Capitalism as Decay and Chaos. Socialism as Social Order and Security.

[Capitalism has destroyed much of the US, including Detroit (pictured).]

By Sudip Bhattacharya

We’ve entered the era of smartphones and eugenics. “They’re eating cats, they’re eating dogs,” Trump had exclaimed frantically, echoing words that could’ve been uttered by a Klansman in the early 1920s, but now that very same level of toxicity having been beamed into households all across the world for whoever has the stomach to bear it.[1] So many now have access to learning about events on the ground from almost anywhere, where we can communicate, send money to, and spread the word of various political events due to the devices in peoples’ pockets, and yet, none of that alters the fact that entire family trees have been erased in places like Palestine. No amount of streaming with emojis can negate the brutality of Israel’s siege, a high-tech form of genocidal intent and killing, with drones swarming the skies, but a genocide nonetheless.[2]

R. Palme Dutt, a Marxist theoretician of the interwar period in Europe, noted similar dynamics in his own era, the clashing of so-called technological progress with civilizational decay and impending horror. At the time, the productive capacities of Europe had expanded tremendously in a rather short period of time. Major manufacturing and industrialization had finally led to a capacity across most Western societies, including the U.S., to resolve issues of hunger and starvation. However, countries chose to get rid of their “surplus” food, burning it, dumping some of it into the nearest ocean.

“The burning of millions of bags of coffee or tons of grain, in the midst of mass starvation and poverty, have horrified the world,” he stated at the time, while the global economy had still been reeling from years of a financial reckoning.[3] In parts of the colonized world, European policymakers would intentionally funnel basic food commodities, like rice and grain, to maintain high levels of prices for such products, in the process leading to mass starvation in places like Bengal. Prior to European colonization, famines were a rare phenomenon. Even in feudal times, local authorities, however authoritarian and demeaning, had kept aside piles of grain to satiate the masses in times of hardship, to avoid unrest. But that had all changed the moment the British ships arrived, followed by the French and the Americans, all of whom were dedicated to squeezing profit out of every inch of land and person, from the trader to the peasant.[4]

Treating food as a commodity rather than meeting human needs remains a routine feature of our global system. It was only a month or so into the pandemic when farmers across the U.S. were compelled to destroy acres of “excess” food. “In scenes reminiscent of the Great Depression, dairy farmers dumped lakes of fresh cow’s milk (3.7m gallons a day in early April, now about 1.5 million per day), hog and chicken farmers aborted piglets and euthanized hens by the thousands, and crop growers plowed acres of vegetables into the ground as the nation’s brittle and anarchic food supply chain began to snap and crumble.”[5]

In 2008, Japan, one of America’s closest allies, had plans to “dump” excess rice in parts of Asia to alleviate food insecurity. The U.S. was against this, the number one reason being that it could decrease the demand for rice in consumer markets, allowing the price of rice to “dampen.” A New York Times report, the prestigious rag for the “concerned” elite, had stated at the time: “The effect would be more pronounced if Japan followed it with further sales or donations from the 1.7 million tons of imported rice now sitting in Japanese warehouses. Roughly 30 million tons of rice are traded globally each year.”[6] As Dutt understood it generations ago, the mishmash of progress, as in the productive capacity to create a far richer world than it’s ever been imagined, coupled with what he described as “decay”, was not a problem of humanity losing its soul in the modern age. It wasn’t a problem of technological advancement rotting our level of empathy with one another, or something philosophical of that nature. Rather, it’s a direct product of the disorder and irrationalism capitalism forces the vast majority of humanity to endure. “Today they are burning wheat and grain, the means of human life. To-morrow they will be burning living human bodies”, Dutt stated as early as 1934, predicting the death spiral modern capitalism would allow to fester, leading to the next great war that would end up killing millions of people due to inter-imperialist rivalry desperate for new markets to conquer.[7] Much of the world had been carved up and seized by the British empire, the French, and the U.S., with newly industrialized nations such as Italy and Germany frustrated at their own limited right as Europeans to dominate and control parts of Africa and Asia. This was one of the main reasons precipitating the war, with fascism as a product of this rising anger over the denial of the German peoples and the Italian peoples, and the Japanese, access to more colonies and overseas territories they could also brutally exploit for extreme profit and gain.[8]

Through capitalism, such things as economic growth, competition, and the drive for more are prioritized against what humanity truly requires for its existence, from peace and security to universal access to healthy food, housing and entertainment. This rotting dynamic has been the most pronounced in the U.S., and countries it chooses to ally with, like South Korea, where at the most molecular level, our daily lives become a constant web of stress and rolling chaos. How else to describe being surrounded by so much alleged abundance, and yet, not having consistent access to it based on how much you make, being denied that access in critical moments even, like when severely ill. Sharon Zhang at Truthout wrote merely a few years ago, “A new report done by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has found that drug prices in the U.S. on average are about two to four times higher than they are in Australia, Canada and France.”[9] Some of this has changed, but only for certain medicines, like insulin, but even then, Americans have died due to this inane system whereby you either have the money to give to these private entities that hoard these essential resources and services, or you are compelled to plead for donations to help pay for life-saving medications instead.[10] How is this sanity, let alone moral?

Most of us navigate our lives with this level of pressure mounting. Either we have limited access to the most fundamental things we need, as employees, as consumers who can sustain some level of income cobbled together in a mesh of part-time and full-time work, or we lose it all in a matter of weeks, months maybe, if we’re so fortunate. One moment you can be at your computer, or at the cash register, filing reports, running items through barcode scanners mindlessly, and in another, you’re hiding in your bedroom as a voice bellows at you from behind your apartment door, right before another eviction notice has been slipped underneath your door.

It is in the “rational” interest to cause this level of mayhem and pain, and panic in our lives by businesses that are allowed to dominate and control how much we work, how much we own, how much time we have to be ourselves. Unemployment is a necessary condition for capitalism to thrive. For private employers to retain an increasing level of profit, they must euphemistically “let people go”, cut them off. There can never be full employment either since capitalists need and desire some level of people without jobs so they can always replace their existing employees if unrest starts to brew, and to drive down wages with this threat in place. Economist Richard Wolff states, “Capitalism makes employment depend chiefly on capitalists’ decisions to undertake production, and those decisions depend on profits. If capitalists expect profits high enough to satisfy them, they hire. If capitalists don’t, we get unemployment. Capitalism requires the unemployed, their families and their communities to live with firing decisions made by capitalists even though they are excluded from participating in those decisions.”[11] Such decisions sow chaos at the personal level for so many, and even social problems that communities must endure (like crime), and yet, these considerations are barely considered since the main guiding light is how heavy a man’s wallet can get.

Dutt too spoke of how major capitalists, just as the global capitalist economy was steadying itself through some measure of increased social democracy, decided to unload workers they felt they didn’t need, once more sowing disorder and political turmoil. “Increasing millions are thrown aside as ‘superfluous’”, he stated.[12]

However, none of this can compare to the most chaotic and disorderly result of all: climate change. Quite literally, the right for mainly Western companies and nations to accrue wealth has been the reason why the waters are rising across the globe, why so much land has become more challenging to grow food on, why the temperatures are rising to dangerously high levels, threatening the majority of the world’s population.[13] The need to see red arrows ticking upward on graphs unveiled at executive boardrooms across Europe and the U.S. has been the reason why humanity is on the brink of extinction.

LORDS OF CHAOS

Only in capitalist societies can thugs like Trump, and Bolsonaro find space to not merely fester, but thrive, and maneuver into major seats of power. At the time of Dutt’s major work, Fascism and Social Revolution, published prior to the horrors of WWII, fascism itself had already become a worldwide phenomenon, having conquered state power in Italy, Germany, Japan, and threatening to do so in the U.S. among other places. Of course, the U.S. itself, although not explicitly run by a fascist party, remained in the throes of white supremacy and colonialist interests. It was the same within the British Isles too, with figures like Winston Churchill already professing his hatred of black and brown peoples, eager for the British government to pour money and technological support behind every hard-right nationalist movement imaginable to squelch the rising tide of “Bolshevism” across parts of Eastern Europe.

The rise of fascism and other forms of extreme forms of racialized terror (i.e. Jim and Jane Crow) had everything to do with capitalism and how it breeds elements of social dysfunction, intentionally or not. At one level, due the chaos that capitalism itself creates and the various classes affected by such chaos, people themselves can be driven, out of lost privilege in many instances, toward extreme right political movements. As Dutt explains, during times of economic crises, no one was immune. Even those who have been raised to believe they are “middle class”, a meaningless vacuous concept designed to obscure one’s true class position (you can earn six figures and still be an employee reliant on your job), can start to feel the ground underneath them shake. However, because such elements of society have been developed intellectually to think they’re entitled to more, and are better than others, in many examples, such groups lash out at those below or around them instead of seeking solidarity against said system of exploitation and unjust results. This is more of an issue, Dutt explains, when societies lack a robust labor movement that’s radical and internationalist, able to funnel the rage of the white-collar workers and occasionally, even small business owners, into something far more productive for themselves and others. In the American context, the rise of overt white supremacy was eventually welcomed by various capitalists because this meant a force that could stamp down on socialist, or more liberatory movements that sought to free the black masses and other nonwhite groups from their position as being heavily exploitable and captured as a consumer base for separate, oftentimes subpar, services and goods.[14]

But even this last point has everything to do with the broader economic system. In the U.S., political power and speech is fundamentally linked with money and wealth. Although on technical terms all civic and various interest groups can participate in lobbying government institutions, for the most part, those who have the most money can effectively shape policy at a greater pace, able to unleash their army of lawyers into every conceivable issue-based policy discussion at Capitol Hill.

Political scientist, Lee Drutman, in one of the rare well-written Atlantic pieces, writes, “Corporations now spend about $2.6 billion a year on reported lobbying expenditures—more than the $2 billion we spend to fund the House ($1.18 billion) and Senate ($860 million). It’s a gap that has been widening since corporate lobbying began to regularly exceed the combined House-Senate budget in the early 2000s. Today, the biggest companies have upwards of 100 lobbyists representing them, allowing them to be everywhere, all the time. For every dollar spent on lobbying by labor unions and public-interest groups together, large corporations and their associations now spend $34. Of the 100 organizations that spend the most on lobbying, 95 consistently represent business.”[15]

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But beyond the explicit political channels available to people, allegedly, capitalism privileges the worst elements of people to attain power and control. If it is a meritocracy, it is a meritocracy for the craven and cunning, the sociopathic and disjointed. In American life, the distribution of land to white “settlers”, for the purposes of extending capitalist hegemony across the North American continent, empowered the worst to exact revenge and bloodlust against various groups of native and indigenous peoples. The Northern obsession over sustaining high levels of private manufacturing was intrinsically tied to the resources plucked and grown by enslaved Africans.[16]

In the modern era, starting in Dutt’s time, capitalists not only created the conditions for the indirect creation of swamp things and horrid extensions of themselves into the rest of civil society, they actively supported rightwing formations, from the right-wing of the social democrats who promised some measure of stability without “Bolshevism”, to finally, fascist groups and various rightwing nationalists, all of whom dedicated to smashing communist and socialist workers organizations across Europe. In the U.S., the growth of the Klan was supported by business owners, national and regional, as a means of instilling terror and “discipline” against the domestic “horde” of black and nonwhite peoples seeking self-determination, and labor groups vying for dignity and some measure of control over their own lives.[17]

In Italy, Dutt writes, the army itself trained Mussolini’s forces and stepped aside as those same forces rampaged through socialist party labor halls and community centers. As communists threatened to bring democracy to Germany, the German capitalists and their allies abroad eagerly feted and funded what was the Nazi party. “Unlimited funds, not only from German bourgeois, but also from foreign bourgeois sources, were poured into the National Socialist coffers,” he explained.[18]

One of the leading backers of Trump is Elon Musk, a billionaire able to accrue wealth and power during “normal” times under capitalism.[19] Now, he uses that same wealth and influence to spread disinformation and hate speech, reminiscent of the 1920s, through social media, as well as throwing his support behind someone as odious and confusing as Trump, a billionaire himself, having done the brave thing of not paying workers, and inheriting his father’s money.[20]

But before Trump became the increasingly spiteful figure he is, uncomfortably alongside Musk, the political class, both Democrat and “moderate” Republican, supported him, and allowed for him to grow his wealth and control.[21] While working class black and brown families were torn apart in the ‘90s, Trump was applauded for his branding schemes.[22] Just as others were being hit by drones, Trump, even though he was humiliated, was invited to luncheons and major public events, despite his track record of being a notorious scumbag.[23]

Beyond Trump or Trumpism itself, the various scurrilous ideas that consist of his platform, like his intense hatred of immigrants from Latin America, China, and parts of Africa (essentially, the entirety of the nonwhite world), have been pet projects among billionaires for decades.[24] John Tanton, one of the leading “advocates” against immigration from the so-called Third World, soaked in his fear of “demographic” changes to the U.S., succeeded in spreading his poisonous gospel with the aid of benefactors such as Cordelia Scaife May, part of the wealthy Mellon of Carnegie Mellon fame.[25] “With May’s support, Tanton established a small network of think tanks and nonprofits that would, in the decades ahead, grow to become the most powerful mainstream advocates of immigration restriction since the early nineteenth century—a key component in the ruling class’s ideological machinery of exploitation and oppression,” writes Brendan O’Connor in his study of the rise of the modern far right in Blood Red Lines: How Nativism Fuels the Right.[26] As much as companies have branded themselves as empathetic or somewhat oriented to aspects of social justice (at least in some scraps of rhetoric), they easily align with the existing security state as it serves to harass, intimidate and sow mass panic and fear among black and brown working class and poor migrants. “In fact, brands and private industry had pride of place at the Border Security Expo,” O’Connor details, “Corporate sponsors included familiar names like Verizon and Motorola, and other less well-known ones, such as Elbit Systems of America, a subsidiary of Israel’s largest private defense contractor, as well as a handful of IT firms with aggressive slogans like ‘Ever Vigilant’ (CACI), “Securing the Future” (ManTech, and ‘Securing Your Tomorrow’ (Unisys).”[27]

Coalitional corporate entities, like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which includes companies like Amazon and Johnson & Johnson among other heavyweights, exists solely to influence politicians, to develop networks of think tanks, and to pour money into astroturf on-the-ground groups to do everything possible to stall any form of progressive legislation that would improve the lives of working people, and various marginalized groups.[28] Such organizations end up diminishing the natural antibodies of a healthy political system, of radicalized labor and the left, that could serve as a bulwark against impeding fascism. “Despite its generally low profile, ALEC has drawn scrutiny recently for promoting gun rights policies like the Stand Your Ground law at the center of the Trayvon Martin shooting case in Florida, as well as bills to weaken labor unions and tighten voter identification rules.”[29]

What benefits the public interest, including a safe and healthy political system, is far from the minds of most corporations and those who run them, no matter how well spoken and articulate they may be in front of the cameras. A Trump, a Musk, a Sheldon Adelson, a Bill Gates, a Jeff Bezos, Steve Bannon will routinely slither into the moonlight so long as there exists the swamp, a bubbling sweltering pile of business “rationale” and anti-egalitarian anti-human debris, lurking and seeking an opportunity to smash and dominate. 

And when the contradictions of life under capitalist hegemony expands, such forces will continue to unify against any form of legitimate and effective labor and justice-oriented agitation. They’d rather watch the world burn than allow for anyone to be able to control their own waking lives.

COMMUNISM IS ORDER & PEACE

Communism has stood in stark contrast to the chaos and lack of control that most people endure while surviving the vicious cycle of booms and busts in a capitalist system. Under capitalism, social dysfunction and disorder are the norm, increasingly so. This is not to suggest that somehow all social issues or at all times, social order, will be present in a socialist world. There will still be tensions between people, conflicting issues too. But what is so different about a socialist world compared to a capitalist one that we have currently, a product of U.S. imperial rule, is that such disorder and dysfunction are severely limited, and can be better resolved since the prime objective of a socialist society internationally is one that privileges and incentivizes the public welfare over private selfish desires, especially any that’s been attached to the profit-motive that’s led us down this abyss that we’re currently experiencing.

“The workers’ dictatorship is the only alternative to the capitalist dictatorship, which at present is increasingly passing from the older ‘democratic’ to Fascist forms,” Dutt stated.[30]

Peace and security, social order and justice can only be achieved once there is a system in place  that doesn’t allow for wealth to equate with political power and rampant influence. Order and peace is unleashed, allowed to thrive, when goods and services are managed, not for private gain, but rather for the public welfare. In a socialist society, people would still need to labor, but when they do, it’ll not be for any private employer. Instead, it would be done to help provide what the general public needs and wants. Housing, healthcare, education, entertainment, and food, among other fundamental things that make life worth living will be managed and distributed by government institutions, institutions that are transparent and have a higher level of input from workers, and communities that have historically been displaced and disenfranchised.

Essentially, to prevent the world from slipping back into the clutches of political and economic chaos, there can be no capitalist class. There can be no so-called “free market” in charge of how people access basic amenities. The U.S. imperial regime, which has done so much to redistribute land and resources for herself and her allies the world over, must be dismantled, replaced by a global world order of governments seeking common solutions and health for the world’s majority, especially for those who’ve been often condemned to a life of immiseration and dysfunction due to the rise of the U.S. global regime.[31]

Socialism brings us closer to ourselves as human beings, not as profit-seeking monsters, sometimes compelled by capitalism’s latent drive for more and more, to destroy ourselves and others. Trumps will certainly still show themselves in a socialist society, the art of dissent is still one that can be easily manipulated by nefarious forces claiming pluralism and “democracy”. But in a socialist world that seeks to uplift the historically exploited and oppressed, backed by governments that work tirelessly to help regulate society in ways that benefits the majority of such groups, not only shall the rightwing remain a tiny minority, but if they do start to boil and bubble over, will find no allies in higher institutions of management and governing. Instead, they will only find what we ourselves experience today, repression and the prioritization of positive public policies that value the oppressed and exploited, which include our right to control those elements that threaten us.

“Only the working-class revolution can save humanity, can carry humanity forward, can organise the enormous powers of production that lie ready to hand,” Dutt had stated, when optimism and pessimism clashed.[32]

Examples of this future we can see glimmers of in countries such as Cuba, where healthcare remains a right, despite the brutal U.S. embargo.[33] Or in places like Vietnam, a country that rebuilt itself, almost miraculously, following the brutal occupation of French and U.S. forces.[34] China too, despite some of its flaws, represents forms of political thinking that can prove useful to the rest of the planet. As Covid-19 became reality, it was China’s government that so swiftly directed the masses to construct hospital after hospital to care for its own.[35]

In America too, there have been fleeting moments but moments nonetheless of what can be possible. The early days of the Reconstruction era, as W.E.D. Du Bois examined in his classic Black Reconstruction, saw the federal government, for the first time in U.S. history, rise to the occasion in creating government programs and institutions that could provide basic schooling and healthcare to the masses, black and white, while having troops stationed across the confederacy to stifle emergent white supremacist rebellions and putsch.[36] It was only when the federal government retreated from these stated objectives that the white supremacist gangs had taken over and conquered political power.

But what was done can be done again. There is no other choice anyway. It is either we, as Dutt states, “rise to the height of its task”, of finding ways to generate the social movements that can create order and stability that people crave, and need, or we witness total devolution and chaos. Nothing is set in stone, yet. The waters haven’t risen over our heads, not yet at least. But whatever we choose to do has to be done, very, very soon.

There will be no order and peace, or security, until the capitalist and the colonizer have been obliterated.

 
Notes

[1] Merlyn Thomas & Mike Wendling, “Trump repeats baseless claim about Haitian immigrants eating pets,” BBC News, Sept. 2024, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c77l28myezko.

[2] Rasha Khatib, et. al, “Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential,” The Lancet, July 10, 2024, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext.

[3] R. Palme Dutt, Fascism & Social Revolution (New York: International Publishing Co., 1934), 64.

[4] Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (New York: Verso, 2002).

[5] Christopher D. Cook, “Farmers are destroying mountains of food. Here's what to do about it,” The Guardian, May 7 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/07/farmers-food-covid-19.

[6] Keith Bradsher & Andrew Martin, “U.S. in Difficult Position Over Japan’s Rice Plan,” New York Times, May 23, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/23/business/worldbusiness/23rice.html.

[7] Dutt, 68.

[8] Dutt, Fascism & Social Revolution.

[9] Sharon Zhang, “Prescription Drugs in US Are Quadruple What They Cost Elsewhere, Report Finds,” Truthout, April 21, 2021, https://truthout.org/articles/prescription-drugs-in-u-s-are-quadruple-what-they-cost-elsewhere-report-finds/?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAiA65m7BhAwEiwAAgu4JHAE9XUZPidG3m1RSVg_DXL1XYekevJptgBSD5C58J0r2Cv9NnbEPhoC6tAQAvD_BwE.

[10] Ben Popken, “With rise in patients dying from rationing insulin, U.N. tries a new solution,” NBC News, Nov. 15, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/rise-patients-dying-rationing-insulin-u-n-tries-new-solution-n1083816.

[11] Richard Wolff, “Capitalism and Unemployment,” Truthout, Nov. 15, 2013, https://truthout.org/articles/capitalism-and-unemployment/.

[12] Dutt, 44.

[13] “Crop Changes,” National Geographic, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/climate-change/how-to-live-with-it/crops.html.

[14] Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1990).

[15] Lee Drutman, “How Corporate Lobbyists Conquered American Democracy,” The Atlantic, April 20, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/04/how-corporate-lobbyists-conquered-american-democracy/390822/.

[16] Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (New York: MacMillan, 2020).

[17] Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK (New York: W.W. Norton, 2018).

[18] Dutt, 139.

[19] Maggie Haberman, et. al, “How Elon Musk Has Planted Himself Almost Literally at Trump’s Doorstep,” New York Times, Dec. 30, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/30/us/politics/elon-musk-trump-mar-a-lago.html.

[20] David Barstow, “Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father,” New York Times, Oct. 2, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-schemes-fred-trump.html.

[21] Maureen Dowd, “When Hillary and Donald Were Friends,” New York Times, Nov. 2, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/magazine/when-hillary-and-donald-were-friends.html.

[22] Lisette Voytko-Best, “Judge Rules Trump Can Be Sued For Marketing Scheme Fraud,” Forbes, July 26, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisettevoytko/2019/07/25/judge-rules-trump-can-be-sued-for-marketing-scheme-fraud/.

[23] Shawn McCreesh, “Trump Among New York’s Elites at a Charity Dinner: It Got Awkward,” New York Times, Oct. 18, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/18/us/elections/donald-trump-al-smith-dinner-new-york.html.

[24] Christine Ro, “Why African Groups Want Reparations From The Gates Foundation,” Forbes, Sept. 2, 2024, https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2024/09/02/why-african-groups-want-reparations-from-the-gates-foundation/.

[25] Nicholas Kulish & Mike Mcintire, “Why an Heiress Spent Her Fortune Trying to Keep Immigrants Out,” New York Times, August 14, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/us/anti-immigration-cordelia-scaife-may.html.

[26] Brendan O’Connor, Blood Red Lines: How Nativism Fuels the Right (New York: Haymarket, 2021), 29.

[27] Brendan O’Connor, 175.

[28] Alex SeitzWald, “Revealed: Full List of ALEC’s Corporate Members,” Truthout, May 5, 2012, https://truthout.org/articles/revealed-full-list-of-alecs-corporate-members/?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiA1Km7BhC9ARIsAFZfEIufx4FOoy_3vNZHfBMnvL2x7OEGtWbVauJtxl46Oc2GgUqhsUP8h30aAkgBEALw_wcB.

[29] Mike McIntire, “Conservative Nonprofit Acts as a Stealth Business Lobbyist,” New York Times, April 21, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/us/alec-a-tax-exempt-group-mixes-legislators-and-lobbyists.html.

[30] Dutt, 306.

[31] “Hugo Chavez Harshly Criticizes Bush at U.N.,” NPR, Sept. 20, 2006, https://www.npr.org/2006/09/20/6111080/hugo-chavez-harshly-criticizes-bush-at-u-n.

[32] Dutt, 309.

[33] David Blumenthal, “Fidel Castro's Health Care Legacy,” The Commonwealth Fund, Nov. 26, 2016, https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2016/fidel-castros-health-care-legacy.

[34] “Viet Nam’s Economy is Forecast to Grow 6.1% in 2024: WB“, World Bank, August 26, 2024, https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2024/08/26/viet-nam-s-economy-is-forecast-to-grow-6-1-in-2024-wb.

[35] Yuliya Talmazan, “China's coronavirus hospital built in 10 days opens its doors, state media says,” NBC News, Feb. 3, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-s-coronavirus-hospital-built-10-days-opens-its-doors-n1128531.

[36] W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (New York: The Free Press, 1935).

The Exploitative Alliance: How Corporate Strategies and Union Investments Undermine Worker Security

[ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX NABAUM]

By Peter S. Baron

A major obstacle to the collective well-being of workers is how corporate employers connect retirement funds to the stock market. This linking means that workers bear the brunt, as publicly traded companies aim to maximize profitability through cost-cutting measures that negatively impact their wages, job security, and working conditions. Similarly, labor unions like the United Auto Workers (UAW) channel membership dues into investment funds that often hold stocks in the very companies they may confront or negotiate with.

Recent history has witnessed a significant transformation in the structure of labor's retirement portfolios; they are now primarily sustained by individual contributions, with companies only occasionally offering modest matching contributions. Individuals now shoulder the entire risk, while corporations benefit from reduced financial liabilities and greater predictability in managing retirement expenses. Insidiously, as corporations have shifted financial risk onto individuals, they have also directed these investments toward financial management behemoths. These entities hold control over each individual investor’s voting rights, effectively seizing the collective power of working-class retirement funds. This power is then leveraged to amplify the relentless profit-driven mechanisms at the core of capitalism. Running parallel, organized labor’s advocacy power has been undermined by union bureaucrats who have chosen to tether the union's financial health to the success of the same corporate giants it should be challenging, effectively making the union a complacent, and likely complicit, partner in the very corporate strategies that exploit its members. 

These financial realities, carefully engineered by corporations and meekly accepted by labor, are riddled with contradictions that reveal the blatant exploitation at the core of the elite’s oppression of workers. They serve as stark reminders that security and well-being, let alone collective liberation, won't come from corporate investment schemes or the leadership of corporate bureaucratic puppets, but only from the solidarity and unified strength of the workforce. The power to dismantle this exploitation lies in workers rejecting the illusion of corporate benevolence and instead building unwavering unity to reclaim their future through collective action.

Background

Traditionally, workers' retirement funds were managed through Defined Benefit (DB) plans, which ensured a stable pension for retirees and placed the investment risk on employers, who shouldered the costs of employees' retirement benefits. Though these DB plans were similarly invested in the stock market, the companies themselves were responsible for ensuring that the retirement fund has enough resources to meet those guaranteed payouts, meaning the employer must cover any shortfall if investment returns do not meet expectations. These plans became seen as economically burdensome by corporate executives who aimed to maintain steadily growing profits in an era marked by rapid market shifts and increasing global competition (https://livewell.com/finance/why-have-employers-moved-from-defined-benefit-to-defined-contribution-plans/).

The transition to 401(k) and other Defined Contribution (DC) plans offloaded these risks onto employees, fundamentally transforming the nature of retirement savings. Defined Contribution plans prioritize contributions over guaranteed payouts, requiring employers and workers to allocate set amounts into individual retirement accounts. With the employer no longer liable to provide a guaranteed income, workers must now shoulder the burden of their own retirement funding, gambling their hard-earned savings in the unpredictable stock market. Though favorable returns can occur, sustained gains are elusive due to regular market crashes that occur every six years on average. This means that when the market plummets, it's the employees who bear the brunt, not the employers, exposing workers' financial security to the whims of an unstable market while leaving them vulnerable to navigating a system designed to shift the risks and costs of retirement away from corporations.

The neoliberal ideological shift that encouraged employers to search for cost-cutting measures also aligned with broader economic changes, including a shift from manufacturing to service and IT sectors, where new companies were more likely to adopt DC plans. Furthermore, legislation like the Pension Protection Act of 2006 facilitated this transition by imposing stricter funding requirements on DB plans and enhancing the attractiveness of DC plans through various incentives (https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v69n3/v69n3p1.html).

Running parallel, the recent trend of labor unions—such as the massive United Auto Workers (UAW)—investing membership dues in the stock market, including in companies they might challenge or negotiate with, starkly illustrates how union bureaucracies are increasingly co-opted by the very corporate forces they are supposed to oppose. From the 1980s onward, the government-corporate alliance has evolved into a toxic web of aggressive market liberalization and ruthless deregulation. The calculated removal of oversight was a brazen move that handed corporations unchecked power while shredding public accountability. Worker protections were gutted, and investment returns soared on the backs of labor exploitation, as corporate greed flourished at the expense of those who toil.

The UAW, like many other unions, seized on the opportunity to increase their cash reserves and began channeling part of their dues and pension funds into the stock market. Superficially, this was a move to diversify and increase the assets available to serve and protect members. However, it effectively entangled the unions' financial interests with those of the very corporations they were meant to be monitoring and moderating, at the very least.

This alignment with corporate performance underscores a deeper ideological shift within the union bureaucracy, from champions of workers' rights to managers of complex financial portfolios. This shift has distanced the union's leadership from the everyday realities and immediate needs of their rank-and-file members, leading to decisions that favor long-term financial stability over aggressive advocacy for better wages, benefits, or working conditions.

In both scenarios, workers face a ridiculous contradiction: pursuing their true interest in collective emancipation from the exploitative capitalist class risks undermining their wages, benefits, and retirement savings.

The Paradox of Worker Investment in Corporate Profits

The transition from traditional pension plans to 401(k) plans encapsulates a critical transformation in the relationship between labor and capital, deeply embedded with ideological and material implications.

By investing their retirement savings in the stock market, workers are compelled to support, and indeed root for, the success of the very entities that exploit their labor. The corporate profits that boost their retirement funds are sourced directly from corporate strategies such as suppressing wages, reducing workforce sizes, and demanding increased productivity. This is effectively a transfer of wealth from workers to the rulers, who assume the title of “shareholders” and “executives.” Yet, this extraction of wealth is cleverly disguised as a harmless, or more often, benign, retirement savings scheme, misleading workers into passively acquiescing to their own exploitation.

Under the oppressive gears of capitalism, driven by the relentless hunger for perpetual growth, these savings plans don't just subtly coerce workers into endorsing their own exploitation—they force them to champion an ever-escalating cycle of exploitation. This vicious spiral is demanded by a system addicted to ceaseless profit increases year after year, chaining workers to a fate where they root for deeper cuts into their own flesh. Essentially, through these defined contribution plans, workers unwittingly empower their rulers to repeatedly enact the very cost-cutting measures that threaten their jobs, deny them raises, and increase their workload and hours.

Relinquishing Control

A troubling feature of 401(k) plans is the significant loss of control they impose on workers, who must hand over their financial decision-making to corporate giants like Vanguard, Blackrock, or State Street. Workers are compelled to hand over their retirement funds to corporations like Vanguard, Blackrock, or State Street because these financial goliaths contract with employers to manage 401(k) plans, effectively controlling the investment options and strategies available to employees. These management companies administer 401(k) plans, offering workers only a limited selection of investment options that are chosen to serve corporate goals rather than the financial needs or preferences of the employees themselves. This limited selection gives the appearance of choice, but in reality, it substantially diminishes workers' autonomy over their own retirement funds.

In other words, these managers make critical investment decisions without direct input from the workers, decisions that shape the potential growth and security of the workers' retirement savings. Consequently, workers are left on the sidelines, passive observers of their own financial destinies, reliant on the strategies and ethical considerations of entities that prioritize corporate profitability over individual security.

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Despite the fact that, collectively, the controlling stake in almost all publicly traded companies is technically "owned" by a broad base of worker-investors, the reality is starkly different. By channeling investments through entities like Vanguard, workers are stripped of any direct influence over corporate actions. When workers entrust their savings to financial behemoths like Vanguard, they effectively hand over their shareholder "voting rights," surrendering any semblance of control over the corporations their collective labor has built.

This arrangement starkly illustrates how capitalist structures co-opt workers’ assets for corporate gain, rendering them powerless in decisions that affect their own economic futures. Intermediaries like Vanguard wield our collective power to relentlessly pursue corporate profit growth, endorsing actions that ruthlessly undermine our interests as workers. They push for job cuts, relentless lobbying against fair wage laws, and environmental shortcuts—all leveraging our collective votes to bolster shareholder value at the expense of the very workforce that enables it.

The systemic channeling of worker investments into entities like Vanguard, Blackrock, and State Street is not merely a feature of modern financial management; it is a cornerstone of capitalist power dynamics. This process ensures that the vast pool of capital derived from workers' savings is used not to empower those workers as shareholders, but rather to fortify the very structures that oppress them. With our collective investments holding controlling stakes in nearly all publicly traded companies, the corporate elite deliberately divert this immense power into their own hands to maintain dominance. They design this system to crush any potential worker resistance, ensuring their agendas remain unchallenged while deepening economic disparities that empower the elite at the expense of the working majority.

Blindness to Class Antagonisms

The financialization of workers' savings essentially turns their labor into a commodity. By reducing their economic agency to numbers in an investment portfolio, workers are disconnected from the real outcomes of their own economic contributions. As their hard-earned money is invested in large capitalist enterprises, it's managed under the guise of seeking growth and security. However, this management actually reinforces the power structures that limit workers' autonomy and freedom.

Investment funds serve as tools that embed workers deeper within the capitalist system, presenting their subordinate position as a necessary efficiency rather than exploitation. This makes the process seem like prudent financial management, but it's really about maintaining the status quo. This creates a cognitive and practical dissonance, where the worker’s financial planning for the future is tied up with strategies that undermine their present livelihood and working conditions.

As workers see their retirement savings—invested in volatile stock markets—potentially jeopardized by decisive labor actions, there arises a rational general reluctance to engage in or support extensive strikes or vigorous protests. This caution stems from the fear that disrupting the market, even temporarily, could diminish their financial security, despite the potential long-term benefits such actions could have on improving working conditions.

Without the backing of unorganized laborers whose retirement funds are entrenched in the stock market, organized labor faces a much tougher challenge in gaining public support for substantial changes that would shift power from the elite to the people. This dynamic introduces a significant delay in the class struggle, reducing the momentum for radical change. Thus, the capitalist class gains a buffer period to adjust and refine oppressive strategies, reinforcing the status quo and perpetuating the cycle of worker exploitation, all while maintaining a facade of empowering workers through financial participation.

The capitalist class exploits this lag, not only through overt repression but also through more subtle forms of coercion. By shaping norms and expectations—such as the prioritization of market stability over the improvement of labor conditions—they manipulate workers into accepting, and even defending, a system that fundamentally works against their interests. This ideological control helps sustain the status quo, continually diverting attention from the systemic exploitation that underpins the capitalist system and muffling the calls for transformative change that might otherwise resonate through the working class. This clever manipulation of worker priorities ensures that any potential disruptions to capitalist accumulation are blunted, securing ongoing dominance by the ruling elites.

The UAW’s Investment Strategy and Worker Conflict

Even within organized labor contexts such as unions, bureaucratic structures often paralyze workers into a passive acceptance of a system that purports to aid their financial well-being while subtly undermining their real interests, just as unorganized laborers, with their retirement funds tied to the stock market, passively support the corporate entities they should be challenging. In unions, this dynamic is replicated through bureaucratic controls that bind workers to the same detrimental financial entanglements, ensuring that even within organized frameworks, the mechanisms ostensibly designed to empower workers instead reinforce their submission to a system that undermines their genuine interests.

For example, the UAW bureaucratic apparatus derives a substantial portion of its revenue from indirect auto company subsidies and Wall Street investments. These funds have been used not just for operational costs but to swell the ranks of its high-paid staff and finance extravagant leadership conferences, from which the ordinary union member is conspicuously absent.

Dues from UAW members are funneled into various mutual funds and stocks globally, including stakes in companies whose workers are represented by the union. In essence, the auto workers' union is investing in the very companies they are negotiating with for better wages and conditions! Notably, the UAW also has investments in notorious hedge funds like Bardin Hill Investment Partners and Kohlberg Investors IX, firms infamous for harsh worker cuts, operating out of places like the Cayman Islands. Thus, the UAW is investing in both the employers that exploit their own members and in corporate entities that extract wealth from workers generally.

As a result, net spending for the UAW, excluding strike payouts, escalated dramatically from $258 million in 2022 to $318.4 million in 2023, with compensation for headquarters staff rising from $52.57 million to nearly $59 million. This investment strategy has undeniably benefitted from the stock market's recent boom, driven largely by Wall Street's aggressive undermining of the working class's social standing, particularly through widespread layoffs, wage suppression, and the denial or reduction of benefits.

Ostensibly, these vast reserves bolster the UAW's strike fund, yet strikes are rarely called and are often restricted in scope. Last year's "stand up strike" saw most auto workers continue to labor, while the employers’ revenues actually increased. The strike fund, rather than serving as a militant tool against corporate power, increasingly appears as a financial cushion for the union bureaucratic elite, not the workers it claims to represent.

This arrangement embodies a conflict: while the union fights for better wages and conditions, its financial health and the ability of its strike fund to grow are largely dependent on the prosperity of the same corporate entities they may be contesting. This interdependence complicates the union’s role and its strategies in advocating for workers' rights.

Conflict Between Worker Advocacy and Financial Interests

The financial maneuvers of the UAW, particularly its investments in the very companies its members labor under, reveal a stark betrayal orchestrated by union elites. These leaders—career unionists who have risen through the ranks—are entrenched in safeguarding their own positions, power, and privileges at the expense of the rank-and-file workers they claim to represent. These bureaucratic elites have distanced themselves from the daily struggles of the workforce, becoming gatekeepers who often suppress radical initiatives that could genuinely empower workers.

This leadership stratum, with its grip firmly on the union’s strategic levers, has consistently shunned aggressive labor actions that might jeopardize their investment portfolios and their cozy relationships with corporate powerhouses, or possibly even invite state backlash. Their risk-averse, conservative tactics dilute the potential for revolutionary changes, favoring instead incrementalistic policies that do little more than maintain the status quo. In negotiations, these leaders are quick to prioritize job security over substantial wage increases or essential adaptations to industry evolution, such as retraining for emerging technologies. This strategy goes beyond mere conservatism; it is actively complicit. It represents a deliberate choice by a self-interested bureaucratic elite to align with corporations and a co-opted state, entities that actively resist transformative changes.

Reflection

The seismic shift from defined benefit (DB) plans to defined contribution (DC) plans marks a significant transformation in the landscape of worker retirement security. This transition encapsulates a broader trend in the neoliberal economic agenda, prioritizing market solutions and individual responsibility over collective welfare and guaranteed benefits. By shifting the burden of retirement savings to individuals, workers find themselves compelled to invest in and support the very corporate systems that may undermine their job security and wage growth. The involvement of financial giants like Vanguard in managing these investments exemplifies a deep entrenchment of capitalist interests in workers' lives. These firms, by controlling vast pools of retirement funds, not only influence corporate governance but also align workers' financial futures with the health of the stock market and corporate profitability, effectively muting potential collective dissent against exploitative practices.

In parallel, the role of unions like the UAW in this financialized landscape reveals a troubling convergence of interests between union leadership and corporate power. As unions invest in the stock market, including in companies they negotiate with, there arises a conflict between advocating for robust labor rights and maintaining the financial performance of their investments. This duality suggests a corrosion of union solidarity, driven by a bureaucratic elite more attuned to the fluctuations of the market than to the struggles of the rank-and-file members. Such dynamics underscore a broader erosion of labor power, where the traditional role of unions as bulwarks against corporate excess is compromised, making them less a force for challenging the status quo and more a part of the financial systems they should be critiquing.

It's time to disengage from these capitalist structures that exploit us and instead cultivate solidarity rooted in class consciousness. Only by recognizing our collective power and prioritizing mutual welfare can we dismantle the financial machinery that subjugates workers and reclaim our future.

Peter S. Baron is the author of “If Only We Knew: How Ignorance Creates and Amplifies the Greatest Risks Facing Society” (https://www.ifonlyweknewbook.com) and is currently pursuing a J.D. and M.A. in Philosophy at Georgetown University.

Union Politics: The Contradictions of a Capitalist Labor Movement

By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso

On December 1st, 2023, the United Auto Workers (UAW) officially voiced their support for a ceasefire in Gaza, becoming the largest labor union to do so. The announcement came from the union’s director, Brandon Mancilla, during a press conference outside the White House. In announcing, the UAW added its name to a growing list of union locals, national chapters, and labor organizations that have called for an end to the genocidal violence still unfolding in the region.

On January 24th, the UAW went on to announce their endorsement of Joe Biden for president during the union’s national Community Action Program (CAP) conference. Thus, in just under two months, UAW managed to call for an end to a genocide whilst simultaneously endorsing a second presidential term for one of its most powerful proponents. And they are not alone. Of the roughly 150 organizations that have signed onto the labor movement petition calling for a ceasefire, nearly one third have also publicly endorsed — or are directly affiliated with a national chapter that has publicly endorsed — Biden for the presidency. Such a gross contradiction cannot be ignored, especially as it represents only the latest example of a broader phenomenon present in much of the American labor movement: capitalist dissonance.

The movement’s shortcomings are well-documented. Much of the labor landscape in the United States — while certainly working to win immediate material improvements for the working class — often fails to provide a more comprehensive framework for revolutionary praxis that looks to a liberated future. The Black Rose Anarchist Federation said it best in their piece ‘The State of Labor: Beyond Unions, But Not Without Them,’ when they described contemporary American unionism as a largely “bureaucratic, service-oriented form” that remains “controlled by a hierarchy of career officials who operate outside the workplace, manage the sale of labor to capital, confine union struggles to narrow and legalistic ‘bread and butter’ issues within their respective industries, and encourage members to pin their hopes to the Democratic Party.” In other words, unions in the United States exist within a heavily enclosed space, one in which their organizational structures and strategic logics, either by external force or internal conviction, do not move past the operational and theoretical limits imposed by the powers that be.

On the domestic front, this can mean a gross lack of worker militancy. Pro-establishment sensibilities make many labor unions averse to necessary direct action and militant resistance in the workplace, especially when financial and legal stability is at stake. This was the case when bureaucratized inaction kept grocery workers across the country from winning tangible post-pandemic gains with their union, the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). It exacerbated the ever-growing division between rank-and-filers and leadership in the education sector with both the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). It also prompted members of the Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU) to begin a petition campaign calling on leadership to demand a ceasefire in Gaza. After all, career organizers and labor leaders are incentivized to chart the path of least resistance, forged by impotent contract negotiations and anti-strike clauses. The same can be said for international solidarity. A top-down labor union in cahoots with the US government may state their disagreement with a foreign policy decision — as many did by signing the ceasefire petition. But their entrenched incentive structures and hierarchical layout will rarely allow for a wielding of labor power that truly beats the state into submission. 

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This is because such radical resistance would put the stability of the managerial labor class at risk. Domestically, opposing a two-party candidate for the presidency means foregoing an otherwise surefire way of securing business-as-usual governance for the next four years. The third-party-facing or non-electoral implications of such opposition would produce a level of uncertainty not compatible with the otherwise predictable “bread and butter” issues, industry-specific bargaining, and established labor relations so characteristic of big unions. On the international scale, the same is true. The stability of managerial labor is feasible only if preceded by that of US capital, as downturns in economic growth and fluctuations in performance can pose a risk to corporate power -- the de facto handler of labor managers -- and radicalize workers into embracing more militant sympathies and radical action as a result. One outstanding threat to such stability is the emergence of left labor movements abroad, as such movements are often characterized by policies that harm US economic interests such as the nationalization of industries and the cutting of economic ties with Western nations. The logical conclusion of such a dynamic can be seen in institutions such as the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (AFL-CIO) Solidarity Center. This agency has a stated mission of “[e]mpowering workers to raise their voice for dignity on the job, justice in their communities and greater equality in the global economy.” Meanwhile, its exploits have heavily involved confrontations with leftist governments in South America, often via funding they provide to opposition groups in countries such as Venezuela.

Highlighting this unfortunate reality is hardly an all-encompassing indictment of the US labor movement. The undeniable upsurge in union activity following the COVID pandemic improved people’s lives and deserves credit. Between 2021 and 2022 alone, “the National Labor Relations Board saw a 53% increase in union election petitions, the highest single-year increase since fiscal year 2016.” The embrace of more militant leadership by unions such as the UAW and the Teamsters has yielded significant victories as well, not to mention the advances made by the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild in September of last year.

But the imperative of organizers and class strugglers to reshape unions to better facilitate collective liberation remains. This can take many forms, such as bolstering organizing efforts by independent unions like (ex: Trader Joe’s United, Amazon Labor Union), supporting the ongoing work and growth of rank-and-file-oriented unions like the Industrial Workers of the World, and backing the emergence of caucuses and coalitions within established unions that either organize to push their organization in a more radical direction, or ultimately become an independent union that can subsequently hold a candle to its establishment counterpart in terms of size and resource access.

Reformist concessions at the negotiating table and rhetoric restricted to the worker-boss dichotomy do not have to be our daily bread. Worker militancy on the shop floor and a rhetoric of class warfare are more in line with the aims of a revolutionary movement. Moreover, symbolic slaps on the wrist and stern talking to’s — petition signatures, public denouncements — needn’t be the only forms of accountability when our government actively finances and endorses acts of genocide. We can do better. Acknowledging this potential will allow us to transform labor in America, liberating ourselves and each other in the process.

Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso is a Colombian writer, organizer, and artist. In his writing, he seeks to interrogate the nuances of socialist thought and praxis.

Beyond the 4-Day Workweek: Unveiling the Capitalist Roots of Worker Anomie and the Quest for Meaningful Labor

[Photo credit: TOLGA AKMEN/AFP/Getty Images]

By Peter S. Baron

Recently, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has put forth a bill to cut the workweek to 32 hours—an effort unlikely to succeed amidst resistance from Republicans and even his Democratic party peers. His argument hinges on the undeniable truth that technological advancements have significantly boosted productivity, which could, in an ideal world, lead to shorter workweeks without sacrificing wages. Although Sanders' proposed bill faces significant hurdles to enactment, it unmistakably highlights the deliberate strategies of the ruling elite to capitalize on productivity gains, blatantly prioritizing profit maximization over the welfare of workers. This choice epitomizes the capitalist ethos that prioritizes profit over people.

Sanders is advocating for a significant change, however, the manner in which he has presented his bill avoids a confrontation with the underlying structure of capitalism, which is at the heart of the issue. This distorted framing is quintessential Sanders, exposing the superficiality of his role as the so-called "democratic socialist" within the Democratic Party.

As exemplified in his most recent proposal, Sanders typically proposes major policy overhauls but stops short of questioning or altering the foundational capitalist system itself, as if the path to social and economic justice is simply a matter of swapping "bad" policies for "good" ones. He puts forth reformist bills, masquerading them as far-reaching, lasting solutions, only for them to be dismissed as extreme by Republicans and impractical by mainstream Democrats. This charade serves to pacify the Democrats’ base by creating the illusion that the Democrats closely represent the people's interests, sidestepping the essential challenge to the capitalist system that truly reflects the people's interests. This strategy effectually tempers the rising leftist inclinations among workers and the youth, ensuring their continued support for the party by diverting attention away from its fundamental allegiance to corporate interests.

The public deserves to be told the truth: that the root of our problems lies in capitalism itself, not merely in bad policies. If framed in this way, the idea of a four-day workweek would not only become widely accepted but could also serve as a catalyst for a wider social movement aimed at fundamentally rethinking and transforming the capitalist system.

The Limits of Shorter Workweeks in Healing Capitalist Alienation

Reducing the workweek to four days, while undoubtedly a positive step in transitioning to a more humane existence, fails to address the root issue: the grotesque alienation and exploitation of workers that comes as a package deal with a capitalist economic system. Capitalism produces a fundamental disconnect between the labor of the worker and the fruits of this labor that engenders a profound sense of anomie, a term the 19th century French Sociologist Émile Durkheim used to describe the normlessness and social instability resulting from a breakdown in the connection between the individual and the community.

This anomie is not merely a byproduct of long hours, although such hours certainly are a factor. Rather, anomie is woven into the very fabric of capitalist work structures, where workers, stripped of any meaningful control over their labor or its outcomes, become cogs in a vast, soulless machine.

The introduction of a 4-day workweek, while benevolent, does little to mend the gaping wound inflicted by this alienation. It's akin to applying a band-aid to a festering sore, superficially covering the issue without addressing the underlying infection: the capitalist mode of production itself, which inherently prioritizes profit over people, exploiting labor to extract maximum surplus value.

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The Many Faces of Disconnection

In the relentless pursuit of profit, capitalism commodifies work, stripping it of personal meaning and transforming it into a mere transaction. This commodification alienates workers not just from the fruits of their labor, which are appropriated by the capitalists, but also from the labor process itself, reducing it to repetitive, uninspiring, and, frankly, boring tasks that fail to tap into even a fraction of the worker's creative potential.

This narrow focus on productivity fosters an environment where innovative ideas and creative solutions are often stifled unless they directly contribute to immediate financial gains. The loss of creative expression and the inability to see one's unique ideas come to fruition can lead to a stifling of personal growth and a diminishing sense of self-worth among workers, exacerbating the sense of anomie.

The issue at hand is not merely about reducing the working hours for those stuck in such mind-numbing jobs nor is it about crafting policies to infuse creativity into jobs. It's about reevaluating the entire mode of production, the nature of jobs deemed necessary, and the overarching structure of society. Capitalism, by its very design, is prone to producing jobs that contribute to a sense of anomie, suggesting that the system itself may be irreformable in this regard.

Dissolving Bonds: The Erosion of Individuality and Community in Capitalist Rationality

Inevitably, under capitalism, the implementation of technology and automation further alienates workers from the production process. While technological advancements have the potential to liberate individuals from menial tasks, under capitalism, they often result in the deskilling and rising specialization of labor, reducing jobs to the performance of progressively monotonous, machine-like functions. Making jobs more interchangeable intensifies concerns over job instability for workers, who find themselves entangled in a rapidly automating world.

This dehumanization of labor and the relentless commodification of time mean that workers are constantly racing against the clock, further disconnecting them from the natural rhythms of work and life. The unyielding commercialization of time transforms workplaces into arenas of surveillance and regimentation, where every task is monitored, and every minute accounted for. The blurring of boundaries between work and personal time, exacerbated by the digitalization of workspaces, means that workers are never truly 'off the clock,' leading to burnout and a pervasive sense of being trapped in an endless cycle of work.

In this environment, the sense of belonging and community that can arise from collective labor is eroded. Workers are pitted against each other in a competitive race to the bottom, where solidarity is sacrificed on the altar of individual gain. They are thrust into a relentless competition, vying for survival in an environment where job security and advancement are scarce commodities. This competitive pressure fosters an atmosphere of every person for themselves, undermining any sense of collective well-being or mutual support.

Instead of banding together, workers find themselves locked in a desperate scramble to outdo one another, often at the cost of their own and their colleagues' dignity and security. This race to the bottom erodes the fabric of solidarity that could unite workers against exploitative conditions, replacing it with a divisive pursuit of individual gain that ultimately benefits the capitalist system by keeping workers isolated and disempowered.

Workers are reduced to mere data points in a vast algorithm of production, their individuality and communal ties dissolved in the acid bath of capitalist rationality.

Towards a Radical Reimagination of Work

The rigid, top-down structures in our workplaces crush any semblance of autonomy and creativity among workers. The whole labor system is set up to strip workers of their skills and reduce them to nothing more than cogs in a giant machine, churning out profits for the few. This isn't just about stifling creativity; it's about the blatant dehumanization that props up the capitalist machine.

The disconnect between productivity growth and real wage increases only deepens the anomie. Workers are producing more and more, yet their paychecks tell a different story—stagnant or worse. This gaping disconnect between the wealth workers generate and the crumbs they're thrown isn't just unfair; it's a slap in the face. It's no wonder people feel lost and disconnected, exactly like Durkheim's warning of a society adrift.

Proposals like the one Sanders has put forth should be framed not merely as swapping out bad policy for good, but as opportunities to critically examine the system itself—a system whose very foundation undermines worker autonomy and creativity, and actively unravels the social fabric, exposing the deep-seated causes of widespread anomie. We must recognize the myriad ways the capitalist logic oppresses our humanity.

In the face of systemic assaults on the human spirit, the call for a shorter workweek, while benign, falls dramatically short. It is not merely the quantity of work that torments the “soul” but the quality and conditions of labor under the yoke of capitalist exploitation. Addressing the endemic alienation and anomie woven into the fabric of capitalist societies demands a radical reconfiguration of the values that underpin our economic systems, one that dismantles the hierarchical edifices of power and replaces them with egalitarian structures where workers can utilize their unique creative potential and have a direct say in the decisions that affect their lives. This would not only bridge the gap between labor and its fruits, mitigating the alienation and anomie endemic to capitalist societies, but also unleash the imaginative resourcefulness of the workforce, fostering a sense of community and purpose that transcends the mere accumulation of capital.

The transition to a 4-day workweek must be seen not as an end but as a steppingstone towards a more profound transformation of society. It's about reclaiming the dignity of labor, restoring the human connection to work, and constructing a world where work serves the well-being of humanity, not the insatiable appetites of capitalist exploitation. Only then can we begin to heal the deep-seated anomie that plagues our societies, paving the way for a future where work is a source of fulfillment and communal solidarity, not alienation and despair.

Peter S. Baron is the author of “If Only We Knew: How Ignorance Creates and Amplifies the Greatest Risks Facing Society” (https://www.ifonlyweknewbook.com) and is currently pursuing a J.D. and M.A. in Philosophy at Georgetown University.

The Duplicitous U.S. Constitution: How An Autocratic Legal Document Became A Sacred and Incontestable Scroll

[Photo credit: MPI/Getty Image]

By Tim Scott

Republished from Dissident Voice.

Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

— Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

We live in a nation founded within a prevailing story line that characterizes the United States as being an exceptional, enlightened and charitable nation. A nation that is a “beacon of light…in every corner of the globe,” generated by the ethos of the American Dream, based on the values and ideals of liberty, justice, fairness, equality and democracy for all.

We also live in a nation that was established to be an empire, whereby imperialism and settler colonialism are endlessly justified and promulgated by an underlying cultural narrative which ascribes whiteness to morality, and by extension a nation bestowed with a divine right to lay claim—at will—to the lands, resources and bodies of Black, Brown and Indigenous people. A nation where private property rights are akin to natural rights, therefore framing capitalism, no matter how brutal, with benevolent intent and thus inviolable. These structural foundations, which are rooted within the barbarism of chattel slavery and the brutality of gender oppression, constructed an enduring national culture defined by genocide, dispossession, white supremacy, anti-blackness, heteropatriarchy, misogyny, social inequity and wealth inequality. Over three centuries later, despite significant efforts by resistance movements to transform it, this underlying national culture persists; entwined within an era where mass surveillance, mass incarceration, unprecedented wealth inequality and unending militarism are perversely justified as imperatives to preserve freedom, democracy and the mythical “American Dream.”

The contradictions between the nation’s mythologies and actual practices are inherent to—and effectively serve to preserve—the cultural, political and economic foundations of the United States. They are indicative of a nation that was founded by an opulent minority of white men who believed that they alone had a God-given right to freedom and prosperity and thus constructed the structural means to protect their wealth and power from a dispossessed demos and to justify the subjugation and exploitation of entire groups of people. Their design for the new nation was based on what economist Joseph Stiglitz refers to as the “interplay between ideologies and particular interests.” As such, the white supremacist and patriarchal ideologies of the wealthy, slave-owning Christian men who founded the nation were fused with free market ideology, the engine for the emerging interests of industrial capitalism. Within this design and from the outset, the founders intended for government to serve as the executor of these violent and undemocratic ideologies and interests.

As many political, legal, and history scholars have acknowledged, the U.S. Constitution was constructed to be an ideological and legal document intended to secure the interests of the virtuous and enlightened gentry who—like royalty—considered themselves to be ordained with a natural right to rule the nation in perpetuity. The founders’ declarations and ensuing constitution promoted an overriding myth or “origin story” that defined the new nation as a unified whole, engaging in a virtuous republican mission whereby, according to John Adams, “all men, rich and poor, magistrates and subjects, officers and people, masters and servants, the first citizen and the last, are equally subject to the laws.” Democracy was therefore (falsely) equated with the ideology of republicanism, whereby the nation’s citizenry was promised equal rights under the law and the inalienable rights to liberty. It is within this context that individual sovereignty and private property were intended to be protected, according to John Adams, from the “tyranny of the majority” (i.e., the “mob rule” of a direct democracy).

In effect, the founders constructed the intersecting cultural, political and economic instruments that would permanently advance the interests of a wealthy white minority through institutionalized and impervious methods of domination and extermination. Thus, the origin story generated by the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” and have “inalienable rights” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” were never intended to be all inclusive. This also holds true to Preamble of the U.S. Constitution, which states:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Instead, the civil and political rights within the U.S. Constitution were restricted to focus exclusively on individual and property rights—for some. This design sought to undermine the possibility for the establishment of universal and equal participation in all spheres of life (participatory parity), not only between the ruling elite, their agents and those they subjugated, but more importantly amongst and between subjugated groups. Thus, complex interdependencies, chains of democratic equivalences, meaningful deliberative processes and solidarities that could threaten the power of the ruling elite were intentionally defused. The founders’ discourse and origin story myths were intended to serve as empty signifiers, having very different meanings and values with regard to who they apply to and how they were to be operationalized. Thus, the discourse of republicanism was ascribed with the interests of the nation’s white male Christian aristocracy and to a lesser degree to their citizen agents who occupied the white middle-class. However, the narrative of life, liberty and equality was never intended to pertain to everyone else.

During the nation’s infancy, when disorder and uncertainty were widespread, the founders’ myths served to define in totality a positive and fully sutured national identity, establishing a foundation for social practices and ideological representations that were instrumental in the social construction of reality and subjectivity for the nation’s white citizen subjects. This set forth a process whereby socialization and identity formation were based on the ideological shaping of a cultural imaginary, constituted through what political theorist Chantel Mouffe referred to as the logic of equivalence, which is “to create specific forms of unity among different interests by relating them to a common project and by establishing a frontier to define the forces to be opposed, the ‘enemy.’” Initially this “common enemy” was the tyranny of the British monarchy, and subsequently took many forms—the tyranny of majority rule, the threat of the “savage Indian,” the emancipation of slaves, Blackness, Mexicans, recognition rights for women and notions of equity and equality in general. Over time and as the empire expanded, the enemy would include any group—or any idea—that posed a threat to the nation’s prevailing power structures.

Despotic ideologies such as this reject the historical conditions by which social relations are constructed, instead representing them as outside of history, as inevitable and natural, while disguising their underlying belief systems as common sense facts. According to Anne Makus, presenting events and practices as ahistorical truths allows problematic events to be framed as unproblematic and a “natural” consequence of society. By losing their postulational status, beliefs are transformed into narrative truths that are immune to differing accounts of events.

Ultimately, the ideological function of the founders’ origin story myths, cultural imaginaries and their corresponding discourse or “narrative truths” resulted in a what Cultural theorist Raymond Williams describes as a “complex interlocking of political, social and cultural forces” known as hegemony.

A Revolution for “Great and Overgrown Rich Men”

Historian Gary B. Nash documented how, for over a century prior to the American Revolution, an elite class of white male landowners, slaveholders and large-scale merchants dominated the political, economic and cultural landscape of the thirteen British settler colonies. In 1770, Boston’s top 1% of the population owned 44% city’s wealth. In the late 17th century the wealthiest 10% of all colonists owned approximately 47% of all the wealth; and by 1775 the wealthiest 10% owned roughly 65% of all the wealth. During the 18th century approximately 30% of all British colonists were free white men, with about 50% of those men owning land, though most of them did not own enough land to be considered wealthy. Approximately 20% of all colonists were Black slaves, and 50% were poor white indentured servants.

At the outset, the privatization of land in the British settler colonies occurred through the genocidal project that is settler colonialism and later through the transfer or privatization of state (“public”) land. According to historian Meyer Weinberg and economists Engerman & Gallman, seized land was often awarded to individuals and families based on their location to power and influence within seats of government and became the basis for commercial pursuits and further accumulation of private wealth. Increasingly during the 18th century, land acquisition and allocation was sold for profit and speculation.

As documented by historian Howard Zinn, the leaders of the Sons of Liberty, the first and second Continental Congress and Continental Army Officers primarily came from the landed gentry of British settler colonial society. With high unemployment and hunger fueling class upheaval following the French and Indian War (1754-1763), aristocratic colonial leaders faced the prospect of waging war against Britain, while also “maintaining control over” the discontented “crowds at home.” During the delegates elections for a convention to frame a Pennsylvania constitution in 1776, a Committee of Privates (composed of white working class enlisted militiamen), “urged voters to oppose ‘great and overgrown rich men” for “they will be too apt to be framing distinctions in society.” According to historians Young, Raphael and Nash, these sentiments led the Committee of Privates to draw up a bill of rights for the convention stating, “an enormous proportion of property vested in a few individuals is dangerous to the rights, and destructive of the common happiness, of mankind; and therefore every free state hath a right by its laws to discourage the possession of such property.”

According to Zinn, the populist discourse of the Declaration of Independence, which declared the right to “popular control over governments, the right of rebellion and revolution, indignation at political tyranny, economic burdens, and military attacks,” proved to unite large enough numbers of white settler colonists to actively rebel against Britain. This propaganda-based document was highly effective in shaping popular opinion by appealing to the yearnings of disenfranchised white settler colonists as a means to unite against a common enemy. Of course, large populations were left out of the populist cause elicited by the Declaration of Independence; namely Black slaves, Native people and in many regards white women. This reality would only become further institutionalized following the War of Independence. It would also turn out that the aristocratic founders were indeed “apt to be framing [class] distinctions in society” as many white working class militiamen had feared.

As Historian Gordon S. Wood explained, in 1776, immediately after issuing the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain, a committee of the Second Continental Congress was charged with drafting the first U.S. Constitution known as the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union. It was signed by Congress in 1777 and ratified by representatives from all thirteen states in 1781. The Articles established the U.S. to be a confederation of sovereign states, with appointed representatives from the thirteen states making up a national government. Under the Articles the national government was composed of a legislature consisting of one house in which states had equal voting power. There was not an executive branch or a general judiciary. This new national government was charged with overseeing domestic relations with Native tribes, international diplomacy and conducting the war with Britain.

According to Charles A. Beard, at the end of the War of Independence in 1783, establishing a cohesive economy and infrastructure overseen by common laws proved to be difficult under the decentralized system of government outlined by the Articles of Confederation. This was especially challenging during a time of economic instability due to immense war debt. Congress lacked the authority to tax and collect debt directly, to stabilize legal tender and regulate commerce since state legislatures were often unresponsive to these demands, operating without legal restrictions or judicial oversight.

For many former colonial noblemen known as Federalists—who made up a majority in most state legislatures and the Continental Congress—the Articles of Confederation were failing to secure the protection and advancement of their personalty or personal property (movable assets). Many southern plantation owners were also Federalists since their wealth was also largely held in personal property (including slaves) and therefore tied to the same economic interests as northern merchants and financiers. According to Beard, this aristocratic class of large-scale farm owners, merchants, shippers, bankers, speculators, and private and public securities holders believed that a more powerful federal government was required to protect their economic interests.

A minority coalition within the Continental Congress whose economic interests were primarily tied to real (landed) property were known as Anti-federalists. This group of white wealthy male freeholders, small business owners and middle-class, tenant and debtor settler farmers equated concentrated federal power with British rule and therefore preferred a weak central government that would not “tread” on individual rights and state sovereignty.

A Constitution for “The Minority of the Opulent”

As Michael Cain and Keith Dougherty documented, the eruption of Shay’s Rebellion in 1786 only strengthened the Federalist cause. This indebted settler farmer rebellion against the state of Massachusetts was fueled by high taxes and farm foreclosures in western Massachusetts, a mounting crisis that was sweeping across the new republic. Noah Brooks chronicled how General Henry Knox, a major public securities holder, wrote to George Washington in response to this “desperate debtor” rebellion of farmers, laborers and Revolutionary War veterans:

The people who are the insurgents have never paid any, or but very little taxes – But they see the weakness of government; They feel at once their own poverty, compared with the opulent, and their own force, and they are determined to make use of the latter, in order to remedy the former. Their creed is ‘That the property of the United States has been protected from the confiscations of Britain by the joint exertions of all, and therefore ought to be the common property of all. And he that attempts opposition to this creed is an enemy to equity and for justice, and ought to be swept from off the face of the earth.’ In a word they are determined to annihilate all debts public and private and have agrarian Laws, which are easily effected by means of un-funded paper money which shall be a tender in all cases whatever.

As Beard explained “the southern planter was also as much concerned in maintaining order against slave revolts as the creditor in Massachusetts was concerned in putting down Shays’ ‘desperate debtors.’” This proved to be a precarious time for the new nation’s elite, which was exalting the virtues of freedom, liberty and democracy while simultaneously taking action to establish new and improved systems of domination. Insurrection was indeed a clear and present danger to the post-war aristocracy within this decentralized and tumultuous landscape.

In 1787 the Federalists in Congress called on state legislatures to send delegates to a Convention in Philadelphia for a single and stated purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation. Members of Congress quietly went to Philadelphia, with a majority of them intent on constructing a federal government powerful enough to protect their class interests. The first order of business, according to Gerald J. Fresia and Robert W. Hoffert, was for the convention delegates to agree to a secrecy clause concerning their decision-making deliberations. As reported by Beard, the delegates were not only acting to protect their personalty interests from foreign competitors, but as importantly, against the threat the domestic unpropertied masses posed to their wealth and power.

James Madison receives endless accolades for his enlightened roles in the founding of the United States, including the title of “Father of the Constitution.” Like most of the founding fathers, Madison was explicit in his undemocratic aims for the new nation. As documented by Steve Coffman, during the construction of the U.S. Constitution, when deliberating over two of the pillars of a substantive democracy—universal suffrage and the equal distribution of resources— Madison argued, “if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of the landed proprietors would be insecure,” and “agrarian law would soon take place,” one that distributes land to the landless. Therefore, according to Coffman, Madison argued, “our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country” through the protection of property rights. More explicitly, Madison went on to pronounce, “Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests” thus making the charge of government “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”

According to the Yale University political theorist Robert A. Dahl and author Daniel Lazare, under the terms of the Articles of Confederation, which was the law of the land during the Philadelphia Convention, the 1787 Constitution was, in fact, an illegal usurping. The Articles were clear in stipulating that there had to be unanimous approval of all thirteen states to approve constitutional change. Yet those who attended the Philadelphia convention unilaterally changed the ratification rule to nine states, which was by no coincidence the number of states that initially ratified the Constitution of 1787. This strategic and unconstitutional move on the part of the Federalists in Congress was an attempt to work around the significant opposition from Anti-federalists. Lazare went on to claim, “the assertion that ‘We the People do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America’ implies a right not only to create new frames of government but to abrogate old ones when they are no longer serving their purposes.”

Dahl and Beard point out that when it came to choosing delegates for the Philadelphia Convention, a large body of aristocrats were selected by state legislatures that were elected according to suffrage laws requiring “high property qualifications” relating to taxpayer status aligned with the amount or worth of one’s real property and/or personalty holdings. According to Beard, when delegates for the Convention were chosen, “representatives of personalty in the legislature were able by the sheer weight of their combined intelligence and economic power to secure delegates from the urban centres or allied with their interests.” Beard went on to explain, “Thus the heated popular discussion usually incident to such momentous political undertakings was largely avoided, an orderly and temperate procedure in the selection of delegates was rendered possible.” In essence, the majority of the new nation’s inhabitants and citizens were intentionally excluded from participating in the construction of the United States Constitution.

According to Coffman, when voting rights for citizens of the new nation were being decided, James Madison expressed his concern that if they were extended “equally to all…the rights of property or the claims of justice may be overruled by a majority without property.” John Jay, a Federalist “founding father” and a member of Congress who went on to become the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, is famous for making the intent of the Constitution even more explicit by boldly stating, “The people who own the country ought to govern it.” During deliberations on voting rights, James Madison expressed his belief that “freeholders of the country would be the safest depositors of republican liberty.” Within this context, Madison went on to caution his peers to consider the imminent rise of the industrial working-class and the threat they would pose to the nation’s “opulent” minority:

In future times a great majority of the people will not only be without landed, but any other sort of, property. These will either combine under the influence of their common situation: in which case, the rights of property & the public liberty, will not be secure in their hands.

Madison also expressed his concerns that if given suffrage rights, the ominous industrial masses could be coerced or bribed into doing the bidding of divergent ruling class political ambitions. As Madison put it, the unpropertied, “will become the tools of opulence & ambition.” Clearly one of Madison’s primary concerns was how the expansion of suffrage could undermine his desires to create a republican fiefdom.

Gouverneur Morris was an influential “founding father” and close ally of Madison who is often called the “Penman of the Constitution.” According to legal scholar Jennifer Nedelsky, Morris’s vision of the new nation was similar to his peers in that “public liberty” should not involve “direct participation in government.” Instead, according to Nedelsky, in Morris’s plan “the people… were not, in effect, to govern… they would choose their representatives and have the influence over them that frequent elections brought… [and] ‘in the course of things’ people would elect the great and wealthy as their representatives.”

An enthusiastic student of political economy, Morris was known for tirelessly working to ensure that the interconnected pillars of economic and political power of the new nation would be impermeable. In doing so, Morris envisioned and aggressively advocated for a market economy, one with a federal government that was constituted with the legal framework to ensure its permanency. Nedelsky went on to document how Morris was known for his “unqualified positions” that:

illuminate some of the most important and contested issues in American political thought: the status our Constitution accords… to private property, the relation between the values of republicanism and those of capitalism, and the distribution of economic and political power our system fosters.

While the Constitutional Convention’s secrecy clause conveniently provided cover for its authors’ anti-republican and anti-democratic intentions, Madison’s unapologetic and forthright style reveals how the Constitution was, in its own words, “a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government.” Accordingly, Gordon S. Wood, explained, “the source of their difficulties came from too much local democracy, and that the solution was to limit this local democracy by erecting a more aristocratic structure over it.” The designers did allow for a semi-popular lower house of congress, yet counterbalanced with the advent of the U.S. Senate, which was to be elected by state legislatures with rotating terms of six years. The Senate should then be composed of, as Madison put it, “a portion of enlightened citizens whose limited number and firmness might seasonably interpose against impetuous councils.” According to Parenti, the founders often referenced the virtuous qualifications of “enlightened citizens” and “men of substance,” which served as code for those with the right race, gender, aristocratic breeding, wealth, education, and experience that bestowed one with a God given right to rule.

In all, seventy-four delegates were appointed by states to attend the Constitutional Convention while only fifty-five showed up, with many anti-federalists refusing to attend and a number leaving as it progressed, with others refusing to sign in protest. Rhode Island declined to send a delegate. Anti-federalists accused the Federalists of working to reproduce an order similar to the British Crown. In the end, this small group of opulent white men proceeded to draft the U.S, Constitution, which according to historian Gordon S. Wood, “was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period.”

As documented by Wood, a number of Anti-Federalists agreed to ratify the U.S. Constitution only on condition that a bill of rights was included as a means to put limits on federal power. Federalists in Congress begrudgingly agreed, despite their opposition to the idea. Federalists were concerned that by making certain rights explicit “the people” would expect protections for those rights alone, thus limiting future interpretations of the Constitution. James Madison in particular felt that a declaration of such rights would be “parchment barriers” (superficial protections) and wanted to rely on the sturdier measures already in place. According to professor of political science Michael P Federici, by parchment barriers, Madison meant:

…the relationship between the written and unwritten constitutions. There are paper boundaries and limits, what the Framers called “parchment barriers”, and there are unwritten boundaries and limits that are not so much legal as they are cultural, ethical, and religious. The preservation of a constitutional order depends, to a great extent, on the preservation of the unwritten boundaries and limits.

From Madison’s perspective, the great protectors of the private rights of the opulent against an organized majority included the “extent of territory” spelled out in the Constitution which separated people geographically; along with the “multiplicity of interest” between the classes. To Madison these classes included, “those who are without property…those who are creditors, and those who are debtors… [a] landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest…actuated by different sentiments and views.” According to Madison:

If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure…the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.

Always the brilliant political operative, Madison took on the task of drafting a bill of rights with the belief that the disorderly demand for such rights was on the one hand a grave problem, yet also presented an opportunity for a strategic solution. His proposed amendments were jubilantly ratified in 1791, effectively thwarting Anti-Federalist efforts to alter the Constitution while successful garnering loyalty for the Constitution from “the great mass of the people.” According to the U.S. Constitutional scholar Robert A. Goldwin, by engendering a sturdy “national sentiment” in support of the Constitution, Madison:

…took the decisive step toward establishing an independent force in the society, a devotion to the Constitution powerful enough to restrain a malevolent majority. Madison saw that the proposed amendments could make the Constitution universally revered…he saw the Constitution itself, not the amendments, as the sturdy barrier to fend off majority oppression and defend private rights. A bill of rights added to the intact Constitution would bring to it the only thing it presently lacked – the support of the whole people.

Madison not only outwitted the Anti-Federalists, but more ominously, he constructed a highly effective hegemonic instrument whereby the Bill of Rights would be widely considered as a sacred and uncontestable scroll embodying the epic virtues of U.S. democracy.

A Government “Over the People”

According to Goldwin and Kaufman and Blau and Moncada at its core, the U.S. Constitution outlines all the things the federal government cannot do, known as negative rights. Paul Finkelman describes the difference between negative and positive rights as being “freedom from” versus “freedom to.” According to Charles Fried, “a negative right is a right that something not be done to one, that some particular imposition be withheld.”

Simply, the founders encoded negative rights into the U.S. Constitution to ensure that government would protect the property rights bestowed upon “the minority of the opulent” by divine authority. In doing so, according to Cass Sunstein, negative rights bolster the ideology and rule of law of free-market capitalism. In terms of the founders’ Constitution, Sunstein interprets the intent of negative rights in important ways:

Most of the so-called negative rights require governmental assistance, not governmental abstinence. Consider, for example, the right to private property. As Bentham wrote, “Property and law are born and must die together. Before the laws, there was no property: take away the laws, all property ceases.” As we know and live it, private property is both created and protected by law; it requires extensive governmental assistance. The same point holds for the other foundation of a market economy, the close sibling of private property: freedom of contract. For that form of freedom to exist, it is extremely important to have reliable enforcement mechanisms in the form of civil courts.

Cornell professor of law Laura Underkuffler also emphasized in 2003 that the “idea of the Constitution as a charter of negative rights – and of the right to the protection of property as simply one of those rights – is an entrenched feature of American political and legal discourse.” New Jersey Deputy Attorney General Gezim Bajrami confirmed in 2013, “Time and time again, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the government has no affirmative constitutional obligations to the public.”

According to Finkleman, positive rights necessitate “affirmative obligations on the part of government to fulfill the right.” Therefore, positive rights enable a nation-state’s constitution to guarantee a political economy that prioritizes egalitarianism in the social, political, cultural, economic and environmental realms. Positive rights enable government to proactively intervene to ensure universal and equitable access to a living income, housing, holistic education, health care, nutritious food, clean water and a healthy and sustainable environment. Positive rights can empower (not hinder) government to forcefully protect individuals and groups of people from forms of domination and targeted violence. As CeÂcile Fabre emphasizes, a nation-state constituted by positive rights would need to guarantee “that a democratic majority should not be able to repeal these rights and that certain institutions, such as the judiciary, should be given the power to strike down laws passed by the legislature that are in breach of those rights.”

Instead, the founders constructed the U.S. Constitution to forever deter emancipatory strivings and collective interests that are inherent to egalitarian societies.

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The Bill of Rights only reinforced negative rights based prohibitions on Congress concerning intervention in the press, speech, religion, assembly, bearing of arms, etc. By doing so, these purported “civil liberties” fortify the Constitution’s undemocratic foundations and its primary function of harnessing the majoritarian menace to further buttress, both legally and ideologically, the primacy of property rights. As Judge Richard Posner of the United States Court of Appeals stressed in 1983, “the Constitution is a charter of negative rather than positive liberties… The men who wrote the Bill of Rights were not concerned that Government might do too little for the people but that it might do too much to them.”

According to Daniel Lazare, the Constitution and its Bill of Rights assign responsibility for civil liberties to the Supreme Court, essentially relieving the semi-elected branches of government, chiefly Congress “institutionally irresponsible” and civil liberties “de-politicized.” Lazare went on to explain:

Thus was born the peculiar rhythm of American politics in which politicians or the people at large go on periodic rampages in which they lynch, terrorize, and generally trample democratic rights until they are finally brought up short by the courts. Then everyone involved congratulates themselves that the system has worked, that the abuse has been corrected, that the majority has been reined in— until some new eruption sets the cycle going again.

Furthermore, the rights of speech, press, assembly, etc., are the means by which the commercial and propertied class instills their ideological, political, economic and social agenda via a free-marketplace of ideas; whereby access is determined by one’s wealth, race, gender, religion and influence. Not coincidentally, the Bill of Rights only applies to federal and state government action, not to the actions of private business and its agents. All in all, “the commons” became the property of the opulent.

According to Michael Parenti, the U.S. Constitution created a form of government and a political system that prevented “the people” from finding horizontal cohesion and instead “was designed to dilute their vertical force, blunting its upward thrust upon government by interjecting indirect and staggered forms of representation.” To do so, according to historian Morton White, a system of checks was constructed to safeguard against Madison’s expressed fears of “agrarian attempts” and “symptoms of a leveling spirit” by “the proportion of those who will labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings.”

The Autocratic First Amendment

The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is widely heralded as the foundational gem of the Bill of Rights and the unambiguous signifier of “American Freedom and Democracy” It reads:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

However, it can also be regarded as one of the most duplicitous instruments of U.S. hegemony.

In 1799, Supreme Court Chief Justice Oliver Ellsworth made it clear that based on English common law, “this country remains the same as it was before the Revolution.” Eight years earlier, with this understanding, the founders applied English common-law when drafting the First Amendment, specifically in terms of the doctrine of “no prior restraint.”

In 1769 William Blackstone, the celebrated “compiler of English law” and major influence on the founding fathers, explained the doctrine of no prior restraint:

The liberty of the press is indeed essential to the nature of a free state; but this consists in laying no previous restraints upon publications, and not in freedom from censure for criminal matter when published. Every free man has an undoubted right to lay what sentiments he pleases before the public; to forbid this, is to destroy the freedom of the press; but if he publishes what is improper, mischievous or illegal, he must take the consequences of his own temerity.

Thus, the First Amendment follows the directive of no prior restraint by prohibiting government from forbidding a “free man” from expressing the “sentiments he pleases before the public.” Yet, if the government determines such “sentiments” to be seditious libel after the fact, prosecution is permissible under the U.S. Constitution. As Howard Zinn put it, to this day the First Amendment under no prior restraint has an important caveat in that:

You can say whatever you want, print whatever you want. The government cannot stop you in advance. But once you speak or write it, if the government decides to make certain statements “illegal,” or to define them as “mischievous” or even just “improper,” you can be put in prison.

This little known yet significant twist on American freedom of expression not only criminalizes dissent after the fact, it also serves the purpose of having a powerful chilling effect in advance. Zinn goes on to explain how, “An ordinary person, unsophisticated in the law, might respond, ‘You say you won’t stop me from speaking my mind–no prior restraint. But if I know it will get me in trouble, and so remain silent, that is prior restraint.”

Yet, in the subsequent two centuries, the U.S. federal government (including the Supreme Court) has also successfully restricted freedom of expression in advance under the rationale of “national security,” most often relating to those who attempt to expose the nation’s nefarious covert and undemocratic activities around the globe. While the First Amendment is explicit in that “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech,” just seven years after Congress passed the amendment, Congress turned around and did just that in 1798 with the Alien and Sedition Acts.

President John Adams and other Federalist leaders expedited the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts under the rational that French and Irish revolutions would spark an egalitarian revolution at home, incited by French and Irish immigrant agitators and foreign spies. Feeding this narrative, a Federalist newspaper of the time claimed Jacobin (egalitarian) French tutors were attempting to corrupt America’s youth, “to make them imbibe, with their very milk, as it were, the poison of atheism and disaffection.” Long-time Massachusetts politician and Federalist Harrison Gray Otis declared in 1797 that he “did not wish to invite hordes of wild Irishmen, nor the turbulent and disorderly of all parts of the world, to come here with a view to disturb our tranquility, after having succeeded in the overthrow of their own governments” and landing in the U.S. “to cavil against the Government, and to pant after a more perfect state of society.”

The Alien Acts included “An Act Concerning Aliens” (enacted June 25, 1798, with a two-year expiration date) which authorized the president to deport any resident alien considered “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.” The Alien Acts also included “An Act Respecting Alien Enemies” (or Alien Enemies Act), which was enacted on July 6, 1798 (with no expiration date), authorizing the president to detain and deport resident aliens whose home countries were at war with the United States.

Enacted July 14, 1798, with an expiration date of March 3, 1801, the Sedition Act applied to U.S. citizens, authorizing the prosecution, imprisonment or large fine of any person who:

…shall write, print, utter or publish, or shall cause or procure to be written, printed, uttered or published, or shall knowingly and willingly assist or aid in writing, printing, uttering or publishing any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the said President, or to bring them, or either of them, into contempt or disrepute; or to excite against them, or either or any of them, the hatred of the good people of the United States, or to stir up sedition within the United States, or to excite any unlawful combinations therein, for opposing or resisting any law of the United States, or any act of the President of the United States, done in pursuance of any such law, or of the powers in him vested by the constitution of the United States, or to resist, oppose, or defeat any such law or act, or to aid, encourage or abet any hostile designs of any foreign nation against United States, their people or government.

As Zinn pointed out, “the Sedition Act was a direct violation of the Constitution. But here we get our first clue to the inadequacy of words on [“parchment”] paper in ensuring the rights of citizens.”

The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 was revised and further codified by Congress with the passing of the Espionage Act of 1917. This reaffirmation of the duplicitous nature of the founders’ Constitution and governing structures was intended to stifle growing resistance against social conditions domestically and the expansion of U.S. imperialism, particularly on the eve of the U.S. entry into World War I. The Espionage Act of 1917 in part read:

Whoever, when the United States is at war, shall wilfully make or convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies and whoever when the United States is at war, shall wilfully cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States, or shall wilfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States, to the injury of the service or of the United States, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both.

As a means to more effectively crush growing dissent domestically, in 1918 (after the U.S. entered WWI) the Sedition Act was passed as an amendment to the Espionage Act, further restricting free expression. It read in part:

Whoever, when the United States is at war… shall willfully make or convey false reports, or false statements… or incite insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States, or shall willfully obstruct… the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States, or… shall willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States… or shall willfully display the flag of any foreign enemy, or shall willfully… urge, incite, or advocate any curtailment of production… or advocate, teach, defend, or suggest the doing of any of the acts or things in this section enumerated and whoever shall by word or act support or favor the cause of any country with which the United States is at war or by word or act oppose the cause of the United States therein, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than 20 years, or both.

During World War I, federal prosecutors enacted the Espionage Act in over 2,000 cases. While no convictions resulted from charges of spying or sabotage, 1,055 convictions resulted from prohibitions on free speech under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, largely targeting labor leaders, civil rights activists, Black and leftist journalists and publishers, war critics, pacifists, anti-conscription activists, socialists, communists, anarchists and civil libertarians.

In 1919 the Supreme Court actively safeguarded the Espionage Act against constitutional challenges in Schenck v. United States. This case involved Charles T. Schenck, the secretary of the Socialist Party of America, who was convicted by a lower court under the Espionage Act after engaging in counter military recruitment activities by distributing leaflets that encouraged prospective military draftees to refuse military service. The first side of Schenck’s leaflet argued that the Conscription Act (the draft) violated the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition on involuntary servitude and was a “monstrous wrong against humanity in the interest of Wall Street’s chosen few.” It urged recipients to “petition for the repeal of the act” because the war was being spun by “cunning politicians and a mercenary capitalist press.” Schenck appealed his conviction to the Supreme Court, arguing that his First Amendment rights were violated. The Court ruled against Schenck, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. stating:

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic… The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

Thus, the well-known legal rationale against “falsely shouting fire in a theatre” became a metaphor for the limits of free speech in America, namely serving as code against dissent that disrupts U.S. hegemony. Schenck went on to serve six months in a federal prison.

During the same period, the U.S. Supreme Court also upheld the conviction of labor leader and Socialist Party of America presidential candidate Eugene Debs, who was charged under the Espionage Act for making an anti-war speech in 1918. Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison. This was not the first time Debs had been imprisoned for his “un-American” activities, yet the Espionage Act served its purpose in making it easier to silence Debs (and other dissidents), hopefully once and for all.

The Supreme Court case of Stokes v. United States (1920) involved the prosecution of reproductive rights and labor activist Rose Pastor Stokes, who was given a ten year prison sentence for simply writing in a local newspaper, “No government which is for the profiteers can also be for the people, and I am for the people, while the government is for the profiteers.”

In 1917 Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph, the publishers of the Black political and literary magazine The Messenger, were arrested under the Espionage Act when they wrote:

Our claim is to appeal to reason, to lift our pens above the cringing demagogy of the times… Patriotism has no appeal to us; justice has. Party has no weight with us; principle has. Loyalty meaningless; it depends on what one is loyal to. Prayer is not one of our remedies; it depends on what one is praying for. We consider prayer as nothing more than a fervent wish; consequently, the merit and worth of a prayer depend upon what the fervent wish is.

Some Supreme Court decisions that reinforced the Espionage and Sedition Acts did not target radicals or dissidents. One such case involved the United States v. Nagler in 1918, which led to the conviction of the Assistant Secretary of State for the State of Wisconsin, Louis B. Nagler. Nagler was prosecuted after simply telling a group of YMCA or the Red Cross canvassers for the war effort who showed up at his office door, “I am through contributing to your private grafts. There is too much graft in these subscriptions. No, I do not believe in the work of the YMCA or the Red Cross, for I believe they are nothing but a bunch of grafters.”

In the case of the United States v. The Spirit of ’76, Robert Goldstein, the producer of the patriotic Revolutionary War movie The Spirit of ’76, was charged under the Espionage Act in 1917 for his film’s graphically unfavorable portrayal of Great Britain, which was America’s primary World War I ally. Federal prosecutors charged that Goldstein had deliberately made a pro-German movie to impugn America’s ally, incite disloyalty and obstruct military conscription. Goldstein who was Jewish (Anti-Semitism was rife in the U.S.) and of German descent, claimed that his intent in making the film was to make money and boost the patriotic mood of the country. He was given a ten-year prison sentence and fined $5,000.

The Sedition Act was repealed in 1921 while the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and the Espionage Act of 1917 have endured into the 21st century. According to Emily Peterson, “The Espionage Act is so vague and poorly defined in its terms, that it’s hard to say exactly what it does and does not cover.”

Diluting the Impact of Popular Sentiments

The Constitution dictates that an Electoral College, not the general electorate or a majority of citizen voters, will choose the U.S. president. Within this undemocratic scheme, voters are actually casting a vote for presidential “electors” tied to the major elite political parties of each state, the numbers of which are based on the number of state Congressional seats. These electors are collectively known as the Electoral College. According to Article II of the Constitution, “Each state shall appoint, such manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the state may be entitled in the Congress.” Translation: state legislatures, not citizens within a state, decide which presidential candidate will receive the state’s electoral votes. These appointed electors, who make up the anonymous Electoral College, are in essence political establishment insiders, who are subject to lobbying efforts, and in many states can roguely decide who they vote for, or if they will even vote at all. According to FairVote, for a presidential candidate to win an election within this system, one must receive over half of the Electoral College votes (in the 21st century, that would be 270 electoral votes out of the 538 national electors). The result is that presidential elections are largely symbolic exercises intended to keep the masses tied to the established order, where the democratic principle of one-person one-vote is prohibited.

As Dahl and Lazare point out, the U.S. Supreme Court was established to exist outside of any form of democratic deliberation and public scrutiny. Instead, imperious and impervious Supreme Court justices are appointed for life by a president and confirmed by a semi-aristocratic Senate (to this day), of which was chosen by state legislatures until 1913. The more popularly elected (yet also largely wealthy) House of Representatives were excluded from these deliberations. This leaves the Supreme Court—the least democratic branch of government—responsible for deciding if and how the rights of the masses are recognized and dispersed, while “elected” representatives stand idle. Accordingly Lazare notes, “rallying behind the Supreme Court” means “rallying behind the Constitution in toto” and “ignoring the constitutional system’s many unsavory aspects.”

The founders’ crafty and abstruse power-sharing arrangement made it difficult to determine where true authority lay, be it in Congress, the Presidency, the Supreme Court or the citizenry at the municipal, state or federal level. As Lazare put it, instead of having a form of government that would serve as “an instrument that ‘We the People’ would create and shape to further our own rule” the Constitution solidified a system of government intended to “create and shape the people in order to further its own rule.” Instead of being a government “of the people” it would be a government “over the people.” Parenti goes on to explain that in keeping with their desire to disenfranchise the majority, the founders included these “auxiliary precautions” that were “designed to fragment power without democratizing it.” Parenti goes on to explain:

In separating the executive, legislative, and judiciary functions and then providing a system of checks and balances among the various branches, including staggered elections, executive veto, Senate confirmation of appointments and ratification of treaties, and a bicameral legislature, they hoped to dilute the impact of popular sentiments. They also contrived an elaborate and difficult process for amending the Constitution.

Article 5 of the U.S. Constitution plays a crucial role in the founders’ undemocratic design by requiring a process whereby a proposed Constitutional amendment has to first pass a two-thirds majority in both the House and the Senate, or through a convention called by Congress based on a request from two-thirds of the states. If a proposed amendment successfully traverses its way through either pathway, it then has to be ratified by three-quarters of state legislatures. As University of Chicago Law School professor Eric Posner describes it, “Any proposal to amend the Constitution is idle because it’s effectively impossible… an amendment requires a supermajority twice—the pig must pass through two pythons.” Two hundred years later, after 11,539 proposed amendments, only 27 have been ratified. The 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments which expanded status rights to former slaves, passed only because the defeated and occupied South was strong-armed into ratifying them, yet as examined later, were not compelled to enforce them. Between 1870 and today only 12 amendments have been enacted, with the last one taking 203 years to be ratified. Posner goes to point out how this labyrinth has led to a reliance on begging the Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution in new ways by hiring “lawyers to formulate their proposals as already reflected in the Constitution rather than argue that the Constitution got the position wrong and so should be changed.” According to Gordon Wood, the very concept of democracy was hijacked and appropriated by the U.S. Constitution in that:

By the end of the debate over the Constitution, it was possible for the Federalists to describe the new national government, even with its indirectly elected president and Senate, as “a perfectly democratical form of government.” The houses of representatives lost their exclusive connection with the people. Representation was now identified simply with election; thus, all elected officials, and, for some, even those not elected, such as judges, were considered somehow “representative” of the people. Democracy rapidly became a generic label for all American government.

In addition to the undemocratic federal government, all 50 states would, in time, establish state constitutions modeled after the federal constitution (to varying degrees), with legislative and executive branches that are semi-popularly elected to develop and administer policies and laws; with state Supreme Courts that preside over legal appeals. State constitutions also establish mechanisms for local governance at the county, municipal or township level where voters popularly elect some variation of town or city managers and/or councils to make and administer local policies and ordinances. It is at the municipal level that the more direct forms of democracy were possible, at least for white men. The town meeting model, where all eligible voters meet to make local governance decisions and elect officials to implement their decisions, was a common form of local governance during the 18th and 19th centuries. State and municipal governments also have a sordid history concerning suffrage rights, often disenfranchising groups of people based on race, ethnicity, religion, class and gender.

The original Constitution left complete discretion to individual states in determining voter qualifications, rules on absentee voting, polling hours and election funding. In most states there is a lot of leeway given to counties in crafting their own ballots, designing and implementing their own voter education programs, deciding how they will handle overseas ballots, the ability to hire and train poll workers, choosing polling locations and in how to maintain their voter registration lists.

Over time (between 1870 to 1972), with the enactment of the 14th, 15th, 19th 23rd, 24th and 26th Constitutional Amendments, various forms of legal discrimination were explicitly prohibited when establishing qualifications for suffrage. It is still legally permissible for states to deny the “right to vote” for other reasons and many have effectively done so as a means to continue to disenfranchise groups of people based on race, ethnicity and class. The 17th Amendment, which enabled U.S. Senators to be directly elected, did not result from popular democratic strivings. Instead, it resulted from pundit and legislator frustrations over corruption, instability, conflict and deadlock due to the indirect process hampering legislative efficiency. In her book Electoral Dysfunction: A Survival Manual for American Voters, Victoria Bassetti sums up suffrage rights this way:

The original document establishing our government acknowledges and weaves slavery deeply into our society. Women cannot vote. Two of the three major federal officers, President and Senator, are not voted on by the people. And there is not a right to vote in the Constitution. The word ‘vote’ appears in the Constitution as originally drafted only in relation to how representatives, senators, and presidential electors perform their duties. Representatives vote. But the people’s vote is not mentioned.

The Bill of Rights did not change this fact. Over two hundred years later the Supreme Court appointed George Bush to be president, and in the process reaffirmed this point in their decision by stating, “The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States.” The double rub here is that the court was referring to a citizen’s rights to vote for Electoral College electors, not the right to vote directly for a presidential candidate.

While allowing citizens to feel as though they have a voice in the political system, the form of “democracy” outlined in the Constitution is clearly designed to impede the citizenry from determining both domestic and foreign policy. Ultimately, the founders crafted a system that allowed select groups of people to have the right to citizenship, privileging a smaller proportion of them to indirectly choose the best “men of substance,” filtered through narrowly prescribed partisan commitments as a means to preserve the wealth and power of the post-revolutionary ruling class. Within this constitutional framework, hegemonic cultural scripts tied to institutional authority perpetuate systemic inequities. In a constitutional republic without positive constitutional rights that mandate parity of political participation and economic redistribution, whilst remedying existing cultural prohibitions on recognition and representation rights; social equity and economic equality will persistently be denied, undermined and contested.

“Unfit to associate with the white race”

One can choose to believe the various cultural myths about how the freedom loving founders despised slavery, but did not work to end it based on a variety of factors, including: timing, not wanting to disrupt a widely accepted and profitable institution, and the need to accommodate the southern plantation system. No matter the rationale, the truth is that it was not in the founders’ political and economic interests to do so, nor is there evidence that they had the moral capacity to end one of the most horrific enterprises in human history. What is clear is that the U.S. Constitution was written to protect slavery while empowering slaveholders in numerous ways. This was demonstrated by General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney’s boastings in front of the South Carolina House of Representatives following the Constitutional Convention about how slavery was secured within the Constitution:

We have a security that the general government can never emancipate them [slaves], for no such authority is granted and it is admitted, on all hands, that the general government has no powers but what are expressly granted by the Constitution, and that all rights not expressed were reserved by the several states.

As documented by Barbara Fields, the Constitution’s three-fifths clause, states were allowed to count three-fifths of their slaves in apportioning representation in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Electoral College. This effectively increased the political power of southern states and thus granted greater protections for the institution of slavery. This disproportionate political power through the Electoral College led to Thomas Jefferson’s 1800 presidential win. The Constitution also had a provision (fugitive slave clause) that aided slaveholders in recovering fugitive slaves, particularly those who sought sanctuary in “free” states and territories. It protected slave-owners rights to human property and made the act of aiding a fugitive slave a constitutional offense. The Second Amendment is also considered to have been, in part, a means to protect slave-owners from slave insurrections.

Another Constitutional provision focused on the highly lucrative enterprise that was the Atlantic slave trade. It read in part, “[t]he migration or importation of such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year 1808.” It also allowed for “a tax or duty” to be “imposed on such importation…” for as long as the trade remained legal. This did not mean that slavery was to be abolished in 1808, but only that the import of new slaves would be discontinued.

As with settler colonialism, America’s domestic slave trade is the story of the founding of the United States. As many scholars have documented, including Du Bois, McInnis and Finkelman, the slave trade was a major economic engine, which fueled the prosperity of the new nation, with profits from enslaved people flowing to many locations in the North and South. Traders and slave owners throughout the South profited by selling human property while others profited from the forced labor it provided in the cotton and sugar fields. So did intermediary suppliers along with carriers in the steamboat, railroad and shipping industries. Naturally, northern capitalists profited as investors in banks in the exchange of money for people as did the companies that provided insurance for the owners’ investments in enslaved labor. So did foreign investors in Southern securities, some of which were issued on mortgaged slaves. The hub of the nation’s cotton textile industry was based in New England, where “enlightened” gentry enriched themselves from the misery of southern slave labor.

Following its Constitutional mandate, the Act of 1807 was the legislation that officially ended U.S. participation in the international slave trade, but not the domestic slave trade. It levied heavy fines and possible imprisonment on those who attempted to import slaves to the United States. This piece of legislation was underfunded and often not enforced, and when it was enforced, it was another source of revenue with its stiff fines and valuable legal merchandise. These realities enabled a smaller yet profitable human smuggling industry to exist in the U.S. until the middle of the 19th century. When illegal smugglers were caught, their human merchandise was seized and sold to U.S. slave owners (Du Bois, Fehrenbacher and Finkelman). The Constitution would continuously be used until the Civil War to defend the institution of slavery from federal intervention and actions taken by an increasingly militant abolition movement.

In 1857 the Supreme Court ruled on the Dred Scott v. Sanford case, based on Scott’s lawsuit to gain his and his family’s freedom in the slave state of Missouri after they had previously lived in a free state and territory. In delivering the majority decision against Scott, Chief Justice Roger Taney held that under the terms of the U.S. Constitution, Black people “could never be citizens of the United States.” Taney explained that when the Constitution was ratified, Blacks were “regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights that the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his own benefit.”

The standing of free Black Americans under the Constitution remained vague for decades to come. The Bill of Rights did not defend free Black Americans from municipal and state laws intent on depriving them of (parchment barrier) Constitutional rights. This cultural and legal reality set the stage for Jim Crow laws in the South and its manifestations nationwide into the 21st century.

In an 1852 Fourth of July speech, the formidable Fredrick Douglas called out the true nature of the institution of slavery in the United States:

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.

Conclusion

While the Bill of Rights and a few subsequent amendments have provided some democratizing effects, they have strictly been limited to affirmative remedies for injustices (instead of transformative remedies associated with dismantling). These tend to be reformist in nature and as Nancy Fraser frames such measures, are “aimed at correcting inequitable outcomes of social arrangements without disturbing the underlying framework that generates them.” Affirmative “remedies” are thus akin to negative rights and often come from state and private powers making limited and ultimately temporary accommodations to justice-seeking collective struggles, frequently through the utilization of disruptive tactics and strategies. In contrast, the inherently violent cultural, political and economic structures that are protected by the U.S. Constitution prohibit transformative remedies intended (analogous to positive rights) to eliminate the root causes of social inequity and economic inequality. According to historian Howard Zinn the American Revolution and its resulting Constitution, “was a work of genius” in that it “created the most effective system of national control devised in modern times, and showed future generations of leaders the advantages of combining paternalism with command.”

At its core, the U.S. Constitution was designed to safeguard a settler colonial society overseen by the supreme laws of capitalism, Christianity, white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. By doing so, it entrenched deep structural disparities in participation that subvert collective strivings for social, economic and political justice. This denial of the basic means and opportunities for all inhabitants of a society to directly contest and deliberate as equals violates the very nature of public reason, the principle by which liberal democracies define themselves (as the U.S. defines itself). Moreover, for a society to be authentically democratic—as an essential determinant of justice—parity of participation is required to serve as the idiom of public contestation and deliberation whereby status equality and the equitable distribution of wealth can be attained. This would require a constitutional framework derived from the principles and practices of participatory parity, where positive rights as well as equality of opportunity and equality of outcome are indisputable.

With the advent of the U.S. Constitution and its consolidation of cultural, political, and economic power; slave owners and “captains of industry” alike were made to feel more secure knowing that a state or territorial governor could rely on a swift federal response when domestic disturbances was beyond the control of local police and state militia (Beard).

With the arrival of the 19th century, mercantilism and the smaller agrarian economy of the settler colonies of the U.S. were quickly being toppled, largely influenced by the 1776 publication of Scottish economist Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Smith’s magnum opus became the recipe for free-market capitalism, and is said to have been enthusiastically embraced by the founders of the new republic, and became the ideological and structural framework for the U.S. political economy. In Wealth of Nations Smith affirmed, over a decade prior to the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, that a, “Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all.”

Decades after the drafting of the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams proudly declaring, “from 15 to 20 legislatures of our own, in action for 30 years past, have proved that no fears of an equalization of property are to be apprehended from them.” Indeed, the U.S. Constitution was serving its purpose in guaranteeing that inequality would remain the supreme law of the land—at an increasing rate—far into the future. In the decades ahead, as industrial capitalism flourished and the settler colonial empire expanded, so would U.S. nationalism, constructing a base and superstructure Jefferson and his peers could have only dreamed of; one that would perfectly buttress the despotic structures they deeply embedded within their beloved Constitution.

Art and Artificial Intelligence: A Pivotal Moment for Unions

[Pictured: Striking writers and actors picket outside Paramount studios in Los Angeles on Friday, July 14, 2023. Credit: AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)

By Bavand Karim

Last summer, the premiere episode of Marvel's Secret Invasion featured opening credits crafted by artificial intelligence. While reviews were mixed, the credits were objectively effective for exploring AI’s potential as a storytelling tool. Perhaps more importantly from the studio’s perspective, the production costs were likely much less than an agency like The Mill or an artist like Daniel Kleinman would demand.

It’s no coincidence that Marvel’s use of AI occurred amid union-led strikes by Hollywood’s writers and directors. And as studios were negotiating with creative unions, they were simultaneously rolling out the tools that might eventually replace many of those creatives. At the time of the negotiations, it was unclear what impact AI would have on the entertainment industry. But the prevailing wisdom seemed to support the general anxiety among insiders that an industry-wide shift was coming.

By November 2023, Dreamworks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg predicted that AI will replace 90% of artists on animated films within three years. It may even be sooner. In December, Google released Gemini, its most advanced AI tool to date. One of Gemini’s advancements is the ability to process up to an hour of video and 11 hours of audio in mere minutes. Although Google warns that processing times vary, their demonstration of long-context understanding analyzes a 44-minute video in under one minute. Earlier this month, OpenAI released Sora, a powerful new tool that generates one-minute video clips based on text prompts. Sora is what is known as a diffusion model. It converts text to videos that resemble static noise, and then removes the noise over several passes. While these emerging AI video tools are not perfect, they are compelling enough in their first-generation iterations to provoke meaningful questions about the future of all creative industries.

It was less than a year ago that we began speculating whether AI visualization tools would disrupt the artistic foundation of Hollywood. Now, it appears the event horizon is upon us.

Last year’s strikes were a watershed moment for unions who were forced to acknowledge the wide uncertainty that the looming threat of AI has introduced into Hollywood. The Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers’ (AMPTP) agreement with the the Director’s Guild of America (DGA) defines AI as “not a person” and clarifies that it will not replace the role of any DGA member. However, it allows studios to use AI as long as a “consultation” takes place with the director, which has stirred debate around the validity and integrity of the agreement.

The Writer’s Guild (WGA) similarly resolved their dispute with new guidelines prohibiting the use of AI in creating written source material such as scripts for films or TV shows.

No other artistic guild or technical union has yet defined how AI will be regulated within their respective domain. The Art Director’s Guild (ADG), which represents title and graphic artists, one of hundreds of International Association of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE) chapters nationwide that could potentially be impacted by AI, released a statement expressing concern over AI video generators, but the path forward remains unclear. While animation industry professionals are unionizing at a record rate, IATSE Local 839 — the Animation Guild — still has fewer than 10,000 members, meaning that the vast majority of the animation industry’s workforce of more than 200,000 artists, assistants, coordinators, and managers are not unionized.

As more major studios utilize AI, the inevitable result will be a wave of disenfranchised and marginalized artists. This industry shift will produce a flood of new independent content as those artists attempt to find their own audiences. While studios like Dreamworks and Pixar are cutting costs in the short term by exploring the benefits of AI, they are also creating a new generation of pissed-off indie competitors.

It feels nefarious of Disney, which owns Pixar, to use the stories most beloved by audiences to sideline workers. The most popular tentpole story franchises like Marvel and Star Wars likely won't be impacted too seriously by viewer backlash. Diehard fans love those stories and they pass that love through generations. So audiences will continue to watch those films and TV series even if they incorporate AI. Disney is surely hoping so. And they probably don't consider those disenfranchised artists, taken independently or collectively, to pose any kind of real economic threat to their business model.

Can human artists use AI to produce their own creative work? Sure. But they can't sell it in the same way. The independent market is nothing like a studio job, which typically offers long-term stability, training, networking and advancement opportunities, health and retirement benefits, and — most importantly — an audience. Copyright laws prevent indie artists from accessing the most desirable story franchises without the impending doom of litigation, and the privatization and monopolization of distribution outlets prevent all artists, disenfranchised or not, from ever being compensated equivalent to the true value of their labor. 

The next three years will be pivotal for the entertainment industry and will test the power of America’s labor unions. Will Disney’s move toward AI produce a greater awareness of, if not a fully-fledged social movement against, these AI tools exactly because of the threat that they pose to human labor? Right now, there is little stopping major studios like Disney from engaging AI across the range of artistic disciplines involved in media production — titles, graphics, story generation, script writing, character design, 3D modeling, environment design and lighting design, editing, visual effects, sound design, music composition — potentially impacting hundreds of thousands of people around the globe.

Disney’s strategy is nothing new. Corporations have always primed consumers to accept socially deleterious but profitable change. During the Industrial Revolution, automobile manufacturers sold individuals on independence and freedom, and gave them an entire infrastructure built around private individual transportation with little regulation resulting in disconnected, unwalkable, traffic-plagued communities. At the dawn of the information age, technology companies promised us enhanced efficiency, connectedness, and socialization. Now it’s apparent how modern electronics and software invade our privacy, harvest and sell our personal information, micromanage our productivity, and erode democracy. The proliferation of AI into mainstream life — even through such an innocuous injection point as entertainment — has the potential for much more destructive erosion of our personal freedoms. Will society nonetheless embrace it, only to later realize the damage done? Or is Disney betting that, as in the past, we will grow to love the chains that bind us?

Make no mistake: once major corporations establish a model for displacing human labor with AI, it will be a global phenomenon. Workforce reduction will occur in every industry to satisfy capitalism’s demand for infinite growth. The Big Four consulting firms will justify it and The Wall Street Journal will report that it was great for the economy while thousands of Americans find themselves unemployed. As they have throughout history, the powers that be are reforming the economy to their own benefit. The rest of us will be left to deal with the consequences.

Multinational corporate monopolies determined to undermine workers’ and human rights in the name of profit must be met with equivalent, equally resolved multinational resistance. Indie artists should leverage as much power as possible and cooperate with unions across the globe to foster government support against the ongoing exploitation and oppression of the working class. Society’s hope may be that in the face of continued oppression, America is able to form a new political party that represents and protects workers, and promises them an equal share of a company’s revenue as if they were shareholders.

We must fight for a world in which technology, including AI, is liberatory — socially and economically — and not corrosive. AI must be a tool for the greater good, not for the profit of the few at the expense of the many.

For an industry that markets and congratulates itself for telling authentic human stories, the result of film’s shift to AI will ironically be narratives about humanity produced with minimal human input through a process that economically disenfranchised as many humans as possible for the sake of profit. This cataclysm will force us to question not just the impact of late-stage capitalism on human creativity but whether creation is a uniquely human trait at all.

Soon, audiences will pack theaters to watch a film produced exclusively by AI. On the screen, a long-deceased Harrison Ford will star as a young Indiana Jones. As he holds up a copy of the original Raiders of the Lost Ark, written by a human and produced with practical effects, the AI Indy flashes a sardonic smile and says, “This belongs in a museum.”

Bavand Karim is a creative executive and academic residing in Los Angeles, California. He is the founder and chairperson of CINE and Lost Winds Entertainment, and co-director of the film program at the College of the Canyons.

Is Marxism "Leftist"?

By Kate Woolford

Republished from Challenge Magazine.

A Marxist approach to leftist moralism

Many self-styled communists view Marxism-Leninism more as a set of moral and ethical values than a science firmly grounded in material reality. To them, Marxism is the ultimate embodiment of liberal and ‘progressive’ values, while those with more conservative values are nothing more than ‘chauvinists’ who should be excluded from the cause. 

However, this moral interpretation of Marxism is inconsistent with Marx’s own understanding, which asserts that the driving force behind human society is contradictions between classes, rather than a moral dichotomy of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’. In this respect, Marx did not abstract capitalism outside of its historical context but instead showed that it could be both historically progressive and regressive depending on its stage of development. Within its early stages, the progressive nature of capitalism is tied up with its need to constantly revolutionise the instruments of production, the relations of production, and therefore also the whole relations of society. This, in turn, replaces the scattered, less-effective feudal mode of production with capitalist production and allows production to be carried out at an unprecedented scale. Nevertheless, as capitalism matures, and the proletariat grows into a fully developed class concentrated together in huge numbers, a contradiction arises between the social process of production and the private ownership of production. 

The contradictions inherent within capitalism are demonstrated through recurrent crises, during which huge amounts of goods and machinery are needlessly destroyed and wasted. Capitalism’s incompatibility with the future development of society can only result in a revolution led by the class capable of bringing about a higher mode of production, that is, the modern working class. Therefore, the inevitability of the socialist revolution is not tied up in capitalism’s moral shortcomings, but on the objective laws governing the development of human society. 

In a similar vein, Engels criticised, “every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatsoever as an eternal, ultimate, and forever immutable moral law on the pretext that the moral world too has its permanent principles which transcend history and the differences between nations”, and disapproved of a theory of morals “designed to suit all periods, all peoples, and all conditions” arguing that “precisely for that reason it is never and nowhere applicable.” Both Marx and Engels upheld that the communist movement unified workers based on the material conditions of their life; their nation, their workplace, and their commonly experienced exploitation as proletarians, not on the basis of a shared set of moral values.

Therefore, those within the communist movement who uphold their personal morals as eternally and indisputably correct, or, even worse, seek to elevate their personal morals to the position of communist morals in general, clearly do not view morals in a materialist way. Nor do they approach it in an anti-imperialist way, with notions of moral superiority giving way to imperialist interventions on the countries alleged to be morally inferior, often on the basis of their cultural and religious values.

What is Marxism?

Marx understood that changes in society, like changes in the natural world, are far from accidental and follow certain laws. This understanding made it possible to work out a scientific theory of human society; to study why it is the way it is, why it changes, and what changes are to come. The scientific method of Marxism, dialectical materialism, regards the world as both a living organism in a state of constant development and composed of matter existing beyond human perception. 

Like all sciences, Marxism is based on the material world around us. Therefore, it is not a finished theory or a dogma, but must be continuously applied to new conditions, new problems, and new discoveries to draw from them the correct conclusions. The value of Marxism lies in its ability to form conclusions capable of changing the world, just as all scientific discoveries can be used to change the world. 

Defining Left and Right 

While Marxism historically belongs to the definite left tradition, that is, it finds much of its origins in the Jacobin radical left of the French Revolution, today’s leftism is understood more as an indefinite set of moral values than a clearly defined ideology. 

Delineating what values belong to the left and what values belong to the right is a challenging task given that these terms mean different things within different contexts. One study found that conservatism can be associated with a left-wing or right-wing orientation depending on the cultural, political, and economic situation of the society in question. Another study found that, within the former Soviet republics, “traditionalism, rule-following, and needs for security are more strongly associated with the old (left-wing) ways of doing things than with right-wing preferences. It is also possible that openness would be associated with a right-wing political orientation in Eastern Europe, rather than with a left-wing orientation, as in the West.” In other words, in the former Soviet republics, the Soviet Union is often associated with values the West considers to be right-wing. 

In this respect, understandings of left and right are subjective and vary widely depending on time and place. Therefore, it is important to clarify that this article will be considering values associated with modern “leftism” in the West today. The cultural values considered in this article are liberation through love, openness, and equal rights, and the policy matters considered are equality, government intervention, and high taxes. 

Love and inclusivity

Notions of love as an all-liberating force find popularity among leftists, an outlook prevalent among 18th and 19th-century philosophers and revitalised during the counterculture movement of the 1960s and 70s. Engels, however, criticised the “religion of love” and, in the End of Classical German Philosophy, denounced Feuerbach’s idea that mankind could be liberated through love alone instead of the economic transformation of production. To Engels, the idea that love could function as a reconciling force for all differences “regardless of distinctions of sex or estate” had no plausibility. 

Despite what leftists proclaim, the act of loving one another, including beyond traditional boundaries, does not inherently constitute a revolutionary act. Engels reinforced this idea in On the History of Early Christianity, which disapproved of the pacification of Early Christianity and its transformation from a revolutionary, working-class religion of “undiluted revenge” into a petit-bourgeois religion of “love your enemies, bless them that curse you.”

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The same principles Engels applied to the “religion of love” can be applied to the leftist values of openness and inclusivity. The proponents of these ideas suggest that the working class should be accepting and accommodating to the ideas, values, traditions, and mindsets of everyone, including the class exploiting them. In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels deemed this position as belonging to the “socialistic bourgeoisie,” and criticised the belief “that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.” Therefore, Marxism has little to do with absolute ‘inclusivity’ and notions of ‘liberation through love’, making it distinct from the leftist counterculture movement borne out of the 1960s and 70s. 

Equal rights

One of the most misunderstood aspects of Marxism is its stance on the concept of equal rights. Despite the prevalent use of ‘equal rights’ as a leftist buzzword, Marx’s work, the End of Classical German Philosophy, outlines that, within bourgeois society, equal rights are, in fact, formally recognised. However, social satisfaction does not depend upon equal rights but material rights – and “capitalist production takes care to ensure that the great majority of those with equal rights shall get only what is essential for bare existence.” In this respect, if the interests of classes in conflict are irreconcilable, the material rights of one class impede on the material rights of another. Therefore, better conditions are not brought about through platitudes of equal rights, but through material rights and the abolition of classes. In Anti-Dühring, Engels traced the origins of the demand for “equal rights” to the bourgeoisie’s struggle against feudalism. During this period, the bourgeoisie called for the abolition of “class privileges” and the proletariat demanded the abolition of classes themselves. 

Furthermore, while leftists uphold equal rights on the basis that all people, by virtue of being human, should be treated the same, Marxism recognises that, within class society, individuals do not relate to each other solely as humans but also as members of a class. In this respect, during the epoch of capitalism, the bourgeoisie uses the state apparatus to suppress the working class. Likewise, during the epoch of socialism, the new state apparatus is used by the working class to suppress the bourgeoisie. 

Moreover, socialism and communism does not seek to enforce complete equality in the everyday life of members of society regardless of how driven and hardworking one might be compared to another. As per Marx and Engels in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, “Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations.” Thus, Communism allows for individuals to enrich themselves over others, so long as this enrichment does not come at anyone else’s expense. Therefore, it is a widespread misconception that hard works reaps no reward under socialism and communism – in fact, hard work can only truly be rewarded under socialism and communism.

The state and taxes

Another policy often associated with leftists is ‘big government’, that is, that the government should play a more active role within society. However, as Marx and Engels explained in the Communist Manifesto, as the proletariat raises itself to the position of ruling class, it sweeps away the conditions of class antagonisms and classes generally, abolishing its own supremacy as a class. At this stage, the state, which functions as an organ of class domination, becomes obsolete as classes do not exist. Consequently, communism does not necessarily involve government intervention into the personal lives of members of society. While the early stage of socialism requires a strong state to centralise production and defend the gains of the revolution, as socialism develops, the state is increasingly stripped back.

In practice, efforts to shift power away from the state into the hands of the people is reflected within Mao Zedong’s little red book, which was published and distributed with the aim of strengthening the peoples understand of Marxism, thus empowering them as the real movement in charge of building a communist society – bottom up, not top down.  

Leftists also often advocate for high taxation as the grand solution to all domestic problem without realising, however, that the scale and direction of taxation is determined first and foremost by the class characteristic of the state. 

Under capitalism, the state serves the interests of the bourgeoisie, and is parasitic in that it sustains a superfluous class of individuals who do not produce material value for society such as the bourgeois police; the military; the whole judicial apparatus; members of parliament, who get paid disproportionately high salaries; etc. Additionally, the state revenue necessary for war and overseas military bases is generated through taxing the working class, while monopolies pile up war profits. Only a fraction of revenue is allocated to production, and to things like the maintenance of roads, railways, buildings, hospitals, schools, etc. 

On the other hand, under socialism, the state serves the interests of the working class and functions mainly to administer economic life. The socialist state is concerned with the production and distribution of goods, the advancement of the wellbeing of working people, and the maintenance of a limited military apparatus to protect the gains of the revolution. 

In the Civil War in France, Marx described the Paris Commune as having made the “catchword of bourgeois revolutions – cheap government – a reality by destroying the two greatest sources of expenditure: the standing army and state functionalism.” The ‘cheap government’ of socialism is financed partly through state owned industry and trade, money which would overwise be retained as private profit under capitalism, and partly through taxation. However, as the state becomes stripped back to the minimum of its functions, taxation is still considerably low as there is no superfluous, parasitic class living off the state as there is under capitalism. 

Furthermore, in the Critique of the Gotha programme, Marx stated that “taxes are the economic basis of the government machinery and of nothing else.” Therefore, as socialist society progresses towards communism and the state, along with its government machinery, gradually withers away, high taxes cease to have an economic basis. For example, no great war machinery is necessary under communism as the international community has a shared future with common interests. In this respect, while a heavy income tax serves as a progressive demand within capitalist society, socialism and communism eventually leads to a society free from the burden of high taxes on working people. 

As the writings of Marx and Engels do not align with, or go beyond, many leftist cultural and economic values, the idea that Marxism is a leftist ideology in the popular understanding of the term should, at the very least, be questioned. Marxism should instead be upheld by communists as a scientific method of analysis existing outside of the political spectrum.

Kate Woolford is the editor of Challenge.

The Syli in the Room: Reviving Ahmed Sékou Touré

By Kevin McCleish

Afro-pessimism in its original iteration found use as a medium to explain the phenomenon of perpetual underdevelopment in Africa. As Mahmoud Mamdani notes, Afro-pessimists suggest Africa cannot rejuvenate itself from within due to the persistence of traditional culture. Kevin Ochieng Okoth describes how Afro-pessimism grew from incessant negative depictions of Africa in Western media, which portray an utterly hopeless continent.

In the face of post-independence failing states, raging epidemics, genocide, and worsening inequality, Afro-pessimism resonated with a global audience because it seemed to justify the interventions of actors ranging from saviorist NGOs [1] to agents of structural adjustment programs like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. If Africans proved incapable of solving their problems, a host of others appeared who claimed they could.

Emerging from the academy, what Ochieng calls Afro-pessimism (AP) 2.0 differs from its predecessor by focusing intently on the experience of black Americans and how, as Adolph Reed Jr. often and sarcastically puts it, “nothing has changed” since 1865. Reed describes AP 2.0 as an approach which…

“... postulates that much of, if not all, the history of the world has been propelled by a universal ‘anti-blackness.’ Adherents of the Afropessimist critique, and other race-reductive thinkers, posit a commitment to a transhistorical white supremacy as the cornerstone and motive force of the history, and prehistory, of the United States, as well as the imperialist and colonialist subjugation in other areas of the world.”

AP 2.0 proponents believe the uniqueness of anti-black oppression prevents collaboration with other oppressed peoples due to fundamental racial antagonism “condemning them to a life of social death.” AP 2.0 therefore hinders the development of the broad, class-conscious coalitions needed to overcome the hegemonic power of capital. This also renders it impotent against imperialism.

Ahmed Sékou Touré, the first post-colonial president of Guinea (1958–1984), understood that fighting imperialism requires collective action across racial and ethnic lines. Touré is best remembered for organizing an electoral rejection of a new French constitution on September 28th, 1958, which prompted immediate political independence for Guinea. Though the referendum was held in France and across all overseas departments and territories, Guinea had the impressive distinction of being the only political unit to vote “no” on the constitution and colonization. Through his organizing efforts, Touré achieved 85% voter turnout with 95% voting against the colonial arrangement.

After becoming president in October 1958, Touré quickly realized that political sovereignty meant little without economic sovereignty. So Touré adopted what he called a “non-capitalist” path of development in recognition that “the anti-imperialist struggle is the climax of class struggle.” Following this path was made all the more difficult by repeated attempts of international sabotage and economic isolation.

A committed pan-Africanist and fierce proponent of nonalignment during the Cold War, Touré played an immense and overlooked role during arguably the most critical juncture in human history: the Cuban Missile Crisis. When President John F. Kennedy directed a naval “quarantine” of Cuba after intelligence showed the construction of nuclear missile sites on the island in response to the American placement of missiles within striking distance of Moscow, the Soviets immediately began planning an airlift of critical military supplies to circumvent the naval blockade. To do so, however, Soviet jets would need to land and refuel prior to reaching the island.

In the fall of 1962, only the five West African countries of Guinea, Ghana, Senegal, Liberia, and Morocco had airstrips long enough to accommodate jet traffic. To stop an airlift before it ever got off the ground, American officials lobbied African leaders to refuse Soviet air traffic. Though each country had its own set of diplomatic challenges, Washington was most concerned about Guinea.

Touré had just accepted Soviet assistance to improve Conakry’s airport runaways months prior. Coincidentally, though, Touré had also just returned from a state visit to Washington where he and Kennedy made good impressions on one another. Recognizing that the Guinean people had nothing to benefit by obliging the Soviet request, Touré, with his trademark independence, refused. His commitment to what he termed “positive neutrality” gave him the diplomatic flexibility to exercise an inordinate amount of influence during the Cold War. 

Unfortunately, readers unfamiliar with the “Grand Syli” (Touré’s nickname; literally “Big Elephant”), are likely to see his revolutionary contributions as a dead end rather than a point of departure. Often overlooked in the Anglophone world, Touré’s radical pedigree, honed from the mass politics of labor organizing, shows how today’s leftists can use labor organizing to facilitate the formation of broad-based coalitions capable of agitating for radical political transformation. Such strategies are a welcome antidote to the alternative approach of AP 2.0, which does not challenge the foundations of the current political economy. 

Radical Roots Sprout a Labor Leader

Touré’s propensity for mass politics came from his poor peasant origins in Faranah, Guinea. As Saidou Mohamed N’Daou recounts, Touré’s social consciousness developed at an early age as he witnessed his deaf mother suffer abuse. His father died early, and mistreatment drove his mother to suicide shortly after. Orphaned at age seven, Touré found loving refuge in his uncle’s family. Touré entered primary school and showed great intellectual promise and an affinity for anti-colonial agitation — from challenging colonial curriculum to organizing protests against a headmaster who forced students to toil in his garden without compensation (the headmaster refused to take responsibility for a student who died of a snakebite whilst laboring in the garden) [2], to leading a food strike, which resulted in his expulsion as a teenager. 

Though his rebelliousness ultimately derailed a promising academic trajectory, Touré’s anti-colonial intransigence ensured he avoided becoming one of the évolués (Africans “civilized” through European education and assimilation) he later came to despise. Had Touré instead complied and wound up in the academy as another “misguided intellectual,” he may have turned out much like his rival and Négritude proponent Leopold Senghor. Touré took issue with Négritude, which — like AP 2.0 — had essentialist foundations.  He dismissed Négritude as a reflection of bourgeois class ideology that merely masked Western cultural imperialism. Touré held that African culture could not be disassociated from political, social, and economic contexts asserting:

“[T]here is no black culture, nor white culture, nor yellow culture…Négritude is thus a false concept, an irrational weapon encouraging…racial discrimination, arbitrarily exercised upon the peoples of Africa, Asia, and upon men of color in America and Europe.”

Rather than ascend to the ivory tower training the colonizer’s comprador class, Touré’s path through vocational school kept him grounded with ordinary Guineans ensuring his exposure and involvement in radical politics.

After several apprenticeships and a year as a clerk in the French Company of Western Africa, Touré passed examinations qualifying him to work in the Post and Telecommunications Department in 1941. Denied the ability to continue his scholarly endeavors through official channels, he continued his studies via correspondence education and took a “Red” turn by devouring the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong. Despite the French Communist Party’s (PCF) refusal to enroll local members in West Africa (in adherence to the orthodox view that Africa undergo a bourgeois revolution to precede a genuine anti-capitalist revolution), Touré became a founding member of the PCF’s first Guinean study group, Groupes d’Études Communistes, three years later in Conakry. Contemporaries remember the PCF “not being progressive enough” for Touré. But he found them useful to learn organizing methods from.

Not content with merely discussing theories of Marxist revolution, Touré’s political praxis led him to organize the first union in French-controlled Guinea, the Post, Telegram, and Telephone Workers’ Union (PTT), in 1945. The PTT, an affiliate of the PCF-connected French General Confederation of Labor (CGT), flexed its muscle in various labor actions under Touré’s leadership which landed him in jail, but also gave him the credentials necessary to organize the United Trade Union of Guinean Workers (USCG). Under this umbrella union, all CGT affiliates in Guinea consolidated just a year later in 1946. Recognizing “unionism is…a calling…to transform any given economic or social regime, always in search of the beautiful and just,” Touré became the most influential labor leader in French West Africa just five years after forming the first Guinean labor union.

Occurring simultaneously with his ascent in the labor movement, Touré’s reputation as an organizer enabled him to quickly climb the ranks of anti-imperialist political organizations operating in French West Africa, such as the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA). Formed in 1946 at the Bamako Conference, the RDA, in cooperation with the PCF, attempted to coordinate the efforts of regional anti-imperialist leaders throughout French-occupied Africa. 

While the RDA formed with PCF support, it is mistaken to assume the leaders were all committed to a vision of “Red Africa.”

As it were, the PCF was one of few European political forces committed to anti-imperialism, which forced many associations of convenience. As Elizabeth Schmidt details, under Touré’s direction, the Guinean RDA chapter, later named the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG) in 1950, certainly remained committed to the PCF and CGT far longer than its regional peers who feared anti-communist repression when the PCF lost governing power in 1947 France. Although the RDA officially broke from the PCF in 1950, Touré dubiously followed the RDA line in his political activities and continued cooperating with the CGT in his union work. Unlike the RDA in other regions whose membership was comprised of planters and chiefs, the PDG’s core membership were civil servants and trade unionists reluctant to sever ties with communist organizations.

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72-Day Strike and Electoral Victories

Touré soon integrated his labor and political acumen after becoming the secretary-general of the PDG in 1952. From that point forward, his labor and anti-colonial political activities converged into one indivisible force. The French administration felt the power of the peoples’ solidarity during the 72-Day General Strike of 1953, which set the stage for the famous 1958 independence referendum.

Both Schmidt and N’Daou produce excellent accounts of the 72-Day Strike, the impetus of which was a reduction of the workweek from 48 to 40 hours. Though a work reduction is typically welcome, pay fell proportionally by 17%. Guineans, who were already poor,  protested. But French management was unwilling to compromise. So Guinean labor leaders voted to begin a general strike on September 7th, 1953.

As he had done his entire labor career, Touré gave neighborhood speeches to thousands and continued education programs throughout the strike, urging workers to eschew ethnic strife and embrace their common bonds as workers. Composed of various ethnic groups — principally but not exclusively Malinke, Susu, and Peul — Guinea’s ethnic tensions proved more salient in the rural rather than urban areas due to the coercive power of the colonial canton chieftaincies. In the more cosmopolitan Conakry, calls to transcend significant social divisions using an eclectic mix of themes, found in the language of Marxist class antagonism, French liberal ideals, and selected African beliefs of honor, dignity, and racial pride united workers along class lines.

Like any effective organizer, Touré understood that the value of an idea is measured by its social utility. While some critique the “third way socialism” of Touré, it is unlikely Marxist-Leninist proselytization would have had the same impact on participants as his pragmatic ideological flexibility. By December 1953, workers won their wage increase with 80% of Conakry’s workers participating in the labor action. Trade union membership exploded, from 4,600 in the beginning of the strike to 44,000 by 1955. 

Touré’s foundation in and amongst the people is what made him successful. His effective organization of workers and their corresponding communities laid the groundwork for his coming electoral success and the resounding campaign to dismiss colonialism on September 28th, 1958. Touré’s broad-based coalition strategy became apparent leading up to the independence vote, when he campaigned throughout Guinea on behalf of the RDA/PDG, asserting that “the RDA is not a knife that divides, but a needle that sews [together].” Knowing that any anti-colonial coalition could not survive identitarian fragmentation, Touré relied on public pedagogy to elevate the political consciousness of the masses, declaring:

“We are against racial and ethnic prejudice. We are for qualified people whether they be European, Senegalese, Peul, or Bambara. Some of you say you will not vote for the RDA ticket…because a European is on it. This reasoning is stupid.”

Ethnic divisions proved more salient in the rural areas, where colonial-approved chieftains exercised coercive power over taxation, corvée labor [3], and — even though it had been outlawed in 1905 — slavery primarily made up of Dialonka people serving Peul-aristocratic chiefs in the region of Futa Jallon. It is estimated that 25% of the Futa Jallon region’s population were composed of slaves or their descendants in 1955. Residue from the colonizer’s imported Hamitic Hypothesis still plagued many amongst the Peul aristocrats, who believed they were of superior racial stock compared to non-Peul Guineans.

This second-class population divided by class and ethnicity were organized electorally by Touré and the PDG by referencing their exploitation at the hands of the colonial-connected chieftaincy and appealing to Islamic egalitarian principles. Ever pragmatic, Touré omitted Marxist references and spoke plainly about the exploitative conditions enforced by canton chiefs. Doing so, however, he carefully distinguished between their material and ethnic differences to ensure his broad-based coalition remained inclusive to all Guineans.

Communicating his message to overwhelmingly illiterate rural populations elsewhere, he continued in comprehensible terms:

“Man is like water, equal and alike at the beginning. Then some are heated and some are frozen so they become different. Just change the conditions, heat or freeze, and the original equality is again clear.”

Facing historic and manufactured social divisions proved no easy task. But Touré’s inclusive organizing paid off, as demonstrated by the electoral results from 1954 to 1957 where the PDG dominated municipal, regional, and territorial elections. Though the French initially managed to stem the tide of Touré through electoral manipulation, after 1954, the colonizers recognized that continuing to engage in obvious fraud would lead to backlash. It was clear who ruled the streets.

With his newfound legislative and executive authority, Touré set out to destroy the colonial chieftaincy through a parallel power structure of democratically elected PDG local committees who effectively replaced the hated colonial canton chiefs by 1957 and assumed their duties of tax collection and administering justice. After years of power-structure analysis, Touré knew their destruction would be necessary to remove the vestiges of colonial authority.

As president, Touré continued to combat ethnic and religious differences by moving bureaucrats outside of their home regions, banning groups organized on the basis of race, religion, or ethnicity, surrounding himself with ethnically diverse advisers, and continuing to communicate in various indigenous languages. In such a brief spell of political activity, the man who cut his teeth as an organizer engineered the only electoral rejection of French colonialism and fought against all odds to achieve genuine political and economic sovereignty.

Whose Touré is This?

Although violent resistance against capitalism is often fetishized, any Marxist worth their salt should be able to organize resistance at the point of production. Through his organizing career, the man who not only read Marx’s Capital but had, as Bill Haywood put it, “the marks of capital all over [his] body” from his time on the shop floor, transcended social divisions and united Guineans of all stripes against their colonizer. Recipient of the 1961 Lenin Peace Prize, Touré’s experience should not only be included in the tradition of “Red Africa,” but serve to illustrate the revolutionary possibilities of labor organizing as an alternative to AP 2.0. 

Touré’s ability to unite a diverse population on the basis of class antagonisms proves his mantra that content rather than form supersedes all concerns for those committed to overthrowing capitalism. By focusing on the common denominators and rejecting essentialist obstacles, Touré’s lifelong commitment to construct a better world is instructive. He unequivocally rejected the notion that black people could not exercise political agency, that cooperation amongst demographically diverse groups is impossible, and that a history of slavery precludes meaningful participation in civic life. Rather than accept condemnation to a “life of social death,” Touré instead embodied the words of Frantz Fanon, believing that:

“Man is a yes…Yes to life. Yes to Love. Yes to generosity. But man is also a no. No to the scorn of man. No to the degradation of man. No to the exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom.”

Kevin McCleish is a high school social science teacher and labor organizer from Illinois. His best work is found on the shop floor.

Footnotes

[1] Examples include George Clooney’s Not on Our Watch, which intervened in Darfur, and Invisible Children — the group behind Kony 2012.

[2] Touré does not indicate the headmaster’s race in his recollection. The omission is, perhaps, indicative of his position that imperialism does not operate exclusively along strict racial lines. The colonial education system functioned to maintain existing power relations using white Europeans, black Antilleans, and Africans of the comprador class. Resistance to the system was inherently anti-colonial.

[3] Corvée labor is a system wherein people must work unpaid for a feudal lord for a period.

Why Are Intellectuals Divorced from Working People?

By Carlos Garrido

Republished in modified form from the Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis.

The question we are exploring today — the divorce of intellectuals from the working class — is fundamental for assessing the crisis we face in the subjective conditions for revolution [1]. The first thing to interrogate is what is presupposed in formulating the problem in such a manner. When we say that there has been a split, a schism, between intellectuals and the working class, there is a specific type of intellectual we have in mind.

The grand majority of intellectuals, especially within the capitalist mode of life, have their lots tied to the dominant social system. They function as a necessary component of the dominant order, those who take the ideals of the bourgeoisie — the class enemy of most of humanity — and embellish them in language which opens the narrow interests of the ruling class to the consenting approval of their class enemies. In the same manner Karl Marx described the bourgeoisie as the personified agents of capital, the intellectuals have been the personified agents of capitalist ideology. They are tasked, as Antonio Gramsci taught us, with making these dispersed and unpopular bourgeois assumptions into a coherent and appealing outlook — one people are socialized into accepting as reality itself. Intellectuals have always, in a certain sense, been those who light the fire and move the statues which the slaves in the cave see as cave shadows embodying reality itself.

But these intellectuals — the traditional intellectuals — are not the ones we have in mind when we speak of a schism between intellectuals and workers. We are speaking, instead, of those who have been historically able to see the movement of history, to make slits within bourgeois worldviews, and who have subsequently thrown their lot in with the proletariat and popular classes — those forces which present the kernel for the next, more human and democratic, mode of life. Marx and Friedrich Engels noted that there is always a section of “bourgeois ideologists” who raise “themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole” and “cut [themselves] adrift [to] join the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands.” We are talking about the W. E. B. Du Boises, the Herbert Apthekers, the Juan Marinellos, the Michael Parentis, and others who, while coming out of the institutions of the bourgeois academy, aligned their interests with working and oppressed peoples. They would become the theoreticians, historians, and poets which gave the working-class movement various forms of clarity in their struggle for power. 

What has happened to this section of intellectuals and its relationship with working people? Have they lost their thirst for freedom? Has their capacity for trembling with indignation at the injustices waged on working and oppressed people dissipated? 

It is important to note that any attempt to answer this question in this short timespan will always, by necessity, omit important aspects of the conversation. I would love here to speak at length about the campaigns of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the formation of a fake anti-communist left, and the role imperialist state departments, bourgeois foundations, and other such outfits had in creating a left intelligentsia divorced from the real movements of working people, both within the imperial core and in the periphery [2]. I know my colleagues here will be paying due attention to such monumental components of answering the question we have before us. 

However, I’d like to instead focus on the practice of intellectuals; on the expectations and requirements set by the academy itself, which have already baked into its very structure the divorce of radical intellectuals from the struggles and movements of working and oppressed peoples. The first thing that must be noted is the following: We cannot simply treat this problem as one rooted in the intellectuals as a class, nor as one rooted in the subjective deficiencies of particular intellectuals. The Marxist worldview requires us to examine the system, the social totality, that produces such a split.

We are tasked with exploring the political economy of knowledge production, if you will, which structures the relations of its mental workers through forms which insularize them to the structures and needs of the academy. As Gabriel Rockhill would say, it is a political economy of knowledge that systematically reproduces radical recuperators, compatible Lefts, and pseudo-radical purity fetish outlooks that play an indispensable role in the reproduction of our moribund capitalist-imperialist system.

From the moment prospective radical scholars enter graduate school, they are integrated into this system. Their lofty hopes of being active participants as intellectuals in a class struggle are castrated by the demands the academy makes upon them qua scholars. They’re told that their writing should take a distinctively academic tone, that popular vernacular is frowned upon, that hyper-referentiality, the practice of citing all the intellectual gods in the cosmos who have commented on a topic, is a sign of good work, of proper scholarship.  

Truth and the struggle for human freedom are at best given a backseat, and that’s if they’re in the vehicle at all. Young scholars in the incubators of their careers are already indoctrinated in the aristocratic dogmas of writing for a select group of elite scholars, worshiping journal impact factors, and condescendingly dismissing those who use their intellectual capacities to work for the people, to actually, in proper Socratic fashion, engage in the radical quest for truth – those who seek to properly understand the world in order to work with the masses of humanity to change it.

Young scholars, burdened by tens of thousands of dollars accumulated in undergraduate studies debt, are told that — even with a PhD — they will have an extremely difficult time finding a job – at least one suitable for continued academic work that pays sufficiently enough to pay back the accumulated debt. They are told — specifically those with radical sensibilities — that they should focus on joining academic associations, network with people in their fields, familiarize themselves with the work published in leading journals so that they too, one day, can join the publication hamster wheel aimed at advancing these slaves through the tenure ladder. They are told they mustn’t waste their time writing for popular audiences, that doing broadcasts and media work — that reaches infinitely more people than the readers of ridiculously paywalled journals or university editorial books — is a waste of time. Every attempt at rooting their scholarship in the people, in the real movements of our day, is shot down. 

The gurus mediating their initiation into the academic capitalist cult ask:

“Do you know how this sort of work on your resume would look to hiring committees?”

“Do you think the scholars in charge of your tenure advancement will appreciate your popular articles for Countercurrents, your books from Monthly Review, your articles in low impact factor, or impact factor-less, journals?” 

At every turn, your attempts to commit yourself to the Socratic pursuit of truth, to playing a role in changing the world, is condemned as sinful to the gods of resume evaluations.

“Do you not want to finish your degree with the potential of obtaining gainful employment?”

“Do you want to be condemned to adjunct professorship, to teaching seven classes for half the pay of full professors who teach three?”

“Do you want to condemn your family to debt slavery for decades to come simply because you did not want to join our very special and elite hamster wheel? After all, who wouldn’t want to spend months writing an article to send it in to a journal that will reply in a year telling you, if you’re amongst the lucky ones, that it has been accepted with revisions rooted in the specific biases of the arbitrary reviewers? Doesn’t that sound fun? Isn’t this what philosophy, and the humanities in general, is all about?”

Eventually, material pressures themselves break the spirit of young visionary scholars. Re-proletarianized and unable to survive on teaching assistantships, they resign themselves to the hamster wheel, with hopes of one day living the comfortable lives of their professors. 

Their radical sensibilities, however, are still there. They need an outlet. They look around and find that the academic hamster wheel has a pocket of “radicals” writing edgy things for decently rated journals. They quickly find their kin, those who reduce radical politics to social transgressiveness, those who are concerned more with dissecting concepts like epistemic violence than with the violence of imperialism. 

Here it is!, the young scholar thinks. A place where I can pad my resume and absolve myself of the guilt weighing down on my shoulders — a guilt rooted in the recognition, deep down, that one has betrayed the struggles of humanity, that one has become an agent of the forces they originally sought to combat. 

Their existence, their lives, will always be rooted in what Jean-Paul Sartre called “bad faith.” Self-deception becomes their norm. They are now the radical ones, the ones enlightened in issues of language. The working class becomes a backward rabble they must educate — and that’s if they come near them at all. What hope could there ever be in the deplorables?

Sure, American capitalism could be criticized, but at least we’re enlightened, woke to LGBT and other issues. Those Russians, Chinese, Venezuelans, Iranians, etc., aren’t they backward? What are their thoughts on trans issues? Should we not, in the interests of our enlightened civilization, support our government’s efforts to civilize them? Let’s go deliver them some of our valued democracy and human rights. I’m sure their people will appreciate it very much. 

I have presented the stories which are all too familiar to those of us still working in the academy. It is evident, in my view at least, that the divorce of radical intellectuals from working-class people and their movements has been an institutionalized effort of the capitalist elite. This division is embedded, it is implied, in the process of intellectuals becoming what the system requires of them for their survival. The relations they occupy in the process of knowledge production presupposes their split with working people. 

This rigidity of academic life has intensified over the last century. Yes, we do have plenty of past cases of radical academics, those who have sided with the people, being kicked to the curb by their academic institutions. But where have they landed and why? A blackballed Du Bois got to teach at the Communist Party’s Jefferson School. Herbert Aptheker, following his expulsion from the academy, became the editor-in-chief of the Communist Party’s theoretical journal Political Affairs. Besides the aforementioned, what other factors make our day different from, say, the 1950s United States? 

The answer is simple: what counter-hegemonic popular institutions we had were destroyed, in part by the efforts of our government, in part by the collapse, or overthrow, of the Soviet bloc. Although some, like ourselves, are currently in the process of attempting to construct them, today we have nowhere near the material and financial conditions we had in the past. The funding and aid the Soviets provided American communists is, unfortunately, not something provided for us by the dominant socialist states of our era.

Ideology does not exist in a transcendental realm. It is embodied materially through people and institutions. Without the institutions that can ensure radical scholars are not forced to toe the line of the bourgeois academy, the material conditions for this split will persist. 

If I may, I would like to end with the following point. It is very easy to condemn the so-called radical academics we find in the bourgeois hamster wheel divorced from the people and their struggles. While condemnation might sometimes be justified, I think pity is the correct reaction. 

They are subjects of a tragedy. As G. W. F. Hegel notes, the essence of a tragedy is found in the contradictions at play between the various roles an individual occupies. Sophocles’ Antigone is perhaps the best example. Here, a sister (Antigone) is torn between the duty she has to bury her brother (Polyneices), and the duty she has as a citizen to follow King Creon’s decry, which considers Polyneices a traitor undeserving of a formal burial. This contradiction is depicted nicely in Hegel, who says that “both are in the wrong because they are one-sided, but both are also in the right.” 

Our so-called radical intelligentsia is, likewise, caught in the contradiction of the two roles they wish to occupy — revolutionary and academic. Within existing institutions, there can be no reconciliation of the duties implied in each role. This is the setup of a classical tragedy, one which takes various forms with each individual scholar. It is also, as Socrates reminds Aristophanes and Agathon at the end of Plato’s Symposium, a comedy, since “the true artist in tragedy is an artist in comedy also.” 

The tragic and simultaneously comedic position occupied by the radical intelligentsia can only be overcome with the development of popular counter-hegemonic institutions, such as parties and educational institutions like the Hampton and Midwestern Marx Institutes, the International Manifesto Group, the Critical Theory Workshop and others. It is only here where scholars can embed themselves in the people. However, scholars are humans living under capitalism. They, just like everyone else, have bills to pay. These institutions, therefore, must work to develop the capacity to financially support both the intellectual traitors to the traditional bourgeois academy, and the organic intellectuals emerging from the working class itself. That is, I think, one of the central tasks facing those attempting to bridge the divide we have examined today. 

Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban-American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). 

Footnotes

[1] For more on the indispensability of subjective conditions to social revolutions, see the last chapter of the author’s book, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism.

[2] For more on imperialist efforts to create an inorganic left intelligentsia, see the author’s book, The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism, Frances Stonor Saunders’s The Cultural Cold War, and Gabriel Rockhill’s forthcoming book, The Intellectual World War.

[3] In the last couple of decades, scholars like Anthony Monteiro (fired from Temple University for not toing the bourgeois line of the African American Studies department) and Norman Finklestein (“unceremoniously kicked out” of Hunter College for his pro-Palestine work) have been blackballed from the academy for their anti-establishment views. 

[4] China here is undoubtedly the only one capable of filling the shoes of the Soviet Union. Yet it has failed to meet the Soviet standard of international proletarian solidarity

"I Don't Believe Capitalism Can Be Fair": An Interview with Clara Mattei

[Photo credit: AFP via Getty Images]

By Diego Viana

Where capitalism goes, austerity invariably follows. This phenomenon has puzzled intellectuals for generations. Why does the dominant economic system consistently adopt reforms that seem to destabilize its very foundations?

Dr. Clara Mattei is a renowned scholar and professor of economics at the New School whose research tackles this question. Her latest book, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism, argues that austerity isn’t “a policy mistake” but is instead a core feature of capitalism. 

Her analysis concentrates on Europe in the years immediately after World War I. Following the armistice, European workers had a rare moment of revolutionary fervor, spurred by the recognition that war governments were perfectly capable of managing the economy beyond the imperatives of profit.

Dr. Mattei argues that, from 1920 to 1927, austerity was instrumental in upholding European capitalism. It accomplished this via three tools: fiscal, monetary, and industrial policy. The trinity entails, respectively and roughly, cuts in social expenditures and regressive taxation, interest rate hikes, and labor suppression. Neoclassical economists like the United Kingdom’s Ralph Hawtrey and Italy’s Maffeo Pantaleoni worked hard to argue for these policies. Ultimately, though, implementation required the break from democracy and political violence that enabled Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime and the development of a fascist mindset which later spread across Europe.

Last month, Hampton Institute contributor and economic journalist Diego Viana interviewed Dr. Mattei about her thesis and worldview. Please enjoy the following transcript, which we have edited for clarity and length:

Diego Viana | Your book argues that austerity is central to the capitalist order. How do current mobilizations figure into this argument?

Clara Mattei | They make the book very topical! Look at the United States. People are mobilizing. And it's not just the strikes. Workers are questioning wage labor altogether. This happened after World War I, when the state politicized the economic realm by intervening in it as part of the war effort. And it’s happening, to a lesser extent of course, again today. Folks got a taste of life without exploited work during COVID when the government offered some social support. Why should they return to work in such horrible conditions now?

That’s where austerity enters the picture. It increases our dependence on markets. That’s typical and specific to capitalism. Most people only have rights if they have money in their pockets that they acquire through wage labor. By cutting social benefits and weakening workers' bargaining power, austerity seeks to ensure no alternative but to bend our necks and accept exploitative conditions.

DV | Nevertheless, mobilizing workers remains difficult due to precarity, reduced union density, etc. Is victory possible?

CM | Your analysis is accurate. It speaks to the “success” of austerity. A half century of hardcore measures has made labor precarious, with fewer union rights, less welfare, and more privatization. Interest rates are rising too, which limits ordinary people’s access to credit and produces more unemployment. Yet people are still mobilizing. True, unions are weaker now than they were after the Second World War — and definitely after the First. But our system is based on exploitation of the majority. So, whenever this majority mobilizes, it's a big deal.

This October the United Auto Workers secured a more generous and progressive wage structure following a 45-day strike. This victory is very serious. And it shows that — when push comes to shove — capital needs workers, who thereby have tremendous leverage to win demands. So —  wherever they are — if workers withhold their labor, that frightens capital.

My book talks about the weapons of the State and its political and economic elites to wage class war against the people. But the book is also optimistic. It recognizes that class struggle is ongoing and workers can win. Indeed, capital as wealth requires capital as a social relation — namely, wage slavery. This means that, so long as we have capitalism, the fight continues. Of course, there have been historical moments when workers were in retreat. But I think now we’re seeing that austerity doesn't mean the death of workers. Austerity is a tool to keep workers in check. In that sense, it acknowledges their power.

DV | Many American economists believe recent stimulus plans mean the age of austerity is over. You push back against this by conceptualizing fiscal, monetary, and industrial policy as a trinity of tools to enforce austerity. Explain how that trinity operates in our current milieu.

CM | The trinity is operating at all levels. Hiking interest rate disciplines workers by “loosening” a tight labor market, which simply means increasing unemployment. And that is exactly what the Fed aims to do. They want unemployment to keep workers desperate enough to accept low wages. That's a really powerful weapon right now. Even if it hasn’t worked yet, it will. The recession is coming. The recession is a short-term cost for a much longer-term gain, which is stabilizing class relations.

DV | How about the fiscal side?

CM | I try to break from mainstream definitions of austerity. People equate it to budget cuts and tax increases. This means nothing. It’s the typical practice of economists to look at the aggregate, disregarding the class dynamics of who wins and loses. But this approach leads to mistaken conclusions — like the idea that austerity is behind us. The state is spending a lot of money, after all! The crucial point is that austerity does not mean “small government” but it means that the government is actively intervening in favor of the elites and to the detriment of the many. 

So fiscal austerity is central, and Bidenonomics is a good example. The public budget expanded. But where did the money go? It went to war, the military-industrial complex, and  energy companies to incentivize them to go green — and, of course, bank bailouts. The state is spending money but giving it to capital owners while structurally defunding social services. For me, fiscal austerity is about social expenditures — not state expenditures generally.

DV | So austerity is compatible with considerable state spending?

CM | Yes! The point is where the state spends. And it’s spending not on the people but the market. It’s commodifying basic services. Joe Biden has done nothing in terms of social redistribution. And his fellow Democrat, Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City, has just announced massive cuts to social spending, spurred also by the fact that interest rate hikes make it more expensive — especially for local governments — to borrow.

So, there, we see the connection. The elements of the trinity reinforce one another. Monetary austerity is reinforcing fiscal austerity. And then there’s the other side of fiscal austerity, which is not just about social expenditure cuts but also regressive taxation. Who is paying the taxes? Again, we’re seeing constant increases in consumption taxes and a total unwillingness to tax capital, profits, inheritance, or any form of wealth. This is very structural. And it’s not unique to the United States. In Italy, Prime Minister Georgia Meloni is doing the same. It's worldwide.

DV | The third element is industrial austerity, particularly in the form of repression.

CM | Biden’s administration can try to give the impression of being pro-labor but it's able to do very little to combat privatization and labor deregulation. It has actually even intervened in a quite cooperative way to block railway workers from striking to achieve better rights last winter. The wins today are coming from organized labor — not the administration.

In other countries, industrial austerity is more present than ever and unions are suffering. Work is getting increasingly precarious. Austerity is really about class — it is about the state’s management of the economy in favor of the elites.

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DV | Beyond explaining austerity, you put it at the core of the capital order — the very structure of capitalism itself. Is this a renewal of Marxian economic thinking?

CM | Yes. My work aims to use Marxian methodology, which understands economic relations as inescapably political. This naturally leads to a complete rethinking of austerity. I want to help people realize that the relationship between capitalism and austerity is structural. And this means that the state is constantly intervening to weaken workers and protect capital. Analyzing how austerity works in real time totally confirms this.

Now more than ever, we must heed the most important insight of Karl Marx's critique of political economy. Marx described how economic growth is founded on capital as a social relation. The majority of people must sell their labor for a wage and this is not at all a natural feature Value creation under capitalism ultimately requires exploitation. While a lot of people — even on the Left — take capitalism for granted, capital is based on a specific social relation. That means it’s not only very political but also inherently fragile. This is why it needs constant protection. There are certain historical moments in history in which that fragility emerges.

DV | You describe a change after World War I in which the spontaneous austerity of Gilded Age capitalism had to become managed and coordinated, hence the Brussels and Genoa conferences. Is this the bedrock of later institutions like the Bretton Woods system or the G7, the World Economic Forum, the World Trade Organization?

CM | Exactly. And I think the book doesn’t do justice to the ways in which political institutions prior to the War were actively preserving austerity. There's plenty of literature showing how the gold standard was not a natural mechanism. It was actually quite politically encased. What I argue in the book is that austerity became visible after World War I.

Austerity is always latent in capitalism and emerges when the system is most contested. When its pillars shake, institutions coalesce to protect the capital order. That's why I focus on 1919 and the period right after World War I. It was a moment in which indeed there was a lot of demand for economic democracy.

In Britain, besides universal suffrage, people demanded a greater say in economic issues. They understood the pretext of balancing budgets was purely ideological and no longer tenable. During the War, states spent all the money they wanted. So people were asking for a post-war reconstruction in which resources were utilized in their favor rather than for profit making.

In these moments of political crisis, austerity refines its tools. Many institutions sprung into action in the early 1920s — especially independent central banks — to insulate monetary decisions from democratic intrusion. I focus on this period in the book. But my next project is to examine how austerity operated after World War II. So austerity could be an angle to rethink the history of capitalism in the 20th and 21st centuries.

DV | The book’s subtitle is about austerity paving the way to fascism. In the case of Italy, the opposite seems to have happened. Fascism paved the way for austerity. What do you make of that?

CM | A common idea is that fascism emerges as a reaction to austerity. But you’re right. In Italy, something different happened. The original fascism — Benito Mussolini's fascism — swept to power because of its capacity to implement austerity. Fascism and austerity needed one another. The authoritarian state was able to enforce austerity much more effectively than any democratic government. Unlike its liberal counterparts, it could intervene directly to repress wages, curtail strikes, and implement a whole slew of social cuts and privatization while jailing opposition. That’s why, as I describe in my book, neoclassical economists were very excited about Mussolini. He imposed their pure models on reality. 

Mussolini was a response to the fact that, shortly before the March on Rome, there were full-blown factory occupations. Workers were gaining lots of rights and crumbling wage relations in favor of democratic management of industry via factory councils, of which Antonio Gramsci was a very important leader. The elite couldn’t have that. Fascism was a godsend. Montagu Norman, who was the governor of the Bank of England, said, “Fascism has surely brought order out of chaos… The Duce was the right man at a critical moment.”

Norman said this in 1926, when the regime had already shown what it meant to be a fascist regime — killings and all. But he liked that fascism was all about suppressing wages, defending private property and investment, and using the state to keep industrial peace to maximize profit above everything else.

DV | How do you see the link between fascism and austerity today?

CM | Today, a lot of fascist or authoritarian governments come to power promising no austerity. Indeed, people feel the economic violent impact of austerity on their daily lives and desire something different. However, because of austerity’s preeminence, people have lost class consciousness and believe they can trust bourgeois politicians — especially the lie that it's all the fault of migrants. So there's an inability to see what’s at stake, because class struggle is never discussed.

Italy today is emblematic. Citizens voted for Meloni’s far-right government because they promised change. However, there's complete continuity between the liberal technocratic governments of former prime ministers Mario Draghi and Mario Monti  and the current one. Meloni's Minister of Finance is Giancarlo Giorgetti from Bocconi University — the same guy who was there with Draghi! And Meloni’s budget for the coming fiscal year is pure austerity. She’s defunding hospitals and schools, eliminating the subsidies for the poor called reddito di cittadinanza, expanding regressive taxation, and privatizing while pushing for further labor deregulation. It's the whole austerity trinity — except for monetary policy, which is managed by the European Central Bank. This is no shock. Historically, when it comes to managing the economy, liberals and fascists have been allies. That's still true. Their authoritarian tendencies may surface in different ways. But, ultimately, the two camps are pushing in the same direction.

DV | Since WWI, has anyone defeated the drive toward austerity?

CM | Not to my knowledge. While 1919 was a really exciting year both for the reformists, who passed many welfare initiatives, and the more radical workers’ councils, who called for workers’ self-governance, this did not last long. Even in revolutionary Russia, Vladimir Lenin’s New Economic Policy basically acceded to some form of austerity. The Soviets had little choice. To compete globally in a capitalist system, they had to deflate their economy. From the 1920s onward, it’s been quite austere all around.

DV | Couldn’t that ingrain a sense of powerlessness? Recall Fredric Jameson's formulation. “It's easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.”

CM | I hope the message of the book is actually the opposite. The fact that we think there's no way forward outside of capitalism speaks to the “success” of austerity. If you break out of austerity, you're breaking out of capitalism. We need to think big, but this doesn't mean that it's impossible. There's a huge amount of movements going on even now as we speak that are about achieving independence from market forces. Look at La Via Campesina, a movement that unites farmers throughout the South of the globe to demand workers’ sovereignty in food production or the neighborhood councils in Chile that mobilize to organize resources democratically and had a big role in the Chilean constitutional process before it was tanked by their supposedly left-wing government. Organizations like these are rekindling democratic engagement in the production process and ecological sustainability.

Now more than ever, we must rethink what type of state we want. The capitalist state is clearly one that must do austerity. And this is also clear for other systems that had to compete in the global order. Even globalization is unnatural and politically constructed. But everything that's actively constructed can also be actively deconstructed if people participate. And this is why I think those on top are constantly concerned. They know that the system is fragile. Although they’ve used neoclassical economics to convince us it isn’t. But I believe in the power of workers to think bigger and defeat capitalist realism.

DV | Economists in the last decade have become smitten with cash transfers, basic incomes, taxing capital flows, etc. as antidotes to economic malaise. These proposals are mostly encased in the framework of neoclassical microeconomics and liberals seem excited about them.

CM | I think those proposals are quite naive. They assume you can have the best of all worlds — a sort of “fair capitalism.” I don't believe capitalism can be fair. In a capitalist economy, the state’s ability to redistribute is necessarily limited — especially politically. These economists fail to see that. Otherwise they’d understand that a livable universal basic income would be a revolutionary measure. Society would cease to be capitalist. Some neoclassical economists, especially those who work at the Federal Reserve and International Monetary Fund, are perfectly aware of this. That is why they often block such policies.

DV | Have you debated other economists who criticize austerity, but consider it merely a bug and not a feature of capitalism?

CM | It's hard to have these debates. Economists generally believe the political and economic realms should be separate. They think I’m not really doing economics because the discipline is ontologically founded on that separation. But that’s an artificial, ideological divide. It’s ideological in the sense that it perpetuates illusions which help foster consensus for the system. Even colleagues at the New School, whose economics department is amongst the most radical, separate politics and economics. The dominant creed is that doing economics has little to do with the actual social relations of production.

DV | After World War II came the Keynesian era of the welfare state and managed capitalism, where wages and capital returns grew at similar rates. Why didn't we see the wave of austerity and fascism that followed World War I?

CM | This is a very important question and is indeed the guiding one of my next book project with the University of Chicago Press. I can start providing a very preliminary answer. The revolutionary spirit of 1919 was not as palpable after World War II. Workers became more integrated in the capitalist state apparatus. This was the great success of Fordism — the system of mass production and consumption characteristic of “developed” economies. Fordism got workers to accept exploitation in return for somewhat higher wages and moderate social benefits. In moments when political upheaval is weaker, states can undertake more ambitious redistributive efforts without risking subverting the entire system. By contrast as I show in my book, after World War I, reconstructionists tried to appease the population through welfare reform. But, in moments of more heated challenge to the pillars of the system, they weren't successful. Rather, their reforms instilled in workers a greater sense of possibility. Getting something caused the majority of citizens to demand more — perhaps even an overthrow of the whole system. Why just accept the lengthening of the leash? 

After World War II, the revolutionary surges weren’t as powerful. This enabled the reformist vision of giving a little without challenging capital accumulation as such. That’s their political project.

Consider the policies implemented after World War II. The term "austerity" was popularized by Britain’s Labour government in 1948. Why? Because they prioritized the inflationary threat. In the historical trade-off between inflation and full employment, they chose to tame inflation. This led to a huge wage freeze in 1964.

Policymakers in Britain, the United States, and Europe were always concerned with compressing wages to avoid diminishing profits and private investment. Monetary stability and international competitiveness were sacrosanct. Sure, profits were so high that real wages grew alongside them. But how much space was there for more structural distribution of resources?

All this makes you question the supposedly great divide between Keynesians and Hayekians that I intend to explore further. Neither John Maynard Keynes nor Friedrich Hayek theorized about exploitation or understood capitalism as the problem. That’s why Keynes sought to optimize the system rather than replace it with something better. Let’s not make the same mistake.