in the 1840s. While this is near to the beginning of his writings it was already indicating that air and water pollution were an environmental threat. His notion of social murder encompassed hunger and poverty and such the effect of poisonous pollution, social murder is a concept that might cover the deaths from extreme weather we are already encountering from climate change.

In his ‘Letters from Wuppertal’ written back in 1839 Engels notes both air and water pollution as serious ills, ‘Work in low rooms where people breathe more coal fumes and dust than oxygen — and in the majority of cases beginning already at the age of six — is bound to deprive them of all strength and joy in life.’ He observed that red colour of the river was a product not of battle but industrial pollution, the result ‘simply and solely to the numerous dye-works using Turkey red.’

At various points in Capital Marx addresses problems that might be identified by environmentalists today such as food additives and deforestation. Capital provides perhaps the clearest application of Marxist thought to the environment, when Marx notes in volume three of our duty to future generations:

Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household].

In turn Engels, while not using the then newly coined term ‘ecology’, reveals his understanding of the science, based on relationships between species, that can lead to unexpected effects. This is from his text The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man:

‘Let us not, however, flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory, it is true, in the first place brings about the results we expected, but in the second and third places it has quite different, unforeseen effects which only too often cancel the first. The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries.’

I guess an early application of this Marxist ecology can be found via William Morris, the British poet, artist and revolutionary. Concerned initially with church conservation, which is perhaps far from radical environmentalism, he read Marx as a defender of the environment against the ravages of capitalism. Morris was active in Britain’s first Marxist organisation the Social Democratic Federation.

Also in Britain, excuse my bias as I live here, the Sporting organisation associated with the Communist Party undertook the Kinder Scout trespass in the 1930s. This was to demand that workers have access to countryside moorland that was monopolised by large landowners. 

During the 1950s and 60s rising awareness of global environmental problems, staring with atmospheric nuclear testing, led to a growing environmental movement. Organisations like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace originated in the late 1960s or early 1970s along with Ecology Parties in the same decade. A minority of writers made the connection between capitalism and environmental destruction. While an anarchist rather than a Marxist, New Yorker Murray Bookchin, writing under the pseudonym of Lewis Herber, drew upon a critique of capitalism to explain the origins of environmental problems, publishing Our Synthetic Environment in 1962, and other works in the 1970s and 80s. Anti-Marxist in his politics, Marxism did paradoxically inform his analysis of ecological problems.

The Frankfurt school of Western Marxists including Marcuse also began to consider ecological problems in this period. Erich Fromm, the psychoanalyst, associated with the Frankfurt school, argued for an ecological politics, which drew upon Marx’s early Paris Manuscripts, showing how work under capitalism alienated us from the rest of nature. This is explained most clearly in his book To Have or to Be?

There are many individuals who have made some kind of link between Marx and Engels work and environmental concerns, however perhaps the most significant intervention in the late 20th century came from Fidel Castro at the 1992 environmental Rio conference. Castro was the first leader of a socialist country to stress the importance of ecological matters, and wrote extensively on the climate crisis and similar threats.

You quote John Kovel who notes that socialism, due to its thought occurring during industrialization, focuses on "the technological optimism of the industrial world-view, and its associated logic of productivism." In what ways do socialist states still perpetuate this idea? Or have some come to include the environment as a meaningful part of political thought?

I feel there is room for cautious optimism. The Soviet Union throw everything into rapid industrial development, often with ecologically damaging effects, a logic that would have continued if Trotsky had replaced Stalin. Having said this, the logic of productivism did provide the Soviet Union the material and technological resources necessary to defeat Hitler. Nonetheless on the whole one gets the impression that a race to outdo the USA in terms of economic growth inspired much Soviet economic development with negative results in terms of pollution and loss of biodiversity.

China is advocating a policy of promoting ‘ecological civilisation’. Mao’s war on the sparrows sounds like a foolish aberration from a Communist sensitive to contradictions and well versed in philosophy! I have never visited China and I am loath to analyse a part of the world I am largely ignorant of. However, it is clear that the present Chinese government and Chinese people at all levels of society, like Engels, are aware that ecological problems can strike where they are least expected. It is good that China has agreed to stop funding foreign coal plants and huge efforts are going into expanding renewable energy. China is the world’s largest producer of solar panels too. Perhaps though this is a version of ecological modernism, expanding technological solutions, without working towards an economy that rejects ever increasing production. Electric cars, whose production and consumption, are rising faster in China than perhaps any other part of the world, are imperfect environmental solutions. Nonetheless environmental considerations are at the core of economic development plans in the country. The rapid expansion of high speed rail, shames countries like the US and the UK, where the dominance of cars is unquestioned.

Cuba is perhaps the country closest to managing to create ecologically sustainable development on our planet, and is worthy of close study. Much has been written on this. During the special period in the 1990s when the fall of the Soviet Union made it difficult for Cuban to get cheap oil, a crash programme that reduced dependence on fossil fuels was instigated, with much success. Cuba shows that socialist countries potentially can achieve far more than capitalist states, when it comes to serious action on climate change.

Recently Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro's book Socialist States and the Environment: Lessons for Ecosocialist Futures has reassessed thinking about the environmental record of socialist states, suggesting that their record was much better than once thought. In the shadow of Cold War propaganda, everything was distorted, despite some serious environmental damage in the Soviet Union, there was also a programme of nature conservation. Just this week I have seen an interesting discussion of how Soviet scientists and planners in the 1970s responded to the Limits to Growth report, produced by MIT “Limits to growth” in communism? - cibcom.

In summary, while capitalism is innately ecologically destructive, for much of the 20th century Socialist States also engaged in environmentally damaging practices, however learning has taken place since, while not unproblematic the practices in China are encouraging and those in Cuba lead the world when it comes to climate change action.

You write "Marx and Engels’ sustained meditations on the sciences including biology, brought them to consider environmental issues." Talk about Marx' and Engels' focus on the hard sciences. I find this interesting as they're oft portrayed as people focused on sociology and economics.

Yes it is easily forgotten that they were obsessive in their concern to keep up with the most important developments in the natural sciences in their day. John Bellamy Foster has explored this topic in exhaustive detail in his book Marx’s Ecology. For Foster, ecology (even the exact term was not coined until later), is at the heart of Marx’s materialism. You can’t separate the science from the philosophy, perhaps there is more to the term ‘scientific socialism’ that is often assumed?

Noting that the Germany Green Party has left its original, radical roots and moved broadly over the decades towards a more center right line and how with the Dutch Socialist Party, too, has become a run-of-the-mill Social Democrat party, do you think that EcoMarxists or those who hold such sympathies should become involved with electoral politics or just shun it all together? In what ways are EcoMarxists interacting with mainstream political parties and electoral politics more generally?

West European Green and Left parties have indeed had limited success and often moved to the centre or the right. The trajectory of both the German Greens and, as you note, the Dutch Socialist Party, is perhaps particularly sobering, organisations moving from Marxist-Leninist roots to the center ground today. It is a sad irony that the German Greens were born out of the peace movement but are advocates of war, and even promoting fossil fuel extraction, at least, in the short term, to deal with the energy crisis caused by the conflict in the Ukraine. In Britain, things are a little different, the Labour Party here, despite a short respite under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership has never been a radical party. Labour supported Empire, in the 1930s embrace the economics of austerity and at present under Keir Starmer are competing with the Tory government to show they are a pro-business party. 

I don’t think it is adequate to say abandon all electoral politics. Alternative socialist strategies haven’t been effective either in Western Europe, the generation that produced the German Greens were the generation involved in the Bader-Meinhof gang, which can hardly been seen as successful intervention. In other parts of the world, particularly Latin America, the left have made some progress through the electoral route. While this has not been uniform and has led to compromises, the success of left parties in Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela and more recently Colombia is encouraging.

Rudi Dutschke the German socialist, argued that there should be ‘a long march through the institutions’, in practice the institutions have generally marched over the left, crushing hopes…sadly this is largely the lesson of the German Greens. I am most inspired by the base building approach of groups like Philly Socialists and near to where I live the Welsh Underground Network. Building community revolutionary capacity through practical action and solidarity. Capacity building is also a means of creating community self-defence in the face of rising environmental crisis and the growth of the far right.

Ecosocialist engagement with electoral politics, where it has occurred, is varied. In Australia the Socialist Alliance have elected local councillors. The example of Nick Origlass, in the 1980s, a pioneering ecosocialists who left the Australian Labor Party, over toxic waste plans, has been an inspiration to such Australian ecosocialists. He was eventually elected Mayor of Leichhardt, Sydney. He defeated motorway building plans through a working class community, created participatory council meetings and reclaimed land for community use. There is a good account of his work in the Australian Dictionary of National Biography here.

So may be some progress is possible with electoral work but yes more often than not electoral politics has institutionalised those on the left rather than allowing institutional transformation. Some ecosocialists are involved in Green or Social Democratic Parties. The HDP in Turkey is a good example of where more radical electoral politics has been linked to popular struggles, although this mainly Kurdish Party has been subject to much repression. The situation is different in different parts of the world.

What are some of the responses of EcoMarxists to climate change, especially given the fact that we have very possibly hit the point of no return regarding major environmental changes? (For example, we hit that point with ocean temperatures in 2014.)

When I first became interested in green politics in the 1980s climate change seem to be a distant problem, now it is an immediate threat. Every day apparently brings news of more extreme weather, in the summer here where I live in Southern England, I witnessed the highest temperatures of my life time. The future is now.

One response from ecosocialists has been to go back to Lenin, if capitalism is destroying the world, a more strategic approach is surely necessary. Andreas Malm, Kai Heron and Jodi Dean and others have been arguing that Lenin provides inspiration in an age of climate crisis. There is a good outline of the debates around Lenin, climate change and ecosocialism here.

Andreas Malm in his recent book How to Blow up a Pipeline argues that the desperation of the situation demands that we take direct action against oil extraction.

There is perhaps an increasing realisation that climate change rather than being an accidental consequence of business as usual which can be approached with technocratic solutions is part of a war. With oil and fossil fuel companies on one side of the conflict and the rest of humanity and nature on the other. So, while not specifically ecosocialists the approach of the British organisation Just Stop Oil, using direct action against oil companies is to be applaud.

Of course, workers plans to convert ecological damaging mining and manufacturing into alternative sources of production is another element of ecosocialist strategy. The Lucas Plan in Britain and the Green Ban trade union campaigns in Australia are examples.

Where can people learn more about Ecosocialism? What are some good books, podcasts, or videos, you would recommend?

Kali Aukuno is a good source of ecosocialists activism, may be start with his interview here.

John Bellamy Foster, while he doesn’t use the term ecosocialism, feeling socialist traditions at least from Marx are innately ecological, has produced numerous books, articles, podcasts, etc. MR Online which he works with is a very good source for numerous articles on ecosocialism. Green Left Weekly in Australia and Climate and Capitalism are also excellent. 

Of the numerous books on ecosocialism, I still think, Alan Roberts The Self-Managing Environment from 1979 is the best, although a bit difficult to track down. People might also be interested in my biography of the great Latin American ecosocialist Hugo Blanco published by Merlin Press.

Finally I must mention Max Ajl’s work, rooting ecological socialism in the struggles of the South, breaking the Eurocentric and North American bias of much of the left. His book A People’s Green New Deal is essential reading. There is a useful interview with him from my comrades at Ebb Magazine here.

Of, By, and For the Elite: The Class Character of the U.S. Constitution

By Crystal Kim

Republished from Liberation School.

Contrary to the mythology we learn in school, the founding fathers feared and hated the concept of democracy—which they derisively referred to as “tyranny of the majority.” The constitution that they wrote reflects this, and seeks to restrict and prohibit involvement of the masses of people in key areas of decision making. The following article, originally written in 2008, reviews the true history of the constitution and its role in the political life of the country.

The ruling class of today—the political and social successors to the “founding fathers”—continues to have a fundamental disdain for popular participation in government. The right wing of the elite is engaged in an all-out offensive against basic democratic rights and democracy itself. This offensive relies heavily on the Supreme Court and the legal doctrine of constitutional “originalism”. Originalism means that the only rights and policies that are protected are ones that are explicitly laid out in the constitution, conforming with the “original” intentions of the founders. As the article explores, this was a thoroughly anti-democratic set up that sought to guarantee the power and wealth of the elite.

Introduction

In history and civics classrooms all over the United States, students are taught from an early age to revere the “Founding Fathers” for drafting a document that is the bulwark of democracy and freedom—the U.S. Constitution. We are taught that the Constitution is a work of genius that established a representative government, safeguarded by the system of “checks and balances,” and guarantees fundamental rights such as the freedom of speech, religion and assembly. According to this mythology, the Constitution embodies and promotes the spirit and power of the people.

Why, then, if the country’s founding document is so perfect, has the immense suffering of the majority of its people—as a result of exploitation and oppression—been a central feature of the U.S.? How could almost half of the population be designated poor or low income? Why would the U.S. have the world’s largest and most extensive prison system? If the Constitution, the supreme law of this country, was written to protect and promote the interests of the people, why didn’t it include any guarantees to the most basic necessities of life?

This contradiction between reality and rhetoric can be understood by examining the conditions under which the U.S. Constitution was drafted, including the class background of the drafters. Although it is touted today as a document enshrining “democratic values,” it was widely hated by the lower classes that had participated in the 1776-1783 Revolutionary War. Popular opposition was so great, in fact, that the drafting of the Constitution had to be done in secret in a closed-door conference.

The purpose of the Constitution was to reorganize the form of government so as to enhance the centralized power of the state. It allowed for national taxation that provided the funds for a national standing army. Local militias were considered inadequate to battle the various Native American nations whose lands were coveted by land speculators. A national army was explicitly created to suppress slave rebellions, insurgent small farmers and the newly emerging landless working class that was employed for wages.

The goal of the Constitution and the form of government was to defend the minority class of affluent property owners against the anticipated “tyranny of the majority.” As James Madison, a principal author of the Constitution, wrote: “But the most common and durable source of factions [dissenting groups] has been the various and unequal distribution of property” [1].

The newly centralized state set forth in the Constitution was also designed to regulate interstate trade. This was necessary since cutthroat competition between different regions and states was degenerating into trade wars, boycotts and outright military conflict.

The U.S. Congress was created as a forum where commercial and political conflicts between merchants, manufacturers and big farmers could be debated and resolved without resort to economic and military war.

Conditions leading to the U.S. Revolution

To understand the class interests reflected in the Constitution, it is necessary to examine the social and economic conditions of the time. In the decades leading up to the U.S. revolutionary period, colonial society was marked by extreme oppression and class disparities.

The economies of the colonies were originally organized in the interests of the British merchant capitalists who profited by trade with the colonies. These interests were guaranteed by the British monarchy headed by King George III. In the southern colonies like Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas, a settler class of slave-owning big planters grew rich providing the cotton that fed Britain’s massive textile manufacturing industry.

In the northern colonies, merchant economies in the port cities and associated small manufacturing industries formed the basis for the division between rich and poor. In the countryside, huge landowners who owed their holdings to privilege in Europe squeezed the limited opportunities of small farmers.

In 1700, for example, 75 percent of land in colonial New York state belonged to fewer than 12 individuals. In Virginia, seven individuals owned over 1.7 million acres [2]. By 1767, the richest 10 percent of Boston taxpayers held about 66 percent of Boston’s taxable wealth, while the poorest 30 percent of taxpayers had no property at all [3]. Similar conditions could be found throughout the colonies. Clearly, there was an established ruling class within the colonies, although this grouping was ultimately subordinate to the British crown.

On the other hand, the majority of society—Black slaves, Native Americans, indentured servants and poor farmers—experienced super-exploitation and oppression. Women of all classes had, like their peers in Europe, no formal political rights.

With these growing class antagonisms, the 18th century was characterized by mass discontent, which led to frequent demonstrations and even uprisings by those on the bottom rung of colonial society.

Between 1676 and 1760, there were at least 18 uprisings aimed at overthrowing a colonial government. There were six slave rebellions as well as 40 riots like the numerous tenant uprisings in New Jersey and New York directed against landlords [4]. Many of these uprisings were directed at the local elite and not the British Empire.

This local elite in colonial society found itself squeezed between the wrath of the lower working classes, on one side, and the British Empire, on the other.

Following the 1763 British victory in the Seven Years’ War in Europe, which included the so-called French and Indian War in North America, the French position as a colonial power competing with Britain was seriously downgraded as a result of their defeat. The French did send troops and military aid to support the colonists in their war for independence from Britain a decade later.

Following the defeat of the French in 1763, George III attempted to stabilize relations with Native Americans, who had fought primarily alongside the defeated French, by issuing the Proclamation of 1763. This decree declared Indian lands beyond the Appalachians out of bounds for colonial settlers, thereby limiting vast amounts of wealth the settlers could steal from the indigenous people. Chauvinist expansionism thus became fuel for anti-British sentiment in the colonies.

Making matters worse for the colonists, the British Empire began demanding more resources from the colonies to pay for the war. In 1765, the British Parliament passed the fourth Stamp Act, basically increasing taxes on the colonists. The Stamp Act of 1765 incited anger across all class strata, including British merchants, and was ultimately repealed in 1766.

The struggle around the Stamp Act demonstrated a shift in power relations between the colonists and the British Empire. While the local American elites were in less and less need of Britain’s assistance, the British Empire was in ever growing need of the wealth and resources of the colonies.

In summary, there were at least four factors that would motivate the American “new rich” to seek independence from the British crown. First, the anger of the poor and oppressed against the rich could be deflected from the local elite and channeled into hatred of the British crown—developing a new sense of patriotism. Second, the wealth produced and extracted in the colonies would remain in the pockets of the local ruling class rather than being transferred to the British Empire. Third, the local ruling class would greatly increase its wealth through the confiscation of property of those loyal to Britain. And lastly, independence would nullify the Proclamation of 1763, opening up vast amounts of Native land.

Two points qualified the drive to independence, which ultimately manifested itself in the sizable “Loyalist” or pro-British population during the revolution. First, despite the conflict between the colonists and the British government over wealth, colonists and colonizers were united against the Native American population, whom both tried to massacre and loot. The revolutionary struggle was not against exploitation, but to determine who would do the exploiting.

Secondly, in spite of the disputes over who got how much of the wealth generated by the colonies, this wealth primarily depended on the integration of the economy with British merchant capitalism. While the revolutionists wanted political distance from the empire, they could not afford a complete break.

The leaders of the U.S. Revolution

Revolutionary sentiment among the lowest classes of colonial society was largely spontaneous and unorganized. Leadership of the anti-British rebellion, groups like the Sons of Liberty, originated from the middle and upper classes. Some poor workers and farmers did join their ranks, allowing their leadership to garner popular support.

These leaders were conscious of the fact that only one class would be really liberated through independence from Britain: the local ruling class. However, in order to carry this out, they would have to create a façade of liberating the masses.

This is why the 1776 Declaration of Independence—the document used to inspire colonists to fight against Britain—includes language that was so much more radical than that of the 1787 U.S. Constitution. In fact, Thomas Jefferson had originally drafted a paragraph in the Declaration of Independence condemning George III for transporting slaves from Africa to the colonies and “suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce” [5]. Jefferson himself personally owned hundreds of slaves until the day he died, but he understood the appeal such a statement would have.

Instead, the final draft of the Declaration accused the British monarchy of inciting slave rebellions and supporting Indian land claims against the settlers. “He [the king] has incited domestic insurrection amongst us,” the final version read, “and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages.”

Sixty-nine percent of the signers of the Declaration of Independence held colonial office under England. When the document was read in Boston, the Boston Committee of Correspondence ordered the townsmen to show up for a draft to fight the British. The rich avoided the draft by paying for substitutes, while the poor had no choice but to fight.

Slavery existed in all 13 British colonies, but it was the anchor for the economic system in the mid-Atlantic and southern states.

Thousands of slaves fought on both sides of the War of Independence. The British governor of Virginia had issued a proclamation promising freedom to any slave who could make it to the British lines—as long as their owner was not loyal to the British Crown. Tens of thousands of enslaved Africans did just that. Thousands managed to leave with the British when they were defeated, but tens of thousands more were returned to enslavement after the colonies won their “freedom” in 1783.

Following the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which established the independence of the colonies, vast amounts of wealth and land were confiscated from Loyalists. Some of this land was parceled out to small farmers to draw support for the new government.

While most Loyalists left the United States, some were protected. For instance, Lord Fairfax of Virginia, who owned over 5 million acres of land across 21 counties, was protected because he was a friend of George Washington—at that time, among the richest men in America [6].

The drafting of the Constitution

In May 1787, 55 men—now known as the “Founding Fathers”—gathered in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention to draft the new country’s legal principles and establish the new government. Alexander Hamilton—a delegate of New York, George Washington’s closest advisor and the first secretary of the treasury—summed up their task: “All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well-born, the other the mass of the people… Give therefore to the first class a distinct permanent share in the government” [7]. Indeed, the task of the 55 men was to draft a document that would guarantee the power and privileges of the new ruling class while making just enough concessions to deflect dissent from other classes in society.

Who were the Founding Fathers? It goes without saying that all the delegates were white, property-owning men. Citing the work of Charles Beard, Howard Zinn wrote, “A majority of them were lawyers by profession, most of them were men of wealth, in land, slaves, manufacturing or shipping, half of them had money loaned out at interest, and 40 of the 55 held government bonds” [8].

The vast majority of the population was not represented at the Constitutional Convention: There were no women, African Americans, Native Americans or poor whites. The U.S. Constitution was written by property-owning white men to give political power, including voting rights, exclusively to property-owning white men, who made up about 10 percent of the population.

Alexander Hamilton advocated for monarchical-style government with a president and senate chosen for life. The Constitutional Convention opted, rather, for a “popularly” elected House of Representatives, a Senate chosen by state legislators, a president elected by electors chosen by state legislators, and Supreme Court justices appointed by the president.

Democracy was intended as a cover. In the 10th article of the “Federalist Papers”—85 newspaper articles written by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay advocating ratification of the U.S. Constitution—Madison wrote that the establishment of the government set forth by the Constitution would control “domestic faction and insurrection” deriving from “a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal distribution of property, or for any other improper or wicked project.” During the convention, Alexander Hamilton delivered a speech advocating a strong centralized state power to “check the imprudence of democracy.”

It is quite telling that the Constitution took the famous phrase of the Declaration of Independence “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” and changed it to “life, liberty and property.” The debates of the Constitutional Convention were largely over competing economic interests of the wealthy, not a debate between haves and have-nots.

The new Constitution legalized slavery. Article 4, Section 2 required that escaped slaves be delivered back to their masters. Slaves would count as three-fifths of a human being for purposes of deciding representation in Congress. The “three-fifths compromise” was between southern slave-holding delegates who wanted to count slaves in the population to increase their representation, while delegates from the northern states wanted to limit their influence and so not count slaves as people at all.

Furthermore, some of the most important constitutional rights, such as the right to free speech, the right to bear arms and the right to assembly were not intended to be included in the Constitution at all. The Bill of Rights was amended to the Constitution four years after the Constitutional Convention had adjourned so that the document could get enough support for ratification.

As a counter to the Bill of Rights, the Constitution gave Congress the power to limit these rights to varying degrees. For example, seven years after the Constitution was amended to provide the right to free speech, Congress passed the Sedition Act of 1798, which made it a crime to say or write anything “false, scandalous or malicious” against the government, Congress or president with the intent to defame or build popular hatred of these entities.

Today, many people look to the Constitution—and especially to the Bill of Rights—as the only guarantor of basic political rights. And while the Constitution has never protected striking workers from being beaten over the heads by police clubs while exercising their right to assemble outside plant gates, or protected revolutionaries’ right to freedom of speech as they are jailed or gunned down, the legal gains for those without property do need to be defended.

But defending those rights has to be done with the knowledge that the founding document of the United States has allowed the scourge of unemployment, poverty and exploitation to carry on unabated because it was a document meant to enshrine class oppression. A constitution for a socialist United States would begin with the rights of working and oppressed people.

During the period leading to the second U.S. Revolution, commonly known as the Civil War, militant opponents of slavery traveled the country to expose the criminal institution that was a bedrock of U.S. society. On July 4, 1854, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution before thousands of supporters of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. He called it a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” referring to its enshrining of slavery.

The crowd shouted back, “Amen” [9].

Although slavery has been abolished, the property that is central to the Constitution—private property, the right to exploit the majority for the benefit of the tiny minority—remains. In that sense, Garrison’s words still ring true.

References

[1] James Madison, Federalist Papers, No. 10. Availablehere.
[2] Michael Parenti,Democracy for the Few, 9th ed. (Boston: Wadsworth, 1974/2011), 5.
[3] Howard Zinn,A People’s History of the United States(New York: Longman, 1980), 65.
[4] Ibid., 59.
[5] Ibid., 72.
[6] Ibid., 84.
[7] Cited in Howard Zinn,Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology(New York: Harper Collins, 1990), 152.
[8] Zinn,A People’s History of the United States, 89.
[9] Zinn,Declarations of Independence, 231.

Why Is The Global South Still Poor?

By Allen Myers

Republished from Red Flag.

In the years following World War Two, as numerous direct colonies won formal independence, there was a widespread belief, or at least a hope, that political independence would lead fairly rapidly to significant economic progress. No longer under the control of foreign exploiters, the ex-colonies would be free to undergo economic development like that which had occurred in the wealthy capitalist countries. With assistance from benign international institutions and former colonisers who had seen the error of their ways, the “underdeveloped” global south, renamed “developing countries”, would soon “catch up”, and the huge economic differences between countries would be overcome.

As is obvious today, it didn’t happen. In 2015, not quite 1 billion people in twelve “first world” countries had a per capita GDP of US$44,392; 6.2 billion people in 148 “third world” countries had a per capita GDP one-tenth that size. Why, and how?

The “why” is relatively easy, while the “how” requires a bit more detail and analysis. Despite the nonsensical propaganda they produced, European imperialists didn’t colonise Africa, Asia and the Americas out of noble motives. Their motive, pure and simple, was greed. When a combination of their weakening in the world war and the uprisings of colonised peoples forced them to grant political independence, that didn’t make them stop being greedy. It just made them modify their techniques of exploitation.

The underdevelopment of the global south was not some kind of natural misfortune, like a drought or poor soil or geographical isolation. It was something inflicted on the colonies by their Western colonisers—something concisely summarised 50 years ago by the Guyanese Marxist Walter Rodney in the title of his book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

Of course, it was easier for imperialists to plunder the southern countries when they had direct political control over them. They could engage in what amounted to looting and piracy: forced labour or slavery, direct expropriation of land and other wealth, taxes remitted to the imperialist centres, destruction of industries that might compete against imperialist companies.

Forced to give up direct political control, the imperialists nevertheless continued exploiting the former colonies in more subtle ways. Capitalist competition, promoted as a pathway to growth, was in reality a deliberate dead end. The wealth extracted from colonies over decades or centuries had built large, technically advanced businesses in the imperialist centres. Conversely, the exploitation meant that the former colonies lacked the capital that would have been necessary to create industries that could compete with the imperialists.

No problem, declared the ideological servants of imperialism: the former colonies can borrow the capital they need in order to develop; then they can repay the loans from the profits of their new industries. One of several flaws in this argument was that many citizens of former colonies thought it a bit unfair that they should have to borrow money that had been stolen from them, and then pay interest to the thieves.

This is where international bodies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund come in. They pose as independent, well-meaning sources of capital for the “developing” economies. In reality, they are, and have always been, controlled by the governments of the wealthiest imperialist countries. This ensures that loans go only to governments that don’t rock the boat—the boat that is carrying the enormous interest payments that poor countries must make to both bilateral “donors” and to the IMF/WB mafia.

These interest payments are transfers from poor countries to wealthy ones, and are a significant part of what keeps the global south poor. A 2020 study of 63 “impoverished countries” by the Jubilee Debt Campaign, based on IMF and World Bank figures, found that their external debt servicing in 1998 consumed an average 16.6 percent of government revenue. Partial debt relief for some of the most indebted countries reduced that figure to 5.5 percent by 2011, but it then started rising again, reaching 11.1 percent in 2018. The COVID pandemic will have undoubtedly raised it further. The World Bank notes of the pandemic’s impact: “Low- and middle-income countries’ external debt-to-GNI [gross national income] ratio rose to 29 percent in 2020 from 27 percent in 2019, and the debt-to-export ratio increased to 123 percent from 106 percent in 2019”.

These figures stand like an ironic commentary on the idea that “development” loans would make it possible for poor countries to build industries that increased their incomes and repaid the loans. Even if these countries were to do the impossible for a year and devote all of their export revenues—that is, every cent of export sales, not just the profits—they would still not be able to pay off their full foreign debts.

The owners of the imperialist economies of course never intended for their governments to help poor countries create industries that could compete against them; imperialist corporations are not suicidal. So “development” in the poor countries is restricted to fields that continue the transfer of wealth to the rich countries: direct imperialist investment, the profits of which of course go to the investing corporations; and natural resource extraction and industries characterised by low- or at best medium-level technology, which have correspondingly low rates of profit.

Capitalists in the global south are confined to the least productive, and therefore least profitable, fields. As a result, much of the value created in the south is transferred to the imperialist countries in the course of trade: the poor countries import overpriced goods and sell their own products for less than their real value. The amounts of money transferred in this way, called “unequal exchange” by economists, are staggering. 

A recent article in the journal New Political Economy attempts to quantify the sum for the years 1960-2018. The authors write: “Over the whole period, drain from the South totalled $62 trillion (constant 2011 dollars) ... Appropriation through unequal exchange represents up to 7% of Northern GDP and 9% of Southern GDP”. That is not a typo: the global south was deprived of $62 trillion. Such value transfers are the underlying cause of situations such as the current disaster in Sri Lanka.

If imperialist corporations seem to have arranged everything for their own benefit, it must be recognised that they can’t do it all on their own. Even in the time of direct colonies, to maintain control, the colonisers needed collaborators within the colonial population. After political independence, imperialism still required a social layer that would cooperate to keep the system ticking over profitably.

It found the components of that layer among local capitalists, large landowners and would-be capitalists. In some cases, they might have come from among the open collaborators. In others, they came out of the movements for independence, from those leaders whose visions didn’t go beyond a change of personnel at the top.

Because of the huge sums of value appropriated by the global north, the capitalists of the global south generally cannot compete with the major imperialist industries. Aside from situations of natural monopoly (oil, for example), capitalists in the poor countries have to rely on low-profit areas such as manufacturing consumer goods that northern capitalists have abandoned or assembling electronics for high-tech imperialist companies. In these labour-intensive industries, the poverty and low wages of the south allow them to compete, and they are driven to maintain those low wages as a matter of their own survival.

So, while southern capitalists might sometimes feel that they are oppressed by imperialism and, if they have the opportunity, might put some pressure on imperialist corporations for improved terms of their collaboration, they know well that they share class interests with the imperialists and have a common enemy in the working class. If Marx called competing capitalists a “band of warring brothers”, we might call imperialists and southern capitalists a “band of squabbling big brothers, little brothers and occasional distant cousins”.

This is why southern capitalists are never reliable allies of working people and poor farmers in any struggle against imperialism. It is why the possibility of a radical popular movement forming government in a third world country always arouses the threat of imperialist intervention against it, to ensure that the country’s capitalists remain in charge.

Hunger and Poverty In India: A Case Study on Capitalism, Privatization, and Misleading Statistics

By Prabhat Patnaik

THE Global Hunger Index (GHI) for 2022 has just come out, which shows India occupying the 107th position among the 121 countries for which the index is prepared (countries where hunger is not a noteworthy problem are left out of the index). India’s score on the hunger index is 29.1 which is worse than the score of 28.2 it had in 2014. (The lower the figure the less is hunger). One is so bombarded these days by official talk about India being among the fastest-growing economies of the world, India within sight of becoming a $5 trillion economy, and India being an emerging economic power, that news such as the GHI brings one down to earth. Ironically, the only country in South Asia that is below India on the hunger index, and that too only marginally, is war-ravaged Afghanistan (rank 109); the rank of crisis-hit Sri Lanka is 64, of Nepal 81, of Bangladesh 84 and of Pakistan 99.

The GHI news however should come as no surprise. The fact that hunger in the country is acute and growing, has been pointed out by several scholars. They have used data on per capita daily calorie intake, and per capita annual foodgrain availability to make this point. And they have argued that since growing hunger is a symptom of growing poverty, a proposition that the Planning Commission had originally accepted, the period of neo-liberalism which has seen secularly growing hunger culminating in this year’s GHI, despite the much lauded high GDP growth, must also be a period of growing absolute poverty.

The evidence on secularly growing hunger in the neo-liberal period is quite overwhelming. If we take 1993-94 and 2011-12, the first an NSS “large sample” year closest to the beginning of neo-liberalism, and the second the last NSS “large sample” year for which data have been released by the government, we find that the proportion of the population below 2200 calories per person per day in rural India increased from 58 to 68 per cent; the corresponding figures for urban India where the benchmark was 2100 calories per person per day increased from 57 to 65 per cent. The figures for 2017-18, another NSS “large sample” year, were apparently so appalling that the government decided to suppress them altogether, and even to discontinue the NSS in the old form. But leaked data show that per capita real expenditure for rural India as a whole had fallen by 9 per cent between 2011-12 and 2017-18.

There is however a powerful view among many researchers that this apparently growing incidence of hunger should not be taken as evidence of people becoming worse off over time. There are two strands of this argument. One states that because of pervasive mechanisation, the drudgery of manual work has declined over time, so that working people these days do not need as many calories as they used to earlier. They spend less on food than they used to, and diversify their spending towards other ends. The second strand does not mention the decline in the extent of arduous work, but simply states that people are voluntarily diversifying their expenditure away from such elementary goods as foodgrains, towards both more refined and sophisticated food items, and also towards other commodities like children’s education and proper healthcare.

On both these counts according to them, the decline in per capita foodgrain absorption is symptomatic not of a worsening living standard as of an improvement in living standard; hence to draw conclusions about growing poverty from what appears at first sight as growing hunger (but in fact is a voluntary reduction of foodgrain consumption as part of a better life), is entirely illegitimate. The incidence of poverty, it follows, is not growing but declining, as the government and the World Bank have been claiming (though the latter has recently talked of a rise in poverty during the pandemic).

To repeat, there is no dispute about the decline in per capita foodgrain consumption in India, taking both direct and indirect consumption together, the latter through processed foods and animal feeds; nor is there any dispute about the decline in per capita calorie intake. The real difference is whether this signifies growing poverty or a diversification of consumption away from foodgrains that is symptomatic of a fall in poverty. The fact that an increase in poverty would cause greater hunger is not in doubt; the point is whether the reverse is true, whether reduced ingestion of foodgrains can be taken as proof of growing poverty. The Global Hunger Index becomes useful here.

If reduced food intake was indeed a symptom of an improvement in the condition of life, then we should be expecting many more countries whose growth-rates appear impressive to join India at the bottom of the GHI table. But the countries in India’s neighbourhood on the GHI table, where our rank is 107, are Rwanda (rank 102), Nigeria (103), Ethiopia (104), Republic of Congo (105), Sudan (106), Zambia (108), Afghanistan (109) and Timor-Leste (110). All these are countries that are generally regarded as poor countries, so that their being at the bottom of the table is no surprise. By contrast, countries with which we would like our economic performance to be compared, such as China, are at the top of the table. China appears within the top 17 countries which are collectively, rather than individually, ranked. Its GHI score of less than 5 is way better than India’s 29.1.

The fact that not a single one of the so-called high-growth economies figures alongside India underscores the complete vacuity of the arguments that emphasize a change in tastes (greater keenness for children’s education) or a reduction in “drudgery” (through mechanisation) as being responsible for a (voluntary) reduction in foodgrain consumption. The reduction in “drudgery” owing to mechanisation, or the desire for children’s education, are not characteristics specific to the Indian people; they are universal phenomena. Then why should India alone among the high-growth economies figure near the bottom of the GHI table?

It may be argued that while the desire for children’s education and proper healthcare may be common to people everywhere, in India these are expensive services while in China they may be cheaper. Because of this, parents in India enrolling their children in the more expensive schools may have to cut back on their food consumption, while in China schooling being less expensive, there is no need to cut back on food intake for educating children.

But that is precisely our point, and it has nothing to do with any “change of taste”. Everywhere, parents are keen on their children’s education, but if in a particular country putting them to school requires having to forego food, then this foregoing is symptomatic of an increase in poverty. It indicates an increase in the price of one of the goods in the basket consumed by the people, and hence an increase in the cost of living which is not accompanied by a corresponding increase in money incomes, and leads to a cut in foodgrain consumption. This cut in foodgrain consumption, which means an increase in hunger, is therefore a reflection of a rise in cost of living and hence of a reduced real income; and that exactly is what one means by an increase in poverty.

Put differently, any increase in real income must mean some increase in the consumption of every good in a basket of goods on which this income is spent (or some substitute good for one of these goods). An increase in real income, as cross-section data within India and across countries show, invariably means a rise in foodgrains consumption, not direct consumption alone but direct and indirect consumption taken together. But if there is a decline in the total direct and indirect foodgrain intake, as has been the case in India, then that must mean a decline in real incomes of the majority of the people, and hence a rise in poverty. The link between growing hunger and growing poverty therefore remains valid.

The reason why poverty according to official and World Bank estimates appears to have declined in India, on the basis of which it is claimed that the link between poverty and hunger no longer holds, is because they use a “poverty line”, a particular level of per capita money expenditure below which people are considered poor, which is updated by using a cost-of-living index. But the index as constructed in India does not reckon with the rise in cost of living owing to the privatisation of services like education and health. Therefore the true rise in cost of living is not taken into account, and the poverty line that is updated by using it, keeps falling below what it should have been. This underestimates the magnitude of poverty and the elite laps up this estimated, supposedly-declining, poverty ratio. The Global Hunger Index exposes the falsity of such poverty estimates.

Too Little, Too Late: Biden's Self-Congratulatory Marijuana Reform Falls Short

By Youhanna Haddad

On October 6th, 2021, President Joe Biden issued a blanket pardon of those federally convicted of marijuana possession, noting that “no one should be in jail just for using or possessing marijuana.” This pardon, while seeming huge, releases exactly zero prisoners as no American is in federal prison for simple marijuana possession. Biden further stated that the federal government’s classification of marijuana as more serious than fentanyl “makes no sense,” with the attorney general and Department of Health and Human Services reportedly initiating a process to review marijuana’s scheduling. “Too many lives have been upended because of our failed approach to marijuana,” Biden said. “It’s time that we right these wrongs.”

Biden’s pardon disrupted the more than a century-long history of anti-marijuana policy at the federal level. While the pardon affects but a small minority of total possession convictions, the potential rescheduling or even descheduling of marijuana has not been seriously considered in the United States since the late 1980s. This is thanks in large part to the Controlled Substances Act, which schedules drugs without any regard to their scientifically understood qualities.

To examine the eclectic legal quagmire that is marijuana prohibition, one must explore the history of the plant: its use over time and geography. While the first culture to use marijuana frequently changes as anthropologists continue uncovering older instances of use, it is widely acknowledged that the psychoactive variety of the plant has been consumed for over two millennia. Little to no scholarship has uncovered any historical use of marijauna leading to the decline of living standards anywhere near the level of drugs such as opium.

In the United States, the first marijuana regulations appeared in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War in the mid-19th century. Motivated by the white-supremacist ideology of Manifest Destiny, the United States government pushed westward, running into the then much larger nation of Mexico. After the Mexican-American War, thousands of Mexicans found themselves in newly “American” territory.

To avoid sharing resources, white-American settlers employed a mixture of vigilante and state-sponsored violence to subjugate the Mexican population. They fixated on Mexican use of “locoweed” — a slang term for marijuana — and used prohibition as a means of subjugation. Criminalization thus turned Mexicans into an outlaw class. This served to both reign in the Mexican population and reinforce settler propaganda regarding the “Mexican Menace.”

But it wasn’t just Mexicans who became associated with marijuana around this time. The global phenomenon of jazz music was well underway by the early 20th century. An art form with unmistakably black roots, the popularity of jazz in urban centers led to black male performers gaining fame across the United States.

Concerns over white women in jazz clubs potentially having sexual relations with these men incited panic, particularly in white, bourgeois families. Worrying their daughters might be mesmerized by the siren song of the performers, they sought to restrict the influence of the jazz wave. This manifested in a reinvigorated opposition to marijuana — a known favorite of many jazz performers such as Cab Calloway, whose song ‘Reefer Man’ lauds the drug’s benefits. 

White imagination thus associated Latino and black peoples with marijuana. This set the stage for white outrage at the drug in order to suppress both populations. Rhetoric focused on the potential of marijuana to be used by men of color to dull the inhibitions of white women, facilitating their seduction. While the reality may have been that white women were simply interested in relations with these men, or wanted to explore jazz nightlife, the settler masses adopted this hyper-sexualized rhetoric. The newly established Federal Bureau of Narcotics capitalized on these racist lies in the early 1930s, with leader Harry J. Anslinger proclaiming that marijuana use promoted interracial sex:

“There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others.”

This rhetoric, which ignored widespread white use in order to racialize the issue, was successful in convincing Congress to pass the first truly restrictive federal regulation of marijuana: The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which effectively made the drug illegal to possess or distribute. It took until 1969 for an infamous Supreme Court case to invalidate the law for its violation of 5th Amendment protections against self-incrimination. One year later, President Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act, which classified marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug, meaning the federal government did not recognize any medicinal value and recognized a high potential for abuse.

While obviously nonsensical, this scheduling seemed to make sense to John Ehrlichman, who served as domestic policy chief under Nixon. In a 1994 interview, Ehrlichman stated that there was significant political motivation from the Nixon administration to target certain communities through the Controlled Substances Act. He explained that:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate [them with drugs] we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Nixon’s presidency is widely recognized as a particularly embarrassing chapter in American history, largely due to the Watergate scandal. Only escaping the scandal through a presidential pardon, Nixon was caught red-handed by the nation and world. In light of his crimes, it is unsurprising that the administration sought to quell political opposition through the legal route provided by the Controlled Substances Act.

Today, arrests for marijuana possession follow the same racist logic that birthed prohibition. In 2018, black Americans were 3.64 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession. In Montana and Kentucky, they were over 9 times more likely to be arrested. This is despite the fact that black and white Americans use marijuana at similar rates.

There is no state, including all states where marijuana is legal, that arrests white and black citizens at equal rates. Even in Colorado — the first state to legalize recreational use — black people are 1.54 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession (even “legal” states have possession limits).

Incredibly, there are 19 counties in the United States where black people are more than 20 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana. In Georgia’s Pickens County, black people are over 97 times more likely to be arrested! These statistics demonstrate the racist nature of marijuana enforcement — an enforcement that has never separated itself from its roots as a tool of subjugation of nonwhite populations.

In the best-case scenario, Biden’s directive to reschedule marijuana would result in complete descheduling. That means marijuana would no longer be prohibited by the Controlled Substances Act. While this would undeniably be an overdue victory, it wouldn’t expunge or pardon any past convictions from draconian laws that unjustly decimated generations of black communities. Descheduling alone, therefore, does little to right the wrongs Biden claims to be so concerned about. In order to properly address this state-sponsored terror campaign, all prisoners whose charges derive from marijuana possession must be freed and their records expunged. Anything less is a frivolous distraction masquerading as a step toward justice while keeping the victims of prohibition in bondage.

The Power of Pull-Over Prevention Clinics ("POPs")

By Joseph Lobodzinski

Throughout many leftist circles, debates are taking place over the best way to achieve police abolition. Some insist that the most realistic path is through an electoral struggle, wherein police abolitionists run for local, state, and federal positions. Once elected, they can slash police budgets and implement different policies that will bring us closer to a society without military-like “peacekeepers.” Others put their faith in community-based action such as, but not limited to, abolition read-ins and food/clothing donation events. These efforts seek to model a community wherein social ills are eradicated through basic human compassion, rendering a police presence unnecessary.

Abolitionist inquiry has yielded many great proposals addressing the destructiveness of America’s current police apparatus. As we continue this inquiry, we must take stock of all the meaningful ways people have advanced abolition within their communities.

One particular mode of abolitionist praxis has proved especially successful. It has shown an ability to protect marginalized people not just from cops, but immigration officers as well. Pull-over prevention clinics — or “POPs,” as they’re sometimes called — are free, volunteer-run repair shops. Crews of off-duty mechanics and community handymen help fix tires, install lights and booster seats, and refill essential fluids. This work, of course, allows people to safely conduct their required daily travel. But it also does much more than that. By ensuring compliance with legal standards, pull-over prevention clinics preempt “unsafe [and] discriminatory interactions with law enforcement.”

Ypsilanti, Michigan — located in the Huron Valley between Ann Arbor and Detroit — is a hotspot for this sort of mutual aid. In a remarkable display of solidarity, individuals from all walks of life are banding together to help protect the most marginalized members of their community.

The Ypsilanti Mutual Aid Network is one of many organizations in the Huron Valley region conducting POPs. They explain their reasoning as follows: 

“Police and immigration officers use minor automotive issues as reasons to stop, search, fine, and deport people. POP volunteers provide repair and advice for these issues, share repair skills, and promote access to local resources.”

Since 2020, some local chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America have also assisted hundreds of motorists in the Huron Valley through POPs. In those two years, POP events have grown significantly in both scope and frequency.

An increasing number of organizations in the Huron Valley go beyond car repair to provide other types of community-care work. Roughly once a month, residents of southeast Michigan can receive free COVID and flu shots, test kits, and masks provided by the Washtenaw County Health Department and Packard Health. Free lunches are given away by FedUp Ministries, free pet food and other supplies are provided by Pet Pals Mutual Aid, and clinics often have volunteer DJs and other entertainment for children to enjoy while their parents’ cars are being fixed. While not directly tied to policing, these services nonetheless help build the abolitionist project by drawing in more people who — whether they realize it or not — become part of an effort to eradicate social ills through community action rather than criminalization.

To increase accessibility, information on POPs is always published in both English and Spanish.  This allows word to travel quickly, increasing turnout and thus broadening the impact of POPs. That should encourage organizers, whose efforts will almost surely create positive ripple effects throughout their locale.

In a society with little sense of community, alienation is a staple of American life. It is therefore hard to organize aid efforts with quick, direct, and long-lasting effects — especially when the intended goal is abolition. While the notion of a society without police has gained traction since the murder of George Floyd, much of America is still tentatively supportive of the current approach to law enforcement. As liberal reforms continue to fail, and cities like New York shovel billions of dollars into their police departments, we must show those on the fence that there are better ways to promote public safety. Pull-over prevention clinics might be an integral part of an overall strategy to do just that.

A Marxist Concept of Politics

By Yanis Iqbal

Under capitalism, political violence is not constantly required for the extraction of surplus-value and the maintenance of capitalist social relations. The separation of direct producers from the means of production in capitalist social formations means that surplus-value can be appropriated by economic mechanisms without the repeated deployment or threat of deployment of politico-military force in the battle between classes. In Mute Compulsion: A Theory of the Economic Power of Capital, Søren Mau writes: “The characteristic thing about the power of capital is precisely that it has an ability to reproduce itself through economic processes, or, put differently, that the organization of social reproduction on the basis of capital gives rise to a set of powerful structural mechanisms which ensure its reproduction all by itself, as it were.” Capitalism constructs a new social relationship between the employer and the employed, one that allows the former to gain full control over the immediate environment of the latter. It needs workers to be “free” in a double sense: “free” to sell their own labor-power (not legally tied to a landlord or master) and “free” of any possession of the means of production, so that their material survival is dependent on becoming a wage-laborer. It is important to note here that the “freedom” to sell labor-power is rooted in “the mystified/mystifying moment of the wage contract and the freedom-of-contract rhetoric of nineteenth-century liberal individualism.”

Such a notion of “freedom” refers not to the actual independence of workers but to the ideological concealment of the coerciveness of the wage contract through a discourse of legal voluntarism. It denotes the process whereby proletarianized masses – separated from the means of production – are given the legal ability to enter the abstract sphere of bourgeois-juridical formalism and participate in the capitalist labor market. Thus, the economic power of capitalism exists as a form of exploitation that appears as the agential and self-driven decision of the individualized worker. This appearance is supported not only by the ideology of liberal contractualism but by the operational modality of economic power, which involves the application of indirect, structural pressures upon the material environment of subaltern classes. As Mau comments: “Whereas violence and ideology directly address the subject, economic power addresses it only indirectly through the manipulation of its socio-material environment. Economic power thus has to do with the way in which social relations of domination reproduce themselves by being inscribed in the environment of the subject.”

Insofar that the economic power of capital renders superfluous the need for political coercion in the labor process, there emerges a separation of the economic from the political. This concept of separation, while analytically true, applies to the individual labor process of capitalists, not to the social totality of the capitalist social formation. At the level of the individual capitalist, the need to simply survive, to avoid starvation, surely impels subalterns to join the rank of the proletariat. However, when we look at this issue from the collective standpoint of the capitalist totality, the process that institutes wage slavery as the only economic way of ensuring subsistence is brought about by a political closure of alternative employment options. This situation differs significantly from the one that prevails in pre-capitalist societies. In these societies, direct producers are not yet deprived of the means of production. Given this fact, the surplus labor of the exploited classes has to be appropriated in a form other than the economic coercion of the market found under capitalism. This form is provided by the political power and naked violence of pre-modern ideologies, which use religious prejudices and primitive attitudes to ensure subservience to the exploiters.

What is evident here is the fact that in pre-capitalist societies, individual owners of property have to continually use political violence to maintain control over property, a situation that is different from capitalism, where individual capitalists as capitalist property-owners do not have to use extra-economic force for the reproduction of their class status. But the capitalist class as a whole – in the form of the capitalist state – does utilize political and ideological violence to perpetuate the monopolization of the means of subsistence of the masses and the forcible destruction of non-capitalist livelihoods that may weaken the economic power of capital. Hence, both pre-capitalist and capitalist social formations are dependent upon political violence for their social reproduction. What differentiates the one from the other is the fact that capitalists, unlike pre-capitalist exploiters, don’t have to use violence at the individual level to ensure their dominance since that role is served by the economic compulsion of the market. However, the absence of violence at the individual level is propped up by the presence of violence at the collective level, embodied in the capitalist state. The systematic construction of public apparatuses that can perform repressive tasks for the bourgeoisie ensures that the working class has no choice not to work for a wage, being unable to choose between capitalist and non-capitalist employers.

This state of structural oppression – brought about through the political subjugation of non-capitalist subsistence options – demonstrates that in capitalism, what emerges is not so much the separation of the economic and the political but their functional division wherein individual capitalists possess economic power and the capitalist state possesses political power. Raju J Das writes: “the capitalist state and the capitalist class…are two arms of the social relationship called capitalist class relation. One arm signifies the exploitation of the majority and its (near) separation from property, and wealth-accumulation in the hands of the capitalists. Another arm signifies the political oppression/subjugation of the majority by the state. In other words, one arm signifies the capitalist class as a whole, and another arm signifies the state which is, above all, the coercive instrument to reproduce the capitalist class relations”. 

The capitalist relationship of dialectical mediation between the economic power of capital and the political power of the bourgeois state – distinguished from the sole presence of political power in pre-capitalist social formations – means that the immediate capitalist labor process appears to be free from violence and coercion. This appearance has a material basis in social reality because it reflects how the economic power of capital is structurally imbricated with the political power of the state. When acting as exploited workers in the capitalist civil society, it is only natural for proletarian human beings to perceive their engagement with the labor process as an economic one, as one that allows them to receive wages and satisfy monetary requirements.

Viewed from the perspective of the human imagination, which concerns itself with the affective workings of the senses, the capitalist civil society is a representation of the act of economic exchange and nothing more. The interconnection of this economic sphere with the coercive logic of the state is ignored because the ideas of the proletariat are interwoven with the material practice of wage slavery to such an extent that they are strongly limited by the horizons of the latter. Workers experience the economic mechanisms of capitalism as the immediate apprehension of objective forms that lie outside their subjective being, as mere methods of subsistence to which one has to conform. In this way, the proletariat’s material relation with the economic logic of the capitalist civil society is transformed into an ethereal relation to external forms. The visibility of the capitalist economy arises out of the structural invisibility of the political violence that generated its foundational framework, as well as of the overarching network of socio-cultural relations that serves the bourgeoisie through its manifold cruelties. This inability of human imagination to understand the interdependence of capitalist economy on the political violence of the state is part and parcel of the way in which ideology operates. It limits the mental capacities of human beings by socially constructing a collective sensorium that carries out processes of routinized sense-making and shapes comprehension, interaction, and practice. Gabriel Rockhill and Jennifer Ponce de León elaborate: 

Rather than there being a real, given world outside of ideology, that is then simply distorted through inversion, the world materially delivers itself to us upside down, and this is the primary datum of our ideological experience…material practice formats our perceptual matrix in such deep and fundamental ways that the world is “naturally” delivered to us through the lens of ideology. Instead of simply being a set of illusions or false ideas, ideology operates as an all-encompassing sensorium that emerges from the actual life-processes of homo faber. It composes an entire universe through the collective and historical production of a shared world of sense that is at one and the same time physical and mental. It is the collective historical life-process (der historische Lebensprozess) that forges this sensorium in such a seamless fashion that it is largely rendered imperceptible.

The human imagination is thus essentially entwined with an ideological imaginary i.e. “a collectively produced practical mode of intelligibility that assembles self-evident givens, being at one and the same time a way of thinking, feeling, being, perceiving, and acting. Far from remaining purely conceptual, it is affective, practical, perceptual, and axiological. An imaginary is thus the anchored modus operandi of social agents, which is flexible and varies across the social field depending on the agencies involved in its precise configuration.” In contrast to the ideological nature of human imagination, the rational faculties of human beings interact with reality by constructing adequate ideas that theoretically totalize the given facts through their contextualization in a historical movement of fluid social relations. This means that reason will comprehend the bourgeois political society as a necessary component of capital in which its essence as an exploitative dynamic is expressed, reinforcing the conditions of possibility of surplus-extraction through the repression of non-capitalist possibilities in the realm of civil society. Furthermore, reason understands that the one-sided representation of the capitalist civil society as a sphere of “free”, non-political wage contracts is essential for the continuous expansion of capital, for without this ideological illusion – that relationships in bourgeois civil society are representations of strictly economic exchanges – the commodity-form will fail in forcing subalterns into the entire circuit of capitalist reproduction that generates surplus-value.

Now, taking into account that the separation of the economic and the political under capitalism is primarily an ideological one, we need to examine what impact this separation has upon the logic of politics in a capitalist social formation. From the bourgeois viewpoint, politics actually functions as the invisible background of capitalist economics, as the violent underside of the abstract legalism of the market. The centrality of political violence to the field of economic production demands that it be ideologically mystified so that the dialectical linkages between the political power of the state and the economic power of capital can be broken and the character of the labor process can be normatively described as non-coercive and voluntary. This act of normative description is carried out by taking the capitalist separation of economics and politics at face value, without questioning the essence that lies beneath this appearance. As I have already noted, economic capital, unlike the ideological deployment of violence in pre-capitalist social formations, interpellates the subalterns in a matrix of subordination that works indirectly through the molding of their socio-material surroundings and conditions. Once the proletariat has been politically separated from the preconditions of its sustenance, the realization of its life can be carried out only through the presence of capital as a mediator. Thus, instead of an external power, the working class’s own interests with regards to survival force it to sell its labor-power. Todd McGowan writes:

“In the capitalist epoch, a bizarre inversion occurs: one’s obedience occurs through one’s isolated particularity…One obeys not by submitting to the domination of an authority’s command but by following one’s own self-interest…Capitalism does not eliminate obedience, though it does eliminate the act of submission to a structure of mastery. Individuals continue to participate in a structure that guides their existence, but they cease to experience it as a structure of mastery.”

The coincidence of the proletariat’s individual interest for sustenance with capital’s profit-driven interest for surplus extraction – rooted in the political separation of the immediate producers from their means of production – means that the economy comes to assume a veneer of depoliticized neutrality, with the state’s function of political violence in the capitalist market fading into the background. As soon as the appearance of the capitalist market as a technocratic arbiter of individual interests emerges, bourgeois ideologists discursively entrench this appearance by reconfiguring political society, so that it no longer signifies the coercive complement of capital’s economic power but a synthetic zone of abstract legalism that aids the ostensible market rationalism of bourgeois civil society. Politics no longer refers to the inner component of extra-economic violence that inevitably accompanies the economic power of capital but to a juridified political society that speaks only through the language of the formal equality of otherwise unequal citizens – a language that is itself a reflection of the capitalist market that organizes commodity exchange in terms of the abstract equivalence of qualitatively unequal market actors. The juridical concept of the equality of all citizens before the law, the equal respect for the life and property of each citizen, the equal freedom of association and contract, forms a necessary legal-institutional basis for a system of commodity production that posits materially unequal social agents as abstractly equal “rational” actors that are pursuing their individual interests through the medium of the market. Under a social structure of capitalist accumulation, the representative liberal state enforces this formal contractual equality only to cloak the very real inequalities that exist between the propertied capitalists and the property-less wage-laborers. 

For the proletariat, the natural-law contractualism that undergirds politics in a capitalist society – founded upon the ideological depoliticization of the economy and the technocratic erasure of the violent antagonistic social relations inherent to the field of production – results in the systemic delimitation of politics: in its status quoist version, politics sets its boundaries of intervention in an external fashion with regards to the field of production. It considers its area of operation to be the juridified political society of capitalism – a sphere of political existence that is wholly internal to the constraints of the bourgeois state and its institutional apparatuses, functionally bounded by the field of reproduction of the strategic political and social interests of the bourgeois class. Here, we can observe how the apparent alienation and separation of this sphere of bourgeois politics from the material intercourse that takes in bourgeois civil society actually facilitates their ever close intermeshing.

The claims of bourgeois political society to a juridical status of an abstract entity that can’t interfere with the market rationalism of civil society leads to a paradoxical non-interventionist stance: state-supported political violence consistently intervenes against opposition to the scientific pretensions of the market so that it can maintain the space within which the ostensibly non-political and self-sustaining mechanisms of the market can work. Political intervention creates the conditions of possibility for a supposedly non-political market that is touted as an entity capable of sustaining itself without further intervention. The lack of intervention of the capitalist state in the free market is based upon political interventions that create the conditions of possibility for that non-interventionism through the elimination of any form of opposition. Bourgeois ideologists want to drive out the paradoxical character of the political state by forgetting the political coercion that constitutes the condition of possibility for the self-regulating market and ideologically consecrating the bourgeois state as a legal guarantor of the rationalism of capitalist civil society. The proletariat demolishes this façade by showing how the rationalism of the market requires as its dialectical counterpart the irrationalism of the political state, how the realization of working class survival through market exchanges is produced by the destruction of non-capitalist options, how the juridified political society’s respect for the so-called scientific nature of the market is actually a mask for coercively eliminating the class antagonisms found in the capitalist labor process. From this, it is clear that the bourgeoisie’s hegemonic project is conflictual: to gain consent, the ruling class has to interact with the proletarian hostility arising from the class conflicts that are constitutive of capitalist society. In this process, the collective structures of civil society are given a bivalent character. On the one hand, they serve as the instruments through which the elite exercises economic and ideological power. On the other hand, insofar that the bourgeoisie has to maintain a power equilibrium through the creation of apparatuses that deal with subaltern opposition, the organisms of civil society also function as the principal vehicle for the actions of these oppressed classes.

The existence of this duality causes the emergence of two different conceptions of politics: bourgeois politics, which revels in the abstractness of legal contractualism, and proletarian politics, which constantly overflows the barriers of bourgeois politics to highlight the violence that forms an essential substratum of economic exchange. While the former resides in the realm of political society, unwilling to explore how the state is not a legal guarantor of juridical equality but a capitalist enforcer of material inequality, the latter resides in the connective terrain between political society and civil society, constantly highlighting the internality of the bourgeois state’s political violence to the supposedly “neutral” economic power of capital. This form of proletarian politics understands that the enrichment of the political equality promised by the bourgeois state cannot lead to the eradication of exploitation from the economic arena of bourgeois civil society. On the contrary, it reinforces the social legitimacy of the state institutions that are responsible for hiding the essentially violent and oppressive nature of the capitalist economy. Bourgeois ideologists have combatted the counter-hegemonic thrust of proletarian politics by portraying it as an unscientific remainder of pre-capitalism that attempts to politically disrupt the non-political stability of the free market’s invisible hand. As Etienne Balibar notes: 

The fundamental point is that from Adam Smith onwards, ‘economic’ discourse, by presenting itself as science and radically divorcing itself from ‘politics’, represented as a remnant of pre-capitalism, and thus instituting the distinction of civil society and the State, provides the different factions of the bourgeoisie with the means of considering, and thus of organizing the unity of their interests as just so many conditions of the accumulation of capital. Everything opposing their mutual interests is called ‘politics’, and everything which leads back to the logic of accumulation, that is, to the command of capital (or money) over labour, is called ‘economics’ At last this provides the means, albeit theoretical, of preventing the interests of labour, or rather of workers, from entering into the conflict of interests between different bourgeois factions, so as to disturb its ‘arbitrations’ (as we say nowadays) and to undermine the mass bases of the State. 

To summarize, from the standpoint of the bourgeoisie, there are two definitions of politics: one is the legalistic one that ideologically reflects the apparent alienation of political society from civil society and the other is the revolutionary one that emphasizes their real interdependence and interpenetration. While the former is based on legal respect for the market rationalism of supposedly scientific bourgeois economics, the latter is based on radical hostility to the scientific and rationalist pretensions of capitalist surplus extraction, highlighting their irrational interrelation with the coercive logic of state-sponsored political violence. These two forms of politics, however, don’t exist in neat separation from one another. To be more precise, revolutionary politics itself has suffered the ideological invasion of bourgeois elements, taking from the latter the notion of the separation of economics and politics under capitalism and radicalizing it in an anti-capitalist direction. This ideological hybridity manifests itself in the form of ultra-leftism, which opposes any form of participation in the movement for reforms. Such opposition emerges from the specific discursive order of that ideology.

The appearance of the division of the extra-economic state from the economic labor process – embodied in the ideological mystification of juridical abstractness – is accepted with a radical twist: the separation is now construed no longer as the juridical respect for market rationalism but as the violent subjection of civil society to the dictates of political society. In the case of bourgeois ideologists, the separation of economics (civil society) and politics (political society) is affirmed to maintain the hierarchical subjection of the former to the latter. In the case of ultra-leftwing ideologists, the same separation is affirmed in favor of civil society. It is said that the hegemonic perpetuation of the power of capital over labour requires a state machinery which is divorced from the mass of the people and beyond their democratic control, so the working class, in order to remove the bourgeoisie from their position of dominance and set up a Communist order, requires a form of government through which political society can be reabsorbed into civil society. The privileging of civil society produces a form of anti-politics that regards as futile any kind of participation in the political system of capitalism. In both the bourgeois and ultra-leftwing cases, the terms – economics and politics, civil society and political society – continue to exist in their static state of separation, only their relational ordering is changed.

Unlike these two ideologies, Communism destroys the strict isolation of state and society and points out how it is their particular dialectical nexus that constitutes the essence of the capitalist arrangement. Contrary to the propositions of ultra-leftists, capitalism does not involve the separation of civil society and political society, and the subjection of the former to the violence of the latter. Instead, it involves the inextricable intermeshing of the political power of the state and the economic power of capital – the former ensuring the preconditions for the continued existence of the latter. The role of proletarian politics consists in advancing a class struggle in such a way that the working class comes to expose the essential violence of the labor process, showing how it is tethered to the coercive closure of non-capitalist alternatives and is full of irreconcilable class antagonisms. In the normal conditions of bourgeois hegemony, the civil war between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie remains latent, or invisible, unavailable to the consciousness of the subaltern, which continues to think of economics and politics in terms of market rationalism and juridical equality, respectively.

When the normal exercise of bourgeois hegemony breaks down, when the apparent separation of economics and politics weakens, the confrontational edge of class struggle comes to the fore, with the proletariat openly criticizing political society and civil society as two moments of a dialectical whole, geared towards their exploitation. Politics in the Marxist sense refers precisely to the transition that is effected by the proletariat from one phase of class struggle to the other, the becoming visible of the latent struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat through the destruction of the antinomies of politics and economics. To use the words of Balibar, for the workers’ movement, the reality of politics “is nothing other than the development of the contradictions of the economy...To transgress the limits of the recognized – and artificially separated – political sphere, which are only ever the limits of the established order, politics has to get back to the ‘non-political’ conditions of that institution (conditions which are, ultimately, eminently political). It has, in other words, to get back to the economic contradictions, and gain a purchase on these from the inside.” This “pattern of referring back to the material conditions of politics, which is in turn required for the internal political transformation of those conditions,” means that the proletariat cannot refrain from engaging with the political dynamics of capitalist society. On the contrary, to destroy the separation of economics and politics, the working class has to consistently build a mass movement that defends the living standards of workers and activates the latent class antagonisms in the field of economic production.

As part of this, the Communist Party has to also participate in elections so that it can displace the ostensible neutrality of bourgeois political society from within that sphere. Expressed in more general terms, while ultra-leftism privileges civil society and attempts to voluntarily proclaim a space of proletarian autonomy within that sphere, Marxism recognizes the structural embeddedness of subalterns in the dialectical nexus of political society and civil society and thus builds proletarian autonomy through a concrete movement of political practices that can dissolve that nexus. Bearing in mind how the apparent separation of economics and politics under capitalism weakens the independence of the proletariat, the Communist Party always tries to overcome this separation through all possible means. Insofar that Communism has as its goal the unification of economics and politics, it is both hyper-political, highlighting the intense antagonisms found in both political society and civil society, and anti-political, overcoming bourgeois restrictions to articulate an expansive notion of politics. Once this separation has been overcome, class struggle can replace the capitalist totality, whose dialectical moments are political society and civil society, with Communist totality, whose dialectical moments are formed by the free association of human beings working toward their self-actualization through democratically managed production.