Bodily Autonomy is Impossible Under Capitalism

By Petra Glenn

Bodily autonomy is the right to make decisions about one’s own body. United States capitalism has turned bodies into commodities, thus preventing the obtainment of the human right of bodily autonomy. Capitalism requires the utilization of bodies as capital to generate wealth. The historic bodily oppression and utilization, particularly of black women, has created a dangerous and exploitative experience of motherhood in the United States. Rather than being based on care, the American medical, childcare, and education systems are built to generate profit, which in many cases results in poor care and exploitation. Due to the role and priority of economic efficiency in every stage of reproduction within the United States racialized capitalism, true bodily autonomy is impossible to obtain. 

This argument is part of a wider national discussion regarding bodily autonomy in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and Republicans’ newly revealed Project 2025, both of which highlight the GOP’s goal of eliminating access to reproductive healthcare. However, Project 2025 and the Dobbs decision are a consequence of a working system rather than a broken one. Capitalism, in theory and practice, relies on the commodification of bodies. So, despite living under a system supposedly grounded in individual liberties (abortion bans notwithstanding), to secure proper bodily autonomy, capitalism must be abolished. 

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Capitalism requires the utilization of bodily autonomy to sustain profit from workers. Workers sell their labor that occurs through the use of their bodily capital. Capitalists utilize labor by placing an economic value on labor and bodily capital. Through this process, the worker’s body becomes commodified. The United States economy was created through the oppression of enslaved person’s bodily autonomy and now operates under the guise of guaranteeing bodily autonomy but is instead rooted in the denial and utilization of bodily autonomy. Reproduction is vital to this system as it creates more bodies for the labor supply. Laborers create surplus value, or the value from labor that isn’t used to compensate the laborer. Through surplus value, businesses and companies generate profits. The goal within capitalist markets is to maximize profits, and therefore the surplus value created through laborers. Laborers thus don’t own their labor value. This system therefore relies on the exploitation of lower classes, which further burdens marginalized populations, such as women. 

The oppression of women has long played a role in the maintenance of capitalism even when separated from its racialized elements. The creation of modern Western class hierarchies was in part an establishment of gender hierarchies. From slavery through feudalism to capitalism, the oppression of women has been a feature of all stages of class society. The creation of separate family units isolated women into servile positions in their homes and families. Capitalist ideology reduced women to vessels of future workers, demeaning them while stealing the fruits of their uncompensated domestic labor. Pregnant people are therefore cogs in the creation of a labor supply while being economically valued through their labor in rearing children, homemaking, and other aspects of unpaid labor on which the United States economy relies. 

Black women are among the most oppressed populations in the United States through their intersection of race and gender. Through the legacy of slavery and contemporary racist policies,  race and American capitalism are inherently linked. Black labor was, and still is, foundational to the growth and development of the United States. The pivotal industries of cotton, tobacco, and sugar, which established the early infrastructure and profit that grew the economy, were built by enslaved persons. Railroads, which were essential in the Western expansion that grew and industrialized the states, were too. The White House, Capitol, and other landmarks were built by enslaved people. The rearing of many white children of plantation owners was through the labor of enslaved women. The for-profit prison industry and policing system were created in response to the emancipation of enslaved persons and now rely on black bodies for continual profit. The very core of the United States economy and culture was created through black labor and the suppression of bodily autonomy. 

Abortion access is just one facet of a racialized and for-profit medical system, which often fails to deliver actual care. Reproductive justice includes the ability to birth and raise children in a safe and healthy environment, which requires proper medical care beyond abortion access. These are consequences of the healthcare system's overall capitalistic structure, which creates economic inequality via class division. Owners' interests come first, so even healthcare is governed by principles of maximizing shareholder value. Among other things, this incentivizes insurance companies to deny care to those who are qualified for coverage.

Consequently, women are routinely denied the care they need to fully realize bodily autonomy — including but not limited to abortion. And it’s not just healthcare. No paid maternity leave also curtails bodily autonomy. The lack of support pushes many mothers into financial instability, disempowering these women and making them more reliant on their employers. 

Proper bodily autonomy therefore cannot exist under capitalism. For mothers in particular, every stage of conceiving, rearing, and raising children has been commodified, erasing the sanctity of procreation and parenthood. True reproductive justice is impossible under a class system that values profit over human lives. The Dobbs decision and the doom of Project 2025 simply prove that reforming a for-profit society can only secure basic rights for so long until the hierarchy inevitably shoves women back into place. Regardless of who wins in the upcoming 2024 election, securing true bodily autonomy will require greater class consciousness, rather than bandaging a system that requires control over our bodies. 

Petra Glenn is an activist and aspiring political scientist. She is pursuing her PhD and aims to aid in bridging the gap between academic theory and practice.

Groveling at the Feet of Greed: How U.S. Politicians Sacrifice Lives for Profit and Power

By Peter S. Baron

U.S. foreign policy has consistently exposed the cowardly and self-serving opportunism of our political leaders, who are driven by the interests of their corporate elite overlords. From the earliest days of the Republic, American interventions abroad have prioritized the elite class’s accumulation and consolidation of profit and power over human rights and international stability. Politicians, ever ready to serve corporate interests, have implemented policies designed to expand market access, control vital resources, and maintain global dominance, all while cloaking their actions in the rhetoric of democracy and security.

American politicians, as executors of this foreign policy, perpetuate wars, coups, and economic sanctions, ensuring a steady stream of blood money to their elite patrons. They manipulate public sentiment and suppress dissent to create a facade of national interest that conceals the true beneficiaries of these policies. The cumulative devastation from the African Slave Trade to the genocide in Gaza exposes the moral bankruptcy of a foreign policy rooted in murder and torture for profit and power. This grotesque complicity demands a radical rethinking of America's role in the world, prioritizing human dignity over corporate greed.

A History of Exploitation: From Slavery to Modern Conflicts

The pattern of exploitation, intrinsic to American capitalism and imperialism, traces back to our earliest days as a new nation. Understanding this continuum helps explain ongoing atrocities in places like Gaza, where marginalized lives remain collateral damage in the pursuit of profit and power.

The African Slave Trade, beginning in the 16th century, was an era of unparalleled brutality that resulted in the deaths of approximately 1.5 to 3 million African people. This brutal chapter in history was propelled by European powers and elite colonists, whose capitalist ambitions demanded a massive labor force to produce surpluses of profitable crops like sugar, cotton, and tobacco. Africans were enslaved and forcibly torn from their homes, families, and cultures, then transported across the Atlantic under the most inhumane conditions imaginable. Packed like cargo in the filthy holds of ships, many died from disease, malnutrition, and abuse. Those who survived the harrowing journey were sold like cattle, treated as mere property, stripped of their humanity, and forced to toil under relentless, brutal conditions.

The dehumanization and commodification of millions of men, women, and children generated immense wealth for European and American economies, laying the very foundation for modern capitalism.

In what is now the contiguous United States, the Indigenous population was decimated from over 5 million before European contact to fewer than 238,000 by the late 19th century, a near-total annihilation that subjected indigenous communities to unimaginable horrors—relentless warfare, violent displacement, and the deliberate introduction of diseases to which they had no immunity. The forced removal and extermination of Indigenous peoples was justified by U.S. expansionist policies under the guise of "Manifest Destiny." Americans were supposedly destined to occupy and control the land across the American continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Driven by a relentless capitalist hunger for land and resources, the U.S. government and settlers aggressively seized vast territories for agriculture, mining, and real estate ventures in a calculated effort to pave the way for capitalist development.

The American Revolutionary War resulted in approximately 25,000 American deaths, around 24,000 British deaths, and about 7,500 Hessian (German) mercenary deaths, totaling approximately 56,500 fatalities. British trade policies were designed to keep the colonies economically dependent on Britain, restricting their ability to trade freely and forcing them to benefit the British economy. These policies included excessive taxation, which disproportionately burdened the lower classes in the colonies, fueling their anger towards both the elite in the UK and their colonial counterparts.

However, as the revolution progressed, the colonial elite seized control of the revolutionary committees and assemblies. This allowed them to hijack the grassroots demands for liberty and self-determination, twisting the revolutionary fervor to serve their own selfish economic interests. The common colonists were thrust into a violent and bloody struggle, duped into believing they were fighting for genuine freedom. However, the revolution ultimately served only to enrich and empower the wealthy American elite, betraying the common people and stripping them of the promised economic and social gains.

Elite leaders such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison ensured the founding documents would usher in a political structure that safeguarded the interests of property owners and the wealthy. The original Constitution included mechanisms like the Electoral College and the Senate, which diluted the direct influence of the popular vote and ensured that power remained concentrated among the elite.

In essence, the rich leaders of the revolution, like George Washington who was one of the wealthiest men in the colonies, sought to dismantle British control to establish a capitalist economy where private property and free enterprise reigned supreme. Washington, often lauded for his prudence in declining to rule as King, certainly did not forgo the opportunity to live like one. He paid himself a Presidential salary that amounted to 2% of the total budget of the newly established American nation.

The US Civil War, which claimed between 620,000 and 850,000 lives, was fundamentally a battle between the Southern elites' agrarian economy based on slavery and the Northern elites' industrial economy based on wage labor. Southern landowners accumulated wealth through the brutal exploitation of enslaved people on plantations that produced cash crops like cotton and tobacco. The relentless drive for profit under capitalism pushed these enslavers to seek expansion into new American territories, a practice that Abraham Lincoln aimed to halt.

Northern elites, driven by the same capitalist commitment, were invested in expanding industrial capitalism, which relied on wage labor. They saw slavery as an economic hindrance to their vision of a more profitable and adaptable workforce. Wage labor allowed Northern industrialists to exploit workers without the legal and logistical constraints of slavery, offering a more scalable and flexible labor force for factories and industries. Workers could be hired and fired based on demand, paid only when needed, and subjected to poor working conditions without the need for lifelong ownership.

The North's victory dismantled the Southern slave-based economy, ending the agrarian capitalist model and paving the way for industrial capitalism to dominate. This shift facilitated rapid industrial growth and infrastructure development, promoting a capitalist economy based on wage labor. After approximately a decade of Reconstruction efforts, Northern industrial powers strengthened their influence over key economic sectors such as manufacturing, railroads, and finance. Subsequently, they withdrew their support for Reconstruction, allowing the South to effectively reinstitute slavery through the systems of sharecropping and convict leasing.

The Spanish-American War of 1898, which led to approximately 60,000 Spanish deaths and 3,200 American deaths, was driven by the U.S. desire to expand its influence and open new markets for American goods. The war was partly fueled by the sensationalist journalism of the time, which drummed up public support for intervention in Cuba's struggle for independence from Spain. However, underlying this public sentiment were strong economic motivations. The U.S. sought to protect its investments in Cuba and to gain control of other Spanish colonies like Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. The acquisition of these territories allowed the U.S. to expand its reach into new markets, securing strategic locations for military and trade purposes, thereby furthering American capitalists’ economic and strategic interests.

The US-Philippine War, which occurred from 1899 to 1902, caused around 220,000 Filipino deaths. This war was driven by the U.S.'s desire to establish a foothold in Asia, opening up new markets and resources for American businesses under the guise of "civilizing" and democratizing the region. Following the Spanish-American War, the U.S. took control of the Philippines, facing resistance from Filipino nationalists who sought independence. The brutal suppression of the Filipino independence movement demonstrated the lengths to which the U.S. would go to maintain its new colonial possessions.

During World War I, the federal government registered about half a million "enemy alien" civilians, monitored many of them, and sent around 6,000 German Nationals and German-American men and a few women to internment camps. The camps were harsh and inhumane, with poor living conditions, inadequate food, and rampant disease. Internees were subjected to forced labor and constant surveillance, stripped of their freedoms under the guise of protecting the nation. Perhaps, more strikingly, the government seized vast amounts of private property, often with dubious connections to the war effort, amassing assets worth over half a billion dollars—nearly the entire federal budget before the war.

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By seizing the businesses and properties of German Americans, the American elite removed economic competition and consolidated control. Xenophobia was used as a tactic to create an ideological construct where the German American community was scapegoated, symbolizing both external and internal threats. This strategy reinforced national cohesion by projecting fears onto a racialized other, uniting the nation against a common enemy.

Following the Pearl Harbor attack, American elites and their obedient politicians deflected public anger away from their own profit-driven actions that had escalated tensions with Japan. The greedy capitalist elite, desperate to control vital resources like oil and rubber from Southeast Asia, had imposed crippling economic sanctions on Japan. A State Department memorandum a year before Pearl Harbor laid bare their true motives: fear of losing access to lucrative markets and essential materials in Asia. These ruthless measures posed a clear and potent threat to Japan's very existence, intentionally provoking them into war. Instead of holding these capitalist vultures accountable, the government cowardly redirected blame onto Japanese Americans, shielding the true culprits behind this manufactured conflict.

Thus, echoing the strategic motivations behind the internment of German Americans during World War I, the U.S. government initiated the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. These camps were dehumanizing, with families torn from their homes and businesses, stripped of their rights, and confined in remote, desolate locations. The deplorable conditions lacked adequate shelter, food, and medical care. People lived in overcrowded barracks, surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards, enduring extreme weather and a constant sense of fear and uncertainty.

The Korean War, which raged from 1950 to 1953, was a horrific conflict that resulted in approximately 2.5 million deaths, leaving the Korean peninsula in ruins and its people devastated. This war, driven by the U.S. aim to contain Soviet influence and protect global capitalist interests, reveals that the Cold War was essentially a series of hot wars, with Soviet and American elites fighting proxy battles around the world. After World War II, Korea was divided into two zones, with the North under Soviet influence and the South under American control. The American aim was to establish a capitalist South Korea that could serve as a bulwark against Soviet influence, ensuring a market-friendly environment beneficial to American economic interests. The war saw relentless bombings, mass executions, and widespread atrocities. Entire cities were leveled, and countless civilians were caught in the crossfire, subjected to unimaginable suffering.

In Guatemala in 1954, the U.S.-backed coup of Jacobo Árbenz set the stage for decades of brutal conflict and repression, including the Guatemalan Civil War, that led to the deaths of between 140,000 and 200,000 people. The overthrow of President Jacobo Árbenz was a direct response to his land reform policies that aimed to redistribute land to impoverished peasants, which threatened American corporate interests, particularly those of the United Fruit Company.

The US-backed Indonesian genocide from 1965 to 1966 resulted in the deaths of between 500,000 and 1 million people. The U.S. supported General Suharto's rise to power as part of a broader strategy to eliminate communist influences in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim-majority country and a region of significant geopolitical importance. Suharto's regime, with U.S. backing, targeted members of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) and suspected leftists, resulting in mass killings and widespread atrocities. The elimination of communist influences in Indonesia helped to secure a stable and capitalist-friendly regime that ensured a favorable environment for American economic interests and multinational corporations in Southeast Asia.

The Vietnam War, from 1955 to 1975, resulted in approximately 2 million deaths. The U.S. intervened to prevent the spread of communist influence in Southeast Asia, crucial for protecting global capitalist interests. The Domino Theory suggested that if one country fell to communism, others in the region would follow, threatening capitalist markets and investments.

The war was characterized by extensive bombing, chemical warfare, and brutal ground battles, leading to immense destruction and loss of life. The U.S. aimed to support a non-communist government in South Vietnam to maintain a strategic and economic foothold. Th U.S. government installed Ngo Dinh Diem as the leader of South Vietnam in 1954, a man who aided the French colonizers in rounding up independence fighters during Vietnam’s revolution and who was living in Lakewood, New Jersey prior to being installed as President of South Vietnam. Villages were razed, civilians massacred, and entire regions devastated by napalm and Agent Orange.

As part of the Vietnam War, the U.S. bombing campaigns in Cambodia and Laos from 1969 to 1973 resulted in 500,000 deaths. These, known as Operation Menu and Operation Freedom Deal, were aimed at destroying North Vietnamese supply routes, particularly the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which ran through these countries. The campaigns involved extensive use of carpet bombing and chemical defoliants, causing widespread civilian casualties and long-term environmental harm. In total, U.S. dropped 2,756,941 tons of bombs, more than all of the bombs dropped by the Allies in World War II.

The Bangladesh famine of 1974, which claimed up to 1.5 million lives, was tragically induced by U.S. policies that prioritized geopolitical interests over human suffering. During the Bangladesh Liberation War, the U.S., driven to uphold global capitalism through their Cold War alliances, supported the Pakistani government with aid and arms, enabling Pakistan to brutally suppress the independence movement in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.

The conflict ravaged the region, leading to widespread devastation and economic collapse. When Bangladesh finally achieved independence, it was left in ruins, its infrastructure destroyed, and its economy in shambles. The newly formed government struggled desperately to address the famine that followed. Fields lay barren, markets were empty, and the people starved. During the height of the famine, the U.S. withheld 2.2 million tons of food aid as a means to pressure the Bangladeshi government into aligning with American political and economic interests.

The haunting images of skeletal children did nothing to stir the cold, calculating hearts of American politicians, who shamelessly grovel at the feet of greed. As expected, their consciences, deeply buried beneath their unwavering service to those who relentlessly pursue profit, remained impervious to the suffering they inflicted. The elite relied on their unwavering commitment to corporate profit and control over the global order, and these politicians met those expectations without hesitation.

The $8 trillion U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, part of the broader War on Terrorism, has resulted in over 900,000 deaths over the ensuing years. Initially justified as a response to the September 11 attacks, aimed at dismantling Al-Qaeda and toppling the Taliban, this intervention was heavily influenced by imperialist strategic interests. Afghanistan's critical location in Central Asia made it a prime target for projecting U.S. power and influence, surrounded by key nations like Iran, Pakistan, China, and the Central Asian republics. Establishing a foothold in Afghanistan provided the U.S. a strategic base to manipulate regional dynamics and counterbalance rivals such as Iran and China. Additionally, the prolonged military occupation and reconstruction efforts were a boon for American corporations involved in defense, security, and infrastructure, including then Vice President Dick Cheney's Halliburton.

The U.S. interventions in Iraq, including the Gulf War in 1991 and the Iraq War in 2003, resulted in catastrophic human losses, with approximately 100,000 deaths the Gulf War and 600,000 deaths from the Iraq War. These interventions were driven by strategic interests in Iraq's vast oil resources, with the U.S. aiming to control and secure these assets for capitalist benefits. The Gulf War was initiated to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, a key oil-producing country, thereby protecting U.S. allies and ensuring the stability of global oil supplies. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, under the pretext of eliminating weapons of mass destruction, was similarly motivated by the desire to gain control over Iraq's oil fields and to establish a compliant government that would favor U.S. economic interests. Here too, the Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton, made a staggering $39.5 billion from contracts related to the Iraq War, many of which were awarded without competitive bidding.

The devastation caused by these wars was immense: infrastructure was obliterated, cities were reduced to rubble, and millions of civilians were caught in the crossfire or suffered from the resulting chaos and instability, with 5 million displaced. The prolonged occupation and the dismantling of its military and governmental structures created a power vacuum and widespread chaos. This environment facilitated the rise of extremist groups, with ISIS eventually forming from the remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq and other militant factions.

The NATO intervention in Libya in 2011, which led to approximately 22,000 deaths, was officially framed as a humanitarian effort to protect civilians during the uprising against Muammar Gaddafi's regime. However, beneath this veneer of humanitarianism lay significant strategic and economic interests, particularly related to Libya's vast oil reserves. Libya, boasting the largest proven oil reserves in Africa, was a crucial supplier of oil to Europe. The NATO-led intervention resulted in the overthrow of Gaddafi but also plunged the country into chaos, leading to prolonged instability and conflict. This destabilization allowed multinational corporations easier access to invest in and exploit Libya's oil resources. Moreover, the intervention had dire consequences for the social fabric of Libya. The power vacuum and ensuing chaos led to the re-emergence of open-air slave markets, where human beings are being bought and sold like commodities for as little as $400.

The ongoing genocide in Gaza is simply another manifestation of the capitalist ethos that permeated the violence described above. The U.S. government's complicity in perpetuating violence and destruction is driven by economic and geopolitical imperatives just like those we have discussed above. American taxpayer-funded military aid to Israel supports a relentless campaign against Palestinians, masked as a security measure but fundamentally rooted in capitalist and strategic interests. This alliance between American and Israeli elites consolidates control over critical resources and trade routes, enriching defense contractors and entrenching regional dominance. Innocent civilians bear the true cost: tens of thousands killed, homes and infrastructure decimated, and entire communities obliterated.

Collective Disengagement: Standing Up to Oppression and Building a New Future

The elite sustain this centuries long pattern of calculated violence by manipulating our collective psychology. They justify their acts of violence and war, while those who denounce such atrocities and propose new ways of organizing society are marginalized and discredited. Public sentiment is meticulously crafted through propaganda that narrows the range of acceptable discourse and paints revolutionary voices as unrealistic, insane, or dangerous.

Their fearmongering is particularly effective because it exploits our vulnerable position in a systemically competitive society. Those who have the least are warned they can't afford to join the courageous revolutionaries and risk losing what little they have, even though they stand to gain the most. Meanwhile, those with some financial security are told that embracing revolutionary ideals would plunge them into the struggles faced by those below them. The truth is, these revolutionary ideals would remove us from the cutthroat competition that characterizes the current world order. Such actionable ideals promise a world where no one has to live in insecurity or fear of losing everything. By fostering cooperation instead, we can create a society where everyone's needs are met, and the constant anxiety of survival is abolished.

The elite's hostility towards so-called 'radical' ideas is not simply a matter of ideological disagreement. They are acutely aware of the power, practicality, and rapid spread of these revolutionary concepts, and they fear how quickly they can be implemented. Thus, they ensure such dissent is systematically suppressed through state-sanctioned violence, creating a climate of acquiescence. This dual approach of bounded discourse and suppressed dissent ensures that transformational ideas are marginalized and genuine social change is hindered. Through this method, the ruling class engineers a grotesque charade where the only permissible political stances are those fundamentally devoted to perpetuating corporate dominance and expanding capitalism.

But their manipulation runs deeper—they sell us these contrived choices! They cleverly associate being a Democrat with specific cultural values and being a Republican with others. Glossy advertisements and sleek marketing campaigns flaunt both celebrities and everyday people who embody these fabricated values, pushing products that supposedly define liberal or conservative lifestyles, along with their various subcultures.

Every purchase we make, whether it's a hybrid car adorned with progressive bumper stickers or a pickup truck flaunting patriotic decals, feeds into this fabricated dichotomy. We're not just voting with our wallets; we're being coerced into aligning our self-worth and identity with these consumer choices. It's a grand illusion where both sides, despite their apparent differences, funnel us into the same exploitative system.

We’re bombarded with slogans and images that blend politics with consumerism. "Vote blue, buy green." "Real Americans wear red." It's a relentless cycle where we are implored to buy products that signify our 'values'—values crafted in boardrooms to serve corporate interests.

Every vote, every purchase, every piece of cultural paraphernalia we adorn ourselves with is a cog in their profit machine. The elites sit back, watching us dance to their tune, our dissent muted, our choices orchestrated, our lives commodified. This is a profound violation of our autonomy and dignity, a testament to the insidious power of corporate hegemony.

It’s time we reject the individuals who are “leading” our country, recognizing them as the spineless and avaricious opportunists they repeatedly prove themselves to be. They do not look out for “American interests.” They look out for elite interests. The elite are fully aware of the destruction and death they cause. They wield force not just because it’s effective but because it sends a chilling message to those of us who see through their charades. They know that some of us can see their justifications for war—drenched in pompous, misleading rhetoric of spreading democracy or protecting American interests—for the sham that it is. They want us to understand that if we challenge them, they can and will bring hell upon earth. They will kill without hesitation.

Yet, they have a vulnerability. To oppress and kill, they need us to do their bidding. They need us to ship the bombs, to provide political support, to play their rigged game. They require vast numbers of soldiers to sign up, commit these atrocities, suffer from PTSD, and then be discarded when they return and seek help. It's time we stand together and refuse to be pawns in their murderous schemes. We must take this stand for ourselves and for humanity. By building networks of mutual aid and supporting each other, we can create the solidarity needed to resist their exploitation and implement new, just ways of organizing society.

Our collective power lies in our ability to say no. By refusing to participate in their wars, by resisting their propaganda, we can dismantle their power. The elites rely on our complicity, our labor, and our silence to maintain their dominion.

Imagine we chose to serve each other instead! Picture the strength of a unified populace, rejecting the exploitation and brutality inflicted in our name. We must rise together, in defiance of the so-called leaders who have sacrificed their integrity on the altar of capitalism. For every life shattered by their betrayal, for every dream crushed under the weight of their gluttony, we must unite. It is our duty to reclaim the values they have perverted, the future they threaten, and the planet they are setting aflame with their endless pursuit of profit. We owe it to ourselves and to the world to disrupt this cycle of violence and build a new social order that values human dignity over capital. Now is the time to come together and take action.

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 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.

Why Do We Oppress Women?

By Wonder Louis

Since the dawn of civilization, women have been treated as second-class citizens. This condition pervades every stage of history and virtually every culture and region. Under capitalism, the phenomenon of gender inequality is observable through tangible acts of oppression such as unequal pay, fewer educational opportunities, domestic violence, and more. However, these observable acts are not exclusive to capitalism, as they were prevalent in different modes of production. To understand capitalist gender inequality specifically, we must examine the social relation and position that women hold under capitalism. 

Marxist analysis reveals that, just as capitalism divides bosses and workers, it treats men and women differently based on their relationship to production. The sexual division of labor both in and outside the household is caused by and produces gender inequality in all aspects of life. As Marxism informs us, the base of society is its economic system. In our current order, everything flows from capitalism and the asymmetric social relations it demands. 

Under capitalism, people — especially women — lose their humanity and become commodities. Workers  must sell the only commodity the bank can’t take from them, their labor, to not just accumulate wealth but survive. Granted, most female labor falls outside the commodity market and is instead directly consumed. But women are also often reduced to their exchange value. Sex trafficking and dowries are examples.

The view that capitalism encourages gender inequality is hardly universal.  Some argue that capitalism promotes female wellbeing through technological advancements in women’s health. Others claim capitalism must encourage gender equality because women are supposedly worse off in “traditional… non-capitalist societies.” These cultures are usually quite religious. People believe that their women are worse off because they suffer from lower life expectancy, poverty, and stricter gender oppression. Capitalism allegedly improves these maladies via constant and rapid technological innovation. It is the best system for social innovation, its proponents say. No other structural arrangement better facilitates social mobility or individual rights.

Whatever capitalists say, the fact remains: gender inequality exists under capitalism, and we must change that. This can occur in a number of ways. But lasting, fundamental change requires targeting the structure of the economy and superstructure of society. By altering these two elements of social life, women can defeat gender oppression once and for all.

Addressing the economy calls for more affirmative action. These policies can ensure minorities receive equal occupational and educational opportunities. Affirmative action has helped many women access institutions they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. In 1995, for example, female employment increased by  15% at jobs with affirmative action requirements compared to 2 percent at jobs without. 

The second task is changing traditional gender culture. We can do this through education — namely, by introducing egalitarian concepts to children at a young age.  Curricula should teach how harmful sexist and gender stereotypes are. Educators should be prepared to call out and challenge misogyny whenever it arises in the classroom.   

Capitalism is driven by the accumulation of wealth and capital. It lays waste to all other values — chief among them, gender equality. Under capitalism, women face financial  and cultural oppression, physical violence, and lower living standards than men. To combat these inequities, women need fair treatment in the workforce, especially equal pay, and in society as a whole, free from misogynist norms.  

Wonder Louis is an aspiring historian and political theorist. Holding a Bachelor of Arts in History, Wonder aims to promote revolutionary thought and educate the masses on all forms of social inequality.

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.

The Stranglehold of Capital and Why We Must Break Free

[Photo Credit: Doug Mills / AP]

By Nathaniel Ibrahim

The village of Yellow Springs, Ohio, like much of the United States, has an affordable housing shortage. To address this, the Village Council considered rezoning 53 acres for higher-density homes. This was controversial among Yellow Springs residents including comedy superstar Dave Chapelle, who threatened to pull his investments from the town:

”If you push this thing through, what I’m investing in is no longer applicable… I am not bluffing. I will take it all off the table.” 

It was never guaranteed that the Village Council would pass the rezoning without Chapelle’s interference, or that the plan would even make housing more affordable. But it was hardly a fair fight. Losing millions in investment dollars would transform the economic landscape of Yellow Springs. Municipal representatives could never consider the housing project on its own merits.

Strongarm tactics by capital happen on the national stage too. Shortly after Barack Obama won the presidency on a platform of “hope and change,” Emerson Electric CEO David Farr said his company would only expand in the United States if government got “out of the way.” 

Barclays CEO Robert Diamond claimed corporations wouldn’t “have the confidence to hire in the United States… until we… believe… the government, the private sector, and financial institutions are working together and connected again.” 

Bausch + Lomb CEO Brent Saunders warned that, because of Obama, multinationals are “more tentative on whether… to…invest.” 

The Wall Street Journal synthesized these sentiments, lamenting that Obama wasn’t doing enough to encourage “U.S. businesses to unleash the $2 trillion in capital they are holding.” 

Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner summarized it well the following year:

“Job creators in America basically are on strike.” 

It isn’t novel to point out the political influence of the wealthy. Even former president Jimmy Carter called the United States an “oligarchy with unlimited political bribery.” Research shows that better-funded candidates generally win. There are basic fundraising thresholds candidates must meet to have a chance of winning. This allows the wealthy to influence who runs and wins. Even when donations don’t outright guarantee electoral success, candidates still value them and allow donors to influence policy. 

Just as ultra-wealthy benefactors control elections, a handful of companies dominate our media. “Big Tech” dictates culture by moderating the flow of information and “marketplace of ideas” that informs our political process. Corporate giants make it more difficult for voters to make informed decisions and allow relatively few people to curate and regulate public discourse. 

These problems are serious, and make our political system less democratic. They reinforce the privileged interests of the white and wealthy while disenfranchising the non-white and poor. This inequity is rooted in the undemocratic nature of our economic system, which grants certain groups not mere influence or political advantage but the ability to wield pure, unchecked power.

Who Controls Capital?

In the United States, the three richest white men hold as much wealth as the bottom 50% combined. Capital, which refers not to personal property but investment assets, is also unequally distributed. The top 1% of Americans own a majority of the country’s stocks and private businesses. The poorer you are, the more of your resources you must spend on your needs, and the more fully you rely on other people’s capital to have a job. 

Within individual companies, if an investor controls over half the voting shares, they fully control the company, rendering other investors’ capital powerless. Capital is where the real power lies, and it is controlled by a miniscule group. 

How Does Capital Work?

This tiny class of capitalists will only invest capital under certain conditions. Generally, profits are the fundamental precondition for investment, but it’s ultimately down to the investor. They can choose to do nothing with their capital or invest it in some other market, thereby exercising tremendous leverage on the rest of society.

To maintain access to goods and gainful employment, electorates are under pressure to placate capital. This immediate pressure often conflicts with voters’ long-term interests, or any political priorities beyond meeting their basic needs. Thus, politicians under capitalism must serve their constituents’ short-term demands by serving owners and investors. Otherwise, their constituents will suffer, blame them, and vote them out. 

Capitalists directly affect government activity too. First and foremost, tax revenues are almost entirely dependent on investment. Jobs are needed to generate income taxes, while businesses must sell goods and services in order to generate sales taxes. Investment is required to maintain property values and thus property taxes. When governments cannot fund their activities through taxation and turn to borrowing, they become dependent on banks and other potential creditors.

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Often, private capital directly pays law enforcement to do its dirty work. Major corporations funnel millions of dollars into police activities through police foundations. Companies including DTE, Meijer, The Home Depot, and AT&T all have representatives on the board of the Detroit Public Safety Foundation. Across the country, the largest companies in finance, tech, fossil fuels, and other industries funded the police and were represented in the institutions that raise private funds for them. 

The Power of Capital in Action

When a group of capitalists forego investing together — a capital strike — they can quickly cripple the economy. When they have common interests, and frequently voice their concerns through the business press, little direct coordination is required to set off a chain reaction of capital flight.

“Capital strike” and “capital flight” are not commonly used terms, and they almost never come up in election discourse. Capital flight is recognized as an economic phenomenon, one that can often come about as a reaction to political developments, but its political implications are rarely discussed. Some economists characterize capital flight as a “symptom of macroeconomic mismanagement” to be solved with “sensible, credible” policies.

This straightforward narrative is actually quite common when it comes to businesses’ reactions to policies. The policies are never “not what businesses prefer.” They are simply “bad policies,” which “lead to bad outcomes.” Capitalists are treated like they bear no responsibility for the consequences of their actions. The class character of capital strikes is completely mystified and ignored. While it’s possible for certain policies to be bad for both the rich and the poor, that is not always the case. 

There are numerous examples of large-scale capital strikes forcing national governments to abandon progressive, widely-supported policies. The aforementioned strike against the Obama administration strike is one such example. Other capital strikes happened under Franklin D. Roosevelt. 

Capital strikes are not limited to the United States. In the 1970s, the Swedish Trade Union Confederation and members of the Social Democratic Party sought to transcend social democracy via the Meidner Plan, which would have taxed corporate profits to achieve workers’ ownership of major corporations. Fearing a capital strike, the Social Democrats diluted the plan. The plan’s namesake, economist Rudolf Meidner, described the implemented version as “a pathetic rat.” 

In France, after decades of uninterrupted conservative rule, Socialist Party leader Francois Mitterand was elected president in 1981. He was allied with the French Communist Party, called for a “rupture” with capitalism, and embarked on a radical program of nationalization, wage hikes, and union empowerment. Displeased investors pulled their capital, punishing the French economy. Mitterand abandoned his radicalism, purged Communist ministers from his government, and pursued more conservative policies. 

A similar thing happened in Chile. In 1970, Salvador Allende — Latin America’s first democratically elected Marxist head of state — became president. Over the next three years, wealthy Chileans and international businesses reacted with capital strikes, capital flight, and hoarding to destabilize the government and protect their own power. Allende responded with concessions to the Right but was eventually overthrown in a US-backed military coup that was justified as a response to economic instability. 

In Venezuela, the election of Hugo Chávez in 1999 was followed by dramatic increases in quality of life. Chávez lifted nearly one fifth of the population from poverty. Even opponents like the Washington DC-based Organization of American States recognized this achievement and “the eradication of illiteracy… and the increase in access by the most vulnerable sectors to basic services such as health care.”

The massive wealth held by Venezuela’s elite was being slowly redistributed, and the oil revenues that the country had relied on for decades were being directed toward the poor. As this happened, Venezuelan and international businesses began pulling their capital out of the country or holding back certain economic activities. The current Venezuelan economic crisis is, of course, complex, with an overreliance on oil, imperialist sanctions, and political instability of various origins all playing a role. However, capital flight preceded and contributed to these issues, starting at a time when the lives of Venezuelans were improving at the expense of capitalist profits and power.

Of course, national capital strikes are the exception — a “nuclear option” of capitalist control. 

Every day, capitalists and their managers make decisions regarding where to allocate resources within their businesses, or who to do business with. Whether by reflexively chasing profits or strategically leveraging their wealth, they shift wealth toward those who serve their interests.

Voters may begin to “learn their lesson,” and vote in ways that investors will reward them for, even if they end up voting for policies they do not ultimately prefer. Voters may blame some inherent flaw in leftist policies, saying things like “socialism is great in theory, but doesn’t work in practice.” And while left-wing governments have in many cases brought improvements for their people, capital strikes negatively affect their track record.

Others may recognize the power of capital over the economy, but believe it to be justified or necessary, and consciously vote in a way that reinforces this power. When left-wing governments make concessions to capital, their supporters may see it as a betrayal of the policies they ran on, and become politically inactive or shift their allegiance to another party, as happened in Sweden and France. Whether they blame the failure on economic realities, unreliable politicians, or the business owners themselves, voters will respond rationally to actions by capital, and vote in ways that avoid offending investors in the first place.

Legalized Bribery

The coercive power of capital strikes is extremely important in explaining why the rich and large corporations often get their way. But they have numerous other tools at their disposal for directing the political process:

• Rent out a lavish compound to a sitting president (or let him stay for free) 

• Spend hundreds of thousands of dollars at businesses owned by politicians

• Loan politicians’ companies hundreds of millions of dollars

• Pay politicians millions of dollarsf or speeches

• Hire lawmakers and top officials as lobbyists or consultants

• Give politicians seats on corporate boards

• Give them a high-paying job at a think tank

• Sign massive book deals with Supreme Court Justices, or give them free trips

• Take a powerful judge on multiple luxurious vacations,

• Buy their mother’s home and let her live in it rent-free, pay their family member’s expensive boarding school fees, pay for their wedding reception, give them VIP access to sporting events, fund the dedication of a library wing in their honor, and fund a hagiographicmovie about them (This is all the same person)

• Own stocks while being a politician, and reap all the benefits if your political actions favor your stocks or investors at large

What Can We Do About it?

To recap, capitalism results in a tiny minority of the population controlling the means of production and distribution. This control is leveraged to reward or punish voters and governments based on how accommodating their policies are toward capital. These capitalists coordinate not just through institutions and relationships, but need not coordinate at all when their interests align. If a government threatens their profits, they will remove their capital from the government’s jurisdiction, even if the people believe they should sacrifice their profits for the benefit of society. The bounds of what is politically possible are set by the corporate sector.

Those who control wealth use it in more targeted ways to shore up this power. They systematically direct their wealth to individual politicians, or the political class as a whole, to buy their loyalty and give the politicians a stake in the power of capital.

Private businesses control the media that we consume, and the wealthy bend political campaigns, think tanks, charities, and universities to their will with donations. These institutions allow the wealthy to mask and justify their economic power, and articulate their demands to a target audience. They also give them the tools to act even when their economic power is effectively curbed.  

Considered fully, the power of capital appears unassailable, and if we work within the mainstream definition of politics, it is. Our ability to exercise political power is often reduced to participating in elections. However, electoral politics are, in many ways, a manifestation of power wielded by people outside of it, and any movement that devotes all its energy to the electoral sphere will ultimately fail when they are outmaneuvered in the economic sphere. However, understanding the ways that this capitalist power works is the first step to breaking it. 

In order to fight back against this system, ordinary people need to expand their definition of politics and operate in the same fields that the wealthy do. Recognizing that democracy is still something worth achieving is vital. Winning political power will be a bottom-up struggle. Radical labor unions will be a necessary tool for workers to challenge capital in an effective way and wield material leverage toward their political goals.

The specifics of overcoming capitalist power are far from clear. The people of this planet will have to organize themselves and develop plans for effective resistance through international collaboration and dialogue. What’s clear, however, is that no form of capitalism will allow us to experience genuine democracy. Whoever controls economic production and distribution controls everyone dependent on that production and distribution. Self-determination and democracy therefore require economic democracy.

Nathaniel Ibrahim is an organizer and elected leader in the Young Democratic Socialists of America at the University of Michigan.

A Brief and Imperfect Explanation of Dialectical Materialism

[Pictured: Konstantin Yuon’s painting, New Planet, which commemorated the Bolshevik-led October Revolution in Russia.]

By Peter F. Seeger

Dialectical Materialism is a foundational principle of Marxism. This concept, along with Historical Materialism and Marxist Economics, are known as the three “component parts of Marxism.” Surprisingly, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels did not write extensively on the idea of “Dialectical Materialism” during their lives. It was long after Marx’s death and only after Engels’ death that manuscripts could be compiled into Engels’ “The Dialectics of Nature.”

Materialism

Materialism is the philosophical opposite of idealism, which grounds itself in the concept of only one material world. Idealism believes that existence is inseparable from human perception and that reality stems from the mind. A helpful example of this Idealist thinking is Rene Descartes’ quote, “I think; therefore, I am.” In this idea the subjective thought is what confirms existence and subjective thought precedes objective existence. A materialist would rather say “I am; therefore, I think,” showing that the objective existence precedes the subjective perception of reality. Like Dialectics, the philosophy of materialism can be seen as far back as the ancient Greeks of Anaxagoras (c.500 - 428 BC) and Democritus (c.460 - c.370 BC). Marx was known to have been inspired by early materialists like Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke.

Materialism posits that matter objectively exists independently of whether we subjectively perceive it. “Materialism in general recognizes objectively real being (matter) as independent of consciousness, sensation, experience… consciousness is only the reflection of being, at best an approximately true (adequate, perfectly exact) reflection of it.”[1] Since matter exists whether we perceive it or not, then matter must precede subjective perception. Although Marx’s materialism, is not a rigid materialism and must be combined with dialectics to form the full theory followed by Marxists.

Dialectics

The concept of dialectics has existed for centuries. Philosophers like Plato demonstrated an idealist form of dialectics which functions like a conversation. One person presents an argument (a “thesis”), and another presents a counterargument (an “antithesis”). Through conversation, dialogue, and counterargument, the two achieve a better understanding and more correct solution to their issue, a “synthesis.” The “synthesis” then becomes the “thesis” again and will always have an “antithesis” to counter it. This simplified explanation is often used to explain idealist dialectics but is not true to the dialectics that Marx would have been familiar with as a member of the Young Hegelian Society.

Marx and Engels were followers of Hegel and learned an immense amount from the philosopher. Vladimir Lenin also praised Hegel for his ideas on dialectics and even encouraged the reading of Hegel for all Marxists. Although Hegel is the basis for Marx and Engels’ dialectics, Hegel is an idealist and therefore dissimilar to Marx’s Dialectical Materialism in that way. Dialectics, to Marxists, "is nothing more than the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and thought."[2] There cannot be a slave without a master, an exploited without an exploiter, nor a proletariat without a bourgeoise; therefore, they must appear at the same time due to their dependency on the other and in a unity of their opposites.

Dialectical Materialism

Engels’ writings on Dialectical Materialism are where Marxists receive the bulk of this concept. Engels determined three laws of Marxist Dialectical Materialism: (1) The unity and struggle of opposites, (2) the transformation of quantity into quality, and (3) the negation of the negation.[3] Briefly going through these one by one is useful for this complicated theory.

(1) The Unity and Struggle of Opposites:

“The law of contradiction in things that is, the law of the unity of opposites, is the basic law of materialist dialectics.”[4] Every object is made up of two contradictory aspects that together make up the whole in unity and in contradiction. This constant state of opposites is never ending, in constant motion, and always changing; this is also known as the law of contradiction. This is, to Marxists, scientific and can be observed in nearly every field of science. “In mathematics: plus, and minus; differential and integral. In mechanics: action and reaction. In physics: positive and negative electricity. In chemistry: the combination and dissociation of atoms. In social science: the class struggle” between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.[5] This leads Marxists to look to the material world around them and find the core contradictions within society to best understand how it functions.

A contradiction is “when two seemingly opposed forces are simultaneously present within a particular situation, an entity or an event.”[6] Within a contradiction there are aspects of the contradiction, which are the two forces that both function in opposition and unity. The term “Contradiction,” itself is rarely used in Marxism in the singular form because there is a never-ending number of contradictions found in everything, not just capitalism. A common misconception is the belief that Marxism believes in a one size fits all approach to societies and cultures, but inherent in the concept of a contradiction is the understanding that everything has its own internal and external contradictions that determine its resolution.

An example of this complex idea may be found using contradictions as applied to a rock and an egg. Within both objects there are internal contradictions inherent to each’s existence, (erosion or the need for specific conditions for a healthy birth) but both would react and resolve differently when acted upon by the same external contradiction. If you apply the specific temperature to the rock and the egg you may end up with a chicken or a warm stone. The resolutions of these contradictions are dependent on not just the aspects of the contradiction, but the contradictions within the aspects themselves.

The final point on contradictions is that while the concept is universal, i.e., it can be applied to areas outside Marxism such as in nature, it also comes with the belief that there is a “principal” or “primary” contradiction[7] that determines or influences the current or “secondary” contradictions in the world. This “principal” contradiction, according to Marxists, is the class contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. An example of a “secondary” contradiction influenced by the “principal” contradiction could simply be the competition between businesses for profits.

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(2) The Transformation of Quantity into Quality:

Gradual quantitative changes in society give rise to revolutionary qualitative changes. Since all matter is always in motion and changing, these changes function as a quantitative change until it gives rise to a qualitative change which fundamentally alters the matter into something materially different. The implications of this concept show the basis for why or how revolutions occur.  True change only comes from qualitative change. For example, water remains a liquid while it gradually cools down, but there is a certain point where the quantitative change of the temperature creates a qualitative change when the water becomes ice. When applied to the social sciences, according to Marxists, the quantitative changes represent the contradictions in capitalism and the qualitative change would be a revolution. Marxists view matter as interconnected, in perpetual motion, and always changing. Darwin’s theory of evolution grounds this idea in the sense that evolution shows the interconnectedness of matter and its perpetual change. Not only does Darwin’s theory of evolution imply the interconnectedness and constant change of all matter, but also shows that this process has been ongoing for billions of years, processes of dialectical development between contradictory or opposing forces.

Qualitatively different contradictions can only be resolved by qualitatively different methods. For instance, the contradiction between proletariat and the bourgeoisie is resolved by the method of socialist revolution; the contradictions between the working class and the peasant class in socialist society is resolved by the method of collectivization and mechanization in agriculture; contradiction within the Communist Party is resolved by the method of criticism and self-criticism.[8]

(3) The Negation of The Negation

This concept can be simply explained as when the new supersedes the old. Before the quantitative changes lead to the qualitative transformation, this is the first negation. The second negation occurs at the time of the qualitative transformation.

The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual property, as found in the labor of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of nature, its own negation. It is the negation of the negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era: i.e., on cooperation and the possession in common the land and the means of production[9]

This “negation and transformation” is not meant to mean that the “new” is devoid of any aspects of the old. This is paramount in understanding the ongoing struggle that will continue during a socialist transition. Marxism believes that in the social sciences, once societies have qualitative changes, remnants of the old society will still exist and will have to be governed by the laws of the new society. After feudalism, slavery was still within the society although the new system was built from the old system of slavery for labor. Further, once feudalism was superseded by capitalism old remnants of feudalism remained including landlords and slavery. Even under socialism, the remnants of capitalism will still exist in society. This shows that the qualitative change is also in constant motion and in contradiction with itself which must be resolved for the long-term goal of communism.

These laws make up the foundations of dialectical materialism: all matter is interconnected and always changing due to the dialectical forces of contradictions within society, and this posits the inevitability of a qualitative change from capitalism to socialism.

Notes

[1] Vladimir Lenin, The Collected Works of V. I. Lenin, Collected Works 38 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/cw/pdf/lenin-cw-vol-38.pdf. pp. 266-67

[2] Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, Foundations 26 (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2021), https://foreignlanguages.press/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/C26-Anti-Duhring-1st-Printing.pdf. pp. 152

[3] Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature (Moscow, Russia: Progress Publishers, 1954).

[4] Mao Zedong and The Redspark Collective, Mao Zedong’s On Contradiction: Study Companion, New Roads 4 (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2019), https://foreignlanguages.press/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/N04-On-Contradiction-Study-2nd.pdf. pp. 2

[5] Lenin, The Collected Works of V. I. Lenin. pp. 136

[6] David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (London, England: Oxford University Press, 2014). pp. 1

[7] In Marxism the principal contradiction is not fixed. Through history the principal contradiction will change and be foreign to contemporaries.

[8] Zedong and The Redspark Collective, Mao Zedong’s On Contradiction: Study Companion. pp. 28-29

[9] Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, III vols. (UK: Penguin Classics, 1990). pp. 929

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.

Internationalism Today: An Interview with Paweł Wargan

By Daniel Benson

Republished from Monthly Review.

What does a progressive foreign policy look like today? How should we understand imperialism? What is at stake in reclaiming an internationalist political horizon for the left? What forms of organization are best adapted for a new international? Given the many contemporary global challenges—such as climate change, far-right extremism, pandemics, and the increasing threat of nuclear war—it is urgent to develop a strategic, organizational, and theoretical perspective for the international left. Paweł Wargan discusses these and other questions in the interview that follows. Researcher, activist, and coordinator of the secretariat of the Progressive International, Wargan is well suited to highlight the prospects for a new internationalism today. The interview is conducted by Daniel Benson, assistant professor of French and Global Studies at St. Francis College and the editor of Domination and Emancipation: Remaking Critique (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2021).

Daniel Benson: I’d like to begin with a discussion of your overall political perspective and development. What are some of the main events or intellectual influences that have impacted your current writing and activism?

Paweł Wargan: I worked in public policy when the last great wave of climate activism emerged. Every Friday, I would make my way through crowds of protesting schoolkids to get to work. Occasionally, some would block the roads. What struck me was that the ideas expressed in these spaces carried a clarity, a creativity, and an urgency that I never saw at work—where ideas were staid, unambitious, never coming close to addressing the urgency of the moment. So, I took to the streets.

You learn through struggle. You build confidence through struggle. You begin to articulate the reasons for your struggle and develop a feel for the possibilities it opens. The great challenge, I learned over time, is that it’s not enough to have good ideas. In large parts of our movements, demands for “system change” resolve into a politics of advocacy that focuses on appealing to existing institutions rather than building new ones. The very form of these protests—they are often held outside government buildings—speaks to that relationship of supplication. We entreat our ruling classes to deliver something that is not in their power to deliver. And we become despondent when we fail. This reflects a poverty of imagination, which has been carefully cultivated by the ideological machinery of capitalism.

Not long after, I had what you might call a eureka moment. I was working on a long report that envisioned what a green transition might look like in Europe. One day, I was editing a section submitted by an Italian architect. In it, he argued that to build sustainable cities Europe needed to shift to prefabricated, high-rise apartment blocks surrounded by parks and public amenities. I was living in Moscow at the time, on the fourteenth floor of a prefabricated high-rise apartment block surrounded by parks and public amenities. I looked out the kitchen window and wondered: What was this society that, many decades ago, began to build the future we are only now envisioning? That led me to study processes of socialist construction.

Fidel Castro once said that when he first read The Communist Manifesto, he began to find explanations for phenomena that are typically explained in terms of individual human failings—moral failings. He began to understand, he said, the historical processes and social processes that produce both great wealth and terrible immiseration. You don’t need a map or microscope to see class divisions, he said. I think about that often. What Castro meant—and what you learn from reading revolutionaries like Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V. I. Lenin, Walter Rodney, and others—is that there are observable processes of contradiction and class antagonism that shape the world. The job of the left is not to hover above these processes and preach progressive ideas. This is the domain of idealism, of liberalism. You can’t build the future with ideas. You can’t repair the environment with ideas. You can’t feed the hungry with ideas. Our job is to build power through struggle, at every step seeking to institutionalize that power, building structures that can realize the aspirations of the people. That is what the great processes of socialist construction—past and present—teach us.

DB: I agree that building institutions on the left is vital. I think there is an increasing consciousness among left-leaning thinkers, activists, and scholars of the need to focus on organizational issues, on strategy, on building power, and not merely on symbolic gestures or purely theoretical problems. But recent history has shown the difficulty of creating lasting institutional change: from the anti-World Trade Organization protests of 1999 in Seattle to the Iraq War protests of 2003 to the Occupy movements of 2011. Moreover, even when leftist parties can organize and achieve political power at the national level (for instance, Syriza in 2015), they have proven incapable of challenging dominant global institutions. Or, turning to the Global South, progressive projects have struggled to freely develop (Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, among others) in large part due to U.S. imperialism.

I’d like to turn, then, to the question of internationalism and how it relates to building power on the left. I feel that many individuals, students, and even progressive activists see international politics as distant from their everyday life or local struggles. This is very different from, say, the long 1960s, where resistance to the Vietnam War, decolonization, and socialist construction were seen as interrelated and part of the same struggle. Could you explain, first, why internationalism is important to building progressive, leftist institutions? And, second, why you propose the Third International, or Communist International, as an important resource to rebuild internationalism in the contemporary moment?

PW: There is a story I have heard repeatedly—the cast changes, the setting changes, but the story stays roughly the same. Moved by the exploits of Che Guevara, an enthusiastic U.S. socialist travels to Nicaragua. He visits the encampments of the Sandinista movement, which is waging armed struggle against the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship. “I want to join your struggle,” they say. “What can I do to help you?” The response is blunt: “Go home and make a revolution in the United States.”

The answer tells us two important things about internationalism.

First, the struggle of the Sandinista movement does not occur in isolation. It takes place against the backdrop of overwhelming U.S. imperial violence, which is the international extension of its oppressive, racist, and colonial politics at home. In the 1980s, Nicaragua was subjected to an economic and military blockade. Its harbors were mined. The Contras—a fascist force that massacred hundreds of thousands of people across Latin America—were covertly armed and trained to destroy the aspirations of the people. There was a very real need to sever the threads that bound Nicaragua’s brutal immiseration with the prosperity of the U.S. ruling classes—and that necessitated building a revolution in the United States.

Second, the construction of a revolutionary process is in itself an internationalist act. What can you do for the people of Haiti, or the people of Cuba, or the people of Western Sahara, or the people of Palestine, or the people of Venezuela as an individual, without first building power? Can you send them a tanker of oil? Can you send them a container of medical supplies? Can you help them build modern industrial capacities—or support their green transition? The degree of our collective power at home, and the political orientation of our movements, dictates the shape of our commitments abroad.

In 1918, Lenin wrote a piece railing against those who sided with their governments in the First World War. In privileging the “defense” of their countries over the overthrow of those responsible for the war, he wrote, these forces substituted internationalism with a petty nationalism—backing a predatory capitalist and imperialist leadership against the imperative of peace and social revolution. In the end, Lenin said, the position of the Bolsheviks was vindicated. The October Revolution generated the ideas, strategies, and theories that came to power a global revolutionary movement. Like messengers from the future, the Russian people pierced through the terrors of capitalism, and revealed a path forward.

Turning that path into a highway was, to a great degree, the mission of the Third International. Through it, Lenin said, the nascent USSR would lend a “helping hand” to peoples seeking emancipation from colonialism. That mission was born from a thesis that echoes in our story from Nicaragua. The thesis is that European capitalism draws its strength not from its industrial prowess, but from the systematic looting of its colonies. That same process both feeds and clothes the European working class, suppressing their revolutionary aspirations, and generates the material power that sustains their exploitation. The police forces, prisons, weapons, and tactics tested and honed in the colonies are always, after all, readily turned against workers back home. The primary duty of internationalism, then, is to strike at capitalism’s foundations: colonialism and imperialism.

These ideas carry great weight in our time. Whenever we—ensconced in the comforts of the imperial world—advance ideas for the reform of the capitalist system, we are effectively saying: “We don’t care that over two billion people go to bed hungry. We don’t care that hundreds of millions already live in a wrecked climate. We don’t care for the people who suffocate under the weight of our sanctions. Their plight doesn’t concern us.” The theories of the Third International teach us that the power of our ruling classes is the mirror image of the immiseration of the great planetary majority. Now, as countries and peoples begin to assert themselves against U.S. hegemony and its drive towards nuclear and environmental exterminism, our task is to build power with the grain of that historical process—not against it. Now, more than at any point in human history, is the time to build a revolutionary struggle grounded in clear anti-imperialist politics.

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DB: Let’s turn to concrete organizational questions of how to build such a revolutionary movement. The late Marxist scholar and activist Samir Amin was an active participate in organizing across borders and bridging the divide between the Global North and Global South. Amin called for launching a “Fifth International” in 2006 or a “New International” just before his death in 2018. The latter call generated important discussion among scholars, theorists, and activists about how best to “do” politics in the context of neoliberal globalization. Much of the debate revolves around two issues: (1) the longstanding debate on the left of finding the right balance between a “horizontalist” perspective (democratic, pluralist, non-hierarchical, open to various ideological tendencies) and a “verticalist” one (strict criteria of membership, centralized decision-making); and (2) what is the right or appropriate level (local, national, international, global) at which to organize.

What are some of the organizational challenges and successes you’ve encountered in your own experience building left internationalism today?

PW: Organization is simply the way in which we store and instantiate our collective capacity to act—coming into contact with others, forming communities, building confidence, and making the strategic and programmatic decisions about the future that we want to build.

How helpful is the distinction between the “horizontal” and the “vertical”? In my mind, those who reflexively privilege the “horizontal” over the “vertical” cling to the view—cultivated to a great extent in the anti-communist project—that the outcomes we want can spontaneously materialize without us actively pursuing them. That when things become bad enough, the anger of the masses will translate into change. Instead, as movements have repeatedly learned, a commitment to extreme “horizontalism” operates as an obstacle to unity and provides fertile ground for the emergence of invisible hierarchies that immobilize and breed discontent. Equally, organizations that are sometimes derided as “vertical” made tremendous leaps in what we might now call inclusivity. For the first time in history, Lenin’s Comintern brought the demands of women, anticolonial movements, national liberation movements, Black liberation movements, and others under its banner—translating diversity into collective power grounded in a shared analysis of the political situation.

We need to build institutions prepared to address the profound challenges that confront humanity. What are these challenges? In his proposal for a new international, Amin described the U.S.-led imperialist system as totalitarian. I side with Domenico Losurdo in questioning the integrity of that concept, but in this case it is perhaps uniquely appropriate. Capitalism and imperialism sever our connection to the productive process, to nature, to other human beings, and to our own imaginations. We become trapped in a world of imposed ideas, imposed structures. The history we learn, the clothes we wear, the possibilities that we ascribe to the future—these are not ours. They form through the operation of capital accumulation at the global scale, a process that we sometimes euphemistically describe as “globalization,” but which is more accurately understood as imperialism. Extreme violence has been wielded—and continues to be wielded—to preserve this system. Its primary function, as Amin reminds us, is to preserve the “historical privilege” of the colonizers to pillage the resources and exploit the workers of the Global South. But the system is not inevitable.

Marx and Engels devoted their lives to showing that historical processes are not arbitrary. They have motor forces that can be studied and whose movements can be charted. The interaction of these forces generates tensions, or contradictions, that manifest in different ways at different times in our history. Revolutionary processes that ended the enslavement of human beings gave way to a new system of economic organization in which the primary contradiction was between workers and factory owners, or, elsewhere, peasants and landlords. History has shown that these contradictions can be overcome, but only through the collective efforts of the people. This cannot happen spontaneously, and it cannot happen if we cling to the false belief that the previous system can be redeemed or reformed—that a fairer slavery is possible, or that a fairer imperialism is possible. So, one of the primary tasks—and challenges—of the internationalist is to break through the structures of alienation that imprison our minds, our bodies, and our societies.

What does that mean in practice? It means creating the conditions by which peoples and movements from disparate parts of the world can learn from one another and become aware of one another’s fundamental interconnection—overcoming, for example, the idea that the struggle of the Amazon warehouse worker in the United States is separate from the struggle of the garment worker in Bangladesh. When we buy a pair of jeans on Amazon, we wear the labor of the textile weaver in Dhaka. And in that labor, we find the sources both of our collective power and of Amazon’s monopoly power. Our power exists in the socialization of production, in the fact that manufacturing is a collective process and a set of social relations that can be disrupted or captured by the organized working class. Amazon’s power is born of the surplus value generated by its capacity to exploit, dispossess, and plunder, both at home and abroad—a “historical privilege” currently protected by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the 800 U.S. military bases that circle the globe, a sanctions regime that suffocates states seeking to embark on paths of sovereign development, and other infrastructures of economic and military coercion.

But understanding is one part of the puzzle. Sloganeering, however radical, can only take us so far. How can we help build the trade unions in Bangladesh, who are resisting international capital and its agents in government? And how do we politicize the popular movements in the United States that hold the capacity to sever imperialism’s grip on the rest of the world, but largely eschew anti-imperialism as a political horizon? There is a dynamic interplay here between the local sites of organization and action, the transnational networks that seek to unite and coordinate that action in a programmatically coherent way, and the global horizon, where the framework of imperialist globalization reveals to us the threads by which our struggles are connected. The geographic scale of action must dynamically respond to the conditions it confronts. That is why, to me, an International must be a laboratory of political action—grounded in a comprehensive theory of the political and economic conjuncture, faithful to the historical tradition it builds upon, but not dogmatically wedded to this or that organizational template.

DB: I’d like to ask you a question about language and terminology. Specifically, the difficultly in effectively framing and articulating a left internationalist laboratory you describe. Since the rise of neoliberal globalization, which kicked into high gear after the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the very vocabulary of internationalism itself has given way to terms like global justice, global citizenship, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism. These terms are all palatable to a world in which nation-states have become subordinate to global finance. Such terms have seeped into progressive social movements, NGOs, institutions of higher education, and United Nations entities, at least in part to disengage and disassociate from, or simply reject, an entire history of internationalist struggle that you touched on earlier. What is at stake in reclaiming internationalism as a political horizon today?

PW: The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński—among my earliest political influences— compared history to a river. On the surface, he said, the water moves quickly. Beneath the surface, the flow is steadier. Similarly, events pass us by quickly, but in their multitude we can observe stable structures and patterns of thought, which change over long historical epochs. I start here because internationalism carries within it concrete traditions of thought and action that we derive from Marxism, which contain within them a view of the river’s slow undercurrent.

The most important of these is dialectical and historical materialism, an analytical method that teaches us to train our eye not on individual events, but on the movement of history. The dominant philosophy of our time compels us to see only the surface of the river, only the quick succession of events. But these events pass us by with astonishing speed. We struggle to discern patterns, we become overwhelmed. Unable to situate developments in the world within their proper context, we begin to suffer from amnesia. We forget our history. Our creativity is imprisoned because we lose the ability to relate our actions to reality. And our politics resolve into idealism: we believe that a just world can be imagined into being; that our system can be transformed by gradual reform; or that nothing can really be done. Rodney outlined three features of this bourgeois perspective. First, it purports to speak for all of humanity rather than a particular class—the logic that says, “we are all in this together.” Second, it is highly subjective, claiming universal truths while concealing its ideological commitments—just look at the entire field of economics! Third, it refuses to acknowledge contradictions.

Marxism repudiates these notions. It teaches us that historical movement is a product of contradictions between and within things. You cannot have poverty without wealth, a proletariat without a bourgeoisie. The position of these classes reflects their relationship with the material world, with the means of production. The ideas that each group subscribes to also relate to their material environment, to their class position. Idealism is the philosophy of the bourgeoisie, while communism is the philosophy of the workers and oppressed peoples. And central to the communist tradition is the idea that collective human effort can resolve contradictions in favor of the oppressed. In his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, Marx wrote that “philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.” Marx was not just a thinker. He founded the International Workingmen’s Association, the First International, which emerged in part from textile workers’ opposition to British involvement in the U.S. Civil War. At the time, Lord Palmerston’s government was plotting to intervene on the side of the Confederacy. The workers of Britain saved Western Europe, Marx said in his inaugural speech to the First International, from plunging into “an infamous crusade for the propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic.” The conviction that we have the capacity to change the world—that it is our duty to change the world—is inseparable from the tradition of internationalism, which is a communist tradition.

Today, with their imaginations stymied by old, unchanging ways of thought, many organizations do not set out to change the world, because they do not exist in the world. They do not exist among children who struggle to eat, or the workers who struggle to make ends meet, or the peasants dispossessed from their land. They are bourgeois in their makeup. So, they subscribe to categories of thought that hold little relevance for the hungry, the poor, or the dispossessed—and the institutions they build do not serve the interests of those for whom the world must change. The language they use is a product of their class commitment, and one that has been carefully cultivated: the substitution of movements for liberation with NGOified sloganeers is an instrument of demobilization. It shields the status quo by institutionalizing bourgeois ideology.

In a sense, then, everything is at stake in reclaiming internationalism as a political tradition—and I have a very optimistic view of our prospects. Liberalism has not, cannot, and will not find answers to the complex crises facing humanity. But, from the violent, ceaseless flow of events that confront us, internationalism helps us recover sight of history’s laws of motion, and of the peoples and movements that are its engines. It reveals to us the ways in which our struggles and experiences are connected across borders, and the class dynamics that shape them. Even if they have yet to take hold, the ideas of internationalism, of socialism, are alluring to many precisely because the prevailing ideology is not ours. But, where bourgeois thought fails us, socialism shines a light through capitalism’s darkness, reclaims the past from its amnesia, and recovers hope from its futurelessness. These are our traditions, and we have nothing to fear in proclaiming them.

DB: My last question is on how to formulate a progressive, anti-imperialist foreign policy. At the end of Marx’s inaugural address you mentioned, Marx affirms that the working classes recognize “the duty to master themselves the mysteries of international politics; to watch the diplomatic acts of their respective governments; to counteract them, if necessary, by all means in their power.” Today, a lot of mystery, or deliberate mystification, swirls around international politics, not least the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Among the anti-imperialist left, the debate tends to turn on how to understand imperialism. Should imperialism be seen in the singular, as predominately U.S.-led; or are there multiple, competing imperialisms, such that Russia, China, and the United States would all be equally imperialist powers? How does this debate impact the development of a coherent foreign policy for the internationalist left today?

PW: What is imperialism? In the intellectual tradition of the left, it refers to a situation in which capitalist economies mature, the rate of profit falls, and corporations begin to look abroad for resources to extract and labor to exploit. This is the same dynamic that sees small “Main Street” businesses grow into chains, then regional conglomerates, and then into national and ultimately international monopolies. The laws of capitalism demand that expansion. Companies that fail to grow are pushed out of business or bought up by others. Then, state power is wielded to turn sovereign nations into export markets, sources of cheap resources and labor, and outlets for investment for these corporations.

Today, the United States has a degree of power that is incomparable to any empire in human history. This is a product of a particular historical moment that I situate at the end of the Second World War. Having lost 27 million lives to defeat Nazism, the Soviet Union was in tatters. Europe was ruined. China, having faced an even longer war at the heel of a century of colonial subjugation, faced a desperate situation. But the United States emerged not only unscathed, it emerged economically and militarily strengthened, cloaked beneath the terrible aura of the atomic bomb, giving it something resembling omnipotence in the international arena.

How has it wielded that power? From the very beginning, it has wielded it to suffocate humanity’s aspirations for sovereignty and democracy. In the late 1940s, the people of Korea rose up against feudalism and the brutal U.S.-backed dictatorship of Syngman Rhee, which operated death camps for suspected communists. In response, the United States destroyed the north of Korea, killing roughly a quarter of its population and destroying 85 percent of its buildings. It threatened to use nuclear weapons on several occasions. This holocaust has largely been written out of history—and its victims are now the subject of vicious and routine derision by those who sought to erase them. If you ever wondered what the world might look like had fascism prevailed, look no further than the U.S. destruction of Korea.

Then came Iran in 1953, Vietnam in 1961, Guatemala in 1954, Congo in 1956, Vietnam in 1961, Brazil in 1964, Indonesia in 1965, Chile in 1973, Nicaragua in the 1980s—the list goes on and on. Wherever the United States arrived, its parasitic capitalist model of globalization followed like a cancer, suffocating states’ capacities to respond to the needs of their people. Tens of millions of lives have been claimed by direct or proxy violence instigated by the United States, and many more from the effects of being subordinated to the U.S.-led imperial system. Roughly five million people die each year because they do not have access to adequate healthcare—a problem that socialist projects have largely eliminated. But socialism is not allowed in the U.S. template for humanity.

We may ask a counterfactual, then: How might the world look if the United States had not picked up imperialism’s mantle after the Second World War? The defeat of Japanese imperialism and the German colonial project in Eastern Europe—and we must insist on its recognition as a colonial project—severely weakened the colonial powers. It set off a process that saw the British and French empires shrink dramatically. It inaugurated a new, modern consensus for humanity, with the adoption of the UN Charter and the pursuit of decolonization. It gave great prestige to the project of state socialism. The United States pushed against these currents—against the movement of history—and built a global system through which it exerts, at the barrel of a gun, near-total financial, cultural, and political power over the vast majority of humanity. No country in history has a comparable military footprint or proven capacity for destruction.

Attempts to downplay or relativize this violence are an insidious form of apologia. More often than not, accusations of, say, “Chinese imperialism” are rooted entirely in the hypothetical: “China is building infrastructure that could allow it to become a new imperial power.” In this case, the “twin imperialisms” thesis serves to put on equal footing an unsubstantiated conjecture with the actual violence of imperialism—it puts a moral claim on equal footing with an empirical fact. As the historian Vijay Prashad has remarked, we are afraid of Huawei’s 5G towers because we are told they could be used to spy on us, but we are unconcerned by the actual spying that is carried out by the U.S. government, which Edward Snowden and others have revealed. What is this but another red scare, scaffolded in our culture by the increasingly virulent Sinophobia manufactured by the United States and its allies? There are also more surreptitious forms of this on the left: attempts to “redefine” imperialism and cleave it from its analytical tradition to make it more suitable to the particular moral commitments of the day.

This phenomenon—the denial of imperialism—is infantilizing. It confuses left strategy, because it severs our ability to relate to the actual processes of history. It immobilizes, because in a world where everything is bad, nothing is possible. And it risks producing a moment in which, as U.S. violence against China escalates, forces on the western left will side with their own blood-soaked ruling classes rather than build power against them. Guarding against these impulses is among the most important tasks of the day. The moment has arrived for us to heed Lenin’s call to turn the imperialist war into a war on the bourgeoisie that suffocates us.

Note: A French version of this interview was published by the Association Nationale des Communistes on September 18, 2023.