The Publishing Problem: Reading Between the Lines of Industry Self-Censorship

By Chris Richards

Republished from the author’s substack.

At first I didn’t know what to make of Judd Legum’s piece on what he calls “Scholastic’s Bigot Button.” It raises some interesting ideas about whether or not a publisher should pander to conservative political biases by allowing them to hide liberal titles. It shows how not offending certain kinds of white people continues to be an important cultural priority. It informs readers of a right wing pressure campaign against Scholastic Corporation, spearheaded by a conservative Christian publisher of children’s books called “Brave Books.” What it doesn’t really engage with is who Scholastic Corporation is and why the company has so much power.

This is important because who Scholastic is, what they do, and the power they have is central to the right wing pressure campaign to which Scholastic is capitulating. At the moment, Scholastic is selling at $37.48 a share. As Judd Legum points out in his article, it is a publicly traded company with more than a billion dollars of market capitalization. What that means in plain English is that Scholastic’s division Arthur A. Levine Books is the original US publisher of JK Rowling and Philip Pullman. Levine himself left Scholastic in 2019 to establish his own company, but Scholastic still handles the back catalog. That means Harry Potter and “The Golden Compass” are controlled by Scholastic here in the US. In addition, Scholastic itself is the publisher of Suzanne Collins. That’s a lot of Young Adult literary culture in one place.

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That’s just one of Scholastic’s four main business lines. Children’s and Young Adult publishing is big money as it is, but the media rights for those books is big money too. Which is why Scholastic Entertainment exists, to develop intellectual property from Clifford the Big Red Dog, to Harry Potter, the Hunger Games, and the Golden Compass, to Goosebumps. There’s a lot of money in this area too, and a lot of power, but this isn’t why Kirk Cameron’s publisher is going after Scholastic.

You see, Scholastic pretty much controls school book fairs. It turns out that schools don’t just hold book fair themselves using decorations made by teachers and librarians. They pay someone to run the book fair for them. Usually that someone is Scholastic Book Fairs. So nearly every time a public school holds a book fair, Scholastic makes a buck. Scholastic also has book fair packages designed to appeal to different schools as different markets. Here is where Brave Books and their pressure campaign targeting Scholastic comes in.

According to its website, Brave Books was founded by Trent Talbot. Dr. Trent Talbot was a practicing ophthalmologist who was so disgusted by “the inappropriate content being pushed upon children”that he just needed to found a right wing Christian kids’ book and YA publishing company to give parents and schools “a wholesome alternative.” So he naturally decided that Kevin Sorbo and Kirk Cameron were the people he should turn to for help. I think of “wholesome” and I immediately want Kevin Sorbo to teach my kids about masculinity, right?

Because being an obnoxious conservative bigot is a brand in today’s America, Brave Books opened its own book club and book fair divisions to compete with Scholastic and chose an openly confrontational marketing tactic. Brave decided to accuse Scholastic of advancing the LGBTQ+ agenda, because we all know that blatantly accusing your competition of wanting to groom parents’ kids is one way to stake out your own recognizable brand. It also makes it clear that you value the thoughts, feelings, and spending money of the Christian conservative market.

This is the basic background of the specific issue that Legum is writing about. I want to be clear about this background before touching on the specifics of his piece and the core problem left unaddressed by his piece. That core problem, imo, is more important than the immediate specifics of what Scholastic is doing under pressure from Brave. The problem is one of capitalism, and of how the fiduciary responsibilities of corporate officers are seen in the modern business culture.

The specifics of this news are simple. In the face of a marketing offensive from a competitor accusing Scholastic of marketing “inappropriate material” at book fairs, Scholastic has introduced an easy button that school employees planning a book fair can use to eliminate any “objectional content” from their school’s book fairs. Naturally the “objectional content” is all about racial inclusion, the lives of Black people like Ketanji Brown Jackson and John Lewis, and teaching kids that LGBTQ+ families are as valuable as traditional Christian families.

It’s important to keep this in the proper context and look at the material underpinnings of what is happening. This isn’t about Scholastic executives being afraid they will be censored by an out of control state governor like Ron DeSantis. This isn’t even about complaints being made by vigilante parents. This is about a corporate competitor of Scholastic choosing to compete by condemning the morality of Scholastic, as a company, in order to try to sell some schools Christian book fair packages. This is the business of capitalism as usual, with Brave Brooks choosing to brand themselves as the “choice for Christians who want their kids to be safe at the book fair.” It’s a marketing gimmick.

When Scholastic adds a button to their system to exclude liberal content to which conservatives might object, they aren’t knuckling under to any public censorship campaign. They aren’t bowing to the forces of a repressive state. No, it’s much simpler.

They are protecting their market share by giving conservative Christian school employees the easy and quick option to keep liberal material out of the book fair. They don’t want to lose market share because the school districts in Texas and Florida go with the conservative book fair option. So they are making sure their interface allows conservative Christian school employees to feel comfortable with their buying decisions.

There’s a conversation that we should be having about corporate control of our “public” education system that we’re not having.

How the Capitalist Class Censors Dissenting Voices Via the US Government: The Case of TikTok and the Midwestern Marx Institute

By Carlos Garrido, Noah Krachvik, and Edward Liger Smith

​The First Amendment of the United States Constitution says that “Congress shall make no law… Abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” Yet in 2023 the United States is attempting to extradite Julian Assange because he published proof of U.S. civilian executions in Iraq, systematic torture at Guantanamo Bay, and the DNC rigging of the 2016 primary election against Democratic Socialist candidate Bernie Sanders, which is itself a violation of the Democratic rights enshrined in the American Constitution. The U.S., with its supposed constitutional guarantee of free speech and media, has indicted four leaders from the African People's Socialist Party (APSP) and Uhuru Movement on flimsy claims of “advancing Russian propaganda,” simply because they challenge the narrative of the imperialist financial cartels and war mongers. Even if we look only at these examples, how can we say there is freedom of speech or press in our modern age of neoliberal capitalist-imperialism? The Political establishment has shown that it will crack down on anyone who shares information that is damaging to its foreign policy interests, and most social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter, owned by wealthy shareholders like Mark Zuckerberg and others, have proven not only to be impressionable to the influence of US intelligence agencies like the FBI and other institutions of the ruling class, but (after the release of the Twitter files) directly steered by them at times.

No social media platform is more tightly linked to the intelligence community, NATO, or US State Department than the incredibly popular Tik Tok app. In 2020 the Midwestern Marx Institute for Marxist Theory and Political Analysis, within a few months of work, amassed 375,000 Tik Tok followers when the app was still owned and operated by the Beijing, China based company Bytedance, a testament to the people-oriented algorithms of Bytedance that allow any content that is genuinely popular to go “viral”, and a stark contrast to the money-centered way our Western software works. Unfortunately, that year the Biden administration would force ByteDance to hand over management of their U.S. servers to the Texas-based company ORACLE, a company with intimate ties to the CIA. No sooner had news of this forced change of control happened would the Institute have its account, which received millions of views on many videos containing factual information that challenged the narratives of the US war machine, banned from the platform. A second account that we started when the first one was wiped quickly accumulated 200,000 followers, and right when a growth parallel to the previous account was evident, the second account would also be banned. This blatant censorship would continue without explanation as the Institute had five more accounts banned by Tik Tok after they started to quickly gain popularity. It was later revealed that Oracle had hired a litany of former US State Department and Intelligence Operatives to manage the content for Tik Tok, as well as a few NATO executives for good measure. Tik Tok said that they deleted 320,000 “Russian accounts” which included many American socialist organizers who have never been associated with Russia in any way, such as an account ran by an organization of socialist organizers called “The Vanguard” that had over 100,000 followers when it was deleted.

Countless hours of our work that helped inform millions of people were stripped from the internet with little to no explanation, while truly hateful and incendiary accounts were allowed to remain up. Our institute's co-founder and editor, Eddie Liger Smith, was doxxed twice during this period, having his phone number, job, private social media profiles, and location shared by two creators working in tandem to attack Midwestern Marx. Both responsible accounts, Cbass429 and ThatDaneshGuy, were allowed to remain up until recently, when Cbass429 was finally banned for a completely unrelated incident. However, ThatDaneshGuy still has 1.6 million followers on Tik Tok, where he consistently calls for his political opposition to be fired from their jobs. ThatDaneshGuy called for his followers to contact Eddie’s place of employment and ask for his firing, claiming that it was deserved because of Eddie’s stance against US backed regime change efforts in Iran, which Danesh conflated with support for the Iranian Government executing people. Similar campaigns to these have been waged against other Institute co-founder Carlos Garrido and Institute contributor Kayla Popuchet, the latter who, like Eddie Smith, was fired from their place of employment because of the work they do for the Institute. On Tik Tok, the voices which speak the truth and champion peace are quickly banned, while those who harass and deceive people with imperialist lies are upheld by the algorithms.

Since the transfer of power to US entities, Tik Tok users have been fed a steady diet of neoliberal and imperialist propaganda, while critical voices are systematically being censored by the app’s content moderation staff. Neoliberal commentators like Philip Defranco are never made to retract errors, such as when Phil claimed that Russia blew up the Nord Stream Pipeline, despite all the evidence at the time pointing towards a Biden Administration sabotage. Award-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh later proved this to be the case in his detailed report on the incident. Despite all this, Defranco never had his account suspended or removed for posting this misinformation, and his video remains on the platform to this day, as do his comments accusing anyone who suggested the US might have sabotaged the pipeline of believing “Putin propaganda.” The Midwestern Marx Institute had predicted that Biden sabotaged the pipeline before it was revealed in detail and was unsurprisingly attacked and reported for doing so.

Censorship, clearly, does not emerge out of a void. And so, we must ask the question: what are the social conditions which make censorship necessary? Who does the censored speech threaten? Who does it uplift? In whose interests is censorship carried out? On whose side is truth - a category our moribund imperialist era, dominated by postmodern philosophical irrationalism, scoffs at? The liberal ideal of freedom of press can never be actualized so long as the press is owned by a small ruling class, by corporations and shareholders who profit from war and the exploitation of the mass of people. They will always censor dissent and push coverage that suits their foreign and domestic interests. This has been the case throughout history, and the modern Western ruling class is, in this regard, no different from any other. It lies, it manipulates, it misinforms to the best of its ability. It needs a population that can view its actions as ethical and just, and so it must spend countless hours and dollars papering over every crack that appears in the facade its media apparatus has built around the minds of the people.

A revolving door between the media, intelligence agencies, NATO, and the U.S. State Department is only the logical result of a society based on capitalist relations of production, where capitalists not only control the production of material goods, but the production of information as well. The ruling class sees the media, including social media, as a vital part of the societal superstructure that is needed to maintain and reproduce the relations of production at the core of society. In other words, they see it as an important tool to convince you that capitalism and U.S. Imperialism are good and eternal. Under these social relations, the constitutional right to free speech and media have always been exclusive - it excludes all speech and media which substantially challenges the dominant forms of societal intercourse. The freedom of speech and media is, therefore, actually the freedom of pro-capitalist speech and media. V. I. Lenin’s description of the media in capitalist society rings truer than ever in the 2020s, it is dominated by an “atmosphere of lies and deception in the name of the ‘freedom and equality’ of capital, equality of the starved and the overfed.” Any absolute statements about the freedom of the press must be followed by the Leninist question: “freedom of the press… for which class?” The capitalist media’s freedom to deceive the masses in their defense of the existing order is in contradiction to the masses’ interests in searching for and publicizing the truth.

Those who keep our people misinformed and ignorant, who have made their life’s purpose to attack truth-tellers, do so under the insidiously categorized guise of ‘combating misinformation.’ In their topsy-turvy invented reality, as Michael Parenti called it, they posit themselves as the champions of truth and free speech – a paradox as laughable as a vegan butcher. Anyone with the courage to fight for the freedom to speak truth to power should unite in fighting this blatant attack on our constitutional rights. We must stand against this censorship from our ruling class, those who are the worst purveyors of misinformation imaginable, and who now, in the backwards-world name of ‘fighting misinformation,’ censor the truth. 

There is ‘fighting misinformation,’ and there is fighting misinformation. The divide of class interests between the ruling class of the West, and the good, honest, hard-working people who live under their regime could not be clearer. One side finds it necessary to invent a reality, under the guise of fighting the ‘mis-informers,’ that paints the world in a disfigured backwardness, the other side, on the contrary, is sick to death of being lied to by the media machine, and their screams of “fake news” grow more and more common every day. The American people not only deserve the truth, but absolutely need its existence to find commonality in the world, stability, and the ability to pursue lives of meaning and dignity. They are tired of the private monopolization of media that has erased the ability for regular working people to speak on an equal playing field; they feel their voices drowned in a sea of well-funded lies by MSNBC, Fox News, and the rest of them. This struggle has crystallized into a fight over The Truth itself.

And so, if fighting misinformation is to be done, we must begin by asking: Where was the crackdown on the media outlets who got 4.5 million people killed by claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Where are the crackdowns on those who are lying us into a third World War with nuclear-armed powers? Where are the crackdowns against those who play the drums for those marching humanity towards nuclear Armageddon? Why is it only the outlets calling for peace that are dubbed “Putin propagandists” and wiped from the internet? Where are the crackdowns on the blood-thirsty warmongers? The answer is: they are nowhere, and they will continue to be nowhere while giant corporate financial interests control the lives and realities of regular Americans. Truth is censored and lies are proliferated because it serves the interests of the ruling capitalist class, and only through the overthrow of this class can a real freedom of thought, not an abstract empty freedom to deceive the people, be achieved. Until then, all we can have – it seems – is a media and culture that elevates the most odious imperialist voices while suppressing those who seek truth and peace. Nonetheless, the fight must continue, and with the dignity that comes from the incessant speaking of truth to power, the enemies of humanity will fall.

Let us remember the words of Julian Assange, whom the imperialists have rotting in a prison because of his sterling bravery… because he is a true journalist and not a lapdog of the powerful: “if wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by TRUTH.”

Carlos L. Garrido is a philosophy teacher at Southern Illinois University, editor at the Midwestern Marx Institute, and author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism and Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview.

Noah Khrachvik is a working class organizer, teacher, and editor at the Midwestern Marx Institute. 

Edward Liger Smith is an American political scientist and editor at the Midwestern Marx Institute.

The Necessity of Dismantling the U.S.: A conversation with Ajamu Baraka

By Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

On February 26th, I interviewed Ajamu Baraka for my podcast. Baraka is a veteran grassroots organizer whose roots are in the Black Liberation Movement and anti-apartheid and Central American solidarity struggles. He is an internationally recognized leader of the emerging human rights movement in the U.S. and has been at the forefront of efforts to apply the international human rights framework to social justice advocacy in the U.S. for more than 25 years. He is a National Organizer for the Black Alliance for Peace, whose activities we discussed.

Baraka has taught political science at various universities and has been a guest lecturer at academic institutions in the U.S. and abroad. He has appeared on a wide-range of media outlets including CNN, BBC, Telemundo, ABC, RT, the Black Commentator, the Washington Post and the New York Times. He is currently an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and a writer for Counterpunch.

What follows are excerpts from our conversation, edited for clarity. You can listen to the entire interview here.

Kollibri terre Sonnenblume: [In terms of foreign policy], it seems like this last election was just Trump or not-Trump and so there was no discussion about how a Biden administration might be different.

Ajamu Baraka: There really wasn’t. Within the context of the bourgeois press, during the so-called debates, the number of minutes devoted to foreign policy was less than one hour, total. But yet you see that once the Biden administration takes power, some of the first initiatives that they engage in have foreign policy implications. So it’s really incredible that, because of the weight of responsibility that the executive has, that there was so little conversation around foreign policy…

The result was that basically Biden got a pass and there was no real discussion in the campaign and even among civil society. There was an assumption that you just had to get rid of Trump and everything would be just fine. It would be a return to normal. No one talked about what did normal look like and whether what was so-called normal was really in the best interests of not only the people of the US but the people in the global south, who find themselves constantly in the cross-hairs of aggressive US policies.

Sonnenblume: It seems like one untouchable topic these days, both in politics and in civil society, is the US military budget, which as we know takes up over 50% of discretionary spending. It’s obscene. It’s ten times as much as Russia’s is. It’s more than the next ten countries combined. When the conversation comes up of, “How do we pay for Medicare for All?” that’s the perfect opportunity to be like, “Let’s cut that military budget” but then it never comes up…

Baraka: One reason people are not talking about it is because, again, there seems to be bipartisan consensus that the military would get not only what it wants, but even more so. When Donald Trump came into office, that first budget he submitted to Congress included a $54 billion increase in military spending. It’s very interesting because Donald Trump just didn’t know how to filter himself so every once in a while he would say something that was brutally honest, so be blurted out that he thought that that $54 billion was in fact crazy. At first, even Democrats were raising questions about the increase, until a couple months later, I guess they got the memo, and all of a sudden it went quiet. And not only did they give Donald Trump $54 billion increase, they increased it by almost another $30 billion that first year. So that’s been a bipartisan consensus…

The issue we have, as the people, is to make that an issue. To in fact demand that our resources are redeployed to address the objective human rights needs of the people. Because who is benefiting from this 750 billion, or really, over a trillion dollars, spent on defense? It’s the fat cats making the money. These military-industrial complex executives. Everybody’s making money off of this but the people. The people are the ones suffering, so we have to demand that they reduce the spending, that they close down these over 800 military bases worldwide, transfer those resources back to the people. Back to providing housing. Back to providing some decent healthcare. Cleaning up the environment. Creating a first class educational experience for our young people.

But as long as the interests of the rulers prevails, then you’re going to have this obscene behavior, this obscene budget…

We are trying to make people aware of the fact that we have this [global military] basing system, these command structure, and we’re asking a very simple question: Whose interests are being carried out with this enormous expenditure of the public funds? To have these troops, to have these bases that are being built in various parts of the world. Is that helping your family to get a better education? Is that helping you to have some healthcare? A rec center in your community? Do you have access to more capital if you want to start a business? Where is the emphasis? And see, those questions—if the Democrats had been raising those kinds of questions, or pursuing policies that were more in alignment with working class people and the lower elements of the middle class (what we call the petite bourgeoisie)—perhaps the conditions would not have been in place that would have allowed Trump to win the presidency.

These basic questions of whose interests are being served by these policies are the kind of questions that have to be raised on the liberal part of the equation. Because they’re being raised among the radical right and you see a radicalization taking place that culminated in terms of behavior on Jan. 6th.

So there’s a real disadvantage on the part of liberals because they have surrendered their political positions to the neoliberal bourgeoisie and they have disarmed themselves politically and ideologically. As a consequence, they have ceded significant ideological space to the radical right. They’re playing a game that’s very dangerous. Not only are they losing, but all of us are losing as a consequence.

Sonnenblume: You made a reference to neoliberalism being a form or expression of neofascism. I heard you speak about this recently, I believe it was on Black Agenda Radio, and this was new for me to think of it this way. [See Black Agenda Radio 1/25/21.]

Baraka: …What you see is this dangerous coalition of forces, of ruling class forces—Silicon Valley, the military industrial complex, the corporate media companies that control 90% of news and entertainment, and elements of the state: the intelligence agencies—you see the foundation there. We already have the dictatorship of capital. If we want to think about the liberal bourgeois process, it provides a shell for the dictatorship of capital. The shell is not becoming almost an impediment for the neoliberal bourgeoisie. So they are slowly conditioning the US population to accept open fascistic kinds of rule. That’s why they flaunt democracy. That’s why Biden can talk about how he wants to center democracy and human rights, but then turn around and support fascism in Haiti or right-wing elements that are trying to take power in Venezuela.

So not only do I talk about neofascism as having a neoliberal character, it’s important to understand that within the context of the global system, for many years this fascism that we have in the US has been disguised. Because you can have forms of democracy, of democratic practice, at the center, while the connected economies and societies that the empire was connected to, are basically fascism.

When we look at these relationships from the point of view of the oppressed, of the colonized, we say: “Someone explain to us how we didn’t have fascism.”

So for me, I’m hoping that people are alerted to this friendly fascism that’s being developed because in many ways it’s more insidious because it’s not being recognized. So for four years they had us fixated on the theatrics of Donald Trump with his incoherent and clownish behavior, while they were systematically tightening up the national security state, the conditioning of the population to accept an Orwellian-Big-Brother-doublespeak-newspeak kind of environment. It’s very troubling what’s unfolding now because elements who you think would be hip to it, and in opposition, they’ve been helping to go along with it. Just yesterday, the Nation jumped on this whole Facebook thing and called Mark Zuckerberg a danger to democracy. Why? Because they want to engage in even more censorship. To me, it’s kind of crazy.

Sonnenblume: You’ve made a point about this particular topic of social media before, where you’ve talked about how our public space has been privatized.

Baraka: Exactly. It’s been privatized. It’s been colonized. And as a consequence it’s becoming more and more difficult for alternative information to be disseminated. Look, they’ve been wanting to do this for quite some time. Ever since they saw the possibilities and the dangers of the internet and social media. You might recall that at one point, they were attacking what people were referring to as “citizen journalists.” That they weren’t authoritative. That they were just making things up, blah blah blah. It’s always been a concern that information not approved by the authorities would be disseminated and be the source of real political opposition in this country and throughout the entire West. But they never had the nerve to engage in open censorship. But with Russiagate, they had that opportunity to begin laying the ideological foundation and they did it and they did it with a vengeance. So now, four years later, you can have the Nation calling for censorship and no one bats an eye.

Sonnenblume: Within the context of decolonization, do we need to dismantle the United States?

Baraka: Well the short answer is, yes.

Because the United States is a settler-colonial project, a settler-colonial state. It’s had a continuity since 1791, once the new constitutional process was finalized, and that process just basically resulted in the consolidation of the power of the colonists that were on the land since 1619. Even with the Civil War, there’s been continuity, because the US national state won that conflict with the Confederacy. The very fact that the material basis of the US was the conquering of this land and then the confinement of Native peoples to concentration camps that we refer to as “reservations,” provides not only a moral critique but it provides a moral foundation for how a just resolution has to look.

That is, we can’t just be saying, “I’m sorry” and that’s it, or even reparations whatever that’s supposed to be, but it in fact has to be a dismantling of this power, a dismantling of the settler-colonial state.

And that process of dismantling the settler-colonial state and the colonial system requires a decolonization of one’s consciousness. It goes hand-in-hand. That process of decolonizing one’s consciousness is a process in which you root out the ideological foundations of white supremacy. In this society—in this white supremacist, settler-colonial society—everyone who was born—no matter what your ethnicity, nationality or race or whatever—you are subjected to it, and become in essence a white supremacist. It’s part and parcel of the DNA of the US experience. You are taught white supremacy from the very first moments… It’s so pervasive, it’s not even recognized. It becomes just common sense.

So you have to go through a process of purging oneself. Of not seeing Europe as the apex of civilizational development, of understanding that there are other people on this planet who have civilizations, who should be recognized and respected, who have value just as much as the lives of Europeans. You have to rid yourself of Euro-centrism because it’s so pervasive you can’t even see it. So the process of decolonization structurally requires a simultaneous process—maybe even a prior process—of decolonizing one’s consciousness, decolonizing knowledge, decolonizing the very basis of being.

That is the simultaneous process we need to engage in, in this country, and throughout the Western world, because the very notion of modernity, of what is human development, has to be re-thought. Part of that re-thinking is part of the decolonization process. De-centering Europe. De-centering the entire process of modernity.

Sonnenblume: So this makes me wonder: To what degree is the modern technological and industrial state dependent on white supremacy then? Because the wealth that makes it happen comes from these structures. We look at our phones and our other technologies and it’s a colonial and white supremacist process that’s extracting those materials. We know about the child slave labor that’s happening in Africa. Is it even possible to have modern life without it? Can we make a cell phone without colonialism, I guess I’m asking?

Baraka: That’s a very important and profound question. The relationships of colonialism are such that they when they are separate, there has to be a change in what we consume, how we consume, how we relate to nature. That’s part of the process. Now we can’t turn back the hands of time. We have these industrial processes, but right now those industrial processes and the technologies being developed are such that they are almost instruments against collective humanity.

So part of the decolonization process is to take hold of those technological innovations and industrial processes, and reorganize them in a way that makes more sense, that helps to elevate life, and to protect life. And that means a lot of profound changes. For example, what that might mean for these megacities that we have? Can we continue to afford these megacities? When we take hold of the industrial base, maybe we will be able to reorganize agriculture in a different way that will allow people to leave these cities and go back to the countryside and engage in small plot farming, for local and national markets.

The whole logic and rationale of capitalist society has to be looked at in a new way. There are a number of movements that are in fact doing that. That make an argument that we’ve got to completely reorganize every aspect of society if we’re going to be able to survive, because one of the obvious contradictions and consequences of the industrial processes we have is that we’re basically destroying the ability of human beings to sustain themselves on this planet. Mother Earth is going to survive. She might be altered in many ways, but we are the ones who are going to destroy our ability to live on this planet.

So until we’re able to seize power from this minority of the human population that is invested in production processes and social relations that force all of to have to work for them, that put profit over the planet, and over people, then that kind of irrational production will continue, to our detriment. So we have a vested interest in a global revolutionary process.

The major contradiction that Marx identified was between the capitalists and the workers. And that’s a continuing contradiction, but at this stage of monopoly global capital and the irrationality of these processes, the major contradiction today, in my opinion, is between capitalism—the capitalist class—and collective humanity. We have to take power from these maniacs if we’re going to survive. So there’s an objective, material need for us to recognize that we have an interest in taking power back from the capitalist class if we want to survive for ourselves and for our children.

These are the kinds of things we have to look at. When we take power, what kind of societies do we build? That is the other part of the conversation, because you have some people that will argue that there’s some models being developed that represent how a post-capitalist society might look. Well, maybe. But there’s some things in some of these models that some of us don’t want to follow. So what would be created remains to be seen.

But we’ve got to find a new kind of ethical framework, a framework that is based on cooperation, based on equality, based on rationality and decency. I think we will collectively be able to figure out how to reorganize society in ways that will ensure we can survive and live as decent human beings in a new kind of world. I think we can do that.

Listen to the entire interview here.

"We Are Entering a New Totalitarian Era": An Interview with Ajamu Baraka

By Ann Garrison

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

In this interview for Pacifica Radio’s series on “Covid, Race, and Democracy,” Ajamu Baraka warns of a new era of totalitarian neoliberalism.

Ann Garrison: On January 20, we saw Joe Biden carry on about “unity” behind seven-foot fences topped with razor wire and 25,000 plus National Guard troops deployed . One friend of mine said that this pointed to an irony deficiency. Is there anything you'd like to say about it? 

Ajamu Baraka: Well, I think it is ironic, but it's quite understandable that the kinds of activities that the US has been involved in promoting and supporting globally—undermining democracies, subverting states, undermining and destroying any semblance of the rule of law—have basically come back to haunt them. You have a militant movement in the US partially inspired by the inability of the state and the system to address their material interests and to look at their concerns regarding their own understanding of democracy and its deficiencies. They feel like they lack space to articulate those views, and they’ve decided to engage in militant actions to make sure that their voices are heard, and they believe that they are upholding democracy.

And their experience with the state made them feel justified in advancing their concerns about democracy in violent forms. The state has demonstrated to them that the way you defend democracy is through state violence. So they were taking their defense into their own hands and bringing it right back to the center of empire. Some of us call that blowback. 

AG: For the past four years, liberals on the coasts have excoriated the white working class in the middle of the country, whom they perceive to be deplorable Trump supporters. Do you think that this is helpful? 

AB: No. Not only is it not helpful, it is inaccurate and it has helped to create the narrative that many of these forces have embraced; that is the centerpiece of their grievances. They believe that liberals and the liberal order have not addressed their needs, their interests. They believe that the economic elites are only out for themselves and that therefore they needed to rally behind Trump, a billionaire who claimed that he understood their interests and would fight for them because nobody else was.

So this characterization of them as deplorables, and as either Nazis or Nazi-like, is not only not helpful but also contradictory in the sense that those folks who level those charges still have not been able to explain why the Trump presidency happened.

For example, some nine million people who voted for Trump in 2016 had voted for Barack Obama in 2012. Liberals can't explain why, after four years of constant anti-Trump rhetoric, the Trump forces expanded their ranks by another 11 million voters. So this is something in play that's a little bit more sophisticated than these people just being deplorables or Nazis. And that something has to be interrogated. It has to be extracted. It has to be understood if you're going to have a politics to counter it. And right now the liberals have not understood where these elements are coming from because they have basically painted those 75 million people as a monolith of deplorables.

The neoliberals have constructed a politics that is going to result in a continuation of the same conditions, politically and economically, that created what they pretend to be most opposed to—the Trump movement. So this is the failure of imagination, the failure of critical analysis, the embracing of illusions that has characterized much of the politics in the US for a couple of decades now. And we see the consequences of that with us every day. 

AG: In the 48 hours after Biden became president, Israel bombed Syria, killing a family of four, a US convoy of trucks crossed into Syria to steal oil yet again, a double suicide bombing in Baghdad killed 32 people and Foreign Affairs, the journal of the US Council on Foreign Relations, published a piece with the headline “Th e  M yth of a  R esponsible  W ithdrawal from Afghanistan ,” which said, “the Biden administration should accept that there is no feasible middle way for a responsible withdrawal.” What do you think is next? 

AB: The continuation of policies that have resulted in the US being bogged down in Afghanistan for two decades, policies that will ensure that the wars that the US is involved in will continue. There will be a continuation of the commitment to US global full-spectrum dominance. In other words, violence is still at the center of the neoliberal project. And they intend to reintroduce that instrument under the Biden administration.

There were reports leading up to the election that Democratic Party-associated elements were secretly suggesting to the Afghan authorities that they would not have to worry about a peace process being executed once Joe Biden came to power. And they made the argument using some of the same terms and framework that we saw in that article in Foreign Affairs, that the US had a responsibility to remain in Afghanistan. And so they will fully prepare to undermine whatever progress was made for extracting US forces from that territory.

So we're not surprised to see the kind of elements that Biden has brought to his administration. These people were part of the Obama Administration, and they are committed to the US national security strategy, which is attempting to maintain US global hegemony using the instrument that they believe they are dependent on now, which is in fact global violence. 

AG: Yesterday, I signed a petition to Twitter to restore @real Donald Trump , the Twitter account of the 45th president of the United States. I didn't share the petition on my social media pages because I didn't want to have to fend off a lot of cancel culture, but I had enough faith in Pacifica to think I wouldn't get kicked off the air for sharing it in the broadcast version of this conversation. What do you think of Twitter’s suspension of Trump and 70,000  more accounts that they said were linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory? 

AB: I think it was quite troubling. I understand the disgust, the revulsion people have to Donald Trump. We know who Donald Trump is. He's a sociopath, he's a white supremacist. He’s despicable, but Donald Trump is, in fact, America. Donald Trump represents the kind of attitude and the kinds of values that made the US settler state what it is today.

So, this notion on the part of the liberals that he is some kind of aberration is completely ridiculous. In fact, it's ahistorical, but because of the disgust and because of the very serious legitimation crisis the US is facing, and the concern that neoliberal politicians have with the possibility of a return of Donald Trump, they have used the incident on January 6th as their opportunity to not only target Donald Trump as a person, but to target his “movement,” to undermine an above ground, legal political tendency, a tendency that generated 75 million votes.

If they can move against Donald Trump and make a connection between his speech and what occurred on January 6 in order to justify a permanent ban on someone who was the President of the United States with 88 million followers, then arbitrarily take down these other accounts that they say are “conspiratorial,” and if people then cheer because they hate Donald Trump, we are seeing a monumental mistake being made by liberals who think that this state is their friend, and that this state will get rid of Donald Trump, but somehow be able to maintain a commitment to civil liberties.

No, they are in fact conditioning the public to accept the constraints of civil liberties, or to have faith in private capitalist entities to determine what is acceptable speech and information that can be disseminated.

I believe they are, in essence, setting up the kind of dystopia that we see in science fiction movies, where you have corporate interests that have a complete and total control over every aspect of our lives. And of course, complete and total control over the ideals that are disseminated in those kinds of totalitarian society.

So, this is a quite troubling and even more troubling because so many people don't recognize that it’s dangerous. But it's quite slick because, like you said, you don't want to share your petition because you know people would go crazy if you said in public that you believe that Donald Trump's rights have been violated. So, this is a quite dangerous moment because what we see, in my opinion, is the hegemony of irrationality.

AG: Neoliberal militarists are comparing the Capital Riot to 9/11 and using it to justify the further militarization of Washington DC and Biden's domestic terrorism bill . At the same time, he has appointed infamous militarist Susan Rice to a new position, Director of Domestic Policy. Who do you think will become domestic targets during the Biden-Harris years? 

AB: Anyone who is involved in oppositional politics, including those elements that are part of the Black Lives Matter movement, and anyone else who questions US colonial policies. Anyone who will advance sharp analysis of the capitalist state, who will question some of its dominant ideals, who might even suggest that police forces should be withdrawn from certain neighborhoods. And anyone who would advocate better relations with the so-called adversaries of the US, like the Chinese and the Russians.

There’s no telling what is going to be seen as acceptable speech and political practice because we are entering a new totalitarian era. So I think anybody who is in opposition to the hegemony of the neoliberal project is at some point over the next few years going to experience the heavy hand of the state.

Let me just say this about the state that we've been talking about. People say that these Big Tech entities—Twitter, Facebook, Google, YouTube, etcetera—are private corporations, and that therefore they have no obligation to protect free speech rights: We need to make a correction. These entities are of course private, but the essence of neoliberalism is the spinning off of elements of the state that are public to private entities. So what we have with these Big Tech companies is, in fact, the spinning off of the function of speech monitoring and massive surveillance to these private companies.

These companies are in fact, from my point of view, part of the ideological state apparatus. They are part of the state, just like the private corporate media is part of the state. So we have to expand our understanding of what we refer to as the state. 

AG: A lot of people are frightened, particularly Black, Brown, and Jewish people, and most likely Asians now given all the bipartisan China-bashing underway. People, especially in these communities, have good reason to be frightened. And a lot of people are using the word fascist as they have for the past four years. But you've warned that neoliberal fascism will also get worse. Could you tell us what you mean by neoliberal fascism? 

AB: Well, first let me say that it's quite understandable, and we should be quite concerned about some of the more hardcore elements that we associate with the traditional right, who are quite capable and seem to be committed to using various methods to advance their political project. We saw some of those elements in the Capitol on January 6. So it's understandable that we be concerned with that, but I've been warning people also that we should be more concerned with the neoliberal elements that control the state and did even during the time that Donald Trump was occupying the executive branch. We have to remind ourselves, or at least come to the understanding, that neoliberalism is a right-wing ideology. It is a right-wing set of policies, including privatization, deregulation, globalization, so-called free trade, austerity, and reductions in government spending, all to empower the private sector and diminish the public sector. Neoliberalism has to be connected to its essence, which is neoliberal capitalism.

The turn to neoliberalism was born out of an act of violence. A neoliberal capitalist project was imposed on the people of Chile after the assault and the overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973. So this is a right-wing, violent phenomenon. Okay? Now it's been able to dress itself up in the garb of state respectability, but it is a rightist tendency. And so that right-wing, neoliberal, totalitarian element is the element that is now constricting the range of acceptable political activity. They are the ones that re-introduced McCarthyism, McCarthyism 2.0. They are the ones that are now moving to smash this political opposition in the form of the Trump movement. They are the  ones that have allowed the FBI to create first, the Black identity extremist category to target us and to modify that with another term but the same objective—to target and undermine Black radical political opposition. So I've been making the argument that while we have been watching the theatrics of Donald Trump, the neoliberal state has been systematically conditioning the people to accept a new kind of totalitarianism. We've always had totalitarianism, but this is a new kind that will, they believe, ensure the continuation of their dominance. 

And I'm suggesting to people that, even though we hate Donald Trump and the traditional right, we are in a position now where we have to defend their traditional bourgeois rights as well as our own, and not allow the acceptable space of political, ideological opposition to be reduced.

We know that the state will reconcile with the right. Their real opposition and the basis for a potential cross class united front is opposition to socialists and communists, those of us on the left. And we on the left we are the real targets of this settler political state. So we've been trying to warn people to be vigilant and not allow themselves to be manipulated by these very powerful forces. And it's very difficult because they control all of the major means of communications and thought dissemination. But we've got to, to the extent that we can, present an alternative perspective so that we can build the kind of opposition we have to build if we're going to survive this critical period. 

AG: So it sounds like you think there's more we can do than duck and cover. 

AB: We have to. Those of us who have been part of the Black Liberation Movement, we have survived because we have resisted, and we also have survived because we know that we have been through the worst. You see, this thing referred to as fascism is nothing new for us, a colonized people, people who have been enslaved. It has typically been called fascism only when white people do certain things to other white people.

When the Nazis were studying, how they were going to construct laws in Germany, they were studying the apartheid system in the US. The Germans practiced building concentration camps in their murderous assault on the territory today referred to as Namibia. So it's when these policies of brutality, of systematic violence, of rape, when they are moved from the periphery, from the colonial periphery to the Global North, that's when they become Hitlerist, the ultimate expression of violence. 

King Leopold II in the Congo? That’s written off. It's not something that’s important, even though 10 million African people lost their lives. And we don't quantify the level of irrational violence, but we do say that we have an experience with this kind of irrational violence. And so we know we have to resist. And so we know that Donald Trump is not the worst US president. We know that things can in fact get worse. And what we do and have done is to prepare our forces, to resist, and to try to provide leadership to other resistors. Because we know even though it will get more difficult, we know that we are still on the right side of history. And there are enough people of conscience in this country who believe that we can build a new, better world. We believe that once we can organize ourselves, even though it may be difficult for a while, we have a real possibility of not only surviving, but also transforming this backward society.

Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC). He is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and contributing columnist for Counterpunch. He was recently awarded the US Peace Memorial 2019 Peace Prize and the Serena Shim award for uncompromised integrity in journalism.

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize  for promoting peace through her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes Region. Please help support her work on Patreo n . She can be reached on Twitter @AnnGarrison  and at ann(at)anngarrison(dot)com.