Race Reductionism: Neocolonialism and the Ruse of “Chinese Privilege”

[Photo: Singapore circa 1941, taken by Harrison Forman]

By QIAO Collective

Republished from QIAO Collective.

Recent discourse within the U.S. and Singaporean liberal-left has championed “Chinese privilege” as an analytic of power within Singapore and Asia at large. By invoking a Chinese equivalence to whiteness, analyses of “Chinese privilege” not only disavow the material history of racial capitalism in Asia, but appropriate Black and Indigenous critiques of white supremacy to bolster a long history of Singaporean anticommunism in service of U.S. military and ideological supremacy over Asia.

Postcoloniality is the condition of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia: of a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained, group of writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery.

—Kwame Anthony Appiah

Neocolonialism, like colonialism, is an attempt to export the social conflicts of the capitalist countries.

—Kwame Nkrumah

Since 2015, Singapore has seen the rise of a new discourse arguing the existence of Chinese racial supremacy. Influenced by U.S. cultural theories of race, critics of so-called “Chinese privilege” sought to formulate a theoretical framework for thinking about inequality in Singapore. Yet short of interrogating the material specificities of Singapore, these critics—composed not insignificantly of Western-educated cultural elites—found inspiration from transposing U.S. frameworks of racial antagonism directly onto Singapore. “I performed a simple experiment,” admitted the self-professed founding theorist of “Chinese privilege”: “I took a paragraph [from bell hooks’ ‘Beloved Community’] and I substituted the words ‘Chinese’ for ‘white.’” So “Chinese privilege” was born.

In Singapore, the terminology of “Chinese privilege” spread like wildfire within the networks of the cultural elite, circulating abundantly in the capital of “woke” discourse, Yale-NUS College (a liberal arts school jointly established by Yale and the Singaporean government). Soon it became more than just an analysis of “privilege”: suggestions of “Chinese racism,” “Chinese supremacy,” and “Chinese settler colonialism” all began to float in the air, plastered together by their plagiarism from North American Black and Indigenous critique.

When pressed, however, the loosely cobbled Singaporean copies began to fall apart: given the geographic, cultural, and political variation amongst Chinese people, who are implicated in the broad idea of the “Chinese”? What does “Chinese privilege” in Singapore mean, against the existence of more than 200,000 mainland Chinese migrant workers who, along with their predominantly Bangladeshi peers, toil daily in Singapore, with no minimum wage, to build the city’s high-rises, wash its public toilets, and serve in its hawker centers? Finally, given the material histories of race under Euro-American colonization, in which white supremacy actualized itself through racial enslavement, indentured servitude, and Indigenous genocide, how can white privilege be commensurable to anything else—in the world?

As Cedric Robinson wrote, modern capitalism is an extension of European feudalism, built from the very beginning on primitive accumulation established through racial slavery and colonization. Any project that seeks to understand racial capitalism in Asia cannot disentangle capitalism from its definition as a globalized system of value built on and by white supremacy. In Singapore, which for centuries existed both as part of the Indian Ocean world and the Malay archipelago, modern capitalism was ushered in by the British East India Company. From 1819 onward, Singapore became one node in the vast operation of the British Empire, connected by subjugated labor and trade to India, China, Hong Kong, and Britain’s many other colonies in the West Indies and Eastern and Southern Africa.

The history of race in Singapore, then, is a history of racial capitalism. The British colonial government played a key role in facilitating early discourses of race and racial difference in Singapore, producing the racial classificatory system that in Singapore today is known as CMIO (Chinese, Malay, Indian, Other). Interestingly, the British never elevated the Chinese as a superior class—rather, its initial interests were in cultivating a Malay indigenous elite through whom they could rule by proxy. During the century and a half of colonial rule, the Chinese were most useful for the British as primarily as a cheap labor force extending British empire’s labor imperialism (“coolies”), and secondarily, as a middleman merchant class that facilitated the empire’s trade imperialism (opium, rubber, tea). Though Singapore has been both a British and Japanese colony, it has never been a Chinese one—on the contrary, under British rule, the Chinese population in Singapore was alternately disciplined and neglected, and under Japanese rule, subject to ethnic genocide. In this light, there is no historical ground supporting claims of “Chinese supremacy” in Singapore. To argue for it is to mount a deceit that contradicts the very histories of race and capitalism as they were forged during Singapore’s colonial era.

Since its independence in 1965, Singapore has been ruled by the People’s Action Party (PAP), led for 38 years by former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, under whose tenure Singaporean “Chineseness” was transformed into an essentialist cultural project in concert with what Lee championed as “Confucian capitalism.” Refigured as a depoliticized, homogenous, and agreeable alternative to the geopolitical and racial Chineseness represented by “Red China,” the Singaporean Chineseness installed by Lee posited itself as a proxy to Weberian Protestant capitalism. Functioning in contrast against the racial and political threat of “90 million Chinese communists in China,” Lee’s carefully-pruned Confucian Chineseness marked Singapore, a Chinese-majority island, as a capable partner to U.S. empire—and Lee himself as a trusted native informant to generations of U.S. imperial architects.In his prolific public statements, Lee was unabashed about what he believed to be the essentialist characteristics of each “racial” group, and the disciplinary mechanisms supposedly required to harness them into a stable “multiracial meritocracy” that would make Singapore an ideal site of investment for Euro-American capital. In other words, officialized discourses of race in Singapore take on a primarily economic function, shaded by the backdrop of neocolonial U.S.-Singapore relations. In this light, to speak of race in Singapore is to speak of a highly localized phenomenon held in taut relation with historical British rule and contemporary U.S. domination—including the ongoing Cold War of anticommunist containment in Asia.

Yet recently, discourses of “Chinese privilege” have escalated, alighting on a new strategy of manufacturing imperialist antipathy against China and justifying continued U.S. military domination in Asia. Moving beyond Singapore, Singaporean critics of “Chinese privilege” argue that Asia at large is threatened by the looming specter of a “rising China.” Proposing that Chineseness is a universalizing racial category, these critics conclude that “Chinese privilege” and “Chinese supremacy” in Singapore may be extrapolated to Asia-at-large, in which the PRC plots a supposedly imperialist takeover. Of particular vexation to these critics is what they call the “Chinese tankie,” a slur which refers, through a mish-mash of McCarthyite euphemism and garbled identity politic jargon, to anti-imperialist internationalists who oppose U.S. military supremacy in Asia and the ongoing informational war against China.If the vague, anti-China fear mongering of “Chinese supremacy” discourse feels familiar, it’s because it sounds strikingly similar to talking points of the U.S.-led Cold War on China, and increasingly, the discourse of the Singaporean state. While Singapore has historically framed its foreign policy as a balancing act between the U.S. and PRC, since 2018, a series of secretive arrests authorized by Singapore’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, working in tandem with the U.S. Pentagon, have signaled the island nation’s shift toward a more diplomatically offensive position against China.

In a speech given to the public in 2019, former Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Bilahari Kausikan urged Singaporeans to stand guard against what he called China’s “sophisticated and flexible instrument[s] of influence,” which threaten Singapore’s “foundation of multiracial meritocracy.” Of note, Kausikan pressed, was China’s civilizational threat against Singapore: “China’s identity as a civilizational state,” he said, “finds expression in the work of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office… In plain language, overseas Chinese should identify their interests with China’s interests and work to advance China’s interests. And this represents a deliberate blurring of the distinction made between the hua ren (ethnic Chinese) and the hua qiao (overseas citizen of the PRC).”

By suggesting the always already latent possibility of “ethnic Chinese” being turned into spies for the PRC, Kausikan not only taps into a long history of conjoined anti-Chinese, anti-PRC, and anticommunist villainization in Southeast Asia, but also rehashes the “China creep” discourse of the U.S. and its “Five Eyes” alliance. Case in point, Kausikan’s declarations of “Chinese espionage” startlingly echo the propaganda of such warmongering luminaries as the weapons industry-funded Australia Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Lauding Kausikan’s speech, the conservative U.S. policy think tank Jamestown Foundation (on whose board sits Trumpian architect Robert Spalding) noted: “Singapore has long been a target of CCP united front attention, and the city authorities have a history of combatting CCP propaganda that dates back to the 1950s and 70s, when PRC leaders sought to export communist revolution to Southeast Asia.”

This would certainly be an impressive feat, were it true. While evidence of actual “CCP infiltration” is all but nonexistent, what is abundantly clear is that the United States has spent extraordinary effort covertly manufacturing anticommunist, anti-Chinese propaganda across Asia throughout the last seventy years. Drawing from a dense archive of declassified CIA reports, Operating Coordinating Board (OCB) communiques, and U.S. Information Agency (USIA) documents, historian Wen-qing Ngoei concludes,

[T]he key principle of U.S. Cold War policy toward [Asia] was to harness the interconnectedness of Southeast Asia’s Chinese so that Beijing could not. From mid-1954, U.S. planners began seeking ways to ‘encourage the overseas Chinese’ to ‘organize and activate anticommunist groups and activities within their own communities.’ Beyond this, Washington aspired to ‘cultivate’ overseas Chinese ‘sympathy and support’ for the GMD [Kuomintang]-dominated Taiwan as a ‘symbol of Chinese political resistance,’ to forge one more ‘link’ within the United States’ broader ‘defense against Communist expansion in Asia.’ (9)

Within Singapore itself, accusations of “Chinese communist influence” have served as an expedient lie leveraged by both the British colonial government and the British-backed Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s first Prime Minister, to effectively rid the country of leftist organizing. In what became known as the 1963 Operation Coldstore, Lee convinced the British colonial government to invoke the secretive Internal Security Act (ISA) to detain some 113 left-leaning politicians of the opposition party, Barisan Socialis. This effective annihilation of Singapore’s popular leftist movement in turn gave Lee, the British heir apparent, a virtually unopposed path to political power in Singapore’s first general election in 1965.1 In 1987, Lee’s government once again leveraged charges of a “Marxist conspiracy” to detain 22 leftist organizers, holding them for up to three years under alleged torture. Reflecting on the arc of anticommunist fervor that has defined post-independence Singapore, historian T.N. Harper writes that since independence, “the PAP government worked resolutely to depoliticize national struggle, to shed it of its old internationalist connections, and to tear Singapore from its alternative pasts” (48).

Given both the history of U.S. covert operations in Southeast Asia and Singapore’s own virulently anticommunist post-independence history, it should be no surprise that the low-hanging fruit of a “Chinese communist conspiracy” and its pseudo-leftist “Chinese privilege” corollary appear so enticing to both Singapore’s cultural elite and its ruling party. Moreover, their naked antipathy toward China is undergirded by Singapore’s deep economic and geopolitical ties to the United States. It would not be an exaggeration to say that, like South Korea and Japan, the U.S.’s client states in East Asia, Singapore’s economic “miracle” has been largely predicated on industrialization via U.S. militarization during the Cold War. After a visit to the United States in 1967, Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew wrote to Lyndon B. Johnson, expressing his “unequivocal” support of the Vietnam War. Lee argued, as historian Daniel Chua recounts, that

The United States, by holding the line in Vietnam, was buying time for the rest of Southeast Asia to develop stable economies and governments. The American military involvement in Vietnam[, Lee believed,] helped in maintaining political stability of the non-communist regimes in Southeast Asia and also provided them with the years that were necessary to build their economies. (5)

More than providing Southeast Asian nations like Singapore “with the years that were necessary to build their economies,” the U.S. invasion of Vietnam directly contributed to the economic growth of its neo-colonies in Asia, including Singapore. Just as the U.S. war in Vietnam was critical to “South Korea’s compressed development under military dictator Park Chung-hee,” as Christine Hong has written, so too was it instrumental in developing Singapore’s post-independence economy. This developmental trajectory allowed the U.S. to continue where the British had left off: in 1967, the same year the British formally withdrew its bases from Singapore, “a full 15 percent of Singapore’s national income derived from U.S. military procurements for Vietnam.” Prior to the U.S. entrance into Singapore, British bases on the island had contributed $200 million per year to the Singaporean economy, amounting to 20 percent of Singapore’s then-national income. As the U.S. replaced the British as the guest power in Singapore and escalated its invasion of Vietnam, U.S. private investment in Singapore increased at exponential rates, growing at a rate of $100 million a year by 1971.

In 1990, following the Philippine Senate’s closure of the U.S. and military bases in Clark and Subic Bay, Singapore stepped up to the bat as the U.S. military’s newest and most steadfast dependency south of Seoul. Through a series of “memorandums of understanding” (MOUs), Singapore not only opened its Paya Lebar air base and the port of Sembawang to U.S. forces, but in 1998, built a state of the art naval base in Changi for express shared usage with the U.S. Navy. As a 2016 Brookings Institute white paper acknowledges, Changi Naval Base “is currently the only naval facility in Southeast Asia purpose-built to accommodate an aircraft carrier and was constructed (entirely at Singapore’s cost), despite Singapore having no aircraft carrier of its own.”

In 2020, as the U.S. entertained regime change ambitions in Bolivia, tightened sanctions against Venezuela, Iran, and the DPRK, and waged a hybrid war against China, Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong wrote, in a feature article for Foreign Affairs, “Asian countries see the United States as a resident power that has vital interest in the region…. What made Asia’s stability and prosperity possible was the United States.” In other words, Singapore’s supposedly “exceptional” economic achievements, when held under the magnifying glass of historical analysis, reveal a profound entrenchment in the U.S. orbit, as a client state whose imperialist geopolitical, political, and economic orientations were meticulously cultivated during the Cold War. Insofar as Singapore holds the title of being one of the most prosperous nations in the world, its national “privilege” has been built off its role as launch pad for U.S. aggression on Vietnam, Korea, China, and most recently, Afghanistan.

In the face of what can only be understood as blatant, aggressive, and ongoing U.S. imperialization of both Singapore and the Southeast Asian region, both the Singaporean state and its comprador class prefer to harp on a supposed “Chinese communist conspiracy” instead of facing the hegemon literally crouching in their own backyard. Of course, scapegoating China has its perks as well: for the Singaporean state, fervent anticommunism and blithe disdain of China has won it the right to become a vassal state of the U.S. empire; for the Singaporean comprador class, armed with degrees from the imperial core and a taste for “speaking for Global South Asians,” the work of obfuscating U.S. imperialism offers a surefire way to propel oneself to political authority as a model minority in the Global North.

By delocalizing and decontextualizing a U.S.-based identitarian politics of race, discourses of “Chinese privilege” assiduously delink race from its material conditions, and ethnic formation in Singapore from the complex geopolitical and colonial history of the region. In short, “Chinese privilege” performs a crude racial reductionism that, in its easy recourse to analogy, propels what literary historian Jodi Melamed calls a “race-liberal order” that “fatally limit[s] the possibility of overcoming racism to the mechanisms of U.S.-led global [imperialist] capitalism, even as they have enabled new kinds of normalizing and rationalizing violences.” The comprador class stands most to gain from the discourse of “Chinese privilege,” which, as sociologists Daniel P.S. Goh and Terrence Chong remind us, allows them to partake in a “pleasurable act of Foucauldian confession…to reinforce their feelings of goodness and purity” while cementing their position as intellectual and moral gatekeepers in Singapore’s neocolonial production of knowledge.

Without regard to the historic, geographic, and political dissonances implied within the term “Chinese,” theories of Chinese privilege disavow both the material conditions of British colonialism and contemporary U.S. imperialism which have shaped Singapore’s present, while insisting that Singapore, and postcolonial Asia at-large, appear a historical vacuum through which appears a new regime of racial domination by the ambiguously perilous, yet ever-present “Chinese.”

The race reductionism of “Chinese privilege” is dangerous not only for essentializing, de-historicizing, and dematerializing the workings of race in Asia. In this political moment—as the military encirclement of China sees its domestic parallel in anti-Asian violence in the West—uncritical deployments of “Chinese privilege” are dangerous precisely because they fit snugly into a propagandized Cold War redux which paints China as duplicitous, conniving, and invasive. Contributing to U.S. efforts of informational warfare, the depoliticized and ahistorical fallacy of “Chinese supremacy”—sold, largely, to North American and Singaporean audiences—appropriates the specificity of white supremacy while bolstering the long history of neocolonial Singaporean anticommunism. Ultimately, it seeks to naturalize U.S. hegemony as a benevolent force in the face of impending Chinese “invasion,” manufacturing consent for the further militarization of Asia while obscuring the structuring force of U.S. imperialism in Singapore, Asia, and beyond to the detriment of true anti-imperial struggle.

Notes:

1. Political prisoners, including Said Zahari, Lim Chin Siong, Lim Chin Joo, Poh Soo Kai, and Tan Jing Quee, have written about their time in captivity, noting both Lee’s strategic collaboration with the British colonial government and his role in engineering anticommunist persecution throughout the 1950s and 60s. In particular, they unanimously agree, Lee was frightened by the popular support of Lim Chin Siong, leader of the Barisan Socialis, who was projected to win the first election prior to his arrest by Lee in Operation Coldstore. In a posthumously-published excerpt from his memoir, Lim Chin Siong was explicit about Lee’s political motives:

Lee Kuan Yew soon became worried about the left-wing within the party because it enjoyed tremendous grassroots support. He was fearful of being replaced or overtaken. In his calculations, the most ideal constitutional arrangement was to let the British continue to provide a safety net for him and to give him time to build up his own base. He would play the role of a moderate while the British could wield the big stick. On this score, Lee Kuan Yew and the British were hand-in-glove in that ‘the British must keep the final say in order to block the communists out.’ (316)

The Future of Unions During COVID-19

(Pictured: Railroad workers in Chicago)

By Cameron Mancini and Brendan Muckian-Bates

When the pressure of the moment becomes untenable, it is the working class that has continued to muster the strength to hold the business class accountable. Strength in numbers alongside the panic of immediate loss of income and employment are an organizer’s best weapons. However, meeting the challenge of the present means that we must be strategic about what type of world we want to see once COVID-19 is over.

One hundred and one years ago, as American soldiers returned to the US following the end of the Great War, the pandemic of the H1N1 strain of influenza, known as “Spanish Flu” at the time, began ravaging the world. Between 1918 and 1920, it is estimated that around 17 to 50 million people died from this pandemic.

At the same time that millions were dying, workers began striking across major industries. The 1919 Steel Strike was one of the first attempts to organize basic industry by the mainstream labor movement, with the assistance of radicals like William Z. Foster and Mother Jones. In Seattle, WA, “nothing moved but the tide” as workers took over the city for a week. Coal miners struck and won a 14% wage increase.  In all, 1919 saw 4 million workers - 1/5 of the workforce - walk off the job in the US. But it did not end there; Winnipeg, Canada saw a massive General Strike, and in Italy and Germany, workers struck in the industrial centers of their nations, seized factories, and declared socialist republics.

At times of economic and social crisis, mass labor actions are not uncommon. Workers demand immediate changes to their living conditions when those conditions become unstable. Already in 2020, we’ve seen wildcat strikes shut down the Big 3 automakers, longshore workers threaten a walk out in Bay Area ports unless there is proper sanitary conditions in the port, grocery workers demand and win hazard pay in the Puget Sound area, Pittsburgh area sanitation workers refusing unsafe working conditions until they have proper protective gear, and tenants in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood threaten a rent strike.

It’s impossible to say how long or the effects to which COVID-19 will have on the US economy, but here’s what we know so far:

• On March 17th, White House officials briefed Senate Republicans that the unemployment rate could reach 20 percent. For context, at the height of the Great Depression, the unemployment rate was around 25%.

• Two weeks ago, the Imperial College of London released their model for how to combat the spread of COVID-19. Without severe disruptions to our daily routines, and the possibility of long-term, periodic quarantines, COVID-19 could return, killing an estimated 2.2 million people in the US alone.

• The Dow Jones dropped almost 10,000 points in the span of a month, from a high of 28,992 on February 21 to 19,173 on March 20. The percentage of the drop on March 16th is on par with that of the infamous Black Thursday of 1929.

The likelihood of COVID-19 disrupting the everyday living habits of Americans, not to mention the profound and unexpected impact it has had on everyday workers, would have been impossible only a month ago. Now, it is all but certain to have unforeseen, devastating impacts on everything it touches.

At times like these, we often remark with platitudes such as, “If only there was something we could’ve done.” It is clear at this point that President Trump’s handling of the situation has been abysmal. Every morning briefings are given downplaying the impact of this crisis, as though you can cover your eyes and ears and see no evil, hear no evil. The two capitalist parties in government haggle over relief efforts, each trying to outflank the other for electoral gains in the upcoming general election. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve doles out trillions of dollars to attempt to keep the economy afloat. It all amounts to covering up the reality that the economy is simply a juggernaut of immiseration for the working class. Keeping this juggernaut from sinking is the primary objective of the capitalist elites, which is obvious from the framing of the debate around what to do: keep the economy going -- but human needs and comfort are complete outside the scope of understanding for those in control of society. We need a cooperative commonwealth governed by the principle, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.”

While political pundits are seeking to negotiate policy proposals to mitigate this disaster, unions are organizing workers in the here and now. Take, for example, some of the recent actions by members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Just last week, IWW members in Portland, Madison, and Milwaukee took direct action against their bosses to demand specific changes in their workplace conditions. In Madison and Milwaukee, union members at CapTel Industries engaged in a one-day sickout over pay. Although these workers are classified by the state of Wisconsin as Telecommunications Service Priority Level 3, the same level designated for state and local first responders, their pay is far below those of other essential personnel. In Portland, when workers at the historic Crush Bar were told they would be laid off during the city’s lockdown, members of the Crush Bar Worker’s Collective marched on their boss, demanding they be paid their sick time and provide half-pay for their scheduled shifts. Instead of meeting their demands, management called the Portland Police Department on their former employees, despite the order from PPD that they would not respond to calls unless for severe, life-threatening emergencies. Following this action in the city, Wobblies at Voodoo Doughnuts, a popular tourist attraction, formally announced their plans to unionize. This coincided with management’s recent decision to temporarily lay off over a dozen employees. According to one member, management at Voodoo doughnuts is not paying out accrued paid time off in accordance with their store’s own policy.

In each of these cases, workers won some or all of their demands.

CapTel workers won a ninety percent adherence at work, meaning they have less time they need to be on call at their desks. Crush Bar workers won their accrued sick time after the bar closed. Voodoo Doughnuts workers are pushing for, and winning the fight on, union recognition, despite Trump’s NLRB suspending union elections.

Now, workers in several other industries are calling for actions to shut down their workplaces, too.

Whole Worker, a grassroots movement seeking to unionize Whole Foods stores across the country, are calling for a mass sick out on March 31st to protest lack of protection for workers and consumers.

On March 23rd, workers with the Starbucks Solidarity Movement called a nationwide sick out to protest corporate’s desire to keep stores open despite being deemed “non-essential personnel.”

First, these actions signify a shift in the thinking of many low-income workers. For workers in low-wage industries like food and beverage production or distribution, a missed paycheck can mean the difference between making end’s meet and skipping bills. Fast food and distribution workplaces are notoriously difficult to unionize. Few workers in these settings have connections to unions, and fewer attempt to help organize them. The mass surge in workplace actions in these industries shows that workers are beginning to understand the motto that, “Direct action gets the goods.”

Second, building unions that can continue organizing after a major crisis, continue to win demands, and continue to accelerate class consciousness need a legal framework from which to win. Many unions are bogged down by “no strike” clauses in their contract. A “no strike” clause means that during the duration of the contract, no union member is allowed to engage in a strike or sympathy strike against the employer. If they fail to abide by that, the union is legally required to denounce the action or face stiff fines and penalties. This can quickly drain union coffers, making union leaders more like business bureaucrats negotiating with management rather than with membership. Yet, these actions are often done without the use of these union contracts, and are therefore not subject to the same rules. Strikes and slowdowns can be called almost immediately, leaving management in a more vulnerable position.

Lastly, working people need institutions that can provide organizing capabilities in the most hard-to-organize industries. Around 36% (57 million)  Americans participate in the “gig economy” in some way, and around 10% of them work full time in this sector. A decade ago, the AFL-CIO dedicated almost thirty percent of its budget to organizing. In its internal budget for 2018-2019, however, the AFL-CIO dedicated less than ten percent of its budget to organizing. Its largest budget by-line is for political activities, which account for more than 35 percent of the budget. The #RedForEd movement that saw impressive statewide and citywide strikes across more than five states and multiple cities, winning millions of dollars from intransigent, conservative legislators and boards of education is a stark reminder that direct action gets the goods, while political lobbying is an expensive and distant form of organizing.

Too few workers are in formal unions at the moment. Only about ten percent of the overall workforce in the US is currently a dues-paying member of a union. Of this, over one in three public employees are in a union, but only around six percent of private sector employees are unionized. As COVID-19’s outbreak has shown, low-income private sector workers are the most at-risk for any financial or biological crisis that can strike at a moment’s notice, yet are also the most underrepresented unionized workforce.

A massive revival of the US labor movement is needed to circumvent the impending crisis we’re facing. An astounding three million Americans submitted unemployment applications in just the first week of major federal, state, and municipal actions designed to flatten the curve. If the trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic continues as it has, we can expect even starker unemployment numbers to rise. As this happens, the strain placed on those deemed “essential” will continue. The federal government could, in all likelihood, place a federal restriction on strike actions in those industries deemed essential for the continued health of the country, as happened during WWII. Should this take place, these workers could be placed in greater risk of contamination, placing their well-being at risk for the sake of company profits.

We must be prepared for the coming crisis. We must be building for something better in the here and now. The working class is already showing how to do that. C.L.R. James wrote in his classic book Facing Reality that it was the duty of radicals to “observe and record” the actions by the working class. Given the stark reality we are facing, we can observe, record, and now take action. Here is what you can do:

1. Find out what your coworkers issues are concerned about. Meet together (perhaps a phone or video conference to be safe) and make a plan with them to get concessions from our boss. Get in the habit of practicing democracy with your coworkers.

2. Do a petition, or get a group of coworkers together and confront your boss as a group.

3. Walk off the job as a group, but state clearly you are not quitting, but you are refusing unsafe working conditions under section 502 of the National Labor Relations Act.

4. Contact the local IWW branch in your area, or our Organizing Department. Organizers from the union are ready to walk you through the steps of organizing something immediate, but also for the long haul. After the Coronavirus pandemic settles the crisis of unfair treatment, low wages, understaffing, and more remain. Organizing your coworkers into a militant, independent  collective action based union is the best chance to have power over your life at work and beyond.

Cameron Mancini is the General Secretary Treasurer of the IWW.

Brendan Muckian-Bates is the National Press Officer of the IWW.

Lifting the Mask of Capitalist Disaster: The Coronavirus Response

By Tariq Khan

Republished from Black Rose/Rosa Negra.

From official disregard and denial to mismanaged response, each day the COVID-19 crisis brings into ever sharpening clarity the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of the current ruling class. Claims of American exceptionalism and greatness are revealed to be a crumbling mask for the systemic rot that pervades. 

One does not have to be a radical to be appalled by the utter depravity of the conservative establishment’s response to the crisis. We watched Republican lawmakers who have tax-funded paid sick leave for themselves vote against a proposal for working-class people to get paid sick leave. Right-wing lawmakers stalled Coronavirus legislation in an attempt to sneak abortion restrictions into the bill. But it is not only conservative leaders that have been exposed as bankrupt, but also establishment liberal centrists. After listening to months of establishment Democrats during primary debates shoot down mild social democratic proposals for universal healthcare and student debt cancellation with the neoliberal mantra “how are you gonna pay for that?,” we saw the Federal Reserve pull $1.5 trillion — enough to wipe out almost all US student loan debt — out of a hat to inject into the stock market just to calm already-wealthy investors. The Coronavirus bill Nancy Pelosi championed as guaranteeing paid sick leave left out 80% of workers, in order to appease business owners. That was only the beginning, as the Trump administration has moved to bail out the wealthy owners of the cruise ship, hotel, airline, oil, and natural gas industries, while not even considering bailing out the many low-income families who are afraid of school closings because schools provide many children with the only meals they get. 

This current global pandemic is an opportunity for the capitalists. They are ever poised to take advantage of public confusion and alienation to dig their tentacles even deeper into the fabric of society. They are already pushing all kinds of for-profit online education schemes on K-12 public schools and higher education – all forms of “economic shock therapy.” The Trump administration is not missing a beat either by maneuvering to funnel $700 billion to the wealthy and cut payroll taxes by weakening social security. Moments like this call for a vocal left applying counter-pressure from below.

Neoliberal logic is that we don’t need the “big government” (a nonsense concept) addressing social and material needs because the private sector, and the all-wise “invisible hand of the market” will take care of it. The Coronavirus exposed that lie in short order. With few exceptions, the private sector has been at best useless for dealing with the crisis and at worst an active obstruction to a humane response. At the local level it is largely the public sector — such as local public school PTAs working with local school districts and public health departments — that has stepped up to meet people’s needs, as ordinary people are organizing mutual aid projects with the resources available to them. Meanwhile the private sector is arguing about why business owners shouldn’t have to pay their employees sick leave.

Disaster Capitalism or Capitalism as Disaster?

In Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine she explores how capitalists use disasters such as earthquakes, floods, wars, famines, epidemics, and so on to push unpopular neoliberal policy changes on societies during the chaos and shock. Klein focuses mainly on the post-WWII period and the rise of what scholars call neoliberalism, especially as represented by economist Milton Friedman and his Chicago school of economics which pushed capitalist “free market” ideology as the answer to the world’s problems even outside the economic sphere.

Black radical political scientist Cedric Robinson, in his earlier classic work Black Marxism, showed that what Klein later called “disaster capitalism” was not a new phenomenon emerging in the post-war global order, but that the bourgeoisie, or capitalist class, was born of disaster: “In the beginning, before they could properly be described as bourgeoisie, these merchants traveled from region to region, their survival a matter of their mobility and their ability to capitalize on the frequent ruptures and breakdowns of the reproduction of populations sunk into the manorial soil.” The social and infrastructural rot, stagnation, and political and economic degradation of European life is what created the bourgeoisie:

“Into this depressed land where few were free of the authority of an intellectually backward and commercially unimaginative ruling class, where famine and epidemics were the natural order of things, and where the sciences of the Ancient World had long been displaced as the basis of intellectual development by theological fables and demonology, appeared the figure to which European social theorists, Liberal and Marxist, attribute the generation of Western civilization: the bourgeoisie.”

In the important work The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism, radical historian Gerald Horne explains that not only was the bourgeoisie born of disaster, but that — contrary to both liberal and orthodox Marxist notions that the bourgeoisie was a force of enlightenment that, in the words of Marx, “rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life” — the story of the rise of the bourgeoisie is the story not of rescue, but of an apocalypse unleashed on the world: the three horsemen of that apocalypse being the intertwined forces of slavery, white supremacy, and capitalism.

All of this is to say that a term like “disaster capitalism” is redundant. Capitalism was born of disaster, survived on disaster, and spread disaster globally. Capitalism is disaster, and during moments of crisis it extends its reach.

Collective Response to the Crisis

Now is a time to reject capitalist economic shock therapy, and to instead make strong demands for universal healthcare, universal childcare, universal housing, and paid sick leave, as the pandemic makes it clear how all of these things are not “free handouts,” but serve the public interest. In the immediate situation we need free covid-19 testing, a ban on evictions, a rent/mortgage freeze, a moratorium on utility bills and parking fees, and rent/fee-free public housing. Water, electricity, gas, internet, and telecommunications must be treated as public services, not market commodities. There must be free food distribution to vulnerable people who do not have the means or ability to acquire food. Workers who are still required to show up and interact with the public during the pandemic — such as grocery store and drug store workers — should receive hazard pay for the greater risk they are taking on to serve our communities. 

Also in our list of demands should be increased funding to women’s shelters for women and their children who need a safe place to quarantine/social distance. The reality is, social distancing comes with an increase in domestic violence. Further we must demand the abolition of ICE and the release of all people currently detained by ICE/CBP and other immigration authorities, and the phasing out of the prison industrial complex. Prisons and detention centers are public health nightmares during a pandemic and it is nothing short of cruelty to keep people caged without access to the things they need to be healthy.

The three-headed hydra of climate crisis, economic crisis, and public health crisis make it clear that capitalism is an enemy of humanity. Socialism from below is the way forward. Socialize the means of production and expand the public sector.

On Queer Anarchism: An Interview with the Pink & Black Collective

By Devon Bowers

The following is an interview I had with Gywnevere, an administrator of the Facebook page Pink and Black anarchists, where we discuss her interest in anarchism, an anarchist take on the modern LGBT movement, and how people can learn more about queer anarchism.

If you can, tell us a little bit about the history of queer anarchism and how you yourself became an anarchist.

My introduction to the anarchist school of thought has come about rather recently, perhaps within the last six months I have fully come to appreciate where my beliefs lay. However, given my interest in politics, I believe it was inevitable. I grew up listening to Paul Harvey and Rush Limbaugh on the radio with my grandparents, often they'd discuss their feelings on it through their own lens. After 9-11 occurred, my mother joined in on politicking, and my immediate sphere of influence was cemented in as a right-wing echo chamber.

I have known that I was a transgender woman since I was old enough to create memories of the world, and as I began to critique my own beliefs and theirs it began to chip away at the prison which had been constructed around me. As I desired for other people to be free from the same cages I had to deal with, I steadily shifted towards libertarianism of the right. When Obama proposed the Affordable Care Act, I viewed it as an egregious overreach of government, and quickly took to the streets in protest, gave speeches, the whole nine yards. It was during that research that I first discovered the feelings of cognitive dissonance. While pouring through the thousands of pages of the legislation, I could not verify any of the right-wing distortions about it nor any evidence that it could be anything but a blessing for thirty million people. Yet, I still swallowed the bitter pill and forged ahead - ignoring it and my own principles.

From what I have seen these last few months, the history of anarchism is a principled one. More often than the adherents do not, an ethical stance is chosen through careful consideration of the complexities of a topic until it is picked clean as though carrion beetles defleshed it themselves. Emma Goldman's explanation for why she chose to stand up for her friend Oscar Wilde when he was convicted for his sexuality in the 1900s struck the biggest chord with me, "No daring is required to protest against a great injustice." Her collection of thoughtful pieces published in 1910, "Anarchism and Other Essays," shaped the lens through which I burned away my nationalist feelings, my internalized misogyny, and my support for the prison industrial complex. It's a lens through which I must continuously burn away what society constantly heaps upon us. Beyond hearing of other names here and there, I know little of the exact history of anarchism, as often state education glosses over an individual's ties to the community, their contributions, or the individual entirely. However, I continue to add writings and facts to my knowledge daily, and I hope others will take the opportunity to do the same with me. We all must start somewhere.

In what ways do you on an individual level interact with the mainstream LGBT movement, if at all?

I believe that the biggest way in which I interact with the community is by being very vocal, proud, and unapologetically secure in who I am as a femandrogyne individual. However, many of my friends are also somewhere in the community - even prior to my own coming out. If there was one issue which would make my blood boil during a holiday with my immediate family around it was the rights for LGBTQIA+ people. I still flashback to July 4, 2012 where I yelled at my grandmother for being ignorant and stormed off to another room while being yelled after by the two reactionaries left in the room. That incident uncorked the bottle on feeling as though the ideology I was a member of was wrong and that I should begin to be extremely vocal when something was an injustice - no matter the victim. After all, at that point in time, I was simply an "ally."

These days I spend most of my time posting thoughts into the void as myself based on the identities that intersect with my own life. For the past two years or so, I've also been running a page focused on bringing positivity or select information to individuals of the LGBTQIA+ community, but with the recent election results that has been ever-so-slightly changed. Keeping up morale and sharing information, both behind the scenes and at the forefront, has been my life for the last several years as I have grown to understand myself and others.

Why would you say that'd the history of LGBT people, especially more radical instances such as Stonewall, are glossed over while simultaneously being held up as important events in US history?

I do not recall ever hearing about anyone's sexuality when studying at public school or in any community college classes I had. The first time it was ever acknowledge was in a university course on American literature where the teacher wanted to highlight the identities of the authors so that we could better understand them.

It seems likely that such information is glossed over mainly because it is viewed as trivial. As I often recall seeing in other courses, "It is an exercise better left up to the student to figure out." I do not believe that is the only reason, however, because many of our textbooks are printed with the state of Texas, my home state, in mind. The Texas State Board of Education has a longstanding history of historical revisionism, inaccuracies, and outright errors which they convince companies to publish, as they are the largest purchaser of school texts in the nation. They carry a lot of weight, thanks in part to how our society has been constructed, and as such they dictate what is emphasized, ignored, and omitted based on their own traditionalist lens. I recall having a set of books for home, a set readily available in the classroom, and a set in the back storage if either were damaged, a grand total of six textbooks, for a single English class. I never understood it, in the past.

There seems to be a lot of support for groups like HRC, which in reality is a hotbed of white gay men who aid each other (I will include the link later) to the detriment of lesbians and transgender people. Why do you suppose this is?

If I am perfectly honest, I believe it is the byproduct of a traditionalist society within which we live. The clear majority of us were indoctrinated within households that viewed the male figure as superior or dominant which arose from the major influence that Christianity has had on our country's society both past and present. Couple that view of male superiority with the white supremacy that seethes within the United States, and it gives the predominant figure which is likely to be chosen to "normalize" LGBTQIA+ people: a white gay man. It is not that other platforms which aid transgender and lesbian individuals do not exist, it is merely that the most "socially acceptable" ones as described previously bubble to the top in our social consciousness.

Are there any strategies you use to get people, especially LGBT people, to understand that it is OK for LGBT people to defend themselves from violence? As we have seen, the only acceptable LGBT person is one who sits there smiling, while the other person screams that they should die and are going to hell.

I try to engage with them both in public and in private to help them grapple with their fear of direct action or their pacifist/peaceful ways. I share the resources that I have used to help me to shape my own stances on when violence is justified or not. I believe that the only way through which we can help people overcome our natural desire to protect everyone against those who cannot fathom such altruistic behavior without incentive is directly. One-on-one. Engaging with our friends, family, or even acquaintances and getting them to a level to where they may engage with others trying to fathom the kind of brutish behavior exhibited by those with a reckless disregard for those which lay beyond their in-group.

How can people learn more about LGBT anarchism?

Reading. Seeking out information. Filling one's mind with the observations and critiques which combine ethos, pathos, and logos in powerful ways. I found that "Queering Anarchism: Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire" (2013) by Deric Shannon et. al. was a deeply insightful work which helped solidify my feelings about anarchism in place. It discusses why we must protect one another within this community, and those who have yet to realize they are a part of it, with our love and our actions. "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849) by Thoreau, while not particularly tied to LGBT anarchism, I believe is also a necessary read as it highlights the struggle to apply pacifism when the laws themselves are unjust and unethical. There's so much information online and elsewhere, but with this starting point I hope individuals that are just realizing that their liberty is at stake and threatened will gain as much information as they can as quickly as possible so that we may move forward together.